The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

Some SARS-related stories, mostly from Accordion City…

---

On Saturday, Paul and I took visiting International Man of User Experience Matt “Black Belt” Jones and his friend Andrea to Shanghai Cowgirl, a nice little diner on Queen Street West (their motto — I swear this is true — is “Will that be fried or deep-fried?”). The chalkboard sign outside the restaurant read “100% SARS FREE”.

Andrea mentioned that on Matt’s British Airways flight home, passengers would be asked to wear masks for the duration of the flight. Matt, did everyone werar masks, and if so, did you get a photo of the cabin? I think it would be even cooler than the famous Life magazine photo of the audience at a 3-D movie…

---

Chinatown is right around the corner from my house (hence its name, Big Trouble In Little China). While walking around this weekend, I saw the occasional person wearing a mask, and at least two stores were selling N95 surgical masks. A couple of news crews were doing interviews at some of my usual haunts, including the Pho Hung Vietnamese noodle shop and Rol San, home of the sizzling Chinese peppercorn beef.

---

Yesterday on my subway ride home, I was drinking a Diet Coke when the train braked suddenly and I got some down my windpipe. Naturally, I started coughing. I got a couple of concerned looks from nearby passengers, one of whom quickly dove into her purse, got some Kleenex and pressed it over her nose and mouth as a makeshift mask. To anyone who looks even remotely Chinese and has the sniffles or a cough: you officially have the cooties. On the bright side, I’m sure people gladly give me their seat and even some elbow room if I break into a fit of fake coughing.

---

Here’s a cat in Taichung City, Taiwan that’s been given a mask to protect it from SARS.

Which caption do you think is best?

• Awwwwww! Wook at the cute wittle kitty!
• They’ll let anyone into med school these days.
• You’re gonna need a bigger egg roll wrapper! This one won’t even cover its head!

At long last, someone’s written a nice little guide to rock concert etiquette. Live it. Learn it. And quit burning me with your cigarettes!

Cory Doctorow hit the 30,000-word mark on his latest novel, usr/bin/god (ask a geeky friend who uses some version of the UNIX operating system if you don’t get the joke). To celebrate the milestone, he’s posted a 2,000-word snippet which includes this interesting paragraph:

Job interview! He cringed at the words, cringed at the memory of the grueling, humiliating pre-test he’d had to do to even *get* a job-interview, which had included fifteen essay questions on the history of the Internet, the fine points of Microsoft Foundation Classes, and SQL query-syntax. He’d had to define a glossary of no fewer than 30 technical terms, including “PEBKAC” (“Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair”), which had been his freaking *login* for five years on an underpowered Solaris box at his ISP.

Regular readers of this blog may recall a posting of mine about having to answer a dozen essay questions — many of which were meant merely to determine my 1337 bona fides rather than any techincal skill or experience — to even get an interview with a particular software company located in downtown Accordion City. After that, there was still the matter of a pre-interview interview, followed by an interview, followed by a presentation.

Cory noted the job interview hoop-jumping I had to do in two entries in BoingBoing back in November. It would seem that those blog entries provided some inspiration for a detail in the story, which seems pretty cool. (The mention of Microsoft Foundation Classes might have also come from me — see this blog entry — most of Cory’s geek friends are either those dirty Linux hippies or glaze-eyed Mac moonies.)

I am, of course, making a wild assumption here. Cory could’ve come up with that detail all on his own. However, as the World’s Most Humble Egomaniac™, my mantra is “It’s all about me.”

I’ve kidded Jamie Zawinski that I thought he wasn’t disturbed enough to have a LiveJournal, but I’m sure Kim Jong Il is. And lo and behold, it turns out that “beloved leader” actually has one!

Whoever’s writing it has got the LiveJournal writing style down pat, opting to write Kim Jong Il as a mopey teenager. Here’s a snippet:

I’m not feeling very good about myself today. I guess I build walls around myself because I don’t want people to get too close. Sometimes I wish I could just be normal and not such a Stalinist.

All the writer really needs to do to truly capture the LJ angsty flavour is use a black background and mood icons like:

Today I am feeling:

ennui, but so what else is new?

Here’s my favourite entry so far, a transcript of an IM chat between Kim and Bush. Some of you may find the conversation eerily familiar:

License2KimJongill: hey

License2KimJongill: so listen, if you’re not doing anything next month, i thought it would be fun if maybe we did something

Bush43: LIKE WHAT?

License2KimJongill: i was thinking maybe you could come to pyongyang and maybe we could have nuclear negotiations

Bush43: YEAH! IT SOUNDS LIKE FUN! I’LL INVITE RUSSIA AND JAPAN AND CHINA AND ALL THOSE GUYS. AND MAYBE WE SHOULD HAVE IT AT MY HOUSE INSTEAD

License2KimJongill: oh, um……

License2KimJongill: i kind of thought it would be more fun if it was just us

Bush43: WHAT, YOU MEAN JUST THE TWO OF US?

Bush43: ONE ON ONE?

License2KimJongill: yeah! over here in pyongyang. we could watch the mass games and go frolicking on Mount Paektu. there’s this rainbow

Bush43: I THINK THAT MIGHT BE WIERD

License2KimJongill: what do you mean?

Bush43: LOOK I’M STILL GETTING OVER THIS SADDAM THING OKAY? I THINK I ALREADY TOLD YOU SADDAM IS STILL IN MY LIFE. SO I JUST DON’T THINK IT’S A GOOD IDEA RIGHT NOW

License2KimJongill: oh

Bush43: I’D STIL LIKE TO GO BUT I THINK RUSSIA AND JAPAN AND CHINA SHOULD COME TOO. WE COULD DO A GROUP THING

License2KimJongill: you know what…just forget it

A co-worker has locked up a file that I need to edit and gone for a long, long lunch. Bad, bad coworker. How can I write refugee processing software without that file? Leaving refugee data in an inconsistent state makes Baby Jesus cry. I’ll bet it makes relational database pioneer C.J. Date cry too.

In the meantime, how ’bout some more puns on “Coalition of the willing”?

Farmers	Coalition of the tilling
Feather-pen enthusiasts	Coalition of the quilling
Oil companies	Coalition of the drilling
People making flour	Coalition of the milling
Everyone on medication	Coalition of the pilling
Hit men	Coalition of the killing
Drunk oil tanker captains	Coalition of the spilling
A mess of Lisp programmers, all saying “no”	Coalition of the NILling
The Thirsty People of Toronto	Coalition of the swilling
People who make money off the Thirsty People of Toronto	Coalition of the distilling
Several trip-hop and ambient bands organizing a cross-country tour	Coalition of the chilling
Several hip-hop bands doing the same	Coalition of the illing
The North Korean Army doing the same	Coalition of the Kim Jong Illing
Carbohydrates	Coalition of the filling
The entire Lilith Fair engaged in onanism (might not be safe for work)	Coalition of the jilling (might not be safe for work)

I’m just trying to carve out enought time to write those entries. Work has to take precedence as my landlord, the utilities companies and a number of stores in the market have formed a “Coalition of the Billing”.

Morgan and Vinyl Demon both pointed me to this CNN story that begins with this line:

After two run-ins with police for playing his accordion on the village’s streets, Jacob Kouwe has been cleared to polka.

The aptly-named town of Chagrin Falls, Ohio is a suburb of Cleveland (which, contrary to what Drew Carey will tell you, does not rock in the very least). The sixteen-year-old accordion player started busking in the downtown area of Chagrin Falls in December, playing polkas and hymns on his accordion. His playing drew two complaints to the police: one from a busybody nothing-better-to-do Starbucks employee who claimed that he was “soliciting” and another from a resident who complained that his playing was “tacky”. The police looked into the possibility that Jacob was disturbing the peace by breaking a 1935 law prohibiting the loud playing of musical instruments.

I respectfully suggest that the Starbucks employee get a life. As for the other complainant: anyone who lives in Cleveland is automatically disqualified from calling anything “tacky”; this goes triple for anyone who lives in a suburb of Cleveland.

It worked out in the end: the village council (I can’t help imagining a group of elders carrying torches and dropping black or white balls into the preserved skull of the town founder) ruled that his performances do not disturb the peace. Jacob said the following to the council:

I admit street performances are not the polished, perfected, album-quality fare served up by formal concert venues. However, my street performances are from the heart.

Truer words were never spoken. Well done, Jacob!