Marine Mammal Center

The new Marine Mammal Center in Ft. Cronkite opened a couple of weeks ago, but I haven't had time to visit yet. Everyone is really friendly and dedicated; and visits are free, but with the recent spate of sea lions dying, they have a lot of work to do.

If you want to donate to their work of caring for orphaned seal, otter, and sea lion babies, go to http://www.tmmc.org/index.asp.

And no pictures from the autopsy room.

Poetry in motion

Hey, here's a good use of a liberal arts degree--or two.

San Francisco Indie Mart--I bought a killer glass votive candle stand.

PIRATES

From the annual NorCal Pirate Fest in Vallejo. Turkey legs, gunfire, bands covering Metallica, and saucy wenches. (pics)

So, the weekend

Was spent caving in Lava Beds NM, snow shoeing around Crate Lake, and driving 5 hours to Klamath Falls and back.

Good times--my knees are killing me, I have a bit of sunburn from standing on 138 for an hour waiting for the helicopter to take off with some crashed dude and stop blocking the road, and serious sleep deficit.

Oh yeah, I got pictures.

Weekend was OK

The rest of the Tahoe pics

Are here.

Corporate arghitecture

Walnut Creek Cheesecake Factory, notice the fountain and fire pits.



The life size stuffed animal display at the Reno Cabelas store

"Ah like me some tax-ah-dermey, please." Right next to the awesome 500 pieces strong pre-owned shotgun rack.

Hangtown cars

On the way back from Tahoe, I happened on the Placerville* car show and 100+ degree weather. It was at the same time elating (is there a more beautiful car than the 1959 Corvette convertible?) and depressing. All those Chevys and Chryslers and Packards and... compared to the crap American manufacturers put out today.

Yeah, they weren't high mileage, unreliable, and as technological advanced as a trebuchet, but at least they looked good. Just look at the pictures and tell me a current US car that looks like THAT.


*In one of the earliest instances of communal marketing, the city council decided to rename Hangtown, CA in 1850.

Meet Trashy

Nothing like seeing a black bear 20 feet away when walking across the parking lot. S/he was very nice, though, and only checked out the containers. Now I know why people in Tahoe always double up when taking out the trash.

Some pictures

I think this was two weeks ago....Carmel and a bit of Big Sur

Amazon, Apple and the partially self-inflicted death of independent bookstores

On the way back from Big Sur I stopped at the Santa Cruz
Bookstore--together with Powells and Elliott Book Company probably the
best independent bookstore on the West Coast, now that so many like
Cody's have bitten the dust. They're comfy, have a good selection, do
author readings and stuff, and this nice slightly rundown feeling. I
browsed for a bit and found $60 of books I liked. More out of
curiosity, I SnapTell'd them; thinking to myself "I'll pay the extra 8
bucks or so to keep this independent store in business. Turns out the
Amazon price for the lot was $34, with two independent stores selling
one new and one slightly used copy for $16+$8 in shipping.

Etiquette question: am I a bad person for not forking over 36 dollars
for the pleasure of browsing the store for fifteen minutes?

And the larger question--wouldn't it be more economically feasible for
SCB and other stores like this to get their prices somewhat in line
with the online pricing? Obviously, they can't price match Amazon, but
charging 70% more for the same service will drive people out of their
stores who would contribute to keep a local bookstore. I think it
they'd be within 20%, many customers would gladly pay that, especially
in beach front California. I spend $85 at Borderlands a couple of
weeks ago, even though I could probably have saved ten or fifteen by
going through Amazon. And I feel good about it, because it keeps
Borderlands in business.

P.S. I spent the $36 difference at Bugaboo, Gelato Mania, and Chefworks across the street, so they went to local businesses. (I think independent, but I could be wrong about Chefworks)

The fourth estate

I wanted to write a long post about how the newspapers' and press' problems are more because of lack of quality and the fact that instead of reading the local paper now everyone can pick the 3-4 best in the world, but this picture sums the flight from quality better than I ever could. The 20 red cycles are press photographers, the 5 green ones are protesters.

That's not reporting, that's performance art.

California without the tourists

OK, there were tourists, but it wasn't crammed like in summer. You could take pictures without a gazillion people in it.
And thank god for aloe.

Saturday

Hiking, biking, minor sunburn

Sunday

1. Froze my ass off on Land's End Trail. When will I finally learn that it's always much colder than it looks out there. Nice picture opportunities, though.
2. Had lunch at Dosa with some friends. Best Indian food anywhere--including India. And the service is so much better.
   
3. Listened to the sales guys at Borderlands rant about Zack Snyder movies and Beowulf for half an hour. They're not fans.
   

Caring for veterans

My yuppie/dink/soccer mom gym is thankfully mostly clear of the usual annoyances like the groaning iron pumpers and yelling high schoolers. And the hookers who come here for the after work executives are a nice distractions. Also, except for Batty, the woman who shows up every morning at 6am with two duffels of swimming paraphernalia like three pairs of goggles, four pairs of flippers; takes over a lane for 5 hours and glowers at people for "making waves" two lanes over, it's also mostly free of the certifiably exercise insane.

The one unique danger, especially when the light in the sauna is turned off, is Sergeant Tripod. He's a friendly, tiny, black ex-military guy with a name sake a knee-long appendage. The nicest person ever, but he's also a poster child for post traumatic stress disorder. Anyone opening the door gets greeted by a parade ground quality "Good MORNING, SIR!" after which he resumes his in-sauna exercise regimen of nude pushups, nude squats—punctuated with a growled HUUUUU-RAAHHHHH at the end of every set—and nude power stretches that elicit unearthly groans from him. All the while, he keeps up small talk that can be heard right past the hot tub and the showers into the locker room.

Since he's a nice, shy person, nobody ever says anything.

 

But this morning, he added squat thrust. So, how long does one have to wait politely before leaving?

Bhopal and Sanchi

This was actually the third stop in India, but until now, I haven't gotten around to posting the pictures. Bhopal was the first real major Indian city in a sense that it was neither Delhi, nor the somewhat touristified Agra (not that that meant that Agrans didn't carry dead bodies down the street, or had water buffalo roaming the town, or similar. But Bhopal is much larger, and much less accustomed to non-Indian.
Ironically we didn't see much of the town center--except creeping the half mile from the train station to the edge of downtown where traffic broke up at far less than walking pace in the bus. About 200 meters from the station entrance, we got completely stuck and savored 15 minutes of this peculiar Indian trait of not, never, ever, backing up, even if it would mean that everyone, including oneself, could move faster 10 seconds later.After checking in, we hunted down a not completely overpriced tuk tuk to go to the state museum that the guide, the hotel staff and the drivers recommended only to find out that it was closed for <drumroll> Christmas. Obviously, the museum staff were the only Christians within 500 miles.

So we spent the evening at the famous lakes that Bhopal was named for. Since I threw out my knee a coupel of days before I stayed on the shore and watched the paddle boaters and getting my picture taken by the Indians who've come to enjoy and evening on the water. Very cool and very interesting. All the computer science and engineering students wanted to hear about how many Indians work at my company in California.

In a nod to the rising middle class, the lakefront had an amazingly good cafe with great views, fab cappuccino, and ice cream that didn't kill anyone.

Back at the hotel, we got matter-of-fact-ly invited to an Indian wedding. Great times, the bride and groom were from Pitt and CMU, the best man from Linköping, and the rest from assorted universities, and the bankers, business owners and doctors of Bhopal. The hospitality is incredible and slightly embarrassing. I am not confident I would invite 30 Indians who stumble into my reception.

The next morning we left for Sanchi in the morning smog and saw the other side of Bhopal: people camped on the roads under ripped plastic tarps, children stumbling up and down smoldering trash heaps; and right in the middle the new technical university.

Sanchi (pics) was the first of the really historic places in the middle of effing nowhere, and at the end of the IMO worst road we had in India. But everyone on the trip had their particular favorite stretch of Indian road building, so it probably was just middling. So I'll only mention in passing that it took us over two hours to drive the 30 miles.The remaining temples are amazingly well preserved, especially considering that they were build between 300-70 BCE and survived 2000 years of rain, heat, and wind. For sandstone, that's quite an achievement. It was probably helped that they were abandoned and mostly forgotten after India reverted back from Buddhism to Hinduism.

Except for the temples, two of which looked suspiciously Greek or Egyptian, the only thing is the tourist shop where we pissed of one of the proprietors by pointing out to him that he tried to charge twice the government mandated prices that were clearly printed on the packaging.

And then it was back to Bhopal and another 10 hours on the bus to Mandu.

If you find my body, look for this woman

"Isn't it weird that summer is at the same time all over the world?"

checkout girl at Trader Joes.

What are these men doing with that horse?

10 hours into a backbreaking bus ride--on the "good" road, the one from Khajuraho (pics) to Veranasi is so gruesome that we flew the 200 miles the next day--we arrived at the outskirts of Khajuraho and the hotel with the worst service in India. Lunch and check in took two hours, and involved a rousing game of magical supplies: some rooms missed soap, most towels, and some, like mine, any semblance of sheets. As the hotel manager explained so nicely "beds don't come with sheet, we have blanket", scratchy, dirty, moldy blankets that had a few decades on the newish building. After 30 years of traveling, I'm fairly hardcore and quite a few others like the Canadian couple who go hitchhiking in Tanzania even more so, but after near mutiny everyone was at the bus 20 minutes early the next day to get the ef out of there.
Khajuraho's main and only attraction are the famous 10th to 14th century Tantric temples......with their very explicit depictions of the 85 or so positions in the Kamasutra......and a few that Vatsayayana had never even heard off. Some friezes are very embellished. Indian girls must be so disappointed on their weeding night after seeing this:The quality of the work is astounding, and unlike other temples and churches, it's not a bit or relief work here and there, the entire temples are covered from the foundation stones to the roof. Many or most reliefs are actually showing normal life as well or better than Egyptian hieroglyphs, and don't make you go "Done that"..."haven't done that"..."should try that"..."WTF? How on earth do you do THAT?!?".

This one also shows up in Dumbo.The temples that didn't quite make the UN world heritage list are still in full swing and worshipers streamed in for the evening puja.
This being M.P., the temples obviously close at dusk, so we were back on the streets in the half-block of downtown and in the middle of the most annoying touts I've encountered since Marrakech. At one point, a few of us bumped into each other and compared our following. I shared first place for five pushing, shoving and come-my-store-good-bargains yelling youths. Funnily, the best way to escape was going into stores who's owners did their best to keep them out so they could cheat on the commission.

In an amazing show of chutzpah, after pissing me off for the best part of an hour and not heeding a single "fuck off", the most obnoxious "student" tried to charge me 100Rs for the "tour of the city".

Weirdly, this oversold, unfriendly, and overrun town also offered an amazing revue of Indian folk dances at night. Touristy, yes, but the singer and dancers were really really good. Of course, no such event is complete without an elderly German making a complete idiot of himself by repeatedly leaping out of his chair into a prone position in the aisle, moaning audibly from the shock reveberating from his arthritic knees hitting the concrete, to capture the "perfect" shot with a $50 POS camera and no flash.