Robert Zurer’s Blog

 This piece was found this past weekend on our block. It is two post-it notes clipped and stapled together with the sticky sides facing each other. The one underneath is blank.

My best guess as to the text:

Comic reliev
When I was a baby I.
use to count backward
Know I count forward
pick [strange ideograms] you
Count backwards
or forwards. If you
pick backwards..
you are dumb[p?].
so pick forward

by Deijna Blake.

Overall, I think this is good advice.

There may be times however, when counting backwards is a good thing. Removing items from an array or preparing to succumb to a general anaesthetic spring to mind.

Who is Deijna Blake and why did she write this? Was it she who subsequently corrected the spelling or was it done by another unknown hand? Is this the product of a child or a schizophrenic or both?

Found Art. has always fascinated me. As a child I lived a block from Washington Square Park. Much to my mother’s chagrin I was always bringing home my found treasures. It was a natural progression that, after college, I became a junk man.

Sometime last year, my daughter Emma brought me this piece which she found on the sidewalk near our home. It’s a list of beverages written in ball point pen on a piece of cardboard carefully torn from a carton of Pall Malls.

It was folded, creating two sides

The first side

And the other side

What makes this most mysterious is that the words are aligned based on which side of the fold they appear but the numbers are not. If they are rotated 180 degrees they look like this

The first side

The numbers are now clearly right side up and the words clearly upside down. Why is that?

But the other side poses many more questions

At first glance since we live on Atlantic Avenue,  I thought the words were in arabic and that this was a beverage order from one of the arabic groceries nearby. But no. The vague quality of the handwriting makes it very possible to imagine a very different kind of list, a list of unknown beverages which may have very exotic flavors

• 2 apevowal
• 2 peddeto
• 1 aw datem
• 2 aped gueto
• 5 ealuaato
• 3 eat paaj lrcor
• 1 eat paaj mm
• 1 eat pdol

Chestnuts are so good! 

I had forgotten that until last Saturday. It was a bitter cold day. I was inside and warm, listening to music. Soon the music turned into dreams. I awoke to a bowl of steaming chestnuts on the coffee table near the couch.

Erica, my lifelong comrade in arms and wife, had roasted them for me as a surprise treat. We sat, listened to the music and ate them. Later, while researching how others consumed these marvelous shiny maroon delicacies, I came upon the following chestnut consumption instructions. To paraphrase:

1. Remove the chestnuts from the oven or roasting pan and place in a towel
2. Scrunch them a little to loosen the skins
3. Let them cool 5 or 10 minutes
4. Eat them

Erica and I immediately agreed that this was a simply terrible course of action. Burning one’s fingers slightly is clearly part of the gestalt .

As a child growing up in New York, one of the harbingers of winter was the appearance on the street corners of the chestnut vendors. They wore cheap woolen gloves with the fingertips cut off.  I remember their fingers, black with soot,  as they placed the precious chestnuts in little brown paper bags. I don’t see them much nowadays. Even then, they were hard to find . If I recall correctly,  Union Square in front of Klein’s and near the Central Park Zoo were the best places to spot them.  

In Chronicles, Dylan writes

Outside the wind was blowing, straggling cloud wisps, snow whirling in the red lanterned streets, city types scuffling around, bundled up - salesman in rabbit fur earmuffs hawking gimmicks, chestnut vendors, steam rising out of manholes.

While we’re on the subject of shiny maroon delicacies, it turns out that the word maroon, referring to the color, comes from the French marron meaning chestnut. I also came upon this interesting tidbit

That’s ‘an old chestnut’ means, usually, that a joke is old and well known. The origin here goes back to a near forgotten melodrama by William Diamond. The play, first produced in 1816, has one of the characters forever repeating the same joke, albeit with minor changes. The joke concerns a cork tree. On one occasion another character, Pablo, fed up with the same joke says; ” A Chestnut. I have heard you tell the joke 27 times and I’m sure it was a Chestnut!” The quotation was used in real life by the American actor William Warren who, at the time, was playing the part of Pablo. He was at a dinner party when one of the guests started off on a well worn joke. Warren interrupted with the quotation, much to the amusement of the other guests. As a result the expression entered into the wider language.

The chestnut vendor has always struck me as a mysterious romantic figure

My colleague Kris, after reading this post by Charles Petzold, commented on the fact that Charles was writing a book on 3D WPF despite the fact, clear, (to Kris),  from his post, that he is not a domain expert.

Lo and behold!  Today, in another post  Mr Petzold elaborates on just this

Who is the best person to write a book about a programming interface? Is it a person involved in designing and implementing that interface? Or an outsider (e.g., a person much like myself)? There are definitely advantages to either viewpoint. The person involved with the technology can certainly offer insights and rationales into the design. But the danger is that the author is so close to the technology that he or she can no longer imagine what the reader needs to know.

When I’m writing a book, I like to be fairly fresh to the material. That doesn’t mean that I’m writing the book from a pristine state of total ignorance, but that I can still remember my own learning process. I can remember what didn’t make sense to me, what concepts I stumbled over, and how strange and bizarre certain aspects of the API seemed at first. In other words, I can feel the reader’s pain because I’ve been there myself.

Working in an extreme programming team is a difficult XPdition. The principles of XP and the Outward Bound mission statement have some striking similarities

 ”To inspire character development and self-discovery in people of all ages and walks of life through challenge and adventure, and to impel them to achieve more than they ever thought possible, to show compassion for others and to actively engage in creating a better world.”

Our code changes and evolves (hopefully),  as a collective effort. There is a shared understanding and appreciation of excellence but excellence can take many forms. I’m learning, sometimes the hard way, that becoming overly attached to your own ‘default’ way of thinking is dangerous, especially in this environment.

 A friend of mine, when describing the plight of middle-class, left-wing intellectuals said jokingly, “It takes a lot of money to rejoin the proletariat”.  The word “money” is what makes this statement funny but substitute “unlearning” for “money” and it makes real sense.

Unlearning is much harder than learning — enter Beginners Mind .

“So the secret is just to say ‘Yes!’ and jump off from here. Then there is no problem. It means to be yourself, always yourself, without sticking to an old self.”

In no particular order …

1. When code gets simpler, it thanks me.
2. On a good day I experience a real and sustained sense of adventure.
3. I like to share the excitement of discovery with other people.
4. I like creating things. If my creations take on a life of their own, I know have succeded.

The works of Arshile Gorky and Francis Bacon have always hit me in the same place somehow. Both excite me by pointing me towards what feels abandoned and scary but at the same time also incredibly close to me in some vague and mysterious way — like the e.e. cummings lines

in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

Charles Baudelaire’s poem, Correspondences, from Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil) comes very close to describing what I want to understand.

Nature is a temple in which living pillars
Sometimes give voice to confused words;
Man passes there through forests of symbols
Which look at him with understanding eyes.Like prolonged echoes mingling in the distance
In a deep and tenebrous unity,
Vast as the dark of night and as the light of day,
Perfumes, sounds, and colors correspond.There are perfumes as cool as the flesh of children,
Sweet as oboes, green as meadows
— And others are corrupt, and rich, triumphant,With power to expand into infinity,
Like amber and incense, musk, benzoin,
That sing the ecstasy of the soul and senses.

Arshile Gorky - Agony

Francis Bacon  - Three Studies for a Crucifixion - 3

Right now I’m listening to Nothing But The Water by Grace Potter & The Nocturnals. I missed her when she played the Bowery Ballroom recently. She’s not that bad in a bluesy background kind of way. She pushes a little too hard on the up tempo stuff. Her ballads are better. The lyrics are pretty good on “Ragged Company”. The heavenly Hammond B-3 is used throughout the album and that’s nice.

Whenever I go on a long road trip, although I bring plenty of CDs, I find myself searching for and listening to small local AM stations emanating from the nearby towns.

I like to listen to the Saturday morning Swap Shops where people will sell four, almost new, radial tires for $75 or best offer, (or trade then for a washing machine in good condition). The ads run by the neighborhood electrical contractors, used car dealers and feed stores describe a smaller more manageable world.

When I’m at home in Brooklyn I can still listen to far-away stations at night. WWVA out of Wheeling, West Virginia (1170), CHWO Toronto, Ontario (740) or WHAS Louisville, Kentucky (1100) are strong enough to come in on a good night. It depends on the weather.

I have a SELECT-A-TENNA antenna and a GE Super Radio to help things along.

It is true that most of these stations now stream on the internet, but the static provides a feeling of vast distance as it ebbs and flows mixing in a sound like ocean waves. The surface noise of vinyl or shellac, that some of us miss, provides the same feeling but across time.

So why is this mysterious? I have found that not many people share my appreciation.

Perhaps it resonates only with those of us who, in our pre-pubescent years, bought 6 or 8-transistor radios to put under our pillows. But then again, there are also the people who collect grocery lists discarded by strangers in supermarkets