Desperately Seeking Root Beer

Adventures in Indian Waters

2011-01-19T08:41:00.000-08:00

Before leaving on a trip to India, friends, guidebooks, and common sense all agreed on one thing: drink bottled water. Great – check – no problem. I can manage that.

Also, agreed the experts, make sure the safety seal is, well, sealed. People trying to make a quick buck will sometimes refill bottles and sell them as new. Okay, check the seal – check.

Dutifully following these tips, I drank bottled water through the airport that I had snagged on the plane and, after arriving at our Kolkata hotel, opened the complimentary bottle of water in the room.

Himalayan Water, it proclaimed – "savour the taste it took the Himalayas 20 years to make." Sounds good. Bottle: check. Safety seal intact: check.

Except there was one small problem.

It may have taken 20 years for the Himalayas to make this water, but it too one pass through an Indian bottling plant to completely ruin it. Opening the water, an unmistakable waft of petroleum greeted my nose. Having worked in a store where we regularly unpacked shipments of products from India, I knew this particular smell quite well. It inhabited the wrapping papers and boxes, it emanated from the cheap cellophane box tape, and after a short time removing and unwrapping items, it coated your hands in a greasy petrochemical film.

Was it the outside of the bottle I was smelling? No, the smell seemed to come from the water itself. I nervously sipped the water. It tasted like water. With a diesel aftertaste.

I showed it to Maggie. "Am I crazy here?"

"Not at all. I honestly think you could ignite the vapors coming off of this thing."

I poked around for something else to drink, but my only other option was a can of Sprite in the minibar. Under normal circumstances I would never take anything out of a minibar except to make room for my own food, but I was really thirsty. Down went the Sprite, tasting, happily, like Sprite without the slightest hint of diesel.

In the hotel bar shortly thereafter, I asked the bartender if they had any other water options — anything but Himalayan Water. No dice. How about sparkling water?

He thought for a second. "We have this," he said, producing a bottle of Kinley Soda Water from behind the bar, "but we don't serve this. It is only used for mixing drinks."

"Could I have one?" I asked, curious to try it.

"Oh no, you don't want this. Would you like a Sprite?"

"Gin and tonic, please."

Settling down for dinner in the hotel restaurant next to the bar, I tried again with the first waiter that approached. I was, admittedly, pushing my luck, but couldn't have imagined the dinner theater that followed.

[Enter Waiter 1]

Me: [Hopeful] "Do you have sparkling water, fizzy water? Anything like that?"

Waiter 1: [Nods head, smiles.] "Oh no, I am sorry, we do not. Would you like a bottled water?"

Me: [Resigned to drink nothing but Sprite for the next week] "No thanks. I guess I'll just have a Sprite."

[Waiter 1 exits stage left in search of Sprite. After a few minutes, Waiter 2 enters]

Waiter 2: "I am sorry sir, we don't have Sprite."

Me: "Really? I had one in my room earlier, and they just offered me one in the bar next door."

Waiter 2: "I am sorry sir, would you like a mineral water instead?"

Me: "Do you have fizzy water?"

Waiter 2: "Oh yes, I will go get one for you now."

[Waiter 2 exits; Waiter 1 returns holding a bottle of Himalayan Water]

Me: "Actually, I don't want that. I think the other waiter was going to bring some fizzy water."

Waiter 1: [Looks confused] "I am sorry, we don't have fizzy water. Would you like a Sprite instead?"

Me: [Also confused] "Yes. Yes I would."

[Waiter 1 leaves Himalayan Water on the table, exits. Waiter 3 enters carrying an open bottle of Kinley Soda Water, which he proceeds to pour into a glass in front of me. It is preposterously carbonated, throwing little spits of water into the air in all directions. Waiter 3 exits.

I drink cautiously. Very fizzy, but tastes just fine. Maggie tries to drink, but is immediately blinded by the spatter on her glasses.]

Maggie: "I'm not drinking that. It scares me."

[Waiter 2 enters.]

Waiter 2: "I'm sorry sir, we don't have any Sprite. [Ignores bottle of Himalayan Water and Kinley soda on the table.] Would you like a bottle of water?"

Me: "All set there, thanks."

Maybe it was just the bottle upstairs, I thought, and cracked open the new bottle of Himalayan Water. It smelled like a gas station puddle. I sipped, I winced, fully aware that experienced India travelers would simply shrug and say "Welcome to India." After all, what's a week of drinking petroleum tainted water in the scheme of things?

Recently, while watching The Bourne Supremacy, I noticed Jason Bourne drinking from a bottle of Himalayan Water in the opening scenes in Goa. In the same scene, Bourne's girlfriend is tragically shot and killed, but instead of feeling sorry for Bourne, I just felt sorry for Matt Damon's mouth.

[Photos: Himalayan Water by Douglas LeMoines; Kinley Soda by Bron V]

Your Chance to Win an iPad

2010-11-15T00:01:00.000-08:00

Let's keep this simple: you bid just $10, your $10 goes to an awesome charity that's building a village in India, and you get a pretty good chance to win a snazzy new iPad.

An iPad very much like this one could be yours for only $10

In last year's Passports with Purpose fundraising drive, I bid $10 on a trip and another $10 on a stroller. I won neither, but for a mere $20 I helped build a school in Cambodia currently serving about 400 kids, with books, teachers, a school nurse, a food garden and a drinking water well (check out some photos of the school here). Best $20 I ever spent. This year I'll be bidding on a few prizes again and I'm putting up a prize of my own as well, the aforementioned iPad (see details below).

So who are these Passports with Purpose folks and how does it all work? PwP was started in 2008 by four travel bloggers (Debbie Dubrow, Pam Mandel, Beth Whitman and Michelle Duffy) as a way to build community among travel bloggers and to give back to the places we, as travelers, visit.

The concept has proven wonderful in its simplicity and effectiveness: travel bloggers procure prizes for people to bid on, they spread the word through their social networks, people bid on prizes at $10 per bid (tax deductible), and the money goes straight to the charity of the year. Last year, over $30,000 was raised through PwP and some school kids are enjoying the results right now.

This year, PwP is supporting LAFTI, an independent, nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the lives of the Dalit (untouchable) population in India. The fundraising goal this year is even higher: $50,000, money that will go toward building a village in India, providing homes to people who have never had a roof over their heads. See more details about the project on the Passports with Purpose website.

I know some of the PwP founders personally and can vouch for them being sincere, passionate, cupcake-loving and all-around excellent people. They also write some fantastic blogs that you should check out. Don't just take it from me, check out the PwP website and the sites of the dozens of travel bloggers involved this year and in previous years.

If you have an iPad already, or simply don't want one, there are dozens of other great items to bid on and support Passports with Purpose.

The Prize:

A shiny new Apple iPad 16 GB Wi-Fi + 3G

About the prize, plus BONUS prizes*:

This lovely iPad comes all the way from Australia, where they not only have large bouncy marsupials, but nifty tablet computers made by Apple as well. I won this iPad recently in a staff writing contest at Lonely Planet, and, while I love how pretty and fun it is, and identify with the early adopter crowd, I know for a fact that it could be doing more good raising money for charity than it ever could do in my hands.

Because the Australian version did not include the free Winnie the Pooh ebook that seems to come with US models – an exclusion that is morally wrong – I have added this in order to not deprive the winner of great literature involving heffalumps. I have removed the mp3 of "Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport" that comes standard on all Australian electronic devices.** Being an Australian model, it came with a plug that only works in Australia, Argentina, New Zealand, Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Tokelau. Whoever wins, I'll throw in a power adapter for your country (if they happen to be from Tokelau, so much the better).

Sound good? If so, click here to bid on the iPad and any other PwP prize!

You can bid more than once, and bid on as many items as you like. It all goes to support this year's charity, and every bid makes it more likely that you'll win a prize!

Thanks to this year's generous sponsors of PwP: BootsnAll, LiveMocha, Round the World with Us, HomeAway, Traveller’s Point, Hostelling International, Quintess, Raveable, TravelPost, and Uptake. Thanks as well to Lonely Planet for quite unintentionally providing the prize that I'm putting up this year.

* Bonus prizes include a Winnie the Pooh ebook and a regional power adapter.
**This might be a rumor.

Pooh has volunteered to eat an entire jar of honey for every $10 donated to PwP

Soda vs. Pop

2010-11-06T11:12:00.000-07:00

Do you know that feeling of jealousy when someone else has a great idea you wish you had thought of yourself? This happened to me recently when I stumbled across the brilliant web-based scientific study Pop vs. Soda, an attempt to answer once and for all the geographic breakdown of who uses "pop" and who uses "soda" in the US.

If you're not from the US, this undoubtedly sounds somewhat trivial, but this is a long-lasting debate in the US over a product that, for better or worse, is an everyday part of most Americans' lives.

Growing up in California, solid "soda" country, I thought for a long time that "pop" was only used by the elderly and Minnesotans. Clearly I was wrong: pop is huge. Looking at the responses to the survey, there are also a fair number of indecisive fence-sitters out there that use the redundant term "soda pop" and others that prefer other terms like "soft drink" blurring the boundaries, but the geographic pattern is clear nonetheless.

The fact that "Coke" has become a synonym for soda as a whole (an intriguing instance of synecdoche) in the South is, to me, a surprise. If I ordered a Coke in a Memphis diner and the waitress asked me "What kind?" I'd assume she was asking "Regular or diet?" The idea that "7-Up" or "root beer" would be equally acceptable answers blows my mind.

There are a few as yet unexplained mysteries in the Pop vs. Soda data set:

Mystery #1: The St. Louis soda bubble

Soda is predominant in California, Arizona and the Northeast, with pop and Coke fighting it out in between. One notable exception is a large soda bubble in the middle of the country hovering over St. Louis and surrounding counties, wedged between Coke to the south and pop to the north. What accounts for this?

Mystery #2: Chicago Pop vs. Milwaukee Soda

Less than 100 miles separates downtown Chicago from downtown Milwaukee, and yet one favors pop while the other favors soda.

For a brief moment, I wondered if beer might be explain both of these mysteries somehow, as both St. Louis and Milwaukee are big beer producing cities. Sadly, I can't find any strong reasoning to support that connection (although the German word for soda is, if I'm not mistaken, "soda"), and Golden, Colorado, home of Coors, sits in a decidedly pop-favoring county.

If you haven't taken the survey yet yourself, I'd strongly recommend that you ~~pop~~ go over to Pop vs. Soda now and add to the data set. And if you can burst the bubble on one of these mysteries, feel free to chime in below.

One ice cube

2010-07-14T08:32:00.000-07:00

On her first day on the job, a flight attendant for Southwest Airlines received a word of caution from another member of the flight crew, "The passengers are generally pretty nice, just watch out for the Californians."

Being from California herself, the new flight attendant asked, "What do you mean? What's wrong with the Californians?"

"Well," explained the experienced flight attendant, "they always want something very specific, like a Diet Coke with lemon, and one ice cube instead of two."

More than one ice cube

While order modifications might be a bit annoying when you're trying to work your way efficiently through a cabin, most flight attendants would probably agree that there are worse things that could happen on airplanes than a passenger asking for a specific number of ice cubes in a drink. In fact, I would gladly give someone just one ice cube in exchange for evidence that they're actually thinking about and experiencing the world around them.

"Last time they gave me 5 ice cubes and left room for almost no liquid, so this time I'll ask for just one ice cube. More liquid, a little bit of cool ice, that sounds about right."

"This Diet Coke tastes like crap, a little lemon would go a long way towards making it taste like something I should be ingesting on purpose."

Those are perfectly reasonable lines of thinking to me. A person that repeatedly gets annoyed by too much ice or crap-tasting diet cola and never tries to fix the problem isn't being polite, they're just being dense.

Two questions:
1) Is hyper-discerning taste to the point of being annoying to others a Californian trait? I'm Californian, so I'd like to know how much I'm bothering the rest of the world every time I ask for no guacamole on my burrito or walk an extra 3 blocks out of my way to get to the good coffee shop.

2) While I'm in favor of people having discerning tastes, perhaps there's a balance to be sought? After hearing more and more people with bizarrely specific food orders lately, I'm starting to wonder: have we reached a point of too much choice in Western society?

Today I overheard an order for "a medium decaf non-fat extra-hot latte", and recently a man in front of me ordered "an extra-large mocha, but hold the whipped cream 'cuz I'm trying to watch my weight". Starbucks has made preposterously complex orders into a fashion statement. In fact the only thing that ever seems to faze a Starbucks barista is an overly simple order. Order a single cappuccino at Starbucks next time just to enjoy the 10 seconds of confused blinking while the barista waits for you to add a litany of modifications to the beverage. Ordering an extra-hot wet half-calf skinny venti quad caramel macchiato no whip with legs is almost boringly normal by comparison.

On one hand, you have to give Starbucks credit for making people personally identify with ultra-complicated beverages that all taste like frothy scalded milk. On the other hand, it makes me wonder what larger effects this might have. Would we be better off with less choice and more room for compromise?

[Photo by Chrysaora]

Atoms: They Crunk Like That

2010-06-22T08:39:00.000-07:00

I have a friend who goes through phases of collecting unusual found objects. At one point it was buttons found on the pavement, for a while it was pictures of fire hydrants and ice cream trucks from around the world, and then it was discarded notes and shopping lists.

In case you're thinking that this "friend" is me, I'll come clean with my own list of odd collections I've had over the years: corks, found keys (one I actually stole from a church while waiting to sing with a boys choir, so that one doesn't really count as "found"), coins, Garbage Pail Kids, yo-yos, and, in recent years, hideous refrigerator magnets and squashed pennies. All of these, but not discarded notes.

But this time I couldn't help myself. Walking near Oakland's Morcom Amphitheater of Roses (despite it's dotcom-sounding name, it's actually named after former Oakland Mayor Fred Morcom), a piece of paper covered in handwriting caught my eye. The word "neutron" jumped out — this was clearly not your average discarded shopping list.

It was a handwritten rap about about chemistry, written most likely by a high school chemistry student with the unfortunate contribution by his father. The rap goes as follows (please add your own beat-boxing while you read):

I got the protons,
protons and the neutrons.
The nucleus, I suppose
I just want to be an atom.

Protons have a positive charge,
Electrons have a negative charge,
Neutrons have a neutral charge.

[Enter father with nice handwriting. Note how this part is OMG so lame.]

I'm the Dad, my name is Nucleus.
I got two sons Proton & Neutron.

[Father exits. Thankfully.]

Electrons on the outside
in the electron shell.
Atoms are everywhere,
even Taco Bell.

Ya, our atoms crunk like that,
Didn't you see the atomic #,
We rock like that.

Never sit on less than 24 chrome,
if you're not an atom,
go back home.

If only all scraps of paper on the ground were this interesting. And if you've lost your chemistry homework, feel free to drop me an email.

The urban forest for the trees

2010-06-05T15:01:00.000-07:00

Not far from where I live is a stretch of sidewalk that has been reduced to one narrow path by a garden encroaching from both sides. The corner house doesn't have much room for a large garden, so they've taken over the strip along the curb and packed in as many plants as possible. The garden rarely gets trimmed back, so at points you have to duck and dodge to avoid the branches and leaves. I could easily walk on the other side of the street, but I always head for this mini-forest on purpose, even crossing over out of my way to get the chance to walk through and admire the plants and see what's in bloom.

The garden gets a little out of control, and it's probably in violation of some city code, but I think it's fantastic. The gardeners picked some wonderful plants, mostly California natives: towering matilija poppies looking like fried eggs on stilts, scrub oaks, flannelbush, fragrant purple sages, ragged bonsai-like manzanitas.

Matilija poppies

Cleveland sage

Landscape architects would probably shudder at the overcrowding and lack of consistent vision, but the wildness of the garden is what makes it so wonderful. It's a small gift to the world from the gardeners: for a half of a city block you're on a forest path buzzing with happy bees.

Tree mallow in bloom

I walked this way yesterday, leaning into a large bunchgrass to let a woman and her small children by coming the other way. She paused briefly to say thanks, but then she frowned. "This garden" she said, shaking her head in disapproval, "I can't believe they let it get like this."

"Really?" I asked, coming to the defense of the plants and the planters, "I like it. I think it's beautiful what they've done."

"These people are just so inconsiderate. They come and go by the back entrance and never even walk on this part of the sidewalk. They don't know how much of a nuisance it is to people with kids and strollers." The kids had toddled ahead, happily grazing their hands along the plants as they walked.

"I suppose..." I said, trying but mostly failing to see it from her perspective. "To me it's like a mini-forest in the middle of the city."

She didn't buy it; she shrugged and continued in the other direction.

It seemed a funny thing to get upset about, especially in the springtime with all of the flowers in bloom, and no one was forcing her to walk down that side of the street. I can see her point to a degree, in fact I recall once getting angry at an overhanging Japanese maple that I walked into mid-sneeze: how dare it be right in my path at that very moment? Stupid tree. But if she had just looked down at the wonder in her kids' faces as they strolled along this path through a towering gallery of plants many times their height, I think she would have quickly cast aside her gripes and seen the forest for the trees.

Know Your Gestures

2010-04-22T22:03:00.000-07:00

Our van twisted up the mountain through tea plantations on the road to Tanah Rata. It was gray and drizzly, and in the dry warmth of the van I felt sorry for the two soggy backpackers we passed trying to hitch a ride in the opposite direction. They were obviously Westerners: ginormous backpacks, shorts, bandanas, thumbs up in the air trying to flag down a ride as cars hurtled by.

Tea plantations in the Cameron Highlands

Warm and dry in the van, I didn't envy their situation, but I couldn't help laughing a little at their predicament when I thought back to the passage I had read in the guidebook on the long flight to Kuala Lumpur. The thumbs-up, unlike in the US where it means "good" or "way to go," in many parts of the world including Malaysia, can look like you're telling someone to go stick a thumb up their ass.

Needless to say, telling someone to stick a thumb up their ass is not the best way to get a ride from a stranger.

The following day, I was on my own in Tanah Rata taking a day to rest and do some laundry. I had passed a laundry service the previous day, and I walked there in the morning with a big bag of jungle-dirtied and leech-wound-stained clothes. The door was closed and locked when I got there, and I hunted around unable to find any posted hours.

A local man was passing by and noticed my confusion. "They're closed now," he said, guessing that I spoke English.

"Do you know what time they open?" I asked him.

"They open at 10," he said.

And then it happened. In a completely involuntary motion, I gave him a beaming smile, thanked him, and laid a big fat thumbs-up on him.

He froze and his face fell as I walked away. I spun around and was half a block away happily staring at a cart piled high with durian before I realized what I had done.

"Oh no," I thought, looking back to see if he was still there. He had disappeared. "Did he think what I think he thinks? I hope he just took me for an idiot tourist and wasn't offended. Aw hell, he looked pretty offended. Do I actually use the thumbs-up? If so, what a choice time to use it. I really don't think of myself as a thumbs-upper."

It's as if conversation had gone like this:

Helpful man: "They're closed now."

Me: "Do you know what time they open?"

Helpful man: "They open at 10."

Me: "Great, thanks. Oh, by the way... up yours old man!"

That was it — no more. That was absolutely the last time I would use a thumbs-up on this trip. I would not offend another person with my reckless digit. That was the plan, but to my horror, the involuntary thumbs-upping continued over the next few weeks, making it all too apparent that I use the gesture far more frequently than I ever would have guessed.

To the woman serving me noodles at a floating restaurant in Kuala Tahan, "These noodles are delicious! Screw you, you old bag!"

Floating restaurants at Kuala Tahan

At the Muzium Perhutanan, a museum at the remote hill station of Gunung Jerai in northern Malaysia most famous for a large fossilized elephant turd, "Thanks for letting us in to look even though you were closed! Stick a thumb where that turd came from!"

It got so bad that I was fighting my own hand like a parody of Dr. Strangelove by the end of the trip and watching it out of the corner of my eye for any suspicious activity. It's one thing to know about gestures and their meanings in other cultures, but breaking an unconscious habit is another matter entirely.

Now that I'm safely ensconced in a thumbs-up-friendly society, I couldn't even tell you if I've kicked the habit. So if I ever unconsciously give you a thumbs up, feel free to flip me the bird — even if I don't understand, I'll deserve it.

Santa Fe Winter Light

2010-04-07T08:20:00.000-07:00

It was cold and stormy here in the Bay Area this past weekend, so I did what I could do to counteract the lingering winter weather at least on a small scale: cook posole. Posole, whether you spell it with an 's' or a 'z', or even if you call it hominy stew, is a warming hearty meal, and for me the ultimate comfort food in cold weather.

I decided to make my favorite variation, posole rojo made with red New Mexico chiles, hominy, and pork shoulder. Not to overly pat myself on the back, but I really nailed it this time and eating it made my mind drift back to winter in Santa Fe, crackling fires, icy clear air, the smell of corn, chiles and desert piñon. Like I said, it was good posole.

Chile ristras: decorative and delicious

We hit Santa Fe in early December, which turned out to be an excellent time to go. It's cold enough that visitors drop off steeply from the warmer months and lodging rates are low, it's too early for ski season, and it was before the popular Christmas and New Year holidays, so even the ever-bustling area around the plaza was calm. If you can stand a little cold, this is a great time to see Santa Fe.

The spicy New Mexican food suits the cold weather (I would also argue that it suits hot weather and everything in between), and a big bowl of posole rojo or green chile stew sets you up perfectly for walks in the cold, and believe me, if you're one of those crazy people that enjoys stunning gorgeous things, you'll want to take walks in the cold as the winter light in Santa Fe is something to behold. The crystalline clarity of the air, the long shadows of winter light cast from the soft-edged adobe buildings, the deep blue sky and hanging chile ristras set against bright patches snow create an effect that you won't find elsewhere. Every morning I would get up at sunrise to take a walk crunching along the icy streets and I would have the town entirely to myself.

Palace Ave. in the early morning

First Presbyterian Church

Cathedral in the morning light

Shadows on the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts

Alone in the Plaza

A warm glow from the porch light

The New Mexico Museum of Art is a work of art itself

Georgia O'Keeffe has plaque

Morning on Canyon Road

Magpie on Canyon Road

St. Kilda: Sun, Sand, and Scary Clown Heads

2010-03-17T08:16:00.000-07:00

Winter weather in California is nothing to complain about, but stepping onto a plane in the dead of winter and getting off some hours later in the height of summer feels less like a plane trip and more like time travel. The flight to Australia is, of course, monstrously long, but the brain has a remarkable ability to quickly forget the sensation of passage of time. I got on a plane, something halfway unpleasant happened, I watched Julie & Julia (also halfway unpleasant as it turns out), and moments later I emerged on the other side of the planet with bad hair into a disconcerting world of heat and sun. Presto. You can go on and on about jet engines and Bernoulli's principle as much as you like, but you can't completely remove the magic from planes.

Most of my recent trip to Melbourne was occupied with work, the sunny weather passing by without me, so I was happy to have a weekend to take advantage of my short preview of summer weather. On a hot, bright blue Saturday, I rented bicycles in central Melbourne with two colleagues and we took a leisurely ride first along the banks of the Yarra River and then down to the beach, eventually ending up in St. Kilda.

Pedaling along the Yarra River

St. Kilda reminds me of many other beachside towns: slow, breezy, pricey in parts, a bit weather-beaten and fraying at the edges but mostly no one notices or cares because of the beach and the view. It felt very familiar, equal parts Santa Monica, Brighton, and Coney Island. The Coney Island comparison is perhaps the most apt, as St. Kilda is best known for it's old-timey fun park Luna Park, shown below in the middle of construction in 1912.

I can just imagine the architects gazing at this partially completed park sitting next to a glorious beach and saying to themselves, "This isn't quite right yet. You know what this needs? A giant freakish clown mouth for an entrance." And thus Mr. Moon was born.

Mr. Moon

Can't sleep, clowns will eat me. Can't sleep, clowns will eat me.

My nightmare: being eaten alive by a clown named Mr. Moon

I'm endlessly fascinated by clowns and mimes. Please do not take this to mean that I like clowns and mimes, in fact clowns are about the scariest things on the planet next to goats and Rush fans, and mimes tap into a part of the human psyche that was really best left unexplored. But they fascinate me as a concept: how did something so objectively unpleasant and disturbing become so ubiquitous?

This kid had the right idea

Luckily, if you brave the walk through the clown's mouth, the inside of Luna Park isn't scary at all, as this short movie shows:

As disturbing as giant clown mouths are, perhaps the scariest thing I saw in St. Kilda was somebody's future lunch. Ever seen (or heard of) a yabby before? I hadn't, but it certainly sounded Australian. I have no illusion about how food gets to my plate, but I can't eat something that I've been introduced to; I'd rather walk through a giant clown mouth.

Melbourne Sign Language

2010-02-08T08:48:00.000-08:00

When I go to a new city, I always take time to examine signs. There are interesting and sometimes funny differences in the way cities use signs, and Melbourne certainly kept me entertained.

In most places around the world that I've paid attention to such things, pedestrians are shown on signs as gender-neutral walking figures (although in Berlin you sometimes get the guy with the jaunty hat). In Melbourne you get the full walking man on street lights, but you just get legs on signs:

Legs ahead

Ahh, here are the legs

I loved the odd habit in London of naming streets after cuts of meat (Haunch of Venison, Shoulder of Mutton, e.g.) seemingly without any humorous intent whatsoever. Melbourne seems to have taken to naming streets with a wink.

This looked better after dark, but there was a man peeing on the wall under it when I went at night, so I decided to pass on the night photo.

And all this time I thought Gotham was based on New York City.
(Sadly, this is named after early Melbourne settler John Batman, not Bruce Wayne)

It's a shame they couldn't include the lightning bolt

Huh, what?

How to piss off an entire hotel full of people at 6:45 a.m.

2010-02-04T16:02:00.000-08:00

Anyone who stays in hotels enough will eventually have the fire alarm experience: loud sirens, generally in the dead of night, confusion, fumbling with clothes, standing for ages on the street having forgotten some key item of clothing, the arrival of the fire department, and it's inevitably a false alarm. Someone was sneaking a smoke in room 215. Broken sprinkler from a thrown shoe in 422. Power cut out on the 5th floor.

Melbourne after dark

I was in Melbourne staying at a hotel that had just recently opened for business, one of the only places available as hotels were booked up for the Australian Open. It was an infant hotel that had yet to figure out quite what it means to be a real hotel and had opened before it was really ready for guests. No phone, no clock (luckily I brought one), no iron, no hair drier, a bathroom fan the never turned on, a light in the closet that never turned off — and prices that would lead you to assume that they would have had all of these sorted out. I had been staring murderously for two nights at the blinking device on my hotel room's ceiling. Every 5 seconds it would flash. No, 8 seconds that time - wait, back to 5 seconds but this time with a double flash. What the hell was it doing? It looked like it was trying desperately to find something to detect. I closed my eyes, but the light was still visible through my eyelids. Die flashy thing, die. It must have sensed my hateful thoughts, because the following morning it decided to play dirty.

After a shower in the small windowless bathroom with broken fan, I cracked the door to let in some air. Less than a minute later the piercing fire alarm started wailing through my room. I immediately assumed it was me that had done it. Hoping illogically that it was somehow isolated to my room, I swatted helplessly at the screaming and red-flashing detector on the ceiling. No reset button. Nothing I tried did anything to stop the scream of the siren.

I looked at the clock. It was 6:45 a.m. Fuck fuckity-fuck.

I pulled on some clothes and hustled out the door barefoot. Sure enough, sleepy-eyed guests in pajamas were already shuffling down the stairs to the street looking none too happy with the situation. As we reached the door, fire trucks were already pulling up in front.

"It was me officer, all I did was take a shower." Hell with that, I was staying quiet. The pajama mob might turn on me.

It occurred to me at some point that perhaps I wasn't actually the one to blame. There were dozens of other people in the hotel. Maybe some other guest had desperately needed a morning cigarette and caused this whole debacle. Can steam even set off a smoke detector? Crappy smoke detector if so - should just call it a "stuff in the air" detector. If it was a shower, maybe it was someone else's shower that set it off?

A stuff in the air detector much like the one in my hotel (photo by ixographic)

The firemen emerged after a predictably long time and told us we could all go back inside. Filing up the stairs past the firemen, one called out, "We're looking for someone that just took a shower - room one eight."

Shit. I was in room 18 and my hair was still wet. He repeated, "Room one eight." Is that how Australians say 18? He had to be talking about me. Resisting the urge to whistle out loud, I walked past the fireman without a word. This is not the recently showered droid you're looking for. In my defense, what was he going to do, reprimand me for my cleanliness?

I never heard a thing from the hotel management after the incident: no polite note asking me to keep my bathroom door closed until they fixed the problem, nothing at all. It was a good thing that I realized what the problem was so that it didn't repeat itself every morning for the next week. If you happened to be staying in the same hotel and were awoken by the alarm, my apologies for the rude awakening, but if you're looking to place blame, place it on the evil flashy thing in room 18.

No Wonder It's an Epidemic...

2010-01-22T18:12:00.000-08:00

Errr...no thanks, I think I'll pass.

A Retraction

2010-01-18T08:16:00.000-08:00

About a year ago I made the statement that people who buy vowels on Wheel of Fortune are morons. Further watching of the show has convinced me that I was wrong. There are still vowel-buying morons out there (the people that buy a vowel to confirm that they know the answer, or, even worse, the people that buy a vowel to finish a puzzle), but in many cases it's a good strategy to buy vowels.

Here's why you should buy vowels:

1. Winning Wheel of Fortune is all about maintaining control of the board and not giving the other contestants the opportunity the solve the puzzles. The winner of the game is nearly always the person that wins the prize puzzle (nearly always a high value trip that puts you out of reach of the other contestants), so you should do everything in your power to win that round.
2. Buying a vowel means that you don't spin, eliminating the risk of hitting Bankrupt or Lose a Turn.
3. Of the 10 most commonly used letters in the English language, 4 are vowels (E, A, O, I), so vowels are low risk especially in larger puzzles.
4. E is powerful - it's the most common letter in the English language and more than twice as common as R. Buying an E is the quickest way to fill in the board.

Correcting the Wheel of Fortune Consonant Myth:

R, S, T, L, and N are the favored consonants by Wheel of Fortune players, but are these really the best letters to guess? The top 10 consonants in the English Language in order of frequency are T, N, S, H, R, D, L, C, M, W so until I see a breakdown of the consonants used on Wheel of Fortune that convinces me that L is a good letter to guess, I'm sticking with T, N, S, H, and R.

The next puzzle to solve is why I'm watching Wheel of Fortune in the first place when I should be watching Cash Cab.

Top 10 Ways to Revitalize Top 10 Lists in 2010

2009-12-29T13:32:00.000-08:00

Top 10 lists are on their way out. If you spend any time prowling around blogs, Facebook, or especially Twitter where the top 10 list has become a mainstay, you can see the signs: people are finally getting tired of top 10 lists, and it's about time.

On the other hand, the data seem to contradict this hypothesis. Even if you account for link decay in Google listings as pages disappear from the web each year, the annual growth of the internet and the concomitant increase in content duplication, the pattern is clear: we've gone top 10 crazy and it's gotten much worse in recent years. Despite this skyrocketing graph, here are the top 5 signs that a top 10 backlash is imminent:

1. Direct expressions of frustration: "There is no more tired, cynical trope than the end-of-the-year Top 10 list," states Newsweek's Steve Tuttle, who then mysteriously proceeds to give us his own tired, cynical trope of a top 10 list.

2. Resignation: People at Blog World Expo talked about the top 10 list as if it was an abusive spouse that they simply couldn't leave. "They're terrible, but I can't seem to break away and I always get a lot of hits," one blogger told me.

3. Experimentation: Desperate for a spark of innovation and trying to distance themselves from the herd, other list writers have resorted to using wacky numbers like the Top 51 Photos of the Decade, or the Top 211 Twitter Users Who Will Follow You Back, or the Top 6,692,030,000 People on Earth That Would Feel Depressed, Confused, and/or Hungry While Reading That Previous List.

4. Subtle expressions of frustration in the form of rebellious acts of meta-irony (e.g., Leif Petterson's Top 11 Top 10 Lists That No One Made in 2009) and absurd levels of self-referentiality (e.g., Andy Murdock's Top 10 Ways to Revitalize Top 10 Lists in 2010) that began to appear more consistently in 2009.

5. Overkill: I can understand why one might click on a link sent by your old friend Joe to the Top 10 Stupid Poses In Front of Statues by Joe, but there are only so many top 10 lists one can enjoy and more than enough floating around cyberspace for us to need any more. The existence of sites devoted to top 10 lists, like top10list.com, boggles the mind.

Taken together, these are clear signs of a forthcoming sea change in the increasingly important world of pithy online content designed for hordes of information consumers with a pathological fear of paragraphs. While a paradigm shift may be on its way, it's naïve to think that top 10 lists will ever disappear entirely, so it's worth thinking about ways to refresh the medium.

Top 10 Ways to Revitalize Top 10 Lists in the 2010

1. Get rid of numbers

Numbers are standing in the way of innovation when it comes to listing things. Why do we need them? What has a number ever done for you? Ranking is the best excuse for using numbers, but there are many other ways to rank things:

Top 10 quadrilaterals for the 2010s ranked by horribleness of font

2. Get Nerdy

Instead of a boring old list, why not chart the elements in an n-dimensional hypervolume or use a thin plate spline for a 3D graphical representation?

The top famous athletes I've seen eating in Baker's Square

3. Get Symbolic

Why restrict yourself to words when the web allows a broad multimedia palette that gives you the ability to add layers of symbolism?

4. Get Darwinian

Sometimes lists have internal structure and it makes sense to show how list elements relate to each other. When Charles Darwin sat down in 1837 and first sketched a tree-like structure to describe the nature of evolution, he never could have foreseen how far this idea would be taken in the future. Let's take it one step further now and appropriate the cladogram - this may at first seem frivolous, but using this type of diagram can add new and interesting layers of information to the top 10 list concept.

5. Get Old-School

I'd wager that I'm not alone in thinking that we don't see nearly enough Venn diagrams these days. They make me nostalgic for the dog-eared text books or yore and those wonderful old science films with space-age Raymond Scott background noises.

Top celebrities I have recognized sorted by my ensuing reaction

6. Get Elementary

Speaking of nostalgia, why not resurrect art media from your childhood to add a personal touch to your top 10 lists? For example, you could create a list of the Top 10 Best Pasta Names out of elbow macaroni and Elmer's Glue:

Don't limit yourself to small macaroni elbows - you can do amazing things with glitter, string, paste, and Play-Doh.

7. Get Green

The green movement is really catching on right now. Everything is green, from green vehicles to green MBA programs, and I think top 10 lists can also ride the green wave. How? Remember the 3 Rs: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. It takes time, effort, electricity, and disk space to make a new top 10 list, not to mention the time and electricity we waste reading them, so next year let's try (1) writing fewer top 10 lists to conserve resources, (2) reusing old ones when they suit the topic you're discussing or when most people have forgotten the first incarnation, and (3) recycling old content and reworking it into new products. I'll probably just repost this whole thing next year in the spirit of being green.

8. Get Artsy

Show off your art skills and get your top 10 list noticed. What would you rather look at, a dull text-only list or this?:

Top 10 underappreciated adorable animals as reflected by a Parisian puddle

9. Get Honest

Okay, be honest, is your "10 chocolate shops in Belgium" list really about helping people find chocolate in Belgium? Wouldn't it be refreshing if we were all a bit more honest about the purpose of writing top 10 lists?

Top 10 Chocolate Shops in Belgium

Read my blog
Tell your friends to read my blog
Retweet me
Think I'm funny/cool/more worldly than you
Validate the vast amounts of time I spend online for purposes that are quite unclear even to me
Click on my Google AdSense links - I'm trying to break the $1/month income barrier
Buy my e-book based on my travels through Belgium
I'm checking my Google Analytics right now to see how many uniques this post is generating
Wouldn't I be amazing on The Today Show talking about Belgium?
Offer me a book deal/bag of money/free trip to Belgium to eat chocolate

10. Get Idealistic

This is the most daring proposition of all: don't try to revitalize top 10 lists. In fact stop writing them all together. Produce articles of value to the world, rich with detail, emotion and personal voice. Write pieces that move and inspire people. Engage readers' minds and encourage thoughtful interaction with the world. Stop prescribing and start empowering. Fight the lazy, reductionist tendencies of the internet and embrace the nuance and complexity of the world.

Can we do this? I certainly hope so, not only because I just ran out of numbers and I have no room for "Get Pessimistic," but because I'd be genuinely excited to see what's coming next.

Julmust: The Christmas Soda

2009-12-18T08:41:00.000-08:00

I love the foods of the holiday season. They suddenly appear one day and they're gone just as quickly, and somehow this makes me love them all the more. It's similar to Girl Scout cookies: if I could get Samoas, Thin Mints and Tagalongs year-round they would almost certainly lose their appeal. Having a food suddenly appear after a long absence makes it totally irresistible.

Damn I want a Samoa right now

Christmas beverages also undergo a similar disappearing act, but partly this is due to the fact that they suit the winter season: hot cider, mulled wine, eggnog all work well with the cold winter weather. This undoubtedly differs in the southern hemisphere — I can't imagine hot apple cider being a popular beverage during the holidays in Australia, for example (correct me if I'm wrong, Australian friends). I also look forward to the seasonal winter beers, often dark and spicy to suit the season, so perhaps it's not so surprising that Julmust, a dark and mysterious Swedish Christmas soda came about.

Julmust is a member of the proud family of beverages resulting from temperance movements around the world, a Scandinavian cousin to root beer, sarsaparilla, cream soda, ginger ale, etc., but probably closest in concept to shandy. It recently popped up next to the Glögg at Cost Plus World Market, often a good source for unusual sodas, so I had to give it a try. As a lover of sodas, I'm sorry to say that shandies really don't float my ice cream, so to speak, so the ingredients of Julmust made me a bit worried. If I want something to taste like beer, I'll drink beer not beer-flavored soda.

Mmm, hops and malted barley soda.

Luckily, the sugar and powerful artificial flavorings mostly overwhelm the beery elements of Julmust and it's actually a fairly pleasant if somewhat artificial-tasting soda. If I had to approximate a recipe of Julmust, it would be something like this:

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

Andy's Pseudo-Julmust

10 oz. Coca Cola
2 oz. Grape Soda
1 oz. Tonic Water
1 oz. Orange Gatorade
1 oz. Pellegrino SanBitter
A splash of Hubba-Bubba Bubblegum Soda

Combine ingredients, let sit until half of the carbonation has been lost, bottle and slap an out-of-focus Santa label on it. Drink and be festive.

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

On the plus side, Julmust doesn't taste like beer-soda, in fact it mostly just tastes like a fruity spin on cola. If Dr. Pepper had a Swedish cousin, say perhaps Björn Peppar, he would probably taste like Julmust. Is Julmust Christmasy? Does it taste like Winter? Not to me honestly, but then I didn't grow up with it to form those associations, so who am I to judge?

Dear US Postal Service:

2009-12-16T07:50:00.001-08:00

Keep up the good work

Books May Be Dying, But They're Trying To Kill Me First

2009-11-20T23:24:00.000-08:00

"Print isn't dying — we're reading more words than ever, we're just not reading them on paper."

This was a comment made in a talk last week by Lonely Planet founder Tony Wheeler. It's an interesting and provocative assertion, and one could run with this statement in many directions: the future of publishing, the death of the newspaper, the rise of the e-reader, etc. However, because I went through a move this week, this quote resonates on a much more personal scale with a question I've been pondering, namely:

Why do I own so damn many books?

There's nothing like moving to make you question why you hold onto certain things, and having 7000 lbs. of words on paper somehow makes books jump right to the top of the shit-list. Right now I think print should die, simply because I don't want to carry it around anymore.

If the only time I see most of these books is when I pack them into boxes for a move, do I really need all of these books? Determined to get an accurate picture of the situation, I did a detailed quantitative survey of the books on my shelf, the results of which are summarized in the following pie charts:

Firstly, I found that my books could be broken down into 11 functional categories:

Reference books. I adore reference books, but I came to the realization recently that I don't use them any more. It's sad, because I love flipping through a real atlas, or pulling out the magnifying glass to use with my condensed OED, but it's extremely rare for me to find the need to consult these books thanks to the wonders of the internetz. Fact: Your computer will never smell as good as an old dictionary.
Cookbooks. Cooking is one of my favorite hobbies, but my meals cooked to recipes used ratio is something on the order of 1000:1. A few books get heavy usage, others (I'm looking at you, Batali) just sit there full of potential recipe energy (PRE).
Trashy airport books. Perhaps "trashy" is a bit strong, as I would never call Ian Rankin or George Pelecanos trashy. Lee Child, on the other hand... Either way, the pulp mysteries and thrillers get a place of shame hiding behind more respectable books. Also, they're small, so they actually fit behind other books.
Books to establish nerd cred. Predictably perhaps, my shelves have more than their fair share of books that do little beyond proving to anyone that may look that I'm a total nerd.

Nerd credentials firmly established
Ye Olde Bookes. I'm not an old-book collector to any notable degree, but I have a few that I've pieced together over the years that always get a prominent place on my shelf to draw eyes away from the trashy airport books.

Ye Olde Bookes look better in sepia
Books I'll honestly read (or re-read). A small fraction of the books I own might actually get read or re-read at some point. I'd like to think it's a larger fraction, but I keep buying new ones, so I never make any progress on the old ones.
Books I'll never read again but am still attached to. God, there's a lot of these. I took a course on modern Italian literature in college that I absolutely loved, so I have lots of Calvino and Pirandello lurking on my shelves. I went through a phase of reading every Philip K. Dick book I could get my hands on. This made sense when I was 18, but now I can't imagine reading them again.

A shelf full of Philip K. Dick books that haven't been touched in years

This purchase must have been deemed necessary at some point in my life.
At this point I'm only keeping it for the title.
Classics that I just can't seem to part with. No, I'm probably never reading The Odyssey again, but you can't get rid of Homer, right? Well, wrong apparently, because there are several dozen free versions online right now.
Long out-of-date travel guidebooks. Following this study, this fraction is now much smaller than depicted in the pie chart as I decided to recycle almost all of these, saving only the mid-90s edition of the Lonely Planet French Polynesia guide, because it had a good recipe for poisson cru in it.
Books I've been meaning to read for years. I've started Love in the Time of Cholera three times now, so maybe I should just accept that I'll never finish it. I want to, and I've liked it every time I've started it, but somehow I always get distracted by something shiny and put it down. I once convinced myself that I needed to learn to play Go, so I bought not one but two books on the game. I still don't know how to play Go (although I might if I ever actually opened the books).

Challenge me to a game of Go, you'll win. In fact, all you have to do is tell me that you've won and I'll believe you.
Instruction manuals for graphing calculators. I don't do much graphing on calculators these days, but if I ever need to know the integral of a parabolic cylinder function, I know where to turn. I don't even own a VCR anymore, but at least I have the manual so I'll know how to program the clock if my old VCR suddenly reappears in my living room.

Other ways to look at the books on my shelf:

Books I don't actually need (shown in 3D for emphasis)

Does this mean the digital revolution will solve all of my woes? If all I was concerned about was weight and space, then yes. Digital books have the same content and the same cover art — the content is all there. But clearly that isn't the whole story, as this next chart shows:

There are some books that I should simply get rid of: I don't use them, and I don't even want to use them, I just haven't mustered up the energy to get rid of them because, face it, no one else wants them either and recycling books just feels like a waste. I'll keep the rest of the books around because I want them, not because I need them. This may be foolishly sentimental, especially when I have to move heavy boxes full of books I'll never look at again up long flights of stairs while cursing the paper they were printed on, but the simple fact is that I like having a book collection.

If albums and books all go digital, they're invisible. What goes on our walls? This may sound silly, but I don't think this is a trivial question. When you put books and music on your shelves, you're declaring to the world, "This is me. This is what I like. This is what I toiled through in school. I display these because they represent who I am, who I was, who I want to be, and who I pretend to be when I think no one is looking. I place that one there because it makes me look smart, whereas the one hiding behind it makes me look like someone who desperately needed something to read on an airplane. I keep that one over there because it has a funny title. Oh that? That came with my graphing calculator." At least we still have art, but if we use books and albums as external manifestations of our personalities, what fills the void when they disappear?

Whatever the answer is, I hope it's lighter than books.

iPhone: The Backpacker's Best Friend?

2009-11-05T08:48:00.000-08:00

How much technology do you need with you when you go on a backpacking trip in the wilderness? Or, perhaps more to the point, how much do you actually want with you?

My general rule with packing for a backpacking trip is to bring as little as possible, and only as much as you're willing to carry. When a friend brought his iPhone on a recent backpacking trip, I scoffed at the idea. Why on earth would you want to bring that confounded device into the wilderness? There won't be any signal, and you certainly can't pound in a tent stake with it.

The iPhone compass: because real compasses are a snooze-fest

As often happens post-scoff, my initial skepticism softened over the course of the trip as it became evident that the iPhone might in fact be worth considering on your packing list.

With an iPhone you get all of these:

Camera
GPS & Compass
Light
Emergency contact (if you happen to have signal)
First aid info
Taking notes, writing journal entries
Plant/animal identification apps
Dictionary to settle important arguments
Calculator for adding up your score in Rummy
Level: you can check to see if your campsite is level (it never is)
Entertainment: games, podcasts, music, showing friends stupid pictures/movies
Fending off bears
More potentially useful stuff hidden amongst the thousands of other apps

There are some drawbacks to many of these functions, in fact I'd venture to say that it's not particularly good at any of the important things. The camera is pretty abysmal and has no flash, but it does well enough as a point-and-shoot during the day. The GPS functionality is limited. The light is no match for an LED flashlight. Note taking takes longer than a pencil and paper. Many apps require connection to the internet. As an emergency contact device, the iPhone is not the best phone for maximizing reception in low coverage areas. Battery life on iPhones can be pretty bad, especially when you're, say, using it. The speaker on the iPhone is hopeless. Needless to say, the iPhone isn't built for withstanding the elements. On the plus side, for all of these functions, limited as they may be, the iPhone is light and extremely compact compared to carrying an individual tool for all of the above functions.

But here's the rub: by using an iPhone in the wilderness, you might just be reserving a special room in hell. You'll get to share this room with people that talk on cellphones while riding horses, smoke on chairlifts destroying the air for everyone behind them, blast loud music or have a gas-powered generator for their television in campgrounds, people on snowmobiles that zoom by while you're cross-country skiing, and a suite of other people determined to spoil the experience of nature with unnecessary bits of modernity.

While hiking through an old-growth Douglas fir forest in the Marble Mountains, I thought I heard people behind us. I stopped to listen; I could hear thin, distant voices, but couldn't make out where they were or what they were saying. Were there people gaining on us from behind? I doubted it, as we were hiking at a fair clip on a rarely used trail and hadn't passed anyone. When my iPhone-toting friend walked up, I found the source of the voices: he was listening to a podcast about the state of venture capital in the current economy through the tinny speaker on the iPhone.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Hmm? Oh, listening to a podcast. I already finished Madeleine Albright at the Commonwealth Club - you can listen to it later if you want."

I wasn't inclined to take him up on this offer and instead pictured myself snatching the phone from him and crushing it under the heel of my hiking boot with a satisfying crunch.

Now I'm the last one to fight the future – after all I have multiple Twitter accounts, blog in several places, and recently got a little too excited by seeing Chad Vader and Kevin Pollak in a hard-fought bout of Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots — but there are times when the trappings of technology interfere with our enjoyment of the world. This was one of those times. I go on backpacking trips to get away from tweets and touchscreens: I want to build fires, swim in pristine lakes, hunt down wild onions for making soup, make seats more comfy by padding them with bracken fronds, and bore my friends to tears by explaining the concept of buzz pollination. No offense to Madeleine Albright and venture capitalist podcasters, but I would be happy if they stayed at home. Well, unless they wanted to carry the tent and some extra beef jerky.

Fabulous Bathrooms of the Nevada Desert

2009-10-27T23:38:00.000-07:00

It's safe to say that most people visiting Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada are not there to see the bathrooms. I wasn't there to see the bathrooms either, I was there to see the red sandstone formations and the sweeping desert landscapes — or, more accurately, I was in search of an antidote to Las Vegas. Finding out en route that Valley of Fire was where they filmed Captain Kirk's death scene in Star Trek Generations was nerd-icing on the cake. Had I been there earlier in the year, the nerd factor would have been even higher, as I would have been on the lookout for the rare Golden bearclaw poppy, Arctomecon californica, which despite the name has never been found in California. Red rocks, Vegas remedy, Shatner, and rare misnamed poppies, but not bathrooms — after all, who goes out to the desert, much less anywhere else, to look at bathrooms?

But when confronted with a bathroom like this, how can you not take notice?

This bathroom has it good

Entering the Valley of Fire from the east, coming from Lake Mead, you have to pull over to pay the $6 entry fee (which happens to be the best $6 you'll ever pay). Most people will ogle the bizarre water-pitted rock formations that extend up the road, but if you turn around you'll find this bathroom sitting quietly in the most stunning, lonesome setting, not even appreciating how lucky it is to be there.

This bathroom was not a solitary occurrence: at nearly every stop in the park you can find a bathroom set amongst the most improbably dramatic scenery. At the rock formation called "The Seven Sisters," you get:

This

And this

And then amongst all of this mind-boggling natural beauty, you find this:

Another fabulous bathroom

Further up the road you come to the sadly bathroomless Silica Dome, which is where Captain Kirk perished in Star Trek Generations after foolishly hurling his corpulent self onto a precariously dangling catwalk in search of an errant garage door opener [watch for yourself]. You can see why they chose to film Star Trek here: the terrain is otherworldly with stripes of colored rocks smashed together like Neapolitan ice cream.

View from Silica Dome

After a brief intermission at Silica Dome, the spectacular bathrooms continue when the road ends at White Domes.

Bathroom, bollards, and boulders

To continue your bathroom tour of the southern Nevada desert, why not visit the nearby Hoover Dam? Just over an hour away, Hoover Dam is one of the most frequently visited tourist destinations in the area, but again I doubt anyone comes to see the bathrooms.

Coming from the Nevada side as most visitors do (it's free to park on Arizona side, but you do have to walk a bit further), you're treated to a marvelously useless sign intended for visitors who somehow failed to notice the massive, impossible-to-miss, 1244 foot-long Hoover Dam stretching across the gorge.

Where's that confounded dam?

Oh, is this it?

Inside the dam gift shop, it's impossible to miss all of the dam jokes. You're greeted by an audio recording emanating from a mannquin dressed like a miner that's filled with multiple dam joks. T-shirst read "My Parent's Got Me This Dam T-Shirt," and mugs say "I went on the dam tour," etc., etc., ad nauseum. "Are you tired of the dam jokes?" I asked the guy behind the counter. Dam right he was. "Hey, where's the dam squashed penny machine?"

Found it

Back outside the dam gift shop, following the sign to the top of dam, you'll soon come to the bathrooms. Unlike the rather unassuming bathrooms at Valley of Fire, the bathrooms at the Hoover Dam are dramatic Art Deco affairs precariously perched on the very rim of the dam.

That's the dam men's room

Snazzy Art Deco ante-bathroom

The bathroom is small inside, but on the plus side the men's room has a pair of unusual Art Deco urinals that look like oversized athletic cups on raised pedestals (an example here). Oddly, they're free-standing and without any sort of stall wall, so anyone entering the bathroom gets treated to a straight-on view of someone peeing (I guess men were less pee-shy back in the days of the Hoover administration).

One of the more interesting bathroom views in the world

Dam towers

For me, there's no comparison between the crowded superficial tawdriness of Vegas and the vast beautiful terrain that surrounds it, but most people come to Vegas to gamble, drink, see a few shows, and never even think of setting foot off the Strip, much less driving an hour outside the city. No bathroom inside a hotel shaped like a cheap replica of the Chrysler Building can compare to the ones at Valley of Fire, no matter how glitzy. To put this in poker terms so the gamblers can understand, Vegas is a full house, but the Nevada desert is a royal flush.

In Bigfoot's Living Room

2009-09-30T22:37:00.000-07:00

She frowned and almost spat when she spoke; clearly I had inadvertently wandered into sensitive territory, and she was probably tired of the question. How could I not ask? All available space on the restaurant walls was covered in cast iron pans with people's names neatly painted in red and white; there was a sign over a doorway that declared this to be the world's largest privately owned collection of cast iron cookware. One pan proudly held the name of Doug McConnell, host of TV's Bay Area Backroads.

My friends and I had just emerged from a week-long backpacking trip in the Marble Mountain Wilderness in far northern California, and we were in desperate need of some real food. There wasn't much to choose from in the little town of Orleans, so we ended up at a place that simply said "Cafe" outside. A local who had told us where to find food said, "We just call it the greasy spoon."

The Greasy Spoon

“We keep writing Guinness trying to get in the book,” she said pouring the brown stuff that was standing in for coffee that morning, “but apparently they don’t have a category for it.” She paused, thinking dark thoughts about the Guinness Book of World Records editorial staff. “So we’re just waitin’ – what else can we do?” she grumbled.

We changed the subject, "I see you have a stage - do you get bands coming through here?"

"Oh yeah," she said, brightening her mood, "mostly local bands. Sometimes we'll have bands come in from Forks of Salmon."

Forks of Salmon is now without any doubt my favorite town name. Also, any band out there looking for a good name, please consider Forks of Salmon.

To those that don't know California well, it's a land of surfers, movie stars, hybrid driving liberals, and patchouli-soaked pot-smoking hippies. But California is huge, and the more you explore it, the more it defies any simple stereotypes. I was trying to explain this to some friends in London, telling them that even San Francisco isn't at all what most people expect — ironically they had been to San Francisco with their parents and the first thing they saw when they walked out of their hotel was a guy walking down the street in assless chaps. Okay, admittedly San Francisco will have the very occasional assless chaps guy, but the cultural terrain changes dramatically as you travel around the state. Here we were, many hours from anywhere, in a dark, cast-iron-clad greasy spoon where the lumberjacky locals who looked like they had been plucked from the cast of extras on Northern Exposure argued over their card game at the corner table, and bands came in from Forks of Salmon. The road we were driving down was marked "The Bigfoot Scenic Byway" and we had passed an Adopt-A-Highway sign that read "In memory of Critter" and a full-sized billboard reading "Produce the Birth Certificate!" We were no longer in assless chaps territory.

Driving down the Bigfoot Scenic Byway

This was exactly what we were shooting for when we planned this trip. We weren't looking for the world's largest privately owned collection of cast iron cookware per se, but we were intent on finding a remote and quiet corner of California for a backpacking trip. To me, backpacking is all about solitude, so when you plan a trip in the summer high season in California you have to choose your trail carefully. Popular trails in the central Sierra can get miserably busy, and there's nothing worse than a traffic jam on a wilderness trail. I knew we had picked well when I told people that I was going backpacking for a week in the Marble Mountains and I got multiple looks of confusion, one persone that thought I was headed to Vermont, and two people that thought I was going to Danang, Vietnam. While a trip to Vietnam sounds pretty good, these Marble Mountains are a section of the Klamath Range just south of the Oregon border, smack dab in Bigfoot's living room.

Bigfoot in his living room

People in Bigfoot Country take this stuff seriously — it's not just a couple of eccentrics with Bigfoot-shaped mailboxes — the whole area is covered with Bigfoot signs, Bigfoot-branded businesses, Bigfoot power stations (seriously), and more Bigfoot statuary than you would believe. In fact, to add another unconfirmed, non-Guinness-approved world record to the trip, the Bigfoot Museum in Willow Creek has what is supposedly the world's largest Bigfoot statue right in the parking lot.

That's one big Bigfoot

Bigfoot with a couple of grimy backpackers for scale

Bigfootprints

I have to admit that when we set out on the trail a week earlier, I had some small amount of hope that I would catch a glimpse of something and convince myself I had seen Bigfoot. I didn't actually want to see Bigfoot — that would uncomfortably rattle some core beliefs about science and reason that I'm not especially keen on rattling — but thinking that maybe I might have possibly caught a glimpse of something that could have been Bigfoot (but was probably just the back end of a black bear) seemed like it would be entertaining, not to mention fodder for a vastly exaggerated story I could tell for years to come.

At the entrance to the Marble Mountain Wilderness from Haypress trailhead

I'm sad to say that we saw neither hide nor hair of Bigfoot, in fact we had a megafauna-free trip for the most part, despite being in the area that reportedly has the highest concentration of bears in California. At least in part, the lack of animals was due to a large wildfire that had occurred in the Marbles in 2008, and we spent the first day of the trip crossing eerie burned landscapes.

Luckily we were out of the burn zone by the time we hit Cuddihy Lakes, and we were treated to the green meadows, forests, and rock-walled lakes we had hoped for, and the wildflowers were still putting on a show despite being a bit late in the season.

Walking around the first of the Cuddihy Lakes

Sneezeweed in bloom

A new one for the life-list: Klamath gentian, Gentiana plurisetosa

Fishing at Cuddihy Lakes

Our food rations were light on this trip, so we were hoping for fish to supplement what we carried in. The first lakes we hit had been fished hard by summer hikers and pack teams and apart from giant salamanders there wasn't anything moving in the lakes, and we got no bites.

The uppermost of the Cuddihy Lakes

The ultimate goal of the hike was to reach Spirit Lake, described by California outdoors writer Tom Stienstra as one of his favorite lake destinations in the state and a site considered sacred by the local Native American people. Looking at the map, Spirit Lake doesn't look like much more than a small pond, so we didn't know exactly what to expect.

Spirit Lake in the sun as we arrived

Spirit Lake was beautiful - is it Top 10 list worthy? I wouldn't say so, but it does have some really good things going for it. For one, there are two incredible campsites perched above the lake near some of the best fishing spots, and it's far enough into the Marbles that most pack teams and hikers don't typically make it this far, so there were plenty of fish to be caught. Spirit Lake doesn't wow with grandeur and towering granite cliffs or the like, but it has a primordial unspoiled feel that you don't find many places, so it's a fabulous place to go to get a break from the modern world.

Just a few hours later, the spirits descended

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about Spirit Lake is that it's fed by a warm and somewhat salty spring, and when an unexpected cold weather system hit the area just a few hours after we arrived, eerie swirls of fog appeared and were whipped around by swirling winds like ghosts on the lake.

Larkspurs in the fog

Thick fog on Spirit Lake

I kept looking around for Bigfoot lurking in the fog, but he was not to be found. Luckily you don't need to see Bigfoot to feel like you've glimpsed another world, all you really need is a breath of fresh air and wall covered in cast iron pans.

Airstreams and Moon Germs

2009-09-14T13:05:00.000-07:00

With all of the news coverage of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing in the past few months, I was surprised to see almost no mention of the San Francisco Bay Area's connection to this historic event mentioned in the local papers. Only a few people I talked to knew of the USS Hornet Museum in Alameda, and even fewer knew that the Hornet was the ship that recovered the astronauts from the Apollo 11 & 12 missions after splashdown.

The USS Hornet

View of San Francisco from the flight deck (flag at half mast in honor of the passing of Senator Kennedy)

Beyond the association with the lunar missions, the Hornet was instrumental in several key battles during WWII, in fact the Hornet was the ship from which the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo was launched, later made famous in the Spencer Tracy film Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. Coincidentally, Jimmy Doolittle himself was born in Alameda where the Hornet was based and still stands today.

I love exploring large ships, partly because I retain some element of disbelief that something so massive can float, but also I have a peculiar fascination with staircases on ships (gangplanks being a close second). I don't care where they go, I want to climb them. They're really just ladders pretending to be staircases, and I always have that moment of pause at the top when I have to decide whether I should be going down face-first. That's how the cool guys do it in movies like Under Siege — no self-respecting action star would back down a set of stairs no matter how steep — and lord knows I want to be at least as cool as Steven Seagal, so I generally give it a go. [Apologies for the minor digression here, but you really must read the IMDB bio of Steven Seagal, which was written by himself, his publicist, or a deranged stalker - it's hard to tell which.]

Steven Seagal would totally go face-first down this one

Maggie opts for the non-Seagalian method of descent

I have to admit, I liked finding an escalator on the ship, but you would never see a Tommy Lee Jones knife fight here

For space travel aficionados there are countless bits of interest scattered around the hornet: photo exhibits of the splashdowns and recovery missions, the Apollo space capsule used for testing the heat shields, an SH-3H Sea King helicopter used in the movie Apollo 13, and bits of snazzy space fashion.

Lunar couture

Comfy rescue basket

Peering in the Apollo space capsule

The highlight for me among the collection of Apollo artifacts was what is undoubtedly the world's most historically important Airstream trailer.

The one-of-a-kind Airstream MQF

Fearing that the returning astronauts might be carrying some sort of unknown moon germs, a special "Mobile Quarantine Facility" was devised for the astronauts to keep them separated until doctors felt it was safe to release them. The Mobile Quarantine Facility had to look cool and futuristic — no mere Winnebago would suffice — so they used a super-modern Airstream that was specially sealed and fitted for the purpose.

Winnebago's concept for the MQF was unfortunately never commissioned

The astronauts' exit hatch from the MQF

The crew of Apollo 11 talking to Richard Nixon from a safe distance

When I entered the Mobile Quarantine Facility, there was a small child of about 3 years old standing there. "Hi!" he said. "Hi," I replied. It turns out that what he really meant was, "Hi, I just crapped my pants inside of a hermetically sealed Airstream." Maggie climbed in, turned around and climbed back out.

Holding my breath inside the MQF

Everyone gets a chance to be an Apollo astronaut

One small step for man, one giant gulp of moon germs

The USS Hornet is well worth the visit, even if you have little interest in the space travel history. Most of the ship is open for you to wander at will, with most rooms set up as they would be on a working ship, and there are guided tours into some of the otherwise closed parts of the ship. The stunning views of San Francisco are worth the price of admission alone. The USS Hornet Museum is open 10 am - 5 pm, 7 days a week, adult admission is currently $14 - bring a coat as it gets windy and often cold inside the ship. If you time your visit well, you can combine it with a trip to the monthly Alameda Point Antiques & Collectibles Faire or a tasting/tour of Hangar 1 Vodka, or Rosenblum Cellars.

Face Recognition

2009-08-31T12:32:00.000-07:00

In a recent piece, I suggested, given the rise of face recognition software being used in applications like Apple's iPhoto and web-based photo services like Google's Picasa, that we as a society were on the verge of a major breakthrough. In the very near future, we might be able to locate pictures of ourselves in the vacation photos of complete strangers.

You might think, "Well, whoopee - what's so cool about that?" You'll have plenty of time to ponder that question because, after my recent experiences, I think we're a very long way yet from any global face recognition breakthrough.

My new laptop came with the latest version of iPhoto and I was able to really play with the face recognition function for the first time. At first I was impressed: when you go to a picture with a face on it and click "Name," iPhoto was quickly able to pick out the faces in the picture:

iPhoto was easily able to find my face in this photo

After that, all you have to do is label the faces it picks out and then iPhoto is supposed to go through your library and pick out other occurrences of this face - sounds simple enough. Knowing ahead of time that face recognition technology is far from perfected, I expected some level of error. Sadly, iPhoto's ability to (a) locate faces, and then (b) identify them based on a set of manually labeled pictures, doesn't quite live up to even my already lowered expectations and it comes up with astonishing amounts of false positives. On the plus side, these misidentifications proved incredibly amusing. Essentially everyone I know, male or female, young or old, bearded or clean-shaven, was identified as possibly being me - but it didn't stop there: I was numerous faceless inanimate objects as well.

Here are some of the best things that were tagged as me or Maggie in my photo library:

Andy:

A pork pie with sliced pears
A fake aquarium plant
A baby in a bear suit
A clump of dirt
A yeoman warder
Sir Walter Raleigh
A spooky doll
A goose
Sir Joseph Banks
A cluster of tomatoes
A gelato spoon
A Malaysian curry
A bagel
Scary clown head
A chanterelle mushroom
The Golden Gate Bridge
A pizza
A snowball
A handrail
A solid black square
Grandpa Leo's birthday hula dancer
A spatula

Maggie:

Statue of Ron Howard
Cardboard cutout of Elvis
A granite counter tile
A Parisian living statue
Rear end of a pig
A frosty mug of root beer
A penguin
A snowy mountain
St. Francis of Assisi
The Eiffel Tower
Barrack Obama
This creepy mannequin
A camel
Lettuce
A "No Left Turn" sign
A carnivorous plant
A bus tire
Her own knee
Indian man with large scarf

Not Maggie

To be fair, iPhoto did get a lot of photos correct. However, given that a rather large percentage of my photos have either me or Maggie in them, I'm not sure it did significantly better than random. Oh well, I guess I'll have to wait a bit longer for the ability to find out-of-focus pictures of myself accidentally ruining someone else's travel photo.

How to Plan a New York Trip If You Like Food

2009-08-21T12:10:00.000-07:00

The best thing about being a foodie traveler today is that there's more information available than ever before about local food and restaurants around the world. The problem is that most of this information isn't in guidebooks, it's scattered in magazines, newspapers, blogs, online review sites, or locked away in the brains of your foodie friends.

To be fair, guidebooks vary by publisher, location, and author, and some are significantly more thoughtful about food than others, but overall guidebooks are simply insufficient if you're a devoted foodie. Guidebooks have the built-in constraint that only a limited space can be allotted to food content, but the biggest problem I find is that the guidebooks aren't written specifically for me and my personal tastes. I don't really know why this is, in fact someone should really do something about that, but for some untold reason guidebooks are written to appeal to a broader audience, so I find that only a small fraction of the recommendations in most guidebooks are exactly what I'm looking for. I've included below a breakdown of the types of restaurants one can typically find in any given guidebook in the form of a colorful pie chart:

So how do you plan a trip if you're a foodie and you want to tailor a trip to your own peculiar food tastes? Write your own mini-guide. My version of this is almost embarrassingly low-tech: an extensive, sometime multi-page, always sloppily-written, longhand list that I keep in my pocket during the trip. Maybe once I break down and get a smart phone this will change (and, honestly, why I haven't typed these lists is beyond me), but I've done quite well so far with the hand-written list.

My well-used list of food destinations from my recent New York trip

When planning my recent New York trip, I came up with a few categories of places that I wanted to hit during this trip (e.g., pizza joints, gelaterias, hummuiots [see below]), then I pulled together info from various sources including places I've loved from previous trips, recommendations from friends, Yelp, Chowhound, TV food shows, New York bloggers, and various New York publications.

Luckily, Maggie and I have compatible traveling styles: we both like to have a small number of activites planned in advance (typically only things that require advance planning like theater), and then we come up with a list of things we might like to do during the rest of the trip. This allows flexibility in case the weather is bad or unplanned laziness strikes, and it generally lets you do exactly what you want to do at any given moment, which is something I look forward to on vacation. With the food list in your pocket, no matter what neighborhood you find yourself in, there's a good chance that the list has something tasty nearby to try. If not, then guidebooks, concierges, cabbies, serendipity, and your nose can fill in the gaps, and it's always fun to include some off-list experiences.

Highlights from the list:

1. Pizza. I mostly covered the pizza experiences in the previous New York post, but this serves as an illustration of one way the list helps keep you flexible: we wanted to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, which neither of us had done before, but we didn't know what day we were going to do it as it relied heavily on weather. What we did know is that whenever we did cross the Brooklyn Bridge, we'd be right near Grimaldi's at lunch time, so having the address/directions, say on a hand-written list in your pocket, could come in quite handy.

On the way to Grimaldi's (looking back at Manhattan)

2. Hummusiots. I had read an article in the New York Times about the rising popularity of hummusiots, restaurants where hummus is the star of the show. I had been to one such place in London (Hummus Bros) that had disappointingly under-seasoned hummus, but the NY Times article talked up several locations and got me craving some really good homemade hummus.

Hummus with chickpeas from Hummus Place

I have to give credit to my trusty Lonely Planet guidebook on this one, because the best hummus we had in New York was from the amazing Taïm in the West Village, recommended in the guidebook but not even mentioned in the NY Times piece. If you go to Taïm, don't stop at the hummus: make sure you try the falafel, the salads, the brown sugar lemonade, and pretty much anything else they make. If you're curious, Taïm has a series of podcasts that show you how to make many of their dishes (including the hummus).

3. Breakfast. Anyone who knows me well (or even slightly) knows of my love for all things breakfast-related. Despite having a free continental breakfast at our hotel, always a plus, we had to go out for a few breakfasts to explore a bit of Manhattan's breakfast scene. I could claim that I got the tip to go to Clinton Street Baking Co. in the Lower East Side from a recent issue of Lonely Planet Magazine, but in fact I saw it first on an episode of Throwdown! with Bobby Flay, where they competed with Bobby Flay to see who makes a better blueberry pancake.

Breakfast at Clinton Street Baking Co.

I had every intention of ordering the pancakes until I saw the menu. I love places that make it difficult to order by having too many tempting things on the menu, and Clinton St. Baking Co. is definitely one of those. In the end I went with the Southern Breakfast with eggs, cheese grits, fried green tomatoes, and sugar-cured bacon, while Maggie went with a southwestern-style breakfast roughly the size of her head that involved homemade biscuits and tomatillo sauce.

4. Root beer floats. Always on a quest for amazing root beer floats, I did some research on Chowhound and found a few places recommended around Manhattan. At dinner with some of our NY friends at Peasant in Nolita, they snagged our list and eagerly scoured it crossing out things that weren't worth our time, adding arrows, exclamation points, and underlines to things we should definitely do, and even writing in a few additional places that fit our interests. Shake Shack got an emphatic arrow, and prompted one of our friends to say in satisfied caveman voice, "Shake Shack! Shake Shack gooooood!" This was high praise indeed.

Inside Shake Shack - keen eyes will observe a rare and very discerning choice here: Abita Root Beer on tap

The fact that they had Abita Root Beer on tap, my current favorite root beer for making root beer floats, was an excellent sign, as was the fact that they use homemade frozen custard. Sure enough, the float was excellent, but was overshadowed by the almost supernaturally delicious burgers. These aren't ultra-gourmet burgers (although they do use high quality ingredients), they're just really good fastfood-style burgers but with a sprinkling of magic unicorn horn to make you crave more.

Off-list highlights:

1. The Sturgeon King. I feel ashamed now, but I purposely left Barney Greengrass the Sturgeon King off of my list assuming it would be silly and contrived. Boy was I wrong.

We had two other excellent breakfasts out, one at Clinton Street Baking Co., and the other at Blue Ribbon Bar, but our breakfast at the Sturgeon King was far and away my favorite. Complaining that the H&H Bagels on the Upper West Side makes incredible bagels but doesn't toast them, our Shake-Shack-loving friends pointed out that the Sturgeon King serves toasted H&H bagels with their fish platters. That alone was enough to convince me to give it a try.

Inside Barney Greengrass the Sturgeon King

I know smoked fish for breakfast isn't for everyone - and I don't want it every day myself - but when I'm in the mood and it's high quality, it can be amazing. This was one of those times.

H&H Bagels with a Nova lox and whitefish platter

Beyond the excellent food, The Sturgeon King has some serious character, not to mention some serious characters working there, which makes only adds to the experience. This ain't TGI Friday's.

2. A Brief Seinfeld Moment. I didn't eat here but had to take its picture when we happened to walk by on the way to a friend's apartment:

It felt wrong to see this view without a laugh track and bass riff

3. Cheesecake. I wasn't planning to go out of my way for cheesecake on this trip, but I chanced across a Junior's counter just as they were closing for the night in the food hall at Grand Central Terminal.

Junior's cheesecake is a bit sweet, the crust gets a tad soggy, but the flavor's good and the consistency has the mix of lightness and richness that I look for in a cheesecake. Interestingly, it tastes even better when eaten off the ticket counter in the main hall of Grand Central.

Between the list and the off-list places, we ate extremely well, in fact I can't recall a trip in which I was happier with the food, and we mostly avoided very high-end places. Next step, typing the list so I don't have to rewrite it every time.

For the über-curious, here's a map of all of the places we ate on our New York trip, and I'm happy to go into silly levels of detail upon request.

View New York Food Spots - July 2009 in a larger map

Oh Deer

2009-08-16T16:49:00.001-07:00

Spotted today in Alameda Towne Centre, a place known more for cheesy piped music and chain stores than for offbeat humor:

Please do not feed or sit on the deer

If you trust the sign, feeding the bronze deer statues might be unwise. I suppose it might make the statues reliant on human handouts and lead them to favor human foods, certainly less healthy than their typical diet of wild landscaping plants.

Is this intentional humor, or are they really worried about people trying to give the deer a sip of their Jamba Juice?

Pizza Love and Understanding

2009-08-10T22:29:00.000-07:00

When I think of New York food, several things spring to mind: pastrami sandwiches, bagels, hot dogs, and, best of all to my mind, pizza. There's good pizza throughout the US, but there's something about New York pizza that makes me want to run down to the airport and catch the next plane going east.

On my first visit to New York, I had convinced myself ahead of time that New York style pizza was overrated: after all, the pizza I'd had in California that was billed as New York style was bland, used sub-par ingredients, and was generally about as interesting as chewing on a wet newspaper. By the same token, I'm sure many New Yorkers probably think West Coast pizza is all soulless dreck covered in tofu, aioli, pineapple, and a variety of toppings that have no business prancing their way onto a pizza. If so, they're just as wrong as I was.

I never seem to have enough time (or pizza stamina) to try all of the places that crop up in the never-ending New York pizza arguments so I'm not even close to being able to say I've found the absolute best, but this past month I managed to squeeze in meals at three of the classics: John's of Bleecker Street, Arturo's, and Grimaldi's.

John's was my first love in New York pizza and continues to be my favorite. The signed headshot of Vanilla Ice on the wall that says "Keep makin' dope pizza" doesn't inspire much confidence in the quality, but Mr. Ice seems to know his pizza because pizza doesn't get much more dope than John's. It was a simple margherita pizza at John's that showed me what New York pizza was really about: super-high heat from a coal-fired brick oven, quality ingredients, a crust that's thin but has some attitude, and, in true New York fashion, no bullshit.

The margherita pizza at John's

There's a philosophical cheese divide amongst New York pizza fans: some prefer the cheese in small rounds distributed across the pie (e.g., Grimaldi's), others prefer an even spread of grated cheese (e.g., John's). Honestly they both have their merits, and I can't say I strongly prefer one over the other but I give a slight edge to the John's style. At John's, apart from the delicious char marks from the oven, you get a pretty even experience all the way, but at Grimaldi's you get a very heterogeneous pie: one bite will be mostly sauce, the next will have a piece of chewy melted fresh mozzarella.

Pizza Margherita at Grimaldi's

Grimaldi's has several things going for it: they have probably the prettiest pizzas you'll see anywhere, the location under the Brooklyn Bridge is unique and scenic, and the staff are friendly and at least as saucy as the pizza. Perhaps revealing my West Coast origin, I asked the waiter if they had salad. This was apparently a funny question.

The local Olde Brooklyn Root Beer at Grimaldi's

The Brooklyn Bridge looms over Grimaldi's

Oh, and Grimaldi's has perhaps best pizza poster ever:

Now you come and say "Don Corleone, give me pizza," but you don't ask with respect.

Arturo's is perhaps not as well known as Grimaldi's or John's, but often shows up on favorite lists by locals. With a live piano player, Arturo's provided the best entertainment of the three, but the pizza didn't quite live up to expectations the night we went: the crust was a bit too burnt around the edge, and the cheese to sauce ratio skewed way too far in the cheese direction. The fact that they serve Boylan's root beer (good choice) and the restaurant has a pleasantly quirky atmosphere helps a lot, but the pizza that night wasn't in the same league as John's or Grimaldi's.

Mushroom pie at Arturo's

To sum it all up, here's a handy table with the various attributes rated on a 1-10 scale:

	John's	Grimaldi's	Arturo's
Appearance	9	10	8
Crust	9	10	7
Cheese	10	9	8
Sauce	10	8	9
Ambiance	10	10	10
Overall Score	9.6	9.4	8.4
Bonus Points	Root beer by the pitcher, headshots of Bruno Kirby and Vanilla Ice	Local root beer, friendly, location	Boylan's root beer, quirky place, live music

All three restaurants make a solid pie, and I'd even be happy eat at Arturo's again because I have the feeling that I hit them on an off night. John's just ekes out the victory here with their amazing tomato sauce and their magical ability to pull more flavor than should be possible from the few ingredients, but the Grimaldi's pie is a very close contender and has one of the best crusts you'll ever find - definitely a pizza you can't refuse.

Photo Dumpster Diving

2009-07-18T23:22:00.000-07:00

Hi there. This is me:

Not a very good version of me, admittedly, which is why I threw the photo away years ago — or so I thought.

You can learn a lot about people from the things the throw away. I haven't done too much dumpster-diving in my time, but they always seem to find something incriminating after a 10 second garbage inspection on most episodes of Law & Order, so it must be true.

My laptop has been on the verge of dying recently. I think I've been saying that for well over a year, but this time it looks like it means it. Whirring, stalling, and spinning beach balls of death happen when I try to use iPhoto, Apple's nice but memory-hungry photo organizing program. I shouldn't criticize iPhoto too much, as I'm definitely part of the problem: I just noticed that I have 9000 photos in my library, and I found that 1200 photos I thought I had been deleting over the years have remained hidden in the iPhoto trash bin. This is the biggest problem with digital photography: sure, you can take as many photos as you want essentially for free, but at some point you're going to have to deal with them, and dealing with them takes a lot of time.

I was just going to empty the trash bin, but I started looking through the pictures and got fascinated by the stuff I decided was garbage over the past 6 years. I thought I would share some of the best of the worst:

- I like visiting aquaria, and I inevitably try to take photos of the fish, but they rarely come out well because of the glass, movement, and low lighting:

This looks like the cover of a science fiction novel, but it's really just a bad picture from the aquarium at the London Zoo

- This is a picture of me holding smoked mackerel pâté, probably for some intended post on things found in British markets that Americans would find strange:

It was actually pretty tasty, but it made me long for real bagels

- Dozens of pictures of banana peels for some harebrained idea I had a while back:

A London banana

The Swiss apparently throw away whole bananas, but only in the forest

- Several people I don't know at all...

...and people I only pretend not to know

- My toothbrush that I had forgotten in Chiang Mai being fed to an elephant by my so-called friends:

Countless out-of-focus picture of plants and ones ruined by sudden gusts of wind:

Stupid wind

- Things I found hilarious at one point because I'm a 13-year-old boy at heart:

- Pictures of myself I found too embarrassing to keep, like the picture of me scrambling up a steep cliff in Raiatea. This sounds all cool and adventurous, and it was, but...well, the picture doesn't need much explanation:

Ass close-up, take 1

- Several completely mysterious things that could be called "art" if I was so inclined:

Art

- Evidence that I tried to sing Kenny Rogers in Bangkok (and nailed it, I tell you):

You gotta know when to fold 'em

- Frightening numbers of redundant and unnecessary soda bottle pictures:

Lord knows why I took 5 shots of these

- Things that tasted great but didn't photograph well

Poisson cru - incredibly delicious, but not so lovely

I'm no food stylist, but it's hard to make a hog sandwich look pretty

- The last pink-hued gasps of my trusty Canon Powershot:

And evidence that I have watched at least one woman's rugby match

Well, there you have it, a glimpse at my photo garbage heap. I'm glad that iPhoto hung onto these, because now I can't bear to part with some of them. I did learn a few things from going through all of these old bad photos: a. don't take photographs of soda bottles random food items unless you actually have some use for them, b. delete the crap photos immediately after downloading them from the camera, c. don't leave your toothbrush in Chiang Mai, and d. don't let anyone take a pictue of you singing The Gambler.

Golden Gate Vertigo

2009-07-14T13:12:00.000-07:00

No matter how much ground I try to cover, there always seems to be more to explore in San Francisco's Presidio. People often think of Golden Gate Park as San Francisco's largest park, and it is definitely large, just slightly besting New York's Central Park in terms of overall area (and number of bison). The Presidio is larger still and, while not a park in the traditional sense, it has miles of hiking trails, historical buildings to explore, a log cabin, a pet cemetery, George Lucas, and some of the most famous and breathtaking views in the state.

The Golden Gate Bridge from Battery East

I had set out to explore unfamiliar parts of the Presidio, but I got drawn in by a glimpse of the Golden Gate Bridge emerging from the fog and had to stop at Battery East to take some photos. I don't think it's possible to tire of the sight of the Golden Gate Bridge, and I doubt I'm alone in thinking that the fog only increases its beauty. Walking out along the ridgeline to get a view, I found that I was directly above Fort Point, one of my very favorite places in the Presidio, so I threw novelty out the window and opted for a long-overdue return visit to one of my all-time favorite places.

The approach to Fort Point

Fort Point sits directly on the south side of the Golden Gate overlooking narrow strait from the Pacific Ocean into San Francisco Bay. [Total nerdy factoid: Did you know that the Golden Gate refers to the land on either side of the strait, not the strait itself? Impress your friends.]

After the 1849 gold rush made San Francisco populous and wealthy, Fort Point was built by the US Army in the 1850s as a key point of defense along the Pacific coast for an invader that never materialized. In some ways, the Gate was an unfortunate choice of location, as it meant the soldiers manning the fort were constantly buffeted by harsh cold winds, and also it turned out to be the logical place to build a bridge to cross the strait some years later. The fort was thankfully spared during the building of the Golden Gate Bridge in the 1930s by the foresight of the bridge engineer Joseph Strauss who admired the building and altered the bridge design to accommodate it, despite the fact that Fort Point was not declared an official National Historic Site until 1970.

Even if you haven't visited Fort Point before, you might recall it as a setting for a famous scene in Alfred Hitchcock's classic thriller Vertigo. Jimmy Stewart, tailing Kim Novak around San Francisco, follows her to Fort Point and sees her try to commit suicide by throwing herself into the water, and he rushes in to save her.

The Jimmy rescue, heels and all

It looks just about the same today

A lot of visitors, locals and tourists alike, will come to Fort Point for the views of the bridge and Alcatraz, to watch waves crash over the road during storm swells, or to say "Ooh, this is where that scene in Vertigo took place," but then dismiss the fort itself, which is a big mistake. There's really no downside: entry is free; it's much prettier and atmospheric inside than you would perhaps imagine from outside; and unlike many historic buildings, you can go nearly anywhere you want in Fort Point unguided, including four stories up to the open roof with incomparable views. If you go early in the day, especially on week days, you can have the place almost entirely to yourself.

Eastern hallway in morning light

Fort Point in the morning—no crowds

From the roof the bridge seems almost close enough to touch

Hitchcock did what many tourists do: treat Fort Point as a mere backdrop. If he had wanted to, Hitchcock could have taken advantage of some the vertigo inducing aspects of Fort Point itself - the steep castle-like spiral staircases and ladder-like ones from the inner courtyard, views over the ramparts to crashing waves, a lighthouse precariously perched on the roof - all with good movie potential.

The combination of the fort's history and architecture, the dramatic setting, and the bizarre juxtaposition of the towering bridge and the Gold Rush era fort make Fort Point a truly unique landmark and one of my favorite spots in San Francisco. If you go, go early to avoid crowds and slow traffic that crawls through the small Presidio roads on busy days. If you don't mind a walk (and a lot of stairs) and want a few more views of the bridge, park at Battery East and walk down the trail to Torpedo Wharf and west along the bay to Fort Point (~10 minutes). And if you decide to jump in the water with your heels on, make sure Jimmy Stewart is nearby.

Happily Stuck in Lodi

2009-06-23T20:01:00.000-07:00

Have you noticed A&W root beer ads on TV lately? I'm not sure when the last time A&W had a TV marketing campaign was, but I think they had Mr. T in them, so it's been a while. My first thought was that they were pumping up A&W for its 90th anniversary, after all it was 90 years ago that Roy Allen set up his first roadside root beer stand in Lodi, CA and then partnered with Frank Wright to form A&W. There's a larger trend of nostalgia marketing happening right now: nostalgia sends people back to a happier time, as in a time when there wasn't a recession, your house wasn't in foreclosure, and Mr. T distributed frosty mugs of root beer to all who desired.

I pity the fool who doesn't like this ad

A&W isn't alone in this, even in the soda industry. Pepsi made several moves along these lines recently: first they spent over $1 million to redo their logo into something that looks just like their old logo but has a stripe in the middle that resembles a smile (it also just happens to resemble the Obama campaign logo as well, coincidentally), and now they've introduced several new products, Pepsi Throwback, Mountain Dew Throwback, and Pepsi Natural. The two "Throwback" sodas have retro packaging and - gasp - real sugar. You see, in America, the use of real sugar hearkens back to a happier age. Pepsi Natural goes one step further in that it uses actual kola nut extract in the recipe as well as real sugar (and it comes in a nifty glass bottle).

The new Pepsi Natural

Even if these are crass attempts to get us to spend more money on things we really don't need, anything that brings sugar and natural ingredients back into sodas gets my support. With root beer, you don't need to do anything at all to make it a throwback, the mere mention of it can send people back to hot summer days of their childhood, real sugar or no.

Whether the A&W ads are part of some sneaky nostalgia marketing campaign or not, it is in fact the 90th anniversary of A&W, and to celebrate in a suitably nostalgic way, the owner of the A&W Drive-In in Lodi threw a birthday bash complete with a classic car show, a live band playing retro hits like Dream Lover (and yes, CCR's Lodi), and "7-foot-tall ambassador of fun" himself, the A&W Root Beer Bear. Naturally, I had to go.

Playing up the retro

The 7-foot-tall ambassador of fun

Even without the help of the band, it's physically impossible to go to/through/near Lodi without getting the CCR song stuck in your head. I tried, I really did, but it just crept intro my brain and, well, got stuck.

I'm sure it was somewhat of a different town 40 years ago, but despite what John Fogerty claims, Lodi's really not a bad place in which to be stuck. This is probably getting off on a dangerous tangent, but this is just further evidence that John Fogerty isn't always a trustworthy source. After all, CCR's The Royal Albert Hall Concert album was actually recorded in Oakland, California, I highly doubt elephants were actually playing in the band (tambourines, maybe), and he wasn't born on the bayou like he claimed, he was born in Berkeley, making his twangy "hoyd it through the grape vahn" accent and use of words like "hoodoo" highly suspect.

I suppose if you were "lookin' for fame and foytchun" in the music industry Lodi may not be the place to look, but it is quite a charming little town, especially in the old downtown and the surrounding tree-lined residential neighborhoods. Plus Lodi also has an arch, prettier (albeit less slogany) than the one I saw recently in Modesto.

The Lodi Arch (built 1907), leading to downtown

Lodi City Hall

Classic cars and A&W Root Beer

I don't know much about old cars, but I like them. I can't tell you the difference in the tail fins between a '58 and a '59 El Dorado, in fact I'm only mildly confident they had tail fins at all in those years. Mostly what I can do, and I'm quite good at this, is look at old cars and say, "Oooh, car pretty."

Oooh, Corvette pretty

Oooh, Shelby Cobra pretty

Ooh, shiny engine pretty

Oooh, line long

Given that it was a hot day, and a few thousand people showed up to ogle the pretty cars and drink root beer, there was a long line to get into the A&W. No one minded the wait, and they had plenty of staff on hand, so it went fairly quickly.

Even the A&W Root Beer Bear was on hand to make sure everything went smoothly

Triumph

Sadly (but sensibly) they were only serving floats in paper cups on the festival day, and big frosty glass mugs greatly improve a root beer float. Still, I'm not one to complain with RBF in hand.

I couldn't possibly pass up getting a commemorative mug

Lodi's actually really close to the Bay Area (so John Fogerty shouldn't have had a hard time getting back home), and the drive through the Sacramento-San Joaquin River delta is one of the nicest ways to cross the valley. The 100 year anniversary will be 10 years from now — maybe they can line up a CCR reunion concert...

The Cupcake Crawl

2009-06-12T23:51:00.000-07:00

For my friend Bianca's birthday celebration last weekend, she came up with a pretty clever celebration idea: a cupcake crawl. In the more traditional pub crawl, you walk from pub to pub, end up having a bit too much beer, have a jolly time, and generally end up feeling pretty awful. For a cupcake crawl, just replace the phrase "much beer" with "many cupcakes" in the previous sentence, and you'll get the picture. To be fair, I didn't feel awful after the cupcake crawl, but by the end of the day the thought of any more sugar was honestly pretty frightening.

Pub crawls are generally easy to organize because, in a city like San Francisco, essentially any neighborhood will have enough bars. Cupcakes are a bit more challenging. Luckily, cupcakes are super trendy these days and the posher neighborhoods of San Francisco have at least as many cupakeries as gelato shops and high-end pet stores, so a cupcake crawl is definitely possible.

The Marina

We started at Kara's Cupcakes in The Marina. Kara's had a huge selection to choose from, about 10 standard and 5 filled cupcakes, all available in normal or mini size. Given that we were planning to hit four more places after this and there were only four of us to start, we couldn't (sadly) try them all so we picked four of the most promising looking cupcakes.

Analyzing the menu at Kara's

Meyer lemon, passionfruit, fleur de sel, and java cupcakes

The fleur de sel cupcake came highly recommended by the girl behind the counter: it was a chocolate cake with a caramel filing, and a chocolate ganache topping sprinkled with flakes of fleur de sel. The salty, sweet, chocolatey flavor on this was outstanding and one of the most interesting things we sampled all day, although my personal favorite at Kara's was probably the passionfruit. I'm a sucker for all things passionfruit flavored — I know that's not the manliest thing to admit, but I just can't help it.

Just a few blocks away from Kara's is Miette, a French-style bakery and candy shop that makes several types of cupcakes (essentially miniature versions of their larger cakes). They had four cupcakes that day: chocolate with vanilla buttercream, chocolate with strawberry buttercream, chocolate "old fashioned" with a marshmallow cream topping, and ginger bread with a cream cheese frosting. We got one of each as well as an expensive but intriguing bacon chocolate bar (Mo's Bacon Bar from Vosges Haut Chocolat) and took them all over to the park at the nearby Moscone Recreation Center to sample.

Cupcakes from Miette and the mysterious bacon bar

All four cupcakes were good, but the ginger bread with cream cheese frosting was the clear winner. The ginger bread cake was moist and spicy, and the cream cheese frosting was rich but not too sweet. I will definitely be back for another of these at some point.

Sadly, I had to destroy the wonderful flavor in my mouth by sampling the bacon chocolate bar. It was much worse than I imagined, and I had imagined it being pretty bad. It had real pieces of bacon in it, but the flavor was pure smoke, and more smokey than any bacon I know of. It reminded me a bit of salty sweet chewing tobacco, or like what I'd imagine gnawing on a bar of Grandpa's Pine Tar Soap might taste like. I almost spit it out. I could see maybe enjoying this with a cigar and a glass of scotch, but I'd personally pass.

Cow Hollow

After mostly recovering from the encounter with the scary clown van, we headed to Cow Hollow to That Takes the Cake on Union St. The annual Union Street Fair was going on last weekend, so we got to watch lots of kids in jumping bouncy castles and getting nauseous on tea cup rides.

Tea cup ride at the Union Street Fair

The Cupcake Crawlers

Despite being a very pretty place run by nice people, I found the whole experience a bit saccharine. First they started with the name "That Takes the Cake," then they gave it the motto "Hand-frosted memories," and then to put the icing on the cake, so to speak, they gave all of their cupcakes cutesy names: the red velvet was called "Gentlemen Prefer Reds," the strawberry was called "The Prom Queen," and last but definitely least the vanilla with chocolate frosting was called "Alfred Hitchocolate." Perhaps not surprisingly, everything we tried was way over-the-top sweet even factoring in the cumulative sugar effect from the previous cupcakeries. Some people will love this place, but it was just too sweet for my taste.

A Prom Queen, a Gentlemen Prefer Reds, and a Lemon Drop

The Fillmore

The next stop on the route was Bittersweet in the Upper Fillmore. On a map, this looks pretty close to Cow Hollow, and in fact it is. But there's another neighborhood in between called Pacific Heights. The Marina is essentially at sea level, Pacific Heights is 370 ft higher up some of the steepest streets in San Francisco, so steep that the sidewalks turn into stairs towards the top. Luckily we had been supercharged by a month's worth of sugar, so we weren't daunted by the climb.

Where did this giant hill come from?

Looking back over the Marina towards Alcatraz

We made it to the Upper Fillmore, and found Muppets

By the time we made it to Bittersweet, we all were so tired of cupcakes that it was almost a relief to find that they didn't have any that day. We still stopped in and I got one of their famous bittersweet hot chocolates, which are incredible but seriously intense - the small cup is honestly a bit hard to finish, and I got a bit zippy like I do with coffee.

Boulangerie, a boulangerie

Our final stop was just down the street at Boulangerie, which happens to be a boulangerie. We were thwarted again - there were no cupcakes to be found, but this didn't make anyone overly sad. Their baked goods looked so amazing however, that I couldn't resist trying their plain croissants. I find it nearly impossible to find a good croissant in the Bay Area, but my search is now over - even after ridiculous amounts of cupcake and a hot chocolate that had my head spinning, this was one of the best croissants I've had anywhere and actually my favorite item from the whole crawl.

To Summarize:

Best Overall Cupcakery: Kara's Cupcakes
Best Individual Cupcake: Gingerbread cupcake with cream cheese frosting at Miette
Best Food Item All Day: Plain croissant at Boulangerie
Worst Food Item All Day: Bacon chocolate bar (Mo's Bacon Bar by Vosges Haut Chocolat)

Modesto Graffiti

2009-05-29T08:14:00.000-07:00

There's a tendency in the Bay Area to forget that the California Central Valley exists, and to many people it's like an annoying obstacle between home and the Sierra Nevada. I've always had an appreciation for the Valley, and I love driving all of the old mostly forgotten farm roads that crisscross the state. For some reason, I've spent more time exploring the backroads than I have poking around the towns of the Central Valley. Before this weekend, Modesto was just the place I would stop to grab a drink on the way to Yosemite, and I had never given it much more thought — it's just another one of those old Valley farm towns that's mostly mini-malls now, right?

Modesto does have its fair share of malls and a depressed old downtown, and actually consistently ranks as one of the worst places to live in the US, but any town that has a minor league baseball team called the Modesto Nuts clearly has more to it than meets the eye. One thing they certainly have is a snappy rhyming motto, "Water Wealth Contentment Health", which puts nearby Turlock's mildly punny "The Key to the Valley" to shame, and they have a beautiful old arch proclaiming the motto to the world.

The arch is nice, but in my world there's really one over-arching reason to visit Modesto: A&W. The very first A&W was in Lodi, California, not far to the north of Modesto and the place where John Fogerty seemed to get stuck at least twice, but Modesto has one of the few remaining A&W drive-ins, complete with carhops on roller skates.

Initial signs upon pulling into the parking lot are promising:

Elvis on the fender of an old truck below an old-fashioned A&W sign

A Packard bearing the old A&W logo and the license plate "MR ANW"

I was expecting something flashy in that 50s space age Cadillac tail-fin way, with big neon signs and sparkly naugahyde booths, but the Modesto A&W Drive-In is very unassuming, and arguably better: it's not trying to be campy or pseudo-retro, it's just a simple working drive-in that has managed to survive.

It's not entirely without flash, and I might describe it a bit differently on a Saturday night when the Marilyn Monroe look-alike shows up and they hold Elvis karaoke on the back of an old truck. Okay, so there's a little camp, but could you possibly resist if you ran a place like this?

A certain Modesto native named George Lucas also loved the A&W Drive-In it seems, and it served as his inspiration for American Graffiti, set in Modesto (although filmed elsewhere in Northern California). Naturally, the walls inside are covered with American Graffiti memorabilia to play up the connection.

Graffiti memoribilia

One of the best roller skating bear murals I've seen

And there are in fact carhops on roller skates

Hooray for good junk food

I had printed a coupon off of the A&W website for a free small root beer float with purchase. That one in front in the picture above, that's the small. You gotta love US portion sizes. It's not that we don't understand the concept of moderation, we choose to ignore it in favor of more soda and deep-fried cheese.

If you look carefully, you can just make out frozen edges in the root beer float

As we were sitting down to our amazing looking junk food meal, I heard someone on the other side of the room say "Well, we're not being heart-healthy...but, oh well" - my sentiments exactly. It's junk food: don't eat it every day, but enjoy yourself once in a while and don't expect to feel like frolicking in the sunshine afterward.

Not heart-healthy, but so tasty

Maggie summed it up perfectly in the middle of the meal when she said, "This is the real thing, dude." [Slight pause] "I'm getting a little queasy from the real thing." Queasy or no she had another onion ring.

Mr. Heart-Healthy across the room was then heard to say, "So once again, Jones, what was briefly yours is now mine," probably when he ganked a golden onion ring from his friend. Anyone who can recite a Belloq quote from Raiders of the Lost Ark verbatim deserves an onion ring.

This could buy me craploads of onion rings

After sitting for awhile in Moose Park along the Tuolumne River chomping on Altoids and attempting to digest the week's worth of calories and sodium we'd just consumed, we ventured out to see a bit more of the town. Modesto is proud of their George Lucas connection, and remarkably managed to retain this pride through Howard the Duck. In fact they even named a small corner park George Lucas Plaza complete with American Graffiti statue.

Is this Shirley and Opie in bronze?

Some might find it a bit crazy to drive a little over an hour away for junk food, but it was well worth it to me, plus we got to explore Modesto and we took a few beautiful backroads (Maze Rd. across the Valley, Corral Hollow Rd. into Livermore) on the way back to the Bay Area. If you're hankering for a burger and a root beer float at the Modesto A&W Drive-In, you can find it at 1404 G St. at the corner of of 14th St. Marilyn and Elvis show up on Saturday nights. George Lucas Plaza and the American Graffiti statue are at the corner of Downey Ave. and 17th St.

Martinez, Martinis, and Muir

2009-05-18T08:10:00.000-07:00

If you were to ask someone from Martinez, California what makes the town notable, they would probably say (a) Joe DiMaggio was born and raised in Martinez, and (b) the Martini was invented in Martinez. While the first part is undeniably true, the origin of the Martini is more controversial and a bit harder to believe.

"Tell me that story about the Martini again, Joe."

I actually want the story to be true, but it's just a bit too tall of a tale. The Martinez Martini creation myth goes as follows: a miner struck it rich in the 1849 Gold Rush. While returning to San Francisco flush with new wealth, he stopped in Julio Richelieu's saloon in Martinez (on Ferry St. where the disappointingly unhistoric J T LaBeau's stands today) to celebrate with some champagne. The bartender, not having any champagne, told the miner that he had something much better called the "Martinez Special" made with 3 parts gin, 1 part dry vermouth (or sauternes in some versions of the story), and a dash of orange bitters, stirred with ice and garnished with an olive. The miner liked the drink so much that he tried to order it in a bar in San Francisco, but the bartender hadn't heard of the drink so the miner had to show him how it was made. The bartender liked the drink so much that he started serving it, and over time it caught on and eventually became known as the Martini.

Even Martini-girl doesn't know the truth

Whether this contains even a scrap of truth or not, it's a good story. What surprised me was that the name has nothing to do with Martini & Rossi, noted makers of vermouth, but the Martini clearly predates the time when Martini & Rossi started making and exporting dry white vermouth. Because obscure cocktails are currently en vogue, a drink called "The Martinez" made from gin, vermouth, bitters, maraschino liqueur, and a twist of lemon has been making a recent comeback in bars (I think I'll try it if they leave out the maraschino liqueur).

Beyond Joltin' Joe and the Martini, a local who remembers their school field trips might also mention that Martinez was the long-time home of one of the most famous and influential figures in American history: John Muir.

"Nae, Mr. Roosevelt, ye won't find me using any maraschino liqueur."

There are several ironies here that probably cause old John to turn over in his grave on a daily basis: the founder of the Sierra Club and the father of modern environmentalism lived in a city mostly known today for its ginormous oil refineries; the Muir-Strenzel property is now neatly bisected by CA Highway 4; and a statue in his honor at the corner of Alhambra Ave. and Alhambra Valley Rd. has a plaque which reads:

John Muir, 1838-1914. 'I care to live only to entice people to look at nature's loveliness'. A gift to the community of Martinez from Shell Oil Company to commemorate its 75 years in Martinez. December 6, 1990.

Speaking of John Muir's grave, this too is in Martinez (not far from the bizarre Shell Oil tribute to him), although chances are you wouldn't know it even if you grew up in the area. The John Muir National Historic Site oversees the Muir house and property, the adjacent Mt. Wanda (across Highway 4), and a small property along Alhambra Creek that contains an old pear orchard and the Muir-Strenzel private cemetery.

Blue oak woodland on Mt. Wanda

Cream sacs in bloom on Mt. Wanda

Given that there's no mention of the Muir-Strenzel cemetery on the National Historic Site's website (at least none that I can find), I have the distinct impression that the National Park Service would be happy if visitors kept to Mt. Wanda and the Muir house property and stayed away from the cemetery, probably to keep the neighbors happy. So if you go, please respect the neighbors, park a few blocks away and walk in, and be quiet and responsible so the NPS doesn't decide to close off the area.

To find John Muir’s grave:
From CA Hwy 4: Exit Alhambra Rd., turn left on Alhambra Rd., turn right onto Alhambra Valley Rd., turn left on Sheridan Rd. and park along the first (and only) block of Sheridan Rd. Walk to the end of Sheridan Rd., turn right on Strenzel Rd., and turn left into the short gravel drive leading to an open orchard. Walk across the orchard towards Alhambra Creek. The Muir-Strenzel Cemetery is hidden in a grove of tall trees just on the edge of the creek. In the map below, the red pin is the Muir grave, the blue pin is the Muir statue.

View Muir Grave & Statue in a larger map

Entrance to the Muir orchard - cemetery is hidden in the tall trees straight ahead

The Muir-Strenzel Cemetery backing onto Alhambra Creek

Root Beer Floats: A Quest for Perfection, Part II

2009-05-05T08:31:00.000-07:00

In the previous post I dealt with two of the most significant variables in the creation of the perfect root beer float (RBF): the ice cream and the root beer. In this post I will be covering the remaining variables: the ratio of ice cream to root beer, the proper vessel and utensils, the process, and the elusive but essential ineffable elements that go into the perfect RBF experience.

3. The Ratio
Before dealing directly with the proper ratio of ice cream to root beer, let me address one fundamental issue. The perfect RBF has two ingredients: ice cream and root beer. If it has anything else in it, it ceases to be an RBF in my mind. If you want to put your own personal cocktailian spin on it and add a dash of Cointreau, a ribbon of lime zest, or a cube of sugar soaked in absinthe, go right ahead — just call it something else, and for god's sake don't serve it to anyone without ample warning.

The perfect RBF is an excellent example of what is known as the Goldilocks Principle. Remember the story of the thieving little girl that broke into an innocent bear family's house, stole their food, and slept in their beds, all the while complaining that their food was either too hot or too cold, their beds too soft or too hard, until she found one that was just right? The Goldilocks Principle applies to scenarios in which there is a range of acceptable states between two extremes. As with the purloined bear food, there is a "just right" or Goldilocks equilibrium state between two extremes of the ice cream to root beer ratio in RBFs.

So it's true that there is a range of ratios in which you'll be safe - a little bit one way or another and you'll survive. However, there is a point of maximal perfection which can be achieved by having 1 unit of ice cream for every 1.6 units of root beer by volume. The middle image above shows a mug that is just over half full of ice cream, but keep in mind that the root beer should be added in stages (see below under "The Process"). By odd coincidence, or perhaps some odd sort of divine providence, this ratio happens to be the golden ratio, often held to be the most aesthetically pleasing ratio in the arts.

Leonardo Da Vinci's "Vitruvian Man," from the Latin vitrus, meaning "glass-bearing man" - a classic artistic example of the golden ratio

4. The Vessel and Utensils
The proper vessel for an RBF is a mug, specifically a frosty glass mug. As a backup you can use a fountain glass (i.e. a shake glass), or in times of desperation a pint glass.

The proper vessel frosted from a brief rest in the freezer. A&W logo and Snoopy are not required, but certainly don't hurt.

Temperature is extremely important for RBFs. Using anything less that fully chilled root beer is a risky proposition; warm root beer will result in quickly melting ice cream and a milky mess. Chilling the mug is a key step in keeping the RBF cold and promoting the formation of “frozen edges”. What are frozen edges you ask? When conditions are just right (cold mug, cold root beer, cold ice cream) you get a situation wherein the thermal boundary layer between the root beer and the ice cream freezes creating a thin crispy layer of creamy root beer ice. Frozen edges are a bonus: not only do you get root beer and ice cream, you also get small chips of root beer popsicle that break away from the boundary layer.

After the mug, you need two additional items: a straw (preferably bendy), and an iced tea spoon. The iced tea spoon is key: without the additional length you'll find your spoon slipping into the chilly depths of your RBF. If you happen to be a proponent of the old-timey paper straws, feel free to use those, but keep about 4 on hand for every float as they tend to collapse in a soggy mess every few minutes.

Iced tea spoon and plastic bendy straw

5. The Process
Some restaurants will serve an RBF pre-mixed. This is very wrong. An RBF should be served as follows:

One frosty mug containing the correct volume of ice cream, one straw and one iced tea spoon
One bottle/can of root beer on the side.

It is very important to be able to control the addition of root beer to your liking. Personally I like to add the root beer in small increments: pour the root beer over the ice cream until it foams to the top of the mug, stop, slurp a little root beer, eat a little ice cream, and repeat.

6. The Ineffable
Perhaps the most important "ingredient" in making the perfect RBF is a combination of ineffable factors that you can neither control nor fully account for. You could put all of the right ingredients together at the perfect temperature and ratio and yet still not fully enjoy yourself because of the setting, your mood, the time of year, etc. Similarly, you can occasionally get an RBF that isn't well made, but it hits the spot like nothing else beacuse it's 100° out and you just hiked 15 miles.

The best RBF I ever had in a restaurant was in Taos, New Mexico at The Bent Street Deli. They used two local ingredients: Blue Sky root beer (which I like, but isn't a particularly good RBF root beer) and Taos Cow vanilla bean ice cream (very, very good). The mug wasn't chilled, in fact it was a shake glass not a mug, and they were a little skimpy with the ice cream. But I had just had a really amazing morning, the weather was gorgeous, I think Maggie and I had just been giggling at the Peruvian pan flute band outside that seems to follow us everywhere around the world, and at that moment the RBF was just perfection. We went back a few years later, and the RBF was the same but somehow not as good as that first time.

So that about wraps it up: good vanilla ice cream, a balanced fully chilled root beer, the golden ratio, a frosty glass mug, a plastic bendy straw, an iced tea spoon, and the right time and place. Put all of these together and you will have achieved the perfect RBF. If you're already an RBF fan, hopefully this has given you renewed confidence to make one at home; if you're a root beer hater (or suspect you might be), I hope this will convince you to give it a shot - it's worth it. Enjoy!

Root Beer Floats: A Quest for Perfection, Part I

2009-04-15T12:50:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me recently that in several years of penning a blog with "root beer" in the title that I haven't paid due attention to the pinnacle, the king, the gateway drug of the root beer world: the root beer float. Most people that I know who have made the transition from root beer hater to root beer lover have been converted by the silent foamy proselytism of the root beer float.

When done properly, the root beer float (hereafter RBF) is a magical thing, far greater than the sum of its parts. However, when done poorly, an RBF is a sad, unfortunate thing, so I think it's time to deconstruct the RBF and analyze exactly what goes into making the perfect RBF. This isn't a hopeless quest: unlike many foods, e.g., pizza, RBFs can actually be made better by you at home than you will ever find in a restaurant. It’s certainly possible for a restaurant to make an awesome RBF, but 99 times out of 100, they either don’t care enough to make a good one, or simply don’t know what it takes to make the perfect RBF.

Let's consider the variables:

The Ice Cream
The Root Beer
The Ratio
The Vessel & Utensils
The Process
The Ineffable

In Part I, I will be addressing 1. and 2., the two most essential components of any RBF.

1. The Ice Cream

First and foremost, the vanilla ice cream used in the perfect RBF must have a true vanilla flavor. Ice creams using synthetic vanillin or other artificial flavors are not going to cut it. A lot of people, including me, grew up enjoying the artificial stuff so I admit that it can have a nostalgic element to it, and I appreciate that this borders on putting lipstick on a pig, but the flavor is simply far superior when you use a real vanilla ice cream. Whether the ice cream uses natural vanilla flavoring and/or includes vanilla seeds (e.g., Häagen-Dazs’s “Vanilla Bean” or Ben & Jerry’s Vanilla) doesn’t really matter much as long as the flavor is good and not cloyingly sweet. Expensive gelatos are not necessary, in fact you don’t want something so rich that you only want a few bites or so dense that you can't get the spoon into the ice cream when it's bobbing around inside the float.

Try to reconcile A, B, & C with D & E

I picked up a package of a cheap boxed ice cream as an example of an ice cream that you don't want to use for an RBF (and also for the video experiment below). Incidentally, this is another example of why you have to read food labels closely, especially in the US where blatant trickery is the norm. This package is simultaneously implying that they grow vanilla orchids and/or raise cows on a farm (presumably with a bay view) to produce "plain vanilla goodness" for this ice cream, yet the ice cream is artificially flavored and contains no vanilla whatsoever. Essentially they're trying to trick you into thinking you're getting something good and hoping desperately that you won't notice that it's mostly air, fillers, and, on top of that, it really doesn't taste very good.

The second major factor is overrun. Overrun is the percentage of air mixed into ice cream, calculated as the percentage increase in volume of the ice cream relative to the original liquid mixture. The legal overrun limit in the US is 100%, or an ice cream that is half air. Bayview Farms and other economy brands push that limit as far as they can, regularly having overruns in excess of 90%. Gourmet gelatos commonly will have ~20% overrun, whereas many of the major ice cream brands will have overruns ranging from 40–60%. Nothing is worse for an RBF than an ice cream that melts into the root beer too quickly turning the RBF into a creamy mess with no distinction between the liquid and the solid, so avoid high overrun ice creams.

To illustrate the effect of overrun, I did a simple experiment. I placed equal amounts (by volume) of a cheap high overrun ice cream (the Bayview Farms pictured above, with a density of 0.54 g/ml) and a common low overrun ice cream (Häagen-Dazs Vanilla , with a density of 0.90 g/ml) in two room temperature bowls side by side and simply watched them melt. Here is a little video of the results for your enjoyment:

Bayview Farms (left) vs. Häagen-Dazs (right)

I realize that this was a waste of ice cream, but sometimes you have to be cold as ice and willing to sacrifice for science. Not surprisingly, the Bayview Farms started visibly melting immediately and liquefied well before the Häagen-Dazs. Given that a scoop of any ice cream put on a plate next to a piece of pie will seem to melt into a puddle within seconds, I was surprised by how long it took for the two ice creams to fully liquefy: 1 hr 25 min for the Bayview Farms vs. 2 hr 51 min for the Häagen-Dazs.

Thirdly, the ice cream must be fully frozen before being added to the RBF serving vessel; allowing the ice cream to soften enough to scoop is fine and actually desirable, as the ice cream should not be too hard to eat in the RBF.

There are a few other factors to consider when selecting an ice cream. The fat content of ice creams ranges from ~10%–20%, and, predictably, the more expensive ice creams tend to have higher fat contents (as well as low overruns). Some brands make custard-style ice creams that include egg, sometimes called “frozen custard” – some brands advertise their egg content (e.g., Ritter’s Frozen Custard), others don’t (e.g., Häagen-Dazs and Ben & Jerry’s). In general you can ignore these factors — flavor and overrun trump all others: if you get a tasty, low overrun ice cream, you're set.

I do have to say one word in defense of soft-serve ice cream: it's artificial, it's high overrun, it's questionably ice cream at all, so it breaks all of the above rules, yet somehow it can really work in an RBF. They're not the perfect RBF, they're ridiculously sweet, and the soft-serve melts into the soda very quickly, but I'd never turn up my nose at an RBF from an A&W restaurant.

2. The Root Beer

The root beer choice is the most difficult and contentious element of making the perfect RBF. Despite the obvious importance of using the right root beer, most restaurants don’t give this due consideration, generally opting to serve whatever they have in the soda dispenser. While I admit that the classic A&W RBF has a place in my heart, A&W root beer is really not a good choice for making the perfect RBF because it is too sweet to start with, and it has a strong vanilla note, so when you add vanilla ice cream you will get an overly sweet and vanilla-y float. The goal is to find a root beer and ice cream pair that complement each other. The upshot of this is that some of the best root beers for drinking plain will not be good choices for making the perfect RBF.

A variety of root beers mapped on a two-axis root beer space: dry to sweet, and vanilla to herbal (i.e., predominantly wintergreen, anise, or other spice notes) detected with highly sensitive rootbeerometers. The "sweet spot" for RBF-making lies within the dashed line. X= root beers that are no longer extant. The bottled A&W Float broke the rootbeerometers, so its location in root beer space is an estimate.

The optimal characteristics for an RBF root beer include: not being excessively sweet, a moderately high degree of carbonation, and a balanced flavor that leans towards the herbal side of the spectrum (i.e., not overly vanilla-flavored). To break it down one step further, root beers with prominent wintergreen/birch notes are often a good choice as opposed to those with anise/licorice notes. I’m not a zealous proponent of sugar over corn syrup in general, but in this case the sugar-sweetened root beers tend to be drier, spicier, and have a higher freezing temperature that promotes the formation of ice crystals for “frozen edges” (discussed in detail in Part II). The root beers that best fit the above criteria, are shown in the "sweet spot" in the above graph. Barq's is by far the most common of the root beers that fall in the sweet spot, but it should be noted that this is the one root beer on the graph that contains caffeine.

Barq's: a pretty good choice for RBFs, but it does contain caffeine

Because of my stand against artificial flavors for the ice cream, one might expect the same rationale to apply for root beer. However, most all-natural root beers (although not all) fall short in terms of flavor, mostly because the use of sassafras in food and beverages has been illegal since 1960 in the US due to the toxicity of safrole. There is no substitute for sassafras apart from artificial flavoring agents which can mimic (to a degree) the sassafras flavor, so often times I find myself preferring those that have a small amount of artificial flavor to supplement the natural flavors. So sue me.

Safrole: it may be carcinogenic, and it may be a precursur to MDMA, but it's mighty tasty

With the exception of Abita, all of the root beers in the RBF sweet spot contain some artificial flavors. If you're totally opposed to artificial flavors, the best choices are Abita, Virgil's, or Blue Sky.

While this may seem to be all you need to know about making RBFs, there are more factors to consider before true perfection can be attained. Stay tuned for the next post where I'll cover the remaining variables that go into making the perfect RBF.

Baseball and Chilies

2009-03-31T22:37:00.000-07:00

People are funny about baseball. I grew up watching it, and we even had weekend season tickets to the A's for a while, so it all seems perfectly normal to me. But to non-fans, baseball is bizarre and perplexing, kind of like cricket or Sheryl Crow are to me. When we told some friends that we were going down to Phoenix to see spring training baseball, it was as if we had told them we were off to the Arctic to club baby seals. Why on earth would anyone do such a thing?

Tempe Diablo Stadium, spring home of the Anaheim Angels

There are many types of baseball fans: the die-hards, the charmingly superstitious, the unfortunately shirtless guys, the obsessed stats people that keep score on elaborate pads despite the fact that there is a massive scoreboard right in easy view and grumble when the official scorer calls an error on 1st when it was clearly a throwing error by the shortstop you moron, the fair-weather fans, more unfortunately shirtless guys. I'm another type of fan: a bad one. I can recite baseball rules all day long, but I just don't really get involved in fandom, and reading the sports page every day to keep up on how the teams are doing is about as enticing as repeatedly stepping on a sea urchin. I suppose I'm a fair-weather fan in the sense that I like to go when the weather's nice, but if you ask me how the A's are doing in the AL West I'll probably have no idea unless I happened to have overheard something. Apparently Washington has had a Major League team for 4 years and it was news to me about 6 months ago. Like I said, I'm a bad fan.

Oh well, I still love baseball, and after a baseball-free year last year, limited sunshine-filled outdoor activities, and far more snooker on television than anyone could possibly stand to watch, the thought of going to spring training was incredibly alluring.

The stadiums are so small at spring training you can get really close to the field

The weather was incredible - 80° in March

I freely admit that baseball can be boring if you're not into it. However, I think my general baseball philosophy makes it easier for anyone to enjoy it: just pretend it's a picnic with several thousand of your best friends. Seriously. Going to a baseball game for me is about sitting outside on a beautiful day, chatting with some friends and/or strangers, eating a hotdog, picking between a chocolate malt or some sort of slushy beverage, tossing a few peanut shells on the ground, and wondering why the lite beer you just drank cost $8. Oh, and occasionally remembering there's a game going on, just enough to know when to cheer and when to duck to prevent massive head injury. If you go to a night game, try to go on fireworks night so you can lie on the grass and listen to Journey in the dark while the sky explodes.

When do the lights go down in the city? Does he mean dawn?

Needless to say, with that attitude and easy access to hotdogs and Icees, we had an awesome time sitting in the sun watching some baseball.

8000 of our closest friends

Beyond the nifty desert plants and spring training baseball, one other reason I love traveling in the Southwest is the food, which, at it's best, is an orgiastic celebration of all things chili. Go to The Shed in Santa Fe, eat their red sauce until sweat starts pouring out of your knuckles, and you'll know what I mean. Phoenix, despite its massive size, admittedly isn't much of a foodie town in the way that Santa Fe is, but there are still some excellent restaurants to be found.

Dos Gringos: A good place to day drink, a god-forsaken crap-hole at night

For Southwestern food, you can hardly do better than at Richardson's or it's next-door sister restaurant Dick's Hideaway. The breakfast we had at Dick's Hideaway will go down as one of the best breakfasts of my entire life. Also one of the largest. I ordered the carne adovada with eggs, which could easily have been split by a family of four. Maggie's order of huevos rancheros, simultaneously the best and spiciest version I have ever encountered, was similarly massive. I wish I had one of those "wow that food looks so tasty" pictures right now, but you'll just have to take my word and go there for breakfast if you're ever within a few hundred miles. We had intended on going on a nice long hike that day, but after happily waddling out of Dick's Hideaway that plan didn't seem too feasible.

We doubled-up on our Richardson's experience having had dinner the evening before at their sister restaurant Rokerij, a sleek but cozy place that looked like Atelier Joël Robuchon transported to the Southwest and served up one of the best steaks I've had in ages.

We did manage to get out for a short hike nonetheless

And even got saw a plant or two, like this flowering cholla

Phoenix is so fast and cheap to get to from the Bay Area, there's no excuse not to go back next year for more spring training fun. Or sooner because now I'm seriously wanting more southwestern breakfast.

Glass in the Desert

2009-03-21T10:01:00.000-07:00

Shortly after arriving in Phoenix last week, and after getting fueled up with an excellent lunch Haji-Baba, a little gem hidden in one of Phoenix's many unassuming strip-malls, we set off as planned to visit the Desert Botanical Garden. The weather was perfect – clear, blue, mid 70s – so it was the ideal time to go wander around the garden. As an additional bonus surprise, the garden was hosting a Dale Chihuly exhibition with numerous large installations throughout the garden (the exhibition runs through May).

I had previously been familiar with Chihuly's work through the massive Medusa-esque chandelier in the entrance hall of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the slightly more subdued one at Claridge's (seen below in the photo that got me in trouble with a posh twit):

I can't say that I was particularly a fan before – certaily I was impressed at the enormity of the chandeliers and I thought they were amusingly eccentric, but that was about it. With the DBG installation, however, I was really impressed and he seems to have been genuinely inspired by the surroundings. If you get a chance to visit before the end of May, it's really quite a thing to behold.

Some of the sculptures blended seamlessly with the forms of surrounding plants, others were more free-form and abstract but still somehow worked in context, and others were simply so strange they looked to be the handiwork of Willy Wonka (which isn't necessarily a bad thing, depending on your point of view). The garden itself is already somewhat of a fantasy landscape, filled with snake-like chollas, towers of organ-pipe cacti, and Dr. Seussian boojum trees, and Chihuly accentuated this aspect of the garden with his pieces.

A dramatic sculpture blending well with surrounding agaves

Several of the installations involved forests of tall tapering columns of glass

Chihuly naturally couldn't resist a chandelier or two

I think he neglected the plants on this one and focused instead on frightening small children

And then there was this thing

Not to mention the boat full of Everlasting Gobstoppers

There was so much glass, it was hard to imagine how Chihuly managed to make it all and transport it to Arizona. The garden is a large place, and around nearly every corner you would find yet another glass installation. The fact that Chihuly employs a small army of glassblowers helps explain it, but the sheer scale of the project must have demanded months and months of work.

Chihuly and his loyal team of glassblowers

The landscape at the Desert Botanical Garden

The collection of cacti was impressive

Cactus skyscrapers

Boojums, cacti, and glass

This rare crested saguaro was a standout

I really appreciateed the sign that informed patrons that all cacti are succulents, but not all succulents are cacti. Unfortunately a nearby sign had a less than satisfying definition of a cactus, saying only that it is "a plant in the family Cactaceae." Not exactly illuminating. They could easily have said something general like "Any member of a New World family of plants (Cactaceae) adapted to dry environments, most having leaves modified to become spines, and succulent stems that are capable of storing water through long dry periods," but then they didn't ask me.

A blooming desert Penstemon

There was a fair amount of wildlife to be seen in the garden as well. I was hoping to see a desert tortoise strolling around, but I never spotted one; however, we couldn't help but see dozens of lizards, happily buzzing carpenter bees, and a variety of birds including lots of goofy head-bobbing quail.

A Sceloporus spiny lizard

We also saw butterflies

And the butterfly's brother-in-law, the caterpillar

Even without the glass exhibition, I'll rush back to the Desert Botanical Garden next time I'm in Phoenix. I could have personally used a bit more labelling of the plants, and I didn't see a single desert fern in the whole place (although there are certainly areas we missed, so they may have been hidden somewhere), but in all other ways the garden is magnificent, extremely well cared for, and in a beautiful hilly desert setting that you wouldn't expect to find so close to the center of town.

A Spring Post

2009-03-13T08:00:00.000-07:00

It’s hard to believe I’m anxiously awaiting spring given how mild the winter was here. Last year, emerging from the long dreary darkness of a London winter, that spring was something to anxiously await. Here in Northern California, winter is like a brief slightly colder period with occasional rain - we freak out when it gets below 50°F and start worrying about our precious lemon trees.

The London Eye in the London grey

We're weather wusses around here, I'll freely admit that. This is partly why the weather in London was so difficult for us to deal with. Our time in London can be summed up based almost entirely on the weather, as follows:

Warm sunny [Hey, this isn't too bad!]
Not Quite Winter [This is manageable. I don't know why people complain about London weather so much. Buncha whiners.]
Winter [Okay, it's pretty cold now.]
Winter [And dark. I had no idea how early it would get dark here. Why does the rain seem to never stop and come in horizontally?]
Winter [What happened to "storm systems"? You know, storm comes in, storm blows through. This is just a constant grey morass with spitting rain - I don't remember signing up for this.]
Not Quite Winter [Light is starting to return, thank god. Oooh, crocuses - things are looking up!]
1 Hot Day [Hey, Spring came early! This is awesome!]
Snowing [Oh hell.]
Not Quite Winter [I'm starting to see a pattern here.]
Kind of Spring-like [Hey, this is almost nice but not quite]
1 Hot Day [Now this is what I'm talking about.]
Not Quite Winter [Back to this again are we?]

A Welsh colleague of mine recently told me just how proud they are of the weather in the British isles - after all, for how far north they are, the weather is amazingly mild. I'll agree with that - London's weather is a far cry better than that found at the same latitude in Canada or Russia. But the "it could be a whole lot worse" standpoint (otherwise known as "British optimism") doesn't sit well with me in general - it's like saying you love to watch The Rock only because it's better than watching Pearl Harbor.

Despite being only a slight change from winter, spring is really something to look forward to in Calfornia, especially if you're a nature lover (a.k.a. plant dork) like me. In the summer, the hills in California get parched and golden as the grasses dry up in the Mediterranean-style rainless summers. During spring, the hills are still lush and green from the rains, a stark contrast to what they look like for much of the year.

Hound's Tongue, and early bloomer

Douglas's Iris, Mt. Tamalpais

During the early spring, the desert is arguably the most spectacular place to be in California, with nearly all of the desert plants blooming at roughly the same time to take advantage of the cooler temperatures before the intense summer heat commences.

Henderson Canyon, Anza-Borrego Desert

Desert Palafox (Palafoxia arida)

Brown-eyed Primrose (Camissonia claviformis)

Ferrocactus getting ready to bloom

Purple Mat (Nama demissum)

In fact, we're heading off to the desert this weekend - although the plant I'll be looking at more than any other is evenly mowed lawn grass at Cactus League baseball spring training games in Arizona, we're going to the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, a place I've always wanted to visit. This is our first trip to spring training, and honestly we're only minor baseball fans as things go, but after winter and a baseball-less year abroad, sitting in the sun with a root beer and a hotdog watching some baseball sounds pretty perfect right now.

Alameda: An Introduction

2009-02-28T20:42:00.000-08:00

When we were talking with people about possibly living in Alameda, or when we've told people we now live there, these are some of the responses we got (remember, these are from locals):

"I'm not sure I've ever been there. I hear it's nice though."
"Sure Andy, I'll meet you in Alameda. Umm, how do I get there?"
"How long does it take you to get to Oakland?"
"I've been to Alameda for breakfast, but it's a bit out of the way."

Let's put these quotes in a little perspective by looking at a map of the San Francisco Bay:

Oddly, many Oakland residents seem to have only a vague idea where Alameda is and how to get there, despite the 4 bridges and a tunnel connecting Alameda and Oakland, and despite the fact that the distance between Alameda and Oakland is less than an average city block.

Hi San Francisco!

For people that do know Alameda and how to get there, it's mostly known for the monthly antiques fair, multiple classic breakfast joints, the great views of San Francisco, and of course the place where MythBusters does a lot of there large scale experiments. Here's a clip from an Alameda episode:

Alameda is also home to St. George Spirits, makers of Hangar 1 Vodka and in the news recently for reintroducing absinthe into the US.

Beyond the geography comments, we also heard a number of opinions about the general nature of the town:

"It's kind of stuck in the 50s, but at least that means good diners."
"Fogue-town." [as in old fogies]
"It still feels like a military town."
"It's over-policed."

Certainly the breakfast part is true: Ole's Waffle Shop, Jim's, Tillie's, Albert's, Marti's Place, the list goes on. My claim is that Alameda has more breakfast per capita than anywhere else in the Bay Area - difficult to prove perhaps, but I think it's true. In fact, you can watch my ongoing and admittedly foolhardy project to eat at every breakfast place in Alameda here.

The "over-policed" part feels true when you get pulled over for going 28 in a 25 mph zone, but nobody's complaining when they look at the crime rates relative to Oakland. As for the other comments, I can vouch for the fact that Alameda has changed a lot in recent years, and much of the "stuck in the past" feeling has gone, particularly along Park Street where a number of great restaurants and shops have opened in recent years, and the beautiful Art Deco Alameda Theatre has recently been reopened.

The lights are on again at the Alameda Theatre

Alameda is certainly a bit sleepy compared to Oakland (hey, it's "island living" after all), but it's actually quite a quirky place

complete with odd public memorials,

a strange notion of what someone might want for free,

and a unique spectator sport known as "Gooseball".

Because of it's location in the San Francisco Bay, Alameda is a very maritime-focused city, dotted with crowded harbors and boat repair and supply shops. This explains the Alameda City Flag,

the local love for a spirited but rather unsuccessful band of pirates,

and the official Seal of the City of Alameda.

Actually, I hardly had to make a joke about the real official Seal of the City of Alameda, because it almost mocks itself with the rather obvious statement "Seal of the City of Alameda" included on the seal. I should follow this pattern and write "This is a blog" at the beginning of every post from now on, just in case it wasn't clear.

I'm not certain, but I think this might be the Seal of the City of Alameda

Our time in Alameda so far has been great: the community is friendly, there's a wonderful organic market nearby, the fears of living in a stuck-in-the 50s "fogue town" haven't come true at all. So come on over to Alameda for good breakfast, the antiques fair, and, if you get lucky, you might just score a free door.

A Flurry of Position Statements

2009-02-17T08:09:00.000-08:00

In lieu of a post that has some sort of logical flow or connection to current events, here are three new disconnected DSRB Position Statements that came up over the course of the past week:

1) I know it's trendy, but stop burning my food

Have you noticed this? Nearly every slightly trendy restaurant seems to want to burn your food, but do it artfully so it appears "rustic". Upscale pizza places and tapas bars are the buggest culprits in this crime. Grilled bread anyone? Make sure you add some grill marks that taste like ash. Thin crust pizza? You better make that crust cindery. Hell, why don't you toss a lime on the grill too? There's a fine line here because I love a nicely browned lasagna, a well-seared steak, or a toasty piece of bread — but if I taste nothing but carbon when I bite into something, I'm not happy, nor are most sentient people. There's also this thing called "cleaning your grill" that some restaurants might engage in more frequently. End Rant #1.

You're cutting it mighty close on this one, Dehesa

2) If you don't know how to use truffle oil in moderation, please don't use it at all

My second delivery from the Cheese of the Month Club arrived a few days ago. Last month they neglected to include a goat cheese for the "Trio of Milks" theme, this month they forgot to mention a theme at all. All three cheeses were little-known Italian cheeses (I guess that's the theme right there), one of which was a white truffle cheese. This cheese tasted, well, like truffles and nothing else - in fact it's so truffley that I don't really know what to do with it now. I suppose I could grate it over some pasta or risotto, but then the pasta or risotto would taste like white truffle and nothing else. Suggestions welcome.

On Sunday, Maggie and I had a we're-not-going-out-on-Valentine's-Day-but-the-day-after-sounds-good dinner out at Pappo in Alameda. When we walked through the door, we were greeted by a gust of truffle aroma. When we sat down to the table, the food arrived for the couple sitting next to us, accompanied by an overpowering wave of truffle. I didn't need to order the truffle pasta because I got enough of a taste sitting 3 feet away.

Truffle oil is like perfume: if you can smell it across the room, you've put way too much on; if you can smell it walking by, you've put a bit too much on; if you can smell it when you're just inches away, you've got it just right. Unfortunately, because truffle oil is a symbol of extravagance, and because people attracted by extravagance are often attracted by overkill in general, restraint in the use of truffle oil is a very rare thing indeed.

3) When to buy a vowel: never

Okay, it's true, I was watching Wheel of Fortune the other evening — well what was I supposed to do when Family Feud wasn't on? Anyhow, if you're a game theory expert, feel free to prove me wrong on this, but it seems to me that only morons buy vowels. And they always seem to buy vowels that they already know are there. I've even seen contestants buy a vowel that finishes a puzzle.

As I see it, it never makes sense to buy a vowel unless you are totally stuck and you think the next contestant might be ready to solve the puzzle. Even then, it's probably a better strategy to choose the next most likely consonant. And it's called "buy a vowel" for a reason - they're not free. Grrr. If you know a vowel is there, don't buy it in hopes that it will also show up in another word, keep putting consonants up and assume the blanks will be vowels. So sez me.

I promise the next post will hold together better.

There There, Oakland

2009-02-05T08:50:00.000-08:00

The author Italo Calvino spent some time in the Bay Area and wrote that San Francisco is "the only American city to have a 'personality' in the European sense: there is no problem loving San Francisco, everyone can do it." As for Oakland, he was silent.

People find it a lot harder to like Oakland, and outside of hip hop lyrics you can essentially find one famous quote about the city, by author and longtime expat Gertrude Stein who grew up in Oakland:

“What was the use of my having come from Oakland, it was not natural to have come from there, yes, write about it if I like or anything, if I like, but not there, there is no there there."

Unfortunately, the wording of this statement renders its meaning about as clear as that of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution; however, most people have focused on the phrase "there is no there there" and interpreted this as meaning that there's nothing going on in Oakland, or at least nothing worth mentioning. In reality, Stein was returning to California on a book tour and her hopes of visiting her childhood haunts were dashed by the fact that they no longer existed.

Which brings me to an "Only in Oakland" moment relating to things that are no longer there. Near the corner of 4th and Clay sitting in a weedy patch of ground next to the BART tracks with a lovely view of the jail in the background sits this lonely plaque and accompanying boulder:

The boulder appears to have once held a plaque of its own

The plaque behind the boulder

So the plaque is actually a plaque that invites you to a plaque dedication ceremony in 1976, but isn't the actual plaque itself. Presumably the actual plaque comemorating Oakland's first public school was attached to the boulder, but has since been stolen. Not only is there no there there, there is no plaque commemorating there there.

There are many things that could be pointed out here, like how this scene somehow perfectly captures something about the way Oakland works on a very basic level, or how the City of Oakland/Alameda County Historical Society has had, oh, 32+ years to remove the "invitation" plaque and probably a significant amount of time to replace the missing "actual" plaque, or that there is some darkly delicious irony about a plaque commemorating education getting stolen. Feel free to insert your own interpretation.

The Jeopardy! Test Almost-Live Blog

2009-01-29T20:35:00.000-08:00

I finally decided that I'd had enough - no more swearing at the TV when people get easy questions wrong, I was going to step up to the plate and take the Jeopardy! test. I like trivia, I adore pub quizzes, I seem to be pretty good at Jeopardy! questions when I'm sitting at home on my sofa (which is clearly a good measure of how I would do on television in front of a live audience), so what the hell, why not give it a shot?

I don't know exactly why, but taking the Jeopardy! test is close to the nerdiest thing I've done in a long time, and I was reluctant to tell anyone I was doing it ahead of time. (I say close to the nerdiest thing, because I'm not sure if following Brent Spiner on Twitter is nerdier or not). So, seeing as I was mortally embarrassed by the whole endeavor, it naturally occurred to me to make it entirely public on my blog where I could be exposed to public scrutiny and ridicule. Naturally. I even played around with live blogging software, and then I realized that for live blogging to actually be meaningful in any way, people would have to be watching, you know, live. Hmmm, that might be a problem, since I told, oh, two people that I was taking this test tonight and only thought about live blogging it this morning. The other problem is that live blogging only works for events that are exciting, whereas this would be as exciting as live blogging a shave and a haircut. So I'm doing almost-live blogging, that will suffice.

Well fed from some excellent Vietnamese food from my new favorite spot Dragon Rouge, and surrounded by all of the necessities (root beer, bottle of secret nostrum, Ralph Wiggum, handful of kumquats), I was ready to roll.

Hurry up, Alex, I'm ready and full of fish sauce

I logged in just after 7:30, excited and nervous to start the test. Of course I was stupidly early and had to wait 28 minutes and 51 seconds for the test to begin. Luckily I got to stare at the delightfully Perry-Ellis-clad Alex Trebeck while I waited.

I finished my root beer 23 minutes and 11 seconds before the test started.

Just before the test started, the Final Jeopardy song started playing, indicating that it was time to get ready. And then the first question popped up immediately and holy shit, slow down, slow down, you're going too fast, what the hell did that say oh damn that guy was Finnish not Indian why did I think he was Indian?, how the hell do you spell the name of the character from Les Miserables?, gaaaaah!

Thank you for taking the freaky fast panic-attack-inducing Jeopardy! test

50 frantic questions later, which took about 12 minutes, and now I'm done sitting here panting and feeling mildly freaked out. And blogging. Somehow I remembered that Walt Whitman wrote "Oh Captain, My Captain", I stupidly put Alexander Graham Bell and knew that I should have put Samuel Morse the second I hit enter, I confused the Punic Wars with the Peloponesian Wars, I think I got a question about Desperate Housewives right (all I remember is that it said something about a woman cheating with a pool boy). I guessed correctly that the Fermi Award was given out by the U.S. Department of Energy, and I knew that atomic number of an element was the number of protons in the nucleus, but I had no idea who was the "successor to Moses" (better dust off that Old Testament, Andy). I passed on two questions, one was a Before & After that included a late fashion designer and an immigration station, and, damn it I just figured it out right as I'm typing this - Perry Ellis Island. Crappity crap crap. Everything else is a blur. Oh yeah, and there was something about Nicole Kidman and possibly Enrique Iglesias.

Well that was exciting - probably more for me than for anyone reading this. How did I do? I think I did okay, not amazing - but if you read the fine print in the picture above, it sounds like the process of picking is mostly random after this point anyway. If I get on TV, be sure to wave.

Raisin Hell: The Results

2009-01-19T13:02:00.004-08:00

Do people like raisins? Yes, some do. Others vehemently hate them in nearly every use. Still others love them in one food but can't stand them in another. However, after tallying the results of last month's survey, the general opinion seems to be one of ambivalence. On a 1–5 scale, with 5 being the highest opinion of raisins (i.e., "I want to marry them" in the original survey), the average rating was 3.44; they may be flirting, but I don't think the public is quite ready to run off to Vegas with raisins.

Average ratings in different foods (data point falls under each blue bow tie). Overall raisin rating from Question 1 indicated by the dashed line.

The ratings for specific uses of raisins tell a slightly different story. The highest average rating went to Oatmeal/Hot Cereal (3.75), probably the most common way many people think to use raisins. Interestingly, this was the only use to score above the average overall opinion of raisins, while most others clustered right around 3. Raisins in ice cream are clearly not popular (1.88), which isn't entirely surprising given that rum-raisin (the most common use of raisins in ice cream as far as I know) seems to be loved by a handful of people but reviled by most others, like salty liquorice, Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray soda, or Smash Mouth.

The question "Are there any dishes in which you particularly hate/love raisins" generated some interesting comments and pointed out some glaring omissions from my list of common places to find raisins (e.g. cold cereal and trail mix - how did I forget those?). Here are some of the best comments:

I hate raisins in and on everything!!!!
that rice pudding stuff in indian restaurants.
Why spoil an oatmeal cookie with raisins?
I hate raisins in all cakes and ice creams. Otherwise I love them.
Raisins just kind of appear in my life and I think "oh, that's pretty good" and then I ingest them.
Raisinbread is super extra tasty
I hate raisins in Power/Nutrition/Breakfast Bars. But then, I hate Those Bars period so I guess that doesn't count.

As much as I love raisins, I will admit that there are some negatives. I hate the sticky fingers you get from eating them, and I can't stand when I get jabbed by a little grape stem that got left on the fruit. Others agreed, but the most popular choice (clearly overwhelmed by American respondents) was "People that hand them out on Halloween like it's a replacement for candy." Old wounds clearly take time to heal (either that or we have a lot of 8 year-olds reading our blog these days). "The flavor baked" just edged out "The flavor raw" as the best thing about raisins.

I had two predictions regarding prunes: (1) people would rate them lower than raisins overall, and (2) the people that disliked prunes probably haven't had them for quite a while. Both of these predictions turned out to be true (at least in a hand-waving pseudo-statistical sort of way for the latter). The average rating of prunes was 2.875 compared to 3.44 for raisins — not a surprise given the prevalent low opinion of prunes, but we didn't delve into the reasons behind this. The time since last prune relationship to prune opinion came out about how I imagined it would break down:

Time since last prune	Average Rating
Within the last few weeks	4.6
Within the last year	3.1
1-many years	1.5

This seems to confirm my theory that people that think that they don't like prunes simply haven't had them for a while and their opinion is colored by distance and misinformation. It's also possible that people haven't eaten prunes in years because they honestly don't like them, but prunes are so objectively tasty that I'll just discard this possibility. I think a lot of people haven't had prunes in years mostly because (a) their parents forced them to eat them because they were healthier than candy and they have been scarred ever since, (b) because they're perceived as "old people" food, (c) they think prunes are a strong laxative (they're not - they just have fiber in them like most fruits), or (d) they think prunes taste "brown" and leathery. If you fit any of those categories, do me a favor and go buy a small thing of prunes and report back.

When I asked respondents to define "sultana", almost everyone got the correct answer (a dried seedless white grape), although several threw me a bone and voted for "A largely underappreciated Belarusian funk band" (thanks for that). Most also got that "greengage" is a greenish plum cultivar, but again I was tossed a few freebies by the people that responded "Danger Mouse's arch-enemy". Thank you all for indulging me – I know I can count on you.

Sultana's hit single "Мы фанки жеребцов"

Baron Silas Greeenback, not a small green plum

I also wanted to know if people had ever eaten hot or baked fresh grapes. This is clearly a leading question, and obviously I like them and think others should too. I had never thought of such a thing until eating them at César in Berkeley where they will occasionally serve them oven roasted on the vine drizzled with sherry vinegar. It may sound strange, but they're amazingly tasty with a bit of meat and cheese and dead easy to make at home (the recipe is in the César cookbook, but essentially it involves a bunch of red flame grapes put on parchment paper on a cookie sheet, drizzled with sherry or balsamic vinegar, and baked in the oven until they start to brown). Of course, this is just another of the myriad uses of the fabulous grape; don't get me started about chicken tagine with baked prunes...

Praise Cheeses

2009-01-15T08:09:00.002-08:00

So I'm stuck at home today recovering from a really unpleasant case of food poisoning — not exactly what I planned for today, but at least I get to watch bad daytime TV (right now the ShamWow! commercial is on, and Tyra Banks is putting people in the "Gay Truth Booth" - awesome), stare at our new fish bobbing around our aquarium, and write a blog post. And what better to write about when you have food poisoning? Let's talk food.

This past week I got my first delivery from the iGourmet International Cheese of The Month Club, Maggie's most awesome (and most fattening) Christmas present. Each month you get three half-pound pieces of cheese with a particular theme that isn't revealed until it arrives. I eagerly opened the box of cheese and tried to guess the theme before reading the Cheese of the Month newsletter — the box included an aged gouda, a Bavarian blue, and an Italian pecorino, and I couldn't come up with a theme. A north-south sampling through Europe?

The array of cheeses in the first month

No, the theme was "A trio of milks: cow, sheep, and goat"; a great concept, except astute cheese fans may have noticed that there are two cow's milk cheeses (Gouda, blue) and one sheep's milk (Pecorino). Oops - goat fail. So it turns out my north-south theme was actually more accurate, but with three awesome cheeses, I'm not about to complain.

ReNero Pecorino Stagianato (Sheep)

Beemster Master's Choice Gouda (Cow)

Paladin Regina Blu (Cow)

Despite the lack of goat cheese, I have no complaints about the cheese selection: all were new to me, none of them were silly flavored cheeses (you know, mango Stilton, strawberry brie, and their ilk), and all were delicious. The Regina Blu was by far my favorite, super creamy (thanks to a 65% fat content) with a very mild blue flavor. I'm not normally a big fan of goudas, but the Beemster Master's Choice was a close second to the blue: really nutty and lacked the cloying sweetness that goudas often have. A few years ago Maggie and I had a fabulous late night snack of wine and hard cheeses at 'Ino in New York, and ever since I've been a fan of eating the super hard cheeses like pecorinos and parmesans, not just grating them over pastas. The ReNero Stagionato didn't disappoint, although I can't say that it was significantly different from your basic Pecorino Romano (probably side-by-side you could tell).

The first month was a success, and I can't wait to see what arrives next - hopefully no mango Stilton.

By the way, you know what goes well with cheese? Dried fruits, like raisins and prunes. Agree or disagree? This is the last chance to chime in on the Raisin Survey before I summarize the results next week.

A Fond Farewell to Jojo

2009-01-08T00:03:00.001-08:00

New Year's Eve tends to be a festive celebratory night for most people — Maggie and I usually celebrate by staying home, watching movies, and falling asleep on the couch minutes before midnight. Par-tay! This year was a bit different as we had to attend a going away party of sorts. Shortly after we moved back to the Bay Area we discovered that one of our very favorite restaurants, Jojo in Oakland, was closing at the end of the year. The restaurant industry has been hit hard by the recession and many restaurants, especially high-end ones, are having tough times getting diners through the door, and when diners do come in, they're ordering more modestly. The San Francisco Chronicle recently ran an article on the effect of the economy on local restaurants featuring Jojo, Michael Mina, and other local eateries hard hit by the economy. The San Francisco Bay Area is such a food-centric place, one might think that restaurants here would fare better, but, perhaps exacerbated by the high density of restaurants in the area, supply is simply outstretching the current demand.

Jojo was a very special place for us, and the owners Curt and Mary Jo and the staff have become friends with us over the years, so it was especially hard to see it go and we had to go toast them farewell on their final night. One of our very first dates was at Jojo — it was my birthday and Maggie wanted to take me somewhere nice, so I suggested Jojo. We had a fabulous dinner (including a complimentary plate of their delicious homemade pâté de campagne), and we've been going there regularly ever since, and we even held our pre-wedding dinner there for our families.

The open kitchen at Jojo

If you never got the chance to go to Jojo, it's worth describing it briefly to get a sense of the space and the style. Jojo was in a skinny, long storefront next to the Oakland culinary classic BayWolf. While the food was French, the restaurant design and decor was firmly rooted in California, with nods to the many notable restaurants where Mary Jo and Curt had worked and trained, including the legendary Chez Panisse where Mary Jo spent 12 years as a pastry chef, and Oliveto and Zuni Cafe where Curt spent many years. The centerpiece of the restaurant was the open kitchen that occupied a good portion of the already limited floor space. I always loved how the kitchen was right in the middle of things and every patron could see exactly what was going on at any moment — for a chef, this is like a high-wire act: you can't lose your temper, everything must be spotless and impeccably organized, and in the middle of all of the varied demands of cooking, you have to occasionally engage with the audience.

We would always make a point of going to say hi, thanking them for the amazing food (which it always was), and chatting briefly about food or skiing or whatever else was going on. I would feel a bit guilty for dragging them away from their work which is so dependent on precision and perfect timing, but they were always glad to chat and would duck away the second a flat-iron steak needed turning on the grill or a plum galette was ready to emerge from the oven.

Mary Jo hard at work in the kitchen

Mary Jo's baking is simply unmatched: the chocolate souffle cake should go down as one of the culinary wonders of the Western world, both lighter than air and rich and dense at the same time, and her custards always achieved the perfect consistency (plus, how can you beat an orange-anise-vanilla custard?). Back in 2000, the San Francisco Chronicle ran an article on Mary Jo and the use of fruit in her baking and included her fruit galette recipe. She learned the recipe for the crust from the legendary Jacques Pépin when he was a guest chef for a week at Chez Panisse, now I've learned it from her (via the newspaper) and I've been using this recipe ever since, and it never fails to look impressive and taste incredible. Whatever they do next, I hope the world (but especially me) will get to continue enjoying her amazing baking.

Curt's cassoulet

Gourmet got it right when they said that Curt's steak frites nearly steals the show - it was so consistently perfect that it was hard not to order this every time. On the final night, Curt made an elaborate cassoulet that included two types of homemade sausage, duck confit, ham, and several large doses of magic fairy dust (or some other ingredient that made it ridiculously delicious). It may not be the most photogenic of foods, but a good cassoulet is hard to beat, especially on a cold winter night.

Maggie and Mary Jo

It's sad to see a place we love go away, particularly under the circumstances and knowing just how much hard work Mary Jo and Curt poured into the place over the years. We are, of course, anxious to see what they go on to do next - but hopefully it'll be after a well deserved rest!

Farewell Jojo!

Andy & Maggie

XOXOXOXOXOXOXOXO

Revelations and Resolutions

2008-12-30T23:39:00.000-08:00

Things I have discovered just before the new year:

(1) There is one honestly good reason to go to Ikea:

(2) My digital camera is dying and is starting to turn every picture pink (see edges of above photo).

(3) My beloved laptop is making very alarming dying animal noises. Take the camera, but spare the laptop!

(4) My New Year's resolution of riding my bike to work is currently being thwarted by the fact that I do not own a bike.

(5) My New Year's resolution to stop buying things from overseas that can easily be made locally (e.g. sparkling water, which really does not need to be shipped from Italy and cost more than gasoline) is being partially thwarted by the fact that the only local sparkling water I can find is Calistoga, which is gross and ridiculously over-carbonated (Maggie gets mist on her glasses). This is also thwarting my attempt to make elderflower soda using the above syrup from Ikea.

(6) Readers of this blog seem to do so only while they are supposed to be working, which explains why we have only a disappointing handful of responses to the Raisin Survey so far. If I had a sad raisin emoticon, I would paste it here. While I would love to reward the diligent readers who took the survey right away with the results now, I'm going to wait until people get back to work and give them a chance to take the survey - after all, it is absolutely essential that we get statistical significance right?

(7) Maggie got me a membership to iGourmet's Cheese-of-the-Month club, which is both exciting (I love cheese, and I've never been a member of an "of-the-Month" club), but also slightly worrisome. I'm going to have to pedal extra hard on that non-existent bike to work off all that cheese.

All right, now go take that Raisin Survey if you haven't already, and have a happy New Year!

Raisin Hell: A Survey

2008-12-19T00:41:00.003-08:00

Apparently some people despise raisins. I know, I couldn't believe it either, but I've met two of them in the past week. Okay, so they get your fingers kind of sticky when you eat them, and sometimes they have that little leftover stem that pokes you when you chomp down on it, and those things they call raisins in Raisin Bran are closer to pebbles than fruit, but otherwise raisins are all good.

In fact, I feel a position statement coming on. I should have used an official position statement for the caper survey, but I'm certain that my position (i.e., I have no time for capers) was quite clear. But this time I feel the need to make this an official DSRB Position Statement™:

Grapes are delicious. Haters should back off.

That's really all there is to it. In fact, nearly all things made from grapes are good — juice, wine, cognac, raisins, sherry, grappa, jelly, sorbet, verjus, hell I'll even throw in cream of tartar for good measure. I'll admit to not being a big fan of champagne, cava, prosecco, and their sparkly pals, but I occasionally enjoy them and I do at least understand why people love them. On the other end of the spectrum, purple is without question the best flavor of most multi-flavored fruit candies (don't argue, it's a verifiable fact); although purple flavoring contains roughly as much real grape as blue raspberry flavoring contains actual blue raspberries. Plus, other than raisins, what other dried fruit has sung on stage with Ray Charles and Michael Jackson?

So it comes as something of a surprise to find out that there is a percentage of the population that wants absolutely nothing to do with raisins. It's just a dried grape; it's sweet, it's tasty, so what's not to like? And prunes, poor sad delicious prunes. Prunes get an even worse rap, so much so that Sunkist has tried marketing them as dried plums to make them sound more appealing.

This seems like a natural time to go right into our latest survey designed to delve deeper into the complexities of the human-raisin relationship. [SURVEY IS NOW CLOSED]

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Thanks for completing the survey, raisin' awareness to this complex and sticky issue, and listening to me whine. Hopefully we can work together to stem the seeds of raisin hatred and prune away the pernicious tendrils that have penetrated deep into the brix and mortar of our society. Results soon.

Given the season, I'll leave you with a stirring rendition of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer:

Wide Open Spaces

2008-12-11T14:36:00.001-08:00

When we first moved back to the Bay Area, the adjustment seemed totally straightforward. After all, we had both lived in the area for most of our lives, so we didn't have to figure out where to get groceries, how to open a bank account, where to look for rental listings, and all of that stuff that took a lot of effort when we moved to London. So in many ways we hardly noticed the change — it just felt very familiar and normal, almost like we had just returned from a long vacation, except we didn't have a house to come home to and we were distinctly more on the anxious side of things than we tend to be after a nice long holiday.

It has taken a while for it to sink in how much has changed while we were gone: some friends ve moved away, favorite restaurants have closed or changed, and, despite my best efforts to maintain my American-ness in the UK, I occasionally hear myself unintentionally saying things in semi-British ways (like "nice long holiday"). I guess it takes some time to really comprehend any major life change such as an intercontinental move; it certainly took some time to fully appreciate just how different life in London is from life in the Bay Area.

Things are definitely different here

For one, while there are lots of things on the ground in San Francisco, I have yet to find a single banana peel. I know if I keep looking I'll find one, but SF doesn't have banana-mania like London. I took a brief survey of things on the ground in San Francisco, but it was mostly burrito wrappers, cans and broken bottles, the occasional person, a single black sock, and at least one corn husk from a tamale (I was in the Mission, so the sample may have been slightly skewed).

Sock not banana. How do you lose one sock?

In a recent post The Miss List, I listed a few things that we were surprised to find upon moving back, but there were two major omissions: space and light. San Francisco itself is fairly dense, mostly because it's physically constrained by the geography of the peninsula, but because of the setting with water on three sides, it generally feels very open and airy. The rest of the Bay Area is quite a bit less dense and there are countless open spaces, including miles of beaches, mountains for hiking, and parks of every description, all within easy access no matter where you live. The difference in light is tricky to describe — I'm sure it has to do with the latitude and angle of incidence and all that physics jazz, but beyond that there's a lot more blue sky and the air always seems cleaner and clearer because of smog control measures and the influence of the Pacific coast weather patterns.

Late November on Mount Diablo

Above Mitchell Canyon, Mount Diablo

And the space isn't limited to the outdoors. You can certainly find shoebox-sized apartments in San Francisco, although not to the degree of London or New York, but most are considerably more roomy. We loved our little Wapping flat, but the tiny kitchen got so claustrophobic we had to initiate a "one person at a time" rule, particularly when there were sharp and hot things being used. Our new flat in the East Bay, where to things tend to be even more spacious than in SF proper, is quite a bit bigger.

Hard at work in my new kitchen

Hard at work in our London kitchen

Okay, it really looked like this

It occurs to me now that I spent over a year feeling vaguely claustrophobic, although I never really thought about it in those terms at the time (except when crammed into Northern Line like a kipper in a tin). I think, without really knowing it, that among all the things I missed about home, the sense of space was one of the factors I missed the most, and probably why I loved to be by the river in London.

I'm sure there's more revelations to come, probably some of those deep meaningful existential things that tend to get dredged up by big transitions, especially when we start really delving into the boxes of stuff we put in storage and never really thought about for the past year or so (a task I'm not exactly looking forward to eagerly). We're both looking forward to the day that it feels like the move is over, everything is out of boxes, we find a coffee table so we don't have to use an upside-down cardboard box, we know where to find the TV remote, etc. It all seems insurmountable still, but luckily there's Christmas to distract us coming up really soon — although I still haven't bought a single Christmas gift yet...

Relativity

2008-11-26T23:39:00.005-08:00

Today is Thanksgiving, which is always something I look forward to; but more importantly, at least in my little world, Maggie and I are finally moving into our new flat tomorrow. And yes, I did say flat. Contrary to popular belief, the word "flat" is used occasionally in the US, but it usually refers to an apartment that occupies an entire story of a building. Our new flat fits that bill, plus the listing was posted by a British expat, so either way it's a flat.

Just for fun, let's compare the two flats, our London flat vs. our new one:

UK: ~700 sq. ft. in a 40 unit building
US: ~1700 sq. ft. in a 3 unit building with a garden

Now take a guess which one costs more per month.

No matter how you tweak the exchange rate, out London flat was much more expensive even without considering the council tax. We don't have council tax in the US, instead we have potholes, bad schools, minimal public transportation, and lots of homeless people, which is apparently a fair trade-off.

Living in London is crazy expensive, a well known fact, but then again London also has by far the highest average salaries in the UK. The interesting bit to me is the comparison of average household incomes in London and San Francisco: ~£40,000/year in London vs. ~$70,000 in San Francisco (1,2,3). Now some might say, "Sure, but the pound is worth more than the dollar," and this is true. In fact, when we moved to the UK the exchange rate was 2:1 dollars:pounds, and when we left it was around 1.5:1 (which means we got royally screwed in both directions, but that's a story for another time while sobbing into a glass of wine). But exchange rate means nothing when you're living in a country using the currency, what really matters is purchasing power, i.e. how much the money in my hand buys me in terms of goods and services. What we found overall was that most things cost about the same in dollars that they do in pounds. If a sandwich costs you about $5 in New York, it will probably cost about £5 in London. This is all a very long-winded way of saying that (a) cost of living is much higher in London, but (b) London salaries don't adequately compensate for this. Which brings me to the inevitable question, one of the questions we were most frequently asked by our American friends: how and why does anyone afford to live in London? As to why, there numerous factors such as culture, trendiness, alcoholism, and curry. As to how, the question can be answered by what I like to think of as Andy's Special Theory of Economic Relativity (ASTER for short).

Most people don't spend a lot of time thinking about relativity — I know I don't. I freely admit that I spend inordinate amounts of time thinking about lots of pointless things: What movies would I pick for a special Dan Hedaya movie night? (Initial thoughts: The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai Across the 8th Dimension, Blood Simple, and Running Scared - maybe Clueless or The Usual Suspects); What would be my audition song for American Idol/The X-Factor (current favorite: Sister Christian by Night Ranger); If I opened a restaurant that served only fresh baked chocolate chip cookies and ice cold milk, would people come? Anyhow, I'm rummaging through my various pointless lines of thought, and relativity doesn't seem to factor heavily in hardly any of them. But ever since I visited Einstein's house in Bern, relativity has been creeping into my mind, and I think ASTER helps explain some of the economic situations people live in around the world.

Night Ranger is relatively cool in Japan

The classic way that the basic premise of relativity is explained always seems to involve a person on a train and a person on a platform while the train moves by. I'm going to consciously buck this trend and use a new set of images that I think will be more vivid: a clown on a jet-powered tricycle, and a hitchhiking mime on the side of the road. While the clown zooms by the mime, completely ignoring the mime's exaggerated hitchhiking gestures, the clown is expertly juggling three bowling pins. In the mime's frame of reference (the roadside), the clown is moving very fast as he roars by on his festively decorated jet-powered tricycle and the bowling pins are moving forward with the clown. In the clown's frame of reference (on the jet-powered tricycle), apart from the slight vibration caused by the jet engines, the clown isn't moving at all relative to the tricycle and the bowling pins are going straight up and straight down with no forward motion. The point (I think) is that both are accurate depictions of what is going on, but the observations are only accurate relative to the frame of reference. In other words, words that would probably make a physicist wince, a particular reality only makes sense if you are the one occupying that reality.

ASTER is the economic extension of this concept. When we first moved to London, we couldn't do the math. We looked at our salaries, we looked at what things cost, we looked at the weekly rents that were scarily like our monthly rents in the US, and we looked at how we liked to live, and life in London just didn't seem to add up to something we could realistically afford. 8 million people couldn't possibly afford to live in London, yet they did somehow. After several months of adjusting to the way of life in London, all of a sudden the math worked and we could start to accurately get a picture of our budget. I imagine someone from London moving to the US would probably look at the math and think, "Blimey, I can afford a 6 bedroom mansion and a Lamborghini," then they'd get to the US and wonder where all the money went.

Perhaps ASTER isn't that groundbreaking of a concept, and it is probably not even worthy of such a cool acronym. Yes, London is expensive, but people that want to live there make it work by adjusting the way they live (e.g., not owning a car, eating in a lot, etc.) or by going into massive credit card debt. From the outside looking in, it's easy for one to wonder why people don't just move somewhere more affordable; in fact, people elsewhere in the US ask this same question about the San Francisco Bay Area, which is much more expensive than most parts of the US. The point (I think) is that you live where you want to live and you make it work. We couldn't be happier to be back home in the Bay Area, enjoying a real Thanksgiving with circular pies, and moving into our new flat. I just can't wait for the Lamborghini to arrive.

Happy Thanksgiving.

A Towering Achievement

2008-11-20T10:06:00.000-08:00

With the exception of three weeks we spent in Royal Tunbridge Wells, Maggie and I lived just a few minutes away from Tower Bridge and the Tower of London in Wapping for the 14 months we lived in London. We walked over Tower Bridge countless times and took more photos of it than I know what to do with. I walked past the Tower of London twice a day when I was taking the tube over to South Kensington, and I often had the boasting thought, "Hey, what a cool commute I have." Yet, somehow, after 13 months neither one of us had been inside the Tower of London nor had we gone up inside Tower Bridge to walk across the upper catwalks.

And we've definitely never tried the lemonade

It's far too easy to put off doing things when you live close to them; I can't tell you how many people live in the San Francisco Bay Area and (sadly) never go to Alcatraz much less make the drive up to Yosemite. Also, we had heard mixed reviews of the Tower: some loved it, some thought it was overrated, and all thought it was too expensive. To make it even less interesting, several people were adamant that the highlight was the crown jewel exhibition. While this may appeal to some, royal regalia doesn't really lift my tunic, so to speak, and the fascination with the English royalty will forever be a mystery to me. Nonetheless, I was still interested in the Tower as an important historic locale, and of course I'd feel like a complete putz if I lived that close and never went in. Finally, during our last week in London, when we were both off of work and Maggie's friend Cabernet was in town visiting, we got around to doing both the Tower Bridge Exhibition and the Tower of London.

Hey, I can see our house from up here

The Tower of London (foreground) from the upper catwalks on Tower Bridge

Looking west along the Thames

The Tower Bridge Exhibition is definitely worth doing for the spectacular views up and down the Thames on a sunny day. In addition to the views, your £6 admission also gets you two short films on the history of the bridge and admission to the "engine room" on the south side of the bridge (not actually the engine room, just a small museum with many parts of the old steam engine). Parts of the engine exhibit were working, and they tried to enhance the experience with lights and sound (you be the judge):

Fortunately there was some fun to be had in the engine room:

I think Maggie lied when she said this was where they hid the fun

These two kids didn't really know what to make of the engine room

I know I'm not the first to make this observation, but the Tower of London looks more like the Castle of London; it's kind of squat and not so tower-like. In fact, the very first day we were in London we walked across Tower Bridge, strolled right by the Tower of London, and I remember saying something like "Hey, check out that cool old castle thing. I wonder what that is." Idiot. I honestly thought Tower Bridge got its name from the towers on the bridge — it never occurred to me that it had something to do with the Tower of London.

Our Yeoman Warder guide, no doubt yelling about something

We wanted the full experience, so we joined one of the tours guided by the famous Yeoman Warders of the Tower. By far the best part of the Yeoman Warder tour is when they start yelling with gruff gleeful voices when they get to a particularly gruesome part of the story. Hooray for gore! Given that the history of the Tower is one long string of gruesomeness, there was quite a bit of Yeoman yelling to enjoy.

From the outside, the Tower looks fairly small, so I was surprised to find quite a bit of open space in the center, and essentially an entire village, pub and all, inside the walls. I always thought the Yeoman Warders went home at night and went out to the pub — well, they actually do, except both home and pub are inside the Tower of London.

One of the more tower-like parts of the Tower of London

I was expecting to be underwhelmed by the crown jewels, but I was in for a bit of a surprise: the crown jewel exhibit was both underwhelming and extraordinarily surreal as an added bonus. Before you even get to the jewels, you have to walk through a series of rooms with videos projected on the walls of various royal ceremonies (e.g., the coronation of Queen Elizabeth) and loud triumphant music playing in the background. This would be fine except you are forced to walk through a switch-backed labyrinth of banisters in an attempt to slow you down as you walk through (because you really don't want to miss the exciting part of the coronation, lemme tell you). Once through the cattle maze you finally get to the jewels, but the really cool ones (the diamonds the size of kiwi fruits, etc.) you only get to glimpse for a moment because you're on a moving walkway. To add insult to injury, as you leave the exhibit where you just saw countless millions of pounds worth of precious stones and metals, they ask you for a donation to support the exhibit. Um, yeah, that's going to happen. There's nothing like charging £16.50 for entrance and showing ostentatious displays of wealth to make people open their pocket books.

Apart from the jewels (which, admittedly, Maggie and Cabernet liked far better than I did), I quite enjoyed the Tower of London and found the history and the long maintained traditions of the Yeoman Warders fascinating. With free admission to the British Museum, the V&A, the Imperial War Museum, the Natural History Museum, and countless other wonders in London, the price of entry to the Tower of London is hard to swallow; still, I find myself wanting to go back and explore the parts I missed, so I don't regret a single pence.