Awaiting my flight to Lima, where I spend a day in the airport before flying to Cuzco the following morning. I will fly more on this trip through South America than I've ever flown in such a compressed time period. It's a big country. With international flight restrictions, that's a lot of hours sitting in airport lobbies.
Buenos Aires satisfied my urban hankering. It is undoubtedly a sprawling city, crowded, noisy, and fashion-conscious, with pedestrian-threatening traffic at every turn. You do not want to cross a street here assuming that any car will respect your right-of-way. The Avenida 9 de Julio is the world's widest street, with some sixteen lanes and three or four different dividers. It takes two changes of lights just to get from one side to the other.
Two things stood out for me. The first was my dining experience at a parrilla, or Argentine steakhouse. Most famous ones have a giant stuffed bull out front to frighten off any vegetarians, and the one I visited, La Chacra, had a circular, open charcoal pit right inside the front window, complete with several former animals spread-eagled on spits inserted into the ground.
South American love red meat. My dinner might just be the best red meat indulgence I've had in my life, better than Kobe beef in Japan and the churrascarrio in Brazil. The use of charcoal pits is part of it, though Argentines also insist that it's because their cows feed on grass rather than corn, and because they don't feed their cows the growth hormones and antibiotics that Europeans and Americans use in their feedlots. Whatever the reason, the meat, seasoned only with salt, is leaner and tastier than red meat in the states.
An order of the parrillada, or mixed grill, brought me one taster after another. Chorizo (spicy sausage) was followed by costillas (beef ribs) was followed by rinones (kidneys) was followed by lechon (suckling pig) was followed by cordero (lamb). I nearly fell over unconscious at that point from blood loss to the brain and the red wine. Carnivores who go to heaven end up with a seat at a parrilla. Fantastic.
Last night I attended a tango show at Esquina Carlos Gardel, a tango house. After a forgettable dinner, the room full of mostly Spanish speakers and a few tourists like myself were treated to a dazzling display of tango dancing and tango songs. I'm not a huge fan of the tango songs which the legendary Carlos Gardel made famous, but tango is perhaps my favorite ballroom dance. It combines the haughty pomp of upper class dances like the waltz with the naughty sensual playfulness of dances like samba. Impressive--I think if you're going to prepare a wedding dance, you should treat your guests to a performance of the tango. I took some tango lessons in a social dance class in college, but I sure don't remember learning any of the moves I saw last night.
Actually, I'll add a third thing to the list of things I'll remember about Argentina. It's a place where you will feel ugly, unless you're a supermodel. Good genes here, indeed.
The Argentine economic and political difficulties were on display. Political graffiti marred most of the landmark buildings, including the Metropolitan Cathedral, and every several blocks a protest would be conducted while armed militia watched warily from their guard posts in front of government buildings. My travel agent had printed out an Intelliguide report on Argentina and sent it along with me, and I finally read it last night. The first line said that Americans should avoid Argentina until things settle down. Too late. I actually felt quite fine throughout my week here, but admittedly tourism is way way down.
I walked halfway across town yesterday to visit a skilled camera repairman named Jose Norres, but because I'm leaving today he didn't have enough time to fix my film advance mode problem. So I'm stuck taking photos with a two second self-timer delay. It will be frustrating photographing some of the wildlife in the Galapagos. Well, perhaps I'll run into a gifted repairman in Cuzco.
The bus system in Buenos Aires is confusing. I couldn't find great information about it in my guidebook or online, so my route to the Cementerio de la Recoleta was wayward, at best. The cemetery was under renovation so it was a mess, but a security guard read my intentions without a word and led me to Eva "Evita" Peron's grave, nestled tightly in between two other giant crypts on a side alley. The aristocracy of Argentina resent her presence there because she fought against them on behalf of the poor, but for the public it is by far the most popular of the lavish of the gaudy mausoleums in the cemetery.
One limitation of my Lonely Planet Argentina is that the restaurant listings are already out of date despite the publication date of April 2002. Since Lonely Planet only publishes updates to their guidebooks once every 3 or 4 years, it's understandable, but what was more frustrating was the paucity of good restaurant listings for Buenos Aires online. Fodors.com had the best list I could find, and it was woefully inadequate. Lonely Planet says on their website that they're devoting resources towards publishing more frequent guidebooks (as opposed to spending that time posting upgrades online). I still find it surprising that a city of Buenos Aires' size doesn't have a complete listing of restaurants somewhere online.
When I was in elementary school, I was more of a loner. Late in life, I've developed more of a need for socializing. It's a balance, but one that is difficult to maintain with my beginner-level Spanish here. In addition, every country down here speaks a different dialect. It's a lot to absorb. Trying to discuss camera repair with Jose Norres was almost absurd. How do you say, "I think the contacts on the film-advance mode selector wheel are loose?" or even just "my film is stuck permanently in self-timer mode instead of single frame advance?" Isolation because of language issues is particularly severe.
But friendly people abound, and hand signals and body language can go a long way. Off to Peru, where I have my free week in Cuzco. Need to find a place to stay there, and to book some trips into the jungle and to nearby Incan ruins.
Suffered several hours of horrifying mefloquine-induced nightmares last night. Won't jot down their substance here as it's too personal and painful to recount, but I must wonder if the antidote for malaria is worse than the disease itself. Six more weeks of this? On the other hand, such nightmares do reveal to me, in a Freudian release of the unconscious, my deepest anxieties and fears. I think I've reached that age where family is increasing in importance to me. I understand why people will move to be closer to home, with home being where one's family lives.
Nostalgia is a most peculiar emotion. It is inherently sad, to me, but at the same time so appealing. It spreads over the body like warmth, and I find myself nostalgic quite often during this trip. How is it we can miss things we've maybe never even experienced, or can't be sure occurred the way we remember? Maybe it doesn't matter, and all nostalgia is is a side effect of living in a linear temporal world in which our memories point backwards. Perhaps if time were reversed, we'd be nostalgic for the future.
My last post was just after the airline strike by LAPA. Aerolineal Argentinas bailed me out with a flight to Trelew, and I've spent the last two days here in Puerto Madryn. That was probably one day too many, though a day with an empty schedule is not always unwelcome on such a long journey.
My first day here was spent almost entirely on a tour around Peninsula Valdes. It's famous as a national park for some of the wildlife it hosts. The star of the area is the Southern hemisphere's right whale, which can be seen off the coast certain months of the year, but not this month. Instead our guide focused our attention on the next most enticing species, the elephant seal. I knew that it was an elephant seal not because the guide told me but because I read it a day later in an English museum brochure. The guide spoke only a rapid stream of Spanish the entire 12 hours of the tour, and I understood nada. Half the time I slept while we bounced over unpaved dirt roads in our tour bus, cutting across long, desolate stretches of arid steppe where nothing moved beneath the endless canaopy of blue sky except the occasional guanaco. And our mini tour bus.
The elephant seals, which, at the time, I knew only as elefante marino, lie on the beach this time of year, sunning, sleeping, I'm not really sure. They're massive, a pale stone-colored grey, and they lie in small groups, as if dead. They sneeze quite often, and occasionally they fart loudly, which always caused a few of us tourists to snicker like school children, and our guide would shush us with a frown, as if we were embarassing her or the seals, or both.
How do so many people know of Patagonia? Until I decided to travel to South America, I had no idea where Patagonia was on a map, nor whether it was a country, a mountain, or a saying (it's a region). All this consumer-culture baby knew was the clothing brand. Yet everyone I speak to back home about my trip exclaims, "Oh! I want to visit Patagonia." Even without traveling to Patagonia, you can get a very good idea of what the area is like by picturing an environment in which the technical gear manufactured by the clothing brand Patagonia comes in extremely handy--windy, occasionally wet but usually quite arid, cold up high, warm in the summer, a bristly desert floor like the rough half of a velcro fastening.
Nothing but capilene and other synthetic fibers have touched my torso since I left home, and I must admit it's quite comfortable. There's an overdone functionality to wearing capilene, fleece, and gore tex out to dinner that's quite pleasing. You feel like a trekker even if you're simply window shopping around town.
Accumulated sleep deprivation caught up with me, and last night I fell asleep with the TV and lights on about midnight and didn't wake up until 9 this morning. After breakfast, I went for a jog along the beach, all the way to the southern tip of town where I spent a half hour in the Ecocentro, a tiny museum about the geology and marine life of the area. Then I jogged back, fighting a stiff Patagonian gust the whole way. It's the first time I've jogged in forever, and right now my knees feel like rusted hinges. If I step off a curb awkwardly my leg might snap like a dry twig. Still, something about running along the beach in crisp, ionized ocean air revitalizes the lungs.
By the time I felt like lunch, which was 5 p.m., nothing was open. All restaurants close between, say, 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. I ended up having quite possibly the worst pizza of my life at Lizard Cafe, the only restaurant that was open in the nine blocks I walked. Then I strolled arond town looking for trouble and finding none. I was, I am, ready for some urbanity after this two week stretch of Patagonian desolation.
And then I stumbled on a movie theater. The only movie theater in town, and the only movie theater I'd seen since I left the States. At that moment I was so ready for an American movie. My two choices were Chicago or Daredevil. Having seen Chicago already, I settled for Daredevil: El Hombre Sin Miedo (if that doesn't mean "the man without fear" then I'm dumber than I realize). The last time I saw an American movie in a Spanish-speaking country I was unpleasantly surprised to find it dubbed in Spanish, without any subtitles (Tomb Raider, in Madrid). But I guessed that this would have Spanish subtitles because a poster for one of the children's movies coming soon boldly proclaimed "hablada espanol!" or something which I guessed meant "dubbed in Spanish". That message was absent from the Daredevil movie poster.
No commercials or anything. The movie theater went dark and immediately jumped into the famous Twentieth Century Fox graphical montage. It was music to my ears, a blessed familiar landmark for the eyes. And the first words uttered in the movie? In English. I'm all for learning the local languages, but it will be a long time before I can watch any movie in a language other than English and understand it.
The movie itself was terrible, but it killed some time. They don't mess around here. As soon as the credit began rolling the lights came up and the curtains closed on the screen. Damn it, who was the key grip?! Now we'll never know.
I'm starting to pick up some basic Spanish, and I can work out a lot of written Spanish using contextual clues or familiar roots from other Romantic languages. My favorite Spanish phrase is más o menos, which, like its counterpart "more or less" in English, or similar phrases like comme ci, comme ca in French, has an aphoristic lilt, the sing-song charm of a nursery rhyme. I try to work it into conversation with locals whenever possible.
I spent the rest of the time until dinner polishing off the anniversary issue of The New Yorker which arrived while I was in Australia and which has been a perfect travel companion for the last week and a half. I'm sad to have finished it off, and I can't remember the last time I read an entire issue of that magazine from cover to cover. I can't stand to spend an idle moment without reading material--I've been that way for as long as I can remember.
The limitations of printed travel guidebooks was apparent when scouring for restaurants. Half the places listed in the Lonely Planet guidebook for Puerto Madryn have closed or moved. I had to window shop, seeking the place with the most locals. At dinner, I was struck, for the first time in ages, by an unquenchable desire for a cold Coca Cola. They had only Pepsi, but fortunately it came in an ice cold glass bottle, and it was the best tasting drink, the most refreshing thing I've had since a pisco sour in Chile. I loved Coke on ice as a kid. Once again, nostalgia.
Buenos Aires awaits tomorrow. I have a flight to catch in about five hours, and as usual I'll be sleep deprived. I never really left West Coast time, and every morning I'm dragging myself bleary-eyed to whatever sight I have to see. But I nap when I'm tired, eat when I'm hungry, and it's liberating to find that those times aren't the same each day. I'm ready for a dose of urban living, and Buenos Aires sounds like just the thing.
The only annoying issue I'm dealing with right now is a camera problem. My Nikon, at some point in Ushuaia, became stuck on self-timer film advance mode. Everytime I take a picture now I have to wait several seconds until the shutter fires. It's not too terrible for landscape photography, but for shooting active wildlife it's unbelievably aggravating. Without a backup camera body I have little recourse but to keep fiddling with it and hope it fixes itself. There are no camera stores to be found anywhere in these tiny towns, though perhaps Buenos Aires will provide a Nikon shop that can perform a quick fix.
Don't miss too many things from home, except my bike, family and friends, and Cubs games. My beloved Cubbies are in first, and I try and hop online whenever possible to track their progress.
Besides that, am I having a wonderful time? Más o menos.
The airline LAPA went on strike today. Thus my flight out of Ushuaia, scheduled for tomorrow, has been put on hold indefinitely. My local host greeted me as I got off the catamaran that had taken me up the Beagle Channel, and she conveyed the unfortunate news.
So I'm headed to the airport tonight to see if I can switch to another airline to hop a flight to Trelew, a day ahead of schedule. On a vacation with this many flights and destinations, something was bound to happen at some point. No sweat. Part of travel is rolling with the punches. Anyhow, I think I had exhausted Ushuaia.
This year is also the first time I've used travel insurance, and already it will pay for itself, covering the extra flight and additional night in the hotel in Trelew.
The most common things I hear from people back home via e-mail, mostly folks who are working or in school, is that they're living vicariously through my travels. It's a kind thing to say, imbuing my travels with some greater level of importance, but I never believe it for a second. How does one travel vicariously? It's like eating filet mignon intravenously. I don't even enjoy travel writing all that much, though I do enjoy reading books written by people who've lived in an area that I'm traveling to (as opposed to reading books by people who've simply traveled to those destinations as tourists).
Travel guidebooks are a joy, though. Few books in one's life become one's companions in the way a guidebook does. I really should leave my Lonely Planet Argentina behind when I leave Buenos Aires to cut down on my pack weight, but it would be like abandoning a trusted friend. Of all the Lonely Planet guidebooks I've used, the Argentina edition is perhaps my favorite. The local maps of these tiny towns throughout Patagonia have been invaluable, and the short history lessons come in useful, especially when the local museum only includes explanations and tours in Spanish. It even includes enough on Chilean Patagonia that I really could have left my Chile guidebook at home.
Found a bookstore in El Calafate with a few English books. In fact, every store that had any books in El Calafate had the same set of English paperbacks. A few by Robert Ludlum, a few by Tom Clancy, one by Stephen King written under his Richard Bachman pseudonym, a lot by Danielle Steel, some Dean Koontz and W.E.B. Griffith, and a few by P.D. James. I had to plop down just over $10 US each for two P.D. James mystery novels. Painful, especially since the same could be had on Amazon.com Marketplace for less than a dollar plus shipping. It's my first encounter with P.D. James work. Hopefully it will recall that year in my youth when I read just about every Agatha Christie mystery every published.
I located an electric outlet prong converter for Argentina today. Major score. Now I can recharge my iPod. Every country in S. America thus far has had a different prong configuration. This is really something that the world should standardize on. My supposedly universal adapter-converter from Brookstone somehow forgot about the continent of South America.
Such a strange feeling, being on sabbatical. All around you, everyone continues to push their Sisyphean boulders up their hills. One day you just stopped, left the boulder at the bottom of the hill, and hiked to the top with a backpack, a bag lunch, and a pair of binoculars to have a picnic and check out the local flora and fauna.
Tomorrow: Tierra del Fuego and the Beagle Channel. Retracing the voyage of Darwin.
Besides Lance Armstrong, Jordan was the one other sports hero who did seem superhuman. They always came through in the big game, the big event. You felt you couldn't go wrong rooting for him. One of my favorite Jordan memories is staying up late one night in a New York hotel room, watching him pull off a miraculous 37 point game against the Jazz in the NBA finals despite being sick with the flu. Even his skin that day looked a sickly color on TV, he was so ill. Yet he led the Bulls to a comeback victory, and I was jumping up and down and screaming in my room the whole time.
Boys II Men played "It's So Hard to Say Goodbye" at halftime of today's game while his highlights showed on the scoreboard. It's probably for the best I missed that...I surely would have cried.
Ushuaia is the southernmost city in the world. 75% of Antarctic boat excursions leave from its port. The city is nestled at the feet of a glacial mountain range, with the Beagle Channel on the other side. An ideal locale for its 45,000 citizens and the tourists passing through.
Getting here was an adventure. No one told me what airline I was on this morning, and I didn't have a ticket either. I hopped a ride to the airport and fortunately there were only 3 airline counters to try, and one of them had an e-ticket for me. Hey, sometimes everything has a way of working itself out. Perhaps it's the laid back culture around me soaking through, but I never felt too distressed about the whole deal.
Something about traveling through South America keeps giving me these pangs of nostalgia. Perhaps it's the autumn weather, which always reminds me of fall days growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, or those late afternoons at Stanford when the sun was setting, classes were finished, and an open night lay ahead. Autumn is the best season.
Or perhaps my nostalgia is a result of the music around me. Where do old 80's and early 90's pop hits go to die? The tiny hotels and restaurants of the towns dotting Patagonia. Every song is a time warp back to some day in high school or college.
Or perhaps it's the cozy hotels of Patagonia. All with their extensive wood paneling and fireplaces and local decor.
Or perhaps it's dialing in over and over again, trying to find one solid connection to the Internet on this hotel computer. If I'm lucky, after redialing 9 times, I get a 21kbps connection that holds for about 10 minutes before it mysteriously disconnects again. It's the ghost of AOL, arisen to haunt another hemisphere.
Eating lots of seafood. Fish is plentiful, and king crab (centolla) is a local specialty, a bit different than the king crab commonly served in North America. Tasty, and cheap. Meat is also a specialty here, as they pride themselves on hormone-free lamb and beef. I've tried to avoid too many heavy meals of meat, though it dominates most of the menus.
These past two months I've encountered glaciers everywhere: Fox, Franz, Balamaceda, Serrano, Grey, Perito Moreno, and today Martial. I hiked Perito Moreno yesterday. It's the most impressive one I've encountered yet. The face of the glacier rises 17 stories high, and it runs down from the Patagonian ice cap some 17 kilometers. The Patagonian ice cap is the third largest in the world after Antarctica and Greenland, and the Perito Moreno glacier is simply a nub sticking out of the Southeast corner.
If you stand there long enough, a huge chunk of ice will rupture off of the face and crash into the ocean. The sound is awesome, like a giant stalk of broccoli being sheared in half. I saw several of these occurrences, and not once did it fail to elicit all sorts of frantic shouting and gawking from the crowds milling about the viewing platforms.
We hopped a boat and cruised over to the edge of the glacier where we donned crampons and hike around for two hours. Perito Moreno is unique among the world's glaciers in that it is one of the few that is stable. Most glaciers in the world are retreating for one reason or another. The tradition here is to chip off some glacier ice and drink some whiskey with it. Nothing like hiking around a giant glacier with crevasses everywhere with a whole gaggle of tourists drunk on whiskey.
Over thousands of years, snow accumulates, the pressure turns the lower layers to ice, and gravity starts to pull the ice down the mountain slope, carrying dirt and stone with it. Thus are glaciers formed. We love to pinpoint specific moments in time to derive history's course, defining events like volcanic eruptions, decisive turning points like Pearl Harbor, but it's the slow but steady forces like glaciers which most often shape our lives and our landscapes.
Headed to Argentina tomorrow on a bus.
As with most things here in South America thus far, my Internet connection here at this cafe moves at the same speed as the glaciers that carved out most of Patagonia. Brutal. Therefore, this post will be short.
What word on an ATM means withdrawal from checking? I thought the ATM here would have an option for English. Guess not. Couldn't even make out the meanings of the words from the roots, or similar words in French. Oh well.
Torres del Paine is a very impressive national park.
I'm running out of reading material. On vacation, you can absorb books as quickly as the pisco sours they serve before every meal. I read one novel on the flight down to South America (Final Epidemic, an Amazon recommendation: trashy medical thriller, completely plot-driven, the type of novel in which any character's inner revelations are set off in italics, but timely in that it covers a viral epidemic resulting from biological and chemical terrorism) and finished Seabiscuit: An American Legend yesterday and today (engrossing read--highly recommended!). I used to wonder how it was possible to fit a book on two cassette tapes, but when you have blocks of hours to kill, it doesn't take long at all to read a book. I'm down to my last paperback, and I haven't seen an English bookstore the whole time I've been here.
My sleep schedule is odd. I fall asleep each night at about two, two thirty in the morning. Wake up usually around 6 to catch a shuttle to my next destination or tourist destination. Begin tiring in the late afternoon and feel like dying at about 5pm, so I catch an hour nap. Then dinner at around 8 in the evening, and I'm wired until 2 in the morning when it starts all over again. It's not much sleep, just a series of short naps throughout the day, but it seems to work well, like the idea that it's best to eat a whole lot of small meals rather than three large ones.
Given that it's off-peak travel season here, most of the tiny towns I've visited have been very quiet. A bit too quiet at night for me, the solo traveler, but perhaps some time off to think is a good thing. Too much time to think can drive me batty, though.
You don't know darkness unless you've stood out in the middle of a campground in the middle of the night in Torres del Paine, with not one light to be seen anywhere except that of the thousands of stars in the sky. It's a blackness so deep it seems to have weight, and density. Luckily I found my flashlight, or I would have never gotten my tent disassembled and made my ride out of the park this morning.
Who knew? The greatest challenge I've faced thus far is the Spanish-optimized keyboards. None of the punctuation marks, except the period and comma, are where I expect them be. Let me tell you, these will be some HTML-sparse posts because I can't deal with the frustration of having to crank out brackets. So if all sorts of weird symbols show up in my post, it's because I still can't figure out which of these strange things is the apostrophe.
Spent a day in Santiago--an interesting mix of the modern and the traditional. Now I'm here in Punta Arenas in Patagonia--the end of the world, they call it, and indeed, it's the furthest South I've ever been. Here, the sun rises in the Southeast and sets in the Southwest. Strange. It's cool here, a dry, crisp Autumn air. Reminds me of football weather from my childhood days in Chicago. Refreshing, and it clears your head. The landscape is somewhat windswept and desolate, a very beautiful, stark mixture of hills and ocean.
Visited a museum yesterday dedicated to the indigenous peoples of Patagonia. Similar story to every other country I've visited this year. Europeans came, bringing disease and weapons. Here, the natives were sent to missions where many died. I think there's one pure native still alive now--the rest have been assimilated into the local population. The citizens of Punta Arenas don't actually consider themselves citizens of Chile. They call themselves Magellanas, after Hernando Magellan, who came through here in the 1500's and ended up dying in the Philippines.
The pace of life is very relaxed. In fact, I'm waiting for a museum to open up. Posted opening time? 10:00 am. When will it open? Anyone's guess. My limited Spanish skills haven't been too much of an impediment yet, though having a guide with me at times has helped.
Alan and I were chatting while I was waiting at LAX. He and Sharon are moving to the Upper East Side of Manhattan in June where Alan will be studying at Cornell. He must be happy to leave St. Louis after so many years there, right? He admitted to a surprising reluctance, an inertia of sorts, a feeling he equated to hostage, or Stockhom, syndrome. It's an apt metaphor for lots of what I felt just before I left Seattle for South America. We come to embrace the familiarity of our prisons--the known enemy more comforting than the unknown, I suppose. Now that I'm here, wandering the streets at night, it's all good. But how often I fall prey to hostage syndrome, clinging to dependent relationship in work, life, etc.
Here's to breaking free of our captors. Off I head to Puerto Natales.
Off I fly to South America. The last day before a 5 week trip is always a mad rush. I'm packed and about as ready as I'll be at this point, as woefully unprepared as that may be.
I've tried to jot down as many e-mail addresses and phone #'s as possible, but I'm sure I forgot quite a few. Drop me a line while I'm gone, and I'll be sure to reply the first chance I get to hit the Internet. I'd love to hear from you all, as the most mundane news from home is welcomed with open arms while one is abroad, simply for being familiar amidst everything that is foreign.
And if somewhere along the line, you decide you want to quit and rush down to meet me? Well, I'd love the company (solo travel teaches one the meaning of the words Lonely Planet), especially if you speak Spanish.
Pics from my previous trip to NZ and Oz and Rio? Well, time ran out on me. I've only managed to jot down my memories from the first half of the New Zealand trip. Let's hope they're still fresh in my mind when I return from South America. One of these days I'll finish scanning all those photos and post my recollections.
And now I unplug for a while, with simply a camera, some books, a paper journal, and some clothes. What sort of world will I return to in the middle of May?
Hopefully a more peaceful one. See you all in mid-May.
P.S.: If you live in Seattle, a perfect way to welcome me home would be a ticket to see Matrix Reloaded at Cinerama on opening night, the day after I return. =)
For health reasons. Who really knows how much input he had in various decisions over the years, but the truth in recent years was that many free agents shunned Chicago because of him, so all in all his departure must be seen as a net positive.
Now if the Bears could be pried from the fingers of the McCaskeys...
Keira Knightley is going to be the next big young star, after her performances in Bend it like Beckham and her starring role in the upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean (check out the preview from this site; Bruckheimer's movie syntax is exactly that of movie trailers). Female British accents slay me, and it doesn't hurt if you look like a young Winona Ryder crossed with Natalie Portman.
I'm sure a similar reaction awaits me on my first day back in the office.
Early analysis indicates SARS may have come from a virus that causes bronchitis in birds.
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Sosa joined the 500 homer club on Friday night with a blast to right. How do you do that double chest thump blow kiss chest thump blow kiss thing in ASCII? Gotta give the man his props.Sosa always had a fair amount of power, but I admit I didn't think much of him when the Cubs nabbed him from the White Sox for George Bell. Unlike someone like Barry Bonds, Sosa did not come to the majors fully formed. He was a free swinger, with all the tools of speed and power but no discipline. Very few hitters develop plate discipline late in life, but miraculously, around the age of 30, Sosa suddenly became a big, patient power hitter. As soon as he stopped swinging at every high fastball and every breaking ball down and away, pitchers had to come in with the fastball, and with his newfound toe tap to get his weight moving properly he started punishing balls to all fields. He has the most opposite field power of any right handed hitter I've ever seen (his 500th homer was an example, a line drive blast to right on a day when everything Griffey hit that way was knocked down by the wind).
Sosa's no longer fast, and he's not going to win any gold gloves in right, but he more than makes up for it with his offensive production and hustle. Plus, unlike Bonds, who's just an ass, Sosa's very generous with the fans and with his charities.
Hee Seop Choi has very good plate patience, as does Mark Bellhorn. They just don't swing at balls. Very refreshing. Corey Patterson still hacks at anything from head to ankles--he needs to learn from Sosa. Tools + plate discipline equals superstardom.
Forgot the giant squid I'm always obsessing over. My new favorite nature pinup is the colossal squid. Even more, well, colossal and more dangerous than the giant squid, it has 8 arms and two tentacles that have up to 25 lethal hooks! We're talking "sharks with frickin' laser beams on their heads" territory.
Thanks to Hawaii Scott for forwarding this to me. I can't believe this isn't bigger news. I'd never even heard of the colossal squid before today. You probably haven't either. This is an oversight we must all strive to correct.
Seriously, who would have thought New York would have a smoking ban earlier than Seattle? I'm moving.
On the downside, there's a possibility I could end up like this poor German chap.
On the positive side, I discovered yesterday that Jennifer Garner filed for divorce from her husband. This, combined with the mefloquine, leaves the distinct possibility that I'll meet her in my dreams tonight. Her, and a colossal squid.
He was at his best playing aloof, brooding, seemingly tortured souls. Sadly, perhaps this is one time life did imitate art. HKFlix has a very complete DVD filmography for Cheung.
On a side note, the publication of silly April Fool's Day stories on the web on April 1 has become a bit predictable, and when serious and somewhat shocking events do occur on April 1 their validity comes into question. I hesitated to link to this story at first because I thought there was a tiny chance it could be a prank.
How comforting for those of us living in Seattle, the only major city within the outer range of his nuclear weapons.
I recommend reading it while listening to Horowitz in Moscow. A great recording of a great recital.
Trailer for the videogame based on Matrix Reloaded has been released. It contains quite a bit of new footage from Matrix Reloaded, but no spoilers, so catch it if you're curious.
If one flaw of the Matrix movies jumps to mind, it's perhaps the near robotic, or zen-like if you're generous, line readings and acting, some of which are on display in this trailer. Everyone's decked out in leather and too cool to emote. Except Keanu, who's method acting. Whoa.
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NPR has excellent coverage of Grutter vs. Bollinger, the lawsuit against the University of Michigan's affirmative action program. NPR's coverage includes audio clips from the actual hearings. For the first time I can remember, the Supreme Court allowed news organizations to record the oral arguments because of the importance of this case, arguably the most important civil rights case to come before the Supreme Court in decades. It will have implications on affirmative action in employment practices, scholarship programs, mentoring programs, not to mention admissions programs at universities throughout the land.It's worth listening to some of the two hours of footage just to hear the judges comments. They're quite colorful, and the personalities of each of the judges comes through in a way that pure transcripts can't convey. It's fairly clear how most of them feel about this case. Stevens, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Souter will rule in favor of Michigan, and they seem to have been heavily influenced by a brief filed by former heads of U.S. military academies and Joint Chiefs of Staff who note that affirmative action has been a huge success in the military and that without such programs the military would return to being almost all white. Kennedy, Scalia, Rehnquist, and Thomas fall on the other side, with their primary argument being that the Michigan program is a thinly disguised quota which would be unconstitutional. That leaves Sandra Day O'Connor as the swing vote, as she has often been on this court. As usual, she is difficult to read.
Listening to the justices pressing the lawyers on their arguments is fascinating. The complexity and nuances of the issue gain shape in the give and take between everyone present, and the arguments and debate are eloquent and all of the highest order. No screaming or shouting or Hollywood legal grandstanding. I had the audio stream of the oral arguments on in the background while writing this morning and couldn't turn it off. No matter what side or the argument you're on, keep an open mind and listen to some of the points made on either side.
If all court cases were of this nature, I'd pay money to attend sessions, just as I would to watch a Cubs game. Certainly the debate was more educational and entertaining than most of the plays I've seen this past year.
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One controversial decision made by Hong Kong officials was to continue to host last weekend's World Cup of rugby, which brought teams from 24 countries around the world and packed 25,000 screaming, drinking fans into close quarters. Originally officials planned to distribute surgical masks, but they were in short supply so bandannas were substituted. Predictably, few were put to use. The obvious question is whether or not Hong Kong's government felt pressure to continue with the event to boost tourism in a country that is already suffering a cataclysmic collapse in the face of the war and of course what is effectively a global quarantine by tourists. The incubation period of SARS is estimated at one week, so the impact of their decision should become apparent shortly.
The SARS virus reminds me of some of the ideas presented in Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond (which, by the way, is one of the most influential books I've ever read, with amazing explanatory power and scope). Many of the diseases which Europeans brought abroad to the New World were ones which humans caught from domestic animals with whom they had close physical contact. The New World failed to transmit many diseases back in the reverse direction because of the relative shortage of large herds of domestic animals there. This may explain why SARS seems to have broken from Southern China, where many people still live in close quarters with domesticated animals. New strains of viruses often develop in animals and jump to humans.
The second idea I recall is that the threat of the disease to humans the world over may be inversely related to its lethality. Viruses which kill off its hosts quickly often die off because they don't have time to spread to other hosts. The first symptoms of syphilis when it was first discovered in 1495 included pustules covering the entire body, the peeling away of skin from people's faces, and death within months. But by the mid 1500's it had evolved into the milder form we're familiar with today. By keeping its victims alive longer, syphilis ensured it could spread to more victims to ensure its own survival. Assuming SARS can be successfully quarantined, if it was indeed as lethal as some surmise, it could quickly fade away. A good example was the Ebola virus, too deadly to ever get out of Africa.
Early speculation, though, is that SARS is a very contagious coronavirus, capable of surviving long periods of time on surfaces, and that some victims appear to be superinfectors who distribute aereosolized viral balloons which can survive for hours while floating in the air. This is all speculation, of course. Scientists aren't even one hundred percent sure how colds are transmitted.
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I know, it's too early to extrapolate a season based on two baseball games. What I'm about to write about the Mariners has nothing to do with their first two losses to division rival Oakland, though they fit a pattern. Derek Zumsteg of Baseball Prospectus has written extensively on the Mariners philosophy and economic situation in the past.The Mariners best chance to make the playoffs with the old team they have was last year, and ownership made a pretty strong statement about how important that was to them by going out to grab Jose Offerman and Doug Creek when they could have had Cliff Floyd or Scott Rolen for the stretch run. I completely understand why Piniella left. Ostensibly it was about family, but he had to be frustrated with the cards he was dealt. Now they're left with an even older team which they're paying a lot of money for. Freddy Garcia is overrated and flaky. Jamie Moyer is an old, soft-tossing lefty of 40 years of age. Pitchers of that profile don't age well. As soon as they lose command, they get shelled because their stuff is just not that good. Joel Pineiro had a great year but isn't quite as dominant as a starter as he was as a reliever. At least he's young and healthy. I can't even name the other two starters, though I think one of them is Gil Meche, who's due for a lot of "first full year back from arm injury" shellackings.
On offense, the Mariners have three decent offensive weapons in Ichiro, Olerud, and Edgar. None are spring chickens, and all are in what are typically decline years in production, though Ichiro should improve on last year if he can sustain his stamina better than last year. For some reason the Mariners decided in the offseason that the best move was to resign all their old players to multi-year, multi-million dollar contracts. Dan Wilson? 2 years, $7 million, one of the most absurd signings all winter. Jamie Moyer? 3 year deal. Hasegawa? $1.5 million. Edgar and Olerud also were locked up, meaning the Mariners have committed to being adequately competitive this year, and decliningly competitive in the next two years.
But ownership doesn't seem to care. They're sitting on a beautiful stadium that they pay only $700K per year to lease, thanks to ample funding from Seattle citizens, and a revenue stream second to only the Yankees in baseball. The question is, how long will Seattle fans tolerate paying exorbitant ticket prices and $6.50 for a tiny cup of microbrewed beer? It makes me long for the $3.25 Budweisers I used to quaff in the Wrigley Field bleachers.
In a different division the demise might not be as apparent so quickly, but when you have Billy Beane in your class, twice as poor but about eight times as smart, it doesn't matter if you have a box of 64 crayons and Beane can only afford 32. Billy will still win the class coloring contest every time.
I'm a Cubs fan, so the fate of the Mariners concerns me little. Still, as a citizen who contributed some of my hard-earned dollars to funding the stadium that's enriching the M's ownership, I feel compelled to speak out. If you're going to take our money to build your cash machine, at least bring a legitimate World Series contender to the city. Otherwise, give me my money back.
Fuji is coming out with a Fuji Velvia slide film rated at ASA100 this summer. This is big news, because Velvia 50 (or what has been known simply as Velvia until now) is by far most popular color slide film among professionals, especially outdoor photographers. It produces incredibly saturated colors, almost surreal, and has the highest DMax of any slide film I've used. It's certainly my favorite, and I shot a million photos in Velvia in Africa, my first introduction to photography. It didn't disappoint, and never has.
Supposedly Velvia 100 will be more color accurate than Velvia 50. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but I certainly won't complain about another flavor of slide film in the chocolate box.