If you’re wondering, it’s a play on Jeph Jacques’ Questionable Content comic arc involving manga, a “compelling and nuanced story,” and two standard deviations to the right (or left) obsessions. QC is not entirely safe for work, but it’s how I get my first laugh of the day, every week day. I read QC before coffee, and sometimes again once I’ve had the first caffeine shot. Through Jeph’s guest strips I found Yuko Ota, who did the logo and made me look 20 pounds lighter and 10 years younger. Kind of.

After some discussion around the dinner table (where all serious life decisions should be made), I was advised that “Magical Food Gentleman” was both too obscure and inviting of more jokes than would befit a mild PG rating for this site. I have enough issues such that I don’t need to be involved in the first recorded food-moe manga reference.

But for the curious, yes, magicalfoodgentleman.com exists. You’d think I’d let this bit of intense obscurity escape?

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Thanks to Yuko from Johnny Wander for coming up with the manga-inspired Hal-cartoon based on some photographs of me and an egg and provolone sub from White House Sub Shop in Atlantic City. Seriously. She’s as talented as I am hungry. The font work, image placement and other graphical elements that make your eyes beg for mercy are all my own work, and demonstrate how much I totally suck at Photoshop (or in this case, Pixelmator).

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WordCamp New York City 2009 is now open for registration, speaker selection and general excitement. The venue has moved to Baruch College, making this year’s event potentially an order of magnitude larger than last year’s 150-person gig. Disclaimer: Sun Microsystems, my employer, is a sponsor of the event, and I’m a volunteer.

Buy your tickets or better yet, become a sponsor. I’ll be there on Sunday November 15, along with fellow Jersey guy Brad Williams and possibly the peninsular David Damastra, also known as my Professional WordPress co-authors. And the t-shirts (logo above) are definitely a badge of nerd honor.

[cross-posted to Snowman on Fire].

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I should round out the pre-roll by saying that I was on my way to Estonia for yet another meeting of the same conference that brought you the vegetarian pork incident. And therefore I’m compelled to finish the story behind the story with the travelogue that brought me to Estonia, because it explains why pineapple can be humorous.

Getting to Tallinn, Estonia from Newark NJ usually involves a change of planes, in either Prague or Frankfurt. CSA, the Czech National Airline, offered reasonable service with a stopoever in Prague long enough for a shower and perhaps breakfast. CSA proudly announces that they are the “top rated national airline” of the Czech Republic, but I think that’s because there simply is no second. Or maybe second place went to some true former Soviet Tupolev Bears, and I’m be willing to lay even money the Bear’s coffee trumps that of CSA. After a fight with paper tickets, long lines, and a flight attendant who told me the cold breakfast choice was “You don’t want it”, I settled into my seat for the hop over the pond to Prague. Except I noticed that we were mostly hugging the Atlantic coast, going northeast along the Canadian Martimes before shooting over to more frozen, but larger, land masses. Then it hit me: They didn’t want that piece of tin over water for too long. Looking to divert passenger attention, the flight attendants handed out little slips of paper that read “Movie Choice 1 ____ 2 ____” and mini-VHS players. That was the “in seat entertainment.” Sadly, both copies of Pavel teaches tractor repair (English subtitles) were taken quickly, so I attempted to sleep. Which didn’t work, but it was a good effort.

This is a very long preamble to the fact that I finally arrived in Tallinn, then had a 2-hour bus ride to Tartuu, where I sat with several hundred other attendees at a large dinner event. Tartuu is pretty far north, and it was July – which meant that the sky finally hinted at twilight around 11:00 PM. It was also unusually warm, and most hotels in Tartuu do not have air conditioning, so I eventually fell asleep in a real bed, with fresh air blowing in on me, a little after midnight.

I woke up to crisp, bright, unfiltered sunlight hitting me in the eyes. Grabbed my watch, and it read 9:15 AM, and so began the 30-millisecond panic attack that every business traveler has at least once: Had I overslept my speaking slot? Did I fly all of that distance, enduring a cold breakfast, a hot shower, and a missing Czech-mechano-thriller to sleep through my meetings? Why did the hotel call? Why didn’t the rest of my co-workers call? The answer, gentle readers, is that to a 3.5-diopter corrected vision nerd, 9:15 AM and 2:45 AM look very similar on the analog wristwatch. At that point, I resigned to having had about three hours of reasonable sleep, trying to avoid getting a sunburn while waiting for the real alarm.

Sleep deprivation, long distances, and Soviet-era humor put you in a strange frame of mind. So strange that you order something like this for lunch:

After giving my talk, meeting with customers, and walking back through the 11th century city of Tartuu, it was time for my favorite part of any trip: sampling the local food. Unfortunately, at some point I resort to tried and true options if nothing of local color and texture sounds or looks appealing, interesting or appropriate challenging. This is why I ingest a regular diet of cheeseburgers at the Hard Rock Cafe, turkey subs if there’s something resembling turkey around, or grilled chicken salads. Pictured above is the now infamous (at least in friendly circles) Elbonian Pasta Salad.

I’m not really sure who decided that “pasta” meant “tortellini” and further coupled pineapple with the pasta and chicken. I believe pineapple is only indigenous an entire hemisphere away from Estonia, so this was clearly some chef’s interpretation of “pasta” and “fruit salad”, but at the same time. Even though I left Prague behind nearly 24 hours earlier, there was something very Kafka-esque about it. But it was worth it to meet the Elbonian software developers.

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We hosted two Israeli teenagers as part of the Diller Teen Fellow program between our North Jersey federation and our sister program in Rish L’Zion, Israel. They were articulate, funny, techno-savvy and they didn’t laugh at my pidgin Hebrew. My command of food-oriented Hebrew and the morning operatives (coffee, ice, good morning, where are you?) was sufficient until I offered to email some pictures to their parents.

One of the girls spelled out her parents’ email login then directed me to type a shtruedel. I gave her the look normally reserved for my attempts at this modernized ancient langauge (reality check here: last time I was in Israel I had to ask for toilet paper, and could neither remember the word nor describe it, until I forced a Yiddish-Hebrew couplet and asked for mapiot tuchess, essentially, “butt napkins”. It worked, but you should have seen the look). Shtruedel is what my Yiddish-speaking grandparents ate on Sunday afternoons after the obligatory trip to the bakery. It’s not on my keyboard.

Until the air-drawing, repetition and thinking in metaphors clicked: shtruedel is the @ sign. Looks like a strudel in cross-section. I had to double-check Wikipedia on this, just to be sure I wasn’t injected food-related context where none was warranted. Sure enough, the proper Hebrew word for “commerical at” is krukit, which translates to…

Strudel.

I believe this is another one of those Internet generation gap social vignettes, but not one born from students who have never seen a hand-written receipt with a quantity, a “commercial at” sign followed by a price. Nor is it a derivative of pronouncing email addresses in a post-bang addressing Internet. I really think that the current crop of teenagers don’t get the notion that you are “at” your email. Your address is an identifier and a place name; it’s not necessary for you to be at that named place. When first reading email on the Princeton University VAXen in the mid-80s, you had to be physically in the same building, usually on the other end of a nicely soldered RS-232 cable. The @ was less commercial and more existential: You were at that machine, not at a service, but really at a compute node. Today, whether it’s shtrudel, snail, round a, fancy a, or monkey, it’s merely a token that helps us break a network location into pronouncable parts. Why not put a colloquial pronunciation on it? Especially if it’s food-related, as it improves the probability that I know the word.