Ryan McKern

In the last month and a half since I touched this, appar­ently there was a major reli­gious hol­i­day (Kwan­zaa, duh), the Patri­ots cemented their place in Final Jeop­ardy his­tory for the next decade, and the doesn't-mean-a-god-damned-thing elec­tions in Iowa and New Hamp­shire can't decide between six of one or a half dozen of the other.

I've got a lot of things that I want to write about, but right now I've just popped in to men­tion the fol­low­ing snip­pets while I expand other ideas into proper paragraphs

• If an apart­ment is in a build­ing of con­dos, and the condo asso­ci­a­tion doesn't allow pets, that I under­stand. It's land­lords who own their build­ings out­right and sim­ply say "no pets" with­out a will­ing­ness to talk about it that irk me. Yeah, your apart­ment will even­tu­ally rent but you're still going to have to shell out to have it painted and repaired when the ten­ant moves out. If you'd let me move in, I'd have prob­a­bly done it for you, as well as spack­led your walls, changed light bulbs, mopped the floor, and fixed that bro­ken kitchen cab­i­net that you've been mean­ing to put a new hinge on for the last decade but just haven't found the time to touch.

• Avoid the words "quaint", "charm­ing", "cute", and "cozy" when look­ing for a new apart­ment. They are all syn­ony­mous with "horrible".

• The Perry Bible Fel­low­ship book is every bit as awe­some as you'd expect.

• The Chron­i­cles of Worm­wood is a sur­pris­ingly thought­ful story from Garth Ennis. Yeah, it's all drink­ing and swear­ing and weird sex. There are no sur­prises here. But to me, this is the most direct state­ment about what it should mean to be a mod­ern Chris­t­ian vs. what most peo­ple actu­ally do.

• Kikuichi knives are deli­ciously sim­ple to sharpen because the steel they use is so good that it just needs a few quick passes over a 1000 grit or finer stone to remove the slight dull­ness that you might maybe pos­si­bly some­how have man­aged to wear into the "cut off your fin­gers with­out actu­ally mak­ing you bleed" blade. Good luck find­ing one at a rea­son­able price though. The weak dollar-to-yen exchange pretty much guar­an­tees that you're not find­ing any­thing from them for as cheap as you'd like.

• While I'm bab­bling about knives, the Vic­tori­nox Forged Pro­fes­sional line is pos­si­bly my cur­rent favorite line of ger­man cut­lery, but so incred­i­bly hard to find in stores. They feel like a per­fect mar­riage of Japan­ese knife design (lit­tle to no return or fin­ger guard on the bol­ster, allow­ing the blade to be sharp­ened all the way to the end of the edge) and Euro­pean style (thicker spine, flat­ter top, curved tip) with Solin­gen steel. It's designed like a Wüsthof or Henck­les knife, but actu­ally worth the cost. If the spine of the knife was rounded off for you already, it'd be the per­fect Euro­pean chef's knife. As it is, the 10" chef's knife is the first knife I turn to for large jobs, like this last years Thanks­giv­ing dinner.

• Absolutely unre­lated, I miss hav­ing a web-hosting account that I could run Sim­plelog on. While it hasn't been updated prop­erly in almost a year, I really miss hav­ing a sim­ple, easy to use and easy to main­tain app that I'm com­fort­able hack­ing around on push­ing my hor­ri­bly abrupt and dis­jointed ram­blings out to the world.

• Also, it bears men­tion­ing that for the most part, I agree with both Zed Shaw's vit­ri­olic shovel-spade-name-calling (because his points are usu­ally at least in the ball­park when they're not spot on), and his points about things that the Rails "com­mu­nity" is doing to smash its own toes in.