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Ode to a cheesesteak vendor

By on February 16th, 2007

Let us now praise the food-truck vendors of Philadelphia: the tireless purveyors of gyros, hot dogs, burritos, falafel, and street food of every description; the guys who set up at 7 in the morning in Center City to sell fruit salad to commuters; the legions of food trucks that congregate in University City to feed hungry students and university employees (even the vegetarians). And let us offer special praise to the cheesesteak vendors, for they are the essence of Philadelphia.

Let us now above all praise the cheesesteak-making family whose cart is always parked directly between Hagerty Library and the entrance to the 33rd Street trolley stop, whom neither rain nor snow nor subzero wind chills can deter, and who are always ready to sustain a famished and semi-frozen MSLIS student even on days when it’s so cold out that she has to put the cheesesteak inside her coat to keep it from getting cold during the one-block dash to the shelter of the Rush Building. May they be blessed with all that they desire, for verily in the bleakest month of the year, they are an oasis of fried-onion-covered joy. Long live the institution of the cheesesteak truck!

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More library humor from YouTube

By on February 13th, 2007

Both of these YouTube videos landed in my inbox in the last few days, and both made me giggle. So I’m passing them along:

  • An intrepid documentarian watches the strange biannual ritual of the March of the Librarians in Seattle. (It helps if you’ve seen March of the Penguins.)
  • Introducing the Book! If you’ve ever worked at a help desk, or been flummoxed by your computer, you need to watch this one. The bit at the end where the guy says "wait, now it’s like this and I can’t open it!"? Priceless.
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Freedom to Marry Week link roundup

By on February 12th, 2007

It’s National Freedom to Marry Week. Here are some links from around the interwebs:

From Salon’s Broadsheet:
San Francisco county clerks demonstrate their support for same-sex
marriage by issuing "Certificates of Inequality" that read: "I issue
this Certificate of Inequality to you because your choice of
marriage partner displeases some people whose displeasure is,
apparently, more important than principles of equality." (Right on.)

Bitch Ph.D. shares an apposite reader comment.

A group in Washington is challenging the state legislature’s contention that it’s a "legitimate state interest" to limit marriage to couples who can procreate — by carrying the state’s reasoning to its logical and absurd conclusion and calling for a ban on all non-child-producing marriages. It’s a wacky strategy (as they freely admit), intended to make people see the absurdity of the arguments, but kind of brilliant in its own right. (Via Poesy Galore.)

And, finally: I miss my friends and colleagues there, but I’m glad I no longer live in Virginia. Not that Pennsylvania’s exactly idyllic. What’s the legislation like in your state? The HRC has a couple of handy maps (only in PDF format, alas). Yes, since you ask, I have thought about Canadian citizenship.

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Urban exploration: the Italian Market

By on February 10th, 2007

Fridays are non-work days for me most of the time, so they generally end up being devoted to some combination of errands and coursework. Yesterday’s errand was a badly-needed haircut. I’d heard good things about the Jean Madeline Institute down in Queen Village, and I wasn’t disappointed at all: the student who cut my hair did a really nice job of it, and they offer you scalp massages and use high-end hair products.

So then, since I hadn’t really done much exploring south of South Street, I headed for the Italian Market, which I’d been meaning to check out since I got here. It’s an outdoor market where vendors set up stalls outside their shops all year round. There wasn’t a whole lot of activity yesterday afternoon because of the cold (one vendor had a brisk fire going in a metal trash can to keep warm, with showers of ash from time to time). But I still came away with (for about $4) a bunch of scallions, half a dozen apricots, two of those long skinny Italian eggplants, and a hunk of ricotta salata from a shop where they were making pasta behind the counter — one of the shopkeepers was running flat sheets of what ended up as fettucine through the pasta machine, cutting each bunch off with a sweep of her hand. Next time I go back, I’ll take a look at the bakeries and remember to stop for a broccoli rabe sandwich.

Along the way, I kept passing buildings that had been covered in mosaics of glass and tile and mirror, reflecting the winter sun onto the sidewalks. Later, after a bit of Googling, I found out that they’re the work of Isaiah Zagar, who’s apparently been covering South Philly buildings with mosaics for the last 15 years. This was one of the ones I walked past; there are more pictures here, here, and here.

Afterwards I found a pleasant coffee place where I had an espresso and did a bit of reading for my 511 class, and then I hiked back up into Center City to catch the bus home. And I think I officially love this city.

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Backstage at the Academy

By on February 9th, 2007

Huzzah! The Academy of Music is having an open house tomorrow. Apparently they’re going to let people wander around the set of Porgy and Bess. (Note to self: I really need a digital camera.) If there’s time to go, I’ll post about it.

Later: The open house was indeed fun, though I was in something of a hurry on
account of piled-up homework awaiting me. The highlights, for me, were
walking all around the Porgy and Bess set (we couldn’t climb up to
the second level, but it was fabulous to be able to stand in the middle
of it and peer out into the auditorium) and sitting down in the
orchestra pit. Also, listening to the costume director tell hilarious stories about the politics of
assigning dressing rooms,
the engineering challenge that is corset-making, and his quest for hockey-grade knee protectors for the tenor singing Porgy. I also peeked into one of the proscenium
boxes, and I will never envy the very rich again, because the boxes get a far more obstructed view of the stage than I did from way up in the Amphitheatre
section when I saw Cenerentola. They’re optimally positioned to be seen
by everyone else, though, which I suppose is the point.

Oh, and it turns out that they filmed the opera sequence in The Age of Innocence inside the Academy of Music! Well, speaking of rich people seeing and being seen…
 

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Winter blahs and everyday information seeking

By on February 8th, 2007

This has been a week of tiredness and too many layers of clothing and that nagging "am I coming down with a cold?" feeling, combined with mild panic over the fact that within
the next five weeks, I have to plow through a big stack of readings,
write a grant proposal, and put together a literature review. I remember this particular feeling quite well from the University of Chicago: the midpoint of winter quarter always seemed more dire than the midpoint of other quarters. I know I’ve survived just fine before, and can do it again. Still, winter blahs are one of those things you can’t quite reason away.

But tonight’s class actually chased the blahs off; we were talking about what’s known as "everyday life information seeking," which I find totally fascinating. We had a discussion that zinged back and forth between the prevalence of Google as a first stop for ordinary information, what it’s like to grow up in a town served by a bookmobile, and the "strength of weak ties" theory. It was a good class, and I’m starting to feel much more like we’re a cohort now that most of us have been in at least one class together this term and last term.

Now for some Battlestar Galactica, some tea, and so to bed. (BSG seems to keep the blahs at bay, too.)

Quotidian 3 comments

Whining about the weather. Nothing to see, move it along.

By on February 5th, 2007

You know that Jack London short story about the guy trekking through the Yukon in the dead of winter? And the temperature’s considerably colder than 50 below, and he’s got a beard of ice hanging from his face, and his attempts at starting a fire fail because he’s rapidly losing all feeling in his hands? And he’s too far from civilization to call for help, and nobody’s there except for his dog? And then at the end he freezes to death? Yep. That would be today in most of the northeast.

It wasn’t quite that cold here. But there were more than a few moments on my way to work this morning when I remembered that story, and wished I hadn’t been made to read it in middle school, because one really doesn’t want to be thinking about freezing in the wilderness while the wind rushes right through one’s three or four layers of clothing. (You know it’s really cold when even the extra-dorky wool hat with the earflaps doesn’t keep your head warm.)

I am now going to sack out on the couch with a lap robe, a DVD, and a pot of tea. Regular non-whiny posting will resume when I can get Jack London’s man-vs.-the-elements plot out of my head.

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Meeting of the bloggers

By on February 3rd, 2007

Fellow Philadelphian Jeannette (of Moot Thoughts & Musings) beat me to the punch posting about our blogger meet-up yesterday, and has a better description of it than the one I was planning. A good time was had by all, and (as she says) we turned out to have an unexpected and kind of obscure research topic in common, not to mention a fondness for Indian food and Baroque instruments. (Not that the Baroque instrument thing wasn’t already common knowledge.) We’ve got to do that again sometime when we won’t get sleeted on!

Memes 4 comments

Which science fiction writer are you?

By on February 3rd, 2007

Well, this is encouraging:

I am:

James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice B. Sheldon)

In the 1970s she was perhaps the most memorable, and one of the most popular, short story writers.  Her real life was as fantastic as her fiction.

Which science fiction writer are you?

I suspect that a big factor in my getting this result was the fact that, for the question "Are you a total dork with the opposite sex?", the answer I picked was "I am the opposite sex." (What can I say? I like travesti.)

(Via PZ Myers, who’s also James Tiptree, Jr.)

Music 4 comments

We love Bellini

By on February 1st, 2007

[One more post, and then I’m going to bed. Must…keep…reasonable…hours…]

The Opera Company of Philadelphia just announced its ’07-’08 season, and I did a little happy dance when I saw that they’re doing Bellini’s Norma in the spring. I’ll certainly go see Rigoletto in October, and maybe the other two as well (Hansel and Gretel and a new operatic adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac), but it was Norma that made my day.

Incidentally, someday I want to host a dinner party at which the menu includes spaghetti alla Norma and after-dinner Bellinis, and everyone can debate the merits of Callas and Stignani (or Callas and Ludwig) vs. Sutherland and Horne. Or would that be a bit much?