Faster Cars and Smellier Air

One more train item and then I promise to stop. The Washington Post published an article the other day about making Tysons, VA less pedestrian-hostile. This would be an important preparation for Metro Rail service, which is slated if I’m not mistaken for Spring of 2063.

The Dulles Corridor Rapid Transit Project has already gone so far as to give the future Metro stations unimaginative but uncharacteristicly concise names [dead link removed 2005-12-05].

While I am skeptical that Tysons could ever be reworked as a livable downtown, some pedestrian bridges might help. Or better yet, how about a sky gondola system?

Desperate times call for desperate measures.

My brother and sister-in-law were nice enough to indulge my train fixation with a LEGO “My Own” locomotive for my birthday.

This is a pretty good LEGO set.

It was fun to put together. It features two distinct, non-trivial configurations.

It includes stickers.

And best if all, it’s operable. There are swivelling wheel trucks with spinning wheels. It’s a little disappointing that no reciprocating pistons drive those wheels. But unlike LEGO’s rigid frame 1903 Wright Flyer, this simplification doesn’t seriously compromise the historical accuracy of the model (like the particle beam cannon that I constructed out of the extra pieces does, to give another example.)

One complaint: the box the track came in clearly depicts my happy, LEGO-sized train-conducting counterpart. However! Opening the box did not reveal him. Danish toy-making friends: please include a conductor in future track boxes, or failing that a disclaimer starburst.

All aboard!

I was glad to see that the Smithsonian National Museum of American History is planning a major renovation.

I have long felt that there was a great museum inside this good museum struggling to get out. They have a strong collection, but it is not well organized and the building is poorly-lit.

I think there is good cause for enthusiasm here given the recent successes of the National Museum of Natural History update and the new Air & Space annex. But the decidedly qualified success of the National Museum of the American Indian (The Jewelry of Ben Nighthorse?) highlights the additional challenge of human subject matter.

As you might guess from my earlier comments, I hope they bring back the ice cream parlor.

Look, otters!

Check out this banner image from Bank of America’s web site. It depicts a young boy looking on with evident pleasure while his father presumably conducts financial transactions online.

Under scrutiny, the message here is a good deal less wholesome than I imagine our banker friends intended.

Modern currency has no intrinsic value. So how about some banner ads that show people actually doing something with their money? Maybe even something constructive like getting an education, helicoptering stranded climbers off a remote mountain range, or doming a suitable Martian crater to establish a breathable, Earth-like environment?

Any of these, I imagine you’ll agree, would be better than some over-indulged twerp daydreaming about his inheritance.

Like making candles or cobbling shoes, we are losing the craft of ice cream soda-jerking.

This week, three different ice cream stores were unable to fill my ice cream soda order. These included a Baskin Robbins franchise, where the term appeared on the menu misleadingly as a category, utterly divorced from its proper context in American History and our hearts.

If I wanted an ice cream soda, I was going to have to make one myself.

Fortunately, it turns out my mother is one of the world authorities on the subject. After a few ambiguous successes, I called her up for advice.

The Bottom Part

I found that most recipes called for way too little chocolate sauce. At least four tablespoons of chocolate syrup were necessary to achieve acceptable results. Mom added

A soda jerk will whip up the bottom part. If you don’t use milk, a table spoon of ice cream can substitute for cream. You might use whip cream; it will be a fun experiment to try.

Soda Content

Mom confirmed my suspicion that adding the ice cream next was a mistake. Instead, she said first to pour in some soda water and stir. Then, after the ice cream, add a little more non-fizzy soda to top it off.

Her surprising postscript:

The problem is you really need one of those soda fountains. They have a spigot with two adjustments. One is the frizzy spritzy stuff, the other is just the normal pour. Pop [my grandfather. —Dave] would take a bottle of soda, take the top off, put his thumb on it, shake it, invert it, and spray it into the glass to simulate the frizzy setting.

If you can master that one, boy, that’s a talent right up there.

Perhaps one day years from now, all this will be showcased in some kind of Colonial Williamsburg-esque Holocene Park attraction.

I couldn’t resist any longer; I have officially given in to the self-congratulatory blog craze. I will try to keep the interminable accounts of what I had for breakfast to a minimum.

I looked at several blogging solutions, but found each too intrusive. All of them required an application server, or worse still an application server that I couldn’t host myself. To my mind, a blog should be simple enough to run on a plain old web server.

So I ended up writing a short XSLT 2.0 script I call Blogfountain. I plan to post this under the GPL 2.0 license after I have worked the more obvious kinks out. Blogfountain circumvents the problem of comment spam by implementing a clever suggestion made by David Siffry: if you want to make a comment, start your own blog. Blogfountain links to a Google listing of pages that link back to it. [Note: this blog has since been moved to WordPress]