Ambulacral Groove

Starfish, originally uploaded by xopherlance.

From the Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific this past Sunday. Those are tube feet, and they're what starfish walk around on. Almost as cool as the iridium flare I saw on Monday evening. No photos of that, though.

Dumb just doesn't do it for me anymore

In 1993 I was a freshman at VA Tech, and I loved dumb blondes. Alabama Worley (née Whitman), played ever so sweetly by Patricia Arquette in True Romance, was my Platonic ideal of the female in form and action (but especially form -- know what I'm sayin'?).

Check out this video of Kelly Pickler. This is the first time I've ever heard of her (ignorance of American Idol is truly bliss) and hopefully the last. With her platinum locks, doe-eyed naiveté and sweet Tar Heel accent, she is the living embodiment of 'Bama; and she's helped me to realize that I don't find dumb blondes as attractive as I once did. In fact, the word "loathe" comes to mind.



Some representative Ms. Pickler quotations:

"I thought Europe was a country!"
"Buda...Budapest? I never even heard of that!"
"Like, I know they speak French there...don't they?"
"Like, I want to say...is France a country?"

[All of these lines get laughs from the audience, not the gasps of horror and shame they deserve.]

Are you as turned off as I am yet? Tomorrow I'm attending a panel discussion on nuclear energy at the California Science Center, where I'm hoping to encounter some hottie geniuses who can wash out the bad taste this clip has left in my mouth.

Looks can only get you so far in this country, Kelly, and the world is much bigger than this country. Even so, I'd still like to watch you beat the $#!+ out of James Gandolfini in a motel bathroom.

Lunar Eclipse

This afternoon I was driving Soy home from Yogurt Land when NPR informed us of the imminent lunar eclipse. On a whim, we turned round and headed up to Griffith Observatory to sneak a peek at this evening's main event in our solar system. There were a few news vans, some amateur (and professional) astronomers with their 'scopes, and a crowd of a hundred or two shivering sky gazers spread out across the lawn. What impresses me most about seeing the full moon through the lens of a telescope is the fact that it resembles what it actually is: an orb of pale rock and dust, pitted with scars and craters, sailing through the vast emptiness of space. It is a reality check, a reminder of the true nature of the grand universe we inhabit. Under normal circumstances, a glance up at a full moon will reveal a bone-white disc, seemingly tacked to the firmament and changing its position every so often. I think it's the lack of detail that defeats us -- when viewed under a 25x telescope one can see clearly the receding perspective of the mountains, ridges, and seas as they near the edge of the sphere.

We watched the shadow of our planet slowly encompass our anemic satellite; we saw the fingernail crescent of sunlight shrink inexorably to nothingness. We stayed through the 52-minute pinkish totality, the time when the Earth is between the moon and the sun -- when it is lit only by the light skimming off our edges, through our atmosphere. As Jim, our telescope operator, so poetically put it, "the moon is lit only by all the sunrises and sunsets taking place on the planet right now". There are some good pictures on the Pharyngula Science Blog.

The undercards tonight were just as cool as the main event: we were witness to an iridium flare, when a beam of sunlight catches a reflection off of an iridium satellite passing overhead a couple hundred miles up in the sky -- it looked like a shooting star that grew brighter than the stars around it over 20 seconds or so and then faded away; and the planet Saturn, which looks just as your mind's eye pictures it, only tinier.

Self-deprecation is AWESOME

Why I will vote for Barack Obama on Tuesday

Although I view the Democratic nomination race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as a choice between a mediocre candidate and a truly worthy candidate, there are several key reasons why I cannot in good conscience cast a vote for Clinton. She reflects more mainstream Democratic positions and has endorsed universal health care for a decade, but she is also a war hawk, and there is not much sunlight between her and McCain on many issues. In fact, she is more conservative than McCain on several key issues, as evidenced by Ann Coulter's endorsement of Clinton over McCain. That endorsement should tell you everything you need to know, but here are five major points on which Clinton and I diverge:

1. She is in favor of maintaining the Patriot Act as it is, sections of which have been ruled unconstitutional multiple times by multiple U.S. courts, and is in clear violation of both our 4th and 1st Amendments.

2. She is in favor of military action against Iran, a country whose nuclear program we ourselves established in the 1950s, and for which no current evidence exists. In fact, our National Intelligence Estimates put the Iranians about 10 years away from developing a nuclear bomb and state that they shelved the idea of maintaining a nuclear arsenal about 4 years ago. Despite this, Hillary unapologetically goose steps with the Neoconservatives when Bush rattles his saber at Iran, displaying the same gullibility that led her to so enthusiastically follow him into war in Iraq.

I believe that Pakistan is a much more dangerous prospect, as it most likely still harbors the Al Qaida operatives who planned 9/11 and was one of only two countries in the world that recognized the oppressive Taliban regime as the legitimate rulers of Afghanistan. But Bush has rewarded Pakistan by dropping the sanctions imposed by Clinton, selling them boatloads of military planes and equipment, and has given them 10 billion dollars in aid since 9/11. All this while the father of their nuclear program, A.Q. Khan, gave secrets of their nuclear technology to North Korea, Libya and Iran while riding back and forth from those countries on the aircraft we sold them. He now has been pardoned by President Musharraf and lives free in Pakistan. Agencies of our government are not permitted to detain him and to this day have not been able to even interview him. With key allies like Musharraf, who needs enemies? Clinton criticized Obama for stating that "...if we have actionable intelligence on Al Qaeda operatives [in Pakistan] including Bin Laden, and President Musharraf cannot act, then we should."

3. She is in favor of building a fence along our border with Mexico. This is the most inane idea in recent history. If you really want illegal immigrants out of the country, there is a cheaper solution: impose much stricter fines on the corporations, agriculture companies, small business owners, and contractors who employ them, and then enforce those fines. We might even be able to win back some of our budget surplus that Bush squandered on the Iraq invasion. Without available jobs, aliens will have no other option but to return to their home countries -- if there is no wall at the border to stop them. Of course, doing this would impose a huge financial burden on those American businesses, which would have to hire more expensive citizen workers. Many of them would suffer and even go bankrupt, but that's the cost of not having illegal labor in our country. So instead, let's just throw up another billion or two and build a modern Great Wall of China -- which didn't work for them, either -- because it looks impressive and we can all go back to eating our cheaply farmed food and working in our spotless office buildings.

Alternatively, if you're hankering for a large federally mandated construction project, why not build better levees in New Orleans? They currently are engineered to hold up against a Category 3 hurricane (Katrina was a Category 3.5), and the entire levee system is still sinking so over time it will be less and less effective. Coincidentally, Obama wants to protect New Orleans against even a Category 5.

4. She is in favor of the death penalty, while I believe that, with all the recent exonerations of death row inmates using DNA evidence, a moratorium on executions is needed to prevent the sanctioned murder of innocents who had bad lawyers. I also believe that for the guilty, lifetime imprisonment with one's conscience in a cage under armed guard is a far more effective punishment than the escape and quick release of an early demise.

5. She is in favor of torture. Simply put, Hillary Clinton supports the use of torture by American forces and intelligence agencies, while even John McCain does not. This is one of the reasons why Ann Coulter despises McCain.

Regardless of who you vote for, please vote on Tuesday. If you don't yet know who your candidate is, visit The Pew Forum's website, where you can choose an important issue and compare the candidates' views on that issue. Also, there is this nifty tool that allows you feed in your positions on a variety of political issues and then spits out a chart displaying the candidates which agree with you the most and enumerates the topics on which you disagree.

Map, Schmap

Two of the photos that I have posted on my Flickr account have been selected by Schmap!! to be used in their online map/travel guides. I had never heard of them either, but hey, I'm still honored. One photo features the Walt Disney Concert Hall here in downtown, and the other is a pic of the toilet and bidet in my bathroom at the Cavalieri Hilton in Rome:





The downtown L.A. Schmap!! page is here, and Schmap!!'s deluxe hotel guide to Rome is here. In both cases, my photo (and credit) appears in the upper right.

White Buddha in the rain

White Buddha, originally uploaded by xopherlance.

I've finally finished uploading all the pics from my recent trips to Vietnam, Macau, and Hong Kong. Jetlag is a bitch. I'm retired for the moment so I have no incentive to shoehorn myself back into the PDT. For the last few days I've been swinging wildly at my target sleep patterns not hitting anything. First I was going to sleep at 15:00 and waking up at 03:00, then I was able to go to sleep at a reasonable hour (midnight) but I would wake up at 04:00 fully alert and unable to drift back off. Today I arose at 09:00, but took an unexpected nap at 17:00...probably a result of eating the #19 at Langer's. Now I'm wide awake and my circadian rhythms are still shot to hell. I'm going to continue posting photos on Flickr...of the last Encontro when I stayed in HK and visited Shanghai.

Hong Kong Phoody

Monday 12/3/2007: dinner at Club de Recreio. When I think of this meal I can only express disappointment at how mediocre the minchi was compared with Restaurante Litoral in Macau. Their minchi was the tastiest I've ever had, and the same goes for the galinha africana.

Tuesday 12/4/2007: Most breakfasts we either went up to the Conrad's executive lounge or ate the plump fruit and yogurt cups Mom brought down if we slept in. For lunch I ordered an orange gunner (orange juice added to the traditional ginger beer, ginger ale, lime, and bitters) and scrumptious Singapore noodles at Shek O Golf and Country Club, as a guest of Uncle Anthony. We ate on the veranda overlooking the golf course and the rocky coast:



That night we dined in the Kellet Island Bistro at the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club, where I ate some righteous lamb chops, much better than those at the Venetian banquet on our last night in Macau. I noticed that one of them was a touch undercooked, but it was so delicious that I ate it anyway, and no ill effects followed.

Wednesday 12/5/2007: the family and I met up with Ah Chan by the lions in front of the HSBC building and brought her to Yung Kee on Wellington Street. We rocked out to -- among other dishes -- preserved eggs with pickled ginger, deep-fried prawns with sweet and sour sauce, barbecued pork, pea shoots with garlic, pan-fried fish fillets, and roasted goose, the house specialty. We drank Shou Mei tea as an accompaniment, and for dessert I swallowed a bowl of tzi ma wu, black sesame soup. Afterwards we took the Star Ferry to Kowloon to try to walk off the layers of goose and pig we'd packed on.



Wednesday night we had a late dinner without Dad at one of my favorite Hong Kong juhk joints, Tasty Congee & Noodle Wantun Shop. At least I think that's the name; in Chinese it's 正斗, and it's located at 21 King Kwong Street in Happy Valley. I had my favorite preserved egg & beef congee with yau tiu wrapped in a layer of chi cheung fun, and "zha cheung mien", which you can see in a photo on the HK Foodie link above.

Thursday 12/6/2007: We tried to hit Sushi Hiro in Causeway Bay but our party was too big, so instead Uncle Anthony treated us to the best Italian restaurant in Hong Kong: Da Domenico in Sunning Plaza. Alessandro took good care of our party: we started with a ball of the creamiest mozzarella I've ever tasted; it had the texture of a fine chocolate mousse and a delicate but rich flavor. We also ordered the same mouthwatering fried scamorza that I sampled there in 2002 and a fresh spinach and ricotta raviolo the size of my plate. There was also a meat sampler (the meats and vegetables are flown in from Rome twice a week by Cathay) and a savory house-made Italian sausage. JC and I walked around in Central and stopped by Man Mo Temple that afternoon.



I had a luxurious mutton korma that night at the Happy Valley Clubhouse of the Hong Kong Jockey Club.

Friday 12/07/2007: Uncle Anthony took the four of us to his old local breakfast joint in Happy Valley where I'd eaten on previous trips -- Cheung Hing Coffee Shop. We gorged on Chinese style deep-fried "French" toast with cane syrup, condensed milk on toast, pineapple buns, yin yeung and ngau lai cha.




We hiked Bowen Road afterwards, all the way down through the aviary in HK Park. Check out this crazy giant pigeon we ran into:



That thing is just cold foolish and madcap! We hit Club Lusitano for a dressy but disappointing lunch of fish curry and empada; the cheese toast, though, is as good as I remembered.



Friday night Deanne joined our group for a hearty and succulent meal at The Chinnery at the Mandarin Oriental. Kumamoto oysters from Washington and a fillet of lemon sole, with sticky toffee pudding for dessert. We consumed two bottles of a fantastic Viognier from S. Africa over the course of the evening.

Saturday 12/08/2007: While Mom & Dad went out for seafood in Sai Kung with Deanne and Uncle Anthony, JC & I met up with Katish at The Press Room on Hollywood Road for blue crab bisque and a frisee salad with bacon lardons. I adore bacon lardons, and while these were good they weren't as supernatural as the sweet and savory bacon at Square One on Fountain. After lunch we took the MTR out to Hang Hau, so we could see Deanne's new house and say good-bye.



We dined that night at The Hong Kong Club, the colony's first. I started with half a dozen oysters (3 Irish, 3 Scottish), and continued with a medium-rare prime rib of beef with Yorkshire pudding and baked potato. We were accompanied by a beautifully decanted Chateau Lynch-Bages (1998). We finished the meal with a selection of cheeses and a delectable Chateau Giraud. Afterwards, JC and I met up with Daisy again for a drink at FINDS in Lan Kwai Fong, where I'd been treated to the Finnish national anthem two nights before, when Daisy and I unexpectedly stumbled onto Finland's 90th Independence Day celebration.

The food all week was intense and almost always unbearably good. It was also constantly being set before me; I never had the chance to be hungry after leaving Macau. Sadly, I'm now home eating American fare. I had some dim sum on Spring Street only a few hours after arriving at LAX on Sunday, to my great regret. Three weeks of fresh and authentic Asian cuisine could kill an appetite for the best dim sum in L.A., and CBS Seafood is far from the best. My new project -- inuring myself to mediocre cuisine -- begins today.

I'm IN

Flying into LAX from HKG on United is like eating an appetizer at Urasawa, then driving to McDonald's for your main course and dessert. I took the $4 LAX Flyaway Bus to Union Station and walked home, dragging my bag behind me. I know it sounds arduous, but it was actually the most pleasant leg of my journey, after leaving Hong Kong. According to my new Baume & Mercier chronograph watch -- thank you Uncle Anthony -- it took me 32 minutes and 23 seconds to reach the door to my loft, and the morning weather was gorgeous. I stayed awake until about 3pm, and slept until about 4:00 this morning. I breakfasted early at The Pantry on Figueroa and watched the sun rise over downtown. In the coming days I'll be uploading photos and embroidering them with some blog entries.

The above pic was taken from our room on the 54th floor of the Conrad International in Admiralty.

I'm OUT

Vietnam, Macau & HK. Back on the 9th of December.