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Paswari Naan

I’ve barely nibbled on the food, so I can’t say much about its quality one way or another. What I can do is tell a little story.

Based on some online reviews, I finally plunged in and took advantage of SeamlessWeb. Not the most illustrative name around; basically it’s a service that lists restaurants which deliver to your area, and allows you to order online. No surcharge or anything. What’s swell about this, aside from theoretically not having to bother with the phone, is the breadth of participating establishments. At any time you might see a Jamaican barbecue joint, a Japanese restaurant, two or three Indian places, a vegan sandwich shop, and several pizza places. They only show the stores that should be open, so there’s little chance of confusion or fuss.

Again, in theory.

Granted the night of a blizzard was not the best night to order out. I wasn’t aware of how bad it was out there, as earlier in the day the snow was rather delicate. So my wife and I found a decent-looking Indian restaurant called Bombay Heights, put in our orders, set a tip, and submitted. We immediately got a confirmation, which said to expect the food in 30-45 minutes. Okay, fine. We set to our individual tasks and waited.

An hour later, we were hungrier. My wife suggested that I call the restaurant. Nobody answered. I then called SeamlessWeb. I found myself on hold for several minutes. One of the hold messages suggested that I send an email to customer support for immediate attention. I did so, and sat around for another half an hour. Eventually I called the 1-800 number again. Finally we got through. My wife snatched up the phone and reported that it had been 90 minutes since our order, and that we couldn’t contact the restaurant. The lady at SeamlessWeb tried to contact them, and also failed. She then refunded us our money, and gave us a 25% off coupon for our next SeamlessWeb transaction.

Okay, fine. We toasted up some cheese sandwiches and curled in bed with some Cap’n Crunch. My wife kept musing about how horrible she would feel if that delivery actually turned up.

After another hour, there was a buzz at the door. It was the dude from the restaurant. I opened the door, and there was a wall of snow outside. It was like I had opened a portal to Nunavut. The delivery guy was shaking and miserable. With a mind to how horrible it was out there, we tipped him another ten bucks and marveled that he managed to make the delivery at all.

In retrospect there was probably only the one guy working at the restaurant, and he had to take time out to deliver the food himself. And even then it took him hours just to make it up the block. So the food was late; okay, fine. It was still warm when we got it. And the mere fact of its delivery was kind of amazing.

In turn we called SeamlessWeb back up again, and asked that they reverse the reversal on our charge. I’ve no idea if this food is any good, but the guy prevailed in delivering it. We’re not going to penalize him for circumstances beyond his control.

Basically the point of this review is, if nothing else you will get your order one way or another. And it will be wrapped well, and warm. Even if it means slogging an inch at a time through a hurricane of snow.

(January 3rd, 2011 @ 10:56am)



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The Cosmopolis

I got some amazing strawberry jam the other day. It’s made with just strawberries and grape juice. And good junipers, I feel like eating it out of the jar.

It always weirds me out when people eat condiment or filling material on its own. Many women seem to just eat peanut butter, with a spoon; something about that just feels revolting. I’ve also known people to eat ketchup or mustard. Or to drink maple syrup. Even eating luncheon meat on its own strikes me as a little bizarre; it’s like eating a fetal sandwich. By eating it on its own, you are preventing a proper sandwich from being made down the line.

But this… this is beauty and love. Which makes everything gross desirable, and excuses all awkwardness.

There’s a big, normal mainstream grocery store on the other side of the lake. I’m gonna go there tomorrow if I get enough written, and see if they have some Ovaltine already. I don’t get this. In San Francisco you can find Ovaltine in any corner shop. In Oakland, zilch. Is it that cosmopolitan a beverage?

(October 21st, 2007 @ 3:12am)



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The Antikythera Mechanism

Oh hell. Why had I never heard of this?

It’s a Greek clockwork computer from about 150 BC, that calculates the movement of the sun, the moon, and possibly the known planets (though if so, those bits are missing). Possible uses included the prediction of various eclipses. By some accounts, Copernicus was builiding even more sophisticated devices than this.

Perhaps I should have studied Mediterranean history.

(February 1st, 2007 @ 4:58am)



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Missile Happy

Hey, have you ever been to the Sutro estate and baths? They’re way over near you, on the water. That’s where we were the other day. It’s absolutely amazing — the stone staircases and the pathways in the park (where the estate used to be), and the view out over the ocean and the lower part of the city… It’s like something out of a dream. Or Myst.

There’s this high platform where a couple of buildings used to stand; there are a couple of winding paths up to it — and there’s this one very narrow, steep stone staircase cut into the hillside, leading down and away. That staircase is perhaps my favorite thing on Earth.

The ruins of the baths are fascinating as well — really, the ruination of all of this is part of the appeal; imagining the way things once were, and trying to decipher why things are as they are now. There’s a neat, really long cave that ends in some slippery and dangerous rocks; seems like a great place for a murder.

Actually, there’s kind of an Edward Gorey overtone to the whole place. It feels timeless and mysterious, and there’s weirdly little graffiti or vandalism or trash. Only a few scraps here and there. Maybe it’s well-policed. I guess it would have to be.

I kept thinking how interesting it would be to grow up in a place like this where, after school or on a weekend, a kid could pay whatever a youth fare is on the MUNI — seventy-five cents, maybe — and ride out to a place like this, and just sit, and read or draw or explore or think. It’s like a whole other world — and it makes me wonder what else I’ve been missing around here.

(October 24th, 2006 @ 9:11pm)



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It’s alive!

So I’m reading about Gothic architecture — and for all its ornamentation, it actually is pretty logical in its development.

The main ingredient in all Gothic architecture is the pointed arch — a construction that, besides its visual appeal, has some practical aspects in that it allows for a bunch more weight than would normally be bearable, by directing much of the above force outward to its vertical elements. This allows for the very tall, narrow, usually rectangular open spaces typical of Gothic structures. Of course, since the walls are bearing so much weight, chopping such great holes in them for the giant windows typical of the period (and indeed necessary to light such massive structures) — pointed-arch windowframes or not — requires extra support, to keep the structures from crumpling. Thus, the flying buttress — those weird sinewy diagonal bits that you often see outside great Gothic halls, propping them up from the outside.

To keep the buttresses tied up, and weigh down the end that isn’t directly supporting something, they are often capped with a pinnacle — thus all the weird pointy peaks, to accentuate the pointy arches (and therefore pointy roofs) and the sinewy buttresses and the huge windows. The odd, skeletal, sort of grim feeling that this architecture gives off is mostly a side effect of an organic sequence of ideas, that all work together to form a solid, workable structure of a certain interior dimension within certain real estate limitations.

As for Neo-Gothicism… well, that was just the Romantics being all breathless and sentimental. As a result, it’s not always so practical.

(October 4th, 2006 @ 4:52am)



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