Practicalmadness

Tonight's (or rather, this morning's) entry into the ongoing saga of OS X -- I have now used the screen saver-as-desktop trick, and agree that it is fabulous. Moving on...

1. Tuesday night the so-called real world intrudes upon my happy domestic bliss with OS X and, of course, Jenny to remind me that sometimes (gasp!) I can get screwed too...

GET ON WITH IT!!!

Oh, of course. So sorry.
My wallet was stolen. Well, probably not stolen. Not stolen per se. More likely just fell out of my coat pocket on the #36 bus as it lurched forward and, thanks to the magic of inertia, I did not. Not that any of this hairsplitting made the scene we caused at Cosi's any more palatable, or having to make the four mile roundtrip home to grab a credit card any more fun. Especially since he was there.

Each of us has an archenemy, I suppose. Superman has Lex Luthor. Spider-Man has the Green Goblin (or Venom, for a brief period in the early 90s). If you work in retail/foodservice in the Near North or just happen to take the CTA's #36 bus or Red Line train, you have probably seen Newspaper Man at least once.

He's the one wearing a brown raincoat or sport jacket, usually with a bright. Red. Hawaiian shirt on underneath. He's the one carrying 6-12 shopping bags full of newspapers everywhere he goes. And when he brings them into Starbucks, he brings them in two by two, two by two, very so methodically. And he does it in stages. He'll carry two to the sign that says "Line forms here". He'll carry the others to that point. He'll make several trips. Then he'll start carrying them to the small condiment bar. He'll make several trips. And so on.

Finally, once everything is safely scattered around his chair in the back cafe and he's ordered his obligatory cup of coffee-cum-insurance policy against getting thrown out, he will nestle himself into a big, comfy leather armchair and fall asleep.

We have to wake him thirty minutes before closing time or else he'll be there all night.

2. This evening (Wednesday) we ate at the Tempo Cafe, a not-so-greasy spoon at Chestnut and State. They're quite an anomaly: a 24-hour diner serving diner food right smack in the middle of one of Chicago's ritziest neighborhoods, where they've been doing things the way they do them for years.

How do they do them? Well, to begin with, they're cash only. If you order one of their legendary omelets, you will inexplicably recieve a single orange slice and stewed prune with your order. On the entrees, the vegetable could be corn on the cob; then again, it could be a couple of tomato slices. None of this is on the menu. I think the kitchen makes things up as they go along.

But the food? Quite wonderful indeed. I had chopped sirloin with grilled onions and mashed potatoes. Jenny had the grilled pork chops with, natch, mashed potatoes. We both had cups of some really ripping potato soup, and the bread -- served with sweet, creamy Danish butter -- kicks serious booty. If that weren't a big enough meal (all of this is included when you order an entree), you have your choice of yummy Greek-style rice pudding or, um, Jell-O.

We opted for the rice pudding.

3. You know? Even though my wallet was stolen (lost) and I'm gonna have to move heaven and earth to get things back under control, I think things are pretty perfect.

4. Scarlet's Walk, the new Tori Amos album, is a mixed success in kind of the same way that Boys for Pele -- her previous attempt at a 'concept' album, and the least popular of her six previous efforts -- was a mixed success. Here Tori has an idea for a theme, and some ideas of how to get there, and her ongoing desire to become someone else for the sake of singing their songs. That said, she is still Tori Amos, and the song, not the album, is her medium. That is to say that while her albums are always very coherent and very good, here she's perhaps tried too hard to make all the music gell together into an Album (note the capital A). But I'm still listening.

5. I read in Macworld some weeks ago about how to set up Mac OS X (which, beneath its candy-coated, idiotproofed UI, is UNIX) with PHP and MySQL for development purposes. I think tonight or tomorrow I shall do this thing and see how it works.

Listening: Scarlet's Walk (Tori Amos)
Reading: David Copperfield
Watching: Prince Caspian and the Voyage of the Dawn Treader