Practical Home Theater turns 6
October 5, 2006 -- From the moment when I first decided to write the definitive book on home theater, I simultaneously decided to update it every year. This year's edition of Practical Home Theater is the sixth. Like the others, it will run from October 2006 to October 2007, though it's dated 2007. This year's edition received extra nurturing, with 16 pages of new content added, and the chapters on television and surround sound reorganized to make their complexities easier to handle.
An extra complication will attend this year's change of editions. Each edition has a unique book catalogue number, known as ISBN: International Standard Book Number. To make sure you buy the newest edition, you need the ISBN. But on January 1, 2007, the ISBN system is changing from 10 digits to 13 digits. So this year's edition of PHT has two ISBNs. They are:
ISBN-10: 1-932732-08-X
ISBN-13: 978-1-932732-08-5So if you order the book online, make sure one of those two numbers is listed. They both refer to the same brand-new edition. If you order the book from a bookstore, give both numbers to the clerk, and if you're told it's out of stock, point out that the book has two equally valid ISBNs, and that it's printed on demand.
To make editions easier to identify, the color of the cover changes every year. This year it's red. The words "2007 Edition" are printed on the spine.
As I write this, the new edition has popped up only on Amazon. Other retailers will begin listing it as the bibliographical data percolates into their databases. I hope this year's edition of PHT will answer all your questions on home theater, but there's always room for improvement, so if you have any suggestions, please drop me a line.
Eat this and die
August 31, 2006 -- I would like to report having just had the greatest consumer experience of my life. I'm talking about COMBAT Quick Kill Formula bait stations. If you've got cockroaches, you'll love this.
It all started when "The Collector," as my landlord calls him, moved into the apartment beneath mine. I was used to seeing one roach every three months -- by New York City standards, that's miraculously clean, and a tribute to the sanitary habits of most of my neighbors. The miracle quickly evaporated as roaches began hatching from the eggs generously deposited in The Collector's library of vintage telephone books. I went from one creepy-crawly every three months to a dozen a day, including lots of babies. They move a little slower than the adults, because their legs are shorter, so I got a lot of them with my thumb. I was washing my hands a lot.
With not terribly high expectations, I bought the COMBAT Quick Kill Formula bait stations and a huge bottle of boric acid (which remains untouched). The bait stations look like two-inch-wide discs with holes in the sides. They attract roaches with what I assume must be a pleasing aroma. Roaches pick up the bait, carry it back to their nests -- in this case, the telephone books one floor down -- and poison their entire families. There you have family values at their best.
Three days after I distributed a dozen of the bait stations around my kitchen and bathroom, the dozen roaches per day fell to two or three. Four months later, my apartment is virtually roach-free. I haven't seen one in a week. They're dead, dead, dead! I've left the bait stations in place just because the sight of them cheers me up. Thank you, COMBAT!
Summertime and the cooling's easy
June 29, 2006 -- When I was a kid I longed for control of the air conditioner. I loved the buttons and the roaring sound of it. Schools in New Jersey, where I grew up, were not air conditioned then -- ugh! Now I have my own apartment with ACs in the living and bedrooms. Yet, oddly enough, I've hardly used them this summer. July is nearly over yet I count only five days of use, and if I hadn't had guests, it would have been only three.
Why suffer? The answer is: I don't. When I worked in an office and came home from the subway covered in sweat, I'd turn on the AC and shower immediately. My tolerance for heat at that time was maybe 81 degrees. Over the years it rose to 83. This year I seem able to tolerate up to 85 degrees before running for the AC -- and that's with extreme humidity.
There's no one way to account for my increased tolerance for heat. A lot of little things contribute. One is that, in the family tradition, I use a powerful dual exhaust fan to suck hot air from the appliances out of the apartment. In another room, a fan pulls air in through the window and pumps it directly onto me. The air wafts over a lot of skin, since my summer costume, at least indoors, is tank tops and skimpy shorts (outdoors I protect more of myself from the sun).
I've always got a glass of heavily iced green tea by my side. And, as a work-at-home employee, I manage to avoid stress. As long as I produce, my employer grants me the peace to be creative. Finally, it's been an unseasonably cool summer here in the northeast. We've had all the wet-blanket humidity we usually get but relatively few mind-bendingly hot days (folks on the west coast haven't been as lucky).
Of course, when I'm covered with street filth, it's always refreshing to sit down in an air conditioned restaurant (and awful to wait on an oven-like subway platform). Offices, though -- other people's offices -- are often too cold for me. In the summer the temperature in my apartment rarely goes below 80 even on the coolest days, so having to sit through a press conference in a 70-degree meat freezer makes me shiver. I actually have to bring long-sleeved protective clothing when entering the corporate world.
When I do use the AC, I set it to knock the temperature down to 80 -- no lower. I never use both of my machines at the same time, only the one in the room where I'm sitting, and never run them at all if I'm not at home. If the outside temp cools down at night, I turn off the AC, and use the fans instead -- a night of AC usually gives me a sore throat in the morning.
While I manage to do without AC most of the time, losing the option would be traumatic, especially if my fans went out at the same time. This has been a scary summer for the power grid in New York. In Queens, 10 of the 22 feeder cables burned up, sending flames shooting out of manhole covers, and blacking out a half-dozen neighborhoods for more than a week. Staten Island is also seeing power outages, and Washington Heights -- not far from my own Upper Manhattan neighborhood -- had a prolonged power failure in 1999. The massive regional power failure of 2003 would have been grisly if it had been just a few degrees hotter.
Of course the power grid needs to be renovated. But our own habits also need to change. Central AC-ing every room in a large house or apartment is an irresponsible waste of energy, even if you can afford it. Global warming is real. Get with the program.
Happy Pig goes online
June 25, 2006 -- Happy Pig's Hot 100 New York Restaurants is now a website. The book on which the website is based came out in 2004 and has been well received by both restaurant owners and readers. Unfortunately the latter are rather a small and select group. So to bring the Happy Pig to a wider audience, I've turned him loose on the net, and he is now an advertiser-supported website with ads served by Google. Don't forget the zippy URL: happypig100.com.
The Google ads are fun, both for the hits (the Chocolate Bar invariably comes up with chocolate-related ads) and the misses (Elvie's Turo-Turo, a Filipino restaurant, attracts ads for Elvis memorabilia). Naturally, since the site is ad-driven, I hope you'll click on the ads -- but only when you see something that interests you. My hope is that the ads will become an integral part of the Happy Pig experience and enhance the content of the site.
With all listings navigable by neighborhood, type of food, or alphabetical order, this has been rather a hard job, but I'm pleased with the results and hope you will be too. If you're about to visit New York City, do spend some time with the Happy Pig, and rest assured he'll be there to advise when you log online at the dinner hour, desperately looking for someplace to go for a relaxing meal. If you spot any outdated information, or have any comments, the Happy Pig would be pleased to hear from you.
What to do about rising gas prices
May 8, 2006 -- A lot of people think I don't own a car because I live in Manhattan. But the reverse is true. I live in Manhattan to avoid owning a car. For years I've refrained from saying this out loud because I thought people would dismiss me as a nut. But now "peak oil" has been reached, the era of cheap gas is over, I've inadvertently become the man of the future, and my friends in car country are wondering what to do next.
For starters, face the fact that the automobile is obsolete, and so is the landscape optimized for it. If you want to build a sustainable future, with a high quality of life, forget about finding a new magic fuel or building a smarter car. What you need is a smarter landscape, where most of your need for automobility is replaced by walkability and fast, clean, safe, efficient public transit. This may be hard for the average American to imagine. Fortunately, some very smart people have already done it for you.
In the short term, we're going to have to go car-light. The best book I've seen on this subject is Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream. The three architects who wrote this book are not against suburbs. They're against bad suburbs and in favor of good ones, the durable traditional kind of town layout that's safe for kids to play in and a delight for everyone else to live in. These authors are not armchair theorists -- they've actually built the kind of towns they're talking about throughout the country. And their success is reflected in rapidly rising property values in those areas. Meet the new American dream. It looks pretty cool.
In the long term, we need to go carfree, and the clearest vision in this regard is Carfree Cities by J.H. Crawford. His reference design for the new carfree city arranges neighborhoods in loops that surround, and connect with, a central core. He's also figured out how to retrofit various existing places. Some, like Manhattan, are already in nearly carfree shape (except for all the cars). But Crawford doesn't flinch from tougher assignments, like his reimagining of Los Angeles.
Both of these books are beautifully written, edited, and illustrated. They are not just packages of facts and ideas -- they are actually good books. If you want to read more, the seminal work is The Life and Death of Great American Cities by the late Jane Jacobs, the woman who prevented Robert Moses from ramming a freeway through Lower Manhattan. The Geography of Nowhere by James Howard Kunstler is an outraged view of car country as it exists now -- he gets your blood pumping. And Katie Alvord has plenty of good advice to offer in Divorce Your Car!
The bad news is, we're going to have to rebuild America. The good news is, we get to rebuild America! And if you take the trouble to inform yourself, you might be surprised, delighted, and as optimistic about your country's future as I've recently become.
Know your soap
April 11, 2006 -- Afflicted by both acne and rosacea, my skin has always been a source of torment, and lately I've been reevaluating everything I use on it. One interesting thing I've found is the omnipresence of sodium lauryl sulfate. If you believe what the "natural" products industry says, it is scary. Here's a warning from one manufacturer:
Sodium Lauryl Sulfate: An ingredient in 90% of commercially available shampoo and conditioner. Corrodes hair follicle and impedes hair growth. Is found in car wash soap, engine degreaser, toothpaste, cream, lotion, and garage floor cleaners. Penetrates your eyes, brain, liver kidneys and remains there for long-term. Degenerates cell membranes and can change the genetic information (mutagenic) in cells and damage the immune system. May cause blindness and lead to cataracts. Eyes cannot heal properly. Retards the eye healing process. Studies also show that these additives react with the ingredients of food supplements or cosmetics, to form carcinogenic nitrates and dioxin. All of this may enter the circulatory system with each shampooing or each oral ingestion. The end result being that these harmful ingredients can be retained in the liver, heart, eyes, kidneys and muscles for several years after being used. It is further reported to cause eye irritations, skin rashes, hair loss, dandruff and allergic reactions.However, when I doublechecked before posting this piece, I discovered counter-warnings from both an urban legends site and the American Cancer Society.
Even so, while this chemical may not be dangerous in small amounts, it is still likely to be an irritant to someone whose skin is as problematic as mine. I'd like to see what happens if I stop using it for awhile. After all, I have nothing to lose. So I'm cutting down my soap collection to a few trusted favorites old and new. They include:
And so the science experiment proceeds.
- Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap: for use as a heavy-duty deodorant soap; eucalyptus and tea tree versions. I'm especially fond of the eucalyptus, having once smelled it on the skin of someone who changed my life. I'm sentimental that way.
- South of France glycerin soap: for cleaning the most delicate areas of my face; rosemary, tea tree, and unscented.
- Avalon Organics shampoos: lavender, tea tree, and rosemary.
- And for a moisturizer, Lily of the Desert Aloe Vera Jelly, which dries immediately, leaves no gooey feeling, and is very soothing.
I've been rebate-scammed
March 13, 2006 -- Well, it finally happened. I've been rebate-scammed.
For years I've avoided any sales transaction hinging on a rebate. Then I bought a rebated product from Amazon. I trust Amazon. Would Amazon let me down? As it happens, no, but that made me bolder and more foolish.
I went into a brick-and-mortar computer store, exactly the kind of place where rebate scams thrive, and bought a USB hub. It cost more than a simpler and cheaper model that would have filled my need, but hey, after rebate it cost less. I mailed in the rebate form, sales slip, and UPC code -- only to have the rebate refused because the "UPC we received with your submission was not correct."
Well, it was the only one the product came with, and now that the original is gone, so is my claim to the $12 rebate. See the alphanumeric code printed beneath the barcode? It corresponds to the product I bought. There's your smoking gun. No room for doubt here -- I played by the rules and got cheated anyway.
Rebates are usually scams. The people who run them assume that a large percentage of consumers either won't bother filing or will make a minor mistake in submitting the paperwork. If that fails, and they go over budget, they merely lie and refuse to pay. That's what happened to me and it could just as easily happen to you. Remember, shoppers: If the price includes a rebate, that isn't really the price.
Postscript: Six months after this post, the rebate check unexpectedly arrived. Power of the press?
Home is where the quiet is
February 17, 2006 -- With no kids, no car, and no mortgage, my one luxury is to get out of the United States once a year and see how other people live. Last November it was Rome and Venice. Adjustment problems after returning are common for me -- you'd be surprised how many people live better than we do. I have numerous soft spots for places like Amsterdam, Vienna, Copenhagen. But no place has ever haunted me like Venice. I'm past the tipping point now. When I left Venice, I left the home I'd always sought.
Venice is the world's only car-free city. That means it is also the world's quietest city (once you get away from the roar of the vaporettos that encircle the islands and cut through the Grand Canal). You can hear people's voices, footsteps, all the little sounds of life that are normally drowned out by the internal combusion engine. The air is clean, so walking is a pleasure -- you can gulp in great lungfuls of air and feel refreshed rather than sick. With no cars to dodge there is a profound lack of physical threat. Dogs walk themselves, quite cheerfully.
And everywhere you look there is beauty, haphazard, decaying, life-affirming beauty. The picture shows the northern residential neighborhood where I stayed. By Venetian standards, it's nothing special; by American standards, it's paradise. Click on the image for a larger view.
For a writer, Venice is the ideal environment, a place where I could go out for long walks in peaceful streets and let my thoughts gather. The Venetians themselves are relaxed, low-key, and kindly. Perhaps I'll get to retire there and write novels from the notes that are slowly accumulating. That is my dream. I hope I live long enough (and earn enough money) to fulfill it.
Home Theater blog gets busy
January 25, 2006 -- This month's exciting news is that my Home Theater blog has a new title, From the Edge, and is shifting into high gear.
I hesitate to say it's going daily because that would be a tough row to hoe. But that's more or less my goal. While there will be a little overlap with the AV Newswire column I write for the print magazine, there will also be a lot of stuff that never makes the mag. Every morning I trawl the net for news and most of the usable material I find gets discarded. Some of it's just ephemera, but some is interesting news that wouldn't survive the magazine's lead time. Writing a daily blog will give me a chance to deliver fresh news almost instantly and follow developing stories -- like legislation -- one step at a time. Already I'm rather enjoying it.
Audio product reviews will continue to appear every third week. To keep things lively, at least once a month I'll write an essay in the form of a dialogue -- I call it a Diablog. These format changes are entirely self-initiated and I'm grateful to my editors at the Good Ship Home Theater for giving me the creative freedom to steer the blog like the captain of my own little tugboat. I hope you'll stop by, and comment if you like, as often as possible.
News 2005
