intial thought: AWESOME.
second thought: REALLY AWESOME.
i let mel drive it around all weekend to get around since she was nice enough to drive it up here for me in the first place. i took her to the airport on monday morning, and then dove into the carpool lane to go to work during mad rush hour at 7:30.
45 minutes.
it’s great being able to drive in the carpool lane, and yet strange at the same time. i feel vaguely elitist, like i bought my way into some super-exclusive first class private highway right next to the regular one. which of course, i did. mine is congestion-free and paved with silk, while theirs is filled with potholes and smells of cabbages.
talking with chip who also has a prius with stickers, he says that it’s not only the fact that you’re passing all of the traffic, but also that you get into a different mindset: you arrive stress-free, without all of the aggravation of that stop-and-go. i have to agree; it’s much more relaxing and allows you to just zone out. and even when you do stop-and-go, you’re oddly a little excited by it, as it’s an opportunity to regenerate some energy into the battery.
i just hope that the stop-and-go wasn’t the only thing that was keeping me from falling asleep while driving.
as for the prius itself, it is totally a geek car: huge multifunction display shows you exactly what the car is doing, whether you’re being powered by battery or by engine, or whether the battery is being charged by the wheels as you coast for a bit. it shows your average mpg for the last half hour in five minute increments, along with how many 50W light bulb equivalents you’ve regenerated. and then there’s the touch-pad controlled everything else: gps, audio system, bluetooth integration with the phone.
finally, a car that’s quiet enough to have an honest phone conversation without me having to mute constantly and show. now i can talk without the people on the other line complaining about how they can’t hear me. yeah, i’m talking about you. you know who you are.
the smart key is pretty slick as well: i can walk up to the car, it automatically unlocks, and then just sit down, push the on button, and drive away. and then when i get out, just push the button on the door handle, and lock the car back up. at no point does the key leave my pocket. weird.
the only downside so far is that the audio system seems to be pretty, uh, crappy. although it might just be the ipod through the cassette adapter making it extra crappy. i’ll install the ipod thing next week and see if it’s better, otherwise i’m going to have to rip the entire system out. which from what i’ve read, is not a pretty process.
all in all, it’s pretty nice so far. it’s not zippy and not fun like i wanted in a mini, but it gets me to work and back pretty quickly. i do have to admit, though, to make myself feel better about that, often count how many minis i pass on the way to work…
not that you were all holding your breath, but HOLY CRAP i bought a prius. after all that, i hope that you’re everyone the polar bears i’m happy with it. let me be clear: the reasons were thus and in this order:
i would like to note that hmc was very genteel throughout this whole process, saying that i didn’t have to get the prius and give up my mini, and even cautioning me to sleep on the decision before i went through with it to make sure i was ok with it. amongst a million other things, this is why i love her: not trying to crush my dreams.
i actually ended up buying one in lost angels; i had mel check it out for me, and then did all the business over the phone. mel’s driving it up today since she’s coming up this weekend anyway. I LOVE HER!
the mitigating factor is that i don’t have to give up the miata, so i can keep that for fun as well. and as mamaluna pointed out, since the prius has a carpool sticker, it should be easy to resell. thus if i do end up hating it, i can just sell it next year and get a mini clubman.
now everywhere we go is a little adventure. because we’re travelling with a little one, and we can’t adventure very far with said little one.
which is not to say that we aren’t making the effort.
after an outing to scary/lovely orinda on saturday for a housewarming party, on sunday, we made snapper’s first foray into 1. downtown oakland for brunch at cock-a-doodle cafe, and 2. the city to visit 3. the apple store! it turns out that snapper is not that excited about apple stuff, even the new iphone and the ipod touch. she is, however, still slimmer and cuter than that odd looking new ipod nano “fatty”. we were actually there to drop off hmc’s macbook pro which has been intermittently yet consistently turning itself off for the past six months. the good news is that it exhibited said behavior for the apple geniuses. the bad news is that now it vanishes into the scary nebulous world of ‘apple repair’. this is the point where we collectively hold our breath, cross our fingers, and pray. sacrifice chickens if you got ‘em.
also we made a quick stop at the h&m in the westfield mall, which, by the way, has a very nice selection of baby clothes that are not positively frightening. while i do believe that 90% of clothes in general are horrid, it’s really apparent that 99% of baby clothes in particular are ghastly, ranging from the merely puzzling (do people really want their kids to look like raggedy andy?) to the truely creepy (CLOWN PANTS?!?). is it so hard to find simple onesies that are say, just black or grey? sure, i know it’s harder to hide spit up on solid colors, but that doesn’t mean you need to plaster my daughter with vomit-patterned pink butterfly ruffle pants. because if i do, someday i’ll have to answer for it.
yesterday we went to the parkway for baby brigade, for 4. snapper’s first movie: the brave one. which was a little odd, because there were no other babies there when the movie started, although thankfully some snuck in later. (those rascally hoodlums!) as for the movie, it was unfortunately only mediocre, which is a little surprising for neil jordan. for some reason the cinematographer decided that the best way to convey fear was to use hitchcock’s camera tricks from vertigo, which would be fine, if it was still 1958. but it’s not. at least snapper got to see jodie foster, who is watchable in anything, although this movie did make for a much better interview than actual movie.
truth be told, she slept through the entire thing. but at least her first movie wasn’t something involving ben affleck.
from the new scientist:
TAKE a bunch of lap dancers, some lustful men and a fistful of dollars, and you have the best evidence yet for the controversial idea that women send out signals which reveal their fertile periods.
Last month, biologist Randy Thornhill challenged the orthodoxy that women do not undergo regular bouts of hormone-induced oestrus, or “heat”, when they are at their most fertile - something most female mammals experience. Now a study of the tips men give to lap dancers, conducted by a colleague of Thornhill’s, lends further support to the argument for oestrus.
Geoffrey Miller and his team at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, compared the earnings of lap dancers who were menstruating naturally with those of dancers taking the hormonal contraceptive pill. During the non-fertile periods of their menstrual cycle, both sets of dancers earned similar tips. But when naturally cycling lap dancers entered their fertile period they earned significantly more in tips than their co-workers on the pill.
…
But the study does appear to show that the dancers somehow advertise their fertility to men, who then consider them more attractive during this fertile phase, as reflected in their tips. How they advertise, however, and whether they do it consciously, is unclear. “We don’t know the mechanism of attraction,” says Thornhill, who is also at the University of New Mexico but was not involved with the study. “Are the men detecting the scent of oestrus? Or does the women’s behaviour change?” he asks.
“Previous research has shown that women’s faces, scent and clothing become more attractive in oestrus,” Miller notes. For example, earlier this year, Martie Haselton at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that women were judged to dress more attractively during their fertile periods, although the correlation was slight. Other studies show women become more confident during oestrus, says Thornhill. In the context of lap dancing, that may subtly change their behaviour and make them more appealing to clients.
this is fascinating data, and of course demands further study and repeated field trips to gather more data. in the name of science, of course. SCIENCE!
we took snapper in for her one month checkup today (i suppose five and 5/7th week checkup, to be exact). she’s doing great, 8lb 1oz, and up to 21 3/4” tall! as it is, she’s already progressing very well: she’s tracking and following sounds, grasping well, and even starting to hold her head up by herself.
plus, she’s already beaten me at wii tennis.
so a friend of mine at work is selling a 2005 prius with carpool lane stickers. it’s probably a good deal, and it would mean 1. a faster commute, 2. an actual family friendly car, and 3. al gore will get off my back.
however, this would more than likely mean not getting a mini (even a clubman) for the foreseeable future.
do i keep the dream alive, or do i try and save the polar bears?
after meticulously reading through the only two issues of the new yorker we had while down in lost angels (although they did have very interesting articles on seed banks, mushroom hunting, light pollution, ian mckellen, and phillip k. dick), i’m finally almost caught up with all the ones that have piled up here while we were away. i’m up to the style issue from a few weeks ago, and now being a parent, i’m probably obligated to make reference to the snippet on the new nursery school started up by the blue man group:
One morning, not long before the opening, Goldman, Wink, and their wives stopped by the center, which occupies two airy floors in a row house on Lafayette Street. The director, Jane Racoosin, and three teachers were showing a visitor around the unfinished classroom, stepping over a stray disco ball and explaining that a large, apparently blank hanging canvas is an outer-space mural rendered in ultraviolet paint. Nearby, members of the Blue Man costume crew, on loan from Blue Man Productions, in Red Hook, New York, were riveting sheets of green vinyl to the foam-covered walls of what would become the “soft room.”
…
“Imagine a school that people wouldn’t have to recover from,” Wink said. The couples have devised their own guiding philosophy, drawing heavily from what is known as the Reggio Emilia approach to education, developed in Italy after the Second World War, which emphasizes empowering children by encouraging their creativity.
“Some schools feel like they’ve got to rein the kids in,” Wink said, banging on a drum the size of a hot tub. “We kind of let them have moments of unbridled exuberance.”
Racoosin, the director, broke in, sounding a note of institutional responsibility. “It’s all back and forth between the children and the teachers,” she said. “But it won’t be a free-for-all.”
Every day at the center will end with a ritual called Glow Time, during which the shades are lowered, the regular lights are turned off, and black lights are turned on, illuminating the parts of the room (including work created by the students) that have been painted with special UV paint. The collection of Blue Man-inspired educational gewgaws on hand is a far cry from flash cards and Play-Doh. There’s a hypnotic Bubble Machine, with kid-controlled colored lights; a futuristic Water Machine, with a mini-whirlpool; and a trippy installation, left over from the B.M.G.’s 2003 tour, of giant computer-animated dragonflies that can be made to light up, flap their wings, and fly. The Tree House, whose slide deposits kids in the Texture Pit, looks like fun. So does the OMi-Beam machine, a computerized rig made up of eight ceiling-mounted halogen lamps, loudspeakers, and a video monitor (there is only one other OMi-Beam machine in the country, at Madame Tussaud’s). Colored beams create pools of light on the floor, and by waving a reflective wand through the beams kids can produce any number of sounds, from musical instruments to the calls of barnyard animals and samples of pop hits from the nineteen-eighties (one is Fatboy Slim’s “Rockafeller Skank”).
Once the school gets accredited, Goldman and Wink plan to extend it, one year at a time, through at least the fifth grade. And they hope to maintain what they call “Blue Man’s essence.” During a trial run of the center for a group of two- and three-year-olds last year, Goldman and Wink experimented with incorporating actual bits of Blue Man Group business into the curriculum. They decided against teaching their pupils how to catch paintballs in their mouths (“Maybe in second grade,” Goldman said), but they did adapt their spin-art routine, which involves a Blue Man spitting paint onto a canvas rotated by his fellow Blue Men, as an exercise in coöperation. “By the end of the experience,” Wink said, “they got to a tribal place.”
