Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   flying under gaydar
Saturday, August 17 2002

In my continued search for parts necessary to build a powerful 2.4 GHz antenna, I decided to bike to the nearest Home Depot, which in my part of Brooklyn happens to be down at 3rd Avenue and 16th Street (or actually something called Hamilton Avenue that cuts across the lowest part of the Gowanus Canal). It's a dismal, industrial section of portside Brooklyn stuffed beneath the spaghetti concrete of the Gowanus and Prospect Expressways. Crossing the northbound lanes of Hamilton with my bicycle felt like a live action adaptation of Frogger. It was worth it though, once I was inside the store. I like to support my local hardware store as much as the next guy (though it does belong to the True Value franchise), but there's nothing quite like the spread at a super hardware store. The vast variety of little metallic odds and ends on the shelves seems to cry out, "make something interesting from us!" I'm not your usual Saturday afternoon hardware shopper - if I'm in a hardware store it's because there's something I want that cannot be bought. I'm the kind of guy whose projects usually rely as heavily on the plumbing section as they do on the nuts and bolts section.
I noticed that Home Depot is selling category 5 ethernet wire these days as well. I needed some, but it was far too difficult to track down an employee with a wire cutter for me to actually get any of it. The nearest employee I found was hopelessly mired in his flirting with a group of three or four plain young women. One asked if she could open a package of hardware to try it out and he said that it violated company policy, but that he'd be sure to look the other way. Then there was another employee who seemed much more focus on what he was paid to do, but then it turned out that he was deaf and I didn't have the energy to write things down on a piece of paper. Besides, I didn't want to break the guy's flow. He was really into his box opening and inventory shuffling.
There had been a brief storm while I'd been in Home Depot and the grimy streets were suddenly wet, an unusual phenomenon during this draught-plagued year I've spent in New York. I rode home just south of the Prospect Freeway along the edge of the neighborhood of Greenwood Heights, passing through several block parties along the way. The streets had been closed down and fire hydrants opened up. The hydrants in New York have been adapted so that when they are illegally opened, they spray a course mist of water through an array of small holes. This helps to save water and this is the way the children prefer their fire hydrant water anyway. Nearly everyone I saw in the street appeared to be Hispanic.
Back at the house, I tried using copper pipe as an element spacer for a 2.4 GHz washer antenna, but it had a couple of drawbacks. It was way too heavy for antenna use and it was difficult to straighten perfectly (it had come in coil form). I was able to put the spacers in a drill chuck (serving as a makeshift lathe) to file their ends perfectly flat, but the subtle bends and the weight rendered the antenna useless. By this point there was a genuine thunderstorm raging outside, and, as usual, Sally was terrified.
At around 6:30pm I deployed an umbrella and set off through the remaining drizzle for the Pavilion Theater at the other end of Prospect Park West to meet Gretchen, who had just done a two movie sneak-in with David the Rabbi (who, in observance of the relevant commandment, had paid for the first movie).
Gretchen and I took the F and the G subways up to Greenpoint (in the northwestern extreme of Brooklyn) to attend a small party being hosted by some new friends Gretchen had made at that artists' retreat in Vermont.
Downtown Greenpoint looked a little like a run down version of Windsor Terrace (by run down, I mean that its sidewalks were thickly flecked with black bubblegum spots and everything seemed faded, as if in a home movie from the 1970s). Most of the storefronts indicated an ethnic Polish population.
The place we were going was in a bleak industrial corner of the neighborhood. It was an old warehouse that had been converted into a set of lofts above a courtyard. Once inside the gates, the bleakness vanished and suddenly it was as if we were on the set of Melrose Place.
The big feature of today's party was an inflatable kiddy pool, but the oppressive heat that had made the pool such a fun idea had vanished in the aftermath of the thunderstorm. So we sat around at the picnic table in the courtyard, drinking beer and wine and dipping corn chips. Meanwhile there were a couple actual kids present, one of whom was within the unpleasant late-toddler age group.
I'm really terrible with names, and after meeting all these new and interesting people, I don't remember even one single name from this particular party. But this doesn't mean I wasn't friendly or that I didn't have a good time while I was there. I enjoyed the tour of our host's loft apartment and his studio, where he paints colorful abstractions of such overlooked everyday objects as the broken ends of twigs. Out in the undivided space of the apartment, he had converted a harpsichord into a table and figured out how to attach shelving to a wall such that it appeared to defy gravity.
There were actually several people at the party whom Gretchen had met at the Vermont retreat. One of these was a gay guy who was so thoroughly straight-acting that he flew like a Stealth airplane under everybody's gaydar. If I adjusted my gaydar to the sensitivity necessary to detect this guy, it would certainly give me false positives on the likes of Ray and my old housemate John.
Others at the party included several people (and their cats and dogs) from other lofts in the warehouse. Everyone seemed to get along well there, and the party's host and his wife/girlfriend had actually met each other there.
Some of us, including myself, made brief forays into the kiddy pool, but it became uncomfortably cold after a few minutes. I mostly preferred sitting at the picnic table bullshitting anyway.
It was late by the time we left and our hosts argued us into taking a car service home (as opposed to the dreaded G Subway).

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http://asecular.com/blog.php?020817

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