Odds and Ends

It sure is beautiful outside today. Feels like early fall, not early summer. This is the nicest it's been yet, but in general it's actually been quite good ever since I complained about the weather a few posts back. The lesson I draw here is that I should complain more.

Andrew's lightning-quick apartment finding visit to B-more has come and gone. It was a success, as he now has a place to live lined up in Mt. Vernon. (A big building with a rooftop deck at St. Paul and Eager.) Not too expensive, either.

We went for a bike ride and to HonFest before Andrew took off. HonFest is in Hampden, which is seen as a particularly authentic, and particularly Baltimore, neighborhood -- a place where people actually call you "hon." The place (across a park from Hopkins) is gentrifying, and one could cynically see HonFest as the gentrifying forces of New Hampden leveraging a kitschy stereotype of Old Hampden to promote its continued transformation. But anyway, it's a spectacle with fried food and such.

On a completely unrelated topic, Google has a pretty cool Green Tips For Summer Trips link from their Google Maps homepage. As they've gotten big, they've often had a hard time following their "Don't be evil" credo, so it's nice to see that they're still trying. Anyway, they've spotlighted eco-friendly things in some major tourist destinations, integrating them with the maps and nifty embedded video clips. In their NYC section, I found a link to this awesome site that overlays the NY subway lines and stations on Google Maps, which is extremely useful. I also enjoyed the amusing descriptions on what lies beyond the edges of the subway map (western edge: "WARNING: LA This Way").

On that earthy theme, I'm off to see the Al Gore movie (more formally known as "An Inconvenient Truth") with Ira.