Remains of the Day

What to learn from customers

Is El Bulli closing permanently after 2011, or reopening after two years as an institute, or has Chef Ferran Adrià even planned that far in advance? Stories are all over the place, including speculation over how such a coveted reservation (estimates range from 300,000 to 2 million for how many people apply for one of the 8,000 annual seats) could lead to a restaurant losing half a million euros a year (a fact reported in a handful of articles).

In this synposis of an HBS case on El Bulli, Adrià offers a hint as to his restaurant's financial situation when he says, "I should charge 600 euros [for a meal at elBulli] but I do not cook for millionaires. I cook for sensitive people."

The article ends with HBS professor Michael Norton noting, "Adrià says he doesn't listen to customers, yet his customers are some of the most satisfied in the world. That's an interesting riddle to consider."

That's not actually puzzling. At Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos used to say that you can't build a product just by listening to customers. They're good at telling you what they don't like, but not so good at telling you what they want. As an entrepreneur you have to innovate on their behalf. We knew at Amazon that perhaps the most significant barrier to buying online was shipping charges. Customers would tell you again and again that they hated to pay shipping fees, even when they were offset by not having to pay sales tax. But they couldn't tell us what solution we could offer since shipping is not free.

That's where Amazon innovated on behalf of the consumer, first in the form of Super Saver Shipping, then in the form of Amazon Prime. We traded in some of the gross margin efficiencies of the business model to subsidize shipping and offset it with revenue volume from the increased orders that resulted from removing the massive psychological hurdle of shipping costs.

The case also highlights the distinction between understanding and listening to customers. "Adrià's idea is that if you listen to customers, what they tell you they want will be based on something they already know," Norton observes. "If I like a good steak, you can serve that to me, and I'll enjoy it. But it will never be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. To create those experiences, you almost can't listen to the customer."

Bits

The stretches between my posts here are lengthening. Perhaps the best way to ease back into things is in the new year is in bits and pieces. Repetition of small victories, perhaps it's the rough sketch of a resolution?

• The single best thing I tasted over Christmas break in New York was the Crispy Frogs Legs appetizer at Veritas. The legs were encased in a crunchy, stringy crust and served with butternut squash gnocchi, pork belly, chanterelle mushroom, parsley coulis, and parmesan foam. Spectacular, one reason being that it combined the three primary food textures: crisp/crunchy, meaty, and soft.
• I learned about the three primary food textures from a book I read over break: Knives at Dawn: America's Quest for Culinary Glory at the Legendary Bocuse d'Or Competition. It took me a day of intermittent reading to plow through it on my Kindle. It appealed to me by combining many of my interests: food/cooking, contest/competition I've never heard of (shall we call that the Bloodsport factor?), obsessive people (Thomas Keller, Daniel Boulud, among dozens of others), long odds/underdog story (can the Americans finally medal at Bocuse d'Or, long dominated by the French and, surprisingly, the Norwegians?), a true story, and heavy doses of conflict. My only complaint is that the author Andrew Friedman telegraphs the outcome by interspersing hindsight quotes from many of the key players. You can do that in a way that doesn't give away the ending; any modern reality TV show that sprinkles in post-event interviews has to deal with the problem. If you read reviews of the print edition, the spoiler issue is worse; the photos in the center of the book depict the ultimate winners. That amateurish mistake aside, I still recommend the book. The world's leading chefs are all borderline psychotic and reading about their obsessive natures put in the mood to cook sous vide and scrub my kitchen to a sparkle.
  
• Back to Veritas, they are known for their world class wine list (PDF). Martin stopped by and treated us a bottle of the 1995 Eisele Araujo Cabernet. That's not a bottle of wine one drinks every day, the price tag will incinerate your credit card, so many thanks, Martin. It was a true California cabernet fruit bomb. If you are an oenophile in search of a good meal in NYC, Veritas belongs on your shortlist.
• I have a MOMA membership so I was able to bypass the massive line outside and walk right into the Tim Burton exhibit. But there was no avoiding the mob inside, and even had it been empty, it would have failed to hold my interest, consisting mostly of old sketches. You have to be a fanatic of someone's work to want to see their early sketches. I appreciate reading about people's processes, but I mostly enjoy seeing their final products. It's like watching deleted scenes on a DVD, you rarely find one you want to undelete.
• Obama should hire Bruce Schneier to be our nation's security czar. I love his term "security theater," and his summary of U.S. aviation security in light of the Nigerian terrorist plot on the flight to Detroit will sound maddeningly sensible to every air traveler standing in their socks in a U.S. airport this holiday season.

I wasn't looking at my watch last night and so my passage into the new year slipped right by. And we're off.

Thank-full

I had just landed in Chicago for Thanksgiving and was strolling through the O'Hare concourse towards baggage claim when my phone rang. It was my sister Karen's fiance Kevin.

"You know how Karen was going to pick you up from the airport?" he asked. "She can't. She's been in a car accident."

He sounded calm which reassured me, especially since he'd already spoken to her. But then he told me their Prius was in bad shape. My gait quickened even though I had nowhere to go. She might be fine physically, but mentally an accident of that severity had to be a shock.

I called my other sister Joannie to fill her in on the situation, and after an hour or so of phone tag, one car was dispatched to get Karen from the place where they'd towed her car, another to get me from the airport.

When we finally all gathered back at Joannie's, the story had been reported and rereported multiple times, the truth coming together like pieces of a puzzle. Two guys in a sedan had the right rear corner of her Prius, sending her into a spin that ended at the center median of the highway. The sedan, meanwhile, somehow ended up flipped on its side on the other side of highway, on the shoulder.

As Karen got out of the car to gather herself and as various people stopped to help, the two guys somehow made it out of their vehicle. One of the two stumbled a few steps and vomited all over himself. The two of them were drunk.

The police took the two men to the hospital to draw blood, but they'd already failed the onsite sobriety test. The legal system will, I assume, deal with them. But in the meantime, I felt firsthand the anger of those hurt by the stupidity of those who get behind the wheel of three to four thousand pound machines under the influence of alcohol. There is nothing courageous or admirable about someone who manages to drive from point A to point B drunk; it's merely dumb luck.

It's also luck that helped Karen get out of the accident unharmed, save for a stiff neck and bruised knee. My flight arrived late, and so traffic on the 90/94 was light, so no cars were close behind that might have run into her during or immediately after her spinout.

The story has a happier ending as most of our family spent the rest of the week together celebrating Thanksgiving. We didn't dwell on the subject of her accident, especially the hypotheticals. To do so would seem morbid, and I sensed a need for us all to move on lest we cede the happiness of the entire holiday weekend to those two drunken idiots.

This was my first time in charge of preparing a Thanksgiving meal. I did a lot of research on how to prepare a turkey having had many a dry and unappetizing bird in Novembers past. My first big decision was to go with a heritage turkey over the breed commonly found at the grocery store, the Broad-Breasted White. Though they cost more, up to $10 a pound, heritage turkeys are known for their higher proportion of dark meat and a more guilt-free narrative: they tend to be raised on organic feed, on small farms where they're allowed to roam freely. If it lived up to the taste, then paying around $160 for a turkey that would feed the entire group on this once-a-year holiday would be worth it.

The next question was how to prepare the turkey. I consulted most every foodie I knew about their past experiences, and the number one technique mentioned was brining. I thought I could stop there, but it turns out there are different brining techniques. The one I'd heard of most often involved soaking the turkey in salt water. But then, while I waited for my take-out lunch one day, I saw a front page story in a section of the LA Times on the bar counter about dry brining.

It sounded too good to be true; just salt the turkey a few days in advance. Not only was it less messy than a wet brine, it supposedly produced meat of a superior texture.

The best laid plans were nearly derailed by a FedEx delivery person who couldn't distinguish a one from a zero. I spent all of Tuesday checking FedEx online, and mid-afternoon, I got the note that the turkey had been delivered to the front porch. I wandered outside, around the side of the house, poked in some bushes, looked out on the back deck, behind the garage...no turkey. I called FedEx, they tried to call the driver, but he was gone for the day.

Just as I was ready to call FedEx back to tell them they'd ruined Christmas for a group of orphans, a guy in a grey station wagon pulled up out front and walked out with a box. I was standing out on the front porch with such a look of consternation on my face that he must have put it together all at once.

"Are you Eugene? I found this on my porch when I got home just now."

Whoever you are, guy in grey station wagon, I salute you.

After letting the turkey thaw for a couple hours in a cold water bath (it was still vacuum sealed), I brined it inside and out with a mixture of kosher salt and minced parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme, a the Simon Garfunkel of seasonings. I put it in a baking bag and we put it in Joannie's basement fridge, breast-side up. The next day I massaged it and flipped it over, the salt having sucked some of the liquid out of the turkey as I had read it would.

Wednesday we spent the afternoon prepping a few dishes in advance, a batch of creamed corn pudding, garlic mashed potatoes, and the turkey stock. Spices at the grocery store are not sold loose but in plastic containers that always contain too much for any one dish, I used the excess thyme, rosemary, sage, and parsley to make a compound butter and stashed it in the fridge to use as a rub on the turkey the next day. Compound butters are handy to have around in the kitchen and a great way to not waste all that spice.

Making stock, like ironing shirts, alternates between soothing ritual and exasperating burden from one minute to the next. I love the meditative pace of the process, the way the scent sneaks up on you as the liquid absorbs some of the character of all that's in it, the turkey giblet, heart, and neck bones, the mirepoix of onions, carrots, and celery, the sprigs of rosemary and thyme, the parsley and stray chicken parts. But with seven other dishes to worry about, I was tempted, at moments, to reach for canned stock, like a monk tempted by the sins of the material world.

Thankfully I had Karen as my faithful partner chef in crime, and we had enough time to get enough prepared that we could let the stock just simmer while we dined on some Chicago deep dish pizza.

On Thanksgiving Day, I thought about using a turkey bag for roasting, but some articles I'd read suggested that the steaming it would encourage would deprive us of trying a more traditional roasted texture and flavor. My decision was made when we couldn't find the turkey bag we'd set aside.

I contemplated two other methods of adding flavor, one being injection and the other being a rub. Since we didn't have a turkey syringe and I'd made the compound butter the night before, we went with the rub.

Heritage turkeys don't require as high a finishing temperature as regular turkeys as they're free of antibiotics. That brings with it another benefit: a shorter stay in the oven. I gave it about a half hour at 450 degrees to brown the skin, then lowered the temperature to 350 and covered the breast with aluminum foil. One of the chief problems with in preparing turkeys is the fact that the white breast meat tastes best at a lower temperature than the darker leg and thigh meat, thus the selective application of foil. Ultimately, I had to remove the legs and thighs and give them an extra ten to fifteen minutes alone after the rest of the turkey was finished, about two and a half hours later.

Fast forward to the taste test: dear readers, it was good. Damn good. The best turkey I've ever had. Was it the dry brining, or the rub, or the heritage of the turkey? I don't know, but the white meat was moist like a roast chicken, and the dark meat tasted almost like duck. But it was still undeniably a turkey.

A few years back I ordered a turducken for Thanksgiving, and while it was fine, there didn't seem to be any real synergy among the three meats. Stuffing one inside another inside another seemed to offer simply an advantage in carving efficiency, but the flavors simply added up to the sum of the parts, nothing more.

The heritage turkey, with its mix of different meat textures and flavors, seemed to fulfill the vision of what a turducken was trying to be. But whereas the turducken resorts to the culinary equivalent of plastic surgery, the heritage turkey is au naturel, a product of good genes and healthy living.

Thanksgiving day, one soon-to-be-convicted drunk driver was probably pondering a grim future at the hands of the law. Meanwhile, my little sister may have been without her new Prius, but that day she was celebrating Thanksgiving with loved ones over a great turkey she helped prepare. Sometimes the lessons of Thanksgiving come as simple as that.

Miscellany

Google Reader asked some notable folks what their top picks were for Google Reader. Good idea, but I find it a bit offputting that so many folks chose their own website as one of their short list? Their sites are already listed and linked under their names, are we to believe they really spend time reading their own writing in Google Reader?

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This past weekend, I was driving home on the 405 and saw a massive, odd-looking cloud standing alone in a clear blue sky, like a single head of cauliflower poking its head up through a bed of smog. Then I realized it was smoke from the fires in the San Gabriel mountains. It looked like a scene from 24, as if someone had dropped a nuclear bomb on LA. Here's one tightly-cropped time-lapse video of the smoke from the fires.

To truly appreciate how terrifying it looks, watch this wider-framed time-lapse which will give you a sense of the magnitude of this latest SoCal conflagration.

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Hitchcock is a storyboarding app for the iPhone that can use photos. You're limited to the fixed focal length lens of the iPhone, but I could see it being a handy tool on set. We were shooting our Alec Baldwin Super Bowl commercial earlier this year in NYC, and the director Peter Berg grabbed my iPhone at one point and used the camera to help us visualize a shot he envisioned. He mentioned offhand that he wouldn't mind having a simple tool on the iPhone for quick previz.

It's $19.99, but there are more specialty tools coming to the iPhone that aren't intended for mass audiences, and those can justify higher prices.

Incidentally, I wish the iPhone app store had a way to put apps on a wishlist, or save them for later view. I often see apps that I think I might want to buy later, and I never have a way to remember them. Like this one cool app I saw last week, what did it do again, it was something about...oh, forget it.

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A BMW concept diesel-hybrid. As with all concept cars, it looks absurdly futuristic, but it's heartening to see higher end manufacturers committing to the sustainability movement. Design can lift up the mundane and make it desirable, and having manufacturers like BMW or Tesla pushing the high end of this market can only help.

***

On Japanese simplicity.

In just over 30 years Hello Kitty has become a multibillion-dollar model of resourceful minimalism within the global juggernaut of Japanese pop culture. From Tokyo to Tehran, her expressionless, barely sketched visage adorns key chains, backpacks, toiletries and even a Hello Kitty-themed airline jet. Late last year an entire maternity hospital with Hello Kitty imagery adorning bedspreads and birth certificates opened to great fanfare in Taiwan.

But why is she mouthless? Because when you look at Hello Kitty, or “Kitty-chan,” as she is affectionately known in Japan, she will feel just like you do. As Japanese anime critic Hideki Ono says: “Your brain projects the missing information, then your imagination fills it in and feels the pleasure of participation.”

The Japanese design aesthetic has a strong influence on my product team as all my designers are either Japanese or very into Japanese culture.

During my trip to Tokyo earlier this year, I couldn't help but notice that the metropolis of over 12 million people was so clean relative to other cities its size and population. Each night, as we walked back to our hotel after a day of sightseeing, several massive street cleaning vehicles would pass us on the road.

It's not that every part of Tokyo is tea gardens and bonsai trees. Any place with the urban density of Tokyo is going to feel overcrowded, and it's important, as many commenters on the article rightly point out, that cleanliness does not equal a low environmental footprint, even if that's the superficial impression.

I watched Miyazaki's Ponyo recently. Though it is on the surface a retelling of The LIttle Mermaid, it is at its core a story about humans trying to come to harmony with the environment and their natural surroundings. When he makes these movies, is he holding the Japanese up as paragons of that, or is he taking shots at them, too? Often his heroes and heroines are children. Is he issuing a call to the next generation to correct the environmental failings of their parents?

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The resurrection of the suburban novel? I never read many suburban novels while growing up in the suburbs, but there is something to the thesis of this article, that the suburbs are about a state of mind as much as they are about a physical place. The post-war generation fled to the suburbs in search of a big house, a big backyard, a more peaceful and fulfilling existence. That they found a spiritual wasteland that filled them with an almost depressing boredom.

That feeling of disappointment or disillusion is one with broad applications and perhaps explains the enduring nature of the concept of suburban dystopia.

French Laundry

On the last night of a week and a half vacation I took earlier this summer, a trip that covered Hong Kong, Tokyo, and San Francisco, I ate at The French Laundry. Diners there self-select into a specific crowd. Given the restaurant's reputation as one of the, if not the best, restaurant in the U.S., the difficulty of securing a reservation, the average cost of a meal there (four or five dollar bill icons next to certain restaurant names should be put in quotation marks, this being one of them), and its rather out-of-the-way location, a meal there feels like a pilgrimage.

Years ago I had made about a month's effort to secure a reservation, with no success, and then I forgot about it for a while. Back in that day, French Laundry was not listed on OpenTable.com. Two months before the day you wanted to eat there, you had to submit yourself to 15 minutes of frenzied speed dialing each morning at 10am PT and hope for the best, like trying to get through to Ticketmaster to purchase tickets to a Radiohead concert. Eventually you'd get through, just in time to hear that all tables had been booked. It is perhaps fortunate that two months would elapse before anyone fortunate enough to secure a reservation could actually dine there; in that time, the unpleasant and barbaric reservation scrum would have faded from one's memory rather than taint one's overall experience with the restaurant.

While I was planning my vacation, I saw San Francisco sitting at the end of my itinerary, and I may have been hungry at the time, but the thought of trying to tack on a trip to The French Laundry just popped into my head. I didn't think I'd have any luck securing a reservation given I'd only have one day to try to score a reservation, but lo and behold, I called the very next morning, and a table for 2 opened up for me, albeit at the late hour of 9pm PT. When, a few weeks later, I tried to switch my reservation to a party of 3 (it would be a meal to celebrate my friends Howie and Tram's upcoming wedding), they were able to accommodate me, even apologizing for having to move my reservation up to 7:45pm, a far more desirable time. Viva la recession!

Over the years, I've talked to many people who've eaten at The French Laundry, and I couldn't help factoring their reports into my expectations for the meal. Most had nothing but praise, but the few accounts of disappointment hung out in the back of my mind. I was three parts anticipation, one part anxiety.

Even on a weekday, with San Francisco traffic, it only took about 45 minutes to drive there, across the Golden Gate Bridge and out to the town of Yountville. The GPS told us when we were near, but not knowing what it looked like and given its somewhat understated signage, we drove right past the restaurant the first time.

The French Laundry

We arrived early, just before sunset, and the hostess welcomed us to take a tour of the garden across the street or to spend some time in the garden/patio outside the front door. We did both.

Walking through the garden across the street is a unique experience. I've been on many a kitchen tour, met many a chef, sat at many a table watching sous-chefs and line chefs mid-task, but this was the first time I'd seen the raw ingredients on the vine. While we were strolling and admiring the gorgeous produce, someone from the kitchen came out to pick some ingredients. I'm fairly certain he wasn't sent out just to impress us.

Leeks in the French Laundry garden

Howie loves snow pea vines

Greenhouse

Back at the patio, we snapped a few photos on various benches, in front of different plants, standing in archways...no matter how our meal turned out, it would be well-documented. Our hostess came out to grab us and ended up offering to snap some photos of the three of us together.

Inside, we were led to our table on the second level. The interior layout recalls an expensive home converted into a restaurant dining space. To one side of us was a group of three older diners. They had the look of foodies about them. It's hard to pinpoint exactly what that is, but it's a way one carries oneself, with the ease of a lifelong Red Sox fan strolling to his seat at Fenway, for example as opposed to the wide-eyed anxiety of a virgin on prom night fumbling with a bra strap, say.

To the other side of us was a table of about eight young male investment bankers in navy suits, a pack of wild dogs with a client's expense account to pillage, the hint of date rape hanging in the air over their table. They were, at that moment, still sober, but I tried my best to turn my chair away from them. More on them later.

We had the choice of two nine-course tasting menus, the chef's or the vegetarian. Both were $240 each, service fees included, with the option to have the foir gras en terrine for an extra $30 on the chef's tasting menu. No disrespect to the vegetarians of the world, but for that price, my meal was going to include some animal flesh. Tram and Howie concurred, and we split up our choices so that we'd have the chance to try both choices for those courses where two items were offered.

I had just begun collecting wine a short while before this meal, and even with my limited knowledge of some of the more famous wines in the U.S., it only took a minute or two for the French Laundry wine list (PDF) to stagger me. Just about every hot boutique winery and big name wine I'd heard of was represented. It's a world-class all-star wine list, the most storied wine list I've ever looked over. The lofty roster had prices to match. High end wines typically don't support more than a 100% markup given the high starting price, and that seemed to be the markup here, but 2X a high price is, well, a higher price. But if you're going to splurge on a meal at French Laundry, digging into their treasure chest of a cellar for a bottle you might not be able to find on the open market is one of the treats.

For those looking to sample a flight of wines, The French Laundry has a great selection of half bottles, of which I picked out two reds, both of which are no longer on the wine list, so quickly does their wine list rotate. The standout to me was a reasonably priced pinot noir from Skewis Winery, the 2006 Bush Vineyard, Russian River Valley. A few weeks after my meal, I ordered a lot of bottles of that gem from Skewis after finding out that it would be their last year of producing the Bush given the passing of the owner of that land. I usually don't enjoy California pinots as they aren't earthy enough for my taste, but this was a beautiful drinking wine, with a long and complex finish.

Here was our menu (many special characters were pillaged from France in its making). I won't linger on every dish, but will call out the standouts afterwards.

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This is California cuisine, yes, but not the type content to surround two fresh beet halves with five niblets of corn, two asparagus spear heads, and three peas in a miniature tableau and call it a dish. I love fresh ingredients as much as the next gourmand, but in this day and age, when I can visit the same farmer market the local high end restaurant visits for super-fresh produce, the premium I'm willing to pay for such food has shrunk.

Anyone who has perused chef Thomas Keller's French Laundry Cookbook knows that attempting to conquer any of the recipes therein is no task for the average home chef. It will end up more of a coffee table book for most of its owners: inspiring, yes, but a bit like a weekend warrior reading about Lance Armstrong's workout routines. Me, I'm happy to pay for this type of meal because I won't at any point in the meal wonder if I could prepare that dish myself, let alone at a reasonable cost in terms of time and equipment.

Take, for example, the first official course (the first amuse bouche was unlisted and was the same as the one I had at Per Se, Keller's New York sister to French Laundry: cornets of salmon tartare with red onion crème fraiche), one of Keller's signature dishes, "Pearl and Oysters." Served with a special mother-of-pearl spoon, it's a dish whose preparation is a delicate and complex chemistry experiment. If the end justifies the means, then it's worth it, because the dish is brilliant. I don't have the culinary vocabulary to describe it, but in its flavors and textures it's something wholly unique, a creation all Thomas Keller's.

[Note: It was really dark in the restaurant, I did not want to use flash and bother the other patrons, and so the photos are a bit grainy. I would have preferred to shoot with a bit smaller of an aperture to increase the depth of field, but these pics were the best I could manage.]

"Oysters and Pearls"

The butter-poached Maine lobster "mitts" tends more towards traditional Californian cuisine, but the butter poaching and black truffles added just enough dazzle without distracting from the simplicity of its mix of flavors.

Sweet Butter-Poached Maine Lobster "Mitts"

Perhaps the most memorable dish of the night was Confit de Cœur de Veau, literally the confit of a veal heart. Rather than serve the heart in one piece, Keller wisely chose to shave it thinly, and it came out arranged like a bouquet of pastrami for the gods. Rich, dense, and unforgettable. I'm not even sure where you could buy a veal heart to work with, so I took my time eating this one.

"Confit de Cœur de Veau"

One last dish to highlight, and that is the Snake River Farms Calotte de Bœuf Grillée. It is one of the best pieces of beef I've ever had in my life. If I were to become a vegetarian for the rest of my life, I'd want to stash the flavor of this beef in my memory to serve as the canonical flavor of beef for the rest of my days.

Snake River Farms also supplies Wolfgang Puck's fantastic LA steakhouse Cut with its American Wagyu, and if you fancy yourself an expert in the preparation of beef you can purchase direct from them. Best of luck if you go that route: 4 10 oz ribeyes will run you $199.

Snake River Farms "Calotte de Bœuf Grillée"

The only thing marring our meal was the company to my left. By this point in our meal, the investment bankers had a few bottles of wine in them. The volume of their voices had turned up, and snippets of conversation from their table drifted over.

"You could tell, just looking at her, she was a little sexpot."

"Oh yeah. If she was a year or two older, what was she, seventeen? My god."

"Hell, even if she wasn't."

[bawdy laughter]

To my relief, the American Psycho crew left by the time our desserts came.

The name of the restaurant comes from the fact that the building was once actually a French laundry. In keeping with that theme, the napkins are held in clothespins when you arrive, the bill comes on a laundry ticket, and the lampshades have ironing icons on them.

French Laundry lampshades

By the time we finished dessert and nibbled on the mignardises (the little candies and cookies that follow dessert at finer dining establishments, like a post-dessert dessert), I was suitably full. Not sickeningly gorged, but content.

If you drink wine, figure on $300 a person for dinner. After we settled our checks, I mentioned to the waiter that I'd seen the French Laundry kitchen once before, on a plasma TV in the kitchen of Per Se. The two sister restaurants stay connected via webcam. Without my asking, the waiter said once he'd run our credit cards he'd give us a kitchen tour.

The kitchen is not massive, it's smaller than the one at Per Se. By the time we walked in, the kitchen was almost spotless already.

The kitchen

Two things hanging in the kitchen impressed me. One was a sign over one doorway with the definition of the word "finesse." The other was a clock over a doorway, under which was a sign that read "Sense of Urgency." After having completed our meal, these didn't seem like empty decorations but a fitting summary of two of the qualities that make The French Laundry a world class restaurant.

Finesse

Sense of Urgency

And so ended our journey to one of the world's culinary meccas. I thoroughly enjoyed the meal and recommend the journey for those who can drop that much for a meal and not regret it. You know who you are.

Knives and thumbtacks

Oh, what I wouldn't give for a Bob Kramer chef's knife (his knives are used by some of the most famous chefs in the world, like Thomas Keller of French Laundry fame). I'm on Kramer's waiting list, and I hope to make it to the top of it while I'm still in my cooking prime.

I received an e-mail from his mailing list saying he'd just put one of his knives up for bid on eBay. It sent a brief surge of excitement through me that lasted until I followed the eBay link and saw the current bid price.

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Some famous people share their favorite places on Google Maps. Not a very long collection of people, though I was curious to see what places Ferran Adria of El Bulli picked out.

Hong Kong

Slimming Centers in Hong Kong

While riding on moving walkways and escalators in the subways of Hong Kong, I couldn't help but note the many posters featuring attractive female models in bikinis smiling cheerfully, rather than seductively, back at me (though I didn't snap any photos of them, modesty being one reason, and my disinterest in fishing my big camera out of my bag in the extreme humidity being the other; my way of combatting the humidity was to stand as still as possible in an effort to sweat as little as possible). I didn't recall such ads the last time I'd been in Hong Kong, I remarked to Esther.

"They're for slimming centers," she explained. She was right. I looked closer at the fine print on the ads and noted, in small print among all the Chinese text, the English words "Slimming Center".

This shocked me because of one important fact, and that was that I didn't recall seeing a single obese person in Hong Kong. I mean that literally. I did not see one person in my three and a half days in Hong Kong that appeared significantly overweight. In fact, most of the women I saw were thinner than even the models in the slimming center ads. In fact, my week of travel through Hong Kong and Tokyo convinced me, finally and unequivocally, that the United States is the fattest country on earth. When my sister Karen and I spotted our first obese person in our travels, a huge guy in Tokyo, we couldn't help but shoot each other a wide-eyed glance of acknowledgment and surprise. Of course, he could have been a sumo fighter in training in which case I'm not sure if he'd count as a naturally occurring specimen of obesity.

There are many possible reasons for the disparity between the U.S. and other countries, but a few seem most plausible to me:

• Having recently finished Michael Pollan's fantastic two book series, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, the high volume of processed food in the American diet is highly suspicious. The government subsidizes corn, and so a huge portion of the American diet is corn or corn products like high fructose corn syrup.
• Hand in hand with that is that in the rest of the world, more of the diet consists of what Pollan, in In Defense of Food, calls real food, that is, things your grandmother would have recognized as food, like vegetables, fruits, and meats. One of Pollan's healthy eating rules of thumb is "eat ethnic food." He notes that the citizens of almost any country other than the United States, subsisting on their country's base diets, remain slim. In the U.S. we've tried to reverse engineer Mediterranean cuisine or Japanese cuisine to try and find some magic health bullet, like olive oil or omega-3 oil from fish, but Pollan says the real solution is likely some complex interaction of many things which can't be pinpointed to one substance that can be reduced to some magic pill. Instead, he urges people to just eat more ethnic food to try and benefit from all that brings, from the lighter reliance on processed food to any magical interactions among the ingredients of that cuisine. I was glad to read that; it's one more justification for my love for eating my way through my travels, Hong Kong and Tokyo being two of my best cities in the world for indulging that weakness.
• Portion sizes in the rest of the world are not just a little bit smaller than those in the U.S., they're much tinier. This was especially noticeable in Tokyo where the plating itself is often so elaborate, each plate like some miniature assemblage by Joseph Cornell. Calories are cheap in the U.S., but eating cheaply is not the same as eating healthy.

Of course, I could be misreading the correlation and causation equation here, and it's possible that the slimming centers were the source of the successful nationwide weight management, but I doubt it.

H1N1

The fear of swine flu is much higher in Asia than in the United States. Even on the flight over, I noted many Asian travelers and several flight attendants wearing microfiltration masks, On my arrival into Hong Kong, I had to fill out a health form noting if I had any of the symptoms, a cough, a headache, a fever. The attendant scanned my head with some sort of thermal imaging device that looked like a handheld barcode scanner.

In elevators throughout Hong Kong, elevator car button panels were covered with saran wrap and/or marked with signs indicating how often the panels were disinfected, the lowest frequency I saw being every two hours. One night, I went with my hosts Jae and Esther to the Kowloon side of the island for dinner at a restaurant called Hutong, and before we were allowed into the elevator up, we had to pass another thermal imaging checkpoint.

Given Hong Kong's urban density and the sheer number of its people who cross paths each day on subways, on streets, and through one of its many retail centers, it makes some sense that they'd take H1N1 more seriously than we do on this side of the Atlantic. Still, the heightened paranoia was such that I felt apprehensive any time I had to so much as sneeze or blow my nose in a public place.

What's more, many in Asia view Americans as irresponsible for traveling abroad as possible carriers of H1N1. Jae and Esther took me to get a foot massage after a long day on our feet sightseeing, and my masseuse, realizing I spoke Mandarin, struck up a coversation with me. Though I felt more inclined to dive into an English-language celebrity gossip magazine I'd found on the table next to me, it felt rude not to indulge someone who had to sit there kneading my sweaty feet.

She asked where I was from, and when I told her, she immediately noted, "Ah, that's wear the swine flu comes from." But she named it in Cantonese so at first I didn't know what she was saying. It wasn't until I heard a snippet that sounded like "H1" that I realized what she was referring to. She asked if I knew anyone who had swine flu or had died from it, and I told her that I did not. I tried to explain that it wasn't really as bad an epidemic as the news had made it out to be, but she may have interpreted that as one more sign of how irresponsible Americans were for treating something so serious with such casual disregard.

The effect of the swine flu scare in Asia much worse on my friend Mike, though, who, on a flight to China, sat a row ahead of someone who had swine flu. As soon as they tracked Mike down, he was put into quarantine, and thus began an ordeal that he, for our entertainment benefit, chronicled in a series of fantastic blog entries that made him somewhat of a press celebrity once the local bureau chiefs picked up on them. He received a link from James Farrows of The Atlantic Monthly and did an interview with the LA Times.

Highly recommended:

• Welcome to the Hotel Quarantine
• Life in the Big House
• The Seven People You'll Meet in Hotel Quarantine
• 3 Down 2 to Go

Anna Netrebko

The Asian leg of my vacation is complete, and I miss Hong Kong and Tokyo already. It's never a fair comparison, pitting the hometown where you've spent years living and working versus the places you visit for just a few days with an itinerary set to plunder the destination's peak offerings. The allure of the new and mysterious almost always overwhelms the mundane and the familiar, especially given how many vacations come after long stretches of work which have whittled your creative energy down to a nub.

I had many more days of exciting discoveries left in Tokyo. It's such a massive city that my four days there were just enough for me to feel comfortable there at the exact moment I grasped, in a very physical sense, its sheer density and magnitude. I left with a feeling that there were more things I hadn't visited that I would love than I had crossed off the list. That's rare for me, being somewhat of a travel completist.

But more on Asia later. Today I come to speak of the Russian Anna Netrebko, widely considered the world's greatest soprano and its preeminent diva, that term being a great compliment in the world of opera.* I heard Netrebko this afternoon in the final performance of her short run with the San Francisco Opera performing the role of Violetta Valery in Verdi's La Traviata.

I will preface my thoughts by saying I am no expert on opera, so those looking for a review of the finer points of Italian diction and an assessment of where she took her breaths will be disappointed.

I first heard of Netrebko from a friend who'd seen her perform early in her career, and then I lost track of her until a cover story profile in the NYTimes Sunday Magazine. She was most well-known for two things, not often paired in an opera singer: her voice and her beauty, both sensual and captivating. If you were a baseball scout grading her voice on the traditional 20-80 scale you'd give it a 75. As for her looks, I showed some friends her CD covers today after the show and one compared her to Monica Bellucci, an apt comp in that she does recall in many ways the full-bodied Italian starlets of old.

I don't often go out of my way to see certain performers live, but I make an exception for generational talents: Michael Jordan, for example, or Roger Federer, and in this case, Netrebko. When I saw her calendar for 2009 included two stops in the US, one in NY at the Met and one in SF performing La Traviata, I snapped up tickets almost a year in advance for a weekend date of the later and knew I'd plan some way to attend. As I noted before, I'm at best an opera dilettante, but I far prefer a good opera to a musical, and that makes me a rarity among my generation. I'm just as susceptible to being bored to slumber by a pondering German opera, but the best of the ones I do love have an otherworldly musical beauty that lifts me up in a way no musical can.

One of the problems with opera, and one reason I think it struggles to connect with a younger generation, is the deadly pairing of plot implausibility with wooden acting. The cartoon parody of opera, not entirely inaccurate, is of an overweight woman in a Viking helmet, her diminutive male counterpart barely the size of her thigh, screeching so loudly that windows shatter, said immense woman playing an ageless young beauty despite sporting the looks of a fifty-something housewife.

It's a gross objectification and simplification, but I have left many an opera wondering what would have been lost by closing my eyes throughout and just listening considering that the stage choreography consisted mostly of a singer walking to and fro on stage, all facial and bodily expression an afterthought in the pursuit of accurate diction and musical phrasing.

Netrebko arrived on stage in style, in the backseat of a classic Buick. She is a bit heavier now than in photographs I've seen of her, but that's understandable considering she had a baby not too long ago. The voice is still the voice. What's amazing to someone like myself, who can't sing along to more than a few songs at a concert without losing my voice, is how effortlessly she can generate a massive, rich sound. At times she barely appeared to be opening her mouth and yet filled the house with her voice. The ease of her vocal power was such that if I didn't know who se was I'd think it was some odd form of lip synching. This incredible vocal power is a huge advantage when acting out more tender emotions. A lesser singer who'd have to contort her body and strain her face to generate the same output is much less likely to convey emotion than sheer physical exertion.

Netrebko actually matches her vocal expression with acting. No one will confuse the work that can be accomplished while vocally navigating passages of coloratura with the type of method acting Meryl Streep accomplishes in a close-up shot, but Netrebko makes it easier for those who don't understand Italian to understand what she's feeling. There were several moments where I missed the text on the prompter because I was peering through binoculars, but as long as I kept my eyes on her I never lost track of the emotional or plot throughline of the scene.

Having just arrived back in U.S. timezones less than 24 hours earlier, I was worried I'd succumb to jetlag during the show, this being a Sunday 2pm performance that was 6am Tokyo time. But a quick powernap and a rare espresso before the show, combined with the excitement of seeing Netrebko live in a fast-moving La Traviata kept me sharp throughout.

I've never seen La Traviata live, and my lack of knowledge of the finer points of opera preclude any other thoughts on this particular rendition. Two other memorable moments from the performance: at the first intermission, I saw a sign that said Netrebko would be in the lobby after the show signing her CDs and DVDs. At that precise moment I knew that about half the cash in my wallet had just been lit on fire, and I felt a pang of regret that I'd left my SLR at my friend's apartment and would have to rely on my iPhone camera in the underlit lobby. Second, at the end of the performance, when Netrebko came out to a standing ovation, she put a hand over her heart in appreciation and blew kisses to her adoring SF fans, here at the site where she'd made her US debut many years past. As the curtains fell for the last time, just as they were halfway down, she suddenly threw inhibition to the winds and hopped up and down like a young girl, waving her arms frantically overhead, as if sending off departing friends from summer camp. It was a youthful, exuberant expression of joy that I just couldn't picture coming from someone like an Angela Gheorgiu or a Jessye Norman, for example.

I waded through a crowd in the giftshop and picked up some $70 worth of Netrebko CDs for the signing, then jumped into a long line that wrapped around the corner of the lobby inside to wait for her to appear. After twenty minutes in which I saw opera house staff running back and forth with some distress, I felt a hand pull me sharply back to clear a gap in the line to a side door to the orchestra seating of the hall. I looked up to see an older man with a staff badge, and who should walk up from behind him than Anna herself, a young female assistant in tow. The old man rushed to open the side door to give her a shortcut through the hall to get to the autograph table in the lobby, but Netrebko took one look at the door, discerned his intentions, and turned away without breaking stride to walk down the hall past her waiting fans instead.

The old man finally popped back out, puzzled as to why she hadn't come on through. By then Anna was halfway down the hall, waving and clasping hands with fans as they greeted her with shouts of "Anna!" and other phrases in Russian and a variety of other languages.

The line did not move quickly, and while we waited a woman from the opera house came walked down the line with a post-it note pad writing down patron names in block capital letters so we wouldn't have to teach Anna how to spell our names. Good idea, but when she came up to us she also said that we could only give Anna one item to sign. Having purchased four CDs at significant price premiums to what I could have paid on Amazon, I was not pleased. If it were an opera I would have burst out into a fiery aria.

But Anna had already defied the opera staff once, and so I held out hope that she wouldn't adhere to such arbitrary house rules. As I turned the corner and saw her, I understood why the line wasn't moving more quickly. While the staff tried to hustle her fans through, Anna would look each fan in the eye, listen to what they had to say to her, respond, often in their native language (I heard her speak in English, Spanish, Russian, and French to various fans), pose for photos, and sign each CD or DVD with the same deliberate pace.

When I reached her, I chose a double disc set of her performance of La Traviata from Salzburg as the item most worthy of her signature, and she signed it right on the cover of the case. I mumbled something about having been honored to hear her sing, and she thanked me with a warm smile. I turned to leave, but then she saw the other CDs in my hand and reached out her hand.

"Here, let me sign those for you," she said, grabbing the stack. She signed each of them on the cover, but when she reached the last CD, she paused, furrowed her brow, then opened the case and signed the back of the paper insert instead. Then she grabbed the CD of La Traviata back from me.

"I am not sure if this will stay,", she said, rubbing her finger across the ink of her previous signature on the plastic CD cover. But the ink had already dried and did not smear.

"Oh, it is okay!" she beamed.

I usually dread meeting famous people, especially those I admire. The imbalance in relationship of worshipper to hero is so severe as to lead to disappointment more often than not. What can be conveyed in a single autograph line encounter of any substance or genuine emotion between a fan and a celebrity who doesn't know that fan as much more than one of an adoring throng of millions? The usual exchange of pleasantries:

1. Fan expresses admiration for celebrity.
2. Celebrity thanks fan, then asks what the person's name is and what they'd like to have signed.
3. Celebrity signs item while fan perhaps gushes a bit more, perhaps elaborating on the earlier admiration to name a specific moment or instance of the celebrity's work that particularly struck them.
4. Celebrity thanks fan for that more specific example in which his/her work has touched the fan, hands back the autographed item, and then turns to the next fan.
5. Rinse, repeat.

I've just recently met two celebrities to have items signed, one being another classical music performer I've followed for decades now, and the other being one of my favorite movie and music video directors. In both cases, the celebrities were brusque, borderline cold, and the encounters left me feeling like a silly fanboy who'd wasted their time by forcing them to indulge in such banal and forced interactions with the ungifted masses.

What Netrebko conveyed in our short encounter was subtle but, given my previous two hero encounters, momentous. She showed genuine appreciation for my appreciation of her work, and she displayed a thoughtfulness that, amplified by the previously noted disproportionate one-way admiration that is typical of fan-to-hero relationships, bordered on genuine intimacy. This ability to convey a genuine warmth and caring in short interactions with complete strangers is something I'd only read about from skilled politicians like Bill Clinton. Netrebko has it in spades, and one has the sense that if she could spend even more time meeting her fans she'd have a relationship with them that not opera critics or vicious opera bloggers could mediate. She can be the people's diva, and more than that, she seems like a genuine person, and so she brings a realism to the flawed operatic heroes she plays on stage.

My friend who was with me said afterwards that Netrebko's charms seemed particularly tuned towards men, but I didn't hear her at first, I was so engrossed in flipping through my stack of autographed CDs with a big smile on my face. If opera is to survive and thrive in the next generation (I could not help but notice, once again, that the median age of this crowd was likely in the late 50's), there is something to be learned from the Netrebko's of the classical music world, and it is not about selling out with sex appeal or crossover albums.

* The term prima donna comes from Italian. Prima is the feminine form of primo--"first"--and donna means lady. The prima donna is literally the first lady of an opera troupe. It's not a coincidence that the term is more often used in English to describe a vain, temperamental person. But the operatic sense of the term looks at the glass half full and connotes someone able to fill the seats of a massive opera hall and satisfy patrons paying hundreds of dollars for the privilege of witnessing a performance from someone with a personality and stature to match the ticket prices in scale. At least that is my layman's interpretation.

The Wi-Fi High Club

This post is being written from 30,000+ feet on a Virgin America flight from NYC to LA. The PA announcement was fuzzy, but I think it noted that this was one of 3 Virgin America planes outfitted with a wi-fi service they've dubbed GoGo.

Unfortunately my power outlet isn't working, so my online time may be limited. But for now, I've got wi-fi on my laptop, ESPN on Dish Network on my seatback entertainment system. Just connect my cellphone and my overstimulation is complete.

Ah, youth

Having come in a night early for a morning meeting here in Boulder, Colorado, Christina and I strolled around University of Colorado campus tonight. Being around a university reminds me of the happiest time of my life, as an undergrad.

We walked into one building, saw signs for a performance, and walked out to find a play being put on in an open-air theater. I stood to watch a scene--given the many references to D'Artagnan I assume it was The Three Musketeers--then walked out with a smile on my face.

Nothing like mannered student theater acting and eating disorder brochures in the hallways to remind one of college.

Where the Hell is Matt?

Ken sent this to me. It received some big Digg love recently. If you wonder what a guy with a torn Achilles and who loves to travel dreams about at night, this will give you a pretty damn good idea.

blah blah blah

I'm not picking sides on the debate about the impact of the web on journalism, but I do venture to say that stories like this would not have made the news prior to the rise of the web.

American Airlines to start charging $15 for the first checked bag. That's great, because I just adore flying those roomy coach seats. I I look forward to being charged to use the bathroom, charged to do the crossword on the in-flight magazine sudoku, and charged to rent an overhead bin for my carry-on luggage, too.

Eating vegetables raw is not always the healthiest way to consume them. Thank goodness. Also good news: eating vegetables with a bit of fat, for example in full-fat dressing, may help you absorb more vitamins.

Misc

Who is Jimmy Carter endorsing? Seems pretty clear it's Obama.

***

Is it possible to go out both with a whimper and a bang? This may be the business equivalent. RIP ATA and your dirt cheap airfares which I've taken advantage of a few times over the years.

***

One of the cooler hacks I've encountered recently: hack your portable Canon digital camera to enable new functionality like RAW file formats, live historgram displays, unlimited interval shooting, high speed shutters, and much more. I'm so going to do this once I can track down a card reader.

What the...?

Bizarre moment from the minisode of the pilot of Sheena. It's hard to go wrong with a man in a gorilla suit.

***

Kanye West launches a travel site: Kanye Travel Ventures. It's not clear to me what the Kanye twist on this is, but then I could never figure out what Paul Newman had to do with tomato sauce either. [via Thrillist]

Some really cool free things

Work has been so busy recently I haven't had time to pass along some great free Internet services I've been using for a while now.

Sandy, the virtual assistant. I don't have a real-life assistant of my own, but Sandy sometimes makes it feel as if I do. I have a fondness for command-line interfaces, and being able to fire off a quick e-mail to Sandy saying "Remind me to pick up dry cleaning at 9am tomorrow" and having "her" e-mail and text me at that time the next day is very handy. Besides the simplicity of the service, the other thing I enjoy is the pseudo-personalized nature of Sandy's replies. I asked her to remind me of something earlier, and Sandy began her reply, "Wow! You're up late!"

Tripit - Where Sandy's abilities end, TripIt takes over. Most people I know book their travel online, and in the process receive all those oddly formatted travel confirmation e-mails. Then you have to sit there and enter the information into your calendar. It's a pain in the butt, and don't ever do it again. Instead, just forward those e-mails to plans@tripit.com, and TripIt merges all of them into a master itinerary, adding maps and driving directions and weather and all sorts of other useful information. You can print it, send it to your calendar, send it to your phone, forward it to friends and family, or even enhance it with custom information. Ingenious.

Instapaper - Like many people who've grown up with the web, I exhibit symptoms of Internet-attention-deficit-disorder. I regularly have 20+ tabs open in my browser, and I've long searched for a simple way to save a tab to read later so I can close it out for the time being. Instapaper is the simplest solution yet. Add a simple Read Later bookmarklet to your browser, click it when you want to save the web page to read later, and you're done. Visit Instapaper later and all your saved articles are there to read.

Holidays 2007 in Scottsdale

Free wi-fi at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport. Boo-yah. (I wrote that back on Dec. 30, when I started writing this post, and now, weeks later, I'm still trying to finish)

With the addition of so many little kiddies to the family, we tried something different for the holidays this year and rented a vacation home for a week in Scottsdale. The four bedroom house had a pool, a hot tub, a grill, a pool table, a home theater room, and lots of flat screen TVs. My favorite was the home theater room. It had six plush, reclining, leather theater seats with cupholders, arranged in two rows of three, the back row raised off the ground slightly in a stadium seating configuration. A small and somewhat middle-of-the-road projector hung from the ceiling, shining its picture on a screen flanked by theatrical curtains. The kicker was an old school theater-style popcorn machine.

James and Angela had said before the trip they planned to rent a Toyota Solara convertible. So as I stood curbside waiting for them to pick me up from the airport, I thought it odd that a flaming red Mustang pulled up next to me, the passenger waving at me. A second glance revealed that it was Angela sporting her giant movie star sunglasses.

"We decided it was too cold for a convertible," she explained. So we drove back from the airport in a cousin to the future KITT (Knight Industries Three Thousand). The engine makes a suitable American sports car growl, a low, menacing rumble.

That car is no friend to the environment. "I can see the fuel gauge needle moving!" Angela said as she drove.

We all have our natural roles at the holidays. Mine are chiefly around entertainment: I'm responsible for bringing lots of movies on DVD, bringing by Nintendo Wii, and taking photos or video. The parents did most of the cooking. James and Angela bought most of the groceries. Joannie was our liaison to the vacation home owners. Karen looked up info for our social outings into Scottsdale, like the location of hikes and downtown attractions. My dad was responsible for playing with the grandkids in a semi-educational manner.

I brought two movies from the past year for people to watch: The Bourne Ultimatum and Once. James bought Pan's Labyrinth. When the kids weren't watching the Pixar Short Films Collection in the home theater room, those three movies occupied most of that room's screening time.

Usually we'd put on a movie after the kids had gone to bed and the dinner table had been cleared, dishes washed. That meant starting at 10pm some nights, so it took some people a few days to find the time to watch a movie start to finish without having to run off to collapse in bed.

Every one enjoyed all the movies, especially Once.

Our family has just the right mix of personalities to escalate things, so the day someone mentioned the durian, the so-called "king of fruits," and discovered that most people at the table had not eaten it before (come to think of it, that someone was probably me), it was inevitable that we'd end up buying one from Ranch 99 and forcing every one in the family to take a bit on video camera. See, the thorny-skinned durian is famous for its polarizing taste and odor. Those who enjoy it worship it and, I suppose, are the ones who dubbed it the "king of fruits." Those who find it revolting describe the odor as similar to that of rotting sewage or trash. I count myself among the latter.

The durian we bought was not as malodorous as the ones I'd encountered before in China. I remember the scent of raw durian to be so revolting that I couldn't bring myself to eat it raw. I was only able to consume it after it had been incorporated into a pancake, which was actually decent. But under the glare of my father's video camera, there was no escaping it this time. My dad chopped it open and scooped out the yellowish flesh onto a styrofoam plate.

James, the most curious one of us all, stepped up first. Or perhaps it was Sharon. Either way, both found it neither tasty nor awful. I was next and spooned a generous heap into my mouth.

Big mistake.

The taste of it reminded me of its smell and nearly made me gag. It took me about a minute of stomach-turning chewing and mental fortitude to swallow it without coughing up my dinner. I seem to recall breaking out into a sweat as I tried not to heave in front of my family, a sign of weakness that would be recounted at family reunions until my funeral. Karen, Joannie, Mike, and Angela had similar reactions.

My dad was convinced our revulsion was merely in our head, that we had prejudged and condemned the fruit without giving it a fair trial. To prove his point, he took two large bites and chewed away with no reaction. I'm convinced, however, that my dad has lost all feeling and taste sensations over the years. I've seen him slice his finger open nearly to the bone and have minimal reaction, and I thought his nonchalant reaction to the taste of durian was related, somehow, to his indifference to pain. Still, he pitched out the rest of the durian, giving our trash that evening the smell of, well, trash.

Some random holiday notes:

• Most played song: No One by Alicia Keys. By the end of vacation, was I sick of the song? Probably. But for the one week before you reach saturation with a catchy tune, it's toe-tapping good times.
• Most listened to local radio station: Phoenix's Movement 97.5. Like the music they'd play at a dance club that you're just slightly embarrassed to admit you like (think Tone-Loc, Timbaland, Fergie). Driving around in the Stang, blaring 97.5, I realized that James, Angela, and I were a parody of suburban cheesiness.
• Some random food consumption stats: 4 boxes of Gobstoppers, two bottles of Scotch (one Macallan, one Glenlivet), two gallons of Tampico (my brother's private equity firm owns them, so drinking this was a show of solidarity), about twenty bottles of wine, somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty dozen eggs, maybe six cases of water. Last chance for some fun before the New Years resolutions kicked in.
• Most watched movie: Once. That scene in the music store? I've seen it about 28 times now. Best scene of the year.
• Most played video game: Wii tennis. I'm impressed by how hard and flat my four-year-old nephew Ryan can crack the ball in Wii Tennis. Wii sports is the great equalizer. Young children who have infinite patience can, through repetition and immediate feedback, can develop some wicked skills in sports like Wii tennis and bowling. I discovered this the hard way when I ran into a six year old girl who nearly dropped a 300 in bowling on me. I was not amused.
• Number of kisses planted on my nephew Connor's cheeks: 389.

Some personal highlights:

• Scoring 100 in pop-a-shot at the Sugar Bowl ice cream parlor in Old Town Scottsdale. I'm pretty good at pop-a-shot, but for one transcendent moment, I entered the zone. The rules are simple: 45 seconds to shoot as many baskets as possible. Each basket counts for two points, except in the final 10 seconds, when they count for three each. You shoot with a cantaloupe-sized basketball at a smaller than normal basket. I think I missed two shots the entire round, breaking 100 on my last shot. I felt like Michael Jordan in that first half against Portland, or Reggie Miller at the end of the game against the Knicks. "That will be your opus," said James. If so, then that will have been one sad life.
• Scoring a birdie on hole 10 at Troon North. On a good round, I usually shoot one birdie out of sheer luck. But not having played golf in a while, I wanted to snap my clubs over my leg while hitting on the driving range before the round. I thought I had a better chance of actually killing a bird than scoring a birdie during the round (hundred of wild guinea roamed around the golf course, apparently oblivious to the dangers posed by amateur golfers like myself). But by the last several holes, I started to slow down, and my swing started to come around. On the last hole Alan and I played, I hit a drive about 270, a pitching wedge to within 5 feet, and toilet-bowled a putt for my birdie.
• The craziest moment of the holiday, by far, occurred on the third hole of Monument Golf Course at Troon. This par 5 hole is known as the Monument hole for the massive rock sitting right in the middle of the fairway about 260 yards out. Just past that hole, as I walked towards my ball to play my third shot, I spotted what appeared to be a small tiger sitting on the hill. The golf instructor who was riding with us was strolling up the fairway. James and I asked him what it was, and he said it was a bobcat. I stood my ground, expecting it would wander off, but our presence didn't faze it in the least. Soon it wandered into the fairway, past my ball. I took a couple steps back, but it didn't even look my way once, even when our instructor tried to shoo it away. The bobcat was gazing across the fairway. I followed its line of sight and realized it was looking at a rabbit sitting just off the fairway. It crept slowly across the fairway. I couldn't believe the rabbit didn't spot the bobcat which was now within 25 or 30 feet. Though the bobcat was now crawling on its belly, it wasn't hard to spot against the green fairway, and its tail wagged expectantly. And then, just as I thought it might be sitting there for a half hour, the bobcat shot towards the rabbit which dashed off through the bushes across the cart path. The bobcat didn't go after the rabbit but hurled itself into a bush. A narrow escape for the rabbit, I thought. But I was wrong, on both counts. First I spotted the bobcat coming out on the other side of the bush, another rabbit in its mouth. Then I heard our instructor Ryan hitting the brakes on his golf cart. The first rabbit I'd spotted had run across the path just as Ryan was cruising by in the golf cart, and Ryan had hit it. I walked over and saw the rabbit's cotton ball of a tail sitting on the cart path, and we found the rabbit nearby, limping around, one of its back legs broken. Rabbits are pretty damn cute, and we all felt awful, but I wasn't about to pick up a rabid rabbit and try to fashion a splint for it or anything like that. I thought it would be dramatic if I took an 8-iron to it, put it out of its misery, tears in my eyes, screaming "Damn it all to hell!" as I brought the club down again and again, but I didn't. Life, death, the circle of life, and a three putt bogey, all in the course of one hole. Only in Arizona.
• Seeing Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West. I've seen Taliesin in Wisconsin and Robie House in Chicago, and both were inspiring. Now I just need to get out to Fallingwater. Many Heloise Crista sculptures adorn Taliesin West, and they're great.

Most mornings, I'd be woken around 6 or 7am by the sound of my nephews running around. This would be after I'd stayed up until 3am by myself, maybe watching 30 Rock - Season 1 on DVD in the home theater room, or reading The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, or something else. So I'd spend the day sleepy. But not tired. The thing about vacation that keeps me running on so little sleep is the thought that I could get sleep at any time. When you're working, you're never sure how much sleep you'll get from one night to the next, and that worry is more mentally exhausting than anything else.

Most awkward moment of the holidays. Just as we were about to wrap a book I'd bought for my nephew Ryan, he burst into the room and surprised us. He grabbed the book, looked at the cover, and said, "Don't get me this book. I already have it." Then he ran out.

I went running with James and Angela and even Alan a few times. There's a budding movement to try and get as many of us together to run the NY marathon this year as possible. Will it happen? I'm not sure. It's a new year, though, the time to resolve such things.

Technorati Tags: christmas, connor, family

Sedaris on air travel

Being stuck here at the airport reminds me of this recent David Sedaris piece in The New Yorker about flying business class. Really damn funny.

Dark

Via Eric and Christina: the latest branch of a unique restaurant opens in Beijing, China. These so-called dark restaurants put a twist on the dining experience: you eat in complete darkness, guided to your seat and through the meal by visually-impaired waitstaff wearing night-vision goggles.

The goal is two-fold. One is to increase employment opportunities for the visually-impaired and raise awareness of the challenges they have to overcome. A second is to enhance your appreciation of the taste of the food by shutting down one of your other primary senses.

Add that to the list of novelty dining experiences, like Ninja Restaurant. There are Dans Le Noir restaurants in several major cities around the world.

The bathrooms, wisely, are brightly lit. There are some affairs one should conduct without the help of a spotter, for the benefit of both parties.

The last part of summer

Big day today - the first 25 Red cameras shipped. From Jim Jannard:

Just so you know, I am here at 1:09am with the RED team personally reviewing each camera of the 1st 25. We are calibrating each camera and my job is to check the files in RED Alert! that Jarred is shooting. We are shooting ISO 320, 1000 and 2000. There are about 20 people here getting ready for tomorrow. It really is a memorable night. About a year and a half ago this was just a dream. Tonight the dream has become a reality.

I want to thank all those that believed in RED from the beginning.

Jim

And all around the world, high end digital video camera profit margins shrink.

***

Dancing with the Stars…it’s a lot about the casting. I’ve only ever seen clips, but the talent they’ve convinced to grasp at that last of their 15 minutes of fame has been impressive. Among the cast for the upcoming season:

• Mark Cuban
• Floyd Mayweather Jr.
• Wayne Newton
• Scary Spice (Melanie Brown)
• Helio Castroneves
• Jenni Garth
• Josie Maran
• Marie Osmond
• Jane Seymour

Mark Cuban isn't making some last clutch at fame, I think it's more about brand bolstering for him. Generating constant publicity for himself is just part of who he is. Mayweather is in the tail of his career, and I'm surprised to see him on the list. The The rest all make sense.

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Farecast lauches hotel search in beta. It’s both similar and different to their airfare service which lets you know whether fares are likely to go up or down and thus whether to buy now or wait. Their hotel service, called Hotel Rate Key, lets you know whether a hotel’s rates are a bargain or not relative to that hotel’s historical rates.

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What the residents of Dunder Mifflin did on their summer vacation:

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Tom Wolfe reviews Entourage

But there is hope in this moxie wasteland of moviemakers. Johnny Drama draws not my ire. Here is the bravado-laden torch of the past, its fire fueled by protein shakes and casting off the nearly forgotten aroma of desire. His ginseng-toned body twisting and gyrating with anxiety and self-doubt, he’s a New Age Neal Cassady, passed up here for a Lifetime movie, there for a Hallmark Channel special—the Houghton Mifflin and HarperCollins of the television world. Johnny Drama is no mere muzzled bus driver, however. He is a symbol of irony, that word now recognized only by the literati. Played by Kevin Dillon, Sancho Panza to real-life brother Matt, this role oozes the true Hollywood pathos of silver-screen heartbreak. If watch Entourage you must, then watch it for Drama.

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Indexed - lots of fun. I have a hard time picking my favorite.

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Gorilla movie - [via Daring Fireball via Fresh Signals via AdFreak]

Nephews and birthdays

Happy birthday to my little sis Karen. She left LA and went to Chicago just before I headed to LA from NYC, and now she's making the move to NYC. I suspect she's avoiding me. The other possibility is that the country isn't big enough for all of us Wei kids so we're constantly whirling around the country in a geographic pas de trois.

I flew out to DC this past weekend to visit my nephew Connor. My timing was good as my flights out and in were sandwiched around an air-traffic-crippling computer outage at LAX.

Connor was just over 3 weeks old when I met him. He's a tiny thing, between 7 and 8 pounds. My iPhone is taller than his head right now.

His mode of communication is binary at this point. He's either crying or he isn't, and our goal at all times was to get simple: if he was crying, we did everything in our power to get him to a state of non-crying, and if he wasn't crying, we tried to keep him in that state. He likes to be patted on the back all the time. If I so much as stopped doing so for a few seconds, usually because I'd fallen asleep, he'd let me know with an ear-splitting wail.

Until his belly button is healed up, he can't be immersed in water, so for now he has wipedowns instead of baths, like army baby-wipe showers. He's really not a fan. He's highly sensitive to how he's being held. Sometimes he wants to bee lying facedown on your chest. At other times, he prefers to on his back, cradled in your arms. At other times he wants to be held against your shoulder and walked around. Finding which position was preferred at any point in time was a matter of trial and error. He'd let us know when we were off.

After eating, he loves to crane his head back and throw his arms up in a cat stretch. In general, he loves to tilt his head back or to the side as far as possible. Mike is worried he'll develop some strange reverse hunchback posture; I think it's adorable.

When he was well-fed, I'd try and burp him, and then I'd sit on the sofa and rest him on my chest. It's the greatest. His little arms flail around, his motor skills being fairly limited for now. He has that fresh new baby smell, which ranks above new car smell on the list of magical, transitory scents. His little body is a furnace, and feeling his body heat against your chest is pure magic. When awake and excited, he pants or breathes heavily, and he strains to swing his head from side to side as if in search of something. Holding him is like cradling a hummingbird.

He can't quite seem to focus his eyes on anything yet, but I think we made momentary eye contact a handful of times over the weekend. And while his facial expressions are still a cipher when he's not crying, I remember three times when it appeared he was smiling. Joannie thinks he just had gas, but I like to imagine that he thought of something funny, like "boy are you in for a surprise the next time you change my diaper."

It's a good thing newborns are so cute, because they're so helpless. Or maybe they're cute because they're so helpless? I'm exhausted from just the short visit--I have no idea how Joannie or new mothers deal with sleeping a few hours at a time--but I'd trade sleep for some quality time with Connor anytime.

I shot a bit of video of Connor and will post a short clip as soon as I have a moment to digitize and transcode.

Technorati Tags: connor

TSA

Bruce Schneier interviews Kip Hawley, head of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Good read as neither party pulls any punches. To Hawley's credit, he sought out Schneier to see how the TSA could improve its image on the web. I can't tell if security is improving or not--so much of what Hawley cites he cannot share. But that he's willing to engage Schneier on some difficult questions makes me feel a little safer. Even if that doesn't actually make air travel safer for me, there is an economic benefit to the slight boost in peace of mind.

I still do hate taking off my shoes and all that crap, though. Someone should follow that shoe bomber guy around and make him take off his shoes and put them back on every five seconds for the rest of his life.

Technorati Tags: flying, travel

Virgin America

I can't remember the last time I thought an airline was cool. That's just not an association one has with an airline brand except if flying first or business class internationally. But Richard Branson's new Virgin America sounds pretty sweet. Two 110-volt power outlets for every three seats! USB connectors! Wi-fi and Ethernet internet access on the plane (eventually)! Nerds everywhere excitedly rush onto Twitter to announce their in-flight status. Such is the technological prowess of their airplane that they earned a writeup in Wired's Gadget Blog.

What will the in-flight chat rooms turn into? I find most flights to be grim affairs, the social atmosphere rising at most to a level of quiet courtesy born from solidarity of suffering. Will users be identified by their seat number, or name? Or will they be anonymous? If it's the latter, I see a swarm of anonymous complaints arising when there's a screaming baby on board.

I tried booking a flight through their website and ran into a lot of problems (my session kept resetting), so they may still have some kinks to work out. But they fly out of LA to SF and DC, and they've done enough brand differentiation so that they'll be my airline of choice for those flights.

Technorati Tags: airline, flying, travel

A photo of mine in Travel + Leisure

A picture I snapped while in Dubrovnik, Croatia last summer appears on page 158 of the Aug. 2007 issue of Travel + Leisure, on newsstands near you. It's a cropped version of the pic below of the Buza bar which hangs on the side of the cliffs outside the city walls. I've had a few pics in magazines before, but they were mostly cycling pictures in odd European magazines I'd never heard of. This one comes with a paycheck which counts at some sort of mini-milestone.

I don't get anything if you buy the magazine, but I picked up a copy for posterity's sake and it looks to be a useful issue for travelers as it features their annual World's Best Awards.

I highly recommend Dubrovnik. I meant to write about it after the trip but I was having too much fun just traveling, and then I got back and school started, and now it resides in my brain as a happy memory, one that triggers a smile whenever I jab it. Dubrovnik is the choice for Europeans when they want to get away for a vacation and hide from the hordes or summer tourists descending on their hometowns.

Derek and I had just finished our Eastern European travels when I left for Dubrovnik where I was to meet up with Jason and family. On arriving at my hotel, I took a bus into town. Jason and I'd loosely agreed over e-mail to meet at an Internet bar outside city walls. Even so, there's something special when it works out in a foreign country, when you can't just call each other up over a cell phone (is this how we had to meet up in the days before mobile phones?).

I was walking up to the cafe when a newly shorn Jason called out to me on the sidewalk. He'd already been there a night or two, and the first stop he took me was Buza bar. We sat down on the balcony (if you look at my photo below, we were sitting at the open table that's just above the guy in the blue shirt on the steps) to catch up over a beer. The Buza is rumored to be a favorite of folks like Bill Gates when they're in town. Looking out on the ocean with the crisp air brushing past my face, an ancient castle city above my head, and an ice cold Eastern European lager in my hand, I couldn't help but think it was one of the truly epic bars in the world.

Technorati Tags: photo, photography, travel

Spiderman the musical?!

Marvel is in pre-production on Spider-Man the musical, to be directed by Tony-winner Julie Taymor with music and lyrics by Bono and the Edge.

Nice Flickr collection of the evocative name placards on apartment complexes here in Santa Monica. I agree with the photographer - these are the sole redeeming feature of the otherwise fugly apartment architecture ubiquitous in Santa Monica (and Los Angeles in general). You've never seen so much stucco and old shag carpet.

Kaoru Kubo is the famous voice heard on Airport Limousine buses ferrying passengers from Narita Airport to Tokyo. Very soothing.

A montage of beautiful title sequences by Kuntzel+Deygas who did the titles for Catch Me If You Can, among others.

Classified government report says Al-Qaeda is the strongest it's been since 9/11. How did this country ever elect Dubya? Perhaps Bryan Caplan is right.

Technorati Tags: LA, musical, photography, politics, travel

Tidbits

Lousy placement of a Yahoo ad at a baseball stadium.

Mozy offers 2GB of free online file backup for Mac users. Their unlimited backup service is only $5 a month which is not a bad deal. You get backup religion the first time your hard drive dies and takes your MP3 collection to the grave with it (Disclosure: that link contains my referral code, and for every four customers I refer I get 1GB additional free backup).

"As Hotel Prices Rise, a Villa May Be a Bargain" - the headline says it all. I want to stay in a villa!

Mmm, now this is some fresh sashimi (YouTube)

Technorati Tags: food, humor, internet, tech, travel, video, web, youtube

Even with the wimpy dollar, perhaps some deals in Europe

I'm not sure how many years in a row the NYTimes Travel section has been running its once-a-year "Affordable Europe" feature, but I remember it from last year, and it has returned. Well-worth checking out if you're planning to hit one of Europe's more popular cities in the coming year.

Technorati Tags: nytimes, travel

Trying to laugh through the tears

Next year, I'm mailing my taxes via UPS or Fedex. Still fuming and on hold waiting for various financial institutions to answer their customer service lines and resend my 1099's. Argh. But through the tears, perhaps a few nuggets of laughter...

The Apple iRack.

Google Maps directions for New York, NY to Paris, France...skip ahead to step 23 (via a Sports Guy reader)

Also funny, from the same Sports Guy column, this box score from the San Antonio-Phoenix NBA game. Skip down to Robert Horry's line for the Spurs.

Ryanair CEO vows to offer flights from the U.S. to the UK for less than $10.30. You'd probably pay more because Ryanair charges for all sorts of basics a la carte, but still.

Some progress today in the fight against global warming.

Jackie and Jet team up (with an assist from Yuen Woo Ping). It would have been a dream of a pairing if they two of them were about 10 to 15 years younger, but we'll take what we can get. Meanwhile, the Weinstein Co. could use some wire work.

Tiger Woods Reveals He Is Zach Johnson.

Technorati Tags: Apple, basketball, google, humor, movies, NBA, golf, sports, theonion, travel

Daisuke Matsuzaka

Baseball Prospectus examines Daisuke Matsuzaka to see if he's really worth spending $20 to $30 million on, just for the right to even negotiate with him. The answer? He probably is. He might just be the second best starting pitcher in baseball after Johan Santana. I want to see the gyroball.
UPDATE: Rumor has it the Boston Red Sox won the bidding war for negotiation rights with an offer of somewhere between $38 million and $45 million. Wow.

For your next vacation, won't you consider a virtual tour of World of Warcraft with Synthravels, the first online virtual travel agency?

The NanoNuno umbrella dries off with a simple shake. The secret? Nanotechnology. That image on their website makes it seem as if the umbrella emits some kinds of forcefield.

Technorati Tags: baseball, gadgets, geek, MLB, online, pitcher, pitching, gaming, sports, travel

Free international calls?

Via David Pogue in the NYTimes, news of a company called Futurephone that allows users to dial a domestic number and use it as a gateway to dial over 50 international countries for free. Many people can dial domestically for free in the evenings or on weekends via their cell carrier, so this is a sweet deal.

Will it last? I doubt it. But when the occasional crazy company comes along and burns cash in an effort to buy market share or build brand recognition, don't ask questions, just join the looters on the street and grab as much as you can carry.

In short

Ah, the exciting controversies that arise in the heated world of competitive chess. Maybe Kramnik is shooting up in the bathroom. Will steroids leave no corner of the sporting world alone?

Amen. Since these titles change hands these year, they really shouldn't use the superlative, or is sexiness really so volatile? On the other hand, "Sexy woman of the year" rather than "Sexiest woman alive" is not quite as, well, sexy, and perhaps sexiness really is so ephemeral because of some inherent fad-like quality.

Of the 100 largest economic entities in the world, more than half are now corporations rather than countries. The measure used was either GDP or sales. GM is the top corporation at no. 23. The rise of the corporation, able to live across borders and skirt the laws of the countries it resides in, is one reason why so many futuristic sci-fi movies feature evil, gargantuan corporations as the antagonist.

Paris at night. No city more beautiful after sunset.

"Meetin' WA," a short video by Jean-Luc Godard. WA in this case is Woody Allen. Whether you enjoy Woody Allen's movies or not, you must admit that he has been blessed to be able to make his type of movies for a long, long time now. Every director should be so lucky.

El Bulli

Mark Bittman on El Bulli and Ferran Adrià in today's NYTimes. I guess he's not doing foam anymore.

If you offered me the opportunity to eat at one restaurant tomorrow, anywhere in the world, El Bulli would be the choice. That just lumps me in with probably half the other foodies in the world.

Sometimes, just to torture myself, I browse El Bulli's general catalogue and gaze at the photos. You might scoff at applying such nomenclature to food, but scan some of his creations first. They are examples of food elevated to art.

I've eaten at several Adrià-inspired restaurants in the U.S., and if you have the chance, I highly recommend Alinea in Chicago. Grant Achatz is the Lebron James of American chefs.

Sole survivor

Instead of heading straight for LA after leaving NY last week, I stopped over in San Francisco for Mark's wedding. The slower transition from my old home to my new one was much welcome.

For one thing, my friend Cindy's apartment, where I stayed for the weekend, was so large that it helped to ease my sadness over leaving Manhattan. You could fit my entire NY kitchen inside her shower, and her apartment could house two entire families if a tornado picked it up and dropped it in Manhattan. These are things you learn to live with after an adjustment period in NYC, but being able to lie down in a shower to do snow angels helps to ease the pain of leaving NYC the way the patch helps a smoker trying to kick the habit.

California is also a state that makes a strong first impression. She's a looker. As soon as you step out of the airport, she greets you with sunshine and blue skies. The day before the wedding, I went for a jog in the afternoon from the Bay Bridge to Fisherman's Wharf, and though the headwind beat me up, the views of the ocean, sky, and bridges couldn't have been more gorgeous.

The point of this post, though, is to plug my old college classmate Yul who will be one of the contestants on this season's Survivor: Cook Islands. I've never really watched the show, but finally, I am one degree of separation from a reality show contestant. This season's show has already courted lots of controversy by dividing the contestants into four teams by race: Asian American, Caucasian, African American, and Hispanic. Various sponsors have dropped out and community leaders have protested. In other words, this transparent tactic for boosting ratings appears to be working as planned, though the test will come Thursday when the season premier airs.

Yul, though he couldn't share details of what had transpired on the show, invited us to a viewing party for a TV Guide Channel preview of the upcoming season. He was the last contestant profiled and was introduced thus: "...with a Yale doctorate, a compassionate nature, and a whole batch of imposing muscle." The voiceover was paired with an image of Yul sans t-shirt, looking like a video game Bruce Lee. Oddly, Yul never appeared with a shirt on in any of the clips, and you can imagine the ribbing we all gave him.

I won't be rooting for any particular team but for Yul. Early odds have him as one of 6 contestants with 8 to 1 odds, the favorite at this point being Adam Gregory at 7 to 1. If you're watching but have no rooting interest, I offer my endorsement of Yul as a really decent guy, a far cry from the cutthroat reality contestants you love to hate.

Happy Labor Day

A thorough explanation of why Chinese is so difficult to learn. I grew up hearing Chinese in the house and even attended some Chinese school, and I found it to be a bear. I never did really learn to write or read cursive Chinese handwriting very well (yes, Chinese has both print and cursive, like English), another item I'd add to this writer's litany of complaints. Just when you think you've memorized a character, someone scrawls it in their own cursive style and it's as if someone took a print character's brush strokes and tied them in butterfly knots. Of course, without cursive, writing Chinese, with its numerous strokes, is like writing English in neat block capital letters...sloooooooooow).

Curse of the Golden Flower, a movie by Zhang Yimou, starring Gong Li and Chow Yun Fat, releases this Christmas season (trailer). Yeah, I hate dandelions, too, but I wouldn't go so far as to call them a curse.

Crocodile hunter, felled by a stingray. Stung through the heart by a stingray...brutal. I guess it should be obvious from their names, but I didn't realize stingrays were that dangerous. Earlier this year, on a dive trip down in the Turks and Caicos islands, Dave and I fed stingrays just off the beach with some fish our guides had brought along for that purpose. We were soon overrun with stingrays, and one ran up my back and bit me. I popped out of the water, and Dave said the ray had drawn blood. Shortly thereafter, two lemon sharks wandered over, and I hustled out of the ocean.

Get your bootleg Van Goghs and Da Vincis: a city in China is the world's leading producer of reproductions of famous paintings. It doesn't surprise me one bit.

A computer program named WebCrow defeated dozens of human competitors in a crossword puzzle competition. Humans managed to defeat the program in two Italian crosswords featuring lots of puns and political clues.

That green lump that resembles playdough, the one they dump on your platter of sushi? That's not wasabi. Real, fresh wasabi is rarely served at sushi restaurants, but whenever a sushi restaurant offers it I'll request it. Real wasabi is not as hot as the faux stuff, but it's better for you. Unfortunately, the real deal costs a fortune.

Michael Apted's next in his Up documentary series is about to release. He interviewed many children at age 7 about their lives and dreams for 7 Up, and since then, he's gone back to check up on them every 7 years (each doc in the series is named after the age of the characters, so 14 Up, 21 Up, and so on). This next installment will be 49 Up. All the previous installments are on DVD.

The new Sunday Night Football theme (MP3) is by none other than John Williams.

Four words no man wants to hear: bleeding in the scrotum. It's been that kind of year for the Cubs.

HiveLive is a site that allows you to post and share files and information among public or private hives, or groups of people.

The Statistical Review of World Energy 2006, by British Petroleum, including historical data series in Excel format.

You got the touch! Feel, feel, feel, feel, feel...feel my heat!

Underwater wonders of the world

The seven underwater wonders of the world:

• Palau
• The Belize Barrier Reef
• The Galapagos Islands
• The Northern Red Sea
• Lake Baikal
• The Great Barrier Reef
• The Deep Sea Vents

I don't know who declared these to be so, but I first heard about them at dinner tonight, and I looked them up online when I returned home. Sure enough, the same list showed up again and again. I've gone diving at the Galapagos and the Great Barrier Reef. Now I'm intrigued by the idea of diving the remaining five.

Farecast now serving 55 cities

Farecast now offers airfare predictions for 55 U.S. cities.

Flying low

The best time to buy plane tickets: Wednesday from midnight to 1am in the time zone of the airline's home base? Not sure if this is true, but I've heard it from a few people now.

I have to fly in a few hours, and with the current state of airport security procedures, what should be a happy event (traveling) sounds about as pleasant as a weekend getaway to Abu Ghraib. I'm referring just to the portion of my trip that begins and ends at the airport. As always on these security issues, Bruce Schneier is a voice of reason. Greg Palast provides a voice of biting humor on the same issue. Martin Peretz thinks we may have to turn to the procedures used by Israel's El Al airline. You don't have to remove your shoes or your laptop, but El Al puts all its passengers through a short interview before allowing them on the airplane. I can't imagine U.S. airports have the capacity for something like that, but it sounds interesting, like being screened by a Blade Runner.

I'm not going to waste energy fretting about dying in a terrorist attack (airline flight is still much safer than driving, among other forms of travel - PDF), but we're about a year or two away from having to fly practically nude. Airplane travel continues to grow more and more unpleasant, with no solution in sight.

A few months ago, when I was in E. Europe, I was pleased that so many discount airlines had launched in Europe. But now I'm back to wondering at how an entire industry can be so unprofitable while continuing to raise prices for a service that continues to regress in quality. Are the economics of air travel just inherently awful (except for the discounters who depart from the hub-and-spoke model like Southwest, easyJet, Ryanair)? Plane ticket pricing seems to float in a free market, so I'm assuming that airlines don't raise their prices and, in turn, the quality of their service, because these prices are the ones that maximize their profitability, and so this is all the quality they can offer. I'm assuming they're near the optimal intersection of supply and demand with their ticket pricing, but perhaps something else comes into play?

I wonder similar things about other industries. Why do all telecom companies have such shoddy customer service? What about the cable companies? What is it about certain industries that seems to drag down all the participants?

Product feature: does the body good

A gallon of milk on Amazon.com inspires hundreds of customer reviews. Ships from Gristedes in New York. I priced out what it would cost to ship to me here in NYC, and it came out to $30.24, with expedited shipping, which I highly recommend for milk.

Toyota about to pass GM to become the world's largest automaker, though they've been fighting some quality issues recently. I remember when our family first purchased a Toyota Cressida, it might as well have been a Bentley to us. We later participated in the Camry tsunami.

Domaines Ott and French rosé wines are the new hot summer drink. What I find most surprising from this article, though, is that Alex Kapranos, lead singer of Franz Ferdinand, is a food columnist for The Guardian, and Jay McInerney is wine columnist for House & Garden.

"My other vehicle is a Gulfstream." I just enjoy that article's title. Private air travel is tough on the environment because of the outrageous fuel consumption, so I always try to airpool when I take my jet to Aspen or Jackson Hole, cuz that's how I roll. Okay, that's not true. I've only flown in a private jet once, and that trip confirmed that private jets is heaven compared to the human cattle call that is commercial air travel.

Floyd Landis's B-sample came back positive, so his team Phonak fired him. Now USA Cycling and the US Anti-Doping Agency will prepare a case against him while Landis and his team prepare his defense. It will be months before we hear a verdict, though the court of public and media opinion works has already issued theirs. On the "Top Ten Landis Excuses" piece on David Letterman, number nine was "Who can resist Balco's delicious 'spicy chipotle' flavor." Landis posted a statement on his weblog yesterday and a response to the B-sample positive test today.

The pilot for Aaron Sorkin's new TV show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip leaked onto YouTube this week, then was promptly pulled. So I can just link to this 6 minute promo (begins with a riff on Network, beats up on NBC's own SNL, and makes a joke about Sorkin's coke habit) and 30 second trailer. Anyhow, this is all an excuse to tell a short story about my apartment hunt in L.A. At the first apartment I went to visit in Santa Monica, a bald guy named Evan answered the door. He looked really familiar, like someone I'd seen on TV or in a movie, but I just couldn't place him. So I didn't say anything. He showed me his apartment and was really generous with his time, explaining the neighborhood and its nearby attractions. He mentioned that he'd done the New York to LA move also, and that I should keep an open mind to LA (I'm in depression over leaving NY for LA right now). He never mentioned his work, but after I left his apartment, and as I was filling out an application, I realized who he was. Evan played Charlotte's flame Harry Goldenblatt on Sex and the City, the role for which he's most known, and he'll be in the pilot of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. I didn't end up taking his apartment because I got a roommate and needed more space, but it seemed appropriate that he be one of the first people I met in LA.

Google announces "All Our N-gram are Belong to You," which I think is pretty generous of them.

Once upon a tongue, in a faraway place

I was in China last year, and I jotted a few notes about the food in my journal:

My first meal in China was at one of the best Sichuan (Szechwan) restaurant in Beijing, Yu Xin. Straight off the plane, Eric and Christina wasted no time in tossing my stomach into the fire, literally. The spiciness of real Sichuan cuisine comes from mala, a spicy sauce of Chinese chilies and assorted seasonings like sesame oil and Sichuan peppercorns. The word "ma" refers to numbness, the word "la" to the spiciness, so mala spells out its effect: it burns and numbs at the same time. The numbness actually allows you to eat more of it than you would otherwise.

The first dish that came out was a meat dish, but it was unclear from its appearance what the dish contained other than diced chilies. I had to send my chopsticks burrowing deep into the mountain of chilies to find a chunk of chicken. By the end of the meal I'd lost all feeling in my mouth, but that didn't wipe the big grin off my jetlagged face. The problem with eating lots of mala is that all other types of food taste bland in comparison.

The toughest restaurant to get a table at in all of China? Kentucky Fried Chicken (ken da ji). Far more popular than McDonald's. It's so popular that another chain of restaurants knocked off KFC's logo, colors, and mascot. Yes, there's another restaurant with a Chinese-looking colonel and the white lettering on red background, but that restaurant doesn't serve fried chicken at all. I didn't have time to walk into one to see what they served, but its existence seemed appropriate in a place where respect for copyrights is about as scarce as toilet paper in public bathrooms.

The hottest new American export to the Chinese dining scene since my last visit? Starbucks ("xing ba ke" in Chinese, xing meaning "star" and ba ke simply being a phonetic rendering of bucks). There's one in the Forbidden City. We stayed with Joannie's friend Arthur and his wife in Guangzhou. We asked him what he liked to do for fun, when he wasn't cranking out sneakers for Nike (he worked at a supplier to the Swoosh). He said his favorite event of the month was every other week, when he and his wife would drive 45 minutes to an hour into the heart of the city to get Starbucks.

In China people actually don't use soy sauce much. Soy sauce and egg rolls and General Tso's chicken, they're all largely staples of the Americanized version of Chinese food. In China, they prefer vinegar use it instead of soy sauce as seasoning, for example, for dumplings.

My visit two weeks ago to Beijing was another culinary adventure. Christina and Eric are among the more passionate foodies in my circle of friends, and the week's worth of activities they organized for everyone leading up to their wedding included visits to many of their favorite restaurants.

That was music to my mouth. I don't look forward to the cuisine in every country I visit (many of the stops on my E. European visit earlier this year left much to be desired from a dining perspective), but China is a culinary mecca. On my visits there, I look forward to eating as much as or more than sightseeing.

Some meals I remember from this trip...

Our first lunch was at Lei Garden, a fairly new restaurant to Beijing. I don't believe it was there last year when I visited, but it's the newest branch of a high-end Cantonese restaurant chain that first achieved renown in Singapore. For those who love Chinese food but don't possess the most adventurous of palates, this is the perfect restaurant. The restaurant, tucked away on the third floor of a somewhat sober business building, is elegant and polished, and the service is top-notch. As for the food, when I found out we were returning to Lei Garden for the rehearsal dinner, I delivered a celebratory chest bump to the next guy I saw in the street, sending him scampering away in fear.

For one of our dinners, we visited the Qianmen branch of Quan Ju De (English website), the famous Beijing (Peking) duck restaurant. Roasted over a fruitwood flame, the duck arrives with a crispy skin and tender, juicy meat. Carved tableside and served in a wrap with scallion and plum sauce, it's a dish I can never pass on. Quan Ju De has the reputation of being the top roast duck purveyor in Beijing, though there are whispers of declining quality and worthy challengers. If you're only in town for a quick vacation, though, it's the safe choice.

Our dinner the next night was at Qiao Jiang Nan. What I remember most about our meal here, in a private banquet room, was that all the waitresses were wearing one-piece tennis outfits, much like the one Nicole Vaidisova is sporting here. I realize this seems like an excuse to reuse this picture of Nicole, but this is honestly the first photo of this type of outfit I could find. At any rate, I felt like we were eating at the clubhouse at Wimbledon.

Perhaps my favorite meal of the trip was at Ding Ding Xiang, a Mongolian hotpot restaurant which bills itself as "Hotpot Paradise." It's not boasting if it's true. It instantly moves onto my list of restaurants and dishes that will haunt me forever. My second day back from China, I actually did have a dream about eating there again, and when I woke up I nearly cried at the cold slap of reality. At Ding Ding Xiang, everyone gets their own personal hotpot, set on top of a flame. Each diner can select one of several different broths to serve as the base of their hotpot. Christina helped Jed and I out and chose the mushroom stock.

I saw abalone on the menu and had to order it, despite it being the priciest of the dishes. I adore abalone. The waiter actually brought it out for our perusal, and it was still moving! I'd never seen one live before. We also ordered lamb, a whole slew of mushrooms, spinach and other greens, and a whole lot more. The presentation was gorgeous, and the hotpot was simply the most delicious I've ever had, and I've had more than my fair share over the years. I'll be dreaming about that meal for years to come, and it is unequivocally my top restaurant recommendation from this visit to Beijing. The next time I visit, it will be my first stop upon leaving the airport.

As for changes from my visit last year, the Starbucks in the Forbidden City is no longer there. Our guide told us the Congress over there gave it the boot. All the other branches of Starbucks remain a huge hit, however, and Kentucky Fried Chicken is still the king of the fast food restaurants in China. I did not eat there this trip, but I am also not one of those foodie or travel snobs who turns their nose up in disgust at the mere sight of a KFC or McDonald's.

I think it's somewhat of a waste to spend a meal at McDonald's or KFC when abroad, especially when most of what they serve is available back home. But, even as an American, I don't flog myself every time I spot a branch abroad, and I no longer recoil in horror if someone has to duck in under the Golden Arches for the taste of something familiar. The typical travel snob who holds everything foreign on a pedestal can't ignore that most American fast food franchises abroad stay in business primarily through the traffic from locals. I find it interesting to gauge foreign perceptions of American restaurants and culture, and fast food restaurants are an easy barometer.

It's also been many years since I've harbored any illusions that any popular travel destinations are hermetically sealed time machines, completely devoid of other tourists or influences from home. Wherever I go, I see American movies, travelers, books, music, and yes, more than a few frappuccinos and Big Macs. If a complete absence of anything American is the only way you'll be satisfied, then consider that your presence abroad is probably ruining some other travel snob's vacation.

One last food story. I've always been a fairly adventurous, open-minded eater. My mom forced me to clean my plate, to sample something from every dish. Whether it was innate or trained, my broad palate has been with me for as long as I remember. It's a high risk, high reward dining strategy. At times, as with drunken shrimp in Hong Kong, it ends with gustatory ecstasy. At other times, as with some bad (though tasty at the time of consumption) ceviche in Quito, it has sent me to the hospital.

Last year during my visit to Beijing, a bunch of us went for a stroll down a well-known food alley near the Wangfujing neighborhood of Beijing. There, we stumbled upon more than one street vendor hawking some creatures I'd never thought of as food before. They were impaled on kabobs. The mere sight of them was fearsome, but after an initial bout of revulsion, I tried to summon my stomach, so to speak. More than few people from our travel party were there, and an audience usually amplifies my dining bravado. I asked the vendor how much for a kabob, and he said they were 10RMB, or just over $1.

I took a deep breath. Okay, I'd eaten a fried grasshopper before, surely this was not much different. I could do this, and I'd have a story to share for years to come. After all, they were deep fried, right? The vendor reached out for one of the kabobs, for another customer, and that's when the true nature of what I'd be attempting became clear.

These creatures' legs started waving wildly, even as they were impaled on the kabobs.

"I thought they were fried!?" I gasped in Chinese.

"No!" said the vendor, recoiling in horror. "Much better alive. Fresh!"

I couldn't do it. We walked away, but not before I grabbed some video of these unique creatures, both pre and post skewering. These creatures should be familiar to most people (view either the 320 x 240 high quality or the 640 x 480 medium quality Quicktime clip, both about 3.5MB), though perhaps not as a snack.

I'll eat most things, but not everything. I don't know who has the unfortunate job of having to prepare these creatures nor how they do it. I don't know how they ensure you aren't injured or even poisoned when biting one of these while they're still alive. You can ask for them deep fried, but even on my return trip this year I couldn't pull the trigger.

After my initial encounter, just as we turned to leave, a young boy of perhaps 7 or 8 years old walked by with his father. The boy had a kabob of these and had chewed the head off of one.

His t-shirt read: "You are what you eat."

Sizzle, snap, crack

For Floyd Landis, today his Tour victory journey comes to an end. Cue Daniel Powter's "Bad Day."

Today was one of the two monster stages of the Tour de France, including two climbs I've ridden in the past, the Col du Galibier and the Col de la Croix de Fer. Both are HC (hors categorie) climbs, so difficult they are beyond categorization. And those were just climbs to set the stage for the two finishing climbs, the Col du Mollard and La Toussuire. In the punishing furnace of the French summer, Tour cyclists had to ride through a couple of circles of Hell today.

Floyd Landis found his limits today on that final climb. In cycling parlance, he cracked. First Dennis Menchov attacked, and Landis could not follow. Though T-Mobile paced Klöden and Landis back, the blood was in the water. Carlos Sastre attacked, and down went Landis. By the end of the stage, won by that albino praying mantis Michael Rasmussen, Landis had dropped to 11th overall, 8:08 behind Oscar Pereiro. In just over 13km, or the final 8 miles and change, Landis's Tour hopes evaporated as quickly as water off the pavement.

He's still probably the strongest time trialist of the podium contenders, and from day to day, one's legs can feel remarkably different, so Landis can still reach the podium. But he can't sit back and mark his opponents anymore. He has to attack.

The day I climbed the Col du Galibier, I also climbed the Col du Telegraphe first. They are companion climbs. I was riding with another guy on the bike tour, and up and over the Telegraphe, I felt decent despite near 100 degree temperatures and a stifling humidity. I had enough energy to stand up to accelerate through the switchbacks. But on the short descent down the other side, I did not have much time to recover. Before I could catch my breath, the road leaned back into me again on the way up the towering Col du Galibier. About halfway up, my speed dropped down to about 14 km/hr, and no matter how hard I tried, I could not push past that ceiling. I had redlined. My buddy waited for a bit, and then I waved him on. The rest of the climb was a long, lonely delirium of suffering. I spent much of that ride trying to detach my mind from my body so that I could displace my pain, compartmentalize it. I tried to think of my body as merely a machine to which I issued commands.

But despite many hours spent toiling up the Alps and Pyrenees of France, I've missed it these past few summers. Whenever July rolls around, I long to be on my bike, fighting gravity to ride uphill. There have been few times in my life I've felt more alive.

RELATED: An article in the NYTimes about how to run marathons in high heat and humidity.

Screwing around with faces and heads

Every time I arrive in L.A., I think two things. First, as I exit the airport, I think, "Oh the weather here is unbeatable."

Then, as I pick up my rental car and merge directly into a never-ending queue of traffic, "Oh, *%&$@#!."

Two random reader contributions. From John, MyHeritage is facial recognition technology for photographs. Their conversation starter for now is a feature that matches uploaded faces to the celebrities they most resemble. As you can imagine, I rated as a high probability match for a composite of George Clooney and Brad Pitt, but then you didn't need such advanced technology to anticipate such a result.

From Mike:

The Amazing Screw-On Head, a humor comic from Mike Mignola (who
created Hellboy), is being made into an animated series on the Sci-Fi
channel. They have the pilot episode on their website:

http://www.scifi.com/amazingscrewonhead/

It's about this robot-type guy whose head can screw on to bodies. He
works for Abe Lincoln taking care of weird supernatural problems. It's
voiced by Paul Giamatti and the main bad guy is voiced by David Hyde
Pierce, so the acting is good.

Lovecraftian humor and steampunk adventure? I'm there.

Our entire future lies behind us

World Hum's list of the top 30 travel books. I always try and read a book about the area I'm traveling to, or a book by an author from that region, but I've only read the Bryson and Twain off of this list (Bryson's next book, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, releases Oct. 17). The obvious cure, of course, is to pull out the passport and head back out into the world.

***

Speaking of travel books: download the 2000 through 2006 editions of the CIA World Factbook and Factbook on Intelligence for free as PDFs. Very cool reference.

***

Aymaran people of the High Andes think of the future as behind them, the past ahead of them, different than most everyone else, perhaps because of differences in their language. I have a conceptual metaphor for time as well. My mental map of the years looks something like this:

It's a bit more involved than that (if you imagine it as a flat board, the right side of the board is actually pushed further away from me so that the entire board is at an angle), but that's the best 2-d representation I can come up with. 1974 is the start b/c that's the year I was born. When I think of sports events of importance to me, I think of them as falling on this spatial representation of my life. 1984, Cubs lose in NLCS to the Padres. 1985, Bears win the Super Bowl. 1991, the Bulls win their first championship.

When I think of an individual year, my spatial representation is a vertical one, with January at the top, December at the bottom, the days of each week running horizontally, from Sunday at the far left to Saturday at the far right, one week above the next. I suspect this arises from the idea of a wall calendar whose pages are torn out and affixed to the wall, one month above the next.

When I think of 24 hours, my mental image is of a 12 hour circular clock, like an analog watch, with 12:00 at the top. The same with a minute, it's a circle with 0 and 60 seconds falling at the top.

***

Flickr still maintains a 20MB per month upload limit for its freeloading customers. Having just returned from a wedding, I had set up a Flickr group for everyone to use to compile photos for the bride and groom, but then the groom pointed out that the service is all but useless to people without pro accounts because they can only upload a few pics. Flickr needs to raise the upload bandwidth for non-paying customers.

Their pricing seems to be based in a world where printing was not possible. They should up the bandwidth limit but offer cheaper printing prices and longer storage of photos for Pro members. You want to hook people by getting them to upload pics, then convert them to paying customers by giving them strong incentives to stick around.

***

Is football (soccer) boring? I used to think so, but I'm coming around this World Cup (from the television ratings, it appears I'm not alone). I don't have the appreciation for the sport that an actual player has, but my love of cycling has opened my mind to sports that are usually described as appealing only to practitioners. A few things appeal to me. The sheer athleticism and coordination of some of the players is stunning, like watching Reggie Bush in the open field, but if he had to dribble a football. The format of World Cup once it moves into single elimination raises the stakes. Every goal that is scored seems a miracle, and many seem gorgeous in their angles and athletic execution. And the Brazilian female fans? Yet another justification for high definition television.

The global appeal of the World Cup leads to some great gatherings to watch matches. In Beijing last Saturday, as Jed and I were strolling down a dark street after the wedding, we came upon a group of Chinese twenty-somethings gathered around the blue-white glow of a television on the patio of a cafe. They had beers in hand and we were screaming with delight at every twist and turn. If I could have felt my feet, I am certain that I could have joined this group of strangers and been sharing Yanjing beers with them in no time. In 1994 I attended one World Cup match at Stanford Stadium, Brazil - Russia, and from start to finish it was one of most raucous sporting events I've ever been to. I spent almost the whole match jumping around, trying to learn some Brazilian chants and songs.

Still a few things about the sport put me off. Watching two subpar teams battle to a scoreless tie, the ball turned over time and time again, holds about as much appeal as watching professional darts. The theatricality involved in diving is just absurd; they should make players who dive exchange their soccer shorts for skirts for the next match. And using penalty kicks to determine winners in matches that are scoreless through overtime seems a poor method for determining the superior team.

I've often heard that he U.S. loses its best athletes to sports like basketball and football. I'm curious to see some athletic profiles of the best football (soccer) players. How tall and heavy are they, and what are their times in the 40? Vertical leaps? Strength? What types of American athletes would fare best if converted?

***

Please, please, let it end.

The deepest cut

I arrived at Beijing Airport this morning (yesterday morning? who knows anymore) to fight a chaotic mob of people in the international departures area. You have to fill out a departure form and pass through some outbound customs screen before you can even check in. I battled to the counter to grab a departure form, but as my hand reached the pile of forms, someone else grabbed a form and yanked it out, running its edge along my right thumb and opening a deep one-inch papercut.

The sudden and sharp pain startled me, and I shouted. Then proceeded to bleed like a geyser all over the counter, the forms, my clothes. The crowd around me pulled back, horrified, then just went to the next counter over to continue their quest for a departure form. I was left clutching my thumb like an idiot. I opened my suitcase with my left hand and pulled out my toiletries bag, but I had no bandages or first aid materials. I held my right thumb out to my side, dripping blood on the floor. I had three heavy bags and was surrounded by a sea of unsympathetic travelers, not a bathroom in sight. So I just wrapped my thumb in another departure form and waited until the bleeding stopped, and then went on my happy way looking like I'd just slaughtered fifteen chickens. Fortunately my questionable appearance didn't attract any unwanted attention from the authorities, and I managed to clean up after I'd cleared security.

But my papercut pales in comparison to the one Thor Hushovd suffered in Stage 1 of the Tour de France. In the final sprint for the finish line, a spectator swiped one of those giant cardboard hands from PMU across Hushovd's right upper arm, opening a huge gash that proceeded to bleed all over him (in a bunch sprint, riders are flying over 40mph, so running a piece of hard, sharp cardboard across your arm...my eyes are watering just thinking about it). In an odd coincidence, PMU is the sponsor of the green jersey that Hushovd won at last year's Tour.

This is close to what I looked like at Beijing airport this morning, except no one was helping me and my quads are not that huge.

Glass half...

Something in the Chinese culture or disposition lends itself to brutal honesty. I've experiencd this firsthand many times in the past. Seeing an aunt for the first time in ages, I've been greeted more than once with, "Wow! You've sure put on some weight. You should work out some more, maybe skip dinner tonight."

With my Americanized sense of tact, I can only smile sheepishly and reply good-naturedly, "Yeah, hah hah."

On my flight back from Beijing to Newark today, the American pilot came on as we descended into New Jersey, "The weather's a bit overcast, so we may experience a bit of turbulence on our descent."

He was followed by the translation into Mandarin from the Chinese stewardess, "The weather in the Newark area is very bad, hot and stormy. The descent will probably be very rough. Please get to yoru seat and buckle your seatbelt immediately!"

After we'd survived our landing, we pulled a stop on the runway.

Pilot, in English, "We've been informed that our gate is still occupied, but it should be clear in 10 to 12 minutes, so we'll just sit here for a brief moment."

Stewardess, in Chinese, "There's another plane at the gate. We'll probably be held up for 15 to 20 minutes until we can move."

Of course, the stewardess was right. I wonder what Chinese stewardesses say about departure delays in China.

"Ladies and gentleman, we're being held up while we wait for the pilot who's sitting on the toilet right now. That's what happens when you have one too many of those freeze-dried monstrosities we call meals, one of which will be sitting on your tray table shortly, if we ever take off. Please turn off your cell phones. I'm supposed to tell you that they'll interfere with the airplane's communications, but that's a lie, we just don't want to listen to twenty-nine businessman jabbering away in the cabin about pointless nonsense."

He Poos Clouds

Listen to clips from the new album from Final Fantasy He Poos Clouds, featuring vocals from Arcade Fire's violinist Owen Pallett over a string quartet. Pallett is an unabashed nerd--son of two entomologists, he scored a videogame at the age of twelve and two operas by the age of twenty-one--and this album is an attempt to modernize each of the eight Dungeons & Dragons schools of magic. Yep.

iToors sounds cool in concept--Podcasts for travelers to various cities--though the content on the site is still skimpy. For now there are podcasts for Paris, Prague, London, Glasgow, and Santa Monica(?!). The site also has a search engine for suggesting books, movies, and music to accompany a trip to each city, though again the cupboards are still quite bare. I'll withhold judgment until I hear their NYC podcasts, releasing sometime this next month. In general, though, I think the podcast market for travelers is underserved right now, especially having just returned from a month long trip in which my iPod was a permanent fixture. No podcast can replace a seasoned guide who can answer questions that pop into your head as you stroll around town, but a podcast is sure to be cheaper.

Handy list of useful Mac OS X freeware.

The Flock web browser beta is now available. It's a Mozilla-based browser with built-in features to simplify common web activities like bookmarking, blogging, newsreading, and photo-browsing.

Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Three Times, which I saw the NYFF in 2005, is playing in a few theaters around the country. The movie comprises three shorts, each starring Shu Qi and Chang Chen as lovers, in 1966, 1911, and 2005. Though the overall movie is uneven (the second segment was a bit inert), the first segment, "A Time For Love," is romantic, gorgeous, and unforgettable. The movie's trailer is here (Quicktime). You can get a flavor of Hou's tranquil lyricism from his commercial for Air France also (click "Voir les films TV" and then "Le Ponton"), a commercial I saw more than a few times while traveling through E. Europe.

A glitzy annual benefit to sponsor breast cancer research is titled What A Pair! We may not have found the cure yet, but there's no shortage of cringe-inducing puns.

SOAP

The first, lo-fi trailer for Snakes on a Plane.

Greasemonkey script to encrypt your GMail using public key encryption.

Farecast is in beta. You tell it where you want to fly and when (U.S. only), and it tells you whether plane ticket prices are likely to rise, stay flat, or go down, giving you another data point in deciding when to buy. Right now, the only two cities from which you can check fares are Boston and Seattle, so it doesn't do me much good, but if you live in one of those two cities and want an invite to play with the beta, drop me a line. I still have a few of my 25 invites left.

Diving in Grand Turk

NOTE: As I write this, out my window here in New York snow is dumping onto the streets and the thermometer only shows 40 degrees. Last Friday it was sunny and in the fifties. About twenty minutes ago, I was in my running shorts, about to head out for a jog. The weather is having a schizophrenic fit.

This past weekend, Dave and I grabbed a discount fare for a some diving in Grand Turk. Three years ago, Dave had visited and dove at Grand Turk, one of the Turks and Caicos Islands, north of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

The first thing a New Yorker notices upon landing in Grand Turk is the languor. People stand around, leaning against walls or sitting on the ground, and it seems as if they're all waiting for something to happen, though they're in no particular hurry either way. In New York, even the panhandlers are aggressive and in a hurry. If all the cities of the world were grouped at the start line at one point, New York sprinted off and has never stopped, while Grand Turk jogged a few stops, then strolled to the side of the track to lie down in the grass to watch the clouds floating by. On Sunday morning we set our watches ahead an hour, but by the time the trip ended, my watch was probably five or six hours behind.

Perhaps the laid-back pace of life arises from the metronomic refrain of the surf lapping at the shore. It is set for all of time at a soothing largo, and at night it would soothe me into slumber. The perfect weather this time of year didn't hurt. With the sunshine and a light breeze of warmed spring air, no one's in a hurry to get indoors. Wherever you are, that's a good place to be.

The people of Grand Turk, many of them Haitians, also prize spontaneity and a live-in-the-moment attitude over certainty and planning. The next day's schedule at the dive shop seemed to change from moment to moment, and ask a question twice and you're likely to receive a different answer each time. At restaurants, inevitably the first thing I ordered would be unavailable. Dave and I tried to order lobster quesadillas at one restaurant as they were listed on the chalkboard as that day's special. The waitress said they didn't have any lobster. When we pointed out the board, she glanced over and said, "Hmm." Every day, for breakfast, I tried to order the crab and avocado wrap, listed as a specialty. Each day, I was told that avocado would come in the next day, but it never did.

The only time I'd been diving before was in 2003, when I got certified on the Great Barrier Reef. I dove there and in the Galapagos, but hadn't touched thought about diving at all in the years since. I couldn't even find my PADI certification cards for this trip, but fortunately the dive shop was able to look up my info so that I could rent tanks. Dave, on the other hand, has been on some 90 odd dives, and he also owned all his own equipment.

On Sunday morning I took a quick refresher course, relearning how to set up my equipment, handle basic emergency situations underwater, and control my buoyancy. Then I joined Dave and a couple from California for our first dive, at Finnbar's Reef. One of the attractions of diving at Grand Turk is how close the reef and ocean floor wall are to the shore. A five minute boat ride and we were there. I'm not a huge fan of living aboard a boat or taking long, choppy rides out to a dive site.

Diving, like spelunking, has a strong mental component. I'm no yogi, but putting in the regulator and dropping into the ocean feels to me like entering a meditative state. If your mind doesn't want to go to that calm place, your body won't follow. It's not a sport for the easily panicked.

My first open water dive ever, on the Great Barrier Reef, was in really choppy waters, on a rainy day. We jumped in and all grabbed hold of a rope, leaving our snorkels in while waiting for our classmates. The waves kept crashing into us, and when one particularly dense wave hit, the woman next to me, a jittery middle-aged Londoner, suddenly lost her grip on the rope. In her panic, she grabbed onto me and pulled me down into the water.

I immediately choked down a mouthful or two of ocean water. Her hands were all over me, tugging at my hair, mask, BCD, snorkel. My mask came off and I couldn't see. I gave her a light shove to free myself, then tried to get my mask back on. The waves kept pounding me, and I kept swallowing water. In a second between waves, I spotted the rope, too far away now for me to reach. At that moment, I decided I couldn't wait any longer and just put my regulator in, cleared some air out of my BCD, and dropped into the ocean.

With salt water in my mask, I couldn't see much. My heart rate was high, my breathing quick and shallow, and my first few breaths drew nothing. They'd taught us this in class, that you had to breathe slow and deep to pull oxygen out of the tank. I closed my eyes, let my body relax, and drew in the longest breath I could, then exhaled as slowly as possible. And again. And again. And finally, the air came, and I could hear my heartbeat slowing. As I sank down, one foot after another, the water around me grew still. Once I felt in control again, I cleared my mask and swam back to the rope. My first time out, and perhaps my most valuable real world dive experience.

In Grand Turk, I was reminded of the lesson twice. Once, Dave dropped down a few feet, then ascended again. I asked him after the dive what had happened, and he told me that he didn't feel completely right upon entering the water, so he popped back up to straighten his head out. Another time, our divemaster Mackie couldn't clear his ears, so he ascended almost as soon as he'd hit the ocean floor. It took an ascent all the way to the surface before his ears cleared. Experienced divers know it's better to straighten yourself out at the surface then to try and do it down at the ocean floor.

Almost immediately after dropping down to the reef at Finnbars, we encountered a sea turtle feeding. As we flocked around to watch it, I heard a metallic tapping. Our divemaster Mackie (a spitting image of Dusty Baker, but with a Haitian accent) was tapping his tank and pointing into another nook in the reef wall. I swam over to find another sea turtle, even larger than the first. Later we spotted a lobster hiding in a dark nook. On the next dive, at Aquarium, I found a half dozen or so barracuda waiting for me at the anchor line. The water in Grand Turk was a dazzling aquamarine, with glass-like visibility.

[All the sweet pics here are courtesy of Emanuel, one of our guides, who had a Nikon D70 in a really high-end housing with two flash arms. If you're serious about underwater dive photography, this seems to be the way to go, to put a serious camera inside an underwater housing. I've seen plenty of photographs from point-and-shoots and cheaper underwater film cameras, and it just doesn't seem worthwhile. The cost of high-end underwater photography gear will give your wallet the bends, though. Emanuel estimated he'd sunk some 6 to 7 grand in his setup, and with each different lens he'd have to buy a new dome. Dave and I purchased a CD of 25 of his pics to contribute to his effort to recoup the value of his camera equipment.]

That's me, checking out a sea turtle.

Heading back to the line for our decompression stop, Dave and I met up with a group of barracuda.

The next day, we dove twice in the morning. Our first dive was at a site called Tunnels for its two swim-throughs. It was my first time navigating through a tunnel, and it was amusing, like playing in an underwater playground.

Me, popping out of a tunnel.

Our final dive was at Coral Gardens. On the boat ride out, Emanuel told us to prepare to meet one of Grand Turk's local celebrities. As soon as we swam over the edge of the wall, he popped up to greet us. He turned out to be Alexander, a friendly grouper. We were able to pet him, hold our hands over his mouth, and cradle him like a puppy. Dave even pulled out his regulator to give him a smooch.

Greeting Alexander the grouper.

Dave pulled out his reg to give Alexander a smooch.

Up on top of the wall, another grouper named Pretty Boy had staked out his plot. Grouper are territorial by nature, and Pretty Boy had chased Alexander down off the shelf. We spent a good amount of time playing around with Alexander, and without realizing it, he pulled us further and further down the wall. Emanuel finally flashed the signal for us to ascend a bit. I looked at my computer and saw that we were down at 120 feet.

Before our decompression stop, Dave pointed at what appeared to be some dark fern arms poking out of the sand. I shrugged. He tried to think of how to explain what he meant, then went down to the sand and wrote EELS. I looked again and realized he was right. The short, dark strands poking out of the sand were tiny eels.

We wanted to do an afternoon dive, but because we were flying out at 11:15 the next morning, Mackie and Emanuel advised against it. We might have a bit too much nitrogen in the system to fly so soon. Instead, we took the boat out around the southern tip of Grand Turk to Gibbs Cay. Along the way, we stopped to free dive for conch. They scuttled across the floor of the sea, sometimes disguised by the seaweed clinging to their shells.

In a swimming pool, I don't ever have to clear my ears when diving down to ten feet or so. Here, diving down to 15 to 20 feet to grab conch felt like inflating my brain against my skull. The pressure in my ears and head were excruciating. The other issue was that I always had to shoot to the surface after grabbing a conch because I was out of air. We grabbed about six conch, just as much as we planned to eat, and headed on to Gibbs Cay.

Mackie showed us how to clean a conch. First you punch a hole through the shell, near the wider end of the shell, on the opposite side of the opening. Then you use a knife to prod the conch out the other end, so that you can grab it and pull it out. Outside its shell, the conch is an alien looking creature, like a clam or mussel, but with a more complex shape. The conch has a sharp tooth or claw that it uses to drag itself along the sea floor.

The part of the conch we ate was the white flesh, with the consistency of clam. We chopped that portion up and mixed it with diced tomatoes, habaneros, onions, and red peppers. We topped it off with fresh lime juice and a few drops of Tabasco and sealed it in a tupperware container to make conch ceviche.

While we waited for the lime juice to work its magic, we waded into the water with some small fish to feed the local stingrays. They'd already been circling just off the shore in anticipation. The touch of a ray's skin is a bit like liquid velvet. Dave and I weren't prepared for just how aggressive these rays were. We were flanked on all sides, and they hit us high and low. Rays are fairly docile creatures, but those eyes, mounted on top of its body and staring without emotion off to either side, are chilling. Seeing one come towards me was like being stalked by one of the tripods in War of the Worlds.

A few times, I nearly lost a finger. How do stingrays see where to bite when their mouths are underneath their bodies and their eyes are above? Maybe they don't, as I learned. While underwater feeding one, I felt a sharp pain in my back. Another stingray had tried to climb over my back to steal the fish, and on its way over had taken a bite out of my back. I hadn't realized that stingrays had teeth, but now I did. Dave and Emanuel saw my back and seemed startled. The overzealous ray had left a fist-sized bloody hickey on my back.

Later, after a few Presidente beers on the beach, our conch ceviche was ready. That was one tasty dish. While snacking, another visitor arrived, a lemon shark. We waded back in with our snorkels and masks for an underwater peek. For some reason, seeing sharks while diving or snorkeling never seems too dangerous, perhaps because they tend to keep their distance. Of course, the only really dangerous shark I've seen underwater is a hammerhead in the Galapagos. If I saw a tiger shark or a great white, I'd pee my wetsuit.

The only thing we missed out on were the humpback whales, who usually migrate through from late February through early April. They hadn't been spotted in the last few days, and since Dave and I were the only ones interested in going out, the dive shop felt it wasn't economically worthwhile to attempt a trip.

I'd like to try and dive at least once a year from here on out. It would save me the trouble of relearning all my skills each time out. For you divers looking for a good dive site, Grand Turk is recommended. Wear sunscreen on your back, though, so you don't end up looking like a cooked lobster, like me. Dave also suggested diving at Bonaire, Curacao, and Thailand, all of which I'll have to try at some point. For our next dive trip, I'm not sure of where to go, but probably not South Africa.

After seeing marine life up close and personal in the ocean, aquariums seem so dull.

Vitamins and poison pills

Here are those snazzy opening titles from Thank You For Smoking.

***

Are vitamins really good for you? Well, I guess we can wait to see what happens to Ray Kurzweil. Most of the harmful effects of vitamins seem to arise in studies with high dosages. Should be interesting to see Barry Bonds and Kurzweil in about twenty years.

***

Once solely the domain of Corporate America, poison pills have come to the NFL. The Seahawks inserted a clause in their offer to Vikings receiver Nate Burleson that the contract would become guaranteed if he played five games in the state of Minnesota. So of course the Vikings did not match the offer, not that they would have even without the clause. I'd be surprised if these types of poison pills were allowed to stand. If you're allowed to make up random poison pills, then the entire concept of matching offer sheets is negated. You can make up anything to prevent a team from matching your offer.

***

Ryanair turns a profit by discounting plane tickets heavily and making up for that with fees for most every other flight amenity. It's difficult to ascertain exactly how the airlines turns its profit just from reading the article--it could be primarily a result of a low cost structure rather than gimmicky fees--but you can't argue with their results in a tough industry.

***

The most popular movie in South Korean history is King and the Clown, a movie inevitably compared to Brokeback Mountain for depicting a gay male relationship.

***

I would be remiss if I didn't record here that this was the first year that March Madness was streamed online, for free. This was a well-designed first effort, complete with a Boss Button, which would transform the streaming video window into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet with one click.

***

The cost-of-living in NYC is so high, I don't feel quite as guilty as I otherwise would in using the local Barnes and Noble and Sephora as a personal library and medicine cabinet. I still do feel guilty, but on the other hand, there's something of the New York survivor spirit in the frugality of such tactics. I have no idea if those high-falutin moisturizers really reduce aging, shrink pores, and restore a youthful complexion, but $50 for an ounce is probably too high a price to find out with my hard-earned savings.

Yesterday I stopped in B&N to flip through John Dewan's The Fielding Bible, which I do have on order, though from Amazon.com. It attempts to bring defensive evaluations to another level by using data from Baseball Information Solutions.

Instead of just looking at statistics, Dewan and company used video of every batted ball the past several seasons and translated each into a vector composed of direction and velocity. Then they computed which of those balls should have have been turned into an out by a particular fielder. That provided each defensive player with an expected number of outs, and the main statistic in the book is how many plays each player made versus expectation, the plus/minus. The book includes some other statistics for each position to evaluate things such as fielding of bunts for corner infielders and throwing arm for outfielders (the only position not evaluated is catcher).

Some of the book's conclusions align with widely held assumptions. Ichiro is the best right fielder (though the trend is one of decline). Orlando Hudson is probably the best defensive 2B in the game. Manny Ramirez and Adam Dunn are atrocious in left. Torii Hunter is fantastic in CF.

Bill James contributes an entire chapter on Derek Jeter's defense, a much debated topic. After putting Jeter through several different defensive evaluation systems and watching video of Jeter's best and worst plays, James, a noted contrarian, concedes that Jeter's defense is indeed lousy (Adam Everett evaluates as the best shortstop three years running, and it isn't even close). Hey, Jeter counts among his ex-girlfriends Jessica Alba and Adriana Lima; please allow us this one grudging flaw in his game.

At any rate, it's a fun compilation of stats to pore over, the type of book to bring to a ballgame and use to incite heated debates between innings.

Sundance Part II

A few more pics in my 2006 Sundance set on Flickr.

***

Immediately upon entering any of the Park City venues, I quickly scan the theater and read the situation like a quarterback trying to read the Cover 2. Which seats are open, and which are filled? What size groups are moving down which aisles, and what section of the theater will they head to? Which rows, based on where the ushers are positioned and which seats are filled, are the Reserved rows (this is like reading the stance and position of the safety)? Which side of the theater is the microphone located, indicating where the directors and stars will take Q&A and which entrance they're likely to walk in?

***

The snow on the slopes this year was fabulous. It snowed at least every other day, and so the slopes were covered with fresh powder. Utah snow, for some metereological reason unknown to me, is the most perfect ski powder. Perhaps its the aridity, or the altitude (Park City's elevation falls just shy of 7,000 ft.), or some combination thereof. Regardless, the powder is fluffy and forgiving.

The other joy of snowboarding during Sundance is the emptiness of the resorts. The pumped up lodging rates during the festival drive most skiiers to other slopes for the week. On Tuesday, after Jason and Jamie had left and before my second half companions had arrived, I went boarding at Park City resort. For three straight runs, I didn't see a single other person, and I rode up the lift by myself each time, feeling a bit guilty each time I greeted the guy working the lift, as if I was the only reason he had to come to work that day to stand around in the cold.

***

After the screening of Thank You For Smoking, Jason mentioned that the cut during the Katie Holmes-Aaron Eckhart sex scene was awkward. I must have been dozing off, because I couldn't even remember what scene he was referring to.

Sharp eye, that Jason. During Q&A, director Jason Reitman apologized and said we'd missed a chunk of that scene because of an error during the reel change.

The story didn't die there, however. A rumor quickly spread that Tom Cruise had ordered the love scene to be cut so as to maintain his wife's modesty. Park City is a tiny town, and with the density of festival goers during Sundance, rumors spread like a virus in an airplane cabin. Reitman promised the scene would be back in the theatrical cut, so perhaps it was a ploy on the part of Reitman and his distributors, rather than Cruise, to get fest-goers to see the movie one more time.

Sundance Part II

A few more pics in my 2006 Sundance set on Flickr.

***

Immediately upon entering any of the Park City venues, I quickly scan the theater and read the situation like a quarterback trying to read the Cover 2. Which seats are open, and which are filled? What size groups are moving down which aisles, and what section of the theater will they head to? Which rows, based on where the ushers are positioned and which seats are filled, are the Reserved rows (this is like reading the stance and position of the safety)? Which side of the theater is the microphone located, indicating where the directors and stars will take Q&A and which entrance they're likely to walk in?

***

The snow on the slopes this year was fabulous. It snowed at least every other day, and so the slopes were covered with fresh powder. Utah snow, for some metereological reason unknown to me, is the most perfect ski powder. Perhaps its the aridity, or the altitude (Park City's elevation falls just shy of 7,000 ft.), or some combination thereof. Regardless, the powder is fluffy and forgiving.

The other joy of snowboarding during Sundance is the emptiness of the resorts. The pumped up lodging rates during the festival drive most skiiers to other slopes for the week. On Tuesday, after Jason and Jamie had left and before my second half companions had arrived, I went boarding at Park City resort. For three straight runs, I didn't see a single other person, and I rode up the lift by myself each time, feeling a bit guilty each time I greeted the guy working the lift, as if I was the only reason he had to come to work that day to stand around in the cold.

***

After the screening of Thank You For Smoking, Jason mentioned that the cut during the Katie Holmes-Aaron Eckhart sex scene was awkward. I must have been dozing off, because I couldn't even remember what scene he was referring to.

Sharp eye, that Jason. During Q&A, director Jason Reitman apologized and said we'd missed a chunk of that scene because of an error during the reel change.

The story didn't die there, however. A rumor quickly spread that Tom Cruise had ordered the love scene to be cut so as to maintain his wife's modesty. Park City is a tiny town, and with the density of festival goers during Sundance, rumors spread like a virus in an airplane cabin. Reitman promised the scene would be back in the theatrical cut, so perhaps it was a ploy on the part of Reitman and his distributors, rather than Cruise, to get fest-goers to see the movie one more time.

Sundance

Here are a few of my pics from Sundance, where I've been since Friday. This is my third straight pilgrimage to Sundance for my birthday (yes, sometime this weekend my odometer turned another notch, damn it all to hell), and navigating the fest now feels like secondhand nature.

I'll try to post a few more pics later this week, but that depends on whether or not I can clear some space off of the hard drive on my now ancient laptop. Everytime I try to open one of my RAW image files, my computer clicks and whirs and coughs like an old smoker.

Highest wattage celebrity about town: Jennifer Aniston. Jason saw her the first day, and I caught a glimpse of her yesterday (or was it the day before? it's all a sleepless blur) emerging from one of the celeb giveaway stores, and a nanosecond later she was consumed by a mob of people with cameras.

Biggest movie acquisition: Fox Searchlight bought Little Miss Sunshine for $10.5 million and 10% of gross. Biggest Sundance deal ever, and a sweet deal for the creators who had put up a hefty $9 million to get the movie made. Beyond that, no movie has emerged as the clearcut gem of the festival yet, though studios tend to judge the festival on pics of commercial appeal, and there does appear to have been a dearth of movies fitting that description. Most of the ones I saw which seemed destined for commercial success (Thank You For Smoking, Lucky Number Slevin, The Descent) already have U.S. distributors.

Most fun movie screening: Last night I attended a midnight screening of Neil Marshall's The Descent at The Egyptian Theatre. Last year I saw Oldboy, Three Extremes, and Wolf Creek at this Park City at Midnight series, so that gives you an idea of the type of fare showcased in this series. The movie is already out on Feast should come out later this year, caught up as it was in the Weinsteins spinoff from Miramax.

Favorite movie thus far: No single movie has been the revelation that, say, Pulp Fiction was back in the day, but probably the movie that contained some of the most enjoyable and enjoyable micro-moments was the latest by Michel Gondry, The Science of Sleep, starring Gael Garcia Bernal. Rumor has it that Warner Independent snatched the movie up just a half hour after the World Premiere. It won't have the mass commercial appeal of Gondry's previous movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (the movie is destined to split audiences: just look at its early ratings on IMDb), but Gondry still captures the child-like quality in all of us better than almost anyone, and his depiction of male insecurities about women is dead-on in a way that could only come from someone who has lived with them much of his life. The movie feels autobiographical in many ways, and Gondry revealed that all the dreams in the movie are ones he has had. Gael Garcia Bernal, besides seeming like a really pleasant and mischievous guy, proves himself to be a gifted comic actor, and he had to wrestle with French and English in addition to Spanish throughout the movie.

My favorite brush with celebrity: If you walk up and down Main St. enough, or if you attend enough movies, you can't help but satisfy run into someone famous. While waiting in line for the Weinsteins party really late one evening, just as the clock passed midnight and ushered in my birthday, Scarlett Johansson (accompanying Josh Hartnett) walked past me. Yes, my embarrassing crush on her, dating back to the days before she became a sex symbol, is common knowledge, and so my birthday was a good one, even though I could no longer feel my feet.

Pocket lint

Studies fail to find any link between diet and cancer. If people believe in the cancer-fighting benefits of tomato sauce and antioxidants and fiber and beta carotene, that peace of mind is not without value.

A helpful rundown of all the cases for the iPod nano.

James sent me this link to some crazy-ass breakdancers in the Redbull BC One competition. Too bad the video stream is so choppy.

Fascinating article about the constant influx of Chinese who immigrate to America through NYC and then ship out immediately to some of the more than 36,000 Chinese restaurants in the U.S. A few interesting factoids: there are more Chinese restaurants in the U.S. than McDonald's, Wendy's, and Burger Kings combined. The market price for getting oneself smuggled into the U.S. is upward of $60,000. Those Chinatown buses that offer $15 one-way rides from NYC to Boston or Washington originally sprang up to transport these workers, but now they carry quite a number of non-Chinese looking for cheap transportation.

Economic integration cited as one of the main reasons for improved test scores in Raleigh school district. This is one of the main reasons why some education reformers believe the answer to education woes is not to segregate all the best and/or wealthiest students in their own schools. It's a tough sell to the parents of those kids, though.

Downloadable subway maps for many major cities for your iPod. Great, except New York City's MTA and San Francisco's BART have filed cease-and-desist letters. Some graphic designer just needs to make their own versions for this guy. No reason to wait for them to license it to him. That's just ridiculous. The latest update is that he's making progress on his own version of the NY Subway Map.

How can you tell if a woman loves you?

If you’re Gael Garcia Bernal: She loves you.

If you’re not Gael Garcia Bernal, but you’re willing to sit through a “GGB” marathon and agree for 10 consecutive hours that he is indeed the most beautiful and talented man alive—and so down-to-earth, too!—and afterward agree that his portrayal of Che Guevara would have earned an Oscar nod were it not for the implicit politics, agree that taking Spanish classes is a great idea, or salsa, or tango, whatever, agree, agree, agree, and that night lying in bed after sex that ends with her screaming, “Si! Si!” wonder aloud, “But you’re happy with me, right?”: She loves you, man—no one can compete with that Latin bastard. Forget about it.

Customized colors for your iPod Nano, at a premium of $85

So can I get another bag of pretzels?

Tha JetBlue story is a fascinating one because the passengers on board were watching live coverage of their ordeal on the DirecTV feed in their seat-back televisions. It was almost the opposite of the situation in New Orleans, where the trapped citizens were in the dark as to what was happening, even as reporters roamed among them, piping their story out to the rest of the world.

In general, I think it's best for the pilot to share as much information as possible to explain turbulence, or delays, or problems of any sort. Keeping people in the dark is one of the oldest tools in the storyteller's handbook for how to keep them in suspense, but that's not what you want with a plane full of jumpy, bug-eyed passengers.

However, television news coverage is often guilty of sensationalizing late-breaking stories, and from what I've read, passengers were watching uninformed television commentators presenting all sorts of horrific scenarios, none of which were the likely outcome in what aviation experts have described as a standard emergency landing.

So does this help or hurt JetBlue business? In cases like these, it seems as if the airplane model usually takes the brunt of the blame. In this case it's the Airbus A320. Reporters have quickly combed government records and found that 7 Airbus A320's have had landing gear problems (though I have not yet read what the denominator in that equation should be, or how the resulting percentage would compare to that of other aircrafts; is 7 good or bad? Who knows). But I suspect that the impact to the airline affected, or the airplane manufacturer, is brief and minimal.

Either people are really logical and able to do the math to realize that air travel is really safe, or they fly because comparable alternatives are lacking, or some combination of the above. I have certain aircraft types I prefer over others because of the seating arrangement and leg room, but it's rare when I have two flights of comparable price that allow me to choose a specific type of plane.

On a somewhat related note, I'm curious about the answer to the disappearance of Jodie Foster's daughter in Flightplan (7-minute sneak peek at the official site). It's a trailer with an intriguing hook. Everyone I've talked to reacts with surprise when I mention my curiosity, and I suppose they're right in anticipating a mundane explanation. I've never heard of the director, either, and his resume doesn't inspire confidence.

The main problem, though, is that the moviegoing public is well-versed in Hollywood thriller formulas. It's not easy to surprise anyone if you stick to the playbook. The trailer gives away enough that it's highly likely that Foster's daughter was on the flight, that someone snatched her daughter for some reason related to her participation in the design of the airplane (that info will certainly aid her in her search), and that she is reunited with her daughter by movie's end.

Of course, Hitchcock often gave away the gig early in the movie, as in Dial M for Murder, yet still managed to craft an engrossing movie. It's not always what you tell, but how you tell it. I enjoy watching Jodie Foster and Peter Saarsgard on screen, and probably will sometime this weekend.

Washed away

A special report from the Times-Picayune titled "Washing away" and published in June of 2002 foresaw New Orleans' hurricane disaster with tragic accuracy. Some of the articles from the five-part series:

• IN HARM'S WAY: Levees, our best protection from flooding, may turn against us.
• THE BIG ONE: A major hurricane could decimate the region, but flooding from even a moderate storm could kill thousands. It's just a matter of time.
• LEFT BEHIND: Once it’s certain a major storm is about to hit, evacuation offers the best chance for survival. But for those who wait, getting out will become nearly impossible as the few routes out of town grow hopelessly clogged. And 100,000 people without transportation will be especially threatened.
• LAST LINE OF DEFENSE (.jpg graphic): Army Corps of Engineers officials say hurricane levees in the New Orleans area will protect residents from a Category 3 hurricane moving rapidly over the area. But computer models indicate even weaker storms could find chinks in that armor.

The report predicted that citizens would have to be sheltered in the Superdome, that aid workers would struggle to reach survivors, and so much more of what happened this past week. Because of that, it was stunning and horrifying to see the disaster unfold in Louisiana, especially because meteorologists and government officials knew Katrina was on its way. That even advance warning was not enough to save thousands of people is a tragedy of massive proportions.

It was heartbreaking to see footage of citizens of New Orleans stranded and awaiting help when those same citizens had no way to look back out on the world. They were cut off from the rest of the world with no idea when aid would arrive or what the rest of the world was thinking. We were staring in at them through the glass of the television as if staring into a snow globe that had been shaken up.

I was just in New Orleans a few years ago for a bachelor party, and to think that the entire city is just destroyed now is impossible to fathom, even with all the images and video. Will New Orleans be rebuilt where it once stood? That area has always been below sea level, in a geographic bowl, and many of the structures there are likely ruined beyond repair by sitting in floodwaters for days. Even if you could rebuild there in a timely fashion once everything had been cleared out, wouldn't it make sense to relocate New Orleans out of the bowl? Why rebuild on a site in which the forces of nature (gravity, e.g.) invite water? The city can rise up from the disaster of Katrina, both figuratively and literally, whether that means relocating to higher ground or simply building the city up a level as parts of Chicago and Seattle were after huge fires.

Derek visited this weekend, and as always when hosting out-of-towners, I see New York City through new eyes, their eyes. One thing I was conscious of was how badly New York trash smelled in the summer. I'd gotten used to it over the long summer, but Derek made me conscious of it again. If New York City could be rebuilt, would it be built with alleys like Chicago so trash could be stored in dumpsters, containing the odors and keeping the unsightly piles of trash off of the sidewalks? Would that justify the loss in rentable living space? We weren't sure when alleys were built in Chicago, but perhaps after the Chicago Fire, city planners decided not only to upgrade from wood to brick to prevent future fires, but also to install alleys for parking garages and dumpsters and throughput. New Orleans can take this opportunity to not just rebuild and repair but to redo.

As an aside, and an unimportant one when the focus should be on rescuing the survivors, this disaster exposed problems with our nation's emergency response. Some blame Bush; it doesn't help that he just came off an extended vacation, one that earned him a good tan but doesn't seem to have aided his crisis management skills. When he said to Diane Sawyer on ABC that no one could have foreseen the breach of the levees, he hung himself with his own ignorance. Not all the blame lies with him, of course, but this is one black mark that will play for the rest of his term, a constant reminder of the failure of the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA, and many others. After reading the The 9/11 Commission Report and comparing it with earlier snap judgments and analyses of that tragedy, I'll wait for the water to clear to pass judgment on all involved. Snap reactions are bound to reveal more about the biases of those making the judgments than the truth.

Just as people have difficulty handling extremely low probability, high impact events, perhaps institutions do also. Live in New Orleans long enough without being hit by the big one, and the impetus to move declines. If you're in office, constantly funding systems to defend against a low probability event like a massive hurricane may feel like throwing money away, especially if you don't expect it to hit on your term (awful as that line of thinking may be). Perhaps the only ones who do think rationally about such an event are insurance companies. They did the math and did not offer flood insurance in New Orleans.

If you've already donated through the Red Cross, and almost everyone I know has, donate again! One of the blessings of the Internet has been how easy it has become to donate to charity with only a few clicks. I hope that Visa and Mastercard are foregoing their usual fees on these credit card donation transactions.

Knockoffs

The last time I was in Beijing, in 1994, buying knockoff goods was still felt like a dirty business. Silk Alley was a series of outdoor tents, and buying pirated CDs involved following merchants into back alleys or peering at goods in concealed drawers. Today, selling knockoffs is legitimate business, sold in plain view with a legitimacy that's almost brazen. On my return visit to Silk Alley, I barely recognized it. What once was a ramshackle tract of ragged tents is now a five or six story department store. The tents remain, but they're housed in an air conditioned building with escalators and a food court. Policeman roam the halls there, but only to provide security, not to arrest any sellers.

The range of knockoff goods there was amazing. Designer purses and wallets, from Louis Vuitton to Coach to Gucci to Prada. Mont Blanc pens. Oakley and Armani sunglasses. Sneakers from Nike to Adidas to everything in between (Mike and I ran across one unfortunately named brand of shoes - Dike; I don't think they were Nike knockoffs). Titleist and Callaway drivers and irons. Designer clothes from Ralph Lauren slacks to Zegna shirts to North Face jackets. Fake Rolexes, of course. I was shocked that some booths even sold knockoff iPods and Sony PSPs, with packaging that resembled the real thing.

It used to be that knockoff goods in China didn't dare to claim authenticity. They were like cover bands, announcing their imitation as a form of flattery. Instead of Polo, a knockoff's brand would be named Bolo, the horse rider in the stitched logo holding an unopened umbrella instead of a polo stick. Instead of Prada, you could purchase a Pradu. That's no longer the case. These knockoffs not only resemble the real thing, they use the actual brand names. Christina explained to me that her Balenciaga knockoff handbag had several features commonly used to identify the real McCoy, but I had never heard of Balenciaga, nor could I identify one if a woman smacked me in the face with one.

The quality of the knockoffs varied. The few athletic shoes I tried on felt like cardboard on my feet, despite their cosmetic resemblance to the real thing. The Oakley sunglasses knockoffs didn't use the same high quality frame material. The clothing quality was decent. The purses must have passed my sister and her friends' quality inspection, though, because they snapped up several. At $5 to $15 for a designer leather purse, I suppose one need not set the quality bar too high. Most everything seemed to sell for about a tenth to a quarter of what the real thing would cost, and sometimes less.

I'm not much of a shopper when I travel, so I was at best an amused observer. One good that did catch my interest, though, was one that didn't exist during my last visit to China in 1994: DVDs.

A friend of mine who moved to China told me that the first time he tried to purchase some DVDs a year or two ago, he was told to go to a particular street and wait for someone to solicit him. He went to that street and stood around for a long time, walking around, trying to look like an interested customer. He felt like a criminal, sulking about, but eventually someone approached him and led him to the backroom of a storefront to peruse the goods. Quite a few of the DVDs he purchased that day ended up being duds.

Nowadays, pirated DVDs, like other knockoffs in China, are sold in actual stores, with return policies, cash registers, and receipts. The first time I strolled into one and encountered shelf after shelf of product was a real eye-opener. The store clerk offered to play any DVDs I was interested in on a DVD and TV in the store, before I walked out with it. It's possible to find fairly high quality bootlegs of current movies. If it's shot in a movie theater, it's an empty one, without audience noise and the silhouette of someone walking to the bathroom crossing the screen. The DVD will come with an actual menu, though it may consist of nothing but a handful of chapter stops and a trailer ripped off of the Internet.

It's the DVDs of movies already out on DVD somewhere in the world that are the real eye-openers, though. These pirated copies are actual pressed copies of the real McCoy, so you get everything: special features, menus, subtitles and alternate audio tracks, anamorphic widescreen, the works. I saw dozens of Criterion Collection DVDs, obscure foreign titles, and complete seasons of nearly every television show from the United States in gigantic box set packaging.

From Beijing to Xian to Guangzhou to Shanghai, DVD prices ranged from $0.40 each to $1.25 each. China puts a cap on how many foreign (primarily American) movies can be shown on the big screen in China. This means most people in China, locals and expats alike, consume the bulk of American movies through these pirated DVDs. At those prices, however, I'm not sure many of those people would see the movies in theaters even if they did screen. Perhaps someday the Chinese government will take intellectual property rights seriously, but for now it's a free-for-all. The whole situation reminded me of the scene from The Untouchables, when Malone tells Ness that everyone knows where the bootleggers are located, but no one will do anything about it.

[As a humorous aside, the copy on the pirated DVD packaging is always a bizarre mess of English. It seems almost purposefully absurd, as no digital translation engine could come up with some of the odd copy. The tagline for Mr. and Mrs. Smith?

The degree of this quarter must the fire explode the most crazy and wild most intense emotion.

Yep, that sounds like Brad and Angelina alright. The back of the box read:

Turn over to clap from the rare area ram of old make. The cloth pull virtuous- skin especially and Anne Smith's husband and wife from whom the - ZHU LI4 play are a rightness of husband and wife who make person envy in the outsider eyes, but two peopleEach from effect in a secret organization, and concealed the oneself's body of the" occupation cutthroat" each other. Until assassinate the mission same alike once, both the husband and wife the result of the dark isNobody wins-----"]

Being in China, you are both figuratively and literally closer to the true cost of goods sold (COGS) of so many goods consumed in the U.S. As finished goods move from the factory line to the designer store on Fifth Ave. in NYC, their prices swell. A markup for shipping. Another one for marketing and advertising, including fees paid to the superstar athlete or model who wears it in print and on television. Another markup for general brand prestige, and depending on the product, for intellectual property rights. And of course, a markup to provide the profit margin. An $8 pair of sneakers in Guangzhou turns into a $125 supermodel in a U.S. Niketown. But when goods move from the factory line straight to a stall on the streets of China, those steps are skipped. The $8 pair of Lebron James sneakers starts at $16 at Silk Alley, to be negotiated down from there.

Those Lebron shoes are marketed on massive billboards throughout China, but ironically, the demand fueled by Nike's marketing campaigns drives most people to purchase the pirated rather than legitimate versions of the sneakers, because that's all they can afford. The middle class in China is growing, but for most Chinese, premium goods remain too expensive. The vast pirated goods market is the only way they can own a reasonable facsimile.

The same types of factories that churn out the products we pay hundreds of dollars for in the U.S. can easily be copied and charged with churning out pirated versions. The excess pool of cheap labor in China is massive. Mix all that in with a culture that's grown comfortable with piracy and it's difficult to imagine things changing anytime soon. When someone there asks you if something you own is real or fake, it's not immediately clear that one answer is better than the other. Often a high-quality fake is taken as the smarter buy. It's not going to be an easy gig selling media products or software at any sort of profit in the Chinese market, no matter how large it is, until authorities crack down on piracy.

But perhaps you're on vacation and would prefer to leave the larger issues of piracy aside so that you can snag some gifts for friends and family back home. Here's how to bargain for goods in China once you've located something you want:

1. Your expressed enthusiasm for the product should be inverse to the vendor's. The more interested they are in making the sale, the less interested you should appear in buying the product, and vice versa. Your visible interest in the product should never exceed a moderate enthusiasm, never fall below complete and utter indifference.
2. Have the vendor quote a price first (I prefer this to starting the negotiations with a lowball bid). When they do, express shock and outrage at the audacity of the seller for even suggesting such an outrageous price. Ask them for the real lowest price they can offer. Then come back with a counteroffer that brackets your target price halfway in between. If you want to pay 20 and are offered 30, counter-propose 10.
3. If the seller balks, cite a better offer from another vendor, whether or not such an offer truly exists. The fact is that most items you want will be available from a dozen other sellers, sometimes as close as two tents over if you're in Silk Alley. Almost everything is a commodity, leaving you in a strong negotiating position.
4. Cite quality issues and point out that the goods are pirated, not the real thing. Many sellers will insist that the goods are real, but don't let them think for a moment that you're under that misconception.
5. To bridge the gap to your final price target, if all your haggling isn't working, just walk away. Most times the seller will chase you down and acquiesce with a lot of good-natured grumbling about how you're killing him.
6. If you don't get your target price, don't necessarily walk away in a huff. If you don't live in China and the product is something you want and can't get back home, cough up a few extra bucks. There's more to vacation than squeezing every last drop of blood from a local vendor.

Of course, not everyone is comfortable bargaining for goods, and some consider it callous and greedy to dicker (literally) over nickels and dimes on goods that are already priced far below U.S. prices. Personally, I find negotiating to be such a part of the market culture there that's it's almost a standard communications protocol. A bit of give and take, as long as it's good-natured in spirit, seems to leave both sides thinking they've ended up with more money in their pocket than they should, a happy outcome in a zero-sum game.

Location is everything?

My apartment is the size of Bill's kitchen. I state it that way because it's a compliment to my apartment. Looking out his window, I see, no joke, a hummingbird sucking nectar from a flower on one of the bushes, bathed in the golden glow of sunrise. It's as if I died and woke up in heaven, or perhaps my friends sedated me yesterday and put me into a rehab clinic in Southern California. Any minute now a fat nurse will be in to give me an enema.

This is the first clean air I've breathed since...I can't even remember anymore. I'm also reminded that I really miss DirecTV.

Okay, off to the U.S. mecca of golf.

Crash

For some reason, I can't board a plane without imagining how I'd react if it experienced some sort of mechanical failure and crashed into the earth, killing everyone on board, most importantly myself.

Even before boarding, I review my most recent communications, cell phone calls and e-mail messages, for their suitability in newspaper articles or eulogies.

Perhaps something to put the issues of life in perspective.

"'Off to the mother country. I was too cheap to spring for my immunizations...let's hope I don't catch Hep-B! Love, Euge,'" my sister would read from a printout of an e-mail. "What he didn't know was that just a short while later, Hep B would be the least of his worries when flight 82 passed over the Bering Strait and suddenly dropped into a death spiral."

Or the amusing and trivial anecdote, something to personalize me to strangers, or to remind close ones of my life's concerns. "'oh btw, do you have that girl's phone number in beijing? e-mail it to me at my gmail acct. let's hope she remembers me. put in a good word for me if you get the chance. alright, later dude,'" one of my buddies would paraphrase from a brief chat session held the day of my fateful flight. "Well, I sent him that phone number, and it's waiting for you buddy, wherever you are now."

How about my last day's activities? How would they play out in, let's say, a sequel to Gus Van Sant's sober trilogy of death that includes Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days? Would my final interactions reflect well on me?

"He always ask for his shirt folded, no starch," the plump, middle-aged Chinese woman who does my dry cleaning would recall, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. "But this time I forget and starch his shirt. He pat me on the shoulder and say, 'It's okay, Rainbow, a bit of starch every now and then helps to restore one's resolve.' I not know what he mean. But he a kind man."

I imagine in vivid detail how I'd react in my last moments.

While bent over in the crash landing tuck, I might turn my head and gaze upon the overweight, balding businessman in the seat next to me. Then I'd remove the oxygen mask from my face to reveal an expression of preternatural calm and offer him my palm. He'd grasp it, and I'd give his hand a reassuring squeeze, as if to say, "I've been through this dozens of times in my head...just follow my lead."

Random observations from my trip to China

• At the security checkpoint at SFO on my way to Beijing, an airline official encourated people to take off their shoes by shouting over and over, "$100 shoes, $5 million plane. You make the call, people." What does that even mean?
• On my flight to Beijing, the man seated next to me complained that his tray table wasn't perfectly level. He obviously doesn't fly much. The flight attendant looked at him with an exasperated grimace. "I don't know what I can do about that."
• United Airlines' first class is nothing special. I tried to flip my miles to one of the Asian carriers like Cathay Pacific, to no avail. The name "first class" itself is a bad one because it's accurate. Only people in first class are treated like first class citizens even though you'd think that in this day and age everyone who flies would be treated that way. The airlines should have named coach "first class" and first class "luxury class" or something, but the truth is that the economics of the airline industry are such that people in coach fly like second or third class citizens, human sardines in a Boeing tin can.
• If I ever run for Premier of China, I'm running on a platform of "toilet paper in every bathroom." One of the things you quickly realize in China is that toilet paper in public places is a luxury; I visited exactly two restaurants that offered it in bathrooms. If you're fortunate, you're warned of the nationwide BYOTP (bring your own toilet paper) policy before the first time you've finished your business while squatting over a hole in the ground. At least once a day I experienced a cold sweat when some quick mental calculus revealed that a few factors could converge in an imminent and horrific perfect storm: no kleenex in my inventory, no nearby store to purchase any, and a possible need to visit a public toilet. There are never any towels in the bathrooms, either, so after you wash your hands you end up looking around like a fool holding your wet hands out in front of you as if they were alien appendages you suddenly discovered at the ends of your arms.
• The traffic in China feels chaotic, but it's much safer than you'd expect, as I'd read and written about a while back here. Road signs, street lights, painted lines - all our more suggestions than hard and fast rules. Every inch of the road belongs to the first one to occupy it. This is second generations traffic calming in its purest form. Its effectiveness arises from forcing all users of the road to make eye contact, read body language, and interact with each other on a constant basis rather than blindly obeying dumb street signs and signals. It seems to work. Early on in my visit, every time I rode in a cab I thought the driver would hit and kill a cyclist or pedestrian. This happened at least three times every ride. Yet during two weeks of travel through some of the busiest streets in China, I only saw a handful of accidents. Four or five times a day in China, I'd play a real world version of Chinese Frogger while trying to cross the street, and by the end of the trip I'd obtained the native boldness that allows one to walk into the path of an oncoming cab with utter faith that it will halt. Imagine Neo at the end of the first Matrix movie, holding up his hand and freezing bullets in their paths with a zen-like calm: "No."
• China is still much more of a cash economy than I though it would be. I only brought some $200 U.S. over in the hopes of covering most expenditures with my credit card. That didn't work out well for me until I reached Shanghai, where credit cards are more widely accepted. The rest of China remains wary of debt. In Beijing, where many ATMs rejected my card, I had to repeatedly hit Eric and Christina up for cash. Christina had to make four withdrawals from the ATM in one visit just to collect enough cash for her rent payment.
• Yes, it was very hot in parts of China, and yes, I'm now going to complain about it. Are humans the only creatures who employ their advanced communication skills 25% of the time to discuss the weather? Do bees or whales or dolphins do this? Have scientists analyzed animal communication from this perspective? I wouldn't be shocked if sometimes when pigs are grunting they're actually saying, "This summer heat is killing me. I could just die in this sty. I'm sweating like a pig." Actually, I'm fortunate in that the weather in both Beijing and Xi'an was, for the most part, comfortable. My first step out of the airport in Guanzhou, though, was like walking into one of the inner circles of hell. In Shanghai, I had to ride in from the airport in quite possibly one of the oldest cabs in the entire country, and its air conditioning couldn't have possibly been worse unless you stuck a blow dryer in my pants and turned it on high. I begged the cab driver to turn his A/C on higher, but he sheepishly admitted that it was already at its peak setting. He then went on to complain to me about how hot he was and how tired he was of driving a broken down old cab all these years. "Wo lei shi le!" he lamented, over and over ("I'm exhausted!"). This is like hearing a torturer complain about a callus on his hands while he flogs you.
• While we're on the topic of scorching heat and stifling humidity of summer, this trip convinced me that cotton is nearly useless in such climates. For all the advances in fabric and fashion, it's surprising that no one has come up with a fabric that combines the feel and look of cotton with the wicking quality of technical fabrics Dri-fit. I want summer clothing that makes me feel as comfortable as I do in my backpacking gear from Patagonia but that looks like something you'd see in Esquire. Cotton is good for towels and for the cooler climes of spring and fall. In China, wearing cotton outside in the summer is like wrapping yourself in one of those steaming hot towels they give you on international flights to wipe your face.
• It's only when I travel that I realize how long it actually takes to read a book. 13 hour plane flights will do that. On average I read about 40 to 60 pages an hour depending the number of words per page. My book selection on the flight out was The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron. I have a fondness for white collar crime nonfiction, and this paperback was much lighter than Kurt Eichenwald's hardcover Conspiracy of Fools, on the same topic.
• The Chinese believe strongly that luck, both good and bad, can travel through phonetic similarities. 8 is a lucky number because the Chinese weird for 8 (ba) sounds like the Chinese word for 100 (bai), a term that conveys wealth. Our Xi'an tour guide James explained this to some of the people on our bus on the way in from the airport. At that very moment, I looked up and saw a giant billboard advertising the phone number 8888-8888 on behalf of some travel agency. Many company phone numbers in China end in 8888. Meanwhile 4 (si, fourth tone) is an unlucky number because sounds like the die (si, third tone). Eric and Christina's apartment did not contain any floors with the number 4. No fourth floor, no fourteenth floor.
• Chinese people love them their massages. I had four massages while in China, all an hour long. The most expensive of those cost $15, meaning massage is affordable to most people in the growing middle class there. I'm not sure I'll ever be fully comfortable receiving a massage, though. Unless you're a masseuse to a famous athlete like Lance Armstrong (so that your massage is actually contributing to his performance on the bike) or a masseuse to a supermodel (something you'd do for free), I can't imagine that the work is that enjoyable. Of course, I'm no masseuse so I may very well be wrong. On occasion, the massages were just plain painful. At one point I think one masseuse had her full body weight pressing down on her elbow, digging into my spine. My eyes were watering from the agony. For the most part, though, the massages were a perfect nightcap, and my economic valuation of massages may be so skewed that I'll never pay for a massage in the U.S. again.
• Another job I'd like to apply for in China is that of country-wide English copy-editor. As part of my duties, I'd wander the country with a giant red marker and mark my corrections on public signs and documents (like this one). But I'd be judicious. Some of the Chinese to English translations have a certain haiku-like elegance and wit.

Chinese taxi drivers: the good, the bad, the ugly

About half the cab drivers I encountered in China were professional. They recognized the destination took me straight there. The other half were either incompetent, crooked, or rude, or some combination of the three.

Some would pretend to know where I wanted to go, but then would drive around in circles, lost. Several times I had to sit in the cab waiting while the driver went out to ask other drivers or pedestrians for directions. Is this a function of too many new cab drivers or too rapid an urban growth? I quickly learned to always ask the driver if they knew where a destination was before I got into the cab. If they didn't know, I'd just move on to the next driver. You wouldn't want a resident performing an operation on you, and I had no interest in having cabbies learn the city on my dime.

Locals always advise that non-Chinese speakers or tourists get their destination and address written down in Chinese on a piece of paper to hand to cab drivers, but that's often not enough. Instead, you need to get the cross streets written down, and even then, it's still worth confirming that the driver knows where the destination is before hopping in.

Many cab drivers were just rude, complaining and grumbling the entire ride about one thing or another. In Shanghai, soon after I arrived, I took a cab to meet Tony at a Starbucks. Since I didn' t know the city at all, I didn't walk. As soon as the cab driver heard where I was going he sighed and started muttering under his breath about what an idiot I was for taking a cab ride through rush hour traffic when I could walk that same distance in half the time. I asked him how I should walk there, but he refused to answer me. He grumbled the whole way, sighing with audible exaggeration every few seconds.

In Beijing, Joannie, Mike, and I hopped in a cab and gave him the address of Mei's uncle's house. Joannie mentioned that he could also follow the cab ahead of us because Mei was riding in it and knew the route. The cab driver recoiled in indignation.

"You want me to follow that driver! Why? I know where that address is. What are you thinking? Follow that driver. He doesn't even know where he's going. I've driven a cab in this city for 20 years. Unbelievable. Some people." He muttered like this the entire ride. I was so surprised at his behavior that I just had to laugh, but Mike was not pleased. Joannie tried to calm him down but he was on a roll, reveling in this perceived slight.

In Shanghai, Su and I hired a car and driver for a day to take us to Hangzhou. He made more off us that one day than a nanny would make in a month and a half. The trip started fine. The driver told picked us up in a Mitsubishi SUV with industrial strength air conditioning and told us that he was a specialist in Hangzhou, a sort of Hamptoms for the masses of Shanghai. When we got to Xihu (West Lake), though, he didn't know where to find Louweilou, one of the most popular restaurants on the lake. Su and I walked all the way to the other side of the lake to Leifeng Pagoda, perhaps the most visible landmark on the lake. We called the driver to pick us up, but he didn't know where that was. After Su tried to give him directions for several minutes, the driver asked us to walk all the way back across the lake to find him instead. It was like calling for a Town Car to take you to the airport only to have the driver ask you to walk over to his office to catch a ride. He finally found us after nearly half an hour, but when we got back in the car he complained that it would have been easier had we just gone and found him. Unbelievable. I was going to say that I might as well hop in the front seat and drive while Su gave him a foot massage, but I wasn't sure my sarcasm would survive the translation into Chinese.

When we neared Su's apartment, he started acting like a pain in the ass, perhaps just to get under Su's skin. Every time she gave him a direction (turn left at the next light, or make the third right), he'd repeat it back to her skeptically, as if she didn't know how to get back to her own apartment. When we finally arrived, we paid him the agreed upon fare, but as we climbed out of the car he asked for a 50RMB tip. I'm surprised I didn't have to hold her back from delivering a roundhouse to his face.

I only got taken for a ride once in China. On our last night in Xi'an, we had to split into three cabs to go from the Tang Dynasty park to the Muslim Quarters. Mei and her cousin Summer took one cab each with a group of non-Chinese speakers in each, and Joannie, Mike, and I took the other cab. Summer told our driver where to take us, but I didn't pay attention to how to say it in Chinese, nor did I ask Summer or Mei how much the ride should cost.

Our driver recognized as out-of-towners, and soon we were on an extended tour of Xi'an. Since the heart of the city is enclosed by a rectangular city wall, we should have only crossed one gate into the city. Instead, we passed in and out of the city, and it was soon apparent what was happening. Unfortunately, if we got out, we didn't know how to tell the next driver where to go. So we rode around, fuming, shouting at the driver who kept insisting he was taking us straight to our destination. What should have been a 10 minute 15 yuan ride turned into a 40 minute 32 yuan ride. Then the driver dumped us on a sidewalk, waved his hands at the sidewalk and said we were where we wanted to be, and drove off. We had no idea where we were, and we had no cell phone to call Mei on.

I was livid and wanted to track down the driver and go Tony Jaa on him, but more importantly, we wanted to find our friends. Fate intervened when our of the blue, Mike spotted our local tour guide James, just walking down the street with his manager. In a city of some 8 million people, we'd run into him by accident. James is one of the sweetest people we met in all of China, and his beaming smile was an oasis in what now seemed like a sea of unscrupulous cab drivers.

James called Mei and walked us over to them, saving what could have been a disastrous last evening in Xi'an, which otherwise was the most charming of the cities we visited in China. Taxis are still a real bargain in China compared to cabs in other parts of the world, especially New York, but I hope that half of them learn some manners in time for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing and get themselves some GPS devices.

I picture Ron Artest trying to hop a cab to the basketball stadium for a game and getting taken for a ride by a rude cab driver who doesn't know who he is. Okay, so the chances of David Stern selecting Ron Artest for the Olympic basketball team are nil. I can dream, though, and in this dream, that bastard from Xi'an who took us for a ride decides to take Artest for a ride. After a few loops through Beijing, when Artest realizes what's going on, he reaches into the front seat and starts throttling the cabbie.

First impressions of Shanghai

I felt good about my recovery from jet lag yesterday because I managed to stay up all day, from about 8am to 10pm, despite only four hours of sleep. Still, I wasn't completely symptom free. For some reason I thought it was Wednesday and thus ventured all the way up to 138th and Riverside for a kickball game that actually takes place tonight, a trip that wasted an hour and a half of my day.

I awoke at 4am this morning and have been staring into the darkness ever since. Since I fly out to Seattle tomorrow for my annual golf trip to Bandon Dunes, I have another few hours of time shifting left to plant myself in the Pacific time zone. More than a few times during the last two weeks I've felt like Bill Murray in Lost in Translation.

New York, all five boroughs put together, feels tranquil and quaint compared to Shanghai. That's how sprawling and dense and manic a city China's economic hub feels. Shanghai contains more buildings over 25 stories high than any other city in the world, and depending on who you ask, anywhere from a fifth to a fourth of all the world's roof mounted cranes call Shanghai home.

One of the first stops during my visit there was the Shanghai Urban Planning Museum. On the third floor there is a massive scale model of the city as city planners foresee it looking in 2020. It's stunning in its size and density. My first night in Shanghai, I couldn't see water or trees or anything beyond the horizon in any direction from my 29th floor hotel room. High rises and office buildings and skyscrapers stretched out seemingly to the ends of the earth. The model at the urban planning museum confirmed that my suspicions weren't too far from the truth.

That Shanghai even has an urban planning museum speaks to its developmental aspirations. It's as close to urban planning pornography as I've ever seen. On every floor, massive scale models of some of its most famous sites (like the new Pudong airport; every city in China seemed to have a new airport of steel and glass) share space with 3-D CGI animations flying around, over, and through future constructions, all set to throbbing techno music. Next to the 2020 scale model of Shanghai is a display called Windows on the World, depicting famous landmarks from around the globe, like the Eiffel Tower and NY City skyline; the juxtaposition marks the height of the city's ambitions. A more literal marker is the work-in-progress that is the Shanghai World Financial Center, intended to be the world's tallest building when completed. On just one day-trip, Su took me past the world's first high-speed mag-lev train, up the world's tallest hotel, over the world's longest steel-arch bridge, and under the world's largest Ferris wheel.

Few cities of have grown faster than Shanghai in the past fifteen years, but the extent of the progress is dubious. The skyline is an incoherent blend of gaudy structures, each one more eccentric than the next in an attempt to distinguish itself. Many of them are simply hideous by the aesthetic standards of this era or the next. And as all these high rises and skyscrapers have moved in, the city's low-income citizens and more historic architecture have been moved out and razed, respectively. From the 87th floor of the Jin Mao Tower, every low-lying plot of land in Shanghai looked to be marked for bulldozing. It will soon be so crowded you won't be able to see the trees from the forest; every skyscraper will be flanked by several other monstrosities of equal height.

No building represents the worst of Shanghai more than the Oriental Pearl Tower (images), the most prominent structure on the Pudong side of Shanghai's skyline. Depending on your vantage point, it looks like anything from a sci-fi shishkabob, a spaceship, or the world's largest phallic symbol (Su pointed out that from one spot on the Bund, the Pearl Tower rises up from between two giant globes like...well, look for yourself). Even the few attempts at preserving the city's historic architecture can't dilute the city's epidemic of modernization. Xin Tian Di, a historic redevelopment project that reconstructed some of Shanghai's historic Shikumen tenements, is primarily a collection of fusion restaurants, clubs, and retail restaurants. It's less a preservation than a repurposing of the architecture of the past. Both Xin Tian Di and Yu Yuan (the Yu Gardens), two of the areas in Shanghai that still hint at the city's past, have their own Starbucks.

It's unclear how long this pace of development can last. When the real estate bubble bursts, the crash is sure to be spectacular. Roof cranes all over the city will come to a halt, and the unfinished frames of dozens of skysrapers will litter the city like the fossilized skeletons from some unrealized future.

It's not all bad. The flip side of all this foreign investment and real estate development is a vibrant economic hum. Just after arriving in Shanghai one afternoon, I attended a networking event at Barbarossa with Tony, an old classmate of mine. He's one of the tens of thousands of those who've moved to Shanghai in the hopes of carving out a personal fortune on the back of the macro growth trends there. I met dozens of people at the event, each of whom presented me with a business card and their two-minute fortune-seeking thesis. I felt like I was at a job fair, but the difference is that even the people who didn't have any idea how they'd capitalize on the growth in Shanghai beamed with genuine optimism. Shanghai has replaced Hong Kong as the sexy girl China employs to greet its guests at the door.

A city with a population of 18 million people shouldn't feel small, but the next night I ran into many of the same expats at Bar Rouge, one of the epicenters of the global clubbing scene right now. Nearly everyone I asked about what to see in Shanghai told me this was the club du jour. Su and I planned to head there on Friday night, but she had to fly out to Hong Kong and then back that afternoon simply to renew her Chinese visa, and a series of flight delays found me half asleep in my hotel room at 1 in the morning, watching movies in a bathrobe and fading fast. But just when I was about to write off the evening, she called.

I began to offer a mild protest, but she'd have none of that.

"I've been to hell and back today," she said. "You're coming out and having a drink with me."

When we arrived at 1:30am at 18 on the Bund, a throng of people waited outside, trying to cajole their way past the bouncers. We rang up Sam, one of those guys who's out clubbing so often that he's on a first name basis with every bouncer. He came down, parted the sea of hopefuls like Moses, and the bouncers ushered us in.

Located on the 7th floor, Bar Rouge was hopping. From the outdoor terrace, I stood under a Chinese flag blown sideways by a stiff breeze and looked out across the Huangpu river at the now darkened Pudong skyline. Inside, bartenders stacked martini glasses in a pyramid, then lit some unidentified alcoholic drink on fire and poured it over the glass pyramid so that the stream of fire descended to the bar and streamed six feet across the counter. I made quick note of the fire exit routes.

The rest of the night dissolved in bath of green tea and black labels (the local mixed drink of choice) and shots of one sort or another. All the building lights on the Bund and on the Pudong skyline turn off at 11pm (electricity is at a premium), but the youth remain lit until sunrise.

Spread across the time zones

My mind is in NY already, thinking of all the things I need to take care of when I arrive home. My body is here at the United Arrivals Lounge in San Francisco airport. My body clock is trying to catch up, but it's lagging. It fell off the pace some time ago and is floating over the Pacific Ocean somewhere, northwest of Alaska.

And of course, as is the case with travel denouements, the heart is slowest to follow and mine remains somewhere in China, with friends old and new. It's no fun, these last legs of multi-hop international flights, when your heart is elsewhere and your essence is discombobulated. I'm ready for the reunion of all my parts in my bed back home.

I thought I'd have time and the Internet access to write while in China, but I had precious little of either, and the rare times they converged I lacked the will. It will take some effort to get back into a writing frame of mind, and my e-mail inbox is a bit bloated. All in good time.

Brain dump

I've been out of town traveling, and my short stop back in NYC has been packed with errands and preparations for my trip to China. In a few hours, I'll head off to the airport for my flight to San Francisco, and then Beijing.

In an effort to get myself on the Beijing timezone, exactly the opposite of NYC's (Beijing is 12 hours ahead), I'm staying up all night before catching the flight. For some reason, one of the only ways I can keep myself up is by sitting at the computer and writing. Watching TV, reading, eating...they all put me to sleep. But typing engages my brain in a way that staves off sleep. This didn't used to be so, especially when trying to finish term papers the night before they were due, but then again, this isn't a term paper.

I had to use all my United frequent flier miles to book my ticket to China. August is peak travel month in China, despite the torrid heat, and so tickets were going for $1300 and up. Of course, United didn't have any coach fares available for mileage redemption, but the surprise was that all the business class seats were gone as well. So I had to push all in with my miles to snag a first class ticket. I've never flown first class overseas, and I'm looking forward to it. Fully reclining seat? Sweetness.

Before I leave, though, a quick look back at Nik and Maria's wedding from my visit to Chicago last weekend.

***

Congrats to Nik and Maria on their wedding! Theirs was the first Serbian-Polish wedding I'd ever attended, and if I have any say in the matter it won't be my last. Weddings that last more than a few days should really qualify as festivals. The day after my arrival, on a Thursday, the festivities began. I missed that first affair because I was at a White Sox game with Derek, but the next day I jumped in. After a rehearsal at a Serbian Orthodox church, we all drove to Nik's parents' mansion in the suburbs.

So many people were attending that we had to park all the way down at the end of the block. Walking towards their house, we saw a massive catering freezer truck sitting in the driveway. Always a good sign. More than half of the massive backyard sat beneath a circus-sized white tent. Inside, a Serbian band played, the lead singer about three weeks from giving birth, belting out tunes with a vibrato that I came to recognize as characteristic of Serbian singing. Six or seven gigantic coolers sat in the center of the tent, filled with beer and soda, and a series of long tables lined three walls of the tent. Serbian caterers dashed to and fro, placing drinks and dish after dish before us. Then, just after the last course and before dessert, Nik's relatives stood up and started a Serbian line dance.

I was watching and studying the dance steps when one of Nik's uncles, spying my digital SLR, pulled me out of my seat.

"Are you the official photographer? Oh, it doesn't matter." He waved his arms at the circle of dancing family members. "Get that. Do whatever you have to. Stand on the coolers, whatever."

I leapt into action, straddling coolers, weaving in and out of the circle of dancers, snapping away. Several of the people in the circle held the hand of the person next to them with one hand while in the other hand they held not only a beer but a cigarette. By evening's end, I came to believe that this was actually an official variant of the dance formation.

The next morning, we drove back out for another meal, a brunch in the same tent. Afterwards, we drove about forty minutes northeast to the church for the ceremony, which reminded me quite a bit of Ted and Joanne's Greek Orthodox wedding ceremony. Joannie and Mike, both in the ceremony, claimed Nik had to summon Jim Carrey-esque facial contortions during the entire ceremony to keep the tears at bay. If you know Nik, you'd realize how surprising that was, but the love of a good woman can do that to the best of them. We often jokingly refer to Nik as a cross between Brendan Fraser and Luc Longley, but what's most distinctive about Nik is not his height or his face but his jolly, goofy personality. Always joking, always the life of the party. Good times.

Nearly 500 people attended the wedding, and that meant remembering a lot of names, many of them challenging Serbian names. I quickly learned a handy shortcut: if I met a male whose name eluded me, I had a 60% chance of guessing right if I went with Milan. Just about every other Serbian male at the wedding introduced himself as Milan.

At the reception dinner and dance, the videographer let me borrow his flash bracket as he was a fellow Nikon user. How did I live all these years without one? No more unsightly shadows or flash hotspots. Even without the bracket, the new Nikon i-TTL flash system performed like a dream.

This evening, I would not play wedding photographer full-time. Professionals were on hand to handle that. I wanted in on the line dancing. After the official dances, including a fabulous father daughter dance by Maria and her father, set to Paul Simon's "Father and Daughter," I moved in.

The basic Serbian line dance step is not too difficult to master, but like the swing or waltz or any dance step, the complexity comes once you've mastered the basics. An older Serbian woman two to my right nodded in approval at my execution of the basic step, but then with a mischievous grin she left me stumbling over my feet like a drunk on hot coals when she added a couple skips and hops and double time moves.

Serbian songs are long, and they repeat, almost like rounds. After one nearly fifteen minute song I had to retire from the line dance drenched in sweat, ready for my Gatorade commercial moment.

The next morning, because we stayed overnight at the Lisle Hyatt, Joannie, Mike, and I visited Naperville. We stopped by my mother's grave and visited my aunt. We drove past some of Joannie and my old high school haunts. We even did a drive-by of the house I spent so many years of my life growing up in. The saplings we planted in the front and back yard so many years ago had grown into giant trees. The garage door was open, and a large pool had been set up inside the garage, in the shade, on this day when the temperature was 104F, heat index at something like Hell's fifth circle. Several young Indian children splashed and laughed in the garage.

Naperville was recently named No. 3 in Money Magazine's best places to live in the U.S. Back in high school, it all just seemed so dull, but then again it wasn't Money Magazine's best places for a teenager to find hot action.

After the literal trip down memory lane, we headed back to Nik's parents' house for one final event, a pig roast. In the humidity and heat, it was more of a collective roast, but everyone persevered, still buoyed by the previous evening's happy proceedings.

As for photos, I'll have to post them after I'm back from China, but I tossed a few up on Flickr for friends and family.

***

At one of the meals, I can't remember which one there were so many, a few of the Serbian dishes reminded me of dishes from other cultures. This recalled a conversation I had with Ken while in DC a few months back. Some foods seem to be universal. That is, every culture has some take on them.

One of these universals is some meat wrapped in a leafy vegetable. The Serbian version, with ground pork or beef wrapped in cabbage leaves, was quite tasty. The Greeks have their dolmades, the Chinese have their sticky rice and meet wrapped in bamboo leaves. Another universal is some sort of soft grain, so moist it's almost liquid in form. Oatmeal, grits, porridge, couscous.

***

Another thing I had to deal with while back in Chicago was all the stuff I had stored in Joannie and Mike's bounteous storage room. Eight or nine boxes held my childhood comic book and baseball card collections, old high school and college papers and yearbooks, photos, and even some textbooks. Comic books and baseball cards? Lousy investment in the 80's and 90's, and totally illiquid. I barely eked out 10 cents to the dollar for that junk.

***

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Well, I do know, though I hope you'll read the quiver in my lips as an effort to hold back a tear.

***

Off to the airport. How time flies when reminiscing. More from Beijing. Seacrest out.

2002 Tour de France Journal Day 1: If you don’t know who the dummy is...

[More from my 2002 TDF camp journal. I meant to post these over the past week, but I was in Chicago and forgot to bring the journal along. I'll use more of these to fill in here as I'm off to China tomorrow morning for a few weeks...]

First day of camp, I meet all the other campers. One of my chief worries the whole way over was how I’d compare with the other campers. I didn’t feel any better after meeting everyone. Most everyone was either tall and lanky, with endurance sport builds, or tall and lean and muscular.

I felt worse after our first ride, right after we arrived in Joucas. As soon as we arrived at the hotel, about 5pm in the afternoon, we’re told to change for an hour “flat” ride in the countryside around the hotel, to open up our legs. Since my luggage and bike haven’t arrived (at the airport, I waited along with two other campers for almost an hour until the baggage claim belt came to a halt; no bike case, no luggage), official camp den mother Aimee provides me with CTS bike shorts and a jersey. I’m jet lagged and exhausted, and if I lie down on my bed I’ll pass out, so after a quick change into the bike outfit I head straight out.

I meet most of the other campers and some of the staff outside. The camp has set up a mini bike garage outside, and the camp mechanic Robin has already assembled all the bikes. They loan me a bike and a helmet, and before I have time to catch my bearings we’re off.

About five minutes into our ride we hit our first climb and the pack drops me instantly. Eventually I lose contact altogether and am following a long station wagon around through the farm fields of Provence on narrow country roads. If this is the flat ride, I’m in trouble. In Seattle, we’d consider this hilly terrain.

They say in poker that if you don’t know who the sucker is, you’re the sucker. It’s not even that difficult to figure out who the slow guy is in a group of riders. He’s the one in the back at the finish line. That would be me.

Some people don’t mind bringing up the rear, but not me. Being the slow guy on the first day is demoralizing and unpleasant business, but there’s not much to be done about it now. The type of fitness I’d need to gain to catch some of my compatriots isn’t gained over one week or even one year. It takes years of riding and training, just as it takes pro cyclists, including Lance Armstrong, years of competition to reach the level necessary just to complete the Tour de France, let alone compete for a podium spot. I think this to myself and try to just enjoy the rolling golden countryside of southern France.

We finish up and reach the hotel just in time to watch the conclusion of stage 12. Once again, it’s Lance flanked by his teammate Robert Heras and his chief competitor Joseba Beloki all alone in the last stretch. Lance turns on the gas with about 5 or 6 km to go on the devilish Plateau de Beille, and Beloki can’t follow. Lance finishes with a 1 minute 3 second gain on Beloki.

Back in my room, I find a bag full of strange nutritional supplements in bottles and canisters. Red liquids, fluorescent packaging, eye droppers. It looks like Dr. Frankenstein’s childhood chemistry kit. For a second I think that it’s the camp goody bag and shudder at the thought of having to ingest this stuff each night (are there needles?) but then I remember I have a roommate who has probably arrived.

After dinner, a tasty French meal, I pass out, visions of Mont Ventoux in my head. Since I haven’t seen it before, except on TV many years ago, I picture Mordor, the flaming volcano from Lord of the Rings. Little do I know…

2002 Tour de France journal: Introduction

I'll be off traveling quite a bit this next week and month, and so I'm going to drop in some old content. This week, in honor of the last days of the 2005 Tour de France, I'll toss up entries from a journal I kept from my first in-person visit to the Tour de France, in 2002, with Carmichael Training Systems, run by Chris Carmichael, Lance Armstrong's coach.

Introduction (July 2002)

I have this recurring nightmare. It’s the day of final exams in school. I wander down a hallway filled with students on their way to different classrooms. Lockers line the walls on both sides. This must be high school. I know the subject of my next final, but I can’t remember which classroom it’s in, because I haven’t attended a single class all semester. Even if I find the classroom, how can I pass the exam? I haven’t cracked open the textbook once. My heart is racing, and I try walking faster, glancing in every door to see if I’ll recognize the teacher or any of the students, but my legs move slower and slower, and the students in the halls grow sparse as everyone finds their rooms. The faces of the passing students regard me with pursed lips an grim stares as if they see my predicament written on my face. I’ve been exposed.

It’s July 20, in the late morning, and I’m having the cycling equivalent of my final exam nightmare, except I’m awake. More than that, I’m being cooked alive. For a brief second, I think my nose is running and I reach up to wipe it with my glove. No, it is just sweat, pouring off the top of my nose onto the top tube of my bike like a small waterfall. Up ahead, through the trees, a grey tower is visible, seemingly miles away, at the top of a grey, desolate mountaintop. It darts in and out of view as the road before me snakes back and forth.

Around every turn, I hope for relief from the steep uphill grade, but instead I’m greeted by another stretch of rising pavement leading to the next turn through the forest. The bike beneath me is in the smallest possible gear, 39-27, and still I can barely turn the pedals over. My bike computer displays my speed as 9. That would be wonderful, except I’m in Europe and the unit of measurement is kilometers/hour, not miles/hour. The sweat beading off my forehead has collected on my Oakley wraparound sunglasses, mixed with the dirt in the air. The view ahead of blurs.

Around another switchback, and suddenly the road rises to an 11% grade, my heart sinking by the same amount. I feel my bike decelerate as if I’ve ridden into a patch of tar, so I stand out of my saddle to try and muscle through this ridiculous stretch. My left quadricep immediately cramps, and I drop back onto my bike seat with a grimace. On the right side of the road an old Frenchman stands next to his RV vehicle and looks at my face as I crawl by. He’s seen this before and realizes what has happened. I haven’t studied enough this semester, and now, on my first exam, I’ve been exposed. Whatever happens, I have to maintain enough speed to stay upright. Please don't let me fall over.

It’s the second day of the Climbing Stages bike camp with Carmichael Training Systems, and I’m climbing Mont Ventoux. I’m 14 kilometers away from the top of the mountain.

Mugged

Short story by Tobias Wolff in this week's New Yorker
I long ago stopped reading the weekly New Yorker short story unless it happened to be by an author I know and love, like Wolff. Also in this week's New Yorker, Noah Baumbach wrote the comedy bit, titled "Tom Cruise is My Dog." I heard Baumbach speak after the screening of his movie The Squid and the Whale at Sundance this year. Baumbach, a close friend of Wes Anderson, did not seem like the type of guy who'd write a piece like that, but I guess I was wrong.

Upcoming cookbook by Ferran Adria contains recipes from his famed El Bulli
Will cost $210 and include interactive CD-ROM.

Entourage gets a third season

Tattooed fruit could mean the end of the annoying little stickers you have to peel off

***

I'm away from NYC a lot in the next month, so every day here is spent running errands. This stretch of days where I have to venture out onto the street just happens to coincide with the muggiest weather since I've moved here. Within a minute of walking out into the heat, I feel like a damp towel. NYC feels like a sauna with a concrete and asphalt floor, brick and metallic walls, and the sun for a heat lamp in the ceiling.

***

Every camera store I've been to in NYC so far is owned and run by Hasidic Jews, including the massive B&H. Yesterday I had to drop off my inkjet printer for repair at a local camera store and was greeted by a store full of Hasidic Jews, just like B&H. It's the fourth such store I've visited. Interesting cultural phenomenon.

Do camera stores have really low margins? Are photographers a jealous, misanthropic lot? How does one explain the awful customer service at camera stores (it was the same at Glazer's in Seattle)? A majority of camera store employees I've dealt with are rude and curt, as if they disdain my business. I have no idea why that is but it's really unnecessary.

The late night employees at Whole Foods, on the other hand, are just careless and indifferent. Twice the clerks there have forgotten to pack one of my items, and each time I've had to stand there waiting while the checkout clerk carried on a social conversation with one of their peers. In this heat and humidity, it's more than aggravating to walk 10 blocks round trip to retrieve a single item. When this happened again last week, I had to throw a tantrum on the phone to the manager to get him to credit me for my salad (which I pictured the manager eating himself as he replied "uh-huh" "uh-huh" to my litany of complaints). I'm not going there in the evening anymore.

***

I only caught a bit of the British Open, but it seems safe to say that Tiger Woods' swing changes have worked themselves out. To hurt Tiger, a course needs to punish him for errant drives, and if that doesn't work, competitors have to hope he's putting badly. The rough at the U.S. Open handled the former, and Tiger couldn't putt that week. But the British Open links layout didn't punish him when he hooked or pushed his drives. Errant tee shots landed in the next fairway over, and he simply hit irons from wherever he landed. The fairway bunkers? Tiger drover over most of them.

***

While in DC last weekend, Joannie and I visited the Holocaust Museum thanks to Rich's sister Catherine who works there and left passes for us. Even several years beyond its opening, it's still an attraction that requires advanced planning in order to secure a spot. The main exhibit is linear, winding down from the top floor back to the main floor. For some subjects, like this one, I prefer that format over an open format where you have to choose your own path.

Impressive exhibit and well worth a visit. Of course, I also dragged Joannie to see the insects at the National Museum of Natural History. As a compromise I went with her to view the Hope Diamond and other assorted bling.

Thank goodness the DC Metro stations are air conditioned. It was so hot that wandering from museum to monument to museum felt like strolling in a ceramic kiln. At the Supreme Court we viewed a video interview with the current Justices. Ginsberg commented that when the Constitution was written, women couldn't vote and blacks were still suffering the indignities of slavery, among other injustices to be rectified in later years. While she spoke, the video cut for a few seconds to the face of strict constructionist Scalia, and it was all he could do to keep from rolling his eyes. High comedy. Scalia's a nut.

The trip to DC was a success. Joannie found an apartment in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. It will be great to have her and Mike closer by, just a three and a half make that four five hour bus ride away. The bus drivers this time around sure took their sweet time.

On the way down, the in-drive movie was that awful movie in which Jennifer Lopez and her daughter and haunted by a crazy guy, presumably her ex-husband (I wasn't watching that closely). The lunatic was played by the guy who played Carter Buckley on The O.C. this season. Finally, after being terrorized by the guy for the entire movie, J.Lo trains herself in boxing and goes after him. Our arrival in DC cut off the final fight scene, to no one's dismay.

***

I keep receiving a phishing e-mail for eBay, an excerpt of which appears below. This fraudster needs a copy editor. If you want to steal someone's money, at least put some effort into it.

It has come to our attion that 95% of all fraudulent auctions are caused by members using stolen credit cards to purchase or sell non existant items. Thus we require our members to add a Debit/Check card to their billing records as part of our continuing commitment to protect your account and to reduce the instance of fraud on our website. Your Debit/Check card will only be used to identify you and bill any open seller fees incase your initial credit card gets declined. If you could please take 5-10 minutes out of your online experience and renew your records you will not run into any future problems with the eBay® service. However, failure to confirm your records will result in your account suspension.

It's Tour time, baby!

Ever since 1999, July has meant one thing in my mind: Lance in France. The 2005 Tour de France kicks off Saturday morning, and I'm all geeked up. One thing, though, does have me down. I'm not headed over to watch the Tour in person for the first time in four years. The cost proved prohibitive this time around, and I'm going to ache as much as if I had to work through the Christmas holiday season. There's nothing like being in France and watching the Tour in person. It's the type of vacation I could do every year for the rest of my life, and for a while I thought I just might. Everyone should try it at least once.

I'll miss riding through the beautiful sun-drenched French countryside, hundreds of thousands sunflowers swaying in the wind; suffering up the gorgeous but soaring Alps as if climbing into the azure skies; inching up the steep and unforgiving Pyrenees in sweet agony; eliciting a few cheers of my own from spectators from all over the world, camped out on the roadside waiting for the Tour to pass by; burning so many calories that no amount of delicious French food can keep me from dropping a few pounds; struggling to make sense of sweat-drenched paper maps and unmarked backcountry roads; French cheese and bread; the thrumming bass of helicopter blades from further on down the mountain, portending the arrival of the head of the peloton; the sound of several hundred thousand fans, worked up to a frenzy; partying with crazy Dutch contingent on a mountaintop finish (so generous the past two years with their satellite television, their beer, their music); the invigorating chaos; feeling the breeze from these god-like cyclists screaming by at 35 mph just a foot or two from my face; les femmes françaises; discussing cycling with people who've followed the sport nearly all their lives, who know cycling like few people in the American public do; Paris.

I wish I could be there to watch Lance's last Tour. As those of you close to me know, I feel a particular kinship with Armstrong. I lost my mother and grandmother to cancer in 1998, the year Armstrong came back from cancer to prepare for the Tour. My left knee exploded (just about) that same year, that awful year, and after surgery my physical therapist prescribed cycling, a low-impact way to regain mobility in my knee and strength in my legs. In 1999, when Lance Armstrong shocked the cycling world by winning his first Tour de France, I purchased a road bike and became a cycling junkie. In 2000 I completed the Seattle to Portland (STP) one-day ride with a group of friends. In 2001 I got a taste of what it means to suffer in the mountains during the Ride Around Mount Rainier in One Day (RAMROD).

In 2002 I really learned what it meant to suffer in the mountains during a Tour de France cycling camp led by Lance Armstrong's coach, Chris Carmichael. Tom Simpson died on Mont Ventoux in 1967, and under a scorching French sun I thought I might join him. In 2003, on my second tour of duty in the south of France, Lance survived all sorts of calamities to tie the record of five Tour victories. And last year, my most recent trip to France, Lance broke that record.

Though American television has carried very little of Lance's race season, I've followed his performances online. He looked strong in the Dauphiné Libéré, and he looks to be peaking at just the right time. Meanwhile, Jan Ullrich looks just a bit heavy and slow, as if he'll have to ride himself into shape during the Tour yet again. Some things never change.

I don't see any reason why Lance shouldn't be favored to win again. He has Tour preparation and his team dynamics down to a science. Despite living at the eye of a hurricane of publicity and fame, he has an iron grip on every variable in his control.

The team he's bringing to the Tour de France is, on paper, the best cycling stage team ever. The new ICU rules requiring teams to enter all the Grand Tours actually consolidated power with the top teams, and Discovery Channel Cycling is now the strongest team in the world. Among those shepherding Lance around the outside of France:

• Jose Azevedo, sixth in the Tour in 2002 and fifth in the Tour last year.
• Manuel Beltran, three time top-10 finisher in the Vuelta.
• George Hincapie, Lance's faithful lieutenant, someone who's evolved into the ultimate domestique. Also the guy who's lived every male cyclist's dream by hooking up with one of the Tour de France podium girls.
• Yaroslav Popovych, perhaps the best of the rising young stars in the cycling world and Lance's future successor as Discovery Channel team leader.
• Jose Luis Rubiera, four time top-10 finisher at the Vuelta and Giro.
• Paolo Savoldelli, winner of the Giro in 2002 and this year!

If they stay healthy, they'll be a juggernaut.

At this stage in his career Lance would not ride the Tour de France unless he felt he could and would win. The athlete Lance reminds me of most is Michael Jordan, and not just because they both have their own buildings at Nike HQ. Both are hyper competitive, brash and magnificently arrogant, and both maximize their freakish genetic athletic gifts with an unmatched work ethic. Both say the right things to the press, managing their public images with meticulous care, yet ask any of their opponents and they'll tell you that Lance and Michael are vicious, ruthless killers. I remember reading an article by Jason Williams (the one who shot someone on his estate) in which Williams described Michael as a "hard, hard man," that if you crossed Mike on the court he'd track you down and utter, "I'll f***ing break you" in what I can only imagine was a voice from hell. Mike even cracked many a teammate in practice, before they'd even made it into an actual game. One of the images of Michael I'll always remember is his face-off with Xavier McDaniel in the 1992 Eastern Finals. The Knicks had been beating up on the Bulls all series, and the X-Man had finally crossed a line. Michael locked foreheads with McDaniel, shooting him a look of raw fury and uttering what I doubt was the Lord's prayer. Then Jordan went out and led the Bulls to a Game 7 rout.

Various stories of how Lance and Mike gain a psychological edge on their chief competitors circulate among followers of the sport like myths. Lance calling his competitors during the offseason from mountainside climbs and asking them if they knew where he was. Michael trash-talking opponents like Charles Barkley during offseason rounds of golf, probing for any sense of doubt or weakness. Jeff Van Gundy called Michael out on it one season in the press, and the next time the Bulls played the Knicks, a game I was at, Jordan dropped 51 on the Knicks and then cussed Van Gundy out from the court after points 50 and 51 dropped through the net.

They both also demand absolute loyalty from those around them. Slip up once and you'll go from the inner circle to the doghouse just like that, and that doghouse is like a max security prison. Pippen was the perfect teammate for Jordan because he didn't want to be the alpha dog. Hincapie is the perfect sidekick for Lance because for three weeks each July he has no thought other than to put and keep Lance in yellow. Lance's teammates who've left for other teams--Kevin Livingston, Roberto Heras, Floyd Landis--well, let's just say Michael Corleone telling Fredo, "You're dead to me now" comes to mind. One can't shake the sense that even those loyal to Michael or Lance are scared of them. Tiger Woods is the same way, as his former caddy will attest. At this year's Tour of Georgia, when Lance Armstrong helped lead out teammate Tom Danielson to the overall race lead over ex-teammate Floyd Landis on the brutal Brasstown Bald climb, Lance pointed at Landis and then the race clock as they crossed the finish, as if to point out that Floyd could have had the race lead if he'd just stayed by Lance's side.

Even if they didn't have enemies, I suspect Lance and Michael would conjure some up. Both athletes have origin stories for their greatness, almost like comic book heroes. Peter Parker became Spiderman when bitten by a radioactive spider and when his neglect of a criminal led to his Uncle Ben's death. Michael Jordan set out to prove the world wrong when cut from his high school basketball team. Lance Armstrong carries an eternal chip on his shoulder because his father abandoned he and his mother to grow up in a rough neighborhood in Dallas. Later, the cancer that nearly killed him actually transformed him into a champion. Mentally, he had cheated death, and no human competitor could ever intimidate him. He'd live life to the fullest because he had been given a second chance. Physically, it didn't sap his power but did shave some ten or fifteen pounds off his frame, turning him into a that rare combination: a cyclist who could climb and time trial. Who knows if these events have any significance at all? The stories may be passed around more for the rest of us than for Lance or Michael.

Both elevated their sports in unique ways. Jordan, as documented in Playing for Keeps by David Halberstam, Jordan was a once in a lifetime player on the court and off the court, transcending his country, sport, and race to become an international mega celebrity. The NBA is still searching for Jordan's successor as its international mega-ambassador. Armstrong's first Tour win came a year after international cycling seemed ready to collapse under a series of drug scandals. Though cycling still has the drug-use sword of Damocles hanging over it, Armstrong has stayed clean and remained the sport's top story. Having beat cancer, Armstrong is more than just a cyclist; he's an living miracle, an all-purpose motivational speaker, and a deity in the cancer survivor community. Though not everyone loves to see one person dominate a sport year after year, having a single lightning rod for the fan's adoration and attention or hatred allows mythologies and legends to sprout. The NBA hasn't been the same draw since Jordan retired from the Bulls, and I highly doubt the Tour de France will see the same number of American spectators in 2006 that it did in 2004.

Lance's toughest competitors in the 2005 Tour? Himself and bad luck. He's definitely older, not quite as dominant in the time trials on mountains as he once was. For a professional cyclist he's an old man at 34. In a three week stage race, when only minutes or seconds separate the top several riders after over 90 hours on the road, any number of mishaps can cost a rider the race. A crash, an injury, one bad day on a mountain, food poisoning, an overzealous fan, a political protester, mechanical failure.

After that, his toughest competitors, as named by Johan Brunyeel, will be Jan Ullrich, Alexandre Vinokourov, Ivan Basso. Ullrich is a great time trialist but isn't explosive on climbs, and he's like Patrick Ewing or Karl Malone to Armstrong's Michael Jordan: perhaps just not vicious or cold-blooded enough to deliver the winning blow. Vino is a brave, aggressive rider, but not a great time trialist, and he'll be marked the whole race through this time around. Basso hung with Armstrong on two mountaintop finishes last year, but his time trialing isn't in that topmost echelon. Levi Leipheimer, and old teammate of Armstrong's, is also a strong time trialist and climber, but his team may not be strong enough to carry him through. None of Armstrong's former teammates has ever really damaged Lance in the Tour, and there may be a psychological barrier at play there.

Two ways to get pumped for the Tour this week: read Lance Armstrong's War by Daniel Coyle and watch the Lance Week programming on the Discovery Channel family of cable networks. Sang first alerted me to Coyle's book (his cousin used to date Coyle), and then I spotted a few rave reviews in the press. I'm a sucker for any non-fiction Lance Armstrong and/or cycling-related book, and the details at the book's official website sealed the deal. In particular, don't miss the Q&A with Coyle about Lance. Coyle moved to Europe and followed Lance for the year of his sixth Tour de France win, living my dream life, and in doing so, Coyle appears to have captured a more intimate portrait of the man. Most people who've been around cycling for many years know that Lance can be brash in a Texas-sized way, and Coyle donned his wings for a flyby of the sun. This quote from a Velonews interview with Coyle is revealing: "he is a good hero for my 10-year old son, but I wouldn't necessarily want him to date my daughter." Sounds like Michael Jordan, no?

I just received my review copy of the book today, and it will be a miracle if I don't devour it in the next few days.

Tour coverage in the U.S. will be on OLNTV, as usual, live from 8:30 to 11:30am EST daily, with several replays on into the evening. In most years, the Prologue doesn't provide much separation among the race contenders. This year, however, the Tour begins with a medium length time trial rather than the more customary short prologue time trial. This will limit the top finishers to true time trialers, of which Lance and Ullrich are two of the best, and it might provide significant separation among the contenders right away. Santiago Botero and Michael Rogers are also excellent time trialists, and Lance's former teammates Leipheimer and Floyd Landis could be near the top as well.

Follow daily updates on the Tour online at Velonews. Find collections of links at the Tour de France blog, which I'll be checking out this year for the first time and through which I discovered this gorgeous infographic on Lance (PDF). Read commentary at The Paceline and Team Discovery Channel websites. And this year Sirius is offering a daily Lance in France podcast during the Tour; iTunes 4.9 makes it a cinch to subscribe.

And to ease the blogging load on myself so I can keep up with the Tour, I'll try to post bits from my personal journal from my first visit to the Tour de France in 2002.

Mini reviews

I consume and accumulate more media (DVR, Netflix, Amazon.com, RSS, e-mail newsletters, movie theatres, concerts, plays, the Sunday NYTimes, magazines) than I can write about, so perhaps a few impressions or mini-reviews will prove a more manageable format to clear the logjam in my head.

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The Interpreter is cool to the touch, much as I imagine Nicole Kidman's porcelain skin feels. She has a unique beauty, but it is a distancing type of beauty. The camera gazes at her in this movie from up close. She hides behind her bangs (so much so that it becomes a distraction), but even without the bangs, no camera can penetrate her statuesque features.

Sean Penn's character is given a needlessly tragic back story. An actor of Penn's skill is quick to expose such plot contrivances; it's like giving a Yo Yo Ma a metronome for a live performance. His furrowed brow makes for a nice visual contrast to Kidman's flawless complexion, and some of the most interesting scenes are those in which the two of them converse.

The trailer ruins the movie's centerpiece, a cat and mouse game that ends on a New York city bus. Anyone who has seen the trailer knows how it ends. It's a serious movie, with righteous indignation, tears, and impassioned speeches about the dream that was the United Nations. What I wanted more of was Catherine Keener's FBI agent. She receives two lines of note in the movie, and both are zingers.

If The Interpreter had been made by Hitchcock with, say, Cary Grant as the FBI agent and Grace Kelly as the interpreter, sparks would have flown by movie's end. It wasn't, and they don't. The most that Kidman grants Penn is a hug, and that's what the movie gives its audience, a polite hug when we want a hot kiss or a slap in the face.

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In the first Fenway Park scene in Fever Pitch, mannequins are clearly visible in the upper right of the screen in the crowd. Not enough extras willing to volunteer to sit at Fenway? Perhaps Red Sox diehards were too appalled at the idea of Jimmy Fallon playing one of them to lend their support. Were my eyes fooling me? Did anyone else see those?

Fallon's line readings, as with his on Saturday Night Live, seem effortless. Not in a good way. He never seems to try all that hard, and it comes across as a rehearsal. Contrast that with Drew Barrymore, who enunciates her thoughts in romantic comedies with the measured deliberation of someone reading a difficult foreign language exercise, as if the precision of her wording is critical to the incantation that will transform one of the many doofuses cast opposite her into an adult. Now that Meg Ryan has been face lifted into oblivion, Drew is America's new movie sweetheart, with her forgiving smile and child-like wonder (see, I've never met her and we're already on a first name basis). Her charm is the opposite of that of a Nicole Kidman. Drew is one of the very few actresses who can be cast opposite a gawky guy like Jimmy Fallon or Adam Sandler and make the audience believe she could actually fall for them. For a while Jennifer Aniston encroached on this territory, but then in real life she married Brad Pitt instead of Tom Green.

The movie has some clever meet-cute banter, and the Red Sox fandom caricatures are tolerable in doses. When the movie makes Fallon's love of the Red Sox the centerpiece of their conflict, though, it's such a reach that I lost all interest. The fans in Fallon's section of Fenway don't feel like real people. They're almost as much mannequins as the actual mannequins I saw on screen, there to recite some expository dialogue for non sports fans who aren't aware of the Red Sox's tragic history.

Of course, the movie would have been far more poetic had the Red Sox actually lost the World Series last year, but me thinks that Red Sox nation will hang on to their memories and kick the movie to the curb.

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Last last last Sunday, Ken took me to the concluding game of the Washington Nationals (formerly the Montreal Expos) opening series at RFK Stadium, against the Diamondbacks. RFK Stadium is not going to win any design or aesthetic awards--it's in the vein of Busch Memorial and other concrete flying saucer stadiums built before HOK came along with its red brick "old is new" aesthetic--but it's perfectly suitable for watching baseball. We sat down the first base line, giving us a good view across the stadium at the seats behind third base. When the Nationals rallied to take the lead, the fans in that section started jumping up and down, and that section of the stadium visibly bounced. Why I don't know (temporary bleachers set up in the conversion from football to baseball stadium?) but it's cool.

One of the downsides of the stadium's construction is that the outfield seats are way up above ground level. Most home run balls will fall into uninhabited space behind the outfield wall instead of into a fans' hands.

The stadium wasn't full. It seats over 56,000, so I suspect that good seats will always be available. I don't have any feel for D.C.'s appetite for baseball, but I can't imagine it will be worse than that of the Montreal faithful (though to be fair, much of the blame should be pinned on the old ownership).

My one game there has me suspecting that home runs will be at a premium. A few balls that looked to be crushed died short of the warning track. That's unfortunate for one of my fantasy baseball teams that counts Vidro and Wilkerson among its starters.

----------------------

Since moving into an apartment with paper-thin walls, I've had to keep the volume on my stereo system down. That means most music I listen to now is piped in from my iPod, whether I'm listening at home on my computer or strolling around town. The Apple earbuds that come with their iPods are nothing special, and they don't fit my ears. For all these reasons and others, I felt justified in investing in Shure E3c Sound Isolating Earphones.

No regrets so far. The E3c's sound a whole lot better than the Apple earbuds and my old over-the-head sports headphones. They're not noise canceling, but they do an amazing job of sealing my ears from external noise, of which there is an abundance in NYC. When I saunter down the sidewalk with the E3c's on and music blasting, all of NYC seems like a massive music video playing out just for me (in which the citizens of NYC shoot condescending stares my way for daring to saunter).

Search the web; lots of online stores carry E3c's, and good deals can be found. No need to buy direct from Shure at full retail price.

Wash D.C. photos, Adobe ImageReady color shifts

I uploaded a batch of new photos to Flickr, pics from my visit to DC. I tinkered with the white balance and exposure of the RAW files before using ImageReady to convert them to JPEGs for upload.

When I looked at the photos in ImageReady, the colors looked washed out as compared to the more saturated RAW files I had been working with. I should have stopped and investigated then. It wasn't until today that I found the source of this problem. Sigh. Perhaps they won't look washed out for you Windows PC users. I changed my Mac display gamma to 2.2; I like my world's color palette rich and saturated. Sometime I'll have to go back and correct these photos.

Dot dot dot

Not Pron - The hardest riddle on the Internet
Learn about your computer along the way. Good fun.

Directory of Open Access Journals
Over 1,500 journals, with nearly 400 searchable at the article level. Not all are in English, and you always have to wonder about people who write for free journals. What's the business model? Oh wait, thousands of people write for free on the web all the time, like yours truly.

Yo La Tengo's WFMU setlist is awesome
YLT just took requests for covers and played an entire concert of them. Where's the torrent?!

Annotated slideshow of photos by Sebastião Salgado

"The Parachute Artist" - How Lonely Planet changed travel
From this week's Journeys issue of The New Yorker. One article in the issue mentioned a class of traveler called the "budget travel snob," which brought a smile to my face.

I sold a used copy of Salò on DVD on Amazon.com for $200
Apparently it's out of print, and the authentic Criterion 29-chapter version with the frosted ring at the center of the DVD is very rare. Criterion DVDs are the Ferraris of the DVD market; they retain their value, and in some fortuitous cases they shoot up in value when they go out of print. Salò is described as "perhaps the most disturbing and disgusting film ever made," a "loose adaptation of the Marquis de Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom."

The Narutrix
Audio from the Matrix movies, mixed with video from the anime series Naruto.

The Episode III l33t trailer
Video mash-ups/remixes are becoming commonplace. Every week brings a new one.

Google Satellite Maps has spawned a host of miles high voyeurs: interesting Google Satellite maps, Google sightseeing, baseball stadiums
With the U.S. dollar so weak, this is the state of American travel. Sad.

URLwell is a handy piece of Mac software for stashing URLs
Useful while surfing if you'd rather not maintain dozens of open tabs in your browser

Some really late Sundance reviews, including Kung Fu Hustle, The Ballad of Jack and Rose, and The Jacket

It's been almost two and a half months since my trip to Sundance, but some of the movies I saw there have yet to reach theaters so perhaps these impressions from memory will still be of use. Filmmakers continue to go to Sundance to spread the word about their movies, despite all the media attention focused on stars partying and receiving swag from the various sponsors. Many directors and actors journey out for their ten or fifteen minutes of Q&A after each screening, and many will fade back into obscurity. I've seen a lot of movies in the past year but have been terrible about recording my impressions here. When I see the movies at Sundance and other film festivals, I feel like I owe it to the filmmakers to spread the word. Fortunately, many of the movies I saw this year did get picked up for distribution and will reach a broad audience.

These are my thoughts on movies I saw my first two days at Sundance, listed in the order I saw them. By chance, the list includes one movie that came and went, one that is out in theaters now, one that opens in LA/NY tomorrow, and one that may not see big screen distribution.

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Saturday morning, our entire gang went out for our first movie of Sundance at Eccles Auditorium. Ellie Parker stars Naomi Watts as a struggling actress in Los Angeles, attending audition after audition, fighting to maintain her identity and her integrity while navigating the de-humanizing profession of acting in Los Angeles. Like the new HBO series Unscripted, Ellie Parker de-glamorizes the lives of actors, reminding us that for every Hollywood star are hundreds of dreamers whose souls wither from year after over year of being treated like human cattle.

Scott Coffey, an old acting classmate of Watts, wrote and directed. They began shooting five years ago, when Watts actually was struggling to make it as an actress in Los Angeles. Of course, in the ensuing five years, she became one of Hollywood's A-list actresses. That's fortunate for Watts, but a development that blunts the impact of the movie's message.

The movie opens strong. Naomi Watts rushes from one audition to the next, and the shots of her in the car, preparing for the audition, changing outfits while driving, shouting at other L.A. drivers, and bopping to techno music are genuinely funny. Her lines for one audition in a Brooklyn-based drug movie are too profane to print here, but none of us could stop reciting those lines the rest of the weekend (get me on the phone sometime after a few drinks and I'll do my impression of Aussie Watts doing Brooklyn mob floozy). From there we get a glimpse into Watts' chaotic personal and emotional lives. Keanu Reeves and his band Dogstar make a cameo, with Watts as a blathering groupie, jacked up on drugs. I wondered if they shot that scene before or after Watts did Mulholland Drive.

Ellie Parker was originally a short, but after a solid reception at Sundance, Coffey decided to stretch it into a full-length feature. Unfortunately, the narrative suffers for it. Parts of the movie feel like padding, like a sequence when Watts goes to a zoo and stares wistfully at gorillas running about. It's meant to reveal her inner turmoil. Everyone knows, however, that Watts is starring in Peter Jackson's version of King Kong this summer. From staring at gorillas at a zoo to co-starring next to the biggest gorilla of them all; it's an unfortunate coincidence that just reminds the audience that Watts is no longer the unknown she plays in this movie. With some more aggressive editing, Ellie Parker would work as well as a one hour special for television. I don't believe Ellie Parker was picked up, but hopefully it will make it to the Sundance Channel or DVD.

The movie was shot on a 1-chip Sony consumer camcorder, so blown up to movie theater screen size, it looks awful. The shoddy cinematography contributes to the documentary/verite feel, though, and that's part of the movie's charm. And Watts is excellent. Perhaps because of all her years fighting to make it as an actress, she has little to no vanity. She's willing to turn herself inside-out on camera, to be emotionally naked on screen. The adjective brave is overused in describing actors, but it comes to mind when she's on screen.

One of the funniest moments at the screening occurred during Q&A. No one was asking any questions of Chevy Chase, and so at one point he grabbed the mike and said, "I'm not going to answer any questions." Finally someone bit and asked how Chase got involved.

"My agent sent me the script, said I should do it. So here I am in Sundance. I don't know anyone. I have no friends. It's very lonely."

We had no other movies on Saturday, so we spent the afternoon on the slopes of Park City. Sundance Film Fest inflates prices of lodging in Park City, but the benefit for those who attend is one empty ski run after another. Utah had a fantastic winter for skiing, and we treated Park City as our personal playground. In the evening, we cooked a huge feast back at our lodge, grilling steak on our deck and soaking in the hot tub. Even Karen's old friend Cortney drove out from her home in Utah to spend the evening with us. Good times.

After dinner, we fought off food coma and went to the Amazon/UTA Party. It was fun to catch up with old work colleagues, discuss movies with Jeff when he wasn't besieged by movie stars, and to take in the scene. Half of Sundance is like a high school dance, everyone checking everyone else out to see who is worth talking to. Everyone wants to talk up the food chain. You can be disgusted by it all and reminisce about the good old days of Sundance, or you can laugh at it all while enjoying a few free drinks.

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Joseph Gordon-Levitt (left) and Lukas Haas in Brick

Sunday we had a four movies with only a break for lunch. It's the type of day I have no problem with but feel guilty subjecting others to. Mike, Joannie, Karen, and Arya were good sports and put up with my film nerd itinerary.

Rian Johnson's Brick is a modern high school drama cast as a film noir. Brendan Fry (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is the cool-on-the-outside, wounded-on-the-inside bleeding heart hero, investigating the murder of his ex-girlfriend, willing to risk life and limb to unravel the dark and mysterious entanglements that she couldn't escape. Old film noir characters all appear, albeit played by familiar high school social archetypes. The cruel sex vixen is the high school drama queen, the hero's well-informed sidekick is a computer nerd, the femme fatale is the head cheerleader, and a mob boss is played by Lukas Haas as a drug dealer living in his mom's basement (until I read Freakonomics, written by another Levitt, not related to Joseph Gordon-Levitt, I didn't realize why it was that so many gang members live with their mothers).

The dialogue is straight film-noir, delivered at an ear-blistering pace. Director Rian Johnson is clearly a film noir buff, and his rendition of film noir dialogue and cinematography is exacting and faithful. Old film noir movie dialogue, though stylized, has a certain snap and sting that is lacking in modern movies. And there's a certain pleasure in seeing how seriously each of the actors takes his or her film noir archetype. However, the conceit at the heart of this movie, high school drama cast as film noir, doesn't transcend stylish experiement. It's an intriguing choice but doesn't provide any deep insight into either film noir or high school dramas. We've all been guilty of exaggerating the import of our high school social and emotional dramas, but everyone in the movie takes themselves so seriously that by movie's end it comes off as vanity. The movie feels a bit like a creative exercise, albeit one with high production values and a consistently nervous and sinister atmosphere.

The mystery itself is complex, and it took a van ride home of conversation for all of us to lay out the story clearly in our own heads. I seem to recall Sony Pictures Classics picking up Brick for $1 million, so most of America should have an opportunity to see the movie on the big screen. Rian Johnson seemed like an extremely affable and appreciative young guy during Q&A. Hopefully he'll find more work in Hollywood; he has talent.

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Everybody was kung-fu fighting...hee-ya

There's usually one movie every year that just leaves me grinning ear to ear, a movie that's pure fun. I didn't expect to find that movie for 2005 as early as January, but as soon as the end credit for Kung Fu Hustle appeared on screen, I knew I'd be unlikely to have as much fun at any other movie this year. Stephen Chow's follow-up to Shaolin Soccer is a gem in its genre; I'm just not sure what genre that is.

As with many Hong Kong movies, Kung Fu Hustle defies easy categorization because it embodies more genres than you'd expect to see mixed in one movie. The joy of Kung Fu Hustle is that it spans them so effortlessly. One minute the movie is an action flick, the next it's a dance scene from a musical. One scene will have the pathos of a tragedy, and the next scene will be a slapstick comedy with the physical genius of a Keaton or Jackie Chan. Stephen Chow, who wrote, produced, and directed, loves Hollywood movies, and he pays tribute to at least a dozen Hollywood movies and directors, from West Side Story to The Matrix to The Untouchables to The Shining to Batman to the Road Runner.

Sing (Stephen Chow), a bumbling thief, tries to shake down some of the residents of Pig Sty Alley for some money. As has been the case most of his life, he fails miserably, but in the process, he attracts the murderous Axe Gang. The residents of Pig Sty Alley look like a motley bunch, but they have a few surprises up their sleeves, and when the two groups clash, a delirious mayhem ensues.

The landlord (Wah Yuen) and landlady (Yuen Qiu) of Pig Sty Alley steal this movie. They reminded me of a couple of next door neighbors from my childhood, and they'll be familiar to old school martial arts fans. Bruce Lee cleaned Wah Yuen's clock in The Chinese Connection, and Yuen Qiu is a former martial arts actress who hasn't been on screen in years. Their appearance, and their identities in this movie, pay homage to their past in Chinese cinema. They aren't the only screen legends on display; Leung Siu Lung plays the Beast. Quentin Tarantino, for one, casts many of his favorite actors growing up in his movie as his way of paying tribute to their influence on him. Many people find this type of inside circle back-slapping annoying, but it happens in every field, and it doesn't feel forced here. Most people won't even notice.

Stephen Chow has a certain understated manner about him that distinguishes him from other slapstick martial arts comedians (there are many) that have come before him. He doesn't overact, instead surrounding himself with more exaggerated physical comedians, in contrast to someone like Jackie Chan whose dorky Uncle personality and cartoonish facial expressions center his movies around him. The low-key approach works for Chow, also serving as a counterbalance to some of the gaudy special effects. Think Cartoon Laws of Physics depicted in live action and you'll be in the right ballpark.

Though I still can't pin it to one genre, Kung Fu Hustle is most certainly a genre movie. If you had to weight it, it's 50% martial arts, 35% comedy, 10% drama, 5% romance. Seen att a film festival, and among film geeks, especially devotees of martial arts, it's joyride. I know I would never take some people to see it; they'd find it silly and a waste of celluloid, but then I wouldn't take other people to see a French New Wave retrospective either. Some people don't like chocolate, some don't even like watching movies. That's fine, but they're missing out.

Stephen Chow came out after the movie to a standing ovation, the only one I saw at Sundance this year. Kung Fu Hustle had distribution even before Sundance, and joy of joys, it hits theaters in NY/LA April 8 (tomorrow) and nationwide April 22. Catch it with a group; it's one of those movies best enjoyed in the company of others.

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Rebecca Miller, daughter of Arthur Miller, is married to Daniel Day-Lewis. I don't think she had to fly to Italy where he was cobbling shoes to convince him to act in her movie The Ballad of Jack and Rose. Day-Lewis plays Jack, the last of a hippie commune who lives with his teenage daughter Rose (Camilla Belle) on an island away from civilization. They live in harmony with the environment, or at least according to Jack's ideals, and they wage a war with developers building properties near their house. Jack and Rose live alone, both literally, in this outpost away from civilization, and figuratively, in their idealism. When Jack brings his girlfriend (Catherine Keener) and her sons back from the mainland to stay with him and Rose, expected and unexpected clashes and connections follow.

The movie examines and questions the healthiness and sustainability of strict idealism in any form. To adhere to such standards not only sets up painful and inevitable losses of innocence but may not be sustainable. Miller employs a snake in one sequence, its escape coinciding with one such loss of innocence, and it's not nearly as heavy-handed or forced a symbolic moment as it sounds. When Day-Lewis confronts his nemesis, a land developer played by Beau Bridges, Day-Lewis, Keener, Belle, and Ryan McDonald as Keener's son Rodney are excellent. This was the best-acted movie I saw at Sundance.

The subject matter is touching and intelligent but also serious about its ideas. It won't win a huge mainstream audience but should appeal to moviegoers who seek something original and thought-provoking amidst the more predictable fare at the cineplex.

Miller spent years and years working on the script, and the characters of Jack and Rose are based in part on two female characters from a short she screened several years back at Sundance. Day-Lewis came on stage for Q&A looking like he'd just come off the slopes, dressed head-to-toe in ski gear and sporting a mountain-man beard. There's no art about him; he answers questions in such a direct manner it's disarming, almost intimidating. He's also a brilliant, serious actor, and I can imagine no other actor today who would be as appropriate to play the part of a man so committed to his ideals.

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Our fourth and final movie screening on Sunday was John Maybury's The Jacket, out in theaters just a short while ago. The theater was all abuzz before the screening began as celebs strolled in and fought through adoring crowds armed with digital cameras. Chevy Chase. Kevin Bacon. Keira Knightley and her boyfriend. Jennifer Jason Leigh. Adrien Brody and a woman I assumed was his girlfriend. Even Tobey Maguire and Steven Soderbergh (representing Section Eight, I think) dropped in.

The Jacket reminded me of The Machinist. I saw both at Sundance, and both were mysteries, visual puzzles. The movie begins with U.S. Marine Jack Starks (Adrien Brody) apparently getting killed as a soldier in the Gulf War in Iraq. The movie then cuts to Vermont, where Starks, apparently having survived, but with no memory of the incident, hitchhiking along a Vermont road in the middle of winter. He helps a woman and her daughter whose car has broken down, and then a stranger gives him a lift. A policeman flags the car down, and one more blackout later, and Starks finds himself on trial for the policeman's murder.

Found insane, Starks ends up in a mental institution. There, Kris Kristofferson subjects Starks to a brutal experimental treatment in which Starks is drugged, tied down with straps, and slid into one of those metal drawers where they store corpses in the morgue. I think I saw something similar on an episode of Fear Factor once. Surprisingly, Kristofferson is not a patient at this mental institution but a doctor. If Kristofferson were my psychological doctor, that alone would give me nightmares, without the drugs and solitary confinement.

In the drawer, Starks begins experiencing visions. Or are they visions? In one such "dream," he encounters a young waitress named Jackie (Keira Knightley doing a Marlene Dietrich smoky voice) at a rest stop. It's Christmas Eve, and taking pity on Starks, Jackie offers him her sofa for the night. I've had the same dream numerous times, and I know it's a vision, but if being drugged, shackled, and locked in the morgue for the evening is the price to pay to shack up with Keira Knightley, consider me patient zero. Starks doesn't think it's a fantasy, though, and begins to believe that these visions are the key to his salvation.

I'm willing to hang in there with a convoluted plot if there's a piece of cheese at the end of the maze (especially if it's from Murray's Cheese Shop, mmm), but some movies need clarity (e.g., did Sharon Stone kill those guys in Basic Instinct? It matters, and c'mon, she and Michael Douglas are obviously not doing the sequel anymore, so someone needs to come clean). I'm willing to tolerate abstraction if it serves a purpose or is intended to simulate the subconscious (David Lynch, for example, or perhaps Bunuel). But the open-ended and complex mystery in The Jacket just left my eyes rolling because it feels like lazy plotting.

I thought I saw a clue in The Jacket, a little string of beads that two different characters were twirling around their fingers. It was subtle, and I thought it might mean the two were the same person. In Q&A, Maybury revealed that he had both actors holding that trinket solely to mess with the audience's mind, that it was meaningless. At that point I gave up on the movie. Jack Starks sees his tombstone, and on it we see that he is born on Christmas Day. Does that mean he's Christ? After Maybury's admission that the string of beads was merely random and unimportant, I didn't care anymore.

When people asked what the movie meant, Maybury replied, "What does it mean to you?" It's a common response at Sundance; directors hate to explain what their movies mean. If a magician explains how a trick works, the magic is gone, right? Well, sometimes the spectator doesn't care how the trick was done because it wasn't all that magical in the first place.

What, you wanted a picture of Kris Kristofferson?

blah blah blah

Yahoo buying Flickr?
I mentioned earlier this year that I'd be shocked if Flickr wasn't purchased before year's end, and that Yahoo seemed to be the most likely suitor

Danica McKellar, Winnie from The Wonder Years, offers a math tutoring column at her personal website. An undergrad math major while at UCLA, she co-wrote a paper on percolation and Ashkin-Teller models (PDF). Follow the thread and you'll discover that she has an Erdos-Bacon number of 6 and that Dolph Lundgren has a master's in chemical engineering from U. of Sydney, speaks five languages, has an IQ of 160, and won a Fulbright Scholarship to MIT. [via MeFi]

Hong Kong Int'l Airport won Skytrax Best Airport of 2004
I miss the old HK airport, though. Landing there at night was one of the coolest flying experiences. One felt as if you were going to just land right on some busy HK street, between skyscrapers. No American airport ranked in the top ten

Yankees fan's effort to name FleetCenter in Boston DerekJeterCenter on Mar. 1 vetoed

Exposing your babies to classical music doesn't enhance their intelligence

New version of The Apprentice, starring Martha Stewart

Open casting calls are this Friday for the next version of The Apprentice in which she takes the part of Donald

It's not illegal to publish current photographs of the Eiffel Tower at night without permission
Umm, oops

Life lessons from Warren Buffett
I enjoyed these

Gone Sundancin'

[I realized that I posted a draft of an unfinished entry about Sundance before I left for Park City last Thursday...pretend I never did. I'll finish that one and put it back up here shortly because I do believe the logistics of planning a Sundance trip are highly complex and frustrating, but all that's ancient history right now. I've had a great time so far, and I have one evening of fun left.]

I've been at Sundance since last Thursday evening, and tomorrow morning I return home. Most this time, I've been offline, so apologies to those I've failed to respond to in a timely fashion.

Last year's trip to Sundance was a surprise, but Jason and I had so much fun we decided to toss our hats in the ring again, this time with more advanced planning (i.e., we actually bought movie tickets ahead of time).

Every night, I've gotten fewer and fewer hours of sleep, and last night I grabbed only three hours of shuteye after returning home from a midnight screening of the disturbing and brilliant Old Boy before my cell phone alarm started screeching. By the time I heard and comprehended the meaning of that shrill cacaphony, it was 7:55am. My first movie of the morning started at 8:30am. The drive from Susannah's place in Salt Lake to the theatre in Park City was a half hour in light traffic. Then a half mile dash on foot to the theatre from the parking lot. Probably not worth it. I turned off the alarm and crawled under the covers.

But it was too late. My mind had awoken, and I began to think of how badly I wanted to see Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale. You can sleep when you're dead, and all that shit. I tried burying my head under the pillow to suppress the idea, but it only gained momentum.

Damn it! I threw off the covers, rushed into the bathroom and cleaned up quickly, threw on some pants and grabbed a whole bag of papers and winter clothing and sprinted out into the freezing Salt Lake City air to my rental car. What ensued was a frantic dash up over the mountain pass through a dense fog, my rental car struggling to stay over the speed limit on the uphill slopes. I parked at exactly 8:30, and then I sprinted a half mile in the cold to Racquet Club Theatre. I was seated just as the pre-movie short ended.

The Squid and the Whale was wonderful, validating my morning's effort. Baumbach is friend's with Wes Anderson, and they have similar sensibilities. The story is based on Baumbach and his brother's experience of their parents' divorce in Park Slope, Brooklyn, in the late 1980's. As with Anderson movies, the father, played by Jeff Daniels, is a selfish, immature man-child, yet vaguely sympathetic. The humor and music also reminded me of that in Anderson movies, but I thought The Squid and the Whale was more accessible and consistently funny than The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Great performances by Daniels, Laura Linney as his wife, and Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline as the older and younger brothers. It will most certainly get picked up by a studio before festival's end.

Joannie and Karen joined me this year for Sundance, as did Mike, Arya, Jon, and Bill. Jason and Jamie were here, as were a scattering of other folks from NYC and Amazon. Having everyone around added to the fun. We snowboarded one afternoon, cooked dinner and soaked in the hot tub another evening, dined at 350 Main our first night together for my birthday, and attended a few Sundance parties, gawking at celebrities and laying siege to the open bars. In between all that, I'll have seen twelve to fifteen movies by the time they wheel me onto my flight tomorrow morning on a stretcher, and that's not including the Mormon conversion show Karen trapped us in just before her flight out.

More later on Sundance after I return home, but one instant movie classic deserves mention: Kung Fu Hustle. It's an exhilarating slapstick martial arts comedy, and it's superior to Stephen Chow's previous hit Shaolin Soccer. Sony is distributing the picture, and it should hit theatres in March. As is common to Asian martial arts slapstick, it blends a seemingly incompatible set of genres, from comedy to musicals to romance to melodrama to action. As a bonus for movie lovers, Chow tosses in homages to The Matrix, The Untouchables, Spiderman, and a whole series of other movies. I haven't laughed that hard at a theatre in a long time, and at movie's end, Stephen Chow came on stage to a standing ovation from all of Eccles theatre, Sundance's largest venue, a school auditorium seating over 1,000 spectators.

If you have the opportunity to catch Kung Fu Hustle before March for some reason, do so. I didn't see any movies I really disliked, and we all had our opinions of all the movies we saw together, but we all agreed that Kung Fu Hustle was an instant classic, ironic considering it doesn't feel like a Sundance movie.

Jason and I have already begun plotting our return trip next year. After two years here, I finally feel like I grok the Sundance Film Festival, finally understand how to organize a proper Sundance trip for a large group in such a way as to ensure that everyone gets a healthy mix of snow sports, movies, parties, and free time. See you all at Sundance 2006.

Summer road trip pics

During my road trip from Seattle down to Los Angeles to deliver my car to Karen, I snapped a few photos. Many were shot blind as I drove, right hand on the steering wheel, left hand pointing a compact digital camera out the car window. By the way, I don't advise doing that unless you have multiprocessors in the brain. I swerved on to the shoulder a few times.

My last game at Safeco Field. Sang took me to see the Mariners play the Twins. I looked at the lineup and thought two things: "Johan Santana is pitching, and he's filthy, and Justin Morneau is a good young hitter." Santana pitched one run ball for 7 innings, and Morneau hit two homers. Santana went on to win the Cy Young, and he was the best pitcher in baseball this year. I was grateful to see him during his amazing second half run, to see major league hitters flail over the top of his daffy duck changeup. How does he grip it, I wonder, and how crazy is it that he can throw it 75 mph out of his palm when I can't throw a baseball at that velocity holding it normally?

Maelle and Sadie, at my going away BBQ. Maybe babies really do appreciate their awesome complexions.

Eric and Christina bought me this cake. It reads "NYC Ya Later Euge!" The entire outside of the cake was one solid layer of marzipan. Sinfully good.

Frankly, Otto found my imminent departure inconsequential. I pointed out that he had three chins. We reached an uneasy truce.

Taking this photo, I almost drove off the road.

Great weather for my drive down to San Francisco.

I think this is Mt. Shasta, though to be honest I can't remember anymore.

Almost thirteen hours later, I finally crossed the Bay Bridge into San Francisco, my legs having lost all feeling. Another thirteen hours later, I found a parking spot in the city.

Jon took me to catch a game at SBC.

Look where Barry Bonds' bat is relative to the ball. Would you believe he pulled this one foul? That's how ridiculous his swing speed is.

In Los Angeles, Karen took me to a concert at the Hollywood Bowl featuring music from MGM/UA movies (Sept 5). For some of the movies, film clips played on screen while the orchestra played. Maestro John Mauceri would introduce each movie and piece. For some reason, his voice reminded me of Phil Hartman, never more so than when he came out for an encore and then said, "Ladies and gentleman, we are honored to have with us here, Sheena Easton." And then she walked out and sang "For Your Eyes Only." If you had only heard this scene, you'd swear it was from an episode of The Simpsons. Of course, they played bits from Pink Panther, James Bond, Rocky, and West Side Story, but the highlights for me were the clips from Spellbound and City Lights.

Finally, I arrived in NYC, where I stayed with James and Angela. Gorgeous weather blessed us my second weekend there, and I met them in Central Park for a picnic.

My Kato Kaelin period

Since Thanksgiving weekend just passed, I feel it's appropriate to wrap up a post I have had sitting in draft form for a long time, ever since I moved out of my house in Seattle. It's one part travelogue, three parts thank-you note to those who opened their doors to me while I was homeless this summer. So let's hop into the George Michael Time Machine (okay, so he has a sports machine, but it looks like an old science fiction time machine, and it's conceivable that his hairdo is from an older time) and pretend I just arrived in NYC...

Now that I've finally arrived at a home base, and especially since today my sofa finally arrived and I no longer have to sit on the floor, it's time to reflect on my past months as a houseguest. It's an unsettling feeling, to wander the earth like Kane or Bruce Banner, living out of a suitcase and wearing the same clothes week after week, but my transition has been eased by the hospitality of friends. If you find yourself in the same situation and wander through some of the same towns I've passed through, I recommend all my friend's homes as places to crash. Tell them I sent you.

A quick summary:

Peter and Klara's flat in Marylebone, London

Amenities: massive living room with tall ceilings and magnificent floor to ceiling windows that overlook a park. A huge sofa (we're talking Alice in Wonderland proportions) to crash on. Easy access to the Tube (Marylebone Station just 1 block away). Notify Peter and Klara ahead of time and they'll book you tickets to the latest and greatest in theater. Owner Peter is a former actor and will entertain you for hours with lines from Shakespeare.

My experience: In London, I first stayed with Peter at his flat in Marylebone. Peter has learned how to manage expectations, as they are so fond of saying in the business world. He apologized to me many times before I arrived about the modest living room where he'd have to put me.

This modest living room turned out to be larger in and of itself than most apartments in NYC, with high ceilings and three massive windows to welcome the sunlight from outside. The sofa I slept on, left behind by the previous tenants, was perhaps the largest sofa I've ever sat on; leaning back in the sofa, my knees didn't reach the edge of the sofa, leaving the ends of my shins and my feet to jut out in the air. In fact, everything in the living room was so massive that I felt like Jim Carrey in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in the scene where he's back in his mother's kitchen from his childhood and he has shrunk down to a child-like size relative to his environment.

Whenever Peter and I hang out, we spend all our time discussing movies (few people see as many movies as I do, but Peter may actually have surpassed me these past few months in London, a great cinema town. We tried to find a movie that neither of us had seen and were left with the Garfield movie and 16 Years of Alcohol; we opted for the latter) and theatre. We discuss Shakespeare, of whom we're both huge groupies, and recite some of his soliloquys. Peter knows many more by heart, and he certainly can deliver them with more verve than I can.

Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning? Quite chop'fallen.

Of course, we caught a play. Peter bought us tickets to see Hamlet at the Old Vic theatre (Kevin Spacey is artistic director there) in the last weekend of the much-acclaimed production by Trevor Nunn (who is now producing the new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, The Lady in White.

The most controversial decision Nunn made was to cast very young actors to play Hamlet and his peers. He had noted that the word "youth" occurs again and again in Hamlet and felt that other productions had cast actors much too old. Nunn's other surprising choice, and the real revelation of the show, was to cast Ben Whishaw, a young and unknown actor who had only done one show previously, as Hamlet.

Whishaw offered one of the most memorable Hamlets I’ve seen, and it will be difficult in the future to accept middle-aged Hamlets. Nunn noted that the word “youth” appears in Hamlet over and over, and he thought previous Hamlets had been much too old. After all, Hamlet is still in school when his father dies. Whishaw’s Hamlet is a frail rail of a young man, pale, awkward, preternaturally intelligent and introspective. A mopey, sensitive youth dressed in black, hiding and muttering beneath a dark skull cap.

It works, for the most part, though I had a hard time buying that from this self-tortured and physically fragile intellectual would emerge the ruthless judge and executioner that is Hamlet. After all, Hamlet is a man who excoriates his mother, abandons his girlfriend, murders Polonius and two of his childhood friends, and ultimately assassinates the king of Denmark. In between, he draws intellectual moustaches on everyone around him. He is one of the most dangerous protagonists in Western fiction.

But Whishaw is otherwise brilliant, tapping into the humor and wit of Hamlet with an appealing glee, and some of his movements on stage lent the part a physical humor that I’d not seen in the role before.

The rest of the production was interesting, if uneven. It was cast in modern times, with machine guns, music by The Strokes, and electronic A/V equipment on stage, yet the play within a play had male actors playing female parts. Ophelia was played as a bubblehead, not someone one would imagine Hamlet doting upon. Imogen Stubbs, Nunn’s wife, played Gertrude as a middle-aged sexpot socialite, bringing more camp to the role than I’d seen before. Nicolas Jones was excellent as Polonius.

What the play reminded me of was how difficult and challenging a work Hamlet is. For one thing, it’s long: a full production would last four hours, but Nunn’s reductions brought it in just over three hours. The sequencing is odd. In the most widely used version of Hamlet, the famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy occurs just before a staged encounter with Ophelia with Polonius and Claudius eavesdropping. Nunn chose to move the speech way up in the play, at a moment when Hamlet is alone, deciding whether or not to commit suicide with a bottle of pills in his hand.

Trevor Nunn stood nearby us during the play, surveying the proceedings with wistfulness? Oddly, at one point during the play he spent several moments tearing open a candy wrapper, causing Peter to miss several lines of dialogue. Later I'd read a Kevin Spacey diatribe against noisy audience members and chuckle at the irony.

Peter and Klara both have close ties to the theatre world, Peter as a former actor, Klara as a leading set designer. Spending time with Peter in London, then, means rubbing shoulders with actor Cillian Murphy, star of 28 Days Later, and soon to be most well-known for playing Scarecrow in the upcoming Batman movie Batman Begins (goofy title, even worse than Batman: Year One, the classic comic on which it's based) opposite Christian Bale as Batman, directed by Christopher Nolan (Memento). It means visiting acclaimed Irish playwright Enda Walsh (Disco Pigs) at his flat and then taking a walk across half of London, ending with a Lebanese dinner.

I didn't spend much time frequenting tourist sights in London, but Peter and I did walk just about every street in that town. One day we must have logged nearly eight miles on foot. I suspect someday Peter and I may reunite in New York City, where Klara still keeps a flat...err, apartment.

Hart to Hart in Notting Hill

Amenities: Huge, modern flat. Guests get their own bedroom down one level. Owners Greg and Kristin have a cute baby named Jenson. Kristin has been taking cooking classes and will often treat you to a home-cooked meal. High speed Internet access via Ethernet. Nearest Tube station just a few blocks away.

My experience: The second half of my stay in London, I crashed with Kristin and Greg at their flat in Notting Hill. Let me tell you, expats live large. Their flat had two bedrooms, three bathrooms, and another room down a set of stairs that acted as a basement/third bedroom where I stayed. The kitchen was gorgeous. I was stunned.

I met 9 month old Jenson for the first time. He has a sly grin; perhaps he looks around and contemplates inheriting the flat someday. We took several walks around London, Jenson in his pram (I guess that's English for stroller). That's most of what I did in London, just stroll around the city.

Chateau Kilar

Amenities: a Frasier like view of the city from the deck. Personal parking space. Separate guest bedroom with deck. High speed internet access via Ethernet. Gym in the basement with treadmill and ellipticycle.

My experience: Fresh off a jaunt through Europe, I returned to the States in style by checking in at Chateau Kilar, as Eric dubbed it. I'd wake up, don a bathrobe, and go out on my own balcony overlooking the city and pretend as if I owned the house and everything that fell beneath my gaze. "Do you like what I've done with the place?" I'd ask the neighbors, and they'd run into their houses to call the police.

Of course I spent a lot of time with Sadie and Jamie, and Jamie's brother Jared was in town as well. Yes, that meant Jamie had three kids to watch over. Sadie was just in the early phases of walking, and she'd motor around with her arms held up for balance (held up higher than Frankenstein used to do in old black and whites; more a "boo" pose than a sleepwalk pose).

She also had begun speaking her own language. She's just a bit younger than Ryan, and what's useful is how so many kids share the same childhood curriculum. They all can point at the appropriate part of themselves when you ask them where their nose is, or ears, or head. What a little cutie! I'll miss being able to keep track of her development in person.

I began my marathon training here. My first time out running with Jason we ran 3 miles around the crown of Queen Anne in the rain. At the end, I thought I was going to throw up.

1739 Bradner

Amenities: Deck with view of Seattle from the Southeast and a grill the size of hatchback. Sweet modern kitchen with all those shiny, modern appliances. Garage parking spot. Wireless internet. Home theater in the basement.

My experience: Ah, old familiar 1739 Bradner. With Sang having bought my sofa and TV from me, it's like I never left that basement. How appropriate that my last days in Seattle were spent in the place I spent the most time. All things come full circle.

How many times I rode out of that driveway on my bike on my way to loop around Mercer Island or Lake Washington? Countless. I wasn't on my bike this time, though I did jog down to Lake Washington to run along side the water. I'll miss eating burgers off the grill, especially since I can't have a grill of my own here in Manhattan.

Seeing some of my artifacts still in the basement gives me the feeling that I did leave my imprint on one small space in Seattle.

Nob Hill peak

Amenities: Step outside for great views of the city in all directions, and what a beautiful city it is. Walking distance to a whole slew of neighborhood eats. A short jog takes you to the water for a scenic run to the base of Golden Gate Bridge. Strangely addictive electronic Trivial Pursuit handheld game. Nice, homey, young-couple-lived-in feel.

My experience: Justin and Betina rent this sweet little pad at the top of Nob Hill. Rent prices in SF are so low relative to NYC, I almost wept. I walked out one morning down to a local cafe and read the paper while having breakfast, and it was like being home again back in the Bay Area. Another day, Betina charted out a marathon training run for me, and I followed it one day out to the base of Golden Gate Bridge and back. The familiar San Francisco gales were in my face on the way out, but on my return, with the wind at my back, I floated over 3 miles like wing-footed Mercury. Those hills on the way back up nearly killed me.

L'il Jon

Amenities: Internet access. Sweet view back on the SF skyline. Walking distance to SBC Park. Leather sofas, big tv, personal guest bathroom.

My experience: I've stayed with Jon in SF before. Last time was when I was down visiting Gap headquarters. Jon's still in the same sweet bachelor pad. No need to change a good thing. We'd been plotting a visit to SBC (formerly Pac Bell) for some time, and he came through big-time, scoring a block of tickets from some co-worker. Awesome seats, right on top of the field. We spent half the game trying food from just about every concession eatery in the place. Awesome ballpark.

Polly and Ed's: a true home office

Amenities: A guest bedroom, wireless Internet, dozens of eateries just a few blocks south on Castro St. A heavy dose of nostalgia for Stanford alums. In-house exercise equipment.

My experience: I finally got to meet little Emily, the tiniest of newborns. Polly and Ed were worried that she looked like a little boy, but seriously, that's way too much pressure for a girl in her first four months in this world. What's really cool is that Polly and Ed started their own business and run it out of their home, using a separate garage building as headquarters. Seeing packages piled up inside, waiting for twice-a-day pickups from the local UPS truck, reminded me of stories of early Amazon, run out of Jeff's garage.

Karen's new pad in Manhattan Beach

Amenities: My little sis. Wireless internet, walking distance to Manhattan Beach and all its restaurants and stores. Los Angeles weather. Skinny, beautiful people everywhere.

My experience: My time with my car was at an end here, and if we had to leave each other, I'm glad my baby was passing on to family. Karen was in Hermosa Beach last time I visited, and she'd moved to Manhattan Beach. Cleaning out the car was like cleaning out an office in the movies: everything you need to take with you inevitably fits inside one cardboard box.

I went for my first 12 or 13 mile run while down here, leaving the apartment one night at around 6:45pm. I ran along a soft trail for a few miles but found that it was causing a lot of arch pain, so I migrated to the boardwalk on the beach, and hit my stride. For about seven miles, I felt like I had finally achieved some form of runner's high. I ran to the south end of the beach, and beyond. At around mile 11, my legs turned to lead, and the last few miles were a slog. Karen called me once because it was past 9pm and she was worried I'd run to Mexico. At the time, that marathon seemed a long, long ways away.

Karen put up with me one afternoon when I had to borrow her computer to join in on my fantasy football draft for a few hours. We also drove down to Temecula one day to help our parents unpack some of their furniture and to preview their new house. They kept driving me by the Indian casino nearby, asking if I wanted to go in. For some reason, I felt like a recovering alcoholic being driven past the local pub over and over, even though I'm not yet guilty of being a gambling addict.

James and Angela's: A preview of coming attractions

Amenities: Physical manifestation of what a well-furnished, spacious NY apartment can be. Samsung DLP-LCD Projection HDTV. Internet access. Occasional home-cooked meals by Angela.

My experience: James and Angela were kind enough to put up with my presence for nearly two weeks while I apartment-hunted in NYC. Sharon came with me two days to look at places. Apartment hunting in NYC is just as bad as everyone says it is. Truly miserable.

James and Angela have a great apartment, though, in a great location, and ultimately spending time near their place convinced me to try and live near Union Square as well. Many of my early impressions of Manhattan came through them; I saw the city through their eyes. And talking with Angela about her first years in Manhattan (everyone here has a story of first year tribulation) helped to convince me that things would only get better once the apartment hunt was behind me.

Through Angela, I was introduced to the corn fries at Mandler's Sausage, Shake Shack, and brunch at Pain. Through James, I found several local poker rooms. Illegal, of course, which makes them all the more irresistible. Once through the front door, it's tough not to feel like Mike McDermott, especially since Rounders screenwriters David Levien and Brian Koppelman frequented many of these places.

Ultimately, I ended up with an apartment just a few blocks from Union Square and James and Angela's apartment. One long trip behind me, and another one just beginning.

Bandon Dunes

Last weekend, Bill, Ken, and I journeyed to Bandon, Oregon, to Bandon Dunes for what's become an annual golf trip for me. The tagline of Bandon Dunes is Golf as it was meant to be, and I'll attest to that. If I were Hemingway and wrote a letter to a friend after this weekend, I might write:

Just played Bandon Dunes golf course this weekend. It's a goddamn beautiful course. It's been called golf as it was meant to be, but nothing's pure in life, I've decided. But it's the closest thing to it.

On the ninth hole, we spotted some wild pheasants resting in the gorse. Bill and I circled around the back, inch by inch, all the while watching the wind direction. We got close enough to take our 8 irons to a few of them. Bloody mess. Knocked the head of one of them thirty yards. Ken had no stomach for it.

I hadn't played much golf this year, but I made up for it over the weekend. As Bill and I arrived at the airport at North Bend on Friday (a single gate in a structure the size of Bill Gates's outhouse), I called the course to see if any tee times had opened up on Pacific Dunes.

We were in luck. I grabbed the next available tee time on Pacific for that afternoon, and I also put us down for another round on Pacific the next morning, before a previously scheduled round at Bandon Dunes at 12:30. Our room wasn't even ready yet. Bill and I just headed straight to the course from the airplane and teed off.

The Tom Doake-designed Pacific is more difficult than David McLay Kidd's Bandon. The fairways and greens are tighter, and it's more like target golf. Low handicappers tend to favor Pacific. The course has a longer stretch of holes along the ocean. My golf swing was rusty and felt alien to me. I stood over every ball confused and expecting the worse, and I shot my worst round in years.

Saturday morning, Ken, Bill, and I were the first group sent out at Pacific Dunes. We arrived at the course in near darkness just after 6:30 in the morning, and as soon as enough light diffused through the cloud cover, we teed off, at around 7:20am.

My swing was still nowhere to be found, though it wasn't nearly as disastrous as the previous afternoon. Ken was driving everything straight down the heart of the fairway. In the early morning fog, the course felt mysterious, gothic. We could have been in Scotland, and standing over one of my many disaster recovery shots amidst patches of gorse, I half expected Will Smith as Bagger Vance to suddenly appear in a dark brown suit and top hat and say, "I hear you lost your swing. I guess we got to go find it."

One of the great things about Bandon is that they encourage ready golf and push for a pace of 4 hrs 20 minutes a round. And they receive it. We finished our round in four hours and headed straight over to Bandon Dunes for a second eighteen. The sun was out by then, transforming the course again.

They've taken the fangs out of Bandon since last year. They cut back the gorse (a nasty, thorny bush that swallows golf balls whole) on either side of the fairways, widening already wide landing areas on most holes. It's a great course for creative links-style play, though, especially when the wind is gusting. You can use your imagination and approach every whole in a variety of ways. The greens roll as true as any greens I've played anywhere, and the course always plays fair.

We finished our second round at about 5:30pm. I could barely walk. At Bandon, your first round of a day is full price, your second round is half price, and your third round is free. Since we'd already played two rounds that day, any additional holes we played would be free. There's not a whole lot else to do there, and who could turn down free golf on a course as beautiful as Bandon on a glorious day? Bill's caddy Dale did a double take. "You're headed out again? You guys are crazy." This from a guy who said he was half blind in one eye because his brother had dropped a slab of concrete on his head while horsing around when they were young.

We were the first ones out that morning, and we were the last ones to tee off that evening. We could hardly walk, but having that entire course to ourselves was magic. The course had changed yet again, framed by the searing orange of the setting sun.

We staggered to the ninth hole and finished in the murky gray of twilight. 45 holes of golf in one day, the most I'd ever played in a single day.

We sat outside of Mulligan's Pub by an outdoor fireplace, slumped in our chairs like soldiers returned from war, feet aching. A few glasses of the Rogue beer brewed especially for Bandon Dunes restored our energy.

Sunday we had planned on another 25 holes of golf: 18 at Bandon and the 7 just-opened-that-weekend holes at Bandon Trails, the new Ben Crenshaw/Bill Coore designed course that's set to open next year. Unfortunately, Bandon Trails wasn't open on Sunday so we'll have to challenge it next year.

I birdied the second hold on Sunday, a par 3 that played about 170, but it was Bill who was the story. By hole three, when he hit his approach shot, Ken and I looked at each other and made the "whooo-eee" expression. Bill was in that happy place athletes call the zone. We're not professionals, so it wasn't that he was assaulting every flag stick, but he was just rock steady, consistent from tee to green.

On the back nine, I found my swing for a stretch and stayed with Bill for about five holes, all pars and bogeys, but the last few holes he lost me. After the round, Ken and I tallied the score and asked Bill what he thought he had shot. He said 84. We showed him the scorecard, which we had autographed for him. He had shot a career-best 81.

I carded a 91. I think I'm a good luck charm. I was there with Robert when he shot a 73, just barely missing a putt for par, at Washington National. I think I carded a 91 that day also.

Pacific and Bandon rank #2 and #7 in Golf Magazine's 2004 Top 100 Courses You Can Play. Pebble Beach is #1, but at a cost of $395 to $420 a round, it's not a better value. I'll have to try Bethpage (Black) which is ranked #3 and is in Farmingdale, NY. I played Torrey Pines (South) in June, and it doesn't compare to Bandon or Pacific. For golf purists, Bandon Dunes may be the premier single destination in the U.S., especially once all eighteen holes of Bandon Trails open next year.

Lance at NY Marathon?!

Lance Armstrong was on the Tonight Show today, and he revealed that he's pondering running the NY City Marathon. He'd run it to raise money for charity (his cancer foundation) a la P. Diddy. That would be awesome and a huge motivational boost for my training. He said he's out of running shape and would have to run slowly, but somehow I suspect his notion of slow is different than mine.

In fact, my likely race pace is not just slow, it is, according to Houston Marathon medical director John Cianca, an "insult to the distance." He goes so far as to say "a ten-minute pace arguably is not running at all." I'm guessing John doesn't do much motivational speaking.

This afternoon, I ran a route that Betina mapped out for me. It took me along the waterfront to the base of the Golden Gate Bridge and then back. It was a beautiful run on a crisp, sunny day, fighting through a stiff wind on the way out (oof) and cruising with the tailwind on the return. One of the great things about traveling around these past several weeks has been the opportunity to constantly run new trails. Every one of my long runs thus far has been run in a different city, and that should continue this weekend when I reach Los Angeles.

On the way out, I saw a fit, attractive thirty-something woman running towards me with a black shirt that had the word MOTHER in silver lettering across the front. Cool, I thought, someone who wants to prove that you can be a mother and still stay in shape. I turned around after reaching the base of the Golden Gate Bridge and caught up to her after a mile or so.

The back of her shirt contained, in the same font and color, the word F*CKER.

Shut out

Every one-day Farallon Island cage diving trip offered by Great White Adventures this fall is booked solid. Nuts.

You may claim that the thought of lowering yourself into a cage in the water with a Great White Shark is too frightening, you fraidy cat, but then who are all these people who booked the trips solid? It's you, isn't it, you snake? If you're really so scared, let me take your spot.

The writer of the copy for this particular trip exercised get restraint in not using exclamation points, and wins huge points in my book:

Witnessing a very large White Shark attack and consume a 200 to 300 lb. Elephant Seal is an extremely dramatic event.

Give me your tired, your poor, your shower curtains

One of the joys of returning to the States is the uniquity of shower curtains here. For some reason, many bathrooms in France and England do not have shower curtains. Many now have a half pane swinging glass door that conceals have the shower inadequately at best. But some, for example the one at my hotel in Paris, have no shower curtain at all.

This leads to some unusual contortions and gymnastics in the shower. I've never tried yoga, but I'm fairly certain I mastered a few of the advanced yoga positions while trying to keep my bathroom dry. All to no avail. I had to spend a euro to summon housekeeping to fetch me from the shower in a boat to convey me across the moat that had sprouted in the bathroom during my shower.

Why don't many European bathrooms have curtains? Is it because they only take baths? Seriously, does someone know? I'm dying to know.

� > � > $

The dollar is weak. I felt its weakness in Paris, where a sandwich and a drink at Zagat's number one best buy restaurant, the sandwich shop Cosi, cost me about $15 U.S. Not a fortune by any stretch of the imagination, but the prices soared from there. I recall visiting Europe when the euro first went into circulation. Back then, the euro (�) and dollar were about equivalent.

Ah, the good old days.

If Parisian prices make New York's look like those of a flea market, London's prices do the same to those of Paris. The prices for coffee at Starbucks in London are just a bit higher than those in the States, but to compound the disparity the prices here are denominated in pounds, a currency which sounds heavy and carries its weight in dollars. A pound sterling (�) is worth nearly 2X a dollar, meaning a grande latte costs nearly $7. I don't even drink coffee and yet my mind recoils with horror.

If I lived in London or Paris for any stretch of time, I'd end up a Jean Valjean, haunting the sewers like some deranged pauper. Fortunately, I have a stash of Powerbars I brought for my cycling trip. I should be able to live off of those until my return to the States.

Prithee, where be the A/C?

One thing I had forgotten about Europe but which I'm reminded of in these hot summer months: Europe has some sort of prejudice against air conditioning and ice cubes. I have yet to hear a good explanation why this is so. Last summer, during the heat wave that nearly crisped Lance Armstrong during a long time trial, thousands of elderly people in France perished. Maybe it's some perverse form of population control.

July would not be my first choice of months in which to visit Europe, but that's when the Tour de France is held, and so. It's perhaps the hottest month of the year in Europe, and after a day of cycling in the scorching heat and oppressive humidity, the last thing I want to come back to is a hotel room or apartment without air conditioning. But that's often the case.

France has improved a bit. I think all the hotel rooms I stayed in during the Tour had air conditioning this year, though the quality of said air conditioning units varied. Ice cubes, however, are still a scarce commodity.

"Des glassons?" I would plead, holding out my empty glass to the bartender.

"Non!"

It brought to mind Patrick Stewart as the maitre'd at L'Idiot in L.A. Story: "You zink you can hev zee duck weet a craydeet leemeet lahk zees? You cannot hev zee duck. You can hev zee cheeken."

The lack of air conditioning and ice cubes may explain why I'm eternally parched and dehydrated. I can't remember a moment when I haven't been thirsty since I arrived in Europe. Even when I'm bloated with water, I still feel like I've just walked out of the Sahara Desert. Cycling with only two water bottles was just not enough. I'd have to pause in the midst of my rides to dash into cafes to fill up.

The other night, Greg, Kristin, Peter, and I attended a performance of the Jerry Springer Opera. It was a muggy day, and I had been looking forward to a few hours of respite from the heat in a cool, air-conditioned theatre. Surely the theatre would have air conditioning.

Oh, what a naive fool was I! On stage, as Jerry Springer descended into hell, we were gasping for air in our own personal hell, sweat pouring down our heads and affixing us to our fabric seats in the oven that was the Cambridge Theater. Riding on the Metro or the Tube? Bring your own air. The public intercom at the Tube urges all passengers to bring a bottle of water aboard, and signs illustrate the dangers of the trapped air in the tunnels below, depicting the silhouette of a Londoner collapsed at the bottom of an escalator leading down into the Tube.

Though I can't explain the paucity of air conditioning in France and England, this peculiarity explains many other things. Why the French are so thin: they sweat off several pounds each day walking around town. Why the French spends hours upon hours sitting in cafes: they are trying to move as little as possible in an effort to avoid sweating. Why the parfumeries are at the ground floor of French department stores, and why they're some of the most massive parfumeries in the entire world: no explanation needed.

It got to the point where we began selecting restaurants that advertised "salle climatisee." Who can eat in a sauna? After all, I have to live up to the stereotypical image of American obesity, and I can't very well do it lolling about in a cafe, smoking cigarettes.

FOOTNOTE: What I need is one of these Avacore devices. I first saw them being tested by the Stanford football team at Stanford Stadium.

More from the Tour in 04

More of Paris

Paris

Seabiscuit

Really good book, even sans mint juleps--I read it in a few days while traveling through Chile. One of those stories that's tailor made for a movie. The trailer seems to be milking the sentiment, but read the book and you'll realize that all the absurd dramatic highs and lows all happened in real life. This third trailer's music is from Legends of the Fall.

Almost any topic contains the potential for high drama, including horse racing. I for one will be checking in to see if Funny Cide can pull off the Triple Crown.

All good things must?

Awaiting a series of flights that will deposit me back home. In three days I'll be doing something I haven't done in 3 months, and that's head out to an office in the morning.

My trip concluded with a hike of the Inca Trail to the fabled Incan city of Machu Picchu. I felt like a porter because I chose to carry my tripod, ballhead, and other camera equipment with me. With all that weight, the 3300 foot climb up to Dead Woman's Pass nearly finished me, but after 4 days of trekking I survived, and the spectacular visual imagery will stay with me a long time. I may need arthroscopic knee surgery and a pair of new ankles, but I still have to unequivocally endorse the Inca Trail as the most impressive trek I've ever been on, counter to the claims that it's been overcommercialized and overhyped.

Heavy heart, weary legs, fresh mind. Who knows? The next three months may be just as interesting as these previous three, though for different reasons. Decisions, decisions.

Getting high

I'm waiting out a torrid rainstorm here in Cusco, in an Internet Cafe. All Internet cafe's advertise themselves with the adjective "speedy" here in South America. This one happens to fulfill that promise. I've been in Cusco before, and I've spent enough time here to actually have a favorite Internet cafe.

Cusco (also spelled Cuzco, depending on the source; every location and building here in the city has multiple spellings and names, reflecting the tension here between the city's Queccha/Incan roots and its modern identity, post Spanish invasion and post independence from said Spanish conquerors): the first thing most visitors notice about the city is its altitude of 3,400 meters. You don't see it, but you feel it. Walking at a brisk pace quickly leaves you breathless, and if you push it, eventually you get a nasty migraine. Or worse. It's my first experience with altitude sickness, which affects people randomly. It has nothing to do with your fitness (reminds me of oxygen consumption in scuba diving, which also seems unrelated to any measurable physiological characteristics of the diver).

Once you get over the dizzying heights, though, Cusco is a fabulous destination. Much more interesting and exotic than Lima, which you almost always have to fly through to get here. Sure, it's a tourist mecca, but it earns that distinction by virtue of its Incan ruins. The walls of Cusco are a spatial embodiment of its history. The base of many walls consist of Incan masonry, still existing from the age of the Incan empire in the 15th and 16th century. On top of that base of stones, fitted together with remarkable craftsmanship, are the cement and clay walls built by the conquering Spanish. Most of the cathedrals in the city were built by the Spanish atop Incan temples, and it's a shame more of those temples don't exist today. The Incan walls are famous for being made up of giant stones fitted together with remarkable airtight efficiency. The technology to build such walls exists today, but not the patience.

Today, Cusco seems to want to return to its Incan roots. Most locals I meet here proudly proclaim themselves Indian, though no pure Incans remain. Still, it's unique to see a country embrace its distant past. Most contries I've visited treat their indigenous peoples like a cultural artifact to be placed in museums by the conquering Europeans.

Despite the lousy weather right now, I've gained a second wind and am excited to begin the hike. A few days ago, lying ill in a tiny cabin on a ship off of the coast of the Galapagos Islands, I had a momentary pang of homesickness, but now that I'm in Cusco I'm ready to travel another several months. It could be a result of the delightful Peruvian or Andean cuisine. I'm surprised not to have seen any Andean cuisine in the U.S. The day after my nasty bout of altitude sickness, I had a huge Peruvian lunch at a an outdoor restaurant (quinta) called Quinta Eulalia. My meal consisted of rocoto rellenos (spicy bell peppers stuffed with ground beef and cheese and vegetables), choclo con queso (corn on the cob with a slab of local cheese), and chicharrones (fried chunks of pork ribs called chancho). Mmmmmmm. The corn on the cob here is some strain I don't recognize. Each kernel is three times the size of a corn kernel in the U.S., making it look like some mutant vegetable. Other favorites include their locros (potato stews), adobo (spicy pork stews), tamales (like corn bread, wrapped in banana leaves), and anticucho (grilled beef hearts on a skewer). I tried the cuy al horno, the most famous local delicacy, roasted guinea pig. The meat was sweet, but there were a ton of bones, and since the pig came out to me whole, legs splayed out on the plate, teeth bared in a sort of death grin, I couldn't help but feel some pangs of sympathy for an animal which we embrace as house pets in the States.

I have achieved travel zen. No amount of travel inconveniences ruffle me. For every inconvenience there is more than one benefit. The altitude which plays havoc with my body also means that lots of the mountain biking here is downhill. It's insane downhill. You're on an ancient mountain bike, without toe clips or clipless pedals, with lousy brakes, flying down the mountain on the same path as suicidally aggressive trucks, buses, and taxis, fleeing from stray dogs which may or may not be rabid but are definitely hungry, dust and potholes everywhere. And from time to time, if you dare look to the side, you'll see some several hundred year old Incan ruins, like the salt pans of Salinas. How can you beat that?

(though I do, on nights when Mark Prior is pitching, desperately wish I could get a televised feed...I read how he plunked Barry Bonds and then jawed with him...I'm just waiting until I get home so I can purchase an authentic Mark Prior jersey to go along with the autographed Mark Prior baseball I bought last year)

"I respect Barry as a player, as a hitter and obviously what he's done... The inside part of the plate for me, for me to be effective I need it. I was just trying to back him off. He said what he had to say and I said what I had to say. I hold nothing against him. That doesn't mean the next time I face him I'm not going to go right back inside."
--Mark Prior, Cubs pitcher, after hitting Barry Bonds (AP)

"I'm sure it could have gotten heated. I wasn't going to back down from him at all... Just because he's got 15-20 years in the big leagues and 600 homers and I have been in the league a little under a year doesn't mean I have to stop doing what makes me a professional."
--Prior

No escape from Kiper's hair, even in Cusco

Any more worthlessly analyzed event than the pro football draft? The last time I was in Cusco, I stopped for lunch at a restaurant, and the meal took two hours, as the wait staff was working on South American time. The TV in the corner was tuned to ESPN, which was, I surmised, broadcasting the NFL draft for nearly the whole day. Mel Kiper and the rest of ESPN's supposed draft geniuses, dubbed in Spanish, boxed in to complex screens that had tickers running across the left and bottom of the screens, several rows or columns deep, numbers scrolling right to left, up to down, in all directions. It was, perhaps, the single greatest volume of incomprehensible multimedia information every to wash over me. (I should note that super agent Drew Rosenhaus was the only person so loud that he could not be drowned out by the dubbed Spanish track; Rosenhaus, inspiration for Bob Sugar in Jerry Maguire, is the perfect caricature of a power sports agent, except he's for real)

I agree with TMQ on the absurdities of NFL draft analysis--it's all much ado about nothing. Among them, the ridiculousness of 40 yard dash times which differ by mere percentage points, insightful observations such as "first round quarterbacks usually fail since the last few superbowls have been won by journeymen quarterbacks," and stuff like that. I personally find it ridiculous that groups of rowdy fans for a team will be shown on TV, cheering or booing draft picks of players they couldn't name just days before. Why do we care what those boorish football fans care? And why are they spending an entire day of their lives watching a football draft live, anyway? Get a life.

Road Reading

I've been devouring books during transit times through airports, or long bus or plane rides. The selection is miniscule, and most bookstores that carry any English books have the most random selection. It takes dedication to sift through for some worthwhile nuggets. Among my conquests these past two weeks:

• George Stephanopoulus' All Too Human: A Political Education, a fairly interesting account of his days working on the first Clinton campaign, up until his resignation at the end of Clinton's first term. The relationship he had with the Clintons was a complex one, and because they didn't end up as close friends Stephanopoulos can give an honest opinion of Clinton (one could argue that his honest account ended their friendship, though it doesn't seem that way). The book also made me realize just how much of a model it was for Sorkin's The West Wing. Entire plotlines seem lifted from real life. Speaking of Clinton, I see Monica Lewinsky's reality TV show has debuted; it's events like this which make me yearn for another couple of months away from the U.S.


• Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho. I'd read excerpts before, but never the entire book. More gruesome and disturbing than the movie it inspired, which more people were exposed to, I suspect. This is an impressive novel, and its narrative induced in me a trance-like fever. Or perhaps that was the bad ceviche talking. At any rate, I'll have to put it on my all-time favorites list when I get home.
• Jonathan Seabrook's Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture took me just a few hours on a plane ride to finish. Seabrook, who wrote and still contributes on occasion to The New Yorker, writes about the replacement of highbrow and lowbrow culture in America today, and he dubs the conquering fusion of commerce and culture nobrow. He uses the struggles of The New Yorker as a case study of how cultural elitists have lost sway in a society in which pop culture reigns supreme. In America, a nation where social hierarchy is extremely fluid, highbrow culture (reflected in the early, William Shawn New Yorker attitude) consisted of opera, classical music, ballet, the classics. It's the attitude that says anything that is popular can't be of substantive quality, because such an attitude is all that preserves one's elitism in a society in which any Joe can become one of the wealthy, instead of just inheriting it. Somewhere along the way, though, fringe became mainstream, and all the boundaries collapsed and became meaningless. Nirvana's success is most often cited as that seminal moment in the music world when alternative became mainstream, and the assimilation of hip hop is seen as the logical outgrowth. Clinton is the Nobrow president, able to use polls to maximize his Q-ratings, changing chameleonlike to maintain his popularity instead of having to take a guess at which stance would be most popular with the public. Anyway, that's just a rough summary of his thesis, which, though it meanders a bit, is quite fascinating. I think I personify nobrow in my tastes, which range from classic to pop culture. If you had to pick a magazine that reflects nobrow, perhaps Entertainment Weekly would be it.

I've hit the end of the line, though. I don't have any more books to read, and Cusco doesn't have any great English language bookstores. My need to read is compulsive. Given my current state, I really wish I could plug my iPod in and start downloading tunes from Apple's new music download service. As if you needed a reason to purchase an iPod, which now comes in a few new models with a slimmer form factor. I'm glad they added a docking station, and jealous, of course, since mine is one of the old fatties, and, at 10Gb, the lowest capacity now offered.

Off to Peru

Sometimes, I'll be wandering down some quiet street in some tiny South American town, and I'll feel as if I could turn some corner and disappear from the world, and all traces of me would fade away, until a short while later no one would even remember who I was. At these times, the world feels amazingly vast.

Recent highlights include mountain biking down from nearly 13,000 feet to 11,000 feet near Cusco, along a path that hugged the side of a mountain, the cliffs dropping off to one side; snorkeling atop a school of Pacific cownose rays and spotting white tip reef sharks and sea turtles to the side; hiking the ruins near Cusco; snorkeling with a colony of sea lions frolicking all around me; Peruvian cuisine; watching the mating dance of the blue-footed boobies from, well, the front row, essentially (the Galapagos Islands are famed for the fearlessness of their wildlife, who have spent millions of years isolated from predators).

And to be fair, a few lowlights. Difficulties leaving Argentina because they had failed to give me a proper entry card when I crossed from Chile to Argentina. Altitude sickness upon arrival in Cusco, to the extent that for two days my migraines and breathlessness rendered me useless. Getting food poisoned from some ceviche I ate in Quito, and then two days later throwing up from terrible seasickness right after dinner when the boat taking me around the Galapagos Islands crossed rocky seas from Floreana Island to Espanola Island. Avoiding a shifty English-speaking "street guide" who tried to extort money from me and tried to maneuver me into an alley where some of his thug buddies were hanging out.

Just finished up with the Galapagos Islands and Ecuador, and tomorrow I head back to Peru. A day in Lima, a day in Cusco, and then I set off on the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. I'm nearing the limits of my self-imposed budget, and when all is said and done, I'll be content to board the plane home.

It takes two

Awaiting my flight to Lima, where I spend a day in the airport before flying to Cuzco the following morning. I will fly more on this trip through South America than I've ever flown in such a compressed time period. It's a big country. With international flight restrictions, that's a lot of hours sitting in airport lobbies.

Buenos Aires satisfied my urban hankering. It is undoubtedly a sprawling city, crowded, noisy, and fashion-conscious, with pedestrian-threatening traffic at every turn. You do not want to cross a street here assuming that any car will respect your right-of-way. The Avenida 9 de Julio is the world's widest street, with some sixteen lanes and three or four different dividers. It takes two changes of lights just to get from one side to the other.

Two things stood out for me. The first was my dining experience at a parrilla, or Argentine steakhouse. Most famous ones have a giant stuffed bull out front to frighten off any vegetarians, and the one I visited, La Chacra, had a circular, open charcoal pit right inside the front window, complete with several former animals spread-eagled on spits inserted into the ground.

South American love red meat. My dinner might just be the best red meat indulgence I've had in my life, better than Kobe beef in Japan and the churrascarrio in Brazil. The use of charcoal pits is part of it, though Argentines also insist that it's because their cows feed on grass rather than corn, and because they don't feed their cows the growth hormones and antibiotics that Europeans and Americans use in their feedlots. Whatever the reason, the meat, seasoned only with salt, is leaner and tastier than red meat in the states.

An order of the parrillada, or mixed grill, brought me one taster after another. Chorizo (spicy sausage) was followed by costillas (beef ribs) was followed by rinones (kidneys) was followed by lechon (suckling pig) was followed by cordero (lamb). I nearly fell over unconscious at that point from blood loss to the brain and the red wine. Carnivores who go to heaven end up with a seat at a parrilla. Fantastic.

Last night I attended a tango show at Esquina Carlos Gardel, a tango house. After a forgettable dinner, the room full of mostly Spanish speakers and a few tourists like myself were treated to a dazzling display of tango dancing and tango songs. I'm not a huge fan of the tango songs which the legendary Carlos Gardel made famous, but tango is perhaps my favorite ballroom dance. It combines the haughty pomp of upper class dances like the waltz with the naughty sensual playfulness of dances like samba. Impressive--I think if you're going to prepare a wedding dance, you should treat your guests to a performance of the tango. I took some tango lessons in a social dance class in college, but I sure don't remember learning any of the moves I saw last night.

Actually, I'll add a third thing to the list of things I'll remember about Argentina. It's a place where you will feel ugly, unless you're a supermodel. Good genes here, indeed.

The Argentine economic and political difficulties were on display. Political graffiti marred most of the landmark buildings, including the Metropolitan Cathedral, and every several blocks a protest would be conducted while armed militia watched warily from their guard posts in front of government buildings. My travel agent had printed out an Intelliguide report on Argentina and sent it along with me, and I finally read it last night. The first line said that Americans should avoid Argentina until things settle down. Too late. I actually felt quite fine throughout my week here, but admittedly tourism is way way down.

I walked halfway across town yesterday to visit a skilled camera repairman named Jose Norres, but because I'm leaving today he didn't have enough time to fix my film advance mode problem. So I'm stuck taking photos with a two second self-timer delay. It will be frustrating photographing some of the wildlife in the Galapagos. Well, perhaps I'll run into a gifted repairman in Cuzco.

The bus system in Buenos Aires is confusing. I couldn't find great information about it in my guidebook or online, so my route to the Cementerio de la Recoleta was wayward, at best. The cemetery was under renovation so it was a mess, but a security guard read my intentions without a word and led me to Eva "Evita" Peron's grave, nestled tightly in between two other giant crypts on a side alley. The aristocracy of Argentina resent her presence there because she fought against them on behalf of the poor, but for the public it is by far the most popular of the lavish of the gaudy mausoleums in the cemetery.

One limitation of my Lonely Planet Argentina is that the restaurant listings are already out of date despite the publication date of April 2002. Since Lonely Planet only publishes updates to their guidebooks once every 3 or 4 years, it's understandable, but what was more frustrating was the paucity of good restaurant listings for Buenos Aires online. Fodors.com had the best list I could find, and it was woefully inadequate. Lonely Planet says on their website that they're devoting resources towards publishing more frequent guidebooks (as opposed to spending that time posting upgrades online). I still find it surprising that a city of Buenos Aires' size doesn't have a complete listing of restaurants somewhere online.

When I was in elementary school, I was more of a loner. Late in life, I've developed more of a need for socializing. It's a balance, but one that is difficult to maintain with my beginner-level Spanish here. In addition, every country down here speaks a different dialect. It's a lot to absorb. Trying to discuss camera repair with Jose Norres was almost absurd. How do you say, "I think the contacts on the film-advance mode selector wheel are loose?" or even just "my film is stuck permanently in self-timer mode instead of single frame advance?" Isolation because of language issues is particularly severe.

But friendly people abound, and hand signals and body language can go a long way. Off to Peru, where I have my free week in Cuzco. Need to find a place to stay there, and to book some trips into the jungle and to nearby Incan ruins.

El hombre sin miedo

Suffered several hours of horrifying mefloquine-induced nightmares last night. Won't jot down their substance here as it's too personal and painful to recount, but I must wonder if the antidote for malaria is worse than the disease itself. Six more weeks of this? On the other hand, such nightmares do reveal to me, in a Freudian release of the unconscious, my deepest anxieties and fears. I think I've reached that age where family is increasing in importance to me. I understand why people will move to be closer to home, with home being where one's family lives.

Nostalgia is a most peculiar emotion. It is inherently sad, to me, but at the same time so appealing. It spreads over the body like warmth, and I find myself nostalgic quite often during this trip. How is it we can miss things we've maybe never even experienced, or can't be sure occurred the way we remember? Maybe it doesn't matter, and all nostalgia is is a side effect of living in a linear temporal world in which our memories point backwards. Perhaps if time were reversed, we'd be nostalgic for the future.

My last post was just after the airline strike by LAPA. Aerolineal Argentinas bailed me out with a flight to Trelew, and I've spent the last two days here in Puerto Madryn. That was probably one day too many, though a day with an empty schedule is not always unwelcome on such a long journey.

My first day here was spent almost entirely on a tour around Peninsula Valdes. It's famous as a national park for some of the wildlife it hosts. The star of the area is the Southern hemisphere's right whale, which can be seen off the coast certain months of the year, but not this month. Instead our guide focused our attention on the next most enticing species, the elephant seal. I knew that it was an elephant seal not because the guide told me but because I read it a day later in an English museum brochure. The guide spoke only a rapid stream of Spanish the entire 12 hours of the tour, and I understood nada. Half the time I slept while we bounced over unpaved dirt roads in our tour bus, cutting across long, desolate stretches of arid steppe where nothing moved beneath the endless canaopy of blue sky except the occasional guanaco. And our mini tour bus.

The elephant seals, which, at the time, I knew only as elefante marino, lie on the beach this time of year, sunning, sleeping, I'm not really sure. They're massive, a pale stone-colored grey, and they lie in small groups, as if dead. They sneeze quite often, and occasionally they fart loudly, which always caused a few of us tourists to snicker like school children, and our guide would shush us with a frown, as if we were embarassing her or the seals, or both.

How do so many people know of Patagonia? Until I decided to travel to South America, I had no idea where Patagonia was on a map, nor whether it was a country, a mountain, or a saying (it's a region). All this consumer-culture baby knew was the clothing brand. Yet everyone I speak to back home about my trip exclaims, "Oh! I want to visit Patagonia." Even without traveling to Patagonia, you can get a very good idea of what the area is like by picturing an environment in which the technical gear manufactured by the clothing brand Patagonia comes in extremely handy--windy, occasionally wet but usually quite arid, cold up high, warm in the summer, a bristly desert floor like the rough half of a velcro fastening.

Nothing but capilene and other synthetic fibers have touched my torso since I left home, and I must admit it's quite comfortable. There's an overdone functionality to wearing capilene, fleece, and gore tex out to dinner that's quite pleasing. You feel like a trekker even if you're simply window shopping around town.

Accumulated sleep deprivation caught up with me, and last night I fell asleep with the TV and lights on about midnight and didn't wake up until 9 this morning. After breakfast, I went for a jog along the beach, all the way to the southern tip of town where I spent a half hour in the Ecocentro, a tiny museum about the geology and marine life of the area. Then I jogged back, fighting a stiff Patagonian gust the whole way. It's the first time I've jogged in forever, and right now my knees feel like rusted hinges. If I step off a curb awkwardly my leg might snap like a dry twig. Still, something about running along the beach in crisp, ionized ocean air revitalizes the lungs.

By the time I felt like lunch, which was 5 p.m., nothing was open. All restaurants close between, say, 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. I ended up having quite possibly the worst pizza of my life at Lizard Cafe, the only restaurant that was open in the nine blocks I walked. Then I strolled arond town looking for trouble and finding none. I was, I am, ready for some urbanity after this two week stretch of Patagonian desolation.

And then I stumbled on a movie theater. The only movie theater in town, and the only movie theater I'd seen since I left the States. At that moment I was so ready for an American movie. My two choices were Chicago or Daredevil. Having seen Chicago already, I settled for Daredevil: El Hombre Sin Miedo (if that doesn't mean "the man without fear" then I'm dumber than I realize). The last time I saw an American movie in a Spanish-speaking country I was unpleasantly surprised to find it dubbed in Spanish, without any subtitles (Tomb Raider, in Madrid). But I guessed that this would have Spanish subtitles because a poster for one of the children's movies coming soon boldly proclaimed "hablada espanol!" or something which I guessed meant "dubbed in Spanish". That message was absent from the Daredevil movie poster.

No commercials or anything. The movie theater went dark and immediately jumped into the famous Twentieth Century Fox graphical montage. It was music to my ears, a blessed familiar landmark for the eyes. And the first words uttered in the movie? In English. I'm all for learning the local languages, but it will be a long time before I can watch any movie in a language other than English and understand it.

The movie itself was terrible, but it killed some time. They don't mess around here. As soon as the credit began rolling the lights came up and the curtains closed on the screen. Damn it, who was the key grip?! Now we'll never know.

I'm starting to pick up some basic Spanish, and I can work out a lot of written Spanish using contextual clues or familiar roots from other Romantic languages. My favorite Spanish phrase is m�s o menos, which, like its counterpart "more or less" in English, or similar phrases like comme ci, comme ca in French, has an aphoristic lilt, the sing-song charm of a nursery rhyme. I try to work it into conversation with locals whenever possible.

I spent the rest of the time until dinner polishing off the anniversary issue of The New Yorker which arrived while I was in Australia and which has been a perfect travel companion for the last week and a half. I'm sad to have finished it off, and I can't remember the last time I read an entire issue of that magazine from cover to cover. I can't stand to spend an idle moment without reading material--I've been that way for as long as I can remember.

The limitations of printed travel guidebooks was apparent when scouring for restaurants. Half the places listed in the Lonely Planet guidebook for Puerto Madryn have closed or moved. I had to window shop, seeking the place with the most locals. At dinner, I was struck, for the first time in ages, by an unquenchable desire for a cold Coca Cola. They had only Pepsi, but fortunately it came in an ice cold glass bottle, and it was the best tasting drink, the most refreshing thing I've had since a pisco sour in Chile. I loved Coke on ice as a kid. Once again, nostalgia.

Buenos Aires awaits tomorrow. I have a flight to catch in about five hours, and as usual I'll be sleep deprived. I never really left West Coast time, and every morning I'm dragging myself bleary-eyed to whatever sight I have to see. But I nap when I'm tired, eat when I'm hungry, and it's liberating to find that those times aren't the same each day. I'm ready for a dose of urban living, and Buenos Aires sounds like just the thing.

The only annoying issue I'm dealing with right now is a camera problem. My Nikon, at some point in Ushuaia, became stuck on self-timer film advance mode. Everytime I take a picture now I have to wait several seconds until the shutter fires. It's not too terrible for landscape photography, but for shooting active wildlife it's unbelievably aggravating. Without a backup camera body I have little recourse but to keep fiddling with it and hope it fixes itself. There are no camera stores to be found anywhere in these tiny towns, though perhaps Buenos Aires will provide a Nikon shop that can perform a quick fix.

Don't miss too many things from home, except my bike, family and friends, and Cubs games. My beloved Cubbies are in first, and I try and hop online whenever possible to track their progress.

Besides that, am I having a wonderful time? M�s o menos.

Plane strike

The airline LAPA went on strike today. Thus my flight out of Ushuaia, scheduled for tomorrow, has been put on hold indefinitely. My local host greeted me as I got off the catamaran that had taken me up the Beagle Channel, and she conveyed the unfortunate news.

So I'm headed to the airport tonight to see if I can switch to another airline to hop a flight to Trelew, a day ahead of schedule. On a vacation with this many flights and destinations, something was bound to happen at some point. No sweat. Part of travel is rolling with the punches. Anyhow, I think I had exhausted Ushuaia.

This year is also the first time I've used travel insurance, and already it will pay for itself, covering the extra flight and additional night in the hotel in Trelew.

Just a thing you say

The most common things I hear from people back home via e-mail, mostly folks who are working or in school, is that they're living vicariously through my travels. It's a kind thing to say, imbuing my travels with some greater level of importance, but I never believe it for a second. How does one travel vicariously? It's like eating filet mignon intravenously. I don't even enjoy travel writing all that much, though I do enjoy reading books written by people who've lived in an area that I'm traveling to (as opposed to reading books by people who've simply traveled to those destinations as tourists).

Travel guidebooks are a joy, though. Few books in one's life become one's companions in the way a guidebook does. I really should leave my Lonely Planet Argentina behind when I leave Buenos Aires to cut down on my pack weight, but it would be like abandoning a trusted friend. Of all the Lonely Planet guidebooks I've used, the Argentina edition is perhaps my favorite. The local maps of these tiny towns throughout Patagonia have been invaluable, and the short history lessons come in useful, especially when the local museum only includes explanations and tours in Spanish. It even includes enough on Chilean Patagonia that I really could have left my Chile guidebook at home.

Found a bookstore in El Calafate with a few English books. In fact, every store that had any books in El Calafate had the same set of English paperbacks. A few by Robert Ludlum, a few by Tom Clancy, one by Stephen King written under his Richard Bachman pseudonym, a lot by Danielle Steel, some Dean Koontz and W.E.B. Griffith, and a few by P.D. James. I had to plop down just over $10 US each for two P.D. James mystery novels. Painful, especially since the same could be had on Amazon.com Marketplace for less than a dollar plus shipping. It's my first encounter with P.D. James work. Hopefully it will recall that year in my youth when I read just about every Agatha Christie mystery every published.

I located an electric outlet prong converter for Argentina today. Major score. Now I can recharge my iPod. Every country in S. America thus far has had a different prong configuration. This is really something that the world should standardize on. My supposedly universal adapter-converter from Brookstone somehow forgot about the continent of South America.

Such a strange feeling, being on sabbatical. All around you, everyone continues to push their Sisyphean boulders up their hills. One day you just stopped, left the boulder at the bottom of the hill, and hiked to the top with a backpack, a bag lunch, and a pair of binoculars to have a picnic and check out the local flora and fauna.

Tomorrow: Tierra del Fuego and the Beagle Channel. Retracing the voyage of Darwin.

23's last game

Wish I could have caught Jordan's last game. I'm not one to cry, but seeing one of my personal sports heroes hang it up is sad in so many ways, not the least being that it is as clear a mental marker of my age as there is. I remember watching him as a rookie, so to see him retire...I can't even think about it.

Besides Lance Armstrong, Jordan was the one other sports hero who did seem superhuman. They always came through in the big game, the big event. You felt you couldn't go wrong rooting for him. One of my favorite Jordan memories is staying up late one night in a New York hotel room, watching him pull off a miraculous 37 point game against the Jazz in the NBA finals despite being sick with the flu. Even his skin that day looked a sickly color on TV, he was so ill. Yet he led the Bulls to a comeback victory, and I was jumping up and down and screaming in my room the whole time.

Boys II Men played "It's So Hard to Say Goodbye" at halftime of today's game while his highlights showed on the scoreboard. It's probably for the best I missed that...I surely would have cried.

Deep South

Ushuaia is the southernmost city in the world. 75% of Antarctic boat excursions leave from its port. The city is nestled at the feet of a glacial mountain range, with the Beagle Channel on the other side. An ideal locale for its 45,000 citizens and the tourists passing through.

Getting here was an adventure. No one told me what airline I was on this morning, and I didn't have a ticket either. I hopped a ride to the airport and fortunately there were only 3 airline counters to try, and one of them had an e-ticket for me. Hey, sometimes everything has a way of working itself out. Perhaps it's the laid back culture around me soaking through, but I never felt too distressed about the whole deal.

Something about traveling through South America keeps giving me these pangs of nostalgia. Perhaps it's the autumn weather, which always reminds me of fall days growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, or those late afternoons at Stanford when the sun was setting, classes were finished, and an open night lay ahead. Autumn is the best season.

Or perhaps my nostalgia is a result of the music around me. Where do old 80's and early 90's pop hits go to die? The tiny hotels and restaurants of the towns dotting Patagonia. Every song is a time warp back to some day in high school or college.

Or perhaps it's the cozy hotels of Patagonia. All with their extensive wood paneling and fireplaces and local decor.

Or perhaps it's dialing in over and over again, trying to find one solid connection to the Internet on this hotel computer. If I'm lucky, after redialing 9 times, I get a 21kbps connection that holds for about 10 minutes before it mysteriously disconnects again. It's the ghost of AOL, arisen to haunt another hemisphere.

Eating lots of seafood. Fish is plentiful, and king crab (centolla) is a local specialty, a bit different than the king crab commonly served in North America. Tasty, and cheap. Meat is also a specialty here, as they pride themselves on hormone-free lamb and beef. I've tried to avoid too many heavy meals of meat, though it dominates most of the menus.

The weight of water

Glaciers are highly underrated. Among geographical phenomena, mountains get much more acclaim, but most of those were carved by glaciers. Before this year, I couldn't name one glacier I'd seen in my life. I don't know if I had actually seen any in person.

These past two months I've encountered glaciers everywhere: Fox, Franz, Balamaceda, Serrano, Grey, Perito Moreno, and today Martial. I hiked Perito Moreno yesterday. It's the most impressive one I've encountered yet. The face of the glacier rises 17 stories high, and it runs down from the Patagonian ice cap some 17 kilometers. The Patagonian ice cap is the third largest in the world after Antarctica and Greenland, and the Perito Moreno glacier is simply a nub sticking out of the Southeast corner.

If you stand there long enough, a huge chunk of ice will rupture off of the face and crash into the ocean. The sound is awesome, like a giant stalk of broccoli being sheared in half. I saw several of these occurrences, and not once did it fail to elicit all sorts of frantic shouting and gawking from the crowds milling about the viewing platforms.

We hopped a boat and cruised over to the edge of the glacier where we donned crampons and hike around for two hours. Perito Moreno is unique among the world's glaciers in that it is one of the few that is stable. Most glaciers in the world are retreating for one reason or another. The tradition here is to chip off some glacier ice and drink some whiskey with it. Nothing like hiking around a giant glacier with crevasses everywhere with a whole gaggle of tourists drunk on whiskey.

Over thousands of years, snow accumulates, the pressure turns the lower layers to ice, and gravity starts to pull the ice down the mountain slope, carrying dirt and stone with it. Thus are glaciers formed. We love to pinpoint specific moments in time to derive history's course, defining events like volcanic eruptions, decisive turning points like Pearl Harbor, but it's the slow but steady forces like glaciers which most often shape our lives and our landscapes.

Off to Argentina

Headed to Argentina tomorrow on a bus.

As with most things here in South America thus far, my Internet connection here at this cafe moves at the same speed as the glaciers that carved out most of Patagonia. Brutal. Therefore, this post will be short.

What word on an ATM means withdrawal from checking? I thought the ATM here would have an option for English. Guess not. Couldn't even make out the meanings of the words from the roots, or similar words in French. Oh well.

Torres del Paine is a very impressive national park.

I'm running out of reading material. On vacation, you can absorb books as quickly as the pisco sours they serve before every meal. I read one novel on the flight down to South America (Final Epidemic, an Amazon recommendation: trashy medical thriller, completely plot-driven, the type of novel in which any character's inner revelations are set off in italics, but timely in that it covers a viral epidemic resulting from biological and chemical terrorism) and finished Seabiscuit: An American Legend yesterday and today (engrossing read--highly recommended!). I used to wonder how it was possible to fit a book on two cassette tapes, but when you have blocks of hours to kill, it doesn't take long at all to read a book. I'm down to my last paperback, and I haven't seen an English bookstore the whole time I've been here.

My sleep schedule is odd. I fall asleep each night at about two, two thirty in the morning. Wake up usually around 6 to catch a shuttle to my next destination or tourist destination. Begin tiring in the late afternoon and feel like dying at about 5pm, so I catch an hour nap. Then dinner at around 8 in the evening, and I'm wired until 2 in the morning when it starts all over again. It's not much sleep, just a series of short naps throughout the day, but it seems to work well, like the idea that it's best to eat a whole lot of small meals rather than three large ones.

Given that it's off-peak travel season here, most of the tiny towns I've visited have been very quiet. A bit too quiet at night for me, the solo traveler, but perhaps some time off to think is a good thing. Too much time to think can drive me batty, though.

You don't know darkness unless you've stood out in the middle of a campground in the middle of the night in Torres del Paine, with not one light to be seen anywhere except that of the thousands of stars in the sky. It's a blackness so deep it seems to have weight, and density. Luckily I found my flashlight, or I would have never gotten my tent disassembled and made my ride out of the park this morning.

The end of the world

Who knew? The greatest challenge I've faced thus far is the Spanish-optimized keyboards. None of the punctuation marks, except the period and comma, are where I expect them be. Let me tell you, these will be some HTML-sparse posts because I can't deal with the frustration of having to crank out brackets. So if all sorts of weird symbols show up in my post, it's because I still can't figure out which of these strange things is the apostrophe.

Spent a day in Santiago--an interesting mix of the modern and the traditional. Now I'm here in Punta Arenas in Patagonia--the end of the world, they call it, and indeed, it's the furthest South I've ever been. Here, the sun rises in the Southeast and sets in the Southwest. Strange. It's cool here, a dry, crisp Autumn air. Reminds me of football weather from my childhood days in Chicago. Refreshing, and it clears your head. The landscape is somewhat windswept and desolate, a very beautiful, stark mixture of hills and ocean.

Visited a museum yesterday dedicated to the indigenous peoples of Patagonia. Similar story to every other country I've visited this year. Europeans came, bringing disease and weapons. Here, the natives were sent to missions where many died. I think there's one pure native still alive now--the rest have been assimilated into the local population. The citizens of Punta Arenas don't actually consider themselves citizens of Chile. They call themselves Magellanas, after Hernando Magellan, who came through here in the 1500's and ended up dying in the Philippines.

The pace of life is very relaxed. In fact, I'm waiting for a museum to open up. Posted opening time? 10:00 am. When will it open? Anyone's guess. My limited Spanish skills haven't been too much of an impediment yet, though having a guide with me at times has helped.

Alan and I were chatting while I was waiting at LAX. He and Sharon are moving to the Upper East Side of Manhattan in June where Alan will be studying at Cornell. He must be happy to leave St. Louis after so many years there, right? He admitted to a surprising reluctance, an inertia of sorts, a feeling he equated to hostage, or Stockhom, syndrome. It's an apt metaphor for lots of what I felt just before I left Seattle for South America. We come to embrace the familiarity of our prisons--the known enemy more comforting than the unknown, I suppose. Now that I'm here, wandering the streets at night, it's all good. But how often I fall prey to hostage syndrome, clinging to dependent relationship in work, life, etc.

Here's to breaking free of our captors. Off I head to Puerto Natales.

On the road again

Off I fly to South America. The last day before a 5 week trip is always a mad rush. I'm packed and about as ready as I'll be at this point, as woefully unprepared as that may be.

I've tried to jot down as many e-mail addresses and phone #'s as possible, but I'm sure I forgot quite a few. Drop me a line while I'm gone, and I'll be sure to reply the first chance I get to hit the Internet. I'd love to hear from you all, as the most mundane news from home is welcomed with open arms while one is abroad, simply for being familiar amidst everything that is foreign.

And if somewhere along the line, you decide you want to quit and rush down to meet me? Well, I'd love the company (solo travel teaches one the meaning of the words Lonely Planet), especially if you speak Spanish.

Pics from my previous trip to NZ and Oz and Rio? Well, time ran out on me. I've only managed to jot down my memories from the first half of the New Zealand trip. Let's hope they're still fresh in my mind when I return from South America. One of these days I'll finish scanning all those photos and post my recollections.

And now I unplug for a while, with simply a camera, some books, a paper journal, and some clothes. What sort of world will I return to in the middle of May?

Hopefully a more peaceful one. See you all in mid-May.

P.S.: If you live in Seattle, a perfect way to welcome me home would be a ticket to see Matrix Reloaded at Cinerama on opening night, the day after I return. =)

Holy Colossus, Batman!

Forgot the giant squid I'm always obsessing over. My new favorite nature pinup is the colossal squid. Even more, well, colossal and more dangerous than the giant squid, it has 8 arms and two tentacles that have up to 25 lethal hooks! We're talking "sharks with frickin' laser beams on their heads" territory.

Thanks to Hawaii Scott for forwarding this to me. I can't believe this isn't bigger news. I'd never even heard of the colossal squid before today. You probably haven't either. This is an oversight we must all strive to correct.

Smoking bans slash heart attacks

Story over at New Scientist. Personally, I don't care if others want to smoke, but my latest pet peeve is coming home from a bar or club smelling like a chimney. Maybe if all smokers would contribute a small tax which I could draw from for my dry cleaning bills.

Seriously, who would have thought New York would have a smoking ban earlier than Seattle? I'm moving.

I see colossal squids...and Elektra...and there's Auntie Em...

I took my first dose of mefloquine today. It's an anti-malaria pill, and one of its most common side effects is disturbing, strange, and/or unusually intense dreams. It's happened to me before, and after popping the pill this morning I've been somewhat woozy.

On the downside, there's a possibility I could end up like this poor German chap.

On the positive side, I discovered yesterday that Jennifer Garner filed for divorce from her husband. This, combined with the mefloquine, leaves the distinct possibility that I'll meet her in my dreams tonight. Her, and a colossal squid.

Leslie Cheung commits suicide

Fans of Hong Kong cinema are all familiar with Leslie Cheung. Shockingly, the acclaimed actor committed suicide Tuesday, leaving only a cryptic suicide note. Most know him for his roles in A Better Tomorrow, Chinese Ghost Story, Farewell My Concubine, Once a Thief, and The Bride with White Hair. Being a Wong Kar-Wai fan, I enjoyed his work in Ashes of Time, Happy Together, and Days of Being Wild.

He was at his best playing aloof, brooding, seemingly tortured souls. Sadly, perhaps this is one time life did imitate art. HKFlix has a very complete DVD filmography for Cheung.

On a side note, the publication of silly April Fool's Day stories on the web on April 1 has become a bit predictable, and when serious and somewhat shocking events do occur on April 1 their validity comes into question. I hesitated to link to this story at first because I thought there was a tiny chance it could be a prank.

North Korean dictator places triplets in orphanages

This sounds like a plot of an Asian martial-arts B-movie, like the ones in which the evil emperor drinks the urine of young boys to increase his kung-fu skill, but sadly it's true.

How comforting for those of us living in Seattle, the only major city within the outer range of his nuclear weapons.

What would it be like to be the last man on earth?

Not quite as good as it sounds. Highly entertaining read.

I recommend reading it while listening to Horowitz in Moscow. A great recording of a great recital.

Cubs win! Cubs win!

Ah, if only Harry were around to exaggerate the importance of today's Cubs victory. Well, he isn't, so I will.

Let's see. Kerry Wood fought some of his control problems and had filthy stuff. Working exclusively with his fastball and a nasty overhand curve, when he was around the strike zone he was filthy. Looks like he might finally have command of that curve, and he got a few called 3rd strikes on it. When that pitch is on and Wood drops it on a batter after they've seen a few 95mph heaters, it's unfair. If he can work in command of the slider and changeup later this year...ooh baby.

Hee Seop Choi showed his patience at the plate, drawing two walks and smacking a double deep into left center. Patterson showed he can go get the ball in center field, and he'll have to surrounded by the two old horses Alou and Sosa.

Patterson of course had a career day with the two homers and 7 RBIs. I'm still not convinced he's mastered an approach at the plate. He still swings at everything. Still, when he connects, even when hitting off of his front foot, the ball flies off of his bat. If he had some of Choi's patience and pitch selection...

Juan Cruz was filthy in striking out the side two innings in a row. He looks like he has some attitude on the mound this year, and that's a good thing. His stats have always been better from the bullpen, but I still hope he beats out Estes for the fifth starter's job.

Alou looked very comfortable at the plate. The Cubs need a big year out of him batting behind Sosa.

Sosa was, as usual, Sosa. Patient at the plate, not chasing pitches out of the zone, he drew three walks and was content to go to the opposite field since they were pitching him that way.

And somehow Grudzielanek got on base four consecutive at-bats from the leadoff spot. Probably too good to last, but it makes Bobby Hill's demotion easier to stomach for one day, at least.

Should be, at the least, a competitive team.

Ouch! That pricks!

Went for my travel immunizations today and ended up $122 lighter! Sheesh. Who would think that a typhoid fever vaccine and my second Hepatitis-A booster and a few printouts from the Internet would cost that much? Is that the usual going rate? It cots $40 just to have the lady lecture me from notes I could have printed off of the government advisory web pages myself. Oh well.

You read enough before any trip and it's enough to scare you into staying home. In Rio de Janeiro it was the street gangs, carjackings, kidnappings, and riots. In my upcoming destinations I run the risk of yellow fever, malaria, typhoid fever, altitude sickness, Hepatitis A, Hepatitis B, Filariasis, Leishmaniasis, River Blindness, CHAGAS Disease, and rabies. Let's see, if I avoid swimming in any water, drinking any unbottled water, approaching any animals, and sleeping with any of the locals, and if I apply a toxic coating of DEET-rich insect repellent each day, I'll be safe.

Of course, it sounds safer than Asia, the epicenter of the SARS outbreak, or Europe, where some anti-American Frenchman might hurt beat me with a baguette.

Also saw the doctor this morning and was diagnosed with a sinus infection. No wonder I've been feeling so fatigued and miserable. Could barely keep my eyes open today, and a short spin on the bike left me utterly spent. Need to get my hands on some antibiotics tomorrow and try to nip this in the bud before I have to hike at altitude in frigid Patagonia.

Matrix Reloaded soundtrack, and Peter Jackson's next project

AICN had the track listing. Dave Matthews?!?

Disc 1
01. Linkin Park - Session
02. Marilyn Manson - This Is the New S**t
03. Rob Zombie - Reload
04. Rob D - Furious Angels
05. Deftones - Lucky You
06. Team Sleep - Passportal
07. P.O.D. - Sleeping Awake
08. UnLoco - Bruises
09. Rage Against The Machine - Calm Like A Bomb
10. Oakenfold - Dread Rock
11. Fluke - Zion
12. Dave Matthews - When The World Ends

Disc 2
01. Don Davis - Main Title
02. Don Davis - Trinity Dream
03. Juno Reactor - Tea House
04. Rob D - Chateau
05. Juno Reactor - Mona Lisa Overdrive
06. Don Davis vs. Juno Reactor - Burly Brawl
07. Don Davis - Reloaded Suite

As for Peter Jackson, his next project is a remake of King Kong for Universal. Probably more along the Harryhausen King Kong than the Guillermin version, which would be a good thing.

E-mail patterns

Interesting study on e-mail traffic patterns. Would love to see myself charted on e-mail traffic network charts.

Billy Beane

Looks like Michael Lewis (Liar's Poker) has excerpted his book Moneyball, the Art of Winning an Unfair Game on Billy Beane and the Oakland A's in this week's NYTimes Magazine. Can't wait for the book, and the article just whets the appetite more. Beane is the personal hero of sabermetric statheads everywhere because he's living proof that the theories they have obsessively constructed actually work in practice. In a perfect world, he'd be the Cubs general manager.

As well-run as the Oakland A's are as an organization, someone should also do an article on the Mariners as the model economic organization. Got taxpayers to foot the bill for their stadium so they barely pay anything to use it to line their wallets, built their own team store so they could keep all the margins for themselves, signed Ichiro not just as a fine ballplayer but as a tourist attraction, and have wisely parted ways with huge stars like Randy Johnson and Ken Griffey Jr. and Alex Rodriguez when they knew they couldn't absorb the economic hit. As outrageously profitable as the Mariners were last year, they should have signed someone for the stretch run last year. Their window may have closed.

Tony Blair

Out of this whole impassioned debate, I've come out quite intrigued with Tony Blair, who I knew nothing about before.

Scatter plot

Have been spending time with friends who are moving away from Seattle. Lunch with Peter on Friday, just before he caught a flight to London to search for housing. The next time I see him and Klara will be in London. Aaron, who's moving to Germany. The next time I see him and Roswitha will likely be at their wedding outside Nuremberg. Attended two going away parties for Greg and Kristin. The next time I see them will also be in London. Spent an afternoon with Bean, who I'll see again, though by year end I suspect she'll be settling into a new city I know well.

This still feels like an inflection point of a year to me. Close friends and family quitting jobs, changing jobs, starting jobs, moving out of town, getting married, having kids, buying houses, selling houses...you might think the rate of change is always this great and I've been too busy to notice, but you'd be wrong. This is more than usual.

Incidentally, everyone who sees me remarks on how healthy I look. Makes me suspect that while I was working at Amazon my appearance was sickly.

Cheap long distance

Bigzoo is the type of company I always suspected existed, but had never bothered to research. Karen suggested I check it out, though, and the rates are amazing! I can call Europe, Asia, and Australia for less than I currently pay to dial long-distance in the U.S.

I purchased some credit, and I'll give it a try tonight.

Prep for Patagonia

Went to REI as today was the last day to spend my 2002 dividend and get 10% off of one item in the store. Patagonia's going to be cold, and I needed some clothing and trekking gear.

Have to hand it to REI--all of the staff there know their stuff. Most are serious mountaineers themselves, and they had me set up with a multi-day pack in no time, and with my dividend and 10% discount it was a steal. The bonus was coming across an Arc'Teryx Gore-Tex shell on sale for $100 off. I'd seen it in the store before and love given up hope of ever seeing it discounted.

Also grabbed some short story collections from Twice Told Tales on Saturday, and now I just need some film and I'll be set for South America. Lots of solo time in the remote wilderness awaits. Emotionally I'm not necessarily ready to head off. Everything here at home feels comfortable right now and there's plenty to do. Still, it's always better to be out ahead of these curves. The day after I return from South America is the first day I'm due back at the office!!!

We'll ignore that for now.

Pics from New Zealand and Australia

Yes, I'm behind on these. Scanning is laborious, and I've been trying to jot down my memories to go with the photos, and it's all taking much longer than expected. So much to recall. But I promise, it will be up before I leave for South America.

Warm weather, not so hot on the bike

Yesterday and today were the two warmest days of the year thus far in Seattle. 60's, slightly overcast. Woke up exhausted this morning--not sure why. Couldn't keep my eyes open all afternoon, and didn't want to follow through on a promised bike ride with Laura. Neither did she, I suspected. A movie would have been the easy way out.

But thankfully I censored my inner wuss and pushed for a loop around Magnolia. The warm spring air woke me up (it's good to sweat), as did the ride. I'm still as slow as a cow on the bike. Usually I've gotten a few hundred miles in on the bike by this time of year, and I think I just broke 150 today. It will take more than these occasional 30 mile spins to get in shape for the Alps of France in July. Oh, it's humbling in the saddle.

B-Day

Top 10 properties in baseball, as determined by Baseball Prospectus. Interesting.

The past three days I've been neck-deep in baseball statistics, prognostications, and commentary, preparing for two rotisserie baseball drafts. Tuesday was round two of three of bidding in my sabermetric league, and soon as all the fast and furious bidding ended at 6pm I had to completely change my thought process for my rotisserie 5x5 league which was operating using a snaking straight draft. The players are valued differently in each instance, and the draft strategy is radically different because of the formats. Both are fun in their own ways--they're all just games which appeal to gamblers, stat-heads, numbers guys, and not least of all baseball fans. It's similar in appeal to playing the stock market, but more enjoyable because your financial future isn't in play. For those who think they know more about baseball than the next guy, it's a way to put a minor wad of money where your mouth is.

Preparing for all these drafts is mentally straining. The amount of information available is overwhelming, and absorbing it all can be maddening and also strangely enjoyable. Every next tidbit of information catches your eye, and you hoard it all away in the hopes of having that one insight which none of your fellow owners have caught onto. Today was the last round of the sabermetric league, and I'm glad it's over. I'm too competitive to take things like this lightly and it's mentally taxing.

Of course, it helps when you think you'll win.

Decision markets

It's interesting to follow the decision markets in general, but especially in turbulent times like these. The financial page of the Mar. 24 issue of The New Yorker highlights sites like Newsfutures, Iowa Electronic Markets, Hollywood Stock Exchange, and Tradesports, sites which allow you to buy and sell derivatives on just about any outcome imaginable, from how much a movie will make in theaters (traders give Head of State the edge over Basic this weekend, despite the fact that Head of State is opening in hundreds fewer theaters) to whether or not the U.S. will catch Osama Bin Laden in 2003 (currently trades at 35% probability).

Interesting, and accurate. The Iowa Electronic Markets routinely beats national polls in predicting presidential elections. The principles is the same as that governing the efficient markets theory: decision markets channel the collective energy and resources of a group of people with intense knowledge of and interest in a particular area of interest. That's why it's so difficult to beat the stock market.

Of course, when everyone is so wrong about something, that's also worth examining. Look at IMDb's poll or Entertainment Weekly's issue on who would win Oscars and you realize how big an upset Adrien Brody and Roman Polanski pulled off.

How we came to war

Someday soon, a whole series of politicians and journalists will rush books to the market analyzing the leadup to this war with Iraq. Until then, here's one interesting account in this week's New Yorker. Among the intriguing points noted is the now self-evident realization that the United Nations is really only empowered when the great powers of the world are in agreement (by the way, how did France get a spot on the Security Council? is it the same reason old golfers still get to play in The Masters?).

And the somewhat sobering thought that the current administration could care less what protestors are saying in the streets. They've filtered it out like so much low-decibel noise.

Strange

I can access every website from my Macintosh except for anything related to my own website, eugenewei.com. I can't grab my e-mail, can't ftp anything to my directories, can't even find the website through a browser. I have no such problems on my Windows desktop, and my Mac can surf to every other website. Anyone have any idea why that might be and, better yet, how to fix it? Winner definitely gets a nice dinner on me.

South America

Have just about put the finishing touches on a trip to South America to depart late next week. Planning multi-week travels can be hard work, especially given the wealth of information available on the Internet and the overwhelming number of permutations of airplane flights and itineraries one can assemble in a country as vast as South America. Having a budget to enforce helped to narrow things down, and I left one just completely open week in Cuzco in the middle of the schedule to give myself the freedom to just follow my whims while there in person. Should be fun. Will hike through frigid Patagonia, tour the Galapagos Islands, and trace the steps of the Incas to Machu Picchu, among other things.

Still, before I've even left a black cloud has appeared in the distance. Two days after I return from South America my leave of absence will come to an end. Three months hardly feels like enough time for a leave.

Still an assassin

Thanks to Sang, I got to see Jordan in his last game in Seattle the other night. Jordan's 40 years old but still a dangerous, effective player. He played tough, physical defense on Rashard Lewis, and despite not having the stamina to sustain an effort for the full 44 minutes he was on the floor, he paced himself as best as he could, and when the game was on the line he came through with an alley-oop layup and two fade-away jumpers that hit nothing but net to ice the game for the Wizards. Here's hoping he gets one last chance to work some magic in the playoffs.

Not the prettiest of games--the Sonics, who basically conceded they were going into rebuilding mode when they traded Payton and Mason, shot something like 37%. The basketball was bruised and battered from encountering so much rim, so little net.

Spokane II

Nak and I drove out to Spokane again today to watch Stanford in round two. I woke up exhausted so Nak drove, and that proved a wise decision later.

There isn't a whole lot to see on the drive out from Seattle. Open farm fields. The weather was gloomy this time for most of the ride out. Low-hanging, menacing clouds covered the entire sky.

Stanford was up 44-40 at halftime, then couldn't score in the second half and couldn't stop Ben Gordon or Emeka Okafor. That was all she wrote. We watched a half of the second game between Tulsa and Wisconsin before hitting the road.

The trip back was like the trailer for Gerry. We hit a snowstorm crossing the Pass and had to slow down to 30 mph because it was dark and there were no reflectors or street lights. It was like driving into pitch black nothingness with simply snow flying into your windshield. They really need to put streetlights or more reflectors on the side of the road or both there. Better we were in Nak's AWD station wagon then my car, though I've done that before.

The highlight was stopping at Arby's, which reminded me of my youth in Palatine. Taking road trips, one encounters occasional instances of these fast food restaurants from one's youth, located in the most random and desolate stretches of America, marked by neon signs hoisted high in the air like flags, shimmering mirages in otherwise barren farm fields. Perhaps the corporate headquarters simply forgot that some of these franchises existed in these remote locations and they go on operating, oblivious to the fact that the parent corporation has folded or gone bankrupt, like Boston Market.

Now that Stanford is out and since I didn't fill out a bracket this year, I couldn't care less what happens the rest of the tourney. Forget what I wrote before. March Madness is overrated.

The life less ordinary

Everyone asks what I do while on sabbatical, as if curious if I'm overwhelmed by idle time. Nothing could be further from the truth. Every night I lament the end of my reservoir of waking hours, for there still aren't enough of them.

The days are full, but balanced. It's easier to get up immediately when not working. I'm not sure why, but it is. I always wake up at 7:15am these days even though I don't set my alarm, and I immediately turn on a light and start reading. Something about that hazy, dreamlike state I'm in when I've just awoken and the cocoon of silence in the morning is conducive to absorbing fiction deep into my mind. Just finished Part One of Ian McEwan's Atonement...wow! It was incredibly well written. His Amsterdam won the Booker Prize while Atonement fell just short. If Amsterdam is better than Atonement...well, I'll just have to read both and find out for myself.

Then I get up and grab some breakfast and catch up with CNN on the latest news (i.e. all things Iraq) to depress the hell out of myself. I long for a return to the halcyon days of irrational exuberance, when everything was overvalued and it was safe to fly to Turkey.

Then I work out. Normally that would mean a ride on my bike, but the weather has been shit here in Seattle so that's happened all of two times since I've been back from Rio. So I have to hit a gym and lift weights and ride some machine like a prisoner for two hours.

Then it's home for a shower and lunch, and then some optional afternoon activities. One, I can scan some of my slides into my computer and archive the resulting TIFF files on CD-ROMs. Alternatively, I can spend an hour listening to my language instruction CDs. Or I can watch a DVD. I'm trying to watch one classic movie every other day. Or I spend an hour writing. Or flipping through one additional chapter in one of the numerous instruction books I have lying about. There's one on producing beautiful inkjet prints, and a few on photography. Yet another is on digital movie making. And of late I've been flipping through travel books on South America and surfing the web, trying to pull another trip together. Given the SARS outbreak in Asia and the war in Iraq, South America seems a safer choice than Asia or Europe.

Then I'll cook or meet someone out for dinner and perhaps a drink afterwards. The evenings are always different. A movie, or a visit to one of the many families with newborns. A trip to a bookstore to flip through more travel books. A night home to practice editing photos in Photoshop. Doing my taxes, reluctantly. Preparing for my rotisserie baseball draft. Phoning friends and family, here and abroad. Staring sadly out at the rain (I just spend months telling everyone that it doesn't really rain that much in Seattle, and now I'm home and being punished for my impudence). Jotting in my journal.

And with the early starts and the morning workouts, I'm usually too tired to stay up much past midnight. The days go by quickly. It's hardly even a routine considering it's only been my schedule for two weeks out of the past two months off. I do schedule activities for myself in Outlook, just to ensure I cover lots of ground each day.

The only real change since I've been back here in Seattle is that more of my time is spent in my own company. Everyone's working and busy and I don't feel like being the nuisance who's always knocking on doors seeing if so and so can come out and play. I'll try and make time to see folks, but if there's any resistance I'll stay out of the way. The solo time is good preparation or rehabilitation of my days as a writer. Most writers I know have that solitary streak, and I'm indulging mine for a bit.

It hasn't been boring. It reminds me a bit of being a student.

My voice is my passport

I got my Jabra headset and linked it up to my cellphone via Bluetooth. Nifty. I look like an alien with that headset on, but now I can leave my cellphone and its radiation farm from my body, and I can dial people using voice commands through my headset. You simply say a person's name and then the number you want to dial (home, work, or mobile) and the phone dials the number for you.

Amazon has the Sony Ericsson T68i for free after rebates, though only with T-Mobile service which is odd. I've heard nothing but bad things about T-Mobile, and the cloying Catherine Zeta Jones commercials don't do them any favors. My AT&T service has been decent thus far. As with other compact phones, the T68i's buttons are too close together for my tastes, but otherwise I've been pleased. Unlike other phones, instead of having to record multiple entries for a person to cover their various phone numbers, the Ericsson stores up to three phone numbers (work, mobile, home) for each contact, a much more sensible information architecture.

One man sitcom

For some reason that is beyond the comprehension of mortal minds, ESPN.com has given Bill Walton a column. The result is pure comedy for hoops fans everywhere.

Someone who tries so hard to be funny and hip and culturally in-the-know (memo to Bill: it's spelled Salma Hayek) should deserve some kudos for effort, but when a guy his age sprinkles his columns with references to Avril Lavigne, Beyonce Knowles, and Jay-Z, he deserves a reprimand. It's just unseemly, like seeing one's mother come downstairs in the morning with her navel pierced in an effort to relate to her kids.

Road trip into Madness (March)

Lauri and I road tripped out at 7 this morning to Spokane, WA, to watch the Stanford Cardinal in the first round of the NCAA tourney. It took about four hours to drive out there, covering about 260 miles. This all began when Lauri replied to an e-mail of mine on Monday, giving me some ideas on what to do in South America and ending with an innocent question about what I was doing Thursday. It hit me just then. Stanford was probably playing somewhere out West. A quick glance online confirmed they'd be in Spokane. Had to jump on it. Bid on some tickets on eBay and lost. Spokane Arena was sold out. Stanford's ticket office was all out. Rich could get tickets from friends at Dayton, but only for Session II. Stanford was in Session I.

Then I noticed that UConn was also in the bracket, also in Session I, playing BYU. UConn to Spokane. Very far. A quick call to UConn's ticket office confirmed plenty of availability. We were on our way.

About an hour into the journey I realized I had left my drivers license, car insurance, and main credit card back at home so I slowed myself way down to about 75mph. Later that morning, Dan, cruising past Ellensburg, got pulled over for speeding after getting clocked by an airplane. Dan had a rough day in store for him.

There isn't a whole lot to see on the drive through Central and Eastern Washington. In fact, it was almost comic because the occasional tumbleweed would roll across the highway, as in a bad western. I wondered, why do tumbleweeds roll around like that? Are they dead? Lauri, being the sharp girl she is, theorized that they were spreading their seeds. Turns out she was right. Tumbleweeds form a break at their stem when their seeds are nearly mature, and then they blow off in the wind, scattering their seeds everywhere. That's pretty cool, huh? I'll never look at another tumbleweed the same.

The drive didn't feel so bad having someone to talk to. 4 hours was plenty of time for us to catch up on all the crazy places we had traveled while in consulting, our trips to New Zealand and Australia, past years at Amazon, the sorry condition of Buffy episodes this season (please just end the show quickly), Iraq, fun undergraduate days at Stanford, our Oscar predictions and picks, future career goals, etc. Plus, snagging tickets from the UConn ticket office at the last minute and driving out to Spokane on a moment's notice felt like the kind of spontaneous fun which you had to seize while on sabbatical.

Spokane Veterans Memorial Arena holds about 12,000 people and is home of the Gonzaga Bulldogs basketball team (until they build a new arena for themselves), among other things. Parking in the lots outside was only $4.

I walked up to the UConn ticket window to pick up my tickets and they asked for photo I.D. Hmmmm. I had my wallet, but not much in it. I keep my drivers license and main credit cards in a small card holder which I had left at home in another pair of jeans. Then, I found my Costco card and it had a tiny black and white image of me on it. The guy gave me a look but accepted it and we were in. Everything seems more precious when claimed by such tenuous serendipity.

Not only that, but our seats were in the eighth row, behind the UConn bench. We could hear Jim Calhoun cussing out players on the bench or starters on the floor the whole game. That was excellent. We spent the entire game rooting for this guy on BYU who looked like Eminem. In fact, it wasn't until late in the game that we learned his real name, Travis Hansen. We spent nearly as much time shaking our heads at the terrible play of BYU's #55, Rafael Araujo, who had about eighty turnovers on several traveling calls and just missed passes. He'd post on the right block, back in, dribbling slowly, and because he was right-handed you knew he'd turn into the lane with a jump hook or jump shot. Emeka Okafor would just wait, wait, wait, and then as soon as Araujo went up Okafor would just swat the shot away. It happened so many times it was a running joke. The game was 26-26 at halftime, but by the time I got back from a food break at halftime UConn had a comfortable lead and held off a late surge to win. It was an odd college game because they shot so few three pointers.

By the way, I had a great cellphone coverage on AT&T's GSM network all the way to Spokane. Goodness.

Then Stanford was up, and Lauri and I were in hostile territory b/c UConn desperately wanted the University of San Diego to pull the 4-13 seed upset so they'd have an easier game in round two. The game started great for us. Before you could blink Stanford was up 9-0 and then 18-2 and 29-10. Life looked good, but PF Justin Davis and C Rob Little just can't stay out of foul trouble and as soon as they left the game, which was soon, USD's Jasons, huge center Jason Keep and forward Jason Blair, went to work on us inside. Stanford was in huge foul trouble both halves, putting San Diego on the free throw line over and over. And when Keep did get into foul trouble early in the second half, somehow we still couldn't defend Blair even though he was the only scorer left on the floor for them. They gradually pulled back, with the entire arena behind them as the underdog, and then took the lead with under four minutes to go in the game. Stanford looked nervous, tentative, afraid to lose. Lauri and I were losing our hair.

The refereeing in college hoops is terrible, at least based on the calls in this game. I thought pro NBA officiating was weak, but this was ridiculously inconsistent. The officiating is better in the corporate league I play in. A few bad calls helped Davis foul out with plenty of time left, and we had bad memories of the Gonzaga upset at Key Arena about four years ago replaying in our heads.

But give the boys credit, they pulled it out with a few clutch few throws from Julius Barnes, some tough defense and rebounding underneath against Keep, and a clutch three pointer by Matt Lottich from the corner. The great thing about March Madness? Almost every game except the 1-16 seed game is competitive, regardless of seeding. Admittedly, that's not always the result of great skill, but that doesn't detract from the drama of the desperation on both sides in this single elimination scrum. Survive and advance.

After the game we met Dan and Rich for beers and dinner at the Ram before heading home. It would have been a long, depressing ride home following a loss, much like the ride facing Dan and Rich tomorrow since their fourth seeded Dayton Flyers were an upset victim of Tulsa's Green Wave in the day's last game. This is after paying $179 to stay overnight at the Spokane Doubletree. Costly, painful day, Danny boy. Every hoops fan has been there at one point or another, and for every heartbroken fan there's another, equally elated fan somewhere across the arena.

Now I have a date with Lauri's husband Nak on Saturday for round two, versus the UConn Huskies. Another long drive out to Spokane, but I can't complain. You get an invite to the big dance, you just keep dancing until the judge taps your shoulder and directs you to the sidelines.

Global roaming

This announcement by AT&T sounds promising, though I'll reserve hope for a bit. I just bought a new global cellphone, an Ericsson T68i, and my service is with AT&T. Given the amount of overseas travel I'm doing this year, being able to just pop in a new sim card into my cellphone like all the Aussies were doing in New Zealand would be awesome and preferable to renting a cellphone. The U.S. doesn't just stand alone in its desire to run over Iraq with military force, it stands alone in the wireless standards arena and thus we marvel over features our international brethren have enjoyed for years.

The main reason I bought the new phone, though, is to allow use of a Bluetooth headset. Rumor has it that everyone at Motorola uses headsets, and until more conclusive results are in, I'd just as soon stop radiating my brain or groin.

The T68i is a pretty nice phone. Reception on AT&T's GSM network has been fine thus far, though I have yet to test its limits. Perhaps this Thursday if I head out to Spokane to see Stanford in the first round of the NCAA's. The phone's buttons are a bit small, a problem with most such compact phones, but so far everything else has worked like a charm. I'm anxious to get voice dialing set up and to try out my Bluetooth headset, though I'll hold off on WAP and the digital camera attachment functionality until it proves economical.

The sad state of HD

Another area where the U.S. lags the rest of the world is in HDTV standards and programming. I finally got my HD (high definition) dish installed and it added a whopping three DirecTV HD channels to my lineup, Mark Cuban's HDNet, a pay-per-view HD channel, and an HBO HD channel.

That's not enough of a reason to buy an HD receiver. A few other reasons I upgraded: one, the availability of a moderate amount of HD programming from the majors, including NBC, Fox, ABC, and CBS, all accessible by connecting a $25 terrestrial antenna like one from Winegard to your HD receiver. The Oscars will be broadcast in HD this year, and quite a few sporting events as well. Some of the major sitcoms are in HD, and on a widescreen HDTV set the A/V experience in HD is a huge improvement. Secondly, now I can watch a program while taping another on my Tivo, an option which would have saved me some difficult choices during the past several months.

Relative to the rest of the world and what it could be, the options are sparse, disappointing. Until the U.S. can agree on a standard and push it, we'll be limited to the slim pickings out there. It's a shame, because HD done right is gorgeous.

True digital darkroom

On a more positive technological note, I've finally had the chance to try out the Epson Stylus 2200, generating some prints based on scans of slides from my trips to New Zealand.

Wow.

I have no idea what I'm doing, and I still managed a few gorgeous prints at 8 x 10. Even at that size the print quality rivals that you'd get from a photo lab, and the inks in the Stylus 2200 are archival, meaning they'll last long after you're dead. The digital workflow isn't exactly fast, given that each high quality scan takes me about 15 minutes, including image adjustments in Photoshop. Still, the control you have in Photoshop to manipulate photos is intoxicating. You can easily change color photos to black and white, or vice versa. You can sharpen or soften photos, turn them into watercolors, correct exposure errors, and so much more. I still don't own a digital camera, but most of the other elements of my digital darkroom are falling into place.

I have a lot to learn about color management and Photoshop, but the book Mastering Digital Printing promises to move me far along the learning curve.

Animatrix

This is going to be cool. Can't wait.

Can't wait?

Notes on attending Carnaval in Rio

Some notes for folks who may attend Carnaval in Rio in the future. Most are observations based on Phil, Elijah, and my experience in Rio. We were given some misinformation by various people during our trip (lots of good information, too). In no particular order:

• If you attend the Samba Parade in the Sambadrome (and you should for at least one night), try heading out the first night and scalping tickets near the entrance of whichever section you'd like to be seated in. We were told it was very difficult to scalp tickets, that it couldn't be done. Well, if you buy tickets from the hotel, expect to pay a huge markup. If you scalp tickets near the entrance, just first make sure you've seen a legitimate ticket before scalping so you know what you're looking for. Tickets have a magnetic strip that needs to be scanned by machines like those you find in your typical urban subway. Most scalpers with tickets from a certain section hover just outside the entrance to that section, and you can only enter a section through a specific gate. We scalped a ticket for Elijah at half the price we paid the hotel (Elijah's tickets was pickpocketed), and that was with minimal negotiation. Anyhow, if you can't scalp a ticket the first night, go ahead and buy one from the hotel the next night if you want to guarantee yourself a spot.


• Order only 1 entree per two people while at restaurants. The portions are humongous in Brazil, and the three of us refused to believe and continually ended up with copious leftovers that went to waste. In fact, if you wanted a real live case study for the Atkins Diet, few subjects would be more suitable than the citizens of Rio.
• If you're traveling to Rio on short notice, don't try and pick up Portuguese if you already know some Spanish. Brush up on the Spanish. Portuguese is difficult to learn, and it is most similar to Spanish which should help to get you around. We all found Portuguese extremely obtuse.


• Check with your bank to ensure your ATM card will work down there. Mine, from Bank of America, didn't. To make matters worse, almost none of the ATMs down there accept American debit cards. We had to hike some two miles to a Citibank ATM and the line was long with everyone else in the same boat. It was the only sure thing.
• At that time of year, if you want to see the sights and get good photographs, go in the morning for front-lit shots. In the afternoon the sun is at the wrong angle for popular sights like Corcovado.


• Find the Banda de Ipanema and march with them in the late afternoon on Fat Tuesday. They'll be somewhere near the street running along Ipanema beach. Once you're in the jetstream, other bodies will propel you along. You'll sweat, be sweated on, sing and dance, get covered in foam which people will spray on you from all directions, kiss and be kissed by strangers ranging from beautiful Brazilian men and women to drag queens, and have an incredible time.


• Carnaval goes from the Friday to the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday so the dates vary each year. Use this rule of thumb to get your tickets ahead of time. Plan on arriving in time for festivities on Friday, perhaps after a night of rest, and stay through at least Wednesday morning. If you can come earlier or stay later, do so and take a side trip to Buzios.
• If you're coming from anywhere in the U.S., you never have to change time zones. U.S. time zones will put you slightly behind Brazilian time, and that's okay, because your schedule during Carnaval will consist of waking up at around noon or just after, rolling out to the beach, and having your first meal around 2pm. And, if all goes well, you won't get to bed until just after sunrise, around 7am or so. Thus the U.S. time zones actually put you on Rio Carnaval party standard time right from the time you set foot on Brazilian soil.


• If you have to choose between staying just off of Ipanema beach or just off of Copacabana beach, I recommend the former. It's a slightly nicer beach and has better views of the sunrise.
• No need for lots of dress clothes unless you plan on attending hte Copacabana Palace Ball or some other fancy affair. A pair of light fabric long pants of some sort and a collared shirt is all you need to look and stay cool and look cool in most clubs in Rio, and we all got into all the clubs in our sandals, though I recommend close-toed shoes for busting your best dance moves.
• Street food is really safe in Brazil. We all had plenty, and we weren't sprinting for the toilet in our hotel room. If anything, our problem was getting enough fiber in the meat-rich Brazilian diet.


• Stay hydrated. It's hot, it's humid, you're sweating like beer can banished from the fridge into the direct glare of the summer sun. You're always in a state of becoming dehydrated. Remember, cervejas contain water, too.


• To avoid spending your evening in the company of prostitutes, frequent clubs where the local young crowds congregate. A taxi driver will be happy to help.
• Think twice before setting foot in any bar where they give you a paper bar tab when you enter. Waitresses are bartenders mark your drinks on that piece of paper, and before you can leave the bar you'll have to wait in a long line to pay the cashier. Inevitably, the line will move glacially, and you'll be hot, sweaty, and anxious to move on to the next place. We spent about half an hour, on average, waiting in these ridiculous lines, and at the end you'll be greeted by some snippy, stone-faced cashier who barks at you in incomprehensible Portuguese instead of simply writing the total on the paper for you to read.
• This note may not be relevant in a few years, but it bears stating. This is a great time to travel to Rio from the U.S. The U.S. dollar is incredibly strong, and the exchange rate from Brazilian Real$ (pronounced "hey-Al") to U.S. dollars was 3.8 to 1. Without inflation. We were eating and drinking like kings at very low prices.

Show us the money

Hey, it looks like that lawsuit against the studios will pay out $12.60 to each claimant. I hope you went here to sign up back when I posted about this, sometime in January, because the deadline for submitting a claim has passed.

The sad thing is that $12.60 still falls just shy of the price, tax and/or shipping included, of a new CD. Also, I want to know who will compensate me for that Ace of Base album I bought in college.

Michael Lewis on the A's

According to Joe Sheehan of Baseball Prospectus, Michael Lewis, author of Liar's Poker and The New New Thing, spent much of 2002 with the Oakland A's, trying to understand how Billy Beane and company manage to stay competitive despite their meager budget of $45 million. The book is tentatively titled Money Ball.

Statheads have been worshipping Beane for years. His secrets aren't so secret, but other teams just are too conservative or close-minded to accept his ideas. They make the tough decisions, like realizing they can't resign last year's MVP Miguel Tejada to a long-term contract because it would blow their budget. They made the same decision with Jason Giambi and they were fine. A small but merry band of like-Beane-minded general managers is taking control of teams around the League. Epstein in Boston, Ricciardi in Toronto. The Yankees are going to be in trouble in a few years, or maybe even this year, because the Red Sox and Blue Jays are moving in the right direction.

This new breed of GMs subscribes to unconventional ideas which will give them several years of advantage, at a minimum, while the rest of the league sleeps. Sports Illustrated dedicated an entire article to the odd idea that the Red Sox would go with a closer by committee, an idea which statheads have been pushing for years. You have Cubs manager Dusty Baker saying things like this: "[Mark Bellhorn] was programmed by the (Oakland) A's before we got him (in 2001)," Baker said. "Their philosophy is to take a lot of pitches and to get deep in the count. We're trying to get him to be more aggressive. But it's going to take time to change your mindset. We also have to let him be himself."

Hmm, Dusty. Here's a guy who hit 27 home runs as a utility infielder last year, at a position where the Cubs haven't had a decent player since Ron Santo. If he's got some Oakland discipline in him, leave it alone.

Still, Dusty Baker has been a huge improvement over Don Baylor. Baker proves to be a good modern manager. Handles the press well, doesn't abuse his players through the press like Baylor loved to do. Hey, if Baker gets the Cubs to the World Series, he'll be the second most powerful man in Chicago, behind Mayor Daley.

The boy from Ipanema

That would be me last week. Right now I'm the really sick boy lying in bed in Seattle. I was up most of last night coughing like an alcoholic in his death throes.

On the one hand, vacation has reminded me that my body needs less sleep than I think. At the same time, a combination of sleep deprivation, dancing the samba, heat exhaustion, sun stroke, about ten pounds of beef at Brazil's most famous churrascaria Porcao (how do you write an "a" with a little squiggly over it?), and heavy alcohol consumption has weakened my immune system. I am checking myself into a detox institution in a brave, pre-emptive strike against alcoholism, obesity, and skin cancer.

On a side note, I love that the Brazilian lack of inhibitions extends to their food. Naming an all-you-can-eat meat buffet restaurant Porcao and placing a giant neon pig above the entrance tells customers to leave their guilt at home. It reminds me of Star Wars. Remember the overweight X-wing pilot who was part of the rebel assault on the Death Star? He was named Porkins, and yes, he was the first to die. Even as a youth this subtle yet open discrimination against the obese struck me as unjust.

Ah yes, Rio. A week of paradise. Rio during Carnaval is an American fantasy of what Brazil is like all the time, just as Brian de Palma's The Untouchables presents a glorified vision of what a 1920's gangland Chicago would be like in our imaginations. If Mardi Gras in New Orleans is the drunken frat party where usually pent-up Puritans release their inhibitions in a disgusting display of lewd behavior, Carnaval in Rio is the party you attend wearing your smartest tuxedo, but your bow-tie is hanging around your neck, undone, and underneath you've got a swimsuit on, or a feathered skirt, or a thong. Everyone in Rio is uninhibited year round anyway, so they don't need to go overboard a few days out of the year. They simply crank the knob up a few notches.

I'll have to jot down a few notes and memories in a bit, especially because I've decided that all of you need to attend Carnaval in Rio once. It's that much fun, and you can learn from my experience. You don't have to be some young, single swinger; it's fun for all ages, and couple-friendly. Unfortunately, a torrential downpour at the start of day two of the Samba Parade killed my Leica, so all I have in the way of photos are one (as of yet) undeveloped roll from some cheap disposable. Since Elijah's camera also malfunctioned, I'm taking it as a sign that no incriminating evidence was to be recorded. After all, Christ the Redeemer was looking down on us the whole time so I already felt guilty enough about the whole affair.

Hero

One could wait until November or December, or whenever Miramax decides to release Hero here in the United States. Or you could just buy the all-region DVD and watch it next week.

Party at my place.

Homework

It's a good sign when I'm travelling so much I can't even keep up with all the photos to scan and the journal entries to record. I still haven't finished posting my recollections and photos from my trip last year to the Tour de France, let alone New Zealand and Australia and Rio. I did finally finish scanning pics from Christmas 2002, and I added my memories as well.

My family is awesome, and Christmas 2002 was perhaps our best yet. If you ever get the chance to go on vacation with me and my huge extended family of siblings, I highly recommend it. You will have ridiculous amounts of fun, and we may adopt you.

Next let's get the spammers

Dubya has done one thing which the majority of America will approve of. He signed legislation creating a national do-not-call list. Telemarketers calling someone on this list can be fined up to $11K for calling someone on the list. It should go into service this summer, and citizens can put their name on the list over the Internet or by dialing a toll-free number.

Telemarketers complain it will devastate their business and have sued the FTC, claiming the legislation restricts free speech. My heart goes out to them. Plus, I'll have fewer chances to practice Chinese with the telemarketing reps from the long-distance companies who are hoping, because of last name, that I'm a middle-aged Asian who immigrated to the U.S., speak English as a second language, and will do anything when it's offered to me in my native tongue.

Don't get too high on our politicians, though

Of course, at the same time, many of our senators are spending time pushing through name changes for food in the House cafeterias. Upset with the French refusal to support the U.S.-proposed U.N. resolution, a few legislators led the change in names from french fries and french toast to freedom fries and freedom toast. That sounds like a great use of time.

Let's hope this doesn't ruin my trip to France in July for the Tour de France. I'll need some of those French citizens to help push me up Alpe D'Huez.

George

It's fascinating to watch Bush and his administration in this whole confrontation with Iraq. Oh, to be a bug on the line during some of the phone calls from Washington D.C. to the heads of state of all the other members of the Security Council.

Give Bush credit for one thing. He's not exactly taking the most popular route (though perhaps a majority of American are pro-war; it's hard to tell since the anti-war camp is so much louder). As Phil mentioned while we were sunning on Copacabana Beach, the traditional rule of politics is to hoard political capital to generate more of it for elections. Bush is just burning through it and using it to push his rather unpopular agenda.

I watched Journeys With George on HBO about two months ago, and in it I saw a Bush who wants to be liked. I saw someone who might have been president of his fraternity, chummy, joking around, a charmy smarmy jock-turned-investment banker type. Now Bush is angry, frustrated, irritated, and he's on an island. How un-political of him.

It must be frustrating for Bush, Rice, Powell, Rumsefeld, and all those folks, watching Iraq dilly dallying on compliance with resolutions that were passed over 10 years ago, hiding behind the U.N. Saddam is a lunatic for goading the U.S. like this, but he probably enjoys it. Of course, if you're the playground bully, the big man around the block, it's not exactly sporting to let some scrawny punk goad you into pummeling him. And when your fists consist of the world's greatest military, it's not humane, either.

No reasonable person really ever wants war, especially when alternatives exist. But I'd like to see Saddam stripped of his power a year from now. When some crazy dictator in North Korea is testing nuclear delivery mechanisms and when Seattle is the biggest U.S. city within theoretical range of those mechanisms, more than the usual grey clouds are casting a pall in the skies overhead. I'm ready to head back to the Southern hemisphere to work on my tan.

Malcolm Gladwell is a prophet

Longtime readers know I love Malcolm Gladwell (I find myself writing that a lot now..."if you've read my blog before you all know I love this or that"). Well, thanks to a cancellation of one leg of my three leg journey to Rio de Janeiro, I'm stuck in Seattle an extra day, and so I went back and read an article from Gladwell's New Yorker archives.

It's a short article, and in the wake of the Columbia disaster, eerily prescient and relevant. As is his norm, Gladwell assimilates a number of related current ideas from a group of thinkers and pulls them together to shed light on a topic or event, in this case the Challenger explosion which had occurred 10 years earlier. In this case Gladwell tackles risk theory.

One of the ideas is that in complex systems, such as modern technological systems, many accidents are "normal." That means that they occur not because of one egregious error or failure but because of the interaction of a series of undetectable, minor breakdowns. These are often easy to diagnose and blame in hindsight, but for all practical matters nearly impossible to prevent.

The second idea is that of risk homeostasis, the idea that improvements in safety or changes that seem to reduce risk actually do not. They fail to do so because humans react to reduced risk in one area by taking greater risks in another. Gladwell cites the famous experiment in Germany in which the installation of antilock brake systems in a fleet of taxicabs in Munich actually led to more wreckless driving by the drivers of that fleet, giving them a poorer safety record than cabs lacking the new technology.

Risk homeostasis works in the other direction as well. When Sweden switched from driving on the left-hand side of the road to the right-hand side of the road in the late 1960's (scroll down