Snow Day

We got off work today. I celebrated by cleaning the mouse poop out of the kitchen and mopping. Also by watching two episodes of CSI: Las Vegas. And making cocoa. I did manage to finish a draft powerpoint so all was not lost. I may even do some reading now to make up for laying in bed like a slug for six hours!

Weakness

Oh, Patagonia, why must you slash your prices, forcing me to buy things I really do not need (except underwear!)?

Origami

It's sleeting out and I got to come home from work early. Instead of catching up on reading for work (The Economics of Malaria Control Interventions) I am catching up on the New Yorker. There's an article about Robert Lang, a physicist who folds origami. The article has no pictures, which is too bad, because the pictures of his work are amazing. The one in this post is actually by Brian Chan and is one piece of paper. Lang also has pics of polyhedra which are often several pieces of paper folded the same way, then fitted together to make buckyballs, etc.

Hoping for a snow day tomorrow.

Overheard at Dizzy's

Saturday night after climbing we went to Dizzy Issie's, the only place I am happy eating a hamburger, and my favorite bar in Baltimore. Next to us were a pair of old dudes, spry enough, somewhat hale, perhaps not as hearty as they once had been. Late 70's, early 80s maybe. They were discussing finances, the way you or I would discuss setting up a 401k or which mutual fund might give the best return. Only their conversation was this:

"I heard this thing the other day, when you die it's really hard for your relatives to get at your money. So what you do is, see, you make it a joint account with one a' them. That way it's in both your names and when you die they take care of it."
"That's good, you gonna do it? You should get your brother to do that."

...conversation about getting plots in the cemetery....insurance...and the recurring motif of the conversation, stated so matter-of-factly it broke my heart:

"See, what I'm doin' is preparing to die. I'm just getting my stuff in order is what."
"That's right, that's right. It's good to plan ahead! You want one a' these wraps here? They're pretty good. Got corn beef in 'em."

It was one of those special Dizzy's moments, not unlike the night I met the guy with the Colnago.

Rocket to Venus II

This weekend we went back to Rocket to Venus, on 34th and Chestnut in Hampden, so Alistair could have a real Ham experience. Sure enough the waiters did not disappoint, with their rock-star mullets, tight jeans, and nice-blasé attitudes. The hostess texted on her cellphone all night and read the latest issue of Tank Girl. They were out of pirogies so we got the bacon/pork dumplings (good), the potato-leek soup, which had great consistency but tasted mainly of ground pepper, the grilled cheese ("Wow, this is a lot of cheese!" said Al), the Szechuan noodles (spicy and good!), and the house salad (super boring, but the boys managed to eat it all). The table next to us got the wimpies, veggie and meat, and they looked pretty good. Maybe next time.

Apparently, they also have free wireless for customers! Too bad they aren't open during the day.

Bumpers are for Bumping

I am passive aggressive. Especially when it comes to parking. I really don't mind using my bumpers as guides, but noticed this weekend that it is REALLY MORTIFYING to be continuously bashing into people while other people are in the car. So my new goal is not to touch other bumpers while parking (or when backing up to get out of the drop-off zone at the train station...). This came in handy this morning when the car behind me was my friend Lisa's from work. If we start from this morning, with a clean slate, the score is H 1, bumpers 0.

Maintenance, or Why I Should Always Ride My Bike, Even When It Is 15 Degrees Outside

I took the Honda in. For an oil change. Of course they find three other things wrong with it:

- catalytic converter heat shields are missing. Hm, maybe that was what got ripped off on the entry ramp onto I-90 in Madison back in spring 2005?
- my power steering fluid is 'dirty'.
- something induction service something throttle flush something fuel injection system that costs $165.

Because I am a SUCKA, and I don't understand my own car, nor how to properly maintain and repair it, nor do I have the time to become an amateur mechanic (despite the fact that it would also help me get boys!), I will pony up the cash and eat hummous until December so that the experts at Honda can extend the life of my vehicle. Thanks guys!

For the record, I did ask Jiffy Lube how much they would charge for replacing power steering fluid, and they said they didn't do it! Jerks.

Air Vents

are very handy for overhearing my boss and my other boss on conference calls that I don't necessarily want to sit in on. Fortunately it's not really spying, since they would be happy for me to be on the calls most of the time.

We are working on this proposal, and last night it was a dog's breakfast. Our evaluator took it home last night and formatted it and added several pages of pristine, succint and supportive content. I think he's a demon sent from outer space to taunt us with his overwhelming productivity.

It snowed about two inches last night, big fluffy ice crystals that were easy to sweep off the car this morning. It looked like movie snow, or PVC shavings. Took the car into the Honda dealership for a checkup and oil change and found out it will cost me $130 bucks to get a replacement key (lost the other one at bowling a while back). Damn, Gina. I guess one has to weigh:

likelihood of losing key again (small)
with
how much calling locksmith/tow truck will cost (huge)

so maybe $130 is a good investment.

I am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass

I just got this album from Yo La Tengo. I think it's my favorite album title ever. The songs are great too!

Festival in the Desert

The BBC has a nice slideshow about the Festival au Desert in Essakane, Mali, with music and lots of pretty pictures of camels. I told a few people not to go to this (from the US) because it's super expensive and hard to get to. But if you're looking for a way to drop several large and spend days in a broken-down SUV driven by a crazy ex-nomad guide, then maybe it's for you. I admit I've never gone and only heard the horror stories of travel, and ok, how great the actual show was. Four thousand people went this January. Now that Ali Farka Toure has died though, it's less of a draw, for me at least. Salif Keita was on the program but I wonder if he actually played. He's notorious for ditching out. Matthew McConaghey is also notorious for doing yoga half-naked on top of his SUV in the cool morning air at the festival - so I suppose you'd have to weigh those two things.

Thanks to Mom for the link.

Damn you NPR

I was driving to work today and on NPR there was a story that made me cry. It's typical of stories that make me cry, when a person's life is in real danger but someone else who's just doing their job saves their life. En plus, the story was from my hometown of Champaign-Urbana, at the airport that my parents and I fly out of all the time. There's a flight school there and a lot of opportunities for local folks to fly little Cessnas in the clear Midwestern skies. Anyway - this pilot's autopilot decided it would go into a nosedive, and the air traffic controller had to supply the guy with the right readings while the pilot fought against the pull downward. The tower records everything, so you hear the fear and the fatigue in the pilot's voice. You know the story's going to turn out ok and maybe that's what got me - the cognitive dissonance between being in that moment of fear and knowing that there would be a happy ending.

Which prompts another question....what makes humans cry?

Pennies

I throw away the pennies I get, because my wallet's change compartment is small and pennies are dumb anyway. I like to think I did this before reading about K-fed's drive to save the penny, and I probably did, but not on a consistent basis. Now Dubner at Freakonomics announces some guy's proposed scheme to get rid of the penny by revaluing it at 5 cents.

Guess I should've kept those pennies.

Rocket to Venus - Sprouts gone wild

A new pseudo-smoke-free kitsch cafe in Hampden!

Rocket to Venus, reviewed both in the Baltimore Sun and the Citypaper, has an awesome u-shaped bar made from yellow light tubing, porthole windows, and lighting so dim we couldn't read the menu, but boy howdy, did we have some good food. The brussels sprouts were carmelized and salty, the beet salad delicious, and the pirogies and mac n' cheese super-cheesy. Five minutes before nine the smokers were already lighting up and we skedaddled after some slight bill issues that our adorable Hampdenite waitress remedied with embarassment. Two dolla Natty Boh's and 2.75 Yeungling draft made the night that much brighter (and kept our wallets a bit heavier!). My new favorite place....? Heck yeah, for now.

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]