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some of my best friends are Jews harp
Friday, January 1 2010
It might not be the first New Years Day that has this characteristic, but today I had a New Years Day without any trace of a hangover. What did I do with this useful day, a gift from Chris Cohen Almighty? I shitted away the day procrastinating with stupid movies and the like.
This evening Gretchen and I drove across the Hudson Fjord to Rhinebeck and beyond, where Ray, Nancy, Linda, and Adam (our Brooklyn friends) had rented a house. It was a big three-bedroom house, though I had my suspicions about it the moment I discovered that it possessed an octagonal window in its powder room. Octagonal windows are hallmarks of the crassest, most half-assed of McMansionalia (those with doubts should slowly cruise the southwest end of Bush Road near Stone Ridge).
It wasn't just the aforementioned people at the house; there was also the couple Dave and Michelle (who have stayed at our house and had use of our car while when we've traveled). Sarah the vegan had also come down from her temporary place in Tivoli. I sort of want to start calling her Vegan & Sarah, except it makes no sense to anyone who doesn't know about the indypop.
So we ended up having a meal of drillbit pasta, which was utterly vegan save for the parmesan cheese option. Gretchen had brought some vegan ricotta cheese which proved to be something of a hit at the table.
There was also a bottle of Maker's Mark at the table, and it wasn't long before some of us had transitioned from food to that. As I was sipping the delicious brown fluid, it ocurred to me that someone should produce a carbonated bourbon. "What about adding soda water?" someone asked. "But that dilutes it!" I retorted.
My next big idea of the evening was for an iPhone application. Ray was playing DJ with his Droid (a sort of iPhone knock-off), but the tinny speaker was really only good for playing early Motown. I placed it against my mouth and used it as a Jew's harp. Instantly, I was transformed to Peter Frampton. Soon I was proposing a new iPhone App called "Some of My Best Friends are Jews Harp." It would produce various tones or chords to be resonated in the mouth through the speaker. The touch surface of the phone could be used to provide the "strum" function.
Later Dave (of Dave and Michelle) was trying to imagine a McGyver solution to the fact that there were bigger speakers in the house but no wires for attaching the iPhones and Droids. So at some point I went out to the car and found a cheap earbud-based stereo headphone, the kind they used to give you for free on airplanes. I cut off one of the earbuds, stripped the wires, and put them into the phono jack of DVD player attached to a big flatscreen teevee, and then plugged the plug in over them to hold the wires in place. It was just mono, but it worked on the first attempt.
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