Pacific Queen I'd never heard

Pacific Queen

I'd never heard of Pacific Queen apples until I purchased a bag from the grocery store last week. One of the produce guys in the market said they were in fresh from New Zealand, and since I'd just visited I thought I'd try something different than the usual Fuji, Braeburn, et. al. varieties.
Wow! Tasty. Super sweet. Just in my lifetime, dozens of new types of apples have been bred in laboratories around the world. Not all genetic engineering is a bad thing.

? Why are these Iraq's

?

Why are these Iraq's Most Wanted Playing Cards selling so well? They're in the top 10 in Amazon's books store.

25 greatest electronic albums of

25 greatest electronic albums of the 20th century

I own ten of these. Couldn't it just be the best of all time? Or were there electronic albums in the 19th century?

Then why do all babies look like Richard Nixon?

Found a link from BoingBoing to Beautycheck, a fascinating site about research into facial attractiveness. I wasted a good half hour surfing the site because it encompasses all the various beauty theories I'd heard before:

• attractiveness is averageness (Langlois & Roggmann, 1990: "average faces are most attractive")


• the 'symmetry hypothesis' (Grammer &Thornhill, 1994; Thornhill & Gangestad 1999: "facial symmetry has a positive influence on facial attractiveness ratings")


• theory of 'multidimensional beauty perception' (Cunningham, 1986: "attractive faces show a combination of signs of sexual maturity and babyfaceness")


• correlation between attractiveness and attributed social qualities (Dion, Berscheid & Walster, 1972: "what is beautiful is good")

Some interesting excerpts from the research summary:
"By calculating prototypic very attractive vs. unattractive faces for each gender, we were able to show that these faces are remarkably different in their attributes, such as skin texture, proportions etc. Additional surveys showed that attractive female faces are narrower than unattractive ones, and that they possess a brown skin and full, well looked-after lips. The distance between the eyes is larger, eyelids are thinner, there are more, longer and darker eyelashes, darker and narrower eyebrows, higher cheekbones, and the nose is narrower than in less attractive female faces. Surprisingly, more or less the same is the case for attractive male faces: they, too, have a browner skin, a narrower face, fuller lips, thinner eyelids, more and darker eyelashes, darker eyebrows, and higher cheekbones than the less attractive ones. Attractive male faces can furthermore be characterized by a more prominent lower jaw and chin."
"Finally, the results of our studies on social perception suggest that there is a well-defined stereotype of attractiveness: People with more attractive faces were assessed to be more successful, contended, pleasant, intelligent, sociable, exciting, creative and diligent than people with less attractive faces. These results particularly show the far-reaching social consequences human facial attractiveness may have."
"To sum up, our study shows clearly that the most attractive faces do not exist in reality, they are morphs, i.e. computer-created compound images you would never find in everyday live. These virtual faces showed characteristics that are unreachable for average human beings."
Sigh. If only I had a narrower face, higher cheekbones, and a more prominent lower jaw and chin. Thankfully, the remnants of my sabbatical tan remain, which is perhaps why everyone says I look healthy.
Unfortunately, the site drew no conclusions as to why people all seem to gravitate towards faces with these characteristics, which is perhaps the more interesting question. Is it some quirk of genetics, some built-in bias in our perceptive organs, or is it developed over time by social stimuli? Do we find such faces more attractive because we know that our children will be more likely to pass on our genes if they look fit the socially accepted standard of beauty? If we took people that were blind from birth and suddenly gave them sight, would they judge beauty the same as people who'd had sight all their lives? If Daredevil had been blinded from birth, would he still think Jennifer Garner was beautiful when he "saw" her reflected by the rain?

Seattle International Film Festival, 2003

By the time I returned from my sabbatical and got my head in gear, SIFF pre-sales had already been open for a few days. Knowing the fanatical lengths to which movie buffs go to secure tix to desirable movies here in Seattle, I was concerned that all the best movies would be sold out. The truth wasn't quite so bad, though a few movies I wanted to see were no longer available in exchange for passes and had to be paid for. So, not too bad.
The problem with SIFF is always selecting movies to see. Most are movies I've never heard of, and the problem was worse this year since I had spent the last 3 months in other countries, out of the film circuit gossip loop. There are over 200 movies at this year's fest, and the most you'll learn about any of them is the one paragraph marketing-oriented description of the plot in the Seattle Times special SIFF section. It's not much to go on, and the last thing you want to do is wait in line for an hour to see a dud. But that's the risk you take in the hopes of seeing something interesting at a film festival in which most of the entries will never make it to the big screen in your neighborhood again.
My selection strategy involved all of the following: seeing movies I'd heard good things about from other film fests or movie fans, eliminating movies I couldn't see because they would play during work hours, selecting movies unlikely to be released in theaters, attending movies where artists I admire would be present to speak, and focusing on the cinema of countries which had produced interesting movies in the past. And occasionally, I'd just guess.
Here's what I ended up with. If you're in Seattle and planning on attending any of these, let me know and I'll hold a spot for you in line with all the other crazies (I think it was The Stranger that last year referred to SIFF full-series passholders as passholes, and there's much truth to that characterization):

• Valentin (May 22, Paramount Theatre): opening night gala. I don't know what this movie is about, but it came with the Christmas special ticket package I bought.


• Owning Mahowny (May 24, Pacific Place): the always entertaining Phillip Seymour Hoffman as a gambling addict.


• The One-Armed Swordsman (May 25, Harvard Exit): one of SIFF's special programs this year is a screening of numerous archival and restored 35mm prints of classic martial arts movies.


• An Evening with Ray Harryhausen (May 30, Egyptian): the genius behind the first stop-action King Kong movie will be in attendance! Jason and the Argonauts will be screened.


• Animatrix (May 31, Egyptian): before it comes out on DVD, a chance to sample it on the big screen.


• Hukkle (June 1, Harvard Exit): sounds interesting. A montage murder mystery from Hungary with little to no dialogue.


• The Eye (June 2, Egyptian): another flick with an intriguing description...a blind woman has her sight restored and starts seeing strange things. The horror movie capitol of the world has moved to Asia.


• American Splendor (June 4, Egyptian): a Sundance Grand Jury prize winner, adapted from Harvey Pekar's comic book about himself.


• Springtime in a Small Town (June 5, Pacific Place): from the director of The Blue Kite.


• 11' 09" 01 (June 8, Egyptian): 11 big-name directors memorialize Sept 11 with 11 minute, 9 second, 1 frame long shorts.


• Vertical Frontier (June 8, Egyptian): rock climbing documentary.


• Le Cercle Rouge (June 8, Harvard Exit): Jean-Pierre Melville and Alain Delon also collaborated on Le Samourai, one of my favorite movies of all time.


• Infernal Affairs (June 9, Cinerama): my Hong Kong cinema guilty pleasure.


• The Legend of Suriyothai (June 15, Cinerama): most expensive movie ever made in Thailand, and also the biggest box office earner. The trailer hints that it's the type of movie that will take advantage of the Cinerama.

Summer begins when TV shows end

What marks the beginning of summer in Seattle? No, not the end of 4th of July weekend, though from a weather perspective you wouldn't be far off. For me, it's marked by the season finales of the fall TV programs I've been watching. When those end, there's no reason to stay home in the evenings or to download from the Tivo. It stays light out later into the evenings anyway, and those two things combined get me out the door more often.
Bye bye Buffy (it was time, but it's still sad), and 24, and The West Wing. Another benefit of the Tivo, for me, is the ability to watch four or five episodes of these shows back to back. The shows taste better consumed that way. It's especially true of a show like 24, which was dragging on and on for me before I left for South America. Watching the final 6 episodes all at once, instead of dragging those 6 hours out over a month and a half, prevented the suspense and convoluted plot from dissipating. Perhaps, in the age of short attention spans, I've lost my ability to appreciate the serial thriller in its native weekly frequency.
By the way, my Tivo has never recorded anything interesting for me. I read stories about how people love to come home to see what their Tivo has chosen for them, but mine records reruns of Ally Mcbeal and NYPD Blue. I feel like the parent of a child who's last in his age group to learn to speak. Is something wrong? Is my Tivo developmentally challenged? Did I get a lemon?

Copper river salmon, monkfish, and artichokes

It's copper river salmon season again. Delphine was in town for a thoracic conference so I showed her and her roommate Joey around town this weekend. At Pike Place Market, copper river salmon was everywhere.

Everyone around town seemed to know that several thousand thoracic researchers were congregating at the convention center, because every store I walked by, even artisans selling crafts off of plastic tables in Pike Place Market, had "Welcome Thoracic Society" stickers and placards displayed for all to see. It wouldn't have surprised me in the least if a homeless guy begging for change had one of those stickers taped to his cup.
At the place where they throw fish in the Pike Place Market (after countless visits, you'd think I'd know the name of that store), a monkfish was on display.

The fish tossers had wired a hook through its body to its mouth and would tug on that when young children walked up to gawk, causing the monkfish to convulse. This caused the children to squeal with delight. This fish market also had a parrotfish on ice. Can you eat those?
On Queen Anne hill, at the park on Highland Ave. (again, you'd think I'd have memorized the name of the park, but I always forget), the attraction that most delighted Delphine was not the panoramic view of downtown Seattle and the Puget Sound but an artichoke plant in a pot by the sidewalk. None of us had seen an artichoke plant before. It reminded me of seeing lions mating at night in Africa. I'd never wondered what that would look like until I saw it for the first time, and it's not something I'll soon forget. Nor will the image of an artichoke plant soon leave me.

Matrix Reloaded, reviewed, because everyone else has

The Matrix Reloaded is more intellectually stimulating than emotionally moving, and so, in the end, it is less effective a movie than it could have been. Movies which inspire philosophy books always raise warning bells in my head; the strength of the moving picture medium has always been its ability to tap our subconscious through the fusion of sound and image and, to a lesser extent, words. Movies tap emotions much more naturally than books, which are much better suited for exploring complex ideas (for example, mathematics or advanced philosophy).
The first Matrix movie inspired lots of books dissecting its philosophical messages, but tellingly those were written by fans, not by the moviemakers themselves. That movie obeyed the basic storytelling edict of "show don't tell." Sure, Morpheus offered Neo a brief lesson after he chose between the red and blue pills, and the Oracle offered some fortune cookie paradoxes while baking cookies, but for the most part the characters acted out their roles and steered clear of long asides on the deeper meanings of the Matrix and reality and life. The philosophizing was of the "there is no spoon" variety, which was just implicit enough to let the viewer make his own conclusions.
No such luck in the second movie. This time, the Wachowski brothers have written the philosophy lessons into the script. We get long speeches from the Architect, Oracle, Morpheus, Agent Smith, the daemon Merovingian. Making matters worse, snly the Merovingian and the Oracle seem to speak with any flair instead of delivering their dialogue in the holier-than-thou diction preferred by Morpheus. Even Roy Jones Jr., in a cameo, has to tone it down a bit (I really wanted him to give a shout out to his homies in Pensacola). Why has every denizen of the Matrix been reduced to speaking like a constipated monk? This style of delivery overemphasizes the profundity of its content, much like the verbally-italicized dialogue in a David Mamet movie. It took me a second viewing to absorb everything they said, and that's not a compliment for a movie (whereas it might be for a book). The first movie seeped into my brain like warm brandy, and the ideas it represented weren't much less sophisticated.
The ideas discussed were fascinating, but all those speeches stray from the strength of the movie medium. It is enough that the characters all have names laden with meaning; Persephone, Merovingian, Zion, and Niobe are just some of the names pulled from religion and mythology for very specific reasons. That's as explicit as the moviemakers needed to be. Codifying the philosophy in long-winded speeches A movie can be both intellectually and emotionally substantive, much like a classic book of literature. There is The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and then there is Finnegan's Wake. There are corn flakes, and corn flakes with raisins. I know which I'd rather read, and which I'd rather eat. If the first Matrix movie was the perfect blend of action movie and art-house allegory, the second doesn't spend enough time in the blender--it is at times a skillfull but empty action movie (as with the chase scene and the Neo versus the men in black) and at other times a philosophy 101 lecture. My recollection of Philosophy 101 in college was that it sounded more interesting than it actually was.
A second reason the movie fails to connect on an emotional level is the tabula rasa that is Keanu Reeves. His naivete and wide-eyed imcomprehension worked well in the first movie, when he awoke to the reality that his reality was anything but. In the second movie, when we need to empathize with his cause and his love for Trinity, which causes him to choose the door his 5 predecessors avoided, we can't. When the albino Milli Vanilli twins close the parking garage door on him and he opens it to find a giant mountain range, I visualized his thought bubble: "Oh no, I'm back in Little Buddha! I thought I had rescued my acting career from the garbage heap!" Most people who criticize the Matrix Reloaded say it lost its humanity, but there's never been much humanity in either movie. That's not because most humans are dreaming in the Matrix but because the protagonist Keanu Reeves is called on to deliver lines like "I love you too much." The humans here are more Jedi Knights than normal folk in their emotional detachment. Just as Luke lays down his lightsaber and screams for his father's aid at the end of Return of the Jedi with the passion of a son in need, perhaps Neo and Trinity and Morpheus will become more human in the third movie now that their belief in the Prophecy has been shattered.
Another emotional dampener is that the fight scenes are understood to be virtual, both literally (Wired and Time and a whole host of magazines have dubbed John Gaeta and team's new development virtual cinematography) and figuratively (the fights occur in the Matrix, in a virtual reality). Furthermore, Neo's superman-like powers mean left me unconcerned that he'd be hurt in any of his fight scenes. In the first movie, you felt a sense of dread everytime an agent appeared, because you knew Morpheus, Neo, and Trinity all flirted with death each time an agent appeared on the scene (Morpheus gets tossed through a toilet by Agent Smith, who also lands about two thousand punches on Neo in the subway, and Trinity barely escapes death in the opening chase scene). In Matrix Reloaded, it doesn't matter who Neo is fighting, you know he'll either come out on top or soar away. Since the fights are all virtual, anyway, they lose an element of drama. When Neo leaps from one agent Smith to the other, you can feel the lack of physical impact--it recalls the cartoon-like movements that plagued the special effects in Spiderman. The visceral dread I felt while watching the first movie was absent. Since the movie has moved into the real world for the final chapter of the trilogy, that may be merely a middle-chapter problem.
The last flaw is the soundtrack. In the first movie the soundtrack moved in perfect rhythm with the action on screen, but in the Matrix Reloaded it calls attention to itself at inopportune moments. Don Davis atonal score did not, to my ears, make any growth from one movie to the next. It remains, like many of the movies ideas, detached and at times even abstract, disconnected from the visual narrative.
The Wachowski brothers are still exacting and ambitious architects, and in other areas of the movie that is to be appreciated. When Trinity uses Nmap to hack the power grid computer system near the end of the movie, the audience full of Amazon software engineers burst out in laughter (understandably, the less technical audience I later watched the movie with couldn't appreciate that touch). Other movies would have resorted to typical visual shorthand to represent the hack for a mainstream audience, but the Wachowski brothers are not so lazy. Most of Zion consists of minorities, a fact which makes sense when you think of what segments of society would be most likely to rebel against the status quo (perhaps a flaw of the Matrix is that it doesn't eliminate socio-economic stratification along racial lines inside its virtual reality?). Along those lines, it's no surprise that Cornel West is on the council of Zion. The special effects, of course, are visually innovative, and the fight choreography is of the expected Yuen Wo Ping quality. The brief fight between Neo and the Oracle's bodyguard was a humorous homage to martial arts movies in which brothers or old friends always greet each other with a brief and serious fight and then suddenly stop and embrace in laughter at the confirmation of each other's skill.
Though the movie didn't move me, I still admire its style, ambition, scope, and technical skill. After the highway chase scene, I want a Ducati more than ever, and I've stopped wondering why everyone wears sunglasses in the dark setting of the Matrix. If I were loaded into the Matrix, I too would ask for sunglasses to match the leather duds I couldn't afford in the real world. The philosophical puzzles are ones I want to know the answers to. How does Neo retain his powers in the real world at the end? How does Agent Smith cross over into the real world? Is that even the real world, or is Zion just another layer of artificial reality? Why can humans only leave the Matrix through a land line (I'm sensitive to the issue since I just returned from 5 weeks in South America, where the cellular network is far more reliable than the land line system; perhaps all of the Matrix is served by AT&T Wireless, which never gives me a reliable signal in Seattle)? Is the failure of the Prophecy to come true an indictment of organized religion? I'll play the videogame, Enter the Matrix. I'll watch The Animatrix, which offers further background and back story on Matrix Reloaded. And I'll be in line for the Matrix Revolutions, opening night.
Personally, I'm glad just to have been able to review the movie without resorting to any quotes like, "Perhaps my opinion of the Matrix is simply a programmed response within the Matrix." If I hear another guy at the vending machine outside my office asking himself if he's been programmed to select the Cheetos, I'm calling for an exit.

Day One Maury

Maury: "Derek, what do you do when you fall off the horse?" Silence. "You get back on! That's what this business is all about!"
Derek: "Sorry, Maury. But I'm not a gymnast."
For the first time in a long time, three months to be exact, I dressed for work today. No, I haven't been going to the office naked for three months. My sabbatical came to an end.
I woke up and realized I needed to press a shirt for work. Quite a change from my time hiking the Inca Trail, when I wore clothes that had been crumpled and stuffed into my pack for days.
You know what feels especially fresh after a layoff from work? The wrists. Typing hundreds of e-mails each week takes its toll on your hands. My fingers and wrists felt strong and limber today. They felt slightly less so after I worked my way through most of the 3,500 e-mails that had accumulated during my leave.
I saw a few folks, but for the most part I laid low. I feel like a stranger in the office, like an outsider. Like that feeling you have when walking into your room after months away. Everything is familiar but new--it's a dreamlike state, like deja vu. If only we could take regular breaks from all the familiar places in our life, they'd always seem fresh, magical.
Having been away for so long, there's much culture and news to assimilate. A not so brief tour of some of it...

Tufte on Powerpoint

Edward Tufte, author of what I consider to be essential reference books such as The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, writes an interesting critique of Microsoft Powerpoint. It costs $7, but it's worthwhile. Powerpoint has always been the weak link in Microsoft Office, and they I know it inside out, my relationship with it has always been one of reluctant acceptance. Not even love hate, because there isn't much love there.

How many airplanes are over the United States right now

A short clip illustrating a day in the life of air traffic over the U.S. (Quicktime movie). Cool.
A graphic of all the flights and bus rides and horse rides and train rides and hikes I took while in South America would look something like that as well.

Exponential hype

Has there every been a movie more hyped than Matrix Reloaded? The practice of offering pre-screenings and access to either Time or Newsweek in advance in exchange for a cover story (The Two Towers was the previous movie to make that type of business deal, in exchange for one of those covers, I think it was Time) is already getting old. I'm a fairly big film geek, but let's be honest. A blockbuster movie doesn't really merit the cover of Time magazine, not at this time in the world, and perhaps not ever. Standing in the airport on arrival in the U.S. from South America I saw Morpheus and Trinity and Neo staring at me from every second magazine cover.
I haven't seen the movie yet (being on sabbatical meant a temporary demotion from the ranks of the opening day fanatics, but the next time I'm in line for the first showing at Cinerama, say for LOTR: Return of the King, don't call it a comeback), but the expectations are so great that some backlash and letdown is inevitable. The "okay people, let's get real, it's just a movie and not some philosophical masterpiece" articles were bound to happen at some point after the first movie inspired books with titles like Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy and Religion in The Matrix.
After the uniqueness of the first movie (American movies that appropriate visual tropes from Japanese anime and Chinese martial arts cinema is always considered fresh in this country), it's hard to imagine the second movie being superior except in budget and special effects.
Okay, so the Wachowski brothers aren't the next coming of Kierkegaard and Baudrillard. I hope that amidst the marketing blitz no one made the mistake in thinking that they were.

Apple Music Store

The new Apple music store is very solid. The solution is not complex. In fact, it's built on components that have been available all along. (1) Selection: Apple has songs from all five major music labels (2) Micropayments: allows users to download individual songs for the fair price of $0.99 (3) Ownership: the service allows users unlimited burning of the songs to CDs and generous sharing of the songs across their iPod and 3 Mac computers.
My main quibble is that the selection, while it includes albums from all five major music labels, is still just a fraction of the music available from their vaults. It will likely take some time before all the artists allow their music to be shared digitally through the Apple music store, but it's futile to resist. There are still numerous albums and artists I'd like to see represented. Let's hope their early success convinces holdouts to cross the line.
I'd also prefer that the $0.99 price per song be inclusive of sales tax. But that's just me being greedy, since I don't really mind odd prices ($1.07 per track after sales tax in Washington) when I'm paying with a credit card.
All in all, the new music store is a surprising but well-executed move on the part of Apple. It won't eliminate or even significantly dent music piracy, but count me among the converted who are happy to fork over $0.99 for a good tune. Another reason, if you're considering joining the Mac community, to follow through.

PowerPC 970

And a second reason to make the Mac leap sometime in the next year? Perhaps a launch of a new processor architecture, finally bringing Apple out of the dark ages and into greater parity with the Intel and AMD processors powering most Windows boxes.
Considering the popularity of Macs as multimedia editing machines, the new processors can come none too soon. Rendering certain effects on a Mac can be painfully slow.

Lance, part deux

Lance Armstrong and Sally Jenkins are working on a sequel, Every Second Counts, to the bestselling biography It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life. I'm counting down every second, though it doesn't look like it will be ready for me to carry with me up the Alps in July.

The few. The proud.

If TV marketing held complete sway over me, I'd most definitely be a Marine. Great commercials.

Sports break

Bill James, every interesting, both for his analysis and his crusty personality, conducted a chat at ESPN today. His sharp tongued writing is always entertaining, particularly in a chat environment where he can always get the last word. An example:
Tim - Cohasset, MA: Bill, I'm very interested in your work and was wondering how a 20 year old college student would get in on the ground floor working for a team like the Red Sox.
Bill James: Learn to throw 95
Come to think of it, Bill James and Edward Tufte have a lot in common. Among the fun assertions he makes, in the chat, is that the three most valuable commodities in baseball, in order, are Alex Rodriguez, Mark Prior, and Vladimir Guerrero. Good news for Cubs fans. Maybe the Cubbies can sign Vlad in the offseason and get two out of three. I don't think Cubs fans realize yet how good Mark Prior can be. He's certainly the pitcher you'd draft first in the entire major leagues if you held a major league wide draft.
Speaking of the Cubbies, they pulled out a 17 inning game today. The Cubs are going to break the single season strikeout record they themselves set two years ago (that's my prediction). They are stocked up and down with power arms, and today Todd Wellemeyer struck out the side for the save in his major league debut. He was throwing 95 mph cheese and mixing in an 84 mph changeup with very good arm action. Granted, it was against the strikeout prone Brewers, but still, a lot of the Cubs strikeouts have to do with the power arms on their staff. They have a seemingly endless supply of 6' 3" to 6' 6" right handers who throw in the mid 90's. Nasty. Now if the Cubs pick up Mike Lowell from the Marlins before the trading deadline, I'm going to start getting nervous, in a good way.

4 is an unlucky number in Chinese

As the ever smart John Hollinger predicted, the Lakers succumbed the the Spurs, ending their run of championships at 3. Even with Rick Fox, their bench was terrible, and a lot of their loss this year should be blamed on their general manager, who did nothing to bolster their team behind Kobe and Shaq. I was no fan of Jerry Krause, but at least he knew that restocking around Jordan and Pippen was his single most important job, and he did his job well. It doesn't take much when you have two players as good as Kobe and Shaq, so it's a particularly egregious failure on the part of Lakers management.
The Bulls formula was straightforward. Surround Jordan and Pippen with strong jumpshooters to take the kickouts (Kerr, Paxson) and defenders (Grant, Rodman, Harper). The supporting cast knew their roles. Poor Kobe and Shaq had nothing to work with this year. Still, as a Bulls fan, I'm pretty happy to see the Lakers stopped short of 4 in a row. Sam Smith always claims the Bulls couldn't have won four in a row even if Jordan had stuck around after either of the runs of 3 championships, but I disagree. I like Kobe and Phil, but I like Jordan even more.
Fun players to watch when they're hot: Kobe (like Jordan, has developed into a dangerous 3 point threat when it counts), Nick Van Exel (pretty left-handed stroke), Allen Iverson (can embarrass defenders in a greater variety of ways than any player in the NBA), Tracy McGrady (always the chance he'll dunk in a way that will strip his defender of all manhood), and Dirk Nowitzki (the ball hits his hands and then is gone a second later in a beautiful arc towards the basket, no matter where he is on the court). Maybe Paul Pierce, and Peja. Tim Duncan isn't terribly exciting to watch, but his footwork is beautiful.

All good things must?

Awaiting a series of flights that will deposit me back home. In three days I'll be doing something I haven't done in 3 months, and that's head out to an office in the morning.
My trip concluded with a hike of the Inca Trail to the fabled Incan city of Machu Picchu. I felt like a porter because I chose to carry my tripod, ballhead, and other camera equipment with me. With all that weight, the 3300 foot climb up to Dead Woman's Pass nearly finished me, but after 4 days of trekking I survived, and the spectacular visual imagery will stay with me a long time. I may need arthroscopic knee surgery and a pair of new ankles, but I still have to unequivocally endorse the Inca Trail as the most impressive trek I've ever been on, counter to the claims that it's been overcommercialized and overhyped.
Heavy heart, weary legs, fresh mind. Who knows? The next three months may be just as interesting as these previous three, though for different reasons. Decisions, decisions.

Getting high

I'm waiting out a torrid rainstorm here in Cusco, in an Internet Cafe. All Internet cafe's advertise themselves with the adjective "speedy" here in South America. This one happens to fulfill that promise. I've been in Cusco before, and I've spent enough time here to actually have a favorite Internet cafe.
Cusco (also spelled Cuzco, depending on the source; every location and building here in the city has multiple spellings and names, reflecting the tension here between the city's Queccha/Incan roots and its modern identity, post Spanish invasion and post independence from said Spanish conquerors): the first thing most visitors notice about the city is its altitude of 3,400 meters. You don't see it, but you feel it. Walking at a brisk pace quickly leaves you breathless, and if you push it, eventually you get a nasty migraine. Or worse. It's my first experience with altitude sickness, which affects people randomly. It has nothing to do with your fitness (reminds me of oxygen consumption in scuba diving, which also seems unrelated to any measurable physiological characteristics of the diver).
Once you get over the dizzying heights, though, Cusco is a fabulous destination. Much more interesting and exotic than Lima, which you almost always have to fly through to get here. Sure, it's a tourist mecca, but it earns that distinction by virtue of its Incan ruins. The walls of Cusco are a spatial embodiment of its history. The base of many walls consist of Incan masonry, still existing from the age of the Incan empire in the 15th and 16th century. On top of that base of stones, fitted together with remarkable craftsmanship, are the cement and clay walls built by the conquering Spanish. Most of the cathedrals in the city were built by the Spanish atop Incan temples, and it's a shame more of those temples don't exist today. The Incan walls are famous for being made up of giant stones fitted together with remarkable airtight efficiency. The technology to build such walls exists today, but not the patience.
Today, Cusco seems to want to return to its Incan roots. Most locals I meet here proudly proclaim themselves Indian, though no pure Incans remain. Still, it's unique to see a country embrace its distant past. Most contries I've visited treat their indigenous peoples like a cultural artifact to be placed in museums by the conquering Europeans.
Despite the lousy weather right now, I've gained a second wind and am excited to begin the hike. A few days ago, lying ill in a tiny cabin on a ship off of the coast of the Galapagos Islands, I had a momentary pang of homesickness, but now that I'm in Cusco I'm ready to travel another several months. It could be a result of the delightful Peruvian or Andean cuisine. I'm surprised not to have seen any Andean cuisine in the U.S. The day after my nasty bout of altitude sickness, I had a huge Peruvian lunch at a an outdoor restaurant (quinta) called Quinta Eulalia. My meal consisted of rocoto rellenos (spicy bell peppers stuffed with ground beef and cheese and vegetables), choclo con queso (corn on the cob with a slab of local cheese), and chicharrones (fried chunks of pork ribs called chancho). Mmmmmmm. The corn on the cob here is some strain I don't recognize. Each kernel is three times the size of a corn kernel in the U.S., making it look like some mutant vegetable. Other favorites include their locros (potato stews), adobo (spicy pork stews), tamales (like corn bread, wrapped in banana leaves), and anticucho (grilled beef hearts on a skewer). I tried the cuy al horno, the most famous local delicacy, roasted guinea pig. The meat was sweet, but there were a ton of bones, and since the pig came out to me whole, legs splayed out on the plate, teeth bared in a sort of death grin, I couldn't help but feel some pangs of sympathy for an animal which we embrace as house pets in the States.
I have achieved travel zen. No amount of travel inconveniences ruffle me. For every inconvenience there is more than one benefit. The altitude which plays havoc with my body also means that lots of the mountain biking here is downhill. It's insane downhill. You're on an ancient mountain bike, without toe clips or clipless pedals, with lousy brakes, flying down the mountain on the same path as suicidally aggressive trucks, buses, and taxis, fleeing from stray dogs which may or may not be rabid but are definitely hungry, dust and potholes everywhere. And from time to time, if you dare look to the side, you'll see some several hundred year old Incan ruins, like the salt pans of Salinas. How can you beat that?
(though I do, on nights when Mark Prior is pitching, desperately wish I could get a televised feed...I read how he plunked Barry Bonds and then jawed with him...I'm just waiting until I get home so I can purchase an authentic Mark Prior jersey to go along with the autographed Mark Prior baseball I bought last year)
"I respect Barry as a player, as a hitter and obviously what he's done... The inside part of the plate for me, for me to be effective I need it. I was just trying to back him off. He said what he had to say and I said what I had to say. I hold nothing against him. That doesn't mean the next time I face him I'm not going to go right back inside."
--Mark Prior, Cubs pitcher, after hitting Barry Bonds (AP)
"I'm sure it could have gotten heated. I wasn't going to back down from him at all... Just because he's got 15-20 years in the big leagues and 600 homers and I have been in the league a little under a year doesn't mean I have to stop doing what makes me a professional."
--Prior

No escape from Kiper's hair, even in Cusco

Any more worthlessly analyzed event than the pro football draft? The last time I was in Cusco, I stopped for lunch at a restaurant, and the meal took two hours, as the wait staff was working on South American time. The TV in the corner was tuned to ESPN, which was, I surmised, broadcasting the NFL draft for nearly the whole day. Mel Kiper and the rest of ESPN's supposed draft geniuses, dubbed in Spanish, boxed in to complex screens that had tickers running across the left and bottom of the screens, several rows or columns deep, numbers scrolling right to left, up to down, in all directions. It was, perhaps, the single greatest volume of incomprehensible multimedia information every to wash over me. (I should note that super agent Drew Rosenhaus was the only person so loud that he could not be drowned out by the dubbed Spanish track; Rosenhaus, inspiration for Bob Sugar in Jerry Maguire, is the perfect caricature of a power sports agent, except he's for real)
I agree with TMQ on the absurdities of NFL draft analysis--it's all much ado about nothing. Among them, the ridiculousness of 40 yard dash times which differ by mere percentage points, insightful observations such as "first round quarterbacks usually fail since the last few superbowls have been won by journeymen quarterbacks," and stuff like that. I personally find it ridiculous that groups of rowdy fans for a team will be shown on TV, cheering or booing draft picks of players they couldn't name just days before. Why do we care what those boorish football fans care? And why are they spending an entire day of their lives watching a football draft live, anyway? Get a life.

Road Reading

I've been devouring books during transit times through airports, or long bus or plane rides. The selection is miniscule, and most bookstores that carry any English books have the most random selection. It takes dedication to sift through for some worthwhile nuggets. Among my conquests these past two weeks:

• George Stephanopoulus' All Too Human: A Political Education, a fairly interesting account of his days working on the first Clinton campaign, up until his resignation at the end of Clinton's first term. The relationship he had with the Clintons was a complex one, and because they didn't end up as close friends Stephanopoulos can give an honest opinion of Clinton (one could argue that his honest account ended their friendship, though it doesn't seem that way). The book also made me realize just how much of a model it was for Sorkin's The West Wing. Entire plotlines seem lifted from real life. Speaking of Clinton, I see Monica Lewinsky's reality TV show has debuted; it's events like this which make me yearn for another couple of months away from the U.S.


• Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho. I'd read excerpts before, but never the entire book. More gruesome and disturbing than the movie it inspired, which more people were exposed to, I suspect. This is an impressive novel, and its narrative induced in me a trance-like fever. Or perhaps that was the bad ceviche talking. At any rate, I'll have to put it on my all-time favorites list when I get home.
• Jonathan Seabrook's Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture took me just a few hours on a plane ride to finish. Seabrook, who wrote and still contributes on occasion to The New Yorker, writes about the replacement of highbrow and lowbrow culture in America today, and he dubs the conquering fusion of commerce and culture nobrow. He uses the struggles of The New Yorker as a case study of how cultural elitists have lost sway in a society in which pop culture reigns supreme. In America, a nation where social hierarchy is extremely fluid, highbrow culture (reflected in the early, William Shawn New Yorker attitude) consisted of opera, classical music, ballet, the classics. It's the attitude that says anything that is popular can't be of substantive quality, because such an attitude is all that preserves one's elitism in a society in which any Joe can become one of the wealthy, instead of just inheriting it. Somewhere along the way, though, fringe became mainstream, and all the boundaries collapsed and became meaningless. Nirvana's success is most often cited as that seminal moment in the music world when alternative became mainstream, and the assimilation of hip hop is seen as the logical outgrowth. Clinton is the Nobrow president, able to use polls to maximize his Q-ratings, changing chameleonlike to maintain his popularity instead of having to take a guess at which stance would be most popular with the public. Anyway, that's just a rough summary of his thesis, which, though it meanders a bit, is quite fascinating. I think I personify nobrow in my tastes, which range from classic to pop culture. If you had to pick a magazine that reflects nobrow, perhaps Entertainment Weekly would be it.

I've hit the end of the line, though. I don't have any more books to read, and Cusco doesn't have any great English language bookstores. My need to read is compulsive. Given my current state, I really wish I could plug my iPod in and start downloading tunes from Apple's new music download service. As if you needed a reason to purchase an iPod, which now comes in a few new models with a slimmer form factor. I'm glad they added a docking station, and jealous, of course, since mine is one of the old fatties, and, at 10Gb, the lowest capacity now offered.

Off to Peru

Sometimes, I'll be wandering down some quiet street in some tiny South American town, and I'll feel as if I could turn some corner and disappear from the world, and all traces of me would fade away, until a short while later no one would even remember who I was. At these times, the world feels amazingly vast.
Recent highlights include mountain biking down from nearly 13,000 feet to 11,000 feet near Cusco, along a path that hugged the side of a mountain, the cliffs dropping off to one side; snorkeling atop a school of Pacific cownose rays and spotting white tip reef sharks and sea turtles to the side; hiking the ruins near Cusco; snorkeling with a colony of sea lions frolicking all around me; Peruvian cuisine; watching the mating dance of the blue-footed boobies from, well, the front row, essentially (the Galapagos Islands are famed for the fearlessness of their wildlife, who have spent millions of years isolated from predators).
And to be fair, a few lowlights. Difficulties leaving Argentina because they had failed to give me a proper entry card when I crossed from Chile to Argentina. Altitude sickness upon arrival in Cusco, to the extent that for two days my migraines and breathlessness rendered me useless. Getting food poisoned from some ceviche I ate in Quito, and then two days later throwing up from terrible seasickness right after dinner when the boat taking me around the Galapagos Islands crossed rocky seas from Floreana Island to Espanola Island. Avoiding a shifty English-speaking "street guide" who tried to extort money from me and tried to maneuver me into an alley where some of his thug buddies were hanging out.
Just finished up with the Galapagos Islands and Ecuador, and tomorrow I head back to Peru. A day in Lima, a day in Cusco, and then I set off on the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. I'm nearing the limits of my self-imposed budget, and when all is said and done, I'll be content to board the plane home.

It takes two

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.

El hombre sin miedo

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 m

Plane strike

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.

Just a thing you say

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.

23's last game

Wish I could have caught Jordan's last game. I'm not one to cry, but seeing one of my personal sports heroes hang it up is sad in so many ways, not the least being that it is as clear a mental marker of my age as there is. I remember watching him as a rookie, so to see him retire...I can't even think about it.
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.

Deep South

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.

The weight of water

Glaciers are highly underrated. Among geographical phenomena, mountains get much more acclaim, but most of those were carved by glaciers. Before this year, I couldn't name one glacier I'd seen in my life. I don't know if I had actually seen any in person.
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.

Off to Argentina

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.

The end of the world

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.

On the road again

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. =)

Jerry Krause resigns

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...

The next big thing

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.

The Onion: Saddam may be dead

Funny.
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.

***

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.

Holy Colossus, Batman!

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.

Smoking bans slash heart attacks

Story over at New Scientist. Personally, I don't care if others want to smoke, but my latest pet peeve is coming home from a bar or club smelling like a chimney. Maybe if all smokers would contribute a small tax which I could draw from for my dry cleaning bills.
Seriously, who would have thought New York would have a smoking ban earlier than Seattle? I'm moving.

I see colossal squids...and Elektra...and there's Auntie Em...

I took my first dose of mefloquine today. It's an anti-malaria pill, and one of its most common side effects is disturbing, strange, and/or unusually intense dreams. It's happened to me before, and after popping the pill this morning I've been somewhat woozy.
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.

Leslie Cheung commits suicide

Fans of Hong Kong cinema are all familiar with Leslie Cheung. Shockingly, the acclaimed actor committed suicide Tuesday, leaving only a cryptic suicide note. Most know him for his roles in A Better Tomorrow, Chinese Ghost Story, Farewell My Concubine, Once a Thief, and The Bride with White Hair. Being a Wong Kar-Wai fan, I enjoyed his work in Ashes of Time, Happy Together, and Days of Being Wild.
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.

North Korean dictator places triplets in orphanages

This sounds like a plot of an Asian martial-arts B-movie, like the ones in which the evil emperor drinks the urine of young boys to increase his kung-fu skill, but sadly it's true.
How comforting for those of us living in Seattle, the only major city within the outer range of his nuclear weapons.

What would it be like to be the last man on earth?

Not quite as good as it sounds. Highly entertaining read.
I recommend reading it while listening to Horowitz in Moscow. A great recording of a great recital.

Enter the Matrix

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.

***

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.

***

The SARS outbreak is another intriguing story. Terrifying, of course, but fascinating in that viruses are amazing killers, brutally efficient, unpredictable, and able to evolve rapidly to ensure their own survival.
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.

***

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.