entirely safe and fun

fig. 1: The baby perceives the object of his desire, but discovers that it is out of reach.

fig 2: He raises his rear end as high as possible…

fig 3: …and rolls onto his back, critically, straightening his torso. Here, he is momentarily distracted by his socks.

fig 4: Dante rolls onto his tummy, having moved forward about four inches. He wins the prize.

More pix on Flickr, tagged “protocrawling”.

A couple of weeks back, Punam, her mother, Dante and I went to the wedding of our friends Anne and Steve in Santa Fe, NM. The pictures are up on Flickr, tagged “santafe”.

It was Dante’s first plane trip, and his first encounter with the TSA! He had his own boarding verification document that they checked at security.

The happy couple, at the rehearsal lunch. Interestingly, no party in the wedding actually came from Santa Fe — Anne and Steve had met there, but in the intervening time have moved to Phoenix, AZ. But there’s a lot to like about Santa Fe; it’s a beautiful, historic city with really great weather. How important a consideration this is became clear to me during my own wedding in rainy, dark Pittsburgh, when it was pointed out to me repeatedly by the photographers how lucky we were to get a few hours of sun.

We were happy to meet up with Debra and her husband Dave, and spend the night before the wedding hanging around in town. Even if Santa Fe had nothing else going for it, it has a really excellent food scene, as long as you like the meats.

Martha and Chris got to meet the boy for the first time. The suit is so cute! No one could believe that we had found a tie in Dante’s diminutive size.

Punam, Anne, and Debra at the reception. We had a really excellent time!

Dante only looks partied out here… he got his second wind eventually. It was in his diaper.

The DJ played some Guns ‘n Roses. Debra made like Slash for the win.

And somehow, we managed to fit in visits to the Bradbury Museum in Los Alamos (with lots of bizarre nuclear-arsenal propaganda) and Petroglyph National Monument in Albuquerque!

At Petroglyph with Punam’s mom.

After it was all over, we hosed down the boy and put him in his helpfully labelled “BABY” bathrobe, which (as previously mentioned) is sometimes helpful in differentiating baby from bathwater.

And then we all slept like babies, especially the baby.

Some of you may have heard that we had a moderately strong magnitude 5.6 quake centered right under San Jose on 30 Oct. Like (happily) everyone else, we’re all fine, none the worse for the experience. In fact, it was kind of a fun ride! But the long-distance capacity of the phone network was strained, so we couldn’t make calls to let everyone know what had happened. So I have turned to the Internet to let everyone know that Dante rode the whole thing out in style, camped out with me and his mom under a doorway.

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GOOSE?

Seriously, not dead.

First, I’ve got up a Flickr set of our trip to Kauai (for more photos, see the larger set). The photos there will be acquiring notes over the next few days, too. Everything in the Bestof set has a narrative comment already. Thanks to Michael and Daniela at Marjorie’s Kauai Inn for their attentive hospitality! I’ll be pulling together a more comprehensive blog post on this adventure, probably using Flickr’s syndication features, soon.

Second, beer. It turned out excellent and I’ll be repeating the recipe soon, probably next week, but with a couple of small changes to address the things I would have preferred to turn out differently. The hops will become Nugget and I’ll chop the amount down a bit, compensating with a bit more bitter orange peel. At bottling, I’ll rack off the sediment more aggressively, and I’ll be using a little more corn sugar, as well, to increase carbonation.

Finally, two neat websites I’ve started reading lately:

• Boot Legacy Law Blog, a strikingly well-written legal blog on matters related to IP, property, and jurisdiction issues. Way cooler than it sounds, in no small part because of the parts about treasure hunting, and because it’s so well researched and chock full of linky goodness.
• Epidemix, a public health blog… reassuring to me because I was worried that I was the only person actually reading the CDCP’s (pardon the pun, but…) vital Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. It’s news you can use to avoid catching a reportable illness.

Check ‘em out on the blogroll (over there on the right, unless you’re in a feed reader or some commie mutant thing like that).

On a recent trip to New York City, which required me to stay in the Times Square area, I had the good fortune to walk past the BXL Café (125 West 43rd Street, New York) as I found my way from my hotel to our clients’ office. “Good fortune” because I could have sensibly walked across town on any of seven streets (48^th - 42^nd), and I just happened to select 43^rd. That worked out pretty well!

For me to find beers I’ve never had before takes some work, given that I’ve had around 800 different commercial beers by now, and BXL shows some of that hard work, and done well. Fifteen taps yielded two new beers, Dentergems Wit and the German offering Gaffel Kölsch, along with hard-to-find favorite Rodenbach Red. The bartender was also pouring a good selection of the Belgian-style beers brewed at Cooperstown’s superb Brewery Ommegang — the BXL house beer was brewed by Ommegang as well — along with a very pleasant lineup of Belgian standbys like Chimay Triple (”White”). I’d estimate that there were around thirty or forty bottles, as well, many of them new to me. As a capper, I believe that brewery glassware was available for everything on tap, per the Belgian tradition. All in all, BXL is one of the most impressive Belgian beer bars I’ve found, with fine ambiance, knowledgeable staff, and a well-chosen and resonably wide selection.

Almost unbelievably, BXL doesn’t have a web site that can be found with Google. (If anyone affiliated with BXL reads this — setting up a nice web site is easy and fun, and you really ought to do it!) I did find a picture at Blakespot, some barebones entries at Ratebeer and Pubcrawler, which indicate that the food is good, a fact I had no opportunity to confirm on my purely liquid visit. I found one blog entry at a New York restaurant blog which gushed about the food as well, and this from an author who doesn’t even appear to be interested in exotic beer, so I’ll take his/her opinion as more diagnostic than that of the aficionados at the beer sites.

Bigtree is biiiiiiiiiig!

This past weekend, Punam and I, along with my old friend Noah, travelled up to Humboldt County (far northern California) to spend a little time with some really big trees. The old-growth Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) forest is like something out of a science-fiction novel, silent, dark and wet, with trees as straight as carved columns towering over 300 feet in the air, and nary a branch below a hundred feet. One tree that large would be remarkable, but the forests of that region boast of a thick myriad of them, trees forty feet in girth, just forty feet apart, for mile upon mile along the Eel River and its tributaries — a gobsmacking accumulation of Ur-old giants.

We drove up on Friday night, and then spent Saturday driving the Avenue of the Giants, stopping at some of the touristy destinations along the way and taking a short hike at the Founders’ Grove. By preference, we went to Fortuna for tuna, as well as to eat at the fantastic Eel River Brewing Company. Overnight, we stayed in the Redcrest Resort, which I can heartily recommend to other travelers, and then on Sunday we had a light picnic, and a pleasant hike in the Rockefeller Forest. My previous trip into the Rockefeller was in high summer, and I can say without reservation that the wet season is a better time to go — it was practically empty, and there were no equestrians on the dual-use trail (and thus no boot-fouling equestrian by-products).

We topped this all off with a world-class dinner at the Underwood in Graton, near Santa Rosa. Our friends Sebastian (a local and a foodie) and Rebecca led us there, and I had what, on reflection, was one of the best matches of desire and fulfillment I’ve ever had at a restaurant. They had a find selection of oysters on the half-shell, two dozen items on the menu that I regret not ordering, a moderately sized but remarkably concentrated wine list, and local spirits on the dessert menu, including a Davis Family calvados-style apple brandy with a perfect match of fire, fruit, and oak that far surpassed any European offering I’ve yet encountered.

Below, I’ve picked out a few highlights from the pictures I took on the trip. More are available in my Flickr set here. Seriously, you need to check these out, especially the vertical panorama of an exceptionally mighty redwood.

Photo: Michael Stevens, CC by-nc-sa
The 70^th anniversary of Lovecraft’s death, which puts the quietus to the copyright dispute over his oeuvre, and probably moves the stars to rightness besides, is approaching.

On CNN.com’s front page this morning, there was a curious headline: “Providence: Following the Footsteps of a Horror Icon.” First, a moment to entertain an unthinkable thought, but then dismissal. Maybe it was because Stephen King or whoever had spent a little time there, because it couldn’t be that the foundational horror author Howard Phillips Lovecraft had a following among… travel writers? But in a moment of sanity-blasting revelation, I saw that the AP was indeed putting out a location piece on Lovecraft’s place in the history of Providence, RI; whatever the city thinks of him, he thought highly enough of it to have “I AM PROVIDENCE” carved into his headstone.

In the time I allot myself to write a blog posting, it’s hard to sum up my feelings about this article. Lovecraft’s stories have given me a great deal of pleasure over the years, and at some level I’d like to see more interest in his work in the literary mainstream so that more people might share that pleasure. But part of his work’s appeal is that it impels so many subcultural currents, in a way that might be imperiled by more general appreciation. “The Call of Cthulhu” is a great novella, as good as anything in the form, but perhaps more critical is that the idea of Cthulhu has taken on a life of its own, as a shared signifier of a taste for weirdness, a high-fidelity signal of participation in a rich, shared imaginary universe.

By “participation,” I mean not merely “consumption” but “creation.” It is said of the Velvet Underground’s album The Velvet Underground & Nico that everyone who bought it started a band. Similarly, Lovecraft seems to disproportionately attract creators, provoking even productive ones (e.g. Stephen King, a vocal Lovecraft admirer) to pastiche. During his life, and in the near century since his death, the universe he created has been further populated those who loved him and his stories. The Temple of Dagon, over there on my blogroll, is just one easily-accessible manifestation. Even the less-talented and less-motivated are often stirred, like the dreamers moved to nightmare by Cthulhu’s call. I’ve been there myself, writing several scenarios for the Lovecraftian horror role-playing game The Call of Cthulhu, and frequently drawing on the idiom in much of my writing and design. My unease at a wider popularity for Lovecraft might be from a selfish desire to see him best beloved by those most likely to expand on his legacy, who will tell me more stories the way that HPL might have.

As a happy postscript, the 70^th anniversary of Lovecraft’s death is coming up on 15 March, and with it an end to the acrimonious copyright dispute that has marred, however slightly, his otherwise sterling literary estate. His entire body of work will pass uncontroversially into the public domain, and presumably live forever (and now indisputably legally) on the Internet and its successors, or at least until the stars are right and the earth — and all of existence — cleared for its true masters. I urge raising a glass not just to HPL’s memory, but to the shared memory he created for us all.

Click for a larger version

Due to a pressing need (chiefly on my part) not to be in Silicon Valley for a couple of days, Punam and I took an overnight trip starting Saturday morning down to the Monterey area, with the idea that we’d see some new sights and in particular that we’d finally get to see the Mission San Carlos Borroméo de Carmelo.

It has been restored to a strikingly nice condition — enough so that Rome named it a Minor Basilica, and that it received a pastoral visit from the last Pope. Above, I composited a panorama of the courtyard. To the right, the chapel, with its catenary arches, as opposed to the old semicircular arches. Catenary arches are most closely associated with the twentieth-century architect Gaudí, and their use here would have been pretty advanced when the chapel was constructed in its present form in 1793. The calculus required to calculate their correct shapes was less than just about a century old at that point, depending on how you interpret the Calculus Priority Dispute, and far from widely taught. There are some exhibition areas within the Mission’s outer wall, and Punam and I spent a pleasant hour at the exhibition of the art of Jo Mora, the Californian artist-of-many-trades.

Click for a larger version

We then proceeded to Asilomar State Beach, which it pains me a little to say is yet another dramatic Central Coast beach. Which is not a complaint or anything! We hiked through the dunes, and played around near the tidal pools. I took a few photos in a stab at a “micro-panorama,” stitching together some high-zoom, short-range images, but the errors that the focus mechanism made in reporting its focal length in the EXIF metadata, irrelevant in most applications, created some severe aberrations in the final product. Still, it was cool to get so many pixels to work with! This pool, full of bright green sea anemones and deep red seaweed, was isolated a good three or four feet above the then-current tideline, meaning it had been cut off from the ocean for around four hours by the time we got to it, and the uppermost of its denizens were just beginning to dry. Sea anemones can curl themselves up into little donut-shaped masses, which keeps their most delicate tissues (such as their tentacles) from dessication. Some of the little monsters, such as the one in the upper-left corner, are partially dry, and have tucked in the tentacles above the water line while leaving their underwater tentacles out to catch food. Also, some of them are curled up defensively, probably in reaction to my moving shadow.

Your narrator’s beard, unruly though it was, had not a stripe on the tree-beards.

On Sunday, we went to Washington Park in Pacific Grove to see the overwintering butterflies. We walked through the wet forest, every branch heavily-laden with a variety of epiphytes. Initially, we weren’t sure what we were looking for. There were a lot of butterflies in the air, but no more than you might see by chance in a still forest. But then, we saw a small crowd assembling around a taped-off area, and we looked up. There were many thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of monarch butterflies, tightly clustered on high branches. In the picture below, note carefully that there are no dead leaves, just poorly-resolved orange wings.

The butterflies were busily mating, which involves a male grappling with a female, the pair tumbling to the forest floor, and then (after a little while) the male flying away, carrying the female aloft by their attached, load-bearing genitalia. It is most remarkable. My camera, with its once-massive two-megapixel resolution and its sometimes unpredictable shutter delay, simply couldn’t capture it adequately.

And finally, on our way back up to Oakland for a Superbowl party hosted by one of Punam’s high school friends, we stopped in the city of Monterey for a little while, where we walked out to the beach to watch sea otters and listen to the surf. The otters escaped photography, but Punam and I didn’t, so: one final trick-photo panorama.

Sorry for the lack of pictures, but I’m writing from someone else’s computer for now.  I’ll get some pix up soon, though.  In the meantime…

Punam and I arrived in Singapore in the local morning, and decided to visit the island of Pulau Ubin, which by all accounts is the only rural area left in Singapore.  To get there, we took a taxi up to Changgi Village, where we bought noodles and had an early lunch with a growing crowd of locals.  At the ferry terminal, we caught a bumboat, a sort of Singaporean water taxi, and motored over to the island, where we rented a tandem bike to explore the island. It was an adventure — we saw every plant in the spice cabinet, a spider larger than my cell phone, and a fair helping of Singaporeans getting away from their hyper-developed home island for the day.

We headed back to the airport to catch our Air India flight to Mumbai.  Without going into a ton of detail, I’ll just say that the flight was also quite adventurous, and has no competition as the worst commercial flight I’ve ever taken anywhere.  The crew were abusive, the aircraft was poorly maintained, the food was awful, and it took two and a half hours to get our luggage off the plane (on a flight arriving at 00:30!).

Continuing the theme of adventure were our travels in Mumbai, apparently home of the World’s Most Imaginitive Traffic Situation.  I don’t think that Mumbai has any more vehicle traffic than, say, New York City, but it is aggravated by several factors:

• Pedestrians and motor vehicle operators do not acknowledge a border between the spaces they are supposed to use.
• “Defensive driving” means “taking up parts of three lanes at all times so no one can pass, except by squeezing between this car and ten pedestrians with deathwishes, which of course everyone does.”
• Vehicles drive in the left lane, except when they don’t, which is about 50% of the time.
• There are autorickshaws and 2.5+T trucks with no visibility out the back, and further with visibility out the front windscreen limited by painted-on religious and patriotic slogans; faith is a poor substitute for actually seeing things.
• Said rickshaws and trucks are brightly painted on the back with legends like “HORN OK PLEASE”, as if not featuring such a paint job might stop anyone from “SOUND HORN PLEASE” or “HONK HORN OK.”
• People occasionally stop at red lights, when they’re working.

In Singapore, it will be noted, even taxis obey the speed limit.  Mumbai is the anti-Singapore.

Somehow, we survived meeting up with my mother-in-law and our friend Martha (Krupa-auntie having flown in some weeks before, and Martha joining us from Pittsburgh), visiting relatives, and seeing some of the sights of Mumbai. We then got on a flight from Mumbai’s rather pleasant domestic airport to the former small town of Hubli, swollen of late to something like 750 kpeople, on Air Deccan.  India is blessed with a large number of budget airlines which appear to have innovated deeply on cost-cutting; our flight on Deccan was quite pleasant, if bare-bones, and tickets for the flight from Mumbai to Hubli seem to run about Rs 1500 (about $33).

Incidentally, one of these budget carriers is SpiceJet.  Their slogan isn’t “Whoever controls the SpiceJet controls the UniverseJet” (or “The SpiceJet is LifeJet”), but it should be.  “Usul has booked a big one!“

Hubli is a fine town, with one nice hotel, the Hotel Naveen.  My in-laws have been staying at the Naveen on their visits to their former hometown for as long as anyone here remembers; younger cousins call it “America-ajji’s house,” which I think is awfully cute. We stayed there, kind of, for a night before taking off to the still-smallish town of Belgaum, I think to the north-east.  The NH4 divided highway goes (among other places) from Hubli to Belgaum, and I was thinking that finally I’d be able to take a car ride with a little peace of mind.  Little did I know that even a median strip with concrete barriers isn’t enough to keep Indian drivers on their side of the road, and that “safe following distance” is as alien a concept to folks in this part of the world as “tolerable international flight.”  At one point, the bumper of our tiny Tata Indica V2 was underneath the rear overhang of a 7-ton Ashok Leyland truck, as we motored along at 60 clicks, our driver HORN OK PLEASEing and sticking his head out the window to look around said juggernaut, all the while dodging bullock carts, unattended herd animals of all sizes, feral dogs, wild pigs, fanciful (or fancifully-laden) motor vehicles unable to maintain a speed above about 30 clicks.  This went on for several minutes as he tried to figure out if there was any instant when passing wouldn’t get us all flattened.  Adventure!

In Belgaum, we attended not one, but two weddings of Punam’s relations.  Pictures will be required so I will gloss over that part of the trip for now, but I was excited to finally meet her many aunts and uncles and cousins, who until now were just names to me.  All of them were a little disappointed that I don’t speak Kannada (and for that matter that Martha doesn’t speak Kannada); this is a thing I will need to rectify before returning. But they were pleased that even the American contingent showed up for the weddings in local dress and consumed the local food with gusto. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten more idli in a 24-hour period than I have in the last day.

After a typically terrifying return trip last night, we’re back in Hubli at the Naveen, regaining our equilibrium and visiting more family before taking off for a trip up India’s west coast to Murudeshwar and Goa, after which we’ll head to Mysore and then finally Bangalore. Anyone looking to contact me should send email to my pcrc@esandf.pcom account (removing those silent ‘p’s of course); I will get my India phone number out ASAP.  More to come…

Punam and I have touched down safely in Hong Kong. The coolest thing I can say about Hong Kong, based solely on being in its airport, is that it’s my first proof that telecom is making good on its promises. I’m connected to a free wifi network, my phone just works, and I’m getting text messages as usual. Living in the future is fun!