Tomorrow I’ll join a few thousands others swimming, biking, and running in circles in downtown Chicago for the annual triathlon. It can’t be any worse than last year when I had a three hour wait between the closing of the transition area and when my wave jumped in the drink. And then, within a few minutes of the swim I got a goggle lens kicked out in the aquatic melee.

This year sponsor Accenture will be sending live racer telemetry to the web. Not just splits but actual map location data and (so they say) streaming video of finishes for every racer. This will be pretty cool, if it works. You can send basic text information to your phone too.

So if you have nothing better to do at 7:36 AM Central time on Sunday, scoot over to the real-time athlete tracking page. My bib number is 2510. Last year I finished 35 seconds shy of three hours. Here’s hoping I can at least do it with a minute to spare this year.

And if the map data doesn’t update after the swim portion would someone please call the Coast Guard?

(1) Had a 30 minute discussion on what designing a website for a user characterized as a “tattletale” would entail. (Not to be confused with a “gossip,” which was also a user profile we had to deal with.) I’ve never thought so much about the concept of the tattletale in my life. Basically this person has information, must convey it, and must convey it to someone of higher status for personal gain. Try designing a website for that.

(2) The Tolva family challenged the City of Chicago and won. Don’t tell us we left “materials/junk” in the alley, goddamnit. Turns out they had the right address, wrong street. Sometimes I marvel that this city doesn’t sink back into the swamp it emerged from.

(3) I took my oldest son to see Star Wars in Grant Park with a few thousand other residents. I had forgotten how much fun it was to watch movies with large audiences. Hell yes I’m going to cheer when Han knocks off the tie fighters at the end! Might even high five a stranger!

(1) A run to the Chicago lakefront is made easier if you’re chasing the chance to see the sun rise.

(2) The astronomical cost of jet fuel costs does in fact hurt the customer. My flight only had decaf on board. (The end is nigh.)

(3) A blonde white girl singing country music at Amateur Night at the Apollo Theater in Harlem stands not a chance in hell.

(4) Urologists don’t exactly know what the prostate does, other than supply a small fraction of coagulum for the ejaculate.

Came across this recently while sifting through our LEGO bins. This brick — this single brick — could transform an otherwise completely uncool assemblage of 2×2’s, 4×1’s, and slanted roof bricks into a state-of-the-art lunar outpost.

And by state-of-the-art I mean in the way computers were before GUI’s made them all sissy. This terminal was for minifig people who could read computer code straight off the monocrome screen. Hell, that’s probably assembler on there. And they only needed three buttons. Yellow to evacuate the launch pad. Green to light the candle. Red to blow it to smithereens if it veered off course.

Now that would be a cool casemod.

Last year I spent an hour in a sensory deprivation tank and thoroughly enjoyed the experience — so much so that I mentioned it to a friend and before I knew it ABC News had dubbed me a “floating enthusiast“. Well, the celebrity has worn off and I’m still a float tank devotee. Last Thursday I returned to the tanks, but this time I was armed with a waterproof iPod case and underwater headphones.

It all goes back to Autour de la Lune, the haunting, minimalist album by Geir Jenssen aka Biosphere. Many months ago I had commented to a friend that the harmonically rich drones from this album coupled with a removal of non-auditory sensory input (such as when partially submerged in a bathtub) was like an out-of-body experience. My friend mentioned that, in fact, there were real sensory deprivation chambers in Chicago. And thus the story picks up. The first two times in the tank I was in silence, listening only to my breathing getting slower and the pulsation of blood through my inner ear.

But this time I was ready for audio. Call it extreme sensory focus, if you will, enabled by a deprivation of all other sensations. The unit worked flawelessly. I floated as normal, iPod on my chest. The ear inserts which sound awful out of water came alive when submerged. The water in the tank acted a bit like a speaker diaphragm. It was like my head was in the middle of a surround sound field. Truly audiophile-quality listening.

I chose Autour de la Lune because it was the music that originally got me thinking of sensory deprivation, but more importantly it was the only kind of music that I felt would work with the timeless, motionless nature of the tank. My reasoning was that any kind of music that conveyed the passage of time — that is, music with a beat, or with lyrics, or with any kind of discernible structure or movement at all, indeed anything with discrete tracks — would jar you out of the hypnagogic stasis of the tank. Jenssen’s opus fit the bill perfectly. While there are tracks on the album the tones blend seamlessly throughout. There is absolutely no way of knowing where you are in any individual track as the timbres and harmonics cycle, overlap, and interact. (Sample here, here, and here.) I must say, it worked beautifully in the tank.

The album is the result of Jenssen’s access to Radio France’s archival recordings of a dramatization of Jules Verne’s De La Terre A La Lune (From Earth To Moon). You’d think this was a factor in my selection too, since a float in the nothingness of the tank must in some way approximate a spacewalk or the noiseless, lightless experience of deep space. Alas, this only occured to me after the fact. Truth is, the experience is more about inner space than outer space.

As in previous silent floats I found myself coming in and out of lucid mental moments. The music was enveloping; it felt like I literally floated in it. At times I forgot I was hearing anything and just drifted off into thought or a kind of dream. I do know that these brief flares of dream-like visions were much more intense than in silent floats. (No hallucinogens or controlled substances involved.*) Twice I recall having vivid flashes of people becoming increasingly more physically deformed. But these were brief, not part of any larger dream narrative — for one, I wasn’t asleep — just glimpses of something from my mind.

A few times I was unable to distinguish the music from the sound of nothingness. I don’t mean silence. Even a silent tank is quite loud after a while. Your ears can ring from the noise of your vascular system doing its work. (The tanks provide earplugs, if you like.) Because so much of Autour de la Lune is composed of harmonics at the extreme ends of the sonic frequency there were times when I did not know what I was hearing — music, myself, or the echo of both in the reverberant saltwater solution.

To me the best ambient music effects the same kind of experience as a sensory deprivation tank, focusing the mind, providing a sense of envelopment, and effacing the passage of time. If NASA won’t let me tool around in the Manned Maneuvering Unit, I guess this is the next best thing.

[*] I did eat the better part of a poppyseed coffee cake that morning, so it is possible that I had a higher than normal level of opiates in my body. I’m pretty sure I was unaffected by this.

In World War II the subway tubes were used by Londoners to escape the inferno of Nazi aerial bombardment. Today a new enemy made the Tube itself a hell.

If anyone can look this ghastliness in the face and not blink it is Londoners. Not only because of the decades of domestic terrorism that they have lived with but because of their resolve during WWII. I’m finding myself awed by the British people’s organized and strong response to the tragedy.

Viva Britannia.

It’s been six months since I laid out my resolutions for 2005. Let’s review. (It ain’t pretty.)

1. Learn how to conjugate Italian verbs in a tense other than the present.
   Non completo.

2. Get a goddamn backhand.
   Many lessons later, complete. Whether it’ll hold up in match play is a wholly different matter.

3. Fall in love with NASA again.
   Not yet, but I feel that I could be seduced more easily these days.

4. Be nice to political bloggers.
   Publicly, yes. Lots of private cursing, though.

5. Learn to match beats when remixing.
   Nope. Still a stutter-step crossfader.

6. When home, watch only high-definition television programming.
   I achieved this for a few months. The Cubs season ended my streak though, as only a handfull of games are in HD.

7. Convert all old mix tapes to MP3.
   Not going to happen. Quality too low; quantity too high.

8. Become able to change my son’s diaper with one hand.
   Ashamedly, no.

9. Avoid LAX like the Black Death.
   Done.

10. Avoid the Black Death.
    And done. (But that mole is a little worrisome.)

11. Get to know my nephews better.
    Eh, sorta.

12. Figure out how to make my own oak switches for the Russian Baths.
    Hell, I don’t think I’ve even been to the baths since January.

Well, that’s rather depressing. I wonder what the median success rate is for New Year’s resolutions for the public at large. In fact, I wonder if anyone even remembers them by mid-year.

Do it outside. Juice will splatter when you crack the carapace.

Keep separate containers for shucked and to-be-shucked mudbugs. They look remarkably similar and after removing the meat from a few dozen you’ll start to confuse the two piles if you use one container.

To remove tail meat, do the following. Press down with the thumb of one hand where the tail meets the body. Push towards the head with thumb. Rip head off with other hand, discard head. You should have two legs (or more) still attached to the tail and a small white Y-shaped piece of meet sticking out from the tail (pulled from the body itself). Crack off the carapace where the legs are connected. Push index finger, nail first, between the meat and the shell from front to the end of the tail, severing the connection between the two. Pull out meat. Remove small, usually dark vein that runs the length of the tail. The key is to pull it out rather than rip it out since there is a small piece of meat that covers the vein and might as well be retained if you can do it.

Darker-red crawfish have harder shells. On these dark crawfish, you might want to crack the tail like you would do with a lobster before attempting the above.

Your thumbs and forefingers will develop lots of micro-cuts. This is nothing to worry about.

Assuming you seasoned your crawfish with liberal amounts of cayenne (and related hot stuff) your hands will begin to burn after about twenty or so shuckings. It seems the spice-infused crawjuice just seeps in. This is something to worry about. It hurts.

About 17 lbs. of crawfish generates as much meat as pictured above. Lots of work. Best to make certain you’re really into crawfish before undertaking. Good luck.

My brother and a co-worker of mine both have tonsiloliths. Literally, “tonsil stones” and sometimes referred to, so pleasantly, as “throat scabs” these nasties are actually just whitish balls of accumulated goo that form around food particles and bacteria rather like a pearl does around a grain of sand. They live tucked away in the tonsil cavity, occasionally peeking out to say hello and cause a little halitosis. Oh, they also are without question the stinkiest things I have ever smelled produced from a living human body.

If they are ready you can pop them out and dispose of them. I’ve had the unfortunate privilege of witnessing both my co-worker and my brother do this. The funny thing is that they both thought they were uniquely afflicted with these mouth-born stinkbombs and were either too embarrassed or too unconcerned ever to wonder if it were a documented condition. Of course, it is. Googling around a bit with descriptive keywords it is easy to find forums devoted solely to people happy to be in the company of other tonsilolith-producers.

Having witnessed all this, I consider myself a second-hand tonsilolith sufferer. At present, there are no online communities devoted to this topic.

[At one point I actually ran Google keyword ads here and made a little scratch given just how many people search on “tonsilolith”.]