My buddy Chuck has a new “putt-putt mobile.”

I Want To Kern in Bold And Light, And Typeset Every Day | MetaFilter links to rockrage’s music fonts collection. Let the rocking commence.

Andy links to a high-quality copy of the new Hitchhiker’s Guide Trailer – one stamped ‘Do not duplicate.’ He believes it to be a workprint for the final trailer, released in lo-fi on Amazon and embedded in craptastic flash. This is the tradition for studio-promo sites and online stuff, for reasons that are understandable, if totally wrong. Looks like our man Arthur is played by the actor who portrayed Tim on the BBC version of ‘The Office.’

Additionally, no matter how good or bad the released film is, allow me to state that it will certainly be better than the quite terrible BBC-TV adaptation from 1981, which is memorable only for the on-screen segments depicting the actual GUI and data from the legendary Guide itself.

After a mouthwatering discussion of Chinese food with one PF concerning wok hay and ancillary concerns (partially inspired by the recent NYT article, “The Well-Tempered Wok,” unavailable for linking as I write this), I dragged Viv down the block to my favorite Chinese place in Capitol Hill, the Broadway Wok and Grill.

Located at the northern end of Broadway, more or less across the street from the Deluxe, I always enjoy eating here immensely for two big reasons. First, some of the dishes they serve remind me closely of the Chinese food I first tasted as a pre-schooler, prepared under the supervision of one Harry Liu.

Second, the interior of the restaurant is divided into bays, and at the end of the ‘public’ space, someone whom I take to be the proprietor has turned one of the bays into his office, and he holds court in front of a 12″ TV/DVD player combo all night. His pals drift in and out, everyone has a couple of drinks, and they animatedly discuss real estate prices in the Seattle metro region, who is in the hospital, who is opening what new place, gambling, basketball, and for all I know, the price of rice in China in an excited, blurry mixture of Chinese dialects and English, with English strongly predominating. It’s a very down-homey kind of thing, the pot-belly stove and the cracker-barrel transmuted like lead into a higher, slightly stranger substance.

Harry was the black sheep of a distinguished family of restaurateurs. The family’s flagship operation was a joint on the river Mystic in Boston, called “Peking on the Mystic.” Harry split after a dispute with his old man and didn’t return until after his dad had died, as I understand it. My family ate in Harry’s restaurant as long as we lived nearby, probably for five or six years, and he taught me how to use chopsticks.

Harry’s place featured hundreds and hundreds of items on the menu, most listed in Chinese and with a western-alphabet phonetic rendering on the same line. I still have a copy of the menu somewhere amidist my treasured remnants of early childhood. Some items also recieved a translation, but not all. The dishes I recall most clearly were moo shu pork, steamed dumplings (more commonly known on the west coast as potstickers), and a dessert which was almond-based gelatin cubes and mandarin orange slices in a light syrup, the name of which escapes me. To this day I seek out places whose potstickers or moo shu remind me of Harry’s. The Broadway Wok and Grill has a fine moo shu which is similar in my memory to that which I first tasted, learning how to use chopsticks, and maybe a thing or two about ethnicity, culture, and emigration.

Oh, and his potstickers? The number on the menu by which they were known was “182.”

Paper, Glue, Scissors is the title of this MonkeyFilter link to The Toymaker, whom we sincerely hope is not affiliated in any way with the Child Catcher.

The site offers relatively simple papercraft, including the best paper helmets I have ever encountered.

Firefox OSX Safari skin. That is all.

(I had trouble making this work, BTW. YMMV.)

Viv is listening to one of our too-few classical music CDs and I idly googled for free sources of more classical performances, with interesting results that inspired a Metafilter post:

Classic Cat describes itself as "the free classical music directory," and offers links to 3rd-party-hosted downloadable recordings, sliced and diced by hits, composer, performer, and more. There are active fora. Given the old-school look of the site, I was surprised not to find it in my repost search.

Seattle (n)ice, in the Sunday Seattle Times magazine, explores the curious Seattle habit that combines polite public social interaction with a distinct reluctance to engage with others in what is otherwise a typically American, friendly fashion. It’s something that drives newcomers up the wall and which is a constant topic of conversation even among long-time residents.

As it happens, I referred to this in yesterday’s post about Buddy Does Seattle, glancingly. Last night, Viv and I went to a co-worker’s housewarming party and as we were meeting various folks that her co-worker knew and counted as friends, this topic came up yet again. It’s a puzzling thing, but as I said yesterday, the people that stay seem to like it. I know that I treasure the privilege of being able to indulge my antisocial tendencies.

The article makes glancing reference to the use of online resources to plan social events, presenting it as some sort of antidote or solution. It seems to me that that’s an inaccurate positioning – using online social interactions (meetups, blogs, craigslist) to plan offline interactions actually reinforces the tendency toward intermediated, distanced socialization.

Anyway, the article reminded me that it’s probably time to throw up the Mefi signal yet again for an early March wingding. Maybe we can check in with astruc about the whole Seattle (n)ice thing. As previously hinted, I’m thinking the Big Time this time.

Two-Finger-Scrolling with pre-2005 PowerBooks and iBooks implies that the new Powerbook trackpad feature has been a part of the older powerbook hardware for a while now.

I am curious to compare this to SideTrack, which I have found to be so-so, although I do use the feature a great deal. The microsecond delay before it accepts scrolling input combined with the (still!) mysterious mouse gestures in Firefox make it less than the smooth and upholstered ride I’m used to.

After all, I’d hate it if a bump in the road caused me to, say, spill a martini into the keyboard.

Another possible widget is uControl.

UPDATE: As of February 13, the site linked above is down. I was able to download and install the new driver and find that, yes, it sure is better than Sidetrack. I will be continuing to try it out for the next few days.

I moved to Seattle in 1990, the year Pete Bagge and Fantagraphics started publishing “Hate,” one of the all-time record holders for right-place, right-time synchronicity. I bought nearly every issue at the late, lamented Fallout Records and Comics and read them, snickering, on the way up the hill to my home, wondering where the insane parties, nut-case postadolescents, and drunken debauchery was. Pete inflicted this on Buddy Bradley, his hapless alter ego, with such verve and accuracy that I passed the decade of the 1990s convinced that these activities existed not only in my past, Pete’s past, and the comic book, but also in the streets and shared-unit rental homes of Seattle.

A few years older and wiser, I know now that actually, everyone who moved here between 1990 and 1998 moved here at least partially beacuse they love the reserved social expressions that characterize interactions here. In fact, although Pete may have lived the experiences so memorably depicted in “Hate,” the more egregious events are more accurately understood as picture of American subculture in the 1980s than as a mirror held up to the time and place of grunge and dotcoms. I did, at any rate, and at that time rather than here during the ’90s.

That never really stopped me from party hopping in Seattle, rolling from artist’s loft standoff to basement ammonia fiasco searching for the chemical agape I had once known. Meanwhile, Pete was pouring his considerable anomie into these stories with verve and the lack of self-restraint for which is so widely, and deservedly, admired.

Fifteen years later, what do we have to show for it?

Well, most recently, Fanta issued “Buddy Does Seattle,” and I have been chortling my way through every page of the review copy they so kindly sent along. If you ever fell in love with the media idea of Seattle as some kind of bohemeian paradise, or found yourself here, observing the hoopla and yet, of course, unable to locate the source of the fuss, you really owe it to yourself to track this weighty, fifteen-dollar snortfest down.

Pete will probably appreciate any money that eventually appears whenever Fanta pays him for the material. But all the same, he kinda hates the turn toward graphic novels in alternacomix of late. He thinks it’s a reflection of a kind of snooty image-consciousness that privileges the social construction of reading comics in public. Everybody’s trying to look smart, he’s told me.

Well, I think that’s a debatable thesis. But I do know that Bagge’s plenty smart, and these stories have, if anything, improved with age. If you ever wondered what it would be like when a Jersey boy collided with Seattle, Pete’s got the news for you, still up-to-date after fifteen years.