Tuesday Night at IKEA (Again)

Moving into a new place always means too much time spent at IKEA. I now know IKEA products well enough that the last time I was waiting in their customer service area, I could tell that the containers that they had extra nuts and bolts in were not IKEA containers. And I observed that the Billy bookcases they were using to hold these containers were anchored to the wall with brackets that did not come with the Billy bookshelves themselves. They were appropriated from the Pax wardrobe system. I mentioned this to our customer service representative, but she was insufficiently impressed. She seemed a little more interested when I told her about IKEAhacker, and told me that she was a big fan of something called "I hate IKEA", which I can't seem to find online.

This last trip to IKEA was too much, though, and I doubt we'll be going back anytime soon. They had put the wrong part in something we bought previously, and it was a nightmare getting a replacement. We had to wait for over half an hour just to talk to someone about it, then we had to wait well over an hour for them to get the replacement part from the storage area. And when I went back up to the customer service desk to ask if our replacement part had come from the storage area, the dude had the gall to tell me I needed to take a number and wait in line like everyone else. He didn't seem to give a shit when I told him I had already had my number called over an hour before. He just mentioned something about not cutting in line.

Of course there was an altercation in the parking lot also, because the crappy IKEA we went to doesn't police their loading area, and people just park there for hours (literally). I was waiting and waiting for one of the spaces to open up, so we could load up the car with the crap we bought, and after I had already waited 10 min., this dude had the balls to pull right around me into a spot that was just opening up. I told him I had been waiting, and he just ignored me. So I double-parked behind his car, blocking him in, and went inside. This didn't phase him at all, however, as he was still parked there over an hour later, after we had left, gone to Jamba Juice and Target, and come back to pick up the replacement part when it finally came out of the storage area.

What else? Well, I had a pleasant nostalgic moment when I saw the Duno lamp (photo above) that PJ bought when he and I lived together in a coach house in Hyde Park. It was the cause of our first roommate fight, as I hated it and he loved it, and he wanted to put it in the living room and I didn't. He eventually just put it in his room, and may still own it for all I know. If he doesn't, IKEA still sells them, so I'm sure he can get another.

Portability

You may have noticed that I have a certain affection for small books. Well, Meredith recently gave me this absurdly small bookcase with blank books. Needless to say, it made me very happy.

Blue Skies

License plate design has really gone downhill. Current Illinois plates, for instance, don't even bother to place Lincoln's head in between the numbers and letters. And the only thing distinguishing current California plates from the rest is a cheesy cursive typeface. I miss the old days, when plates were completely different colors and didn't have little drawings cluttering the sides. California's old blue-with-yellow-type plates, for instance, were perfect. They were simple yet distinctive.

A Peculiarly Philosophical Pleasure

Occasionally, I'll read something that clearly expresses a thought that I've had a partial grasp of before, but never been able to adequately articulate myself. It's both satisfying and depressing to see one's previously inchoate thought put clearly and concisely. Sometimes, however, the other person's articulation of the thought is so perfect, one immediately realizes that as much as one could've tried, one never would've been able to put it so well. That's how I felt when I read the following passage by Maggie Little, from her essay "Virtue as Knowledge":

"Crudely speaking, there are three main camps of how to account for motivational failure: the Aristotelians place the failure in cognition, Kantians locate it in a failure of will, Humeans attribute it to the absence of a functionally-understood pro-attitude. Fancy as each may sound, they are all of them invocations of some rather empty variable until they are developed into detailed accounts. (Worse yet, think of the all-purpose modern explanation of what bridges motivational failure: the 'drawing of a practical inference'. Rarely is the advocate of this answer asked what it is to draw a practical inference, other than to become moved--much less whether those criteria satisfy relative independence constraints.)"

Old and New

I've had the brown New Balance 574's above (top photo) for over two years. I first saw a pair of them on Josh S. in Chicago, and I had to have them. Sadly, they appeared to be completely sold out. But Meredith found a pair online, and I've been wearing them ever since. As you can see, they're pretty groody (sic?) at this point.

I've been looking for another pair of all-brown sneakers ever since, and New Balance has recently issued a new version of my all-brown 574's, though it differs in significant ways from mine (it's not all leather, the "N" is shiny patent leather, and the back heel is shiny plastic). Which gets me to the bottom photo. They're a pair of 25th anniversary Nike Air Force One's that Meredith got for me last week at Undefeated, on Main St. in Santa Monica. I wore them on my trip to NM, and they were pretty comfy. We'll see if they last two years, though.

Side note: My 574's may be old, but they'll never compare to the pair of sneakers that PJ wore for the first 3 or 4 years of grad school.

Albuquerque, New Mexico

I spent the weekend at a philosophy conference in Albuquerque. The weather was colder than L.A., but the sky was crystal-clear and you could see for miles and miles and miles. I've driven through ABQ before, but never really explored it. This time, I saw a lot of the university and a little of the town. My general impression was that it is a very mellow place.

The Valley

On a clear day, when I pass over the Santa Monica mountains I get a pretty sweet view of the Valley. But, as the picture above demonstrates, it's hard to document this view with a standard digital camera. Everything seems so much larger in real life.

Valentine's Day

Meredith and I got the table above as a kind of joint Valentine's Day present. It's from one of my favorite stores in the world, Muji. It's a side table with a magazine rack.

I've got a lot more to say about Valentine's Day presents and Muji, but it'll have to wait for another time. I'm getting tired, but still have more work to do before tomorrow morning.

Documentary Honesty

My daily (Mon-Fri) commute is a 24 mile drive up the 405. It's a reverse commute, so I usually make pretty good time. My best so far is 32 minutes.

The photo above is what the hill on the left of the off-ramp as I exit the 405 (on the way to work) looks like. It's not pretty. You can't really tell from the photo, but there's some pretty big pieces of trash there. I'm always struck by the enormous pieces of trash you sometimes see on the side of the highway. Just today, I saw a couch that was on the side of the HOV lane. I took note of it because we're looking for a new couch.

L. A. Winter Afternoon

I took the photo above yesterday afternoon in Manhattan Beach. After taking it, I walked down the pier on the right, hoping to find somewhere to sit and re-read the best new philosophy book I've read in a really long time (probably since reading John Haugeland's "Having Thought"). I wasn't able to find anywhere suitable to sit, but my disappointment in this regard was tempered by the sighting of five dolphins just off the end of the pier. They didn't jump out of the water or anything, but it was exciting nonetheless.

The one thing you can't tell from the photo above is that it was quite windy out. Not windy or cold enough to justify measuring the wind chill factor, of course, but, then again, maybe the wind chill factor isn't such a great measurement to begin with.

To be honest, though, if it isn't obvious, I have ulterior motives in mentioning the wind. On the one hand, I wanted to work in a link to that Slate article, because it concerns a topic that I've had several conversations about in the past (with PJ, and with Nat and Josh): namely, whether the wind chill factor really measures anything worth measuring. On the other hand, I also wanted to mention the wind because I've noticed that I tend to try and take photos that portray the best aspect of things. It is often quite smoggy out here, for instance, but I haven't yet taken a photo of the smog, and even if I did I'd be inclined not to post it. A more honest documentarian would photograph the best and worst of things, and everything in between, however. I'm going to try and overcome this weakness on my part.

Spot the mistake

From the back cover of Louis P. Pojman's "Theories of Human Nature":

"Pojman concludes with a discussion of the question of free will, ultimately asserting that each of us must decide for ourselves who and what we are, and, based on that answer, how we shall live."

Because we're free, I get to decide who I am, and what kind of thing I am? OK, I'm the King of France. And I'm a lizard. But since that makes me a sort of super-lizard, and I'm also a man, that means I'm Superman. And, based on that, I've decided I shall live like Superman.

Anyone for an ass kicking?

Went out for BBQ tonight with Ben. I would say it was nothing to write home about, but here I am writing about it.

Poem of the Week

Here it is.

The Most Annoying Thing I Have Read

This is the most annoying thing I have read in a really, really long time. I found it hard to breathe while I was reading it. And I found it nearly impossible to finish reading it. Don't worry: it doesn't get any better.

Lawn Art

Lawns at even the most expensive houses in Venice, CA are pretty small. So the details tend to be pretty interesting. Check out the grass in the top photo, and the use of skateboards in the bottom photo.

Welcome to Singapore

Presumably, our currently lax attitude towards torture hasn't (yet) extended this far.

Lincoln Boulevard

I've always been fascinated with Lincoln Boulevard, a north-south 4-lane road that runs from Santa Monica to LAX. It's lined with stores and restaurants, but it's hard to believe that any of them are actually open for business. They all look as if they haven't been renovated in thirty years--they're quite bleached by the sun--and they rarely have parking lots of their own, which in L.A. makes you wonder how anyone would go to them. Check out the Hoagie Stand above, for instance. I've driven by it 100 times and I always assumed it was out of business. But when I walked up to it to take this picture, I discovered it's open. There were even customers in line.

Expect to see a lot more photos of Lincoln Blvd.

Identity Consumerism

As identity politics was to the 70's, identity consumerism is to the 00's. It's the phenomenon of thinking that in buying a product, you're joining a group of like-minded folks (presumably, like-minded in more ways than just liking buying that product). Saturn, the car company, was the first to really effectively exploit this technique, but Apple is currently its dominant practitioner.

Encyclopedia of Hip Hop Breaks

This is what the internet is for. And, for those who haven't followed all the links I have in my "links" section on the right, it reminds my of this other excellent use of the internet.

No Compilation. No Bootleg.

Longtime friends of mine will know that I have a very special fondness for mixtapes by DJ Muro, the "King of Diggin". So I was very happy to discover a Japanese blog with a series of posts on Muro's mixtapes. I don't have all the ones listed. (I do, however, have several that are not listed.) Although I'm now in email contact with a friend of Muro's who has promised to let me know about any new releases, I have no idea how I would get any more of the old releases.

A side note: when I first discovered Muro, in Tokyo in 1996, I had a good friend whose last name was "Diggin". She was also from a small town in Ireland named "Diggin", so she found his self-description/title extremely funny.