Eric recently added a Strummer bio to his Amazon wishlist, and a new Julien Temple biopic recently screened at SIFF. The Amazon info page notes that Strummer was born in Ankara, Turkey and known by the name ‘Woody’ until he adopted the nom de punk Joe Strummer. I can’t be the only one to hear echoes of Bob Zimmerman’s Turkish and folkie heritage here. Strummer didn’t teach me to hear or play music; those honors go to other abstracted fathers. He very much did teach me that it’s necessary to know your own mind and not to be shy about stating it, lessons lost to an extent in my life of late for many very valid and inescapable reasons.

Joe, here’s to ya.

The sun nears the horizon and the temperature finally dips under 80, welcome relief.

Insurance will not cover the sewer work. We’re working on second calls to alternate providers for differing estimates and the like. On reflection, I am livid that we paid over $2k to a service company that left things more broke than when they arrived. That’s just about $700 an hour of breaking my shit. And I do mean my shit.

In fairness, the (still unusable) toilet has been reset and at last ten dollars worth of new PVC pipe installed. What price arm deep in sewage?

I should note that it’s not the whole house that’s affected, only the upstairs, so we can still shower and use the can. Although the can in the basement also probably has a bad basal seal. Can you guess what company won’t be getting that job?

I forget.

Sophosticated.

Wednesday, March 6 crowd in the street for the sold-out appearance of This American Life at the Paramount. Seattlest reported scalped tickets going for $325.

After a fair amount of painful searching through the rubble of relisting software sites I finally found TextPad, which is ninble and does grep just fine. I needed to do a bunch of string replacing on a pretty big file, over a meg, and the normal apps, including word, were choking on the replacement big-time. TextPad whacked it out in a total of ten seconds of user-time. Right on.

Spotted: a Seattle Banksy?

Welcome back Chris and Coop!

Torkey

Snow, day three