this thing smells like shit! literally!

Syzygy (our sailboat) has 5 seacocks (aka valves) in her hull. Four of them let water in or out of the boat. The fifth lets poop out of the boat. Take a guess which one Jon’s cleaning in a custom hot-water bath. Such is the glamor of owning a 30-year-old boat.

More on the glories of manual labor at SyzygySailing

news from the great plains: goats gone wild = they’ll fine your ass for that

Out there in the Great Plains, law-enforcement is done right: if you’ve got goats in your yard, and you live in the city limits (which is crazy anyway), and your goats get kinda horny and start humping and/or peeing and/or pooping, they fine your ass.

christmakwanzika is almost here! get your ZPG merch soon!

I’m shipping off to Mexico (to work on and sail Syzygy) on December 20th — so get your holiday ZPG orders in before then, or else!

waiter, can you help me? I’m looking for a yellow water bottle

So two weeks ago, when we were down in San Carlos, taking Sunshine for a little spin, we got ourselves into a funny little situation.

We’d just returned from the sea trial, and had put Sunshine in a slip at the marina. The then-owners and broker had gone about their day, leaving us to poke around the boat more, measuring and tinkering and such. With the sun out, Matt, Jon and I put our feet up, congratulated each other, and had a few nibbles of lunch: some prepackaged Mexican cookies and swigs of bottled water (you can tell that I did the shopping that morning.) Then, as typically happens after lunch, the urge to piss arose.

Thing is, the toilet on the boat was out of commission, on account of broken/leaky hoses. And we couldn’t just pee in the bushes, because there were none, or into the water, because it was a really nice, fancy marina. So Jon went up on deck and asked our neighbor if the marina had a bathroom. The  guy explained that the bathroom was just 50 yards behind us, but then traced a wide arc with his hand, and further explained that getting there would require walking about a mile around the peninsula, unless we were willing to swim.

So Jon did what any climber-turned-sailor would do: he went back below deck, grabbed one of those plastic water bottles, and pissed into it. Matt did the same thing. So did I.

Hours later, the broker returned. Matt and Jon packed up their stuff, grabbed a bag of trash, and jumped in the broker’s car. 10 minutes later, back at the office, we were signing important papers, to the tune of I-hereby-agree-to-pay-$60,000-for-that-there-sailboat type of papers. So we sorta forgot about the contents of that trash bag. Actually, Jon remembered, but thought it inappropriate to deposit our piss-bottles in our broker’s trash can. He’s got class, Jon does.

So we signed the papers. We rejoiced over a can of cheap beer. Then we left, trash bag in tow, and walked around the corner, to a coffee shop, to let the feeling sink in some more. It should be noted here that Jon speaks terrible Spanish. Or rather, he mumbles some stuff in Spanglish and then looks at me, knowing that I will correctly translate what has just been not-actually-said. So I heard Jon say the word “basura,” in an interrogative kind-of-way, as in, “do you have a trash can?” The barrista nodded, then extended her hand. Jon passed her our bag of trash. She took it, and disappeared into the kitchen. That seemed to be that.

We had some coffee, then went upstairs, to get online. An hour later, after writing some excited emails, we were eager to get some tacos. Matt and I were packing up our stuff when we heard Jon say, “Shit. I can’t find my Nalgene.” We poked around under the table, in case the bottle had fallen or rolled away. It wasn’t there. So Jon did what any normal person would do: he asked the bartender if he’d seen a yellow water bottle. (His nalgene is made of yellow plastic.) Of course, Jon didn’t get all of that syntax in there, given his Spanish skills. What he actually said is, “water? yellow?? where???”

Now I wasn’t there to actually witness the culmination of this piss-in-a-bottle-in-the-trash story (I had run off to call a taxi for later that night), but here’s what happened, according to Matt. The bartender ran downstairs to search. 3 minutes later, he ran back upstairs, shouting something like, “we found it!” (lo hemos encontrado!) Jon smiled. He ran downstairs. He approached the counter. Halfway there, he probably realized that there had been a grave misunderstanding. The barrista handed him our piss bottles, and did not smile as she did so. Not having any other recourse, Jon accepted the piss bottles. Not knowing how to say, “I am sorry, for this is not actually the yellow Nalgene I was seeking, nor is this a situation that I intended to create, and now I am embarrassed, and you are most likely angry, and for good reason,” he just hung his head low. No translation was needed. He made a beeline for the door.

I caught up with Jon and Matt 5 minutes later, at the taco place. By the time the first round of beers arrived, I think Jon had pretty much given up on the search for his lost Nalgene. Jon looked relieved, having just deposited the piss bottles in a bigger, better trash can.

check, check, don’t check

check it out: I was interviewed in SF Indie Fashion

check this out, too: some ZPG wares are now available at Portage Bay Goods (in Seattle), at Porcelynne (in San Francisco), and will soon be available at Made From Scrap (in San Francisco).

Don’t check this out: My good-but-apparently-off-their-rockers friends Justin and Walker donated a goat, or actually a portion of a goat (technically, a share of a goat), in my name, via Heifer International. How do I feel about it? Offended. Violated. Cheated. It’s the worst Hannukah gift ever. And what the hell: what kind of organization distributes goats around the world? Maybe they should rename themselves Evil Incarnate International. Shit. Hear this, J and W: you will pay for this. I will exact my revenge, someday, somehow…

My new boat gets wet

It’s been hard, these last few days, to contain myself, having bought a sailboat and all. Here she is, going into the water for the first time in years, in San Carlos, Sonora, Mexico. (More at syzygysailing.com)

ClusterFuck – probably the best named alleycat yet

Some rad people from MileHighMess and CycleJerks.com, in Denver, are putting on an alleycat in a month called ClusterFuck. I’m sponsoring it. Like, part of it. I think (and my memory may be failing) that it’s the best named alleycat I’ve heard yet (second best: Get to the Choppa!, which was here in SF). It’s also for a good cause (funding a new community bike shop called Battlesteed), and the people putting it on are rad.

Behold Exhibit A, an email from Jen, who is organizing the race: “I’m so fucking psyched that you’re so fucking psyched about sponsoring the shit out of ClusterFuck! “

I think that’s the best sentence I’ve seen all day.

Anyway, it’s in Denver. January 4. 8pm. I wish I could race it, flatlander-lungs and all. But I’ll be in Mexico, working on my new boat.

“We’re becoming a nation of fatties… in part because if you want a quart of milk, you have to take the car.”

Randy Cohen, aka The Ethicist of the NY Times Magazine, goes off on hedonistic car culture, misallocation of public urban space for parking, and the bad rap that congestion taxes tend to get, in this shortened clip of an interview he did with Mark Gorton, of the Open Planning Project.

My favorite excerpts:

“We’re becoming a nation of fatties… in part because if you want a quart of milk, you have to take the car.”

Q: “What’s wrong with driving everywhere?”
A: “Everything…it’s selfish…they knock me down…they pollute the air…the fumes from their cars…it imposes a huge expense…there’s absolutely no need for the private car in manhattan.”

“The automibile undermines our ordinary daily happiness. That’s truly sad.”

“We’re in a moment in NY history … when there is reason to be hopeful about biking”

41 years of giant, swedish, goat-burning glory

This story, full of burning 40-foot-tall goats, is so awesomely awesome that I need to shout out to Josh Karns for alerting me to it.

So here’s the deal. For 42 years, a bunch of goat-crazed fanatics in the scenic, seaside town of Gavle, Sweden have spent a fair portion of each December building a giant, 40-foot tall goat out of straw. Like, almost 4 tons of straw. (You can watch their efforts in a nifty time-lapse film.) They take great pride in the fact that their Christmas Goat, as they call it, is the largest of its kind in the world. They also take great pains to protect their giant goat from being destroyed, because, for reasons obvious enough to this goat-hater, townspeople have made it their goal, year after year, to destroy the damn thing. In its 41 incarnations, the goat has been destroyed 28 times — 22 of those times by burning, and 6 of them in some other creative way, either by sabotage, fire, or crashing a car into it.

See for yourself, in this compilation of 40 years of Swedish Christmas Goat status reports

1966: unmolested
1967: unmolested
1968: unmolested
1969: burned
1970: burned, then rebuilt
1971: abandoned, then broken
1972: collapsed due to sabotage
1973: unknown
1974: burned
1975: unknown
1976: destroyed in car crash
1977: unknown
1978: broken
1979: burned, rebuilt, then sabotaged and broken
1980: burned
1981: survived
1982: burned
1983: legs broken
1984: burned
1985: burned
1986: burned
1987: burned
1988: survived
1989: burned, rebuilt, burned again
1990: survived
1991: burned, rebuilt
1992: burned, rebuilt, burned again
1993: survived
1994: survived
1995: burned, rebuilt
1996: survived
1997: slightly damaged by fireworks
1998: burned
1999: burned
2000: burned
2001: burned
2002: survived
2003: burned, rebuilt
2004: burned
2005: burned, rebuilt
2006: minor burn to right leg

This year, the straw has been impregnated with a waterproof/snowproorf flame retardant, a webcam has been placed nearby to monitor it, and guards have occasionally been posted overnight to protect it from vandals. There’s even a blog, hopefully the only one if the world, written from the point of view of a giant goat, where other goat-crazed fanatics can delight in the supposed glory of, and send email to <gavlegoat@merjuligavle.se >, a giant inanimate chemical-laden goat.

So here’s hoping some creative pyromaniac gets to the Christmas Goat before too many people are forced to see this thing.