Blogosphere

I posted a comment on Time's Global Health blog last week...starting my imminent takeover of the malaria blogosphere! Har har har. Really I'm just a minion for Bill Brieger's malariamatters.org blog, which he's doing a fabulous job on.

Kites

The New York Times has a story on Puerto Rico with a nice picture of something we did at the fort!

Moonshiner

I got some tacos at Chipotle today, and they were playing Uncle Tupelo's "Moonshiner" as I ordered. I suppose the very expensive muzak service Chipotle employs has decided that this song calls up Western misery and images of gringos fleeing to Zihuatanejo to live out their days away from the prying eyes of Texas lawmen, and that people eat at Chipotle because they feel a kinship with those dudes running south of the border. But "Moonshiner" is about an Appalachian whiskey-still operator who can't quit the bar scene. Oh well. It's one of my favorite songs so I was at once happy to hear it, and cringing that Chipotle has coopted it.

You can tell the place is run by McDonald's, by the way, because of the way your stomach revolts against the food in the middle of the afternoon. It tastes good while you're eating, and then bam! The payback.

Dreaming of Houses

I had some excellent take 'n bake pizza last night with Nick and Johanna, who are in the midst of buying the rowhouse they've been renting for the past 18 months. It's an exciting process, and one that Edith and I are thinking about undertaking as well. We wouldn't buy our apartment, though. Nick and Jojo said there were two houses available on their block of cute little rowhouses, and one was across the street, with a nice little lamp on, and a green door set in faded white brick. Later that night I dreamt that I went over to that house, met the Baltimore Sun journalist who owns it, and was wowed by the vast open space inside the teeny exterior, including a second floor interior balconey, sort of like old British libraries. It was done up in cute colors and while the kitchen was very small, it had a full bar with one of those soda guns.

Unfortunately two brothers, Hopkins PhD students with dreadlocks, came in and made a good offer on the house. I clearly had missed the boat on this one so I left and wandered around Hampden, getting lost and ending up in a subterranean, drippy, pipe-ridden skateboard park.

I'm now checking listings and looking up Baltimore City and JHU housing incentives...jumping on the house-buying bandwagon is maybe not the smartest use of my time right now, but hey, you gotta grow up sometime.....?

London/Geneva

I went to London for work last week and got to see Kara in the process - she came up on her R&R from South Sudan! It was great and we ate lots of bad (as in good) English food, like cheeseburgers and steak and ale pie and pizza. We had coffee every morning at this really super little cafe around the corner from my hotel in Brentford.

We also met up with my college friend Josh, who's doing research for his PhD in the British Library. We went to the Tate Modern and went down the Holler slides:

and then saw the "Sliding Doors" exhibit:

On Saturday we went to another ex-power-station-made-into-art-space, the Wapping Project, which had huge fashion photographs in it. I was a little bored with the 'fashion photos and models in old brick industrial space' concept, and the cafe service was terrible. That said, the candles on the huge pumps and machinery still in the building made the early evening quite pleasant, as did the comedy of five english majors speculating on how the plant made electricity.

We set out for some dinner through Brick Lane (Indian restaurants galore) and Spitalfields, which has a Sunday market and a really good restaurant I'd been to the past summer, St. John. After some street BBQ we got a few beers at a bar, where I explained the sociology of Baltimore's heroin addicts to Josh's friend Ian. Honestly, most of it I just made up. Sorry Ian.

Sunday Kara and I had yet more coffee and went on a hunt for a scarf that took us up to Russell Square, where we perused books at Judd's, and where I accosted a man with a nice scarf, much to his shock and horror, to find out where he'd gotten it. Then back to Covent Garden, where I found said scarf right where he had told me, and then up to King's Cross to confirm Kara's hotel, down to Oxford Circus to grab food and an earful of live blues, and then home on the tube to pack my stuff up.

In Geneva I met with a bunch of people and all went quite well. I even have a friend to go skiing with next time I'm there and there's snow!

Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico was a blast! New Year's Eve was a picture-taking extravaganza. We drove into San Juan from our beach house with Jason on the phone with a friend in Boston, who was Googling good bars to go to. With 10 minutes to spare we found Oyster, a run down New Orleans-themed bar in Carolina. They had drinks and the countdown and a high-performance a/c system, so we shivered as we rang in 2007. Al and I shot pool all night, bought a football at Walgreens, and the gang danced away at Oyster and Monighan's, the Space-Irish club next door. It had a geodesic dome design, stars on the second floor ceiling, and no Irish paraphenalia I could see besides the green neon sign outdoors.

We went to the bioluminescent bay near Fajardo and raced our kayaks through the mangrove trees under a nearly-full moon. The little plankton ("half plant, half animal" said our guide) lit up blue-green when you disturbed the water ("because they are reproducing and dying"). El Yunque rainforest was five minutes from our house so Al and Jason and Will went up to check it out towards the end of our stay. Looked a lot like Gabon, but wetter.

New Years


"The confetti won't go!"

"You have to take the plastic wrap off."

Waterfall, rainforest.

Mes excuses!

Sorry for not posting - I've been away on vay-cay to Puerto Rico (awesome) and work trip to London and Geneva (also awesome!). As soon as I figure out how to offload the pics from my new Blackberry (incredibly useful while traveling; bane of my existence when at home) I will post you some nice things. In the meantime, here's Nick's last post. Phantom Tollbooth author addresses love and math. Awwww.....

"A romance in lower mathematics"

Ran across this cute 1960s animated short of a children’s book by Norton Juster (of Phantom Tollbooth fame and also a western Mass resident): “The Dot & the Line: a romance in lower mathematics”.

Seeing that it’s about love and math, how could I resist?

[nick@anize]