Ethan’s Journal

So, we finally have the mac mini and the laptop both up and running through the linksys router connected to what I can only describe as a “neighborhood LAN.” We were coming home last night and there were 2 or 3 dudes on the rooftop across from us throwing bundles of cable to 2 or 3 dudes on the rooftop across the street. Guess someone’s getting the world wide web.

Next on my list (after somehow juicing up our heart-breakingly slow internet connection) is to move all the plutino.net into CVS. Now that there’s actually stuff here and we’re bouncing back and forth between computers, I’m worried about losing some of these digital gems. I’m also working on a new engine for our “blogs.” I regret to say that I’ve totally gotten over my old php/mysql engine and while waiting for inspiration on a new one, I’m hand-coding these. The new one is going to be php/xml/xslt and I hope that I can just use the php XML DOM features right out of the gate. We’ll see. If anybody has any ideas on this front, please email me at iamabignerd AT plutino DOT net.

Before we even seriously considered moving here, Hamra quickly percolated to the top of the list of areas we were interested in. It’s a reasonably diverse, though predominantly Muslim, neighborhood with all manner of little joints and crazy characters. The atmosphere is buoyant. Around 5 or 6pm, it seems like the whole neighborhood starts getting rambunctious. Last night we came home at around half past midnight and there were still people having conversations from their balconies with friends in the street.

However, walking around at night also gives you the impression of a Hamra that once was. In the unlit signs and padlocked doors of the joints that have gone before, you can see the shadowy footprint of the neighborhood that used to be. My personal favorites:

Fly-High
The Limelight
Jackie O’s
Al-Jazz (which is actually right next door to us)
Rock Inn

So I’m sitting here on the mac at about 9:20 or so in the evening reading an interview with Fat Bobby from Oneida, in which he gives a little nod to the movie that my friend Malcolm and I just finished. Amy’s on the laptop looking at an excel spreadsheet of every movie that our dvd rental place has (which was graciously provided to us on cd). The call to prayer just ended. We live within hearing distance of about 3 mosques, to the call to prayer often sounds like this weird, Ligeti-like chorus. Amy just came over, kissed me on the head, and said, “You smell like Skoal.”

Today was a good day. I woke up to our landlord’s son at the door asking Amy what to do about the Syrians that are following him. We were going to go across the street to Ristretto for lunch, but being Sunday, it was closed. Just as well. We walked to the Corniche and ate at a kind of fancy place near Pigeon Rock. For a fair portion of the time we were there, a man who had climbed to the top of Pigeon Rock kind of wandered around up there, apparently agonizing over whether or not to jump. He didn’t.

After lunch we rode on the rickety and rusted ferris wheel at nearby Luna Park. The view was quite grand and we witnessed a car accident…hit and run…and pursuit. I impressed Amy with my ability to secure our tickets entirely in arabic, a conversation that consisted of “two” (ithnayn), “one thousand” (alf), and “thank-you” (shoukran). When we through being simultaneously filled with amusement and nausea, we walked towrards downtown to have icecream. On the way, a car that was flying both Hezbollah and Amal flags pulled up to the curb in front of us. The ironic thing is that the people who got out of the car were the goofiest, doughiest pair of frat guys you have ever seen. After icecream, I actually bumped into someone I know in Place de l’Etoile; Marcel, who has a design firm from which I almost subletted some office space. Before heading back to Hamra, I tried to buy an arabic keyboard for my mac at the Virgin Megastore, but they were $98.

On the way home, we stopped into a bar near our house called American Dream. We watched Spain beat Argentina in tennis. The bartender gave us one of his caustic creations…TGV, which stands for tequila, gin, and vodka. There were some young guys having a lively discussion at the end of the bar and one point one of them said, “Nazi? Nazi Party?” Gosh, I wish I knew what they were talking about.