Predictably Liberal

Judge of Elections

2011-11-08T15:07:00.003-05:00

It's the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November today, which means that it is time for another general election in the United States. It's not a presidential or regular congressional election, but many other important positions are on the ballot, including municipal officials and judges, which (for better or worse) are typically elected in Pennsylvania. Alas, with my class schedule this year, I'm not able to resume my position that I had in previous elections as judge of elections, checking people in to vote, so I suppose from here on out I shall be forced to list on my résumé "Judge, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (retired)."

As a law student, I take an especial interest in these elections, both in general and in accordance with the principle that "a good lawyer knows the law, a great lawyer knows the judge." I extend that aphorism and say that "a fortiori, that "the best lawyer got the judge elected."

Browsing again the Book of Common Prayer and its section on various Prayers and Thanksgivings, I found this prayer for Courts of Justice on page 821:

Almighty God, who sittest in the throne judging right: We humbly beseech thee to bless the courts of justice and the magistrates in all this land; and give unto them the spirit of wisdom and understanding, that they may discern the truth, and impartially administer the law in the fear of thee alone; through him who shall come to be our Judge, thy Son our Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

And I shall again repeat the petition for an Election, from page 822:

Almighty God, to whom we must account for all our powers and privileges: Guide the people of the United States (or of this community) in the election of officials and representatives; that, by faithful administration and wise laws, the rights of all may be protected and our nation be enabled to fulfill your purposes; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Schedules

2011-10-10T20:03:00.004-04:00

I'm now well into the semester here at the H. John Heinz III College of Carnegie Mellon University (n.b. Thresher geeks, it takes a different style than the James A. Baker, III, Institute at Rice) and have generally enjoyed my courses--which are heavy on economics and, for some reason, Harvard Business Journal readings. But I have two unpleasant aspects of my schedule.

I have an evening class, Monday nights from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m., and I just don't care much for that time slot. I like to do schoolwork in the evenings, and this bumps that start time back a few hours.
Friday afternoon "recitation" review sessions, from 3:30 to 4:50 p.m. They're not mandatory, strictly speaking, but they sure do seem like a good idea.

Thinking back across my eighteen previous years of schooling, I've never had either an evening class nor one that started after 3:00 on Fridays. My schedule is fixed for now, and the Monday night class was pre-assigned before orientation, but at least it's just a half-semester ("mini," in campus parlance) and so will be over soon.

My Google Calendar situation has also gone crazy in the past few months, with what can only be described as a proliferation of calendars for various clubs and groups being shared with me. It's good to know what's going on, but it is visual clutter--though necessary, to be sure.

Oh, schedules! So strictly do they dictate my life.

Mastery

2011-08-17T08:59:00.005-04:00

I'm starting in a dual degree program at Carnegie Mellon University's H. John Heinz III College in the Master of Science in Public Policy and Management next week, in a dual degree program with the law school at the University of Pittsburgh. I'm excited to start but have to take a deep breath with the major tuition burden it will represent. And though I save a year doing the dual degree program compared with enrolling in them seriatim, I'm not crazy about bumping my graduation date back to 2014... the same year as those incoming 1Ls this year.

In any event, I wrapped up my summer job at the law school the other day and am now on a bit of an adventure in New York (and perhaps to Washington later this week). My quest is to visit as many National Park Service sites as possible, and get the stamps in my parks passport, which I "discovered" a year or so ago after having let it lie dormant for around 15 years.

So, I'm hoping to see Grant's Tomb today, and then who knows from there. Huzzah!

'Sliberty

2011-07-24T20:16:00.004-04:00

The new Target store in East Liberty opened this past week, with today's grand opening being the metaphorical capstone to the previous week's petit opening, when the store was open for business, but with minimal fanfare. I stopped by on Thursday and again on Saturday to check the place out, and it is nice. I hope it will be an anchor in the neighborhood for a long time, and as the linked article suggests, it is but one manifestation of a revitalized region.

Surely one of the coolest aspects was this, an escalator for shopping carts raising them from one level to the next. A very neat feature.

The place also boasts around 15 Three Rivers bike racks in the parking lot, which were very much in use as of Saturday afternoon.

After my initial stop on Thursday, it occurred to me that I should check out the documentary East of Liberty. I'd heard about it but never seen it, so I checked it out at the library and watched it that night. While I can certainly sympathize with the plights of people for whom the past forty years haven't been kind, I thought that the critiques offered by the interviewees (and by inference, the filmmakers) were one-sided, simplistic and underwhelming. A lot of it seemed to boil down to complaining about what "those people" ("gentrifying" rich white people, perhaps from the suburbs) were doing to East Liberty, and in particular, to a handful of public housing high-rises. The film seemed to idealize life in pre-Target East Liberty and demonize the people whose efforts (and money) were making it a more attractive neighborhood.

In any case, I will surely be shopping again at the new Target and look forward to the next chapter from the makers of East of Liberty.

Forecasts

2011-06-22T12:28:00.003-04:00

Looking at the iPhone's weather app yesterday, one would have thought it an inapposite evening to take a solstitial bike ride.

But the informed cyclist checks the radar, as on weather.gov :

Not a cloud in the sky for miles around! And so it was.

Flights

2011-05-27T06:39:00.002-04:00

While I did recently fly to Houston and spend some (more) time in Texas, today I "fled" the country, for the nearest, cheapest non-United States place: I took Megabus to Toronto.

The overnight bus was largely uneventful but rather sleepless. And though I specifically asked at the border checkpoint, the immigration/customs officer told me they only stamp passports for travelers arriving by air. So that was disappointing.

But the weekend is otherwise looking good. We'll head back to the Royal Ontario Museum, where I visited circa 1997, and look at dinosaurs excavated from right here in Canada. And many other things.

We head back to Pittsburgh on Sunday night (overnight) but for now I'm going to enjoy the lovely politeness of Canada.

Visits

2011-04-21T12:15:00.009-04:00

Things continue to occasionally happen to me, but in the midst of school, and now with the approach of finals, I have been strained to tell (all of) you about it in this space. Well, my ten-week silence is at an end!

Recent weeks have been characterized especially by visits. Dan Savage, columnist, blogger and founder of the It Gets Better project, came to speak at the University of Pittsburgh, and I was there to see him. (David Lawrence Hall, where he spoke, was also the location of my 8th grade promotion ceremony.)

It was an especially fitting venue since I had first read Savage's column sitting on the Pitt campus waiting for the bus at the Tennyson Avenue stop sometime circa 1999.

Next, I was visited (vicariously) by Vice President Joe Biden. I had written him the day after President's Day to wish him a happy Vice President's Day (which I suggested was appropriately observed on President's Day + 1), and he wrote me back.

I also complimented him on his French cuffs, which looked especially sharp as he sat behind President Obama during the State of the Union address, and he sent me a set of Vice Presidential cufflinks.

The previous night, someone wanted to visit Pitt Law so badly, she tried to drive her car straight into the courtroom.

(Photo by The Pitt News/Luc Felak/Senior Staff Photographer)

The next morning, they had put up some boards to cover over the hole, and a few days later, it was well on its way to being patched up.

But I maintain its distance from any legitimate roadway, not to mention the steps and columns in the way, make this remarkable nonetheless. These photos capture some of the improbability that a car would travel so far.

Then, I was visiting Squirrel Hill and saw that someone else was visiting and brought the skulls of various animals with him or her everywhere he or she went. Excellent.

Then I was a volunteer at TEDxCMU, a fun set of presentations on various topics. Luis von Ahn's presentation on Duolingo was awesome, and I can't wait to see it rolled out for the public.

They showed Twitter posts about the conference during breaks, including this one from me.

Almost as memorable as the presentation on Duolingo was the immense quantity of Red Bull there. Evidently Red Bull called up the organizers sua sponte and offered to co-sponsor the event by donating a couple cases of Red Bull.

I visited Carnegie Mellon's Heinz College, where I've been admitted to their MSPPM program (still waiting on my financial aid package before I decide for sure) and on the way to a reception at the Heinz History Center, we saw none other than Bumper Bike.

Also visiting Squirrel Hill, in addition to the skull-transporting motorist (supra), was a giant squirrel, perhaps named Murray, as announced in this issue of Squirrel Hill Magazine. (Though I was partial to the also-ran names "Captain von Bushy" and "Nut Nut.")

Finally, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori came to Pittsburgh where she spoke about a variety of topics in a Q&A session at Trinity Cathedral.

Let the visits continue!

I guess there's always next year...

2011-02-06T23:26:00.007-05:00

If fan enthusiasm were enough to win a Super Bowl championship, the Pittsburgh Steelers would be riding home with their 45th consecutive championship. Witness the exhibit Whatever It Takes, just concluding a run at Carnegie Mellon University's Miller Gallery. The gallery hosted a Super Bowl watch party, and I went there to watch the first half of the game. I left to watch the (disappointing) second half at a friend's party, but not before posing in Denny DeLuca's amazing, unforgettable Steeler Room (pictured above). The pickle!

So, Pittsburgh won't have this championship, but there's always next year! Here we go... again. And in any case, in the words of the post-Super Bowl XXX Post-Gazette headline, it was "A Super Try."

The really bad news is that this is after a disappointing election season and in the middle of a brutal 1L year. There are enough good things going on that 2010-2011 isn't quite an annus horribilis, but the phrase comes to mind. All I'm saying is, this loss would have been a lot easier to bear if it were Governor Onorato and Senator Sestak paying off their good-natured bets to Governor Barrett and Senator Feingold.

But, in other, uh, news, I was on the news, both as a feature in the background of a KDKA story on post-game precautions...

... and as an interviewee in a Post-Gazette online video. (Minus two points for not proofreading and generating a bogus chyron.)

Sorry, trees

2011-01-30T23:03:00.006-05:00

At law school, we print a lot of cases using either Westlaw or LexisNexis. Printing on these services is "free," meaning, of course, that there is no additional charge, having paid through either tuition or the various non-tuition fees students pay.

Anyway, my colleagues and I print out cases that might be related and read them to glean whatever information might be useful. And then, either determining that they aren't useful, or having read them and finding them useful and extracting the relevant portions, we ultimately throw them away, or hopefully at least recycle them.

My recycling contribution recently has been quite substantial, as you can see below. All I wanted to say is, sorry, trees. I do try to conserve paper, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

Civ proetry

2011-01-25T19:50:00.003-05:00

Occasionally I am so overcome with enthusiasm for various of the cases we read for classes in law school that I can't help but write rhyming verse about them. Here follow some limericks about cases we've read in my Constitutional Law class so far.

When the Congress of powers makes uses
It may do so however it chooses.
Now established these facts
We prohibit your tax
Else the government sovereignty loses.

McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. 316 (1819)

Arrested for articles naughty,
McCardle says “Show me the body!”
But the Court grants no writ
As Congress saw fit
To deny it that power--how haughty!

Ex parte McCardle, 74 U.S. 506 (1868)

The standing and inj’ries of Wright
Were seen by the Court as too slight
For consideration
Of school segregation
So those tax-exempt schools stay all-white.

Allen v. Wright, 468 U.S. 737 (1984)

Environment activists brought suit
Interior rules to reinstitute
But with no plans for travel
Scalia bangs the gavel.
“Beyond reason! They’ve no standing!” The claim’s moot.

Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U.S. 555 (1992)

What standards should standing define—
State sovereignty or a long coastline—
To help Bay State masses
Control greenhouse gases
Should the EPA its mission resign?

Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, 549 U.S. 497 (2007)

Two Anglican Prayers for the Election

2010-11-01T10:26:00.006-04:00

Almost four years ago, the day before the midterm election in 2006, I received this email from a good friend who is a church musician and outspoken liberal. I was thinking about it today in advance of tomorrow's election.

Mon, Nov 6, 2006 at 11:40 AM
To: Ian Everhart (et al.)
Subject: A Pre-Election Prayer from the English Church Music Tradition

Dear Friends:

After listening to NPR and reading the Times this morning I found that - as so often happens when I find myself in a complete state of emotional collapse such as this election has engendered - a great English text popped, unbidden, into my consciousness. Verse 2, 1747 version, of "God save the King" has never seemed so apposite. Note the absence of a reference to the King (impossible to construe divine favor for GWB) and the fact that I, as usual, have blasphemously assumed that, at least in certain matters, God thinks like I do.

O Lord, our God, arise.
Scatter thine enemies,
And make them fall.
Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks,
On thee our hopes we fix,
God save us all.

This would be a good place for an "Amen."

Frustrate their knavish tricks, indeed.

I also love our Book of Common Prayer's section on various Prayers and Thanksgivings, including this one, found on page 822:

Almighty God, to whom we must account for all our powers and privileges: Guide the people of the United States in the election of officials and representatives; that, by faithful administration and wise laws, the rights of all may be protected and our nation be enabled to fulfill your purposes; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

City of Milwaukee

2010-09-21T22:13:00.004-04:00

Law school started for me a few weeks ago, and I've greatly been enjoying the classes. It's a lot of reading, but it's interesting material and I like all my professors. At the same time, it's somewhat unsettling because for most of the classes, the vast majority (if not all) of the grade is riding on the final exam. So I have no idea how it is really going--here's hoping I am feeling well on the day of the exam.

We read a lot of court opinions to discern the rules guiding the judges, and one of the cases has captivated me more than the others. I noticed that the case Milwaukee v. Illinois, 451 U.S. 304 (1981) is referred to by the shorthand "City of Milwaukee," which has the same scansion as the title City of New Orleans, the 1972 Steve Goodman song. The similarity mostly ends there: the song tells the bittersweet and nostalgic story of a train ride from Chicago to New Orleans, while the case deals with issues of federalism and the role of the federal government vis-à-vis the states, specifically in a lawsuit over pollution in Lake Michigan.

Since one good song deserves another, I took about forty-five minutes this afternoon to write a companion song, not about trains, but about the Supreme Court case. To understand the case, you could read the 9,000-word opinion of the court, or you could find a YouTube version of the song, and sing along to the following text, which I wrote today, and which I think sums up most of the procedural history and holding. Perhaps you'll do both.

Pleading for the city of Milwaukee
Springfield says our water is not clean
SCOTUS is their most preferrèd venue
But the motion is denied to be seen

A continu’ng legal odyssey:

They refile in Illinois, N.D.

Saying nuisance is the outcome of our acts

Sewage treatment they prefer

Their motions we deny, defer

And they set about to counterprove our facts.

Oyez, oyez, our great judicial system!

I work on briefs from rise to set of the sun.

I’m the lawyer for the City of Milwaukee

And I know that when it’s through, we will have won.

Now the Congress seeks the grand affair to enter

Clean water law, they enact and decree

With the EPA the administrative center

Disallowing discharges except from a permitee

Our Wisconsin regulators urge

That we guard against a rainstorm surge

And get a state court’s rule to that effect

Illinois still pursues its claim:

“Regulate more, in nuisance’s name

Where maritime health and cleanliness intersect!”

Oyez, oyez, our great judicial system!

I work on briefs from rise to set of the sun.

I’m the lawyer for the City of Milwaukee

And I know that when it’s through, we will have won.

Judges of appeals upheld the cleanup action

Illinois did thoroughly persuade

But the ruling of a robèd six-man faction

The nuisance cause the Supreme Court forbade:

“On such matters where the people speak

Through their congressmen, ye courts, be meek.

We need not craft such fed’ral common law.

Representative democracy

Demands that we should silent be

And rule only on what the congress’ bill foresaw.

Oyez, oyez, our great judicial system!

I work on briefs from rise to set of the sun.

I’m the lawyer for the City of Milwaukee

And I know that when it’s through, we will have won.

Perhaps I shall compose all of my legal documents in rhyming verse!

Trail trial

2010-08-08T21:53:00.019-04:00

As reported previously, I set out last week to bike the C&O Canal National Historical Park towpath and the Great Allegheny Passage bike trail from Washington, DC, to Pittsburgh. And so I did!
I first spent a few days in Washington, seeing friends and riding around the city. I was anxious to see the beautiful Bikestation bike parking facility/bike shop by Union Station, and then I explored Rock Creek Park for the first time, taking a "training ride" up to the Maryland-DC border. This was a Saturday and there were a lot of other cyclists out riding, and I'm pleased to say that I passed or kept up with them all, except one guy who a aero bars and a special aerodynamic helmet, who was cruising just a few miles per hour faster than I could comfortably manage. But--I decided that I'm OK with that.

Of great amusement to me was this bicycle wheel quick release skewer which was embedded into the pavement in Columbus Circle, in front of Union Station. One of the more surreal things I've ever seen.

I left Washington last Sunday, August 1, making sure to stop at the "Mile Zero" marker by Georgetown's Thompson Boat Center for a photo op.

From there, I rode, rode, and rode some more. The C&O Canal towpath, maintained by the National Parks Service in a pseudo-primitive condition, is fairly bumpy, as it would have been in the days of canal boats and mules pulling--towing--goods and people between Cumberland, Maryland, and the port at Georgetown. There are free hiker/biker campsites every five to ten miles for most of the route, and I camped around miles 26, 101, and 154.

My first full day of the trip was quite pleasant. I made Point of Rocks, Maryland, at mile 47, my "Point of Breakfast." I asked a passing motorist for a recommendation, and she told me to go to Kerrigan's to get something to eat. When I got there, the owner said "Are you the one they left money for?"

"Absolutely, I'll take any money that's coming my way," I jokingly replied, not expecting that the driver, who had said her son had recently biked much of the towpath with his Boy Scout troop, had stopped in before I arrived, leaving ten dollars "for the biker in the blue shirt who's about to come in." That was a great way to start my trip--with a $15 meal for only $5!

I locked up my trailer at mile 60 and crossed the railroad bridge's pedestrian span over to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. Famous for being the site of John Brown's abortive abolitionist raid on the armory in 1859, I was expecting it to be as consequential a commercial center as it was historically, but that was not the case. There are a few tourist-oriented shops and the National Parks Service has a number of worthwhile exhibits, but it was always a small town, even in its industrial heyday, and its population today is about 300.

The Appalachian Trail is routed onto the C&O Canal towpath for about three miles near Harpers Ferry, and crosses on the same rail/pedestrian bridge, and I was quite amused to see the sign directing hikers north and south, with the respective Maine and Georgia termini each over 1,000 miles distant. It's not often that you see directions to a destination that far away. (A ranger also told me that part of the reason bicycles must be walked over the bridge is that no bike riding is allowed on the Appalachian Trail. Any faint flickers of desire I might have had to travel more than those three miles of the joint C&O/AT quickly disappeared when learning that tidbit of regulatory policy.)

The canal towpath has a gap around mile 85, so through-riders have to detour in any case, but I took a more extended detour than absolutely necessary, visiting Antietam National Battlefield, the site of the bloodiest single-day battle in American military history. There are monuments in different locations around the battlefield commemorating the positions of various units, but almost 150 years later, it's hard to envision anything other than open fields and rolling hills. The park visitor center had exhibits and a presentation that better helped illuminate the scene. Abraham Lincoln, it seems, came to visit wounded soldiers after the battle, and in the video, at least, he traveled by carriage along the very same C&O Canal towpath I was riding on, riding not much faster than I myself was going.

Pennsylvania had a number of excellent monuments.

I paid a quick visit to Williamsport, Maryland, where before rejoining the towpath trail, I bumped into the town's mayor on my way to find some dinner. I guess I just can't stay away from local elected officials. He asked me why I had chosen to stop and patronize businesses in Williamsport, and I had to confess that the geography just worked out--it was getting dark, I was hungry, and there I was. Geography, now as when the canal was being built, is king!

Leaving the Jordan Junction campsite near Williamsport, I next stopped at Hancock, Maryland, for food, air for my tires, and to take advantage of more geography. Maryland is only two miles wide at Hancock, and I wasn't about to leave the region without biking up to the Mason-Dixon line, going six inches into Pennsylvania, and then hurrying south, over the Potomac, into West Virginia, and then back into Maryland, where I was very pleased to sign the credit card receipt for lunch--that is, to put my "John Hancock" on it in Hancock. Har har har.

The Western Maryland Rail Trail parallels the C&O Canal towpath for about fifteen miles around Hancock, and I was glad to take advantage of it. I think it's kind of crazy to have a fully paved trail run for just fifteen miles only 100 yards away from the C&O Canal National Historic Park towpath, but on the other hand, I was tired of hitting every tree root, tree branch and rock that lay in the towpath. The blacktop was quite welcome, but I dropped back down to the towpath to see the "Devil's Eyebrow," an anticline located right along the trail.

The next morning, I crossed through the Paw Paw Tunnel, an engineering marvel of its day, over half a mile long. Bring a flashlight.

I saw a good amount of wildlife along the ride. I was particularly impressed with the great blue herons flying over the canal in the first 50 miles from Washington. There were a lot of deer who I must have startled--I alternately tried to scare them off, ringing my bell, or tried to get as close as possible before they ran away--and assorted rabbits and other small critters. There were also mosquitoes. And turtles:

I tried not to get too delirious, and I only hallucinated a little bit. I mean, after three days in the woods, those trees do look an awful lot like a person. And things that maybe aren't funny seem really funny, like "Pigmans Ferry Campsite." Pig man--get it? Like in Seinfeld.

And then I reached Cumberland! This is getting long but suffice it to say it was time for another couple photo ops: end of the C&O Canal, Mile Zero on the Great Allegheny Passage, the Mason-Dixon Line, and the Eastern Continental Divide. It was all downhill from there!

The ascent into Frostburg is the longest, slowest fifteen miles I have ever ridden. The trail has a deceptively steep grade, and I stopped a number of times to make sure I didn't have a flat tire--I was sure that something was wrong with my bike to be slowing me down so much. Nope, just an uphill grade, topped with a windy light rain for much of it. But after the storm blew over, I had an amazing vision as the golden sunset illuminated the trail. I'm pretty sure the trail to heaven's pearly gates looks basically like this. I guess I'd rather have an uphill to my final destination than a downhill...

The last two days, from Frostburg to Connellsville, and then on to Pittsburgh, were really long but rewarding. It was really wonderful biking through Ohiopyle State Park, right along the Youghiogheny River, and I had a great time exploring Connellsville, which has more than its fair share of wonderful old buildings, beautiful even when despoiled with gaudy signage.

The roughest stretch of the trip was probably around McKeesport, Pennsylvania--I was in Allegheny County, but was still miles (and hours) away from my destination. When the official trail ends (one of the "gaps" in the "GAP," you might say) there is a sign saying that biking on PA-837 around Kennywood can be hazardous, but I was having none of it. I had come that far and wasn't about to "arrange for a ride to my destination in Pittsburgh" as it suggested. Since the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, I rode on, through Homestead and at length entered the city limits.

I prevailed upon a passer-by to take my picture on the Hot Metal Bridge. This is my favorite view over the city, especially at the "golden hour" right before sunset.

I went home to ditch my cargo--I weighed it, and it was at least 72 pounds I was hauling around--and headed downtown to complete my trip. Bike lift on the Mall--bike lift at the Point. Total elapsed time: 5 days, 2 hours, 15 minutes.

I was then happy to attend the Bike Pittsburgh BikeFest kickoff party, where it was all I could do to refrain from continually shouting "Hey everyone, I just rode here from DC!" Talking to people there, it became clear that the next step is a round trip version of this ride, or maybe something even more extreme... and also that it's a rookie mistake to pack as much heavy stuff as I did. (Falling into the talismanic category of "brought and therefore not needed:" rain jacket, umbrella, hoodie sweatshirt, three spare tubes, patch kit, mini pump, two sets each of brake pads, hex key sets, and imitation Leatherman tools.)

Finally--in a most excellent coda, I went into Whole Foods when I saw someone I knew, who told me to check out the latest issue of the Pittsburgh City Paper. It seems that on page 34 of the August 5, 2010, edition, I am featured prominently in their preview of BikeFest events! And so it was!

I have in the past described myself as occupying a "no man's land" of either being the least serious "serious biker" or the most serious "joke biker." With this long trip, and being taken as the representation of all cyclists in Pittsburgh, I think I have to move myself unequivocally into the category of "serious biker."

What a week!

Vision quest

2010-07-29T08:58:00.003-04:00

In 2008, I heard about a trip being organized in conjunction with Pittsburgh's 250th anniversary from Washington to Pittsburgh by bicycle along the C&O Canal and the Great Allegheny Passage. The former canal towpath and the old railroad right of way have been converted into a recreational trail heavily used by cyclists. Hikers also use it, but it is less popular for hiking, I'm told, than other long-distance trails such as the Appalachian Trail.

The 2008 trip cost about $800, though, and was in the middle of prime campaign season, so it didn't work out for me to go. Anyway--I have been wanting to do this trip since then, and now I think I finally have the chance in the ever-shortening window of time before law school starts. I'm delivering a family friend's car and cargo to D.C., leaving today, and I'll spend a few days in Washington before heading out over the weekend. I'm giving myself some flex time for the weather and not locking myself into a specific date to leave, but probably by Sunday.

And then will begin the epic "vision quest"--or something like that. I'll have 330 miles alone on my bike on the way back to Pittsburgh, and this is the point at which I become concerned. I've never done more than 50 miles in a single day (the first day of my trans-Rhode Island trip, or a couple of long days running errands in Pittsburgh) and never those extended trips on several consectutive days. I'm camping, which is daunting in its own daunting ways. I can't, and won't, carry a week's worth of food with me, which is fine since there are many towns along the trail with ample provisions. But there are long stretches with no services, which concerns me.

So, I'm feeling a good bit overwhelmed now. But I'm really looking forward to the trip, whatever ends up happening. The next time I do a bike lift on the Hot Metal Bridge, I'll be just a few miles from home!

Rhode Island Road Trip

2010-06-30T08:30:00.005-04:00

I'm on a vacation with my family in Connecticut, where we've rented a cottage for the week. It's on Lake Alexander in Dayville, and is a very relaxing place. But one of the highlights for me was the chance to do my first interstate bike trip. I got a bit turned around but eventually found my way to the Rhode Island state line.

I continued onward, eventually meeting up with the Conventry Greenway, a rail-trail that was nice, even though the regular roads were in pretty good shape and bike-friendly.

It's in quite good shape. Someone has obviously invested a lot in this infrastructure. There were some bridges:

Finally, I arrived in Providence, and admired the civic architecture.

And nothing made me happier than doing a bike lift at the Rhode Island State Capitol.

I pick up again today in Providence and from there head for Newport, and on to Block Island on Thursday. I will have biked over nearly the whole state!

Edit: I belatedly realize that when I was living in Washington in 2004, I biked up the C&O Canal Towpath to the Maryland state line, so in that sense, I have crossed a state border on m bike. But I fairly quickly turned around to head back downtown into Washington, rather than making some meaningful visit to Maryland. So this New England trip represents a more enduring trip.

Imagine that

2010-06-20T20:43:00.003-04:00

On Thursday, after a very brief conversation in which I allowed that I was already in a weekend state of mind, I was asked, no doubt in anticipation of Father's Day and possibly preparing to wish me a happy one, I was asked "Are you a father?" by my companion on the elevator.

This struck me quite by surprise, and I laughed before saying, "Ah, no." My interlocutor smiled and said "Well have a good weekend anyway."

As the elevator doors closed, I had just one thought: "Wow, that would be quite a hilarious and terrifying experience for everyone involved."

Indeed.

Happy Father's Day to all those out there who are mature and responsible fathers!

The speech I wish I had heard

2010-06-15T21:46:00.005-04:00

Tonight was President Obama's first address to the nation from the Oval Office, dealing with the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and I watched it at home. I was excited at the possibility that a major initiative or dramatic breakthrough would be announced. The speech read in part:

For decades, we have known the days of cheap and easily accessible oil were numbered. For decades, we’ve talked and talked about the need to end America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels. And for decades, we have failed to act with the sense of urgency that this challenge requires. Time and again, the path forward has been blocked -- not only by oil industry lobbyists, but also by a lack of political courage and candor.
The consequences of our inaction are now in plain sight. Countries like China are investing in clean energy jobs and industries that should be right here in America. Each day, we send nearly $1 billion of our wealth to foreign countries for their oil. And today, as we look to the Gulf, we see an entire way of life being threatened by a menacing cloud of black crude.
We cannot consign our children to this future. The tragedy unfolding on our coast is the most painful and powerful reminder yet that the time to embrace a clean energy future is now. Now is the moment for this generation to embark on a national mission to unleash America’s innovation and seize control of our own destiny.

What followed was a fairly tame and blandly reassuring. Of course, the citizens of the Gulf coast states who can see oil washing up on beaches near their houses, destroying the wildlife and their livelihoods need some reassuring, and it's good to have such a strong statement of support coming from the very top. But in terms of specific solutions, it was overwhelmingly lacking and generally vague. The president gave shout-outs to energy-efficient cars and home renovations, but otherwise, spoke only in generalities. I wish he had continued on, saying something along these lines:

And therefore, I am permanently suspending and rescinding all permits issued for oil drilling in the coastal waters of the United States. It is now clear that there is no such thing as completely safe oil drilling when offshore rigs are floating a mile above the ocean floor, just as it is clear that our dependence on oil and other dirty fuels--both domestically and internationally produced--is a huge strategic liability.

Furthermore, I have tonight sent a message to the Congress asking the House and Senate to enact a new carbon pollution tax, to take effect immediately. For too long, dirty fuels have gotten a free ride, contaminating our air and water at no cost to the polluter, while technologies such as wind and solar have struggled to match the price of these dirtier energy sources. The legislation enabling this new tax on pollution will level the playing field for new clean energy solutions, ushering in the post-fossil fuel era.

Transportation accounts for seventy percent of all United States oil consumption and a third of our carbon emissions, and so I am asking the Congress to establish a new excise tax on gasoline and diesel fuel, at the rate of fifteen cents per gallon, to be increased by five cents each year. In 30 years' time, the cost of a gallon at the pump may finally approximate the estimated true costs of the fuel, estimated today at over $5.00 per gallon, once environmental, health and other factors are added in.

I know this measure will be unpopular in some quarters and with some Members of Congress, but I am prepared to convene and reconvene Congress using my authority under Article II, Section iii of the Constitution until both chambers shall have passed such a pollution-control regime. This measure will be the biggest single shot in the arm of alternative energy that the federal government can provide. If we are serious about pursuing clean energy sources, it is the only reasonable step we can take.

Then, I would have been satisfied to hear these words, actually spoken by the President.

Now, there are costs associated with this transition. And there are some who believe that we can’t afford those costs right now. I say we can’t afford not to change how we produce and use energy -– because the long-term costs to our economy, our national security, and our environment are far greater.

Skeptics

2010-06-07T15:33:00.003-04:00

Think of a group of skeptics. Maybe "9/11 truthers" or JFK assassination conspiracy theorists come to mind. Probably not at the top of your list would be education professionals. Yet they, as a class, have expressed to me, in writing, the most persistent and ongoing doubts about the very fabric of the universe, the inexorable march of time. Perhaps you've seen them as well. Most go something like this:

"It's hard to believe the summer is almost over..."

We now know this in my family as "The Educator's Salutation." My parents and I have received countless letters from elementary, middle and high school principals, superintendents, college deans and vice presidents, and now law school administrators that open with some variation on this.

There are different flavors, of course. The writer might observe and lament the end of the summer, or of Christmas break, or final exams period, rather than mark the start of a new school year, or note the recent passage of such a milestone: such are the many varieties of The Educator's Salutation. One such variation is that of my latest missive, from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, in which an assistant dean says

"We can hardly believe it but our admissions cycle at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law is nearing an end."

From elementary school to law school: it's good to know some things don't change.

Pitt is it

2010-05-04T21:28:00.004-04:00

I've had a hard time leaving this town -- The Clarks, Born Too Late

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. -- Winston Churchill, 1940

After fourteen months of LSAT classes, essay writing, late-night application submissions, tons of computer copying and pasting, résumé reformats, nervously checking the mail and above all, procrastination, I'm done with the law school application and selection process. In total, I probably took three dozen practice LSAT tests and applied to twenty law schools. The fees and expenses reached several thousand dollars, all told--but it's only a drop in the bucket compared to the expenses of actually attending law school.

Of the twenty, I got the metaphorical or literal thin envelope from twelve, was wait-listed at three, and accepted at three. (I applied very late in the year and haven't heard back from two, at even this late date.) And after a few weeks of hemming and hawing, the University of Pittsburgh beat out Temple University and the Ohio State University in a very close competition.

So I'll be here in Pittsburgh for law school starting in August. After being tentative on so many levels, it's nice to have a firm plan established. Actually, it will be two plans: one for my curriculum and career, and a nice payment plan for all the debt I'm going to have to take on! At a Pitt Law admitted student event a few weeks back, the panel of current and former students said they had largely financed everything out of debt and it had worked out, which was somewhat if not completely reassuring.

So--Pitt Law! Now I just have to survive the 1L year, which, I'm told, is pretty killer.

Writers

2010-04-07T12:13:00.002-04:00

Readers here who have talked to me "live" recently may remember me discussing this idea. I'm considering the hiring of writers--à la The Daily Show--to come up with funny things for me to say. They would follow me around, observe what I'm seeing, and help me develop amusing commentary that I can use to impress friends, colleagues, acquaintances and strangers.

There are still a lot of kinks that would need to be worked out. If they're actually following me around, it may be obvious that I'm being coached, especially if they are whispering in my ear every minute or so. My solution is to get some kind of video camera and earpiece, so the can be removed from the immediate scene. A Bluetooth headset would do in a pinch.

A more serious complication is the financing. I can't afford to hire even one, let alone a team, of comedy writers. Maybe I can get some interns?

Speaking of writers, allow me to refer you to my brother's blog of improbable musings, with the understated title of Here are some ideas. Be careful what you do with them.

Rain-Bike/Brrr-Bike

2010-03-21T10:21:00.003-04:00

Beer-Bike was cancelled due to the weather--as predicted--and the usual three bike races (alumni, women, men) were whittled down to the alumni race only, which was a run. Quite disappointing--but I have to say, with a majority of my Beer-Bike experiences being rained out, it wasn't all that shocking. Though I must say, the weather was beautiful Friday and beautiful now on Sunday... how's-a-come it was so lousy yesterday?

So yes, it was wet and cold. If you had to miss one, this was a good one to miss. Still, I saw a lot of friends and had a pretty good time.

Pictures and details later.

Rain, rain, go away

2010-03-19T16:55:00.002-04:00

After a fun afternoon exploring San Antonio, I'm here at Rice for my seventh Beer-Bike. As I had suspected last year, there are fewer people I know still here (and returning for the revelry), but so far it's still been fun.

So, my Beer-Bike number seven, and this is looking to be rain-out number four for me. These forecasts are kind of getting me down.

An actual conversation

2010-03-02T10:39:00.002-05:00

Me: Hey Ted, what's the best way to spend $80?
Ted (my brother): Uh, on law school application fees?
Me: Yes, but what kind of law schools?
Ted: The kind where you're probably not going to get in?
Me: Correct. But when is the best time to spend that money?
Ted: On the day the application is due!
[Cue nervous laughter, hand-wringing--and scene!]

See, I'm using the Socratic method already!

Snow time!

2010-02-09T11:55:00.005-05:00

Streets are for people, not just people in cars.

That's one of the rallying cries of bike advocates, along with the classic Critical Mass line that "We aren't blocking traffic, we are traffic!"

This Saturday in Pittsburgh, at least, it wasn't aspirational so much as descriptive. People with dogs and children in sleds took over many streets that are ordinarily crowded with cars, including Shadyside's Walnue. There were, in fact, cars going up and down this and many other streets, but as a rule, they were going slowly, and in the absence of well-shoveled sidewalks, many pedestrians were taking to the main traffic lane of the streets, where there was at least consistency.

Biking, for those of you wondering, was not advisable, at least in this part of town. On Friday afternoon, the blizzard had yet to descend, and on the tail end of my "Four Park Challenge" route, I paused to take a picture at the Highland Park reservoir. Happily, I didn't have to change a flat tire at this spot, as I had a few weeks back.

By Sunday, I found biking to be tough and not really any faster than walking, given the lack of traction (even with a new rear mountain bike tire) and slipperiness even when I managed to get going. Let's just say snow is actually pretty decent at cushioning falls.

Ugh

2010-01-19T22:51:00.004-05:00

I'm listening to WBUR's stream of Scott Brown's acceptance speech. A couple things:

This crowd will chant anything.
What was up with him talking about his daughters--"They're both available!"
Quoting John Kennedy about lowering taxes--not mentioning that they had been at 90 percent--to pay for World War II.
Brown says it's a good idea to deny the right to a lawyer to to accused terrorists. Good thing nobody is ever accused falsely, right, Gerald Amirault?

I love a road trip as much as the next guy, and I kind of wish I had gone to Massachusetts in person for GOTV, but I ultimately did the next best thing from here in town. I made a bunch of calls to the 508, 978, 781, 857 and 617 area codes in the past few days--probably 25 on Friday, 200 yesterday and 250 today, both from home and from the Pittsburgh OFA office. I'll be back down there again, for sure.

Anyway, it's a disappointing night for Democrats, and hopefully does not portend too badly for elections later this year. Until then, it's time to make Republicans actually filibuster legislation, not just threaten it--reading the phone book, no bathroom breaks, the works. Failing that--let's reconcile that mess.

Auspiciously Inaugural

2010-01-04T12:51:00.005-05:00

Today is Inauguration Day in the City of Pittsburgh. I was just at the swearing-in of two new members of the Pittsburgh City Council and, at a separate event, Mayor Luke Ravenstahl's inauguration for a full term.

There has been some drama at recent City Council meetings, and I do love me some pomp, so I was very excited to be able to show up for these events. I was excited to see it wasn't just a pro forma meeting, and the election of Darlene Harris as Council President was surprising to me, having read that it would be a contest between factions led by Bill Peduto and Theresa Kail-Smith. (I also noted that, in contrast to the practice in the U.S. House of Representatives electing a speaker, in which the candidacies are announced and then each member announces his or her choice by name, in this case they took a roll call vote with ayes and nays on the candidacy.)

So much parliamentarism made me think back to the good ol' days on Hanszen Cabinet. Or better yet, my days as president of the Rice Young Democrats. (On that note, allow me to observe that I was evidently elected "President Forever," which, I am amused to observe, is not necessarily the same as "president for life.") Motion to adjourn? Second?

There's a reception tonight, and if nothing else, I anticipate free snacks and a chance to pass out business cards. (I always say that since I had 250 of them made up, I had might as well pass them out.)

Off to the party!

Last LSAT

2009-12-07T02:47:00.004-05:00

I took the LSAT again on Saturday morning, this time at Duquesne University, after having previously taken it in June at Pitt. For whatever reason, the June LSATs are administered in the afternoon, rather than the morning, as are the other tests. I was quite glad to have the afternoon testing option then but had to settle for an early morning appointment this time.

I arrived a little before our 8:30 a.m. deadline, and it would have been OK even if I'd been a bit late. The proctors had to read lots of boilerplate, and we had to bubble in our names and various ID numbers and survey question responses. The guy next to me called over a proctor to ask if he had to give his Social Security number and/or sex, since he declined to do that when he registered to take the test.

They ultimately told him to leave it as it was when he registered (this was, to me, the obvious answer) but he's going to have to give that out sooner or later in law school applications, so why didn't he do it when he registered? (I only spoke to him briefly, but given that he omitted both of those, and his general attitude I'm fairly certain this was a political thing, and not a matter of questioning his gender identity.) Seriously, who does that? His name was William or something--pretty obvious giveaway at least on the gender question. Does he really think that being male or female will, in applying for law schools' classes of 2013, be an issue either way?

The test went well for me--and depending on which logic games section is the experimental section (and which counts towards my score), I'd say it may have gone very well indeed. One of the things I got from doing around ten practice tests in the 2 weeks leading up to the real LSAT was getting a sense of how well (or not) any given sitting is going, so based on that I'd say I was above the average of what I'd been getting--but let me make that announcement more clearly when actual scores come out in a few weeks.

One semi-interesting fact about the whole process is that each test is scored and scaled against everyone else taking that test. So, in fact, if I think I did decently well on Saturday, but it was a pretty easy test, I may fall right in the middle of the pack. If it was a hard enough test that many people did poorly, I would benefit, as I would if many people who were not very well prepared showed up to take the exam. Since I'm competing with my neighbor William the Paranoid, everyone else in the room, and applicants across the country, this leaves me with a dilemma:

Do I wish them good luck or not?

I mean, I want to be a nice guy and friendly and all that, but honestly, if any of them does better, that may mean that I score worse. Selfish, I guess, but nobody else was falling over himself or herself to give me good wishes. Actually, people were not in an especially talkative mood at all, but I'm not surprised.

At the "halftime" break between sections three and four, I came into the lobby and it was snowing lightly outside. I could only see that as a good omen. (I had the most random snack with me for that: a single piece of three-day old pita bread--the only thing handy to grab when I was on the way out the door that morning. No wonder people weren't talking to me.)

Finally, I was so pleased with myself about the mandatory LSAT writing sample, which, regrettably, does not contribute to one's score. (I began in a good mood since the proctors' script included the direction that we "write an essay, in English, on the topic listed" for us.

LSAT essay prompts are all of a form asking for a recommendation between two courses of action, many that I've seen relating to a business decision (a business should expand in a certain direction, or a client should hire one of two firms, etc.). In this case, a theatre group was deciding between staging a well-known play or commissioning a new play, and balancing its interests to serve the audience as well as local writers and actors. I ultimately told them that they should commission a new play, in part since that course alone allowed for the support of local writers. Though this option turned down the large audiences and corporate support likely with the selection of the existing play, I closed by quoting Julius Caesar, writing "Audaces Fortuna iuvat--Fortune favors the bold. The company should commission a new play."

And now, I get to stress and procrastinate about a completely different set of things.

On to Ghana

2009-09-12T16:37:00.002-04:00

I've arrived in Ghana now, in the historic Asante capital of Kumasi. It's an interesting town, quiet by night (I arrived very late last night) and bustling in mid-afternoon, especially in the Kajitia market area. Everything is in English, at least on mastheads and other written areas, in marked contrast to my last 5 weeks. I found myself saying "Ça va" to guys on the street who greeted me, as one does in French-speaking West Africa. Another Ghanaian walked past me saying, slightly amusedly, "White man." I guess I can't disagree...

This morning I awoke around 7:00 a.m. to a marching band (heavy on the brass) playing some tunes I recognized, including Maccabeus (or is it the Sullivan tune to Thine Be The Glory?). Turns out it was a school group associated with a Presbyterian church. I saw them marching later, including with Scottish-style caps.

Needless to say, pictures of this, and everything else, as well as more text on everything, will be available once I'm back home: Sunday in a week, September 20! I'm really enjoying travel and meeting new people, especially Peace Corps Volunteers in various countries--I'm surrounded by Ghana PCVs at the moment--but am looking forward to coming back and just relaxing and being on my own turf again. And riding my bike around for the last few weeks of good weather!

Niamey stay

2009-09-07T13:12:00.012-04:00

It's been almost two and a half weeks since I arrived in Niamey, and I was glad to have the chance to leave town, even briefly, the other day. My plan had been to tag along with a Rotary group from the US for the first week, which I mostly did. They had built a number of wells in outlying areas, as mentioned previously. My plan was to get out to Agadez or other distant places in my second week in Niger but that has mostly not happened. The buses don't run every day--I went with money in hand to buy a ticket for a Wednesday departure, but that's one of two days a week they don't run. And the buses all generally depart really early in the morning, so I've got that early morning inertia to combat, as well.

So I stayed around Niamey most of the rest of the week, just hanging out and getting to know some of the Niger Peace Corps Volunteers. Who, needless to say, are by and large really cool people.

On Saturday, though, I headed up to Ayorou, a town about four hours up the Niger River from Niamey, to get a feel for what non-metropolitan Niger feels like. (That said, being right along the river, and nowhere near as far away as Agadez, for instance, it was still probably pretty tame, as far as Niger goes.)

This was going to be a real first for me in Niger--heading off, alone, to a place where nobody spoke English, where I didn't really speak French and certainly didn't speak Zarma, and I was only about 300 miles from Timbuktu.

I quickly met a friendly local who showed me to the one hotel in town and we made plans to meet up later. Excuse the mixed metaphor, but the faded glory of this hotel still echoes around the place--there was a plaque commemorating the time when in the 1970s, the president of Niger came to dedicate the place. Since then, it's fallen on hard times, or the management is completely clueless.

Upon arriving, the manager--who, to my tremendous surprise, spoke English with a delightful African accent and cadence--asked "Will you be taking lunch with us?" and when phrased thusly, it's impossible to say no. So I had a fine Western-style chicken dish (with French fries), dining on a veranda that reminded me of nothing so much as "taking lunch" at Governor's Camp in Kenya, resting between a morning and an afternoon on safari.

We later had an interesting conversation--it seems the manager is originally from Benin, and Christian, in majority-Muslim Niger (Ayorou, he tells me, is 97 percent Muslim). He, like many other people I met in Africa, wanted to stay in touch, and I gave him my address, figuring if he wanted to spend on the postage, I would be glad to receive his updates. We also discussed how to make the hotel more appealing to travelers, especially foreigners. I suggested--and this is absolutely, 100 percent true--adding toilet seats to the otherwise-normal toilets in the rooms. "Oh, you mean a plastic thing that goes on them?" the manager asked. "Yes." I assured him. "Toilet seats. Probably a good idea if you want to get some high-end people." In fact, a good idea regardless.

My dining was interrupted by two men who were extremely interested in taking me on a boat ride to see hippopotamus down the river. I'd already done that, so I wasn't especially interested, or at least not for the prices they wanted. After much negotiating, I did get into a much smaller, more precarious craft than I'd been on with the Rotary group, and we braved some micro-rapids to get down to the hippo zone. (They weren't really scary, but they required punting, rather than paddling, from the two boatmen on the way back.)

We had stayed a goodly distance from any hippos the week before, but this time we got a lot closer. My boatman got out of the boat and led me around through a field where cattle were grazing (and flies were feeding... on me) and gestured for me to go on ahead to as close to the hippos as I dared. Which was pretty close. They say more people are killed by hippos every year than any other African animal, which I definitely believe when you look at their teeth.
Some local boys there joined in observing the spectacle. On the way back, we agreed there were at least twelve hippos there, and my boatman said there are hardly ever that many gathered all in one place.

My buddy from earlier in the day was waiting for me, and, in shades of Morocco, wanted to be hired as a guide for several hundred CFA. I didn't like the principle of the thing, but in the end it was not very much, so I went along with it. We went to what passed for a local "bar" and had a drink, where he mistakenly assumed I would be picking up the tab, which I was, but only for what I was drinking myself. I eventually paid, but we agreed to take it out of his fee later. Don't try to get free drinks out of me, fool.

As our tour of town continued, we ran into this group of youngsters by the riverside. They seemed friendly enough, but we had zero language in common, so it was bound to be a short visit.

Nearby, these several boats were "docked," evidently having brought goods for the next day's market from places far and wide.

Saturday night, people were finally breaking the fast. I had some decent rice-sauce in one of the plazas, but was basically ready to turn in for the day, so I made arrangements to meet my guide the next morning to go to see the vaunted Sunday animal market.

My buddy showed up at the appointed time, taking me a goodly distance to the animal market. Essentially just a big open space with stakes in the ground for owners to tie animals up to, there were beasts of all kinds on offer. Many small-time traders came with a dozen or so sheep or goats, but there were also huge collections of camels, donkeys and other livestock.

After that it was time to go "home" to Niamey. At least I didn't have to travel in a true "steerage class":
Back in Niamey I I was looking forward to urban biking! You haven't biked until you've biked in Africa, I've started to say. Bikes are, of course, a very common mode of transportation in Niamey, given the general impecuniousness of the area and the low cost of bikes.

Vicky was kind enough to lend me her bike, and I'm sure I turned many heads and generated many cries of "crazy annasara" (foreigner)--just as I no doubt generated many exclamations of "crazy gringo" in Honduras. The Peace Corps bikes were in excellent condition, and I put the one to good use, speeding around town. On a few occasions, I passed some slow-moving mopeds, to my great delight and amusement. Another time, I had just pedaled up a long hill and was waiting for a traffic light to turn when a motorcycle driver said something to me. I told him he was going to have to repeat himself, and I eventually heard him say "Armstrong"--as in "Lance Armstrong." He seemed comfortable speaking French, so I tried to get across that Lance didn't have to worry about sub-Saharan weather--only mountains, so it was a trade-off. I think he may have understood what I was saying, but the light turned and we both headed off.

For my money, one of the more illuminating things about Niamey is how "share the road" isn't a road sign but a way of life. Cars, bikes, pedestrians and donkey carts share the same road--pictured here is the two-lane Kennedy Bridge--the only span over the Niger River for miles, improbably named after the 35th President. I have video of me biking over this bridge on my Picasa Web Albums page.

One thing you may notice--I pass by some other cyclists, and not slow passes, either. I may or may not be in better shape than they are, and their bikes may be slowing them down, too. I'm pretty sure, though, that they're making a conscious effort to go slowly, to avoid getting all hot and sweaty. That is one stereotype of Africa that was true in my experience: it's hot, especially if you're doing any kind of physical activity. I was out for about an hour and a half, and must have sweat about a gallon. These guys, probably not so much.

Finally--in Ayorou I saw several instances of Obama-themed clothing. After a while it got passé to see the president's visage even in the remotest corners, but I was able to get my camera out fast enough to capture this Obamacloth shirted donkey cart passenger in Ayorou.

Not-so-hungry hippos

2009-08-26T15:01:00.008-04:00

There's a group of American Rotary members here in Niamey this week, and I've been living not-so-vicariously through them. They're here on a trip to inaugurate some wells they sponsored to provide reliable drinking water to people in the villages where they're located.

We stopped first to see the mayor of Torodi, a village about an hour's drive southwest of Niamey. We also stopped to have a look around a health clinic there.
I was amused to see a faded Peace Corps logo painted on the gate to some kind of compound; it seems that there had been a regional sub-office there at some point.
Finally, they stopped at some wells in the area that they had sponsored in a previous year, to see how they were doing. While we were there, some locals came by to get some water and we posed for a picture.
They're also here to see what there is to be seen, with an expedition yesterday a few miles up the Niger River to see hippopotami in their natural environment.That was quite a treat. We started by getting into a large canoe with an outboard motor.

And soon enough, saw some hippos! They were not super photogenic.

We also got off the boat at a small village to walk around.

In this village, there were, inexplicably, lots of bats.

Niger sejourn

2009-08-21T12:25:00.003-04:00

I've arrived in Niger! Sitting in the Peace Corps office in Niamey, which in many respects is like the Peace Corps office in Tegucigalpa, except they call it a bureau rather than an office for the most part and it has Zarma and Hausa language materials, not Spanish-learning books. As they say, Le plus ça change ... le plus c'est la même chose. Or, I'm told, that's what one sixth of Nigériens would say, since that's the proportion that speaks French. That's right, Nigériens, not to be confused with Nigerians.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to exploring Niamey. I've already got a tentative agreement to have another PCV show me around on bike (it will be my first sub-Saharan biking experience, since I took a spin with Cindy Berning in Morocco for my first African ride) and am obviously looking forward to that.

Photos will come later. Email me to request photos of any certain aspect of the trip!

Better late than never

2009-08-20T07:41:00.003-04:00

Traveling, I'm not online as much as I am at home, and certainly not enough to post all the funny things that happen. So here are some Facebook status updates that never made it online, and it's too late now:

is pretty sure the immigration officer in France didn't look at the passport picture, just stamped it.

has only been outside for 10 minutes and is sweating already.
has some ideas for names for the camel burger at Café Clock in Fes: McCamel, McBerber, the Berber Burger, the Two-Humper Quarter-Pounder with Cheese...

They need some work, but I figure it's too good to pass up this chance to update you on what might have been if I'd had a Facebook or Twitter interface handy.

Leaving on the next plane

2009-08-19T19:45:00.002-04:00

I'm not quite sure on the reasons, but my flight to Niger was cancelled tonight. Maybe not enough passengers to justify flying a whole plane there (and presumably back again)? In any case, they've put me up at a fine four-star hotel--the nicest place I've stayed in quite a while. It's a big change to go from places with no hot water to this. My other observation is that the regular rate for a room is probably as much as I've spent in the last week for all my expenses.

Hopefully I'll be on the next plane from Casablanca to Niamey. If I'm not, I'll regret it. (OK, enough with the Casablanca references.)

The road to Morocco

2009-08-16T07:38:00.002-04:00

What a whirlwind of a trip. We started in Tangier (with a well-deserved reputation as the hustler capital of North Africa) and wended our way clockwise around Morocco, through Chefchaouen, Meknes, Fes and now to Marrakech, with a detour to the Midelt area to visit my friend Cindy's Peace Corps site. I don't have the time or the bandwidth here for photos or more prose, but I'll get to that sooner or later.

I'll also say that I'm a little disappointed that so many cool things are happening in the U.S. right now, especially in Pittsburgh: Netroots Nation and Bikefest, just to name two, that I'm missing. I'm looking at the schedule of bike events and getting quite jealous, but this has been a great trip and isn't nearly over. And surely there will still be cool things in September when I get back.

So apologies to the reader for not updating more, and I'll try to get something up soon.

What a day

2009-08-05T02:24:00.003-04:00

Walking around the Dupont Circle neighborhood. Good times.
Stopped by the National Museum of the American Indian, which has a good collection but a better building.
Fulfilled a long-standing agenda item, going to the National Botanical Garden--one of the few buildings subject to the Architect of the Capitol.
Was a visitor at the new Capitol Visitors' Center. Cost overruns or no, it seems very well done. (Told that a certain line was where they took walk-up tours of the Capitol, it was all I could do to refrain from saying "I used to give tours here!")
Dumbarton Oaks unfortunately closes at 5 p.m., which left me with precious little time to see their stunningly great collection. Stop by sometime if you're in the area.
Washington Nationals baseball game with Bob and Adam (and Stephanie, kind of). When they're not playing the Pirates (as they were earlier this week), I guess I'm a Nats fan!

Tomorrow (demain): To France!

I hear the drums echoing tonight...

2009-08-04T01:47:00.002-04:00

There actually was a guy playing steel drums by the Dupont Circle Metro station earlier today, but my drums will be playing mostly from Thursday onward. I've put together a fairly ambitious trip for myself with the main destinations of Morocco and Niger, via Paris, passing through Ghana and for at least an hour on a layover with Royal Air Maroc, Lome, Togo. I get back to the U.S. on September 19.

I'll update more as the trip goes on, but let it suffice to say it's going to be an adventure of the first order, not in the least with some of the logistics of getting to the airport, checking some luggage and all that. Here's hoping I make all my connections, and I don't get too many dirty looks for my not-so-great French!

Rolling on a rickshaw

2009-07-08T21:59:00.003-04:00

For a few weeks now I've been working occasionally with Green Gears Pedicabs here in Pittsburgh. Mostly I've been working on the North Shore, Downtown and the South Side (map) where (mercifully) it's pretty flat. I did climb Rialto Street (with a 25 percent grade) yesterday, but that was on a "standard" bicycle, not a pedicab (which weighs probably 4-5 times as much, before passengers' weights are included.)

So far I've had a pattern of an early evening event in the PNC Park/Heinz Field area (a Pirates game the first time, the Independence Day and Regatta festivities the second) and then moving over to East Carson Street and ferrying people around between 10th and 28th Streets. It's a good job and fairly lucrative--for what it is. It's certainly not a full-time position (I don't think there's much of a market on weekdays) and my legs are dead tired after pedaling for over eight hours. Still, I'm getting paid to ride a bike, and as I tell my customers, there's no need to belong to a gym with a job like this. I'm thinking of putting together a narrated tour for the downtown area and marketing it to out-of-towners, or locals, for that matter.

So hop in if you need a ride!

Mostly pomp

2009-07-03T01:49:00.013-04:00

(One can imagine that it's not exactly normal to see professors and others in academic regalia on days other than commencement weekend, but it would be fun if that were the case.)

Whatever else Yale may excel at, one underestimates its knack for pageantry at one's own peril. My dad observed that brass plus percussion makes quite an impressive sound, and so it was at Yale's commencement on May 25.

The myriad chairs set up in the quad of Old Campus were in fact used first for the Class Day exercises, where a guest speaker delivers an address that at other institutions might be in the graduation ceremony itself, and there are any number of in jokes made. In any case, undergraduates observe a tradition that dictates the wearing of nonstandard hats and other headwear.

We also went to the Baccalaureate (not of an explicitly International variety) where Yale President Richard Levin delivered some not-especially enthralling remarks on the economics of a college degree and its possibly not-apparent value in a time of economic recession.

We arrived a bit late and wound up sitting in what Roger Babusci often called the "nosebleed section" (so high up in a balcony that the air is noticeably thinner and will burst blood vessels, in the joke's formulation), behind the Yale Glee Club which performed Randall Thompson's Alleluia, a university event classic, it would seem (the Rice Chorale performed the same piece, also from a balcony, at President David Leebron's inauguration in October 2004). During a singing of Joyful, joyful, we adore Thee, we of course sang the interior verses in the parts as prescribed by The Hymnal 1982 as best as we could remember, and an astonished Glee Club member turned around and asked us "did you just make those parts up on the spot?" We're good, but not that good.

Noteworthy, perhaps, is that the venue for that was Woolsey Hall, a large space used for concerts and other events, with a famous (to me, anyway) double-wide seat, visible in the photo, allegedly built for William Howard Taft (class of 1878) and his ample girth.

The baccalaureate concluded with the playing of Pomp and Circumstance by Edward Elgar, which, we were pleased to no end to see had had its U.S. début in that very hall. Somehow, the classic "graduation song" seemed to be a perfect fit for the Woolsey Hall organ, and upon reading that, it became evident why that was.

The actual commencement began, as do many, with waiting, and was observed, as other events have been, chiefly on a Jumbotron screen. We observed that Hillary Clinton, among a distinguished set of luminaries, was set to receive an honorary degree from her legal alma mater. I, for one, noted the lack of Secret Service coverage and speculated that she would receive it in absentia, but I was happy to be proven wrong when the Secretary of State came through Phelps Gate with the rest of the degree candidates and then received her diploma on the dais with everyone else.

Ted, of course, was also in that procession, and can perhaps now mention that he was in Hillary Clinton's class at Yale... after a fashion.

Thereupon followed the diploma ceremonies at each residential college and, I'm told, each graduate school.

I'll take this moment to comment on the academic dress custom at Yale, and in short, I find it deficient when compared to the practice at Rice, based on my cursory examination. Hoods are not worn by undergraduates, and college affiliation is indicated by pins and cryptic adornments such as the bunches of grapes visible above (in this case, a reference to the implicit vine of Qui transtulit sustinet, the motto of Saybrook College, not to mention the state of Connecticut). One can see how the college-identifying stole and the hood, indicating to those familiar with the code the degree, field, and granting institution, work together one some 2006 graduates from Hanszen College.

But I digress.

After a banquet at Saybrook, it was time to do some final packing (and more importantly, final throwing-away) and then we hit the road.

Not too epic, though

2009-07-02T21:17:00.000-04:00

Blog update fail.

Memes this week

2009-05-25T01:07:00.002-04:00

The Yale thing has been big the last few days but I can't seem to get away from some other topics:

Pirates hats! People are wearing Pittsburgh Pirates baseball caps all out of proportion to what I perceive to be the logical distribution. I saw at least three in Philadelphia and four in New York City, mostly on the street or on public transit, and I'm pretty sure one guy in New Haven had one on that I saw earlier tonight.
Pregnancy! I couldn't turn around this week without seeing someone's baby bump. (Do people still use that term?) It just seems that two weeks ago, I wasn't seeing any expectant mothers and now every other woman is anticipating such a blessed event. What's going on here?
People asking me for directions! I'm really flattered that people would think I'm competent and knowledgeable--I get it--but then they ask me "Is this the westbound blue line?" or "Where's Giovanni's?" Or, "Did you just make up that tenor line?" (in an appreciative/admiring, not sarcastic tone). But seriously, I'm not from around here, and if I know where your thing is, you're just lucky that I had just seen it while I was walking around the neighborhood. And/or can read the signs in front of us both.

Pedinosaur

2009-05-24T01:38:00.004-04:00

Just an ordinary crosswalk post, right?

Guess again. Looks like someone had a minor budget and license for mischief in New Haven.

Briefly

2009-05-22T11:30:00.002-04:00

Sometimes life just goes a little easy on you.

-- Evan Sanchez, January 2009

Pittsburgh: the more things change, the more they stay the same. It's a great place for biking, I'm rediscovering. (In German, would that be Fahrradort?)
Baltimore: more to it than just The Wire, though those kinds of neighborhoods exist, too. They've got great bluegrass music in unlikely places.
Washington: more fun with time to enjoy't. The view down Pennsylvania Avenue still gets me every time.
Philadelphia: Terry Gross sighting! Also, Cézanne, the Mütter Museum and Eastern State Penitentiary were all worthwhile--if pricey.
Me: I know I should plan ahead more, but continue to learn all the wrong lessons.
New York: I know a guy who knows someone who knows Judah Friedlander (not to be confused with Saul Friedländer) and Dave Attell, both of whom I saw Tuesday night. Joke of the week at cash-only establishments: "No American Express--but do you accept Metrocards?" And, as I mentioned elsewhere, Fleet Week is prime time for violation of hte no-white-pants-before-Memorial-Day rule.

Next: New Haven. Pictures later. (Careful readers of the blog will notice that I've put up some pictures in those places where I have said that. Impatient readers of the blog can email me and/or leave comments where they especially want visual details of my exploits.)

There can be only one

2009-05-13T15:23:00.003-04:00

I'm going out of town for an extended weekend starting tomorrow, probably through May 26. Quite a weekend, I know. Anyway, it just so happens that I'll be missing some great events in Pittsburgh. The Democratic primary election for mayor, for one, and also two bike-related events.

Many readers will know about Beer-Bike, the single greatest college tradition ever. This is, of course, the only and true Beer-Bike, but there's a guy here who's setting up an attractive, if heterodox, alternate conception of the term.

The East End Brewing Company has an annual launch party for its seasonal Pedal Pale Ale. The party takes the form of a Keg Ride, where the brewer loads the season's first keg in a bike trailer over to an undisclosed location, and anyone who shows up on a bike and rides from his Homewood South brewery to the designated bar gets a free pint. Not a bad deal, except that I'll miss this year's version.

Consider yourself advised for next year.

Just in time

2009-05-07T10:37:00.002-04:00

Something strange started happening to me in my last week in Chapel Hill: I started running into people. It didn't happen that often, but I did see someone from the compline choir at the Orange County dump, a Chapel of the Cross parishioner on the street and someone else at the post office, not to mention the faces I started to recognize in different places, having been now for the first time in Chapel Hill long enough to be a consistent patron at various establishments--does that make sense? So the phenomenon I so enjoyed on visits to Pittsburgh started to present itself in this other context, but only as I'm heading out on other trajectories.

I'd say it's just my luck, but I actually have had a lot of very good luck recently. So let's say I've been lucky to get to know so many people in North Carolina, and will be able to meet even more people in Pittsburgh.

I'm homeless

2009-05-07T00:13:00.002-04:00

Well, not really, but kind of. The sale of the house in Chapel Hill closed today (Wednesday) and the house in Pittsburgh doesn't close until tomorrow (Thursday) so I don't currently have a legal residence, I suppose, but I will soon. We had around 350 boxes on the truck, plus furniture etc. Lots of fun adventures of unpacking!

Last night

2009-05-04T23:04:00.004-04:00

There's a big United Van Lines truck on the street outside the house now, with about half our stuff in it, the other half in boxes inside the house. We've been anticipating this for a while now, and our wait is almost over.

A number of people from our church threw a terrific party on Friday night, and we've been making the social rounds for a few weeks now. Having said goodbye to most folks, I feel we need to get going to avoid the "aren't you gone yet?" syndrome.

I feel like I've moved a lot in recent years--in and out of dorm rooms, various rooms and houses in Peace Corps--but moving an apartment is a much smaller task than a full-fledged house. Just a little note to self there.

I've got an LSAT class tomorrow night, but will drive all day Wednesday to Pittsburgh. Only a few hours left here.

Boxes

2009-04-30T14:50:00.004-04:00

Well, the hypothetical is now very much concrete. There's a team of three guys--all of them very nice--going through the house packing everything up in boxes. We'll be living out of suitcases for most of 5 days on this end, it seems, and then a while after that in Pittsburgh. It's happening!

One week to go

2009-04-27T18:16:00.003-04:00

This feels like I'm stripping the altar on Maundy Thursday.

-- My dad, taking the computer, printer and phone off the house's main office desk before the Craigslist buyer came over to take it away

As previously announced, the family is moving. This has, for me, involved getting rid of tons of stuff. Lots of books and old electronics recently, but in around November-December, lots of paper, documents and other pseudo-memorabilia. A lot of it was kind of worthless stuff that needed to go, but if by chance I need to know what was on my calculus test in March 2001 or what Barak Naveh said in IB History on April 4, 2002, I’m going to be out of luck.

The reality of moving has come incrementally, and this week was a big watershed. I made probably my 6th full haul of our Passat station wagon to the Goodwill in Durham, and took another load to the Orange County dump. Our church’s rummage sale also received some of our erstwhile gems, and my Craigslist account has been at least decently active. And of course, the aforementioned desk and our washer and dryer, another Craigslist purchase. (The new buyers evidently don't want these, and the new place has its own.)

I have a calendar with a handful of farewell social engagements--dinners and parties of various sorts--which are of course welcome but seem to necessarily clutter up this already-busy time. I have some strange sort of senioritis (an inflammation of the senior, of course) where I'm almost ready for it just to be over. But then I think about it and no, I'm not really ready. Though there will be some welcome end to the constant cycle of cleaning and purging--or at least it will take on a new character as I see what fits in the new house. And, one imagines at some point, I see what I need to take with me as I pursue one of the many excellent jobs I plan on having offered to me.

I've moved a lot in the last couple years, but this seems different. Hopefully it's just as good an experience as any before has been.

International recognition dissing

2009-04-10T01:24:00.003-04:00

Browsing the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs' website (as I do) I came upon this travel advice page for French citizens traveling in the United States. It mentions some things that are probably true: don't raise your voice or lie to the police, and a "monokini" is probably going to get you in hot water.

It also has a comically incomplete map of American cities and neighborhoods to avoid under "Sécurité." It has a brief description about Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Richmond, Chicago, Houston, Saint Louis, Atlanta and Los Angeles, but no map. There are maps showing supposedly dangerous areas of New York, Washington, Cleveland, Detroit, New Orleans, Miami and... Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh!

We can argue about whether it's fair to classify the entire borough of the Bronx as unsafe to travel alone and I'm not sure I'd draw the line for "Quartier Nord-Est" in Washington exactly where they have it, but somebody must have been throwing darts at the map to decide to map those seven cities.

I'll leave it further to neighborhood partisans to assert that Hazel Wood [sic] is in fact safe to visit, even at night, but even my rudimentary French skills leave no doubt that "Sixième Pont" means "Sixth Bridge," not Sixth Street Bridge, as it actually is.

Moving

2009-03-30T23:40:00.003-04:00

Those wishing to stay at the Everhart Hostel in Chapel Hill should book and complete their stays in the next month or so. Clients may make bookings for the Everhart Bed and Breakfast on Ellsworth Terrace in Pittsburgh starting around May 6, 2009.

Choir wire

2009-03-30T23:24:00.003-04:00

I've been singing in The Chapel of the Cross' compline choir since mid-November. It's a neat small group with mostly low-key repertoire, doing many pieces often enough to be semi-memorized. Which came in handy last night when the power went out last night. (The nave is darkened, but we have lights clipped to our music stands to help us see the music.) But, in a commendable-if-I-do-say-so-myself turn of events, we keep singing through the blackout, turning, resourcefully, to the LCD goodness of our various cell phones. It helped that we were able to keep going on autopilot for a few notes, having (a) looked ahead as we read and (b) gotten to know the piece (a Nunc Dimittis by Healy Willan) over the course of several months, or years for some of us. We continued for the balance of compline by cell-phone light, and the source of the blackout remains unknown to me.

Also, in the "senior choir," one guy was passing notes during evensong of the score of the UNC basketball game. Seems he was checking on his Blackberry for the final minutes of an NCAA tournament game (inconveniently scheduled to overlap our Lenten choral evensong) and getting the word out to other fans in the choir. Happily, the game was over by the time we started singing our Bach cantata and everyone was able to devote his or her energies to the task at hand.

Not for nothing do they call it March madness.

Young 'uns

2009-03-20T16:28:00.004-04:00

Many things have changed at Rice since 2006. This should not be a surprise, but it always feels like one. The freshmen are now astoundingly young, among other things. The Thresher is different and I recognize hardly any of the names. They've taken the Aca-barrier concept to a new, surprisingly effective and astoundingly creative new level.

More later, including pictures.

Okay:

So in ~~2004, I want to say,~~ 2003, some of us stayed up late and put up the first-ever Aca-barrier, inconveniencing Wiessmen who ordinarily pass between the Hanszen Commons and New Section to get to Wiess. There are other ways there, but from most of the campus, this is the fastest way. We put up a plywood structure, and, predictably, Wiess tore it down soon enough. Housing and Dining staff may have helped.

The next night, after they tore it down, we took one of the panels and put it up along the Beer-Bike parade route by the Baker Institute's section of the Berlin Wall. I'm not sure it's the most flattering comparison, but we thought it would be clever to put one wall section next to another, especially where it would be seen by the whole university the next day.

In 2006 we did the same thing:

And when I came back to visit in 2007, the tradition had been carried on:

This year I heard talk of a moat, medieval castle-style. "Yeah right," I thought. "That's going to work." Well, sure enough, it did. Behold:

They built the frame using plywood and wire fence, and then lined it with plastic and sandbags, and put the hose in. Soon enough, they had a bona fide moat/wading pool, complete with an inflatable alligator.

But in an even more astonishing turn, rather than trashing it, some guys from Wiess, I'm told, came over, took some measurements, and returned later with lumber to construct a bridge over it. From start to finish, they put together the bridge in about a half hour.

They added some steps and voilà! Ready to accomodate any passers-by, in this case a group of beer golfers.
Shortly afterwards, they made up signs, inaugurating the Hanszen-Wiess Unity Bridge, rated to carry "2 peeps" at any given time.

Wonderfulness

2009-03-19T17:31:00.002-04:00

I'm at Rice for Beer-Bike.
Katharine Jefferts Schori was on my flight from Atlanta to Houston. I said hello as we both waited for our gate-checked bags.
I've got Twitter forwarding to Facebook, which wasn't at first obvious, but easily enough done. See http://www.twitter.com/ianev/.
I had a headache that has mostly disappeared.

To all of these, I say: awesome.

Countup with Ian Everhart

2009-02-24T23:13:00.003-05:00

(Countdown seems to have been taken by some guy on MSNBC.)

Employment! I'm back working at the law firm (Glover & Petersen, P.A., for those of you playing at home) where I was for summers during college. So my "sabbatical," which began in early November, officially ended in late January.
Moving! My parents are moving (back) to Pittsburgh in the next few months and the house in Chapel Hill is currently on the market. Mention this blog posting and you get 5% off! Look for us in Shadyside around June.
Obama! He is still the president, and gave a great speech tonight. I looked in vain for a watch party (until I found one at Duke, about 20 minutes before it was going to start) but my mom, dad and I had a great time applauding Obama and yelling at Bobby Jindal through the TV. (I don't think he heard us.)
Law school! I seem to have missed the boat for admissions for fall 2009 (I was doing other worthwhile things) and now am looking at fall 2010, at least. So I'm occasionally looking at LSAT prep books and other such fun items in my now more limited free time.
Beer-Bike! I'm going to be at Beer-Bike next month (March 19-23), and am looking forward to it tremendously. See you all there!

One good celebration deserves another

2009-02-07T23:57:00.002-05:00

Two big events this year! Between the inauguration and the Steelers Super Bowl win #6, there's been a lot to celebrate. And look at the similarities in celebrations: a parade for Obama, a parade for the Steelers. Around 1.8 million for Obama, 350,000 for the Steelers--Pittsburgh football fans seem to turn out more heavily than the average Obama supporter, though there's a stronger geographic concentration for the Steelers, I'd say.

Anyway, it's been a good year so far--let's see what the next big, good, great thing is!

Waiting hours for the transfer of power

2009-01-26T01:13:00.012-05:00

There's that [cinéma vérité] moment where the helicopter you're watching on the screen suddenly becomes the actual helicopter overhead.

-- Hank Stuever, When a Love-In Spreads to Most All D.C. Streets, the Washington Post, January 21, 2009

They told us it would be crowded. They told us it would be cold. They--in this case, the Presidential Inaugural Committee--were absolutely right on both counts.

I'm telling you it was awesome.

I got up at 3:15 a.m. to head down to the Mall from the Northwest Washington neighborhood where family friends were very graciously hosting my brother and me. He and a friend of his from college had decided that two hours' sleep wasn't even worth it and they set out for America's Front Lawn around 2:00 a.m. Madness, I say.

My early start was prompted by predictions of record crowds (correct predictions, I might add) and my desire to get a jump on them, ideally by being on the first train when the Metro system opened at 4 a.m. that morning. The taxi I called at 3:30 a.m. never materialized--I'm still waiting for them to call me back and let me know they're in the neighborhood--but after 30 minutes standing on a street corner, a taxi that just happened to be in the neighborhood took me to the Foggy Bottom-GWU station. So far, so good. I got on going towards downtown, and everything was normal--if jam-packed rush hour-style trains were normal at 4:30 a.m. Getting off at L'Enfant Plaza, though, was where things took a sharp deviation from normal.

I made it out of the station and jogged ahead of the remaining mass of people towards what I thought would be a mostly-vacant lot near the intersection of 4th Street and Independence Avenue, Southwest. But people had been there for hours, it seemed, and in the kind of localized decision making that ultimately resulted in the Purple Tunnel of Doom (where people with Purple and Silver tickets got shut out), I guess people were let into the space earlier than had been previously announced.

So I shuffled over to 7th Street at Independence Avenue, still Southwest, and waited in line next to some sort of school group. Figuring that from about 5:30 a.m., when I arrived there, through 7 or 8, when the gates were scheduled to open, I would be waiting, I tuned into the local NPR affilliate, WAMU, to hear essentially wall-to-wall coverage of the inauguration, the crowds, traffic, reaction from around the world, etc.

Around 7, we were ready to be let in to the Mall, but in some epic misunderstanding or miscommunication--"purplegate" seemingly characteristic of the crowd control elements of the day--that area was deemed full to capacity--though it was clearly not--and we were told to move along to entrances at 12th or 14th Streets. Already getting sick of this and not wanting to be more than a mile away from the Capitol, I double-timed it to 12th Street where--surprise!--there was no security screening at all! That's good, because it would have taken just about forever and most of us wouldn't have much liked taking off our jackets and other layers in the morning chill. (I wore eight layers on top, three on bottom, two pairs of socks, plus a hat, gloves and scarf. With all that, I was just barely not cold.)
Then came the waiting, from 7:15 a.m. when I arrived at my spot (near the center of this map, north of the Arts and Industries Building and just south of the main east-west axis of the Mall) until the ceremony got started at 11:30 a.m. I amused myself with NPR and when Morning Edition went into repeats, I switched over to C-SPAN radio, trying in vain to call in to Washington Journal, I suspect because cellular networks around the Mall were overloaded.

[The sun rises. That's got to be some kind of "Morning in America" metaphor.]

The many Jumbotrons along the Mall began to play back the concert from two days earlier, which helped while away the time, and then the official program began with its various musical selections and then the swearings-in themselves, all of which is well known.

[That's right, someone is waving a Terrible Towel in this picture!]

The Jumbotron feed wasn't always in sync with either C-SPAN radio or anything else, but did on occasion use a live overview of the Mall, and whenever they showed us, we waved our Girl Scout-provided flags. Quite the display.
As it got nearer to "showtime," we saw more and more recognizable faces. People got excited when the Clintons were seen coming down the hallway to the west Capitol façade.

Finally, the man of the hour came down the hallway.

Someone near me called out at 11:58:20 that there was only one minute and forty seconds left until noon, so when the musical interlude by Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman and company was not unexpectedly short, I knew the legal moment of transfer of power had passed before the President stepped up to the podium and raised his right hand.

Of course, that should have been the ultimate climax of the day, but having had someone call out the time deflated it a bit for me. I also expected there to be more reverberation in the crowd but it does occur to me that the open air has less resonant acoustics than an auditorium or even a stadium. Still, the cheers came up unmistakeably at all the right moments, in the speech as throughout the event and I was glad to add my voice to the strain.

Vice-President Biden was sworn in, then the newest President, who gave a few remarks, as well.
Radio reports consistently mentioned that the crowd assembled was in good spirits, which aligns with my experience. That said, the one thing that could be counted on to raise their ire was seeing George W. Bush on screen or hearing mention made of his name. At first I wanted to join in, but as I thought back to someone's commentary about Inauguration 2005, that it was supposed to celebrate our country, not the triumph of one party or another, I thought it more proper to do as I would have had done four years ago.

After the President's inaugural address, many people started to wander away, but I wanted to stay around, having heard on C-SPAN or NPR that the Marine One-style helicopter that would ferry "43" away was already parked on the west front of the Capitol. So I stayed tuned in, listening to the narration and eventually found a screen erected by MSNBC showing their coverage, and saw the Obamas and the Bushes headed together out the Capitol's west front. Bush aboard, I waited as the chopper came to life, and after what seemed like an eternity from when it lifted from the ground on the MSNBC screen, I saw it emerge above the Senate chamber on the north side of the Capitol, and come straight down the Mall, taking a traditional final spin over the White House before turning for the Andrews Air Force Base and the final Bush presidential exit from Washington.

There's that above-referenced cinéma vérité moment. The crowd was slowly but steadily dispersing as soon as the President finished his Inaugural address, affording me the chance to get up closer to the MSNBC screen and pseudo-trailer studio.

Around me, people chanted "Na na na, hey hey, goodbye!" and on another day I might have joined them. But on Tuesday, seeing George W. Bush leave office gave me little satisfaction--surprisingly little satisfaction. Maybe if it had been John Kerry taking that presidential oath, four years ago, I would have joined in the revelry of seeing the former president off with a "one-finger salute," as one flier passed out to inaugural attendees exhorted us to do. But as the Obamas carried themselves with dignity--even as the inaugural address effectively repudiated the policy legacy of the Bush years--I thought it fitting that I approach the day with that same attitude of decorum.

MSNBC was filming live, and was swinging a camera on a boom over the crowd outside. My mom tells me I appeared, since I called her to tell her to flip on the TV, and she saw me as it came by. In the studio are Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow, Eugene Robinson, it looks like, and Keith Olberman, who isn't visible in this view.

A media "fixer" approached me as I was wandering around the Mall, waiting for the crowds to subside, and I obliged in offering a few of my thoughts on the day for an AP video reporter. The guy pulled a raggedy credential out of his pocket to let me join him up in the middle of these media risers.

After all this, I took off, circumnavigating the west side of the Mall and Pennsylvania Avenue's parade route. The Metro stations on the south side of the Mall were overwhelmed, so I went the long way around, towards Union Station. On the way, I joined crowds also going around the end of the Capitol Complex, and the mob persuaded some security folks to open up a gate to cross Southeast 1st Street. It seems the area to the south of the Capitol was a staging area for some of the parade, and they had a corridor for the floats and people to make it through to Pennsylvania Avenue, where they would proceed up to the White House. So while my fellow pedestrians and I were waiting for an appropriate break in the traffic, we saw a bit of the parade going through, including historic military re-enactors (in Revolutionary-, Civil War- and World War I-era costume, some crazy female equestrian flag display group, and Senator Jon Tester and Governor Brian Schweitzer, both of of Montana.

I waited for the inaugural luncheon to finish and hopefully see the presidential party head up towards the White House, but couldn't wait for that: as it happened, Union Station was mobbed amd I had to walk most of the way to Dupont Circle, and then I got a bus out to the Palisades , finally making it back to bed for a quick nap before the evening's festivities.

Rock for Barack

2009-01-26T01:07:00.010-05:00

OK, that title is too easy.

Last Sunday the Presidential Inaugural Committee held a concert at the Lincoln Memorial as part of the Inaugural Opening Ceremonies, with spectators seated around the Reflecting Pool in Constitution Gardens. I went and enjoyed it thoroughly.

Lines were the order of the day--of the whole week, really. I deduced, and the press reported, that the Sunday concert was something of a dry run for Tuesday's inaugural ceremony, as much for the spectators as for the organizers, to know what to expect--but then moreso.

Another theme of the week turned out to be the (presumably unlicensed) sale of Obama merchandise. Hats, shirts, buttons--everything was for sale. My favorite product was an "Obama air freshener." No joke.Getting to the Lincoln Memorial area was a bit of an adventure. Much of downtown Washington was blocked off to vehicular traffic. Military police with Humvees were stationed along 23rd Street and Virginia Avenue, Northwest, the route from the GWU-Foggy Bottom Metro station to the designated entry point to the Constitution Garden grounds where spectators were to be admitted, near 19th Street and Constitution Avenue, Northwest. I and some other would-be concertgoers wanted to take up a more brisk pace than the adagio moving average on the sidewalks and stepped into the streets, empty but for the security personnel. Evidently fast-moving pedestrians are a threat to national security, and we were ordered back onto the sidewalk by guys with guns wearing balaclavas. They didn't seem especially open to persuasion, and I was in a hurry to beat the crowd, so I mostly obeyed that directive.

The crowds, by the way, were tremendous, and when I finally reached the sidewalk where we were all searched for contraband, there was a rewarding sense that we weren't going to let anyone cut in line. I suppose all of us were tempted, but there was a lot of peer pressure not to do so. (Though once inside, people trying to push through the crowded mob were sometimes playfully heckled "VIPs coming through! Everybody let these VIPs come through here!")

So I and my 300,000 new best friends arrived early and waited for the program to begin. It was as crowded as anything I've ever experienced. I sorted my way through and (unhappily) wound up two or three "rows" of people in front of four loud schmucks, who insisted on providing a running commentary of lame peanut gallery-esque comments--mostly jokes at the presenters' expense, interspersed with calling out occasional Blackberried updates on the ongoing Eagles-Cardinals playoff game. The culprits included the guy in the backwards blue baseball cap and his nearby buzz-cutted friend. Fortunately, I had the good sense to distance myself from these knuckleheads about halfway through the event.

I counted myself lucky at 6'4" to see over most everyone's heads, up to the Lincoln Memorial and the big screens, but shorter visitors would have had mostly a view of the back of other peoples' heads. A couple people went Zacchaeus-style, climbing up trees with varying degrees of success and, one imagines, comfort.

Honestly, at about a quarter mile away, all anyone could see was the Jumbotrons, either more or less obstructed. And so, I have a series of pictures of the Lincoln Memorial and Jumbotrons with celebrities.

The show got started with an invocation by the Right Reverend V. Gene Robinson, Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire, whose audio feed was inaudible to the crowd until near the end. I'm told that HBO's later repackaging of the event cuts out this segment and can only speculate that this played a part in the opening audio snafu.

Bruce Springsteen and a red-robed gospel choir sang The Rising (an Obama campaign event staple), and Martin Luther King, III, spoke.

People didn't quite display proper symphony etiquette, loudly talking on cell phones and to one another during all the performances and speeches (especially the aforementioned knuckleheads behind me) but I could hear most of the event. Frequent overflies by planes on the River Visual approach to DCA made it hard to hear every word. Though it must have been cool to be on one of those planes and look out to see this tremendous mass of people

I knew some of who was going to be in the starting lineup--U2 and Bruce Springsteen, among others--but was truly astonished when Steve Carrell, of The Office fame, came out, speaking as neither Michael Scott or his Daily Show persona. Stevie Wonder joined in a medley much more characteristic of his public profile.

Samuel L. Jackson resisted what must have been a strong urge to make a Snakes on a Plane reference. Tom Hanks (not pictured) read from Aaron Copeland's Lincoln Portrait--inevitable, I suppose, at the Lincoln Memorial, with another Illinois president and Lincoln admirer about to assume office.
There were a host of other presenters, but the two biggest names were probably Bono and Obama. U2 was the exception in two regards: the only non-American act and the only to play two songs--two rockin' songs, I might add. Maybe not everyone was or is the biggest U2 fans, but I was glad to hear City of Blinding Lights (another from the campaign event playlist) and Pride (In the Name of Love).

Then the president-elect spoke for a few moments.

I think there were a few other speakers after that, and a big sing-along of This Land is Your Land, but it wound down quickly, and the task at hand became how to disperse a quarter million people. The police sensibly discarded their policy of "no pedestrians in the streets" policy (in force just a few hours before) and let us all go on our merry way.

My merry way led me up 17th Street, passing the Red Cross headquarters bedecked for the occasion and those same soldiers/MPs from earlier, now posing for photos with (mostly female) civilians in front of their Humvees. (One cameraman asked his subject to flash him a peace sign, but the sergeant pictured here on the left resolutely gave him only a thumbs-up, perhaps in deference to orders to be nonpolitical while in uniform.)

Even more amusingly, near the DAR Constitution Hall, either Fred Phelps' group or copycats set up a few anti-gay picketers. This was either a smart or very dumb move, to catch thousands upon thousands of Obama supporters just having been rallied up by not one but two leaders known as "The Boss," and some pro-gay marriage activists were either very quick in reacting or very well prepared, setting up a counter-protest which gained much more sympathy from the passing crowd.

I met up later that evening with some high school friends from Pittsburgh, where we watched parts of the Steelers-Ravens game, culminating with a Steelers win (of course), and stopped by a Capitol Hill Steelers bar.

What a day!

The Brooklyn experience

2009-01-26T00:51:00.002-05:00

In New York, I paid my first-ever visit to Brooklyn (except perhaps when getting to or from JFK or LGA from Manhattan), and I was favorably impressed. I was staying with a friend in Williamsburg so I saw more than my fair share of fixed-gear bikes, but I also made it out into "real Brooklyn" for a bit.

I headed over to the Brooklyn Museum and saw their ancient Near Eastern collection of Assyrian and Egyptian artifacts, as well as various paintings and decorative arts. Anywhere else in the country (or the world) this would be a first-rate collection but since it's just a subway ride across town from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, it gets second billing and tourist hordes generally head over to the complex on Central Park. There were a handful of visitors to the Brooklyn Museum and a number of school groups but it seemed quite underpopulated.

Inspired by the Parks Conference, I wanted to see Prospect Park, as well, so took a detour through what seemed to be a regular neighborhood to visit it. Prospect Park, larger than Central Park, was also designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, and Olmsted declared it his favorite. Surely it's more fun when it's not freezing out, but I certainly did get a feeling for the place.

Of course, I've heard some of the jokes and stereotypes about living in the Outer Boroughs, and heard some of them enunciated when I mentioned that I was staying by the Bedford Avenue subway stop--in jest, I'm sure. Walking to Prospect Park, I overheard one aggrieved Brooklynite complain about the snootiness of a Manhattan resident, and made the case that he wasn't inferior simply because he had to cross a bridge or go in a tunnel to get to Times Square. I found Brooklyn delightful and after getting a brief primer on relative real estate prices, I'll say that Brooklyn is a great place to visit--even if some people wouldn't want to live there.

Train, train, don't go away

2009-01-26T00:38:00.004-05:00

Uh, you get a pillow. And a blanket. Let's see, uh, you also get a drink.

-- Amtrak conductor, explaining the benefits of buying a business class ticket versus a regular coach ticket.

To get from Pittsburgh to New Haven, and then from New Haven to New York, and then from New York to Westfield, New Jersey (whence I got a ride to Washington) and then around New York and Washington, I've been traveling substantially by rail. As it turns out, trains are great.

The Pittsburgh Amtrak station has four trains a day, two routes going each way. It's not the most convenient in terms of schedule but if it's snowy and you're not in a super hurry--and don't mind saving some money over airfare--it's a nice change.

Drama at Burger King

2009-01-26T00:02:00.003-05:00

Scene: Burger King, Whalley Avenue, New Haven, Tuesday, January 13, around 6:30 p.m.

[Enter Ian, Paul and Sarah. Sarah, a vegetarian, is snacking on a bag of carrots she just bought at the grocery store.]

Homeless guy, for some reason allowed by BK management to engage with customers. Hey guys, my name is Sam. [unintelligible]
Ian. Hi, Sam!
Sam. [unintelligible] ... and today's my birthday.
Ian. Today's your birthday? Happy birthday! How old are you?
Sam. Um, uh... [unintelligible] ...uh, 48.
Ian. Forty-eight! That's getting near fifty.
Sam. Uh, yeah.
Ian. I'm going to go over here and place my order now.

Meanwhile, stage right:

Other customer. [to Sarah] You tryin' to make everybody feel guilty?
Sarah. Uh?
Other customer. With the carrots, eating healthy, you know.
Sarah. Um, not really, just snacking. I'm a vegetarian. You want some carrots?
Other customer. Sure, I guess so. Thanks.

[Other customer spots Ian's Obama '08 fleece.]

Other customer. Hey man! Obama!
Ian. Hey yeah! Yes we can! Yes we did!
Other customer. That's what I'm talkin' about! You have a good night.
Ian. You too!

[Other customer exits. Paul and Ian get their food, then they and Sarah step outside on the way to Paul's car.]

Sarah. That was possibly the most surreal thing that's ever happened to me.

[Exeunt omnes.]

Day one

2009-01-21T14:57:00.000-05:00

So far, so good.

More later.

I saw it

2009-01-20T00:40:00.003-05:00

Question: What does the White House look like with just eighteen hours left in the Bush Administration?

Answer: Beautiful.

Pass/fail: TRIP 0109

2009-01-14T12:38:00.002-05:00

I'm just wrapping up some five days in New Haven, and I had a pretty good time. I toured a number of the Yale museums, even though some of them had floors closed off that I really wanted to see. (I also saw the K of C museum, which inexplicably had no exhibits about Colonel Sanders!) I saw Paul ("BGP") and Sarah from Peace Corps and hung out with them, as well as other folks I knew more or less directly. I looked at New Haven/Yale architecture, played in the snow, and impersonated a Yale student (again!).

But I had three big failures!

No pictures! I had pictures of a lot of this stuff, and maybe I should have taken some more but ultimately I didn't.
No law school! I was hoping to get a reading on the situation at Yale Law School, perhaps talking to some current law students, but YLS operates on a baffling schedule and the students are mostly out of town.
All aboard! Except me. I missed the 11:57 train to New York by about two minutes, and will be on the 12:57 instead. Unless I write too much here and miss that too. But I am going to make it there, so I'll make it anywhere.

Bumping into in the 'Burgh

2009-01-07T23:42:00.005-05:00

This is like walking into a Zulu vocabulary lesson!

-- My brother Ted, upon seeing the African savanna exhibit at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History

I'm wrapping up a few days' visit to Pittsburgh which, I have to say, has been a success. I walked all over parts of the inner East End, saw parts of the Carnegie International exhibit, met up with some old friends, and had a grand old time generally.

I was almost disappointed with the trip, though. Since my family moved to Chapel Hill in 2002, I've made about six trips back to the 412, and every time, I've run into people I know just randomly on the street, and usually within not very long of arrival. So as I was entering day two of my stay and not bumping into anyone, I thought it might not happen. People move away, after all--witness me, not staying in any one place for more than 30 days at a time in the last three years--and then just the chances of me being in the same place as someone I know (let's be generous and say that would be out of a pool of maybe 1,000--maybe) and it would be completely possible to be in town and not see anybody. Of course, the longer I stay, the greater probability I see someone I know, and I can also affect this by hanging out in public areas where people would be (Forbes and Murray Avenues in Squirrel Hill, Walnut Street in Shadyside) rather than sitting in a hotel room or any other low-traffic area.

So you all will presumably be pleased to learn that I did in fact run into some people I knew. Nobody to whom I was or am particularly close (my definition of "run into" excludes arranged meetings) but people whom I recognized, and who recognized me. One from Frick, the other from Schenley, which is about the distribution I've had in the past. So huzzah for getting that probability sorted out!

Update: I forgot to mention, I was also stopped by a girl on the street who liked my Obama fleece and after talking for a moment, we realized we had a number of friends in common. We initially speculated in the 50-60 range, but according to Facebook only ten. But that's something, right?

Ian went down to Georgia

2008-11-29T17:29:00.005-05:00

I just couldn't get enough campaigning in before the general election so I came to Atlanta for seconds. (Looks like that door I hit at 7:20 p.m. in Akron on November 4 wasn't my last for this cycle.) Jim Martin is in a runoff election for the U.S. Senate and I'm helping out with the final push to get people to vote. It's a weird situation since runoffs invariably have lower turnout than regular elections, and it's said to be very close.

Some fun quotes from the past few months while I've been canvassing at voters' houses:

me: [interrupting a flow of vitriol from an annoyed canvassee] Um, ok then, you have a nice afternoon, sir.
him: You have a rotten afternoon!
-- Akron, November 1, 2008

me: [as {voter} opens the door]: Hi, my name is Ian; I'm a volunteer with the Jim Martin for Senate campaign...
him: Oh, get out of here with that bulls***.
-- Atlanta, November 29, 2008

me: ... Great, and remember to bring ID with you when you go to vote.
voter: Fo' sho'.
-- Atlanta, November 29, 2008

GOTV (Get Out The Vote) operations are a lot of fun, especially when they involve hopping in and out of a car dropping off door hangers. So I've been enjoying myself and finding myself working 12 hour days again. Such is the campaign life.

A large proportion of the people working here are organizers and staff from Ohio, many of whom I recognize and know from my time there. It's like a reunion for us, doing more of the same stuff. Lots of fun so far, except for sore feet after a long day knocking on doors.

We'll see how it turns out Tuesday night!

Campaign in Columbus

2008-09-27T08:35:00.003-04:00

Briefly--
I got into Columbus yesterday morning to work with the Ohio Democratic Party's Youth Vote Corps from now until Election Day. So far it's looking to be great fun except for occasional long hours. My legs hurt now because I walked around about five and a half miles yesterday since (a) I hadn't figured out the bus system yet and (b) it was a lovely day and perhaps most importantly (c) I didn't check the scale on the map and didn't fully appreciate how far it is to walk 4 miles.

We're based in the ODP headquarters, which as far as I can tell was at some point a church. I mean, what kind of office building has funky 1970s-era stained glass windows (not visible in this picture), a (now-converted) gym in the basement and signs for the "Fellowship Hall" and "Music Room"?

Those old houses

2008-09-27T08:26:00.002-04:00

After the conference, I drove around western Pennsylvania and northeast Ohio with my mom seeing the places she grew up. I loved being able to go to Johnstown, Youngstown and the Cleveland area and seeing the houses where she lived at various points in time. They all seemed to be in lovely areas and in the future I'll have to go back to spend more time in those areas. Of course, as referenced above, the great weather in Pittsburgh extended across the region, and it's easy for any place to seem nice when it's sunny and 73 out.

Pictures later.

Weathering the conference

2008-09-27T08:20:00.003-04:00

Finally--

The weather in Pittsburgh earlier this week was just unbelievably wonderful. Sunny and 73 degrees Fahrenheit every day. Of course, people who've spent time in Pittsburgh know that this kind of thing is pretty rare.

One running joke throughout the conference was various speakers saying some ironic variation on the line "And of course, the weather is always like this!" This happened easily three times a day in different meetings. The most groan-worthy had to be at our closing event under the tent at Schenley Plaza where the chairman of the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy board said the obligatory remark. That was OK, but then Bill Peduto, a city councilman, arrived late from another event and, not ten minutes later, did it again.

There were a lot of eye rolls after that one.

Post-conference

2008-09-27T07:44:00.002-04:00

Regular readers here may have heard from me in one way or another about the Conference on Urban Parks sponsored by the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy that I was helping with last week. That was a lot of fun and, I'd say, a resounding success. We had some 600 people in attendance from ten countries (and it would have been eleven if the guy from Pakistan had his visa approved). I was in charge of collecting all the PowerPoint presentations (in .ppt, .pdf and .pptx format, which was difficult because I couldn't open .pptx files to check them for completeness). This was more epic a task than it might at first seem; I was downloading these files from sometimes-fickle FTP and Gmail servers. Then sorting through who was late with the presentation, who wanted to make changes, who just never got back to us on whether he or she was going to even have a presentation. Not to complain, but between the technical and the interpersonal difficulties, I had a few moments of frustration.

But in the end it worked out fine with no major (or even, I think, minor) issues. One attendee, who was asked to moderate a panel discussion after the scheduled moderator was unexpectedly unable to come, said that she had been to dozens of conferences over the years and this was the best-organized of them all. She also noted that she is not always so friendly and can sometimes be acid-tongued, so it was all the more rewarding to hear that. Praise from Caesar is praise indeed.

Cultural interchange, kind of

2008-09-18T12:10:00.002-04:00

Sometimes I can be very clever. I'm working today in the offices of the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy and since it is getting to be crunch time for the conference, they ordered in lunch for everyone working here, some items from a Chinese restaurant and a salad and some ziti from an Italian place. I was perusing my options when someone standing next to me said she wasn't sure if she wanted Chinese or Italian. So I said, "Why don't you have some of both--the 'Marco Polo special?'"

As I say, sometimes I can be very clever.

Some pictures

2008-09-17T23:59:00.002-04:00

Things happen to me from time to time and I often like to document them with pictures so without further delay, here is some visual evidence of my life.

I turned 24 a few weeks back and my wonderfully generous Peace Corps colleagues Kate and Brody Weber threw baked me a birthday cake. Astute observers will note that my initials, IBE, are spelled out with exactly 24 chocolate chips. I was given a large piece of cake to take with me, which I did, but then left it in the refrigerator of these gringos living in La Campa, so it was lost, to me at least.

I said goodbye to people in San Manuel on August 27, including Asunción the municipal treasurer, one of the more competent people I dealt with, shown here helping some citizens with their financial questions.

On my last morning in San Manuel, August 28, I saw this woman outside Angélica's comedor sweeping the dirt. Not sweeping up the dirt or sweeping it off from some surface, but just sweeping the dirt on the dirt road from one place to another, nearby, place. There has got to be some metaphor for international development work in there somewhere.

This is me right before closing the gate to my house for the last time.

My friend from JICA helped me take some of my things from San Manuel to Santa Rosa and let me pose for a picture in the truck, as if I were driving.

There will be more to come, including more pictures from my last weeks in Honduras, once I have the time and motivation to put them online. Huzzah for high-speed Internet!

Leaving on a jet plane

2008-09-05T18:01:00.003-04:00

Tomorrow is the big day! I'm flying back to the U.S., from TGU to RDU via IAH. So I'll arrive in Raleigh-Durham at 10:32 p.m. EDT if everything goes according to plan.

I have to finish packing, which mostly involves deciding which things I am going to keep and which I am going to leave behind and/or donate. So that is causing me some stress but not enough to address it. Needless to say, I will be up late dealing with that and also partying with friends.

Dear Honduras: I'll see you later. Peace Corps bought me a round trip ticket, coming back on October 10, so maybe I'll be back then, but maybe not.

Dear U.S.A.: See you tomorrow.

Busy

2008-09-02T02:25:00.002-04:00

What are we going to do with all this stuff?

-- Howard Dean, contemplating the fate of his campaign merchandise after he ended his 2004 White House bid

Hi everyone, I haven't posted lately for a variety of reasons. I've been busy, primarily, doing odds and ends that one needs to do at the end of a time like this. I left San Manuel for the last time last Thursday, August 28, and got a ride from San Manuel from JICA, who brought me and Shannon onward to Tegucigalpa. I owe them big time.

As now-Chairman Dean contemplated four and a half years ago, I am asking myself what to do with the things that I had in my house in San Manuel. Some of them I gave away, others I sold, others I returned to their owners as I was just borrowing them (on long term lease) in any case but too many things I just brought with me. That was the dark side of the wonderful JICA jalóns; it didn't force me to pack light then so I have to do it now.

I also have to do all the COS (close of service) things like take a zillion medical tests (four stool samples!) and do a lot of paperwork. I also have to write my DOS (description of service), a semi-important official documentation of my time in Honduras which I will inevitably put off until the last minute. (Actually, I hope not.)

I have pictures that I'll upload later, perhaps after my return to the U.S. On Saturday I'm flying to Raleigh via Houston Intercontinental from Tegucigalpa; anyone who would like to visit at IAH should plan on being there between 4:19 p.m. and 6:55 p.m. The welcome party committee should plan for an arrival at RDU at 10:32 p.m.

Postscript to previous post: Also, I never found my backpack. I put up fliers and announcements on the radio but to no avail.

Now hear this

2008-08-31T18:25:00.001-04:00

I had a series of very interesting observations I was going to put here but they escape me at the moment. This is why people write things down, I suppose. Maybe they'll come back to me later.

Another one rides the bus, or not

2008-08-07T16:15:00.003-04:00

Well, today I did something I haven't done since I've been in Honduras: I missed the bus. Actually, I guess you could say I missed it coming back from site visit in September 2006 (it left 5 minutes before the scheduled time) and I missed the bus to Yorito in December 2006 on the way to Tom's (I thought there would a bus leaving later than 1 p.m., which, there were not). But I really missed it today, because (to be mature and blame myself) I spent too long at the Internet café and then went to get lunch and stop at the pharmacy when I didn't really have time to do it, or because lunch took way too long (I waited about 10 minutes to get a lunch that usually takes 2 to prepare) and the phamacy didn't have my order ready that I had emailed about yesterday, to be an unsympathetic character and blame external factors.

The mayor of San Manuel is in town, though, and he's going back up later today and will take me, so that kind of works out. Another upshot is that I get another hour online, of which I am happy to take advantage. But I had a backpack and some shopping bags on the bus which I am now not riding, as well as a big water bottle, so I have been kind of scrambling to get people there in San Manuel to take care of it for me, which, amazingly, seems poised to work out. I guess I have the right people's numbers programmed into my phone.

I do a lot of things here that could turn out badly (any bus ride carries the potential of a crash, as does every time you get in a car anywhere in the world, for that matter) and have gotten very lucky to date. Today, I threw snake eyes when I needed a seven, but it was a small stakes game. Yes, I am the archduke of metaphors.

Counting down

2008-08-06T18:03:00.002-04:00

I've been counting down for longer than I'd care to admit, but as of when I write this (July 24), I have five weeks in site and just over six until I leave Honduras. I've been "in country" for more than two years now, and in the final stretch, a period of limbo between my second anniversary and when I actually leave, having completed my ostensible two year commitment. That training period messes all those calculations up.

Now, nearing the end, I have to change my mindset and behaviors. Whereas before, I bought food and other supplies for the long haul, I've now got to balance buying enough versus too much for the short time I have left. For a long while, I've been out of book-acquisition mode, focusing on reading what I have--I'm never going to make it through it all--and getting books out of my house, to pass on to someone who will enjoy them. A few weeks ago, I delivered a large, heavy backpack's worth of New Yorkers, Atlantics and Economists as well as a handful of assorted book sto Santa Rosa where at least they will be glanced through. (My goal in all of this isn't that this all be saved, necessarily, but that I not be the one to throw it away.)

I'll also be getting rid of other items, and while some are take-it-or-leave-it (who wants my two broken plastic deck chairs?) many items are in demand, chiefly among them my refrigerator (Jack has dibs) and my electric stove, even if it kind of melts the insulation on the wire when the left burner heats up for too long. Other things (empty glass jars I was saving for some unknown purpose, the tortilla maker I inherited from Leo) I've given away already, but most of the rest I'm hanging onto until the the last possible moment. My water pump, for instance, I plan on using until the bitter end here. Also, it's some sentiment that makes me not want to think I'm really done here, or even winding down, though I certainly am.

It's certainly ambivalent for me here in the final stretch. On the one hand, I feel as if I still have more work to do here. On the other hand, so many things are just so difficult here--shopping, communications, travel, even bathing requires 20 minutes' lead time to heat the water--that I'm ready to go. Lately I've been telling myself, "I don't have to live like this--and in two months, I won't."

My plan for now is to leave San Manuel for good on August 28 and make it to Santa Rosa de Copán, erstwhile home of the Peace Corps House, and see Barack Obama give his acceptance speech from the Convention in Denver. Either that same night or the next, there will be the Noche de Fumadores (Smokers' Night), the annual party sponsored by the local cigar factory. I will, of course, not be smoking, but it's evidently a fun event and something I'd might as well hit on my grand tour on the way out. So between August 29 and September 1, I make my way to Tegucigalpa, where I have COS processing, including a battery of medical tests (we need to produce three stool samples, and something approaching half a gallon of blood, I'm told), canceling my Honduran residency, closing my bank accounts here, taking a final Spanish-proficiency exam, filling out various forms documenting my time here and describing my site. That runs September 2-5, and then on September 6, I will be catching a plane back to the U.S.A. Best guess, "Welcome Home" committees should be at baggage claim at RDU around 4:30 p.m.

UPDATE: The countdown is now three weeks until leaving San Manuel and just over four to arrival in the U.S.

This Hard Land mourns Tim Russert

2008-08-06T17:58:00.001-04:00

As mentioned previously, I have the best parents ever, in that they devote inordinate amounts of time and energy to burning me DVDs on their DVR of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Dad does the recording and burning while mom makes sure they get to me, is generally the division of labor, as they tell me, and furthermore, once I'm back in the U.S., neither of them is sure what my dad's going to do with the time he doesn't have to devote to editing out the commercials and burning the episodes to DVD. And at some point, noticing that most Mondays' shows included a reference to an interview done on NBC's Meet The Press, they started recording that as well and including it on my packages. So between these and my Newsweeks (referenced here), I am generally up to date about six to eight weeks after the fact. My various podcasts keep me in the loop on a more realtime basis, and it's sometimes confusing to be mentally occupying two different points on the calendar.

So on July 22, when I popped "IBE Pkg 81" into my laptop, which includes programs from June 10-16, 2008, I had known of Tim Russert's death for over a month, and I knew that the program for Sunday, June 15, would be a tribute to him, hosted by Tom Brokaw. Seeing Brokaw on the verge of tears up was telling about what Russert must have meant in the NBC family, and I was happy they were able to give Russert such a fitting tribute.

I was also happy to see clips from episodes that I could remember seeing when they aired, and when I saw telling interviews from the 1990s and early 2000s, I kicked myself for not having watched it before late 2006. Some of the things they told about him I had known about and seen online closer to the time of his death, but I was somewhat stunned to learn that while a student at Cleveland's John Carroll University, Russert was a concert promoter and had brought a then-unknown singer named Bruce Springsteen to campus. On tour in Europe, The Boss dedicated a song to Russert's memory on that Saturday night, and NBC closed the hour playing a montage of photos of Russert and his family to the sound of Thunder Road.

Springsteen's music is often of a fairly depressing character, writing, as he does, in large part about tough times in the Rust Belt. (Listen to Youngstown, My Hometown, and basically the whole album "The Ghost of Tom Joad" for a pretty good sample.) And even a Meet The Press "New Timer" such as myself knows that Russert was a diehard Buffalo fan; I don't think it would be unfair to characterize him, in the words of Howard Fineman (speaking of himself), as being "absurdly proud of [his] hometown." (In fact, Fineman and Russert, both big-time Washington media guys coming out of Rust Belt cities, seem to have had similar life trajectories. I wonder if they themselves ever meditated on that fact.)

All this combined for me, a sometime member of the Rust Belt Pride fraternity (you may be eligible if you're from Joel Garreau's Foundry) no matter where I might currently be registered to vote, to feel more personal than it should have. So I had a very depressing evening a few days ago, I'll miss Tim Russert on NBC's election coverage this year and probably won't be able to hear Thunder Road again without thinking of him.

Mississippi medicine and meals

2008-08-06T17:56:00.001-04:00

There was a medical brigade in San Manuel a few weeks back. Medical brigades, as they are known, are groups of doctors, other medical professionals and other volunteers who come to various places in Honduras and set up shop somewhere for a couple days and try to attend to the medical needs of the local people. They seem to be mostly from the U.S., at least the ones that come to Honduras, and since they don't necessarily speak Spanish, Peace Corps Volunteers often have the chance to help out as translators, or in other roles. So when I heard that a brigade was in town, I walked up to the school where they were operating and offered my services. They were closing up shop for the day, I was told, but the guy told me I could come back the next morning and see what there was to be done.

So I came back the next day and they put me to work guiding people through the school compound on a semi-labyrinthine route, which was more daunting of a task than one might think. They had a ton of orange string strung up to create "lanes" that people would in theory travel down from one station to another, but people often needed guidance, specifically in the form of telling them "No, please don't cross the line. Yes, back under the string, and down to the end. That's it, but no, no, no, don't cross the line. Yes, thank you." This is partially attributable to the design of the route, but probably moreso to the custom of people in this part of rural Honduras to squeeze under, over or between lines of barbed wire which are set up to impede the passage of cattle but not of people, so it comes very easily to them to crouch down under one single, non-barbed string.

I was also called upon, from time to time, to serve as a general-purpose translator since they had brought about 10-15 mostly high-school aged bilingual Hondurans to do that, so I was only occasionally asked to tell somebody something or another, such as that they are out of the backpacks that they were giving away yesterday, due in part to some people taking two, three or four per person, leaving none for people coming today. Sometimes the clients were very persistent about trying to get a backpack or some of the other items that had allegedly been given away earlier, but I was able to convince most of them that we were indeed out, and only once or twice had to go get the boss of the operation to have him tell her himself. I was also able to tell them a little more about the area, answering their questions about the area. Somebody along the line, perhaps a Baptist minister they'd talked to in San Pedro Sula, had told them that in San Manuel and its environs there was a lot of idolatry and idol worship, and I was glad to have the chance to express to them my skepticism of that, as well.

The Medical-Dental Mission saw about 3,000 people over the course of three days--or rather, processed about 3,000 cards; there were a number of people who came through more than once. The two dentists saw about 200 patients and pulled around 250 teeth between them, which, unfortunately, was the only dental service they were offering. Everyone went through a triage session and was diagnosed with something or another even if it was just an occasional headache, then was seen by a dentist if he or she had a bad tooth, maybe received eyeglasses and finally went to the pharmacy station to pick up vitamins, ibuprofen and whatever else he or she needed. Every client or family group also received a "family pack" with goodies such as a toothbrush, toothpaste, shampoo, soap and often tennis balls and candy. The candy, of course, was a big hit, and most of it seemed to be consumed on the premises, leaving the wrappers and other trash right on the ground.

The group was from Mississippi, through the Baptist Medical-Dental Mission and they brought, in addition to a decent M*A*S*H-esque operation including pharmaceutical supplies and a truckload of Bibles, their own kitchen staff, kitchen appliances and down-home Dixie cookin', to which they graciously invited me. So for the first time in my life I had tomato gravy (not, as I had idly speculated, a tomato-based dish but rather, as I was informed, one based on grease and flour), and for the first time in a long while, I had grits and biscuits, and for the first time in San Manuel I had other such American classics as baked beans, chicken salad, coleslaw, real hamburgers with real French fries and real Heinz ketchup. After explaining it to my dad, he captured the essence of my job: guide people down the lines, smell the food as it cooks and then line up to chow down when it was meal time.

So that was a very rewarding experience for me. It was a welcome change from my generally very slow days in San Manuel--I was fairly exhausted after working two full days from 6:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.--and I got to see a lot of people I knew. Sometimes it seems that I don't know many people, and indeed, I don't know that many people all that well. But over the course of those two days, face after face seemed familiar and I knew many of them, if not by name than as "the guy who has the little store at the end of the street and who always is wearing that old cowboy hat." As far as I was concerned, it was a wonderful chance to see the entire town and belly up to some good cooking. And if somebody got a medical condition taken care of, it was a nice lagniappe.

Additions ex post facto:

One of the Honduran translators had a Steelers shirt on. Made me feel right at home. He's in the middle, I'm on the left and one of the Mississippian volunteers is on the right.

There were crowds of hangers-on, interested in taking home even the scrap boxes in which they had brought the supplies. The brigade staff and volunteers went "downtown" to see San Manuel's historic church.
I also hitched a ride all the way to Santa Rosa on their bus!

Nota bene

2008-08-06T17:52:00.000-04:00

One of my joys of being in the Peace Corps is the ample time afforded me to read. I only sometimes take advantage of this opportunity, especially if I have a new set of DVDs to work through. Anyway, the Peace Corps administration has procured for all Volunteers--worldwide, as I understand it--subscriptions to Newsweek magazine. Newsweek sometimes is a bit conservative, always comes at least a month late, and the Good Life section without fail highlights some of the most disgustingly opulent items avaiable in the Western world. (Though I do see how, in the days before the Internet, CNN en Español (or Inglés, for that matter) or cell phone towers, this subscription could be a vital link for PCVs to the outside world. I once commented, before San Manuel got a cell-phone tower, that North Korea could have detonated a nuclear weapon in Manhattan and I wouldn't hear about it until I went to Gracias.)

But I also, from time to time, have gotten my hands on other publications. Sent from home, brought back from vacations or given away by other Volunteers (who no doubt had them sent or brought them back), I've seen a fair number of The New Yorkers, The Atlantic Monthlys and occasional copies of The Economist, Harper's, Time and Foreign Affairs.

While reading a "recent*" issue a few months back, I was surprised to see the author of a movie review was David Denby. David Denby? He's an actor in The Office, right? You're telling me that Roy Anderson from the warehouse is moonlighting with The New Yorker?

Ah, but reviewing The Office's credits recently, I realize that the actor is David Denman, not David Denby. So that's probably a totally different person.

* Recent here probably means it was from mid-2006 to late 2007. While I know it's not true and doesn't hold across the board, in some major sense time has stood still for me since June 2006, when I came to Honduras.

Lately

2008-06-17T10:03:00.003-04:00

'How was it?' like you came back from a movie.

-- PCV Rich Schreib, on how people may ask us about our time in the Peace Corps, expecting a brief answer to a question that may not ever be answerable, June 6, 2008

I no longer wanted to be permanently temporary, but in many ways I am.

-- RPCV Ed Bresnyan, Sr. Rural Development Economist, The World Bank/Honduras, June 4, 2008

Well I guess it ain't easy doing nothing at all, oh yeah
But hey, man, free rides just don't come along every day.

-- The Offspring, Why Don't You Get A Job?

Last week was our COS conference (close of service, for those of you who don't speak acronym), which walks us through various aspects of the procedures to check us out from Peace Corps Honduras, and to psych us up for going back to the U.S. more generally. Career options, how to parlay our Peace Corps experiences into our next adventures, how to describe it effectively to non-Peace Corps people, etc. The first two of those quotes come from that conference (Rich was going over a list that small groups had come up with as possible stressors once we get back and Ed was part of a panel of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers).

The last is, of course, from The Offspring's 1998 song from its album Americana, and occurred to me thinking about the phenomenon of jalóning that I and other PCVs do more or less regularly. Allow me to tell you that if you are a gringo in Honduras of a certain demographic (and you dress the part), free rides do just come along, if you wait long enough.

So that meeting was a good experience if a little dry and repetitive ("Wait, which is our routing number for our Readjustment Allowance direct deposit?") and a great chance to see the other members of Hondu 9, aka Hondu Awesome aka Hondu Rock 'n' Roll. It's a sobering moment to think that as of the end of that conference, I had but 91 days left in Honduras, and now that is about 81. So that's going to be interesting, making that transition.

I don't really have any plans after September 6, when I am planning to fly back to the U.S., from either Tegucigalpa or San Pedro Sula, then to Miami or Houston, and finally to Raleigh-Durham. I'm working in some capacity at the 2008 International on Urban Parks from September 21-23 in Pittsburgh. Then it's campaign season, and I'm going to try to get a job with some candidate or another, or failing that, volunteer with someone. (I'm backing Obama now, check Fundrace to see my donation once that gets posted.)

So I'm going to try to finish strong in San Manuel. I just worked on a big electrification study which will hopefully turn out to be something rather than a bunch of wasted effort. All in all, I'm very ambivalent about leaving. I desperately want to leave some aspects but sometimes I feel somewhat unfullfilled and want to stay until I can complete my mission, whatever intangible that thing might be.

I've got around six more trips on the San Manuel bus--a trip which I never really enjoy--and I don't really look forward to any of them. Both because I don't much like the ride, but also because of all the other stuff. Ambivalence is the order of the day.

Good grief

2008-06-14T16:00:00.002-04:00

Hillary Clinton dropped out off the presidential race. Tim Russert died. I'm leaving Honduras and the Peace Corps in 84 days with a lot of ambivalence. What's this world coming to?

I'll write more Monday.

Antiquing in Antigua

2008-05-03T14:19:00.005-04:00

Mom, dad and I left Panajachel and headed over to La Antigua Guatemala (the Old Guatemala), better known as simply Antigua. Antigua was the capital of Guatemala until a series of earthquakes over the course of several centuries persuaded the authorities that it was going to be cheaper in the long run to move everyone to the new capital than to rebuild every couple years, so the capital was moved to La Nueva Guatemala (the New Guatemala), aka Guatemala City and the former Guatemala City was renamed La Antigua in a kind of Istanbul/Constantinople thing. (Dear Antigua Guate: Them's the breaks / You just simply had too many 'quakes.)

It's a charming town stuck several centuries in the past because its main industry dried up and has been unintentionally preserved while its neighbors modernized, like Rothenburg ob der Tauber and and Bruges in Germany and Belgium, respectively. While at first it was by chance that things stayed the way they were, it is of course now carefully preserved, as the town is very conscious of its status as an attraction for tourists.

The earthquake-damaged ex-cathedral reminded me of some ruins in Rome, particularly the Basilica of Constantine, in certain ways.

The place is indeed crawling with gringos, and not just tourists, it seems. Someone told me (or maybe I read it, I forget) that some astonishingly high proportion of Antigua's residents are foreigners, somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 percent. That seems way too high, and though mine was at best a cursory survey I would say the figure can be no more than 25 percent.

They also sell many textiles and other souvenirs to tourists and others, and we of course bought some of that.

A nice little town, all in all. The next day we took a cab over to Guatemala City to get on the bus to head back to Honduras, but on the way passed through the "Plaza Estado de Israel," I imagine a monument to Guatemala's role in the establishment of the Jewish state. (As I'm told, Guatemala's position and intention to vote in the United Nations in 1947 was not pre-announced, and put Israel over the top in a key resolution.

Great day

2008-05-03T04:33:00.003-04:00

I'll interrupt this recounting of the events of March 28 - April 5 to note that today/yesterday, May 2, I had an absolutely wonderful day. Everything went my way, pretty much, and I've been in a terrific mood. To wit:

The good times started yesterday when I went to La Campa to help Ellen with a computer problem at her computer center. I popped some RAM chips in and out and reformatted the drive, but I couldn't fix the problem (nor even diagnose it) but the staff arranged for a thank-you lunch for my efforts anyway. And Ellen, an excellent baker (mistress bakeress?) had banana-chocolate chip muffins to give away. I got a jalón about halfway back to San Manuel, and then, in an Ascension Day miracle, the bus was not way overloaded; by contrast, there were even seats empty!
I came back into Gracias and Santa Rosa to get some medical supplies today (Friday) and after a fairly (but not disgustingly) full bus ride, I got another jalón to Santa Rosa within ten seconds of arriving at my favorite spot.
One of my randomly met travel companions in the back of the pickup truck left behind her cell phone when she got out, so I was able to return it to her later in the evening after calling the most recently dialed number to explain the situation. Makes me feel good about doing the right thing.
I got to see my friends Kate S., Sean and Shannon serendipitously on the streets in Santa Rosa, without any particular planning or foresight put into the rendezvous. (I love chance meetings; the many times nothing significant happens makes the occasions when something neat does happen makes it just that much cooler when it does.)
My hair was getting dangerously shaggy and I was glad to get a much-needed haircut.
I opened a new bank account which, if I've understood the terms and conditions correctly, will pay me a rate of interest easily ten times what I'm currently receiving. On a deposit of $250, I should be getting $6-7 every month. Just for leaving it in the stupid account!
I got my medicines, huzzah for anti-allergy pills!
I saw and said goodbye to Paul who is heading out in the next few days. His apartment was pretty bare and I was able to relieve him of some random items in his "up for grabs" box.
Paul and I had good times in one of Santa Rosa's department stores when he was looking to buy a new piece of luggage, but the one he wanted had a wheel that was messed up. I was able to fix it but it broke again (a reinforcing plastic chip had fallen out and was the source of the problem) so instead we bargained with the salesperson and made a variety of jokes about buying one or another and asking for discounts because the included lock wasn't working, and then of course getting the discount! And Kate S. was there too (again, randomly; I say that not that she wanders town at random but that it was not a pre-arranged get-together) and so we all enjoyed the fun bargaining atmosphere.
At the big supermarket in Santa Rosa, evidently Fridays and Saturdays they usually have free samples of a lot of things, so as I was shopping I was munching on this and sipping on that. I'm never going to shop on any other day of the week.
I participated in salsa night in Gracias at Guancascos, and didn't trip anybody or fall myself. I did manage to always creep back towards the wall and have to readjust towards the center of the room, but I think I have the basic motion down. Nacho salsa is great, but this is surprisingly fun as well.

So that's it, just a series of great happenings, any one of which would be smile-worthy, and the whole series of them is simply fantastic. It's been a long time since so many things went so right for me all in the same day, but here's to hoping that it's a frequent occurrence from here on out.

2008-05-03T03:42:00.005-04:00

En la feria de Atitlán
Yo compré un violin.
Lin, lin, violin,
Lon, lon, violon,
Nete-nete-nete, clarinete
Tara-tara-tara, la guitarra.

¡Vaya usted, vaya usted en la feria de Atitlán!
¡Vaya usted, vaya usted en la feria de Atitlán!
So sang Ian Everhart the second grader as he walked through Walnut Street in Shadyside on several afternoons after having sung that song in Spanish class at Liberty Elementary School in Pittsburgh earlier in the day. More recently, I was able to visit Lake Atitlán, if not the fair itself, which was our next destination (but not stop) after layovers in San Pedro Sula and Guatemala City. The road is long and winding from Guatemala City to Panajachel, the principal town on the lake's shores, especially the second half, which elicited advisories that they were feeling carsick from mom and dad and from me the mostly-successfully suppressed desire to say "Wait 'till you get to San Manuel!"

Our hotel there was the beautiful Hotel Atitlán, which sits on the edge of a natural preserve and counts a beautiful garden among its many refinements. On several occasions, mom pronounced it to be the equal of any of the many nice places we have stayed on our travels around the world.

Mom's initial judgement was confirmed by (presumably) that of Guatemala's wealthiest, who come to the lake by helicopter (to avoid the many hairpin turns on the road) with such frequency that the hotel has not one but two helipads (which made me think of my as-yet-unrealized plan to establish the Hanszen Helipad with a can of yellow paint on the patio behind the Upper Commons).

Topiaries!

Upon arriving, we had lunch and proceeded to do nothing but chillax in the pool which overlooked the lake.

The next day we took a series of boats across the lake (going on a public water ferry as well as hiring our own private lancha, as they are called). We first stopped at Santiago Atitlán, which from our incomplete survey seemed to be almost exclusively comprised of stalls selling various textile souvenirs. Looking at a map later, it seems we didn't make it up to the main part of the town, but mom's bad knee probably wouldn't have made it both up and down the hill, and dad's "banana* bag" didn't have much more space after buying so much stuff.

We then "chartered" a ride over to San Marcos which has the reputation of being the most hippified of the villages on the lake since it has been adopted by the holistic and transcendentalist medicine crowd as their favorite location to offer massages and acupuncture as advertised, and, one imagines, also drink a lot of herbal tea. It seems that the owners of many of the restaurants in the "Gringo quarter" of San Marcos close their businesses (coffee shops, restaurants) on Tuesday and/or are just uncommonly lackadaisical about being helpful to potential customers, since we visited at least two establishments--both of them a fair trek off the main road--which were closed that day, without any such indication on the many signs pointing us to the hard-to-find-in-any-case entrance to the Japanese restaurant or the other restaurant that they would not be serving lunch. After a brief flirtation with a vegetarian restaurant featuring two shirtless guys talking over some organic beverage ("Well, I've been here eight weeks already and might move on if I hear back from the Co-op in Portland but I really like the vibe here so who knows, I might stick around another few months and take a leave of absence from college next semester," goes the conversation, one imagines.), we finally settled on an Italian-inspired restaurant where my micro-pizza took so long to come out, I can only assume they were airlifting the mozzarella in from Naples. We explored a little more and, partially to my surprise, once you stepped out of the Gringo quarter, it was a regular little Guatemalan town, and for all I could see, not that different from many Honduran villages, for that matter.

We rounded out our day with another boat ride to Panajachel and a drink at a lovely restaurant overlooking the lake, and then hired another craft for a quick jaunt back to our hotel, which next to the helipad had a dock for just such arrivals as ours.

* So called because on the Hedman Alas bus from San Pedro Sula to Guatemala City, we used it as our one allowed carry-on to bring my laptop along, and also tossed in water bottles, a sweatshirt, various maps, books and, you guessed it, a banana or two, which inevitably exploded somewhere en route to leave dad's reading material and the back end of my computer bananafied. We got most of it cleaned up but it was an exasperating mess to pick out banana from the port interfaces on the back of my computer, which, fortunately, did in any event not impede its function. Guess what object we won't be putting in the same piece of luggage as fruit of any stripe next time?

Craving an enclave

2008-05-03T02:35:00.009-04:00

I've never been to the Panama Canal Zone when it was under American administration (nor was I even alive during its existence) but I have to imagine it was a lot like the Telamar resort. A 1964 article in Time Magazine says that the Zone's urban centers of "Balboa and Cristobal are model company towns with look-alike houses, bargain-priced groceries [and] liquor." At Telamar, the company wasn't the U.S. government running a canal, its locks and military bases, but the United Fruit Company exporting bananas and wielding undue influence in the years when Honduras was the prototypical "banana republic." The premises which contained the residences of United Fruit executives were converted into a beachfront hotel some years back and the place is now the resort par excellence on the north coast of Honduras. And it was our first stop after my parents arrived at the San Pedro Sula airport in their nine day visit to Central America.

Telamar is a beautiful property but bizarrely isolated from the surrounding town of Tela, which I suppose is the point of it all. When my brother came to visit with a group from our church a year ago, four of us stayed in a "cabin" that was in fact a spacious three-bedroom house no doubt once occupied by some banana administrator and his family. This time we looked at the rooms in the more modern buildings but chose were a one-room townhouse-esque cabaña which seemed more suited to a bachelor banana man and was also very nice.

As I say, the older housing had a certain colonial feel and also emitted a strange Stepford vibe since the many fine houses and the streets they lined were utterly vacant but well-maintained and all of a certain style (a feeling that, as I reflect upon it, can be replicated in many American suburban gated communities during business hours). But this was one week after Semana Santa (see previous posts) and probably a fairly low season after many, many people had been at the coast the previous week. Of course, it all had an institutional feel of controlled development, since, like a suburban developer's project or a university campus, building projects were presumably under the control of just a few people making all the decisions.

But it's a lovely place and while I can't speak to the availablilty of groceries, the food and beverages, as in the Canal Zone, were priced well, either at the main restaurant (which has a great view of the beach) or at the "Tiki bar" which lies at the end of a short boardwalk (and, sitting right on the beach, also affords an excellent view.)

The pool is an attraction as well. We decided that the three "lobes," isolated the one from the other by low footbridges, would serve to make the place seem less crowded by blocking the field of vision when one large open pool would allow the eye to sweep over all the bathers in one view. The waterslide (known in Spanish as a tobogán) was fun, as was the in-pool bar. Just like the Diani Reef resort in Mombasa!

After checking out of the hotel, we drove to Tornabé, a mostly Garífuna village a few miles down the coast. The beach was just as nice as at Telamar, but we were clearly no longer in the colonial enclave but the real Honduras, which is what mom and dad had come to see.

Carpetbagging

2008-03-21T17:57:00.006-04:00

Santa Rosa de Copán is one of a number of towns in the Spanish-speaking world where they have a series of processions during Holy Week, or Semana Santa as it is known in Spanish. I saw this in Spain during Lent 2000 and have now seen it here this year. (Last year I didn't see it here but saw Holy Week and Easter in a different setting.)

Anyway, Santa Rosa has the custom of creating fairly elaborate "carpets" out of sawdust, sand and other materials. The practice is also big in Comayagua, the colonial capital of Honduras, and Antigua Guatemala, as I understand it.

Starting early on the morning of Good Friday, many citizens in Santa Rosa start laying out the sawdust along a route of the city's streets, in preparation for a procession to commemorate the Stations of the Cross with floats (carried by pedestrians), a marching band and many hangers-on.

The photo is of the sixth station, Veronica limpia el rostro de Jesús (Veronica wipes Jesus' face with her veil).

After the procession has passed, people (presumably the ones who put it down in the first place) sweep up the trampled remains and cart it away, mostly in plastic sacks.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

Bam!

2008-03-15T19:35:00.002-04:00

Anybody else see this article: George Speaks, Badly? Gail Collins tears into George W. Bush. No mercy!

Reverse jocularity constant

2008-03-10T17:41:00.003-04:00

As I was unpacking after returning to San Manuel about a month ago now, I had occasion to reflect on some recent incidents. I was going through my stuff and came upon my empty camera case. (Sigh.) But then I had to chuckle:

"The joke's on him! I still have the USB transfer cable!"

Eh, OK, it's only kind of funny. But American Express did reimburse me for the amount of the camera I had charged (I used a gift card for about a third of it, so I'll not be getting that quantity back.) So huzzah for American Express!

The great Ian robbery

2008-02-10T09:07:00.000-05:00

Before you ask: I'm fine. A little shaken and down one camera but fine.

I was walking from the Hotel Guadalupe II in Tegucigalpa to the Peace Corps office and I had my fairly new digital camera in my hand. I was crossing the street behind the Peace Corps office in front of the Apostolic Nunciature (Vatican Embassy) and this guy came up to me from my left. I thought he was going to ask me a question, but pulled a handgun out of his shirt and moved to my right to grab the camera out of my right hand. He kept moving and hopped on the back of a motorcycle driven by and accomplice and sped away. It was over before it even started.

So that put a damper on my day, and it was a further pain to find a police station to file a report, and I then had a 7.5 hour bus ride to look forward to. But I wasn't hurt and didn't lose any of the many items in my great big backpack, and I was still covered for most of the value of the camera under American Express' Purchase Protection Plan.

So that was a bummer but I do hope it's the worst that ever befalls me. After 20 months, I would say I've had a great run of luck and this was not a case of it running out, but just running thin.

Super week

2008-02-03T23:55:00.000-05:00

Today was Super Bowl Sunday (or just Super Sunday) and Tuesday is Super Duper Tuesday so this is shaping up to be a Super Week. It was a nail-biting game and it will be an exciting election night, which I will watch with the Municipal Development project's Reconnect conference at Gloriales in Tegucigalpa. And Super Duper Tuesday is also Fat/Shrove Tuesday, aka Mardi Gras. (It makes more sense now that I'm kind of learning French through my podcasts.) So it should be fun!

Taking the plunge

2008-02-02T20:10:00.000-05:00

To date I've taken the coward's way out and not committed to support a nominee in the Democratic nomination contest, but as of Thursday night I am declaring myself for Hillary Clinton. I feel that Hillary is more realistic about what she can do once elected and while I like Barack Obama I still have lingering feelings that he's not quite ready for prime time.

That I've waited this long ought to make it evident that it wasn't an easy decision to make, and that I make it with only rational exuberance. As I've told several people, I would have liked to see a Dodd or especially a Biden candidacy, but they polled too low for them to remain viable candidates.

Anyway, I saw the one-on-one debate Thursday night at Jack's and that clinched it for Clinton with me. What they say about Obama is that his speeches are great, but in other formats he is less impressive, and it's true, as far as I'm concerned. I saw a Hillary Clinton speech a few years back and she's pretty good at that, so that, the debate and the New York Times' endorsement put her over the top.

I am deeply concerned about the polls that indicate that some 40-45 percent of Americans would not vote for Hillary Clinton under any circumstances, but I have to hope that in the next eight months, assuming she is the Democratic nominee, whatever irrational dislike people might have for her will dissipate, or at least be replaced by rational dislike of her. I also remember Dr. Earl Black's assessment of the American political landscape in the mid-2000s that said that it's only really the middle 15-20 percent of the electorate that is decisive, meaning that perhaps a quarter of the middle is squarely against her, but the other three quarters, and the majority of voters at large, would consider voting for her. To turn the question around, as to whether I would consider voting for any Republican for president (or any office) under any circumstances, I might, but short of an alien invasion and the dissolution of the Democratic Party, I can't easily imagine them.

At the debate I saw on Thursday, there were few substantive differences between the two candidates. I feel that Hillary has a better grasp of the healthcare issue and based on what I heard, I marginally prefer her plan. I saw her other proposals as more realistic and detailed than his, and her encyclopedic knowledge of most themes was evident that night as well.

Obama's recurring charge about "judgment"--a not-so-thinly-veiled reference to Hillary's vote in the fall of 2002 on using force in Iraq--connects with me, but only slightly. That vote has turned out to be a mistake, and I wish she would just say as much. She comes close when she says that if she knew then what she knows now, she would not have voted that way, but it is unsatisfying to see her holding her ground on this issue, which is a loser for her in this nomination contest.

But as Obama says, he wants to look to the future and not back at the past, and there is not a lot of daylight between them on their plans for going forward Iraq. And even though Clinton says this was the single most important vote of her career, this was just one vote, and what about the hundreds of votes where her judgment was unequivocally the correct one?

About the time I post this I'll go to hillaryclinton.com and make a donation, probably $10. The contest will probably be settled on Super Duper Tuesday and I want to go on record, win, lose or draw before then. And rest assured, I'll support the Democratic nominees up and down the ticket on November 4 with my vote, and I'll work for them and donate more between now and then.

Whatever you do, do NOT pack any heat

2008-02-02T20:03:00.000-05:00

As I understand it, there is a new group of Peace Corps trainees coming in sometime in February, and the packing list for them is probably about the same as it was for us a year and a half ago. So, for the benefit of these (and all future) Peace Corps Honduras trainees (and perhaps to some extent to PCTs in other Central/Latin American countries, or worldwide for that matter), and for the record, here are my additions and subtractions for what to bring.

Clothes: In most sites that I've seen, blue jeans are about as dressy as you will ever need to get. (This is true for men; I don't want to hazard any guesses about women's attire.) The list I got suggested we bring five pairs of nice pants/jeans (two weeks' worth). In my experience, you should balance that more towards jeans and less towards "nice pants." T-shirts are fine for most days in site and a polo shirt or short-sleeve dress shirt is about the upper limit on what will ever be expected of male volunteers. Do definitely bring a sweatshirt and/or sweater; a lot of time in Tegucigalpa and its environs as well as other parts of Honduras (the west in particular), it can get into the 50s Fahrenheit, and most houses have minimal insulation and no heating. One bathing suit will probably be more than enough. Gentlemen, definitely bring a nice shirt, slacks, tie and maybe a blazer for swearing-in; ladies, something comparable. You may wear it again (if the president or U.S. ambassador comes to your town) but can pretty safely send it back with visiting family or friends, or take it back on your first vacation home.
Shoes: My list says that shower flip-flops can be bought once you get here but anything bigger than a men's size 8 might be hard to come across, so plan accordingly if you've got big feet. With respect to shoes/boots/sneakers, I wear hiking boots in my town since the roads are in bad condition with a lot of rocks and I appreciate the reinforced sole, but anytime I go out of site I wear sneakers because they're lighter which is good especially if I'm carrying a lot of luggage. I brought some "nice" shoes and am glad to have them with me for any fancier occaions but have not worn them except now and then in nineteen months. Incoming PCTs may want to consider bringing two years' worth of shoes since (a) quality shoes will probably be cheaper in the U.S. and (b) they are only sold in places that might be a ways away if you're in a remote site.
Backpack: I initially brought a school-sized backpack which was on the small side, so for any expedition over one night, I had to get a clunky duffel bag which was less than ideal for bus and foot travel. If you've got the space to pack, bring both a large-ish backpack (maybe not super-huge) and a smaller one for day trips or overnights.
Pocket knife/Leatherman: Motion seconded. Remember to toss it in your backpack when you hit the road in case you need it while away from home.
Flashlight: I worked with a basic AA flashlight for my first eight months in Honduras and bought a LED headlamp on my first trip home, and highly recommend that new PCTs bring a headlamp, with perhaps a regular flashlight as well. In power outages at night, candles and matches are the default option for the locals, and they're fine in many cases but for cooking or reading are not so great.
Camera: Again, I second the motion that new PCTs bring a digital camera. If you already have one, don't necessarily buy a new one to bring since there is a good chance that it may die on you and warranty service is hard to come by.
Rechargeable batteries and charger: Definitely. If you're in a site without electricity, you'll save yourself a small fortune with your headlamp and you'll also be able to use it with whatever else you bring. Rechargeable is the way to go.
Durable water bottle: Definitely bring a Nalgene or equivalent water bottle. Reusing other plastic bottles is not an attractive option for me because (a) you have to buy and replace them every so often and (b) recycling is essentially, if not actually, nonexistent and every bottle you throw out will end up in some landfill.
Sunglasses: Bring some medium-range sunglasses (in the neighborhood of $10-15). The selection available here bifurcates between $100 brand names in the big cities and $2 pieces of junk everywhere else.
Personal hygiene items: The only toothbrushes I have seen in most places are the extra hard bristles not recommended by the ADA so one or two with soft bristles would be a good thing to bring. I like to have one that I have for travel and one for home so if I forget I'm not stuck out on the road with nothing. Perhaps also look for a travel-sized (4-6 ounce) bottle for shampoo for travel (to be refilled after every trip) so you're not packing a regular bottle of shampoo in your toiletry kit every time.
CD player etc.: In my non-scientific survey of PCVs in Honduras circa 2007, I'd say about 70 -80 percent have an iPod or comparable MP3 device. (If yours isn't an iPod, the rechargeable batteries will again be useful with this. I knew one guy who had a solar recharger for his iPod for his no-electricity site but don't know how well it actually worked.) Others have CD players or listen to music (and podcasts) from their computer (of which more later). Not many people seem to listen to shortwave radio: probably about half of sites have some kind of cable if you wind up buying TV and with the other technology people bring, shortwave isn't as vital a link to the outside world as it probably once was for PCVs. I have a regular Walkman radio/tape player combination I used to listen to NPR on the way to staging but haven't used it much since; IMHO the (regular terrestrial) radio stations play such hideously bad music here that I never listen to them.
USB memory drive: A USB drive, aka thumb drive or jump drive, is just about the most useful single item of technology you can bring, certainly as relates to work. Probably 256 MB and up will be sufficient. A 1 GB drive is available here for about $15 but for the same price in the U.S. you may be able to get a better quality item.
Surge protector: Many houses (including mine and probably yours) will have power sockets that are not properly grounded. Bring a lightweight surge protector from the U.S. I'm not sure how well this would actually protect anything in the event of a power surge, but it does give me some peace of mind. A battery-heavy uninterruptable power supply will probably be more trouble than it's worth and you will have hauled its ten pounds all for nothing if you're placed in a site with no electricity.
Laptop computer: Nobody I've met who has brought one has regretted it, and several people who have left theirs behind have subsequently wished they had it and/or had family send it to them once they're here (at a cost of around $100). The usual rules apply, as with all expensive toys, but if you are careful and have a little bit of luck, it will probably get neither broken or stolen. To the uses listed on my packing list (facilitate work, pre-write emails, download digital photos, watch DVDs, listen to music) I would add that you can download podcasts when you're online (expect no more than an hour a day if you're in a bigger site to 4-5 hours every other week if you're in a more remote place) to which you can listen back at home. This is my number one way I keep up with the world. My favorite podcast providers include NPR and Slate.com, and others have found worthwhile downloads from the BBC, PBS, hometown radio stations, various universities and The Economist.
Resealable plastic bags: Bring a handful to get you started, but in most medium-sized towns you can find basic resealable bags, and usually even Zip-loc brand, if not necessarily the fanciest versions with the sliding seal or all sizes available in the U.S.
Warm cap/scarf: I thought I was absolutely crazy or just stupid bringing a sweater and warm knit cap to Central America (latitude: 15 degrees North) but I underestimated the cooling effect of being in the mountains and there have been occasions on which I have needed them. It may be necessary only a few days out of your two years, but it's small enough to be worthwhile.
A few good books: Do bring a few and expect to leave some/most behind. There is an active trading network among PCVs and the other gringos/English-speakers here (mostly teachers at bilingual schools and retirees) and, as the list indicates, the library at the Peace Corps office in Tegucigalpa is fairly extensive. I imagine it grows a decent amount every time a group finishes up and people donate their personal libraries to the common cause. You will probably also inherit books from nearby PCVs who don't want to haul their library to the capital as they leave. If friends and family want to send you books here, it will cost around $6-10 for a moderate-sized paperback and up to $25-30 for a large hardcover.
DVDs: Traded among the same network as books, DVDs of movies (and TV shows, etc.) circulate among the PCV and gringo community. If you're going to bring a lot, it's best to invest in a CD/DVD wallet and leave the clunky cases at home. Leave some slots open for things people wind up loaning you.
Medical supplies: The packing guide says not to bring anything, but it may be wise to bring just a handful of minor pain relievers (Tylenol, ibuprofen) and antihistamines for the first few days until the Medical Unit can get you what you need.
Spanish language materials: The list I got says not to bring anything. I got a Spanish-English dictionary and two grammar books on either day two or three but I've heard complaints from the last few training groups that they either didn't receive dictionaries or had to wait (an uncomfortable situation if you've been ranked as a Novice-Low), so maybe a pocket dictionary would be good just to help you interact with your host family. If you're bringing a laptop, a digital dictionary CD may be worthwhile. Good ones--I have one from Microsoft Encarta--will have more esoteric definitions than all but the most unwieldy print volumes.
Cell phone: I found it useful to bring my U.S. cell phone with me to staging so I could make say any necessary last-minute goodbyes and make other final pre-departure arrangements. You could set your contract to expire the day after you leave or, if you have a benefactor who will pay a few bucks each month to keep you on a family plan (thanks, Dad!) you can maintain the account and then use it the moment you step off the plane as you return on vacation and at the end of your Peace Corps term. If your phone is compatible and has international roaming enabled, you can also use it to send text messages and make (expensive) calls in an emergency. For instance, my first night in Honduras, I couldn't make a collect call to tell my family I had arrived safely and everything but I did send a text to that effect which got the message across. The cheapest phones here retail for no more than $40, and some vendors have promotions where the phone is free if you buy $25 or $30 worth of minutes.

I basically agree with everything else on the list, so do read that, but I thought it might be useful for incoming PCTs to get an annotated packing list with field experience from the field.

And, before I forget and you get all busy packing, welcome to Peace Corps!

Final thoughts on Vacation II

2008-01-21T12:51:00.000-05:00

Fun times also included some where my dad misheard "car" for "cat" in conversation as we were driving along, and for the next half hour we had a laugh riot substituting the two words in every sign along US Route 13 in Delaware: "Cat wash." "Used cat dealership." And so forth.

Also, Davis, one of Ted's buddies, said "I wish coffins could tessellate," referring, I imagine, rather, to the irregular hexagonal shape of coffins, particularly as seen in old vampire movies. That was a moment of great hilarity.

Also, in Trader Joe's on December 28, I saw a guy who looked a lot like Paul David Hewson (aka Bono). He even had the glasses on indoors. I was going to take a picture of him with my camera phone but then I chickened out and didn't. I will, hopefully, be able to post a picture of a guy from San Manuel to whom I refer mentally as the "Bono of San Manuel." They don't have a lot in common, but he does always does wear sunglasses (every time I've seen him, at least) and, given the chance, he would no doubt wax rhapsodic on the need for fair trade for Africa to world leaders.

Also also, I thought it was really bizarre in Miami airport when everybody was speaking in Spanish around me. More strangely, I would speak in Spanish to them and I wouldn't get the "Wow, the gringo speaks Spanish" looks I might get in other parts of the world. One of the convenience stores was impossibly maddening because nothing was labeled with its price. I found the manager and asked her why nothing (candy, snacks, etc.) had its price beneath it, as you would find in every other store in the United States. She replied that you just had to ask one of the sales people because they knew all the prices. "But I don't want to ask about every stupid item, I just want to see the price and make an instant decision" I insisted, but she seemed to think the "just ask a cashier" was a satisfactory policy. It was like I was back in some pulpería in rural Honduras again, except here there were a zillion items and instead of me being the only person there, it was crowded and the cashier was fairly busy. The experience was more frustrating than it probably needed to be.

And again, until next time, take care of yourself, and each other.

Trip roundup

2008-01-07T12:43:00.002-05:00

Briefly--

After New York, we bounced around the Mid-Atlantic region, starting in Baltimore-Washington and then migrating to Delaware. On Christmas Eve, we went to both the 5 p.m. at Brown Memorial Presbyterian in Baltimore, home of a ton of Tiffany stained glass windows. A family friend is the music director there and we actually sang in the choir--my first appearance in a robe in a while.

Then we rode the mighty I-95 down to Washington for the awesome, ticket-only 10 p.m. at the National Cathedral. It was great but no surprise to anyone who's familiar with the quality of their liturgies. This was my first visit there since they completed their new parking garage. Structured parking, I know from my time on the Rice University Parking Committee, is unbelievably expensive, and underground parking much more so than an above-ground garage, so driving under the depths of the cathedral close I was impressed at the scope of it. Clearly, at the NatCat they are subscribers to the theory of "If something is worth doing, it's worth doing right."

[A photo of the garage's elevator lobby--built itself on a cathedral scale--will be forthcoming.]

On Christmas Day proper, the family made its way over to my uncle's house in Delaware to exchange gifts and all that. We stuck around until December 27 for the memorial service for my grandfather at First Presbyterian in Smyrna, after which there was a reception and a long drive to Chapel Hill.

New Year's was fun in Chapel Hill, as my brother and some friends resurrected the long-dormant potato cannons my dad's cousin gave us a few years ago, so we rang in 2008 with some blanks, igniting bug spray into the night sky. Then I scrambled to try to get done all my shopping, and then before I knew it (as we might have heard in Little Italy, bada-bing, bada-boom) my three week visit home was over.

Now for the final stretch in Honduras! Sometimes I feel it'll be a sprint, other times a marathon. Eight months isn't that long, is it? (To quote a Mormon missionary some PCV overheard a while back, the days are like weeks but the weeks are like days.)

The Quotable President

2008-01-04T11:54:00.000-05:00

One of the many excellent Christmas gifts I got was the George W. Bush daily countdown calendar, each new sheet revealing a gem of a Bushism. Flipping through, there are hits and there are misses in the series of quotes, but the one for January 1 was good:

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on.

-- 2001 Gridiron Dinner

Only 382 days left!

Sonnet for the first week

2008-01-04T02:15:00.000-05:00

I had the (brilliant/stupid) idea to sum up each week or segment of my vacation with a brief sonnet (Elizabethan, of course), but naturally wound up writing only one. Here it is. (I wrote it in about 20 minutes, working on it off and on while helping Ted with that soup.)

As I step out of Yale's art gallery
The sun is long descended from my view
Is over now my second day of three
But still I find so much I'd like to do.

The snow, once ankle-deep, is swept away
What's left is capped with a thin sheet of ice.
When there I dare to tread my legs just splay:
The kind of stuff we never did at Rice.

The Yalies' shadows fall on ivied walls
In this semester's final grueling week
The books are cracked within these storied halls,
Upon the lavish tables made of teak.

Behold the busy students walking past!
My visit: not the first, and neither last.

The Biggest Apple

2008-01-04T02:13:00.000-05:00

Frank Sinatra's song suggests that if one can make it in New York, one "can make it anywhere."
(I feel that way about living in San Manuel for two years.)

You can never see everything there is to see in New York on a single visit, but we tried. Starting at the Museum of Modern Art where I scoped out the work of a fellow Schenley High School graduate.
From there we went to St. Thomas' to hear a performance of the Britten Ceremony of Carols and Messiaen La Nativité du Seigneur, both of which were wonderful (we don't go to anything that's not good). The craziest thing was that we had to get there a half hour in advance to hear this (free) concert. That means there are some 800 people in metropolitan New York City who are interested in hearing a performance of these two semi-obscure pieces. Madness!

The next day we mostly wandered downtown, seeing one thing or another (including the J&R electronics store, which rivals the Electronics District in Tokyo for tech overload. From there I went with my dad and brother to the NBC studio tour which was worth it, even if they made it seem that NBC were the only network of any importance in the history of television. (Though, to be fair, if you asked me to name mega-hit TV shows, the ones that would come to mind are ones like Seinfeld and Friends, which were NBC projects, and I would be hard pressed to name many coming out of CBS or ABC.)

And of course there was a gift shop at the end, and while I didn't buy any of their overpriced merchandise, I did take a picture with some sample items from my new favorite NBC show.

The next day I did a tour of Central Park on my own and then met the fam at FAO Schwartz, home of the Big Piano. (It remains unclear to me whether this is simply a commentary on how large the piano is, or whether it's the Big Piano, named after the 1988 Tom Hanks comedy.) In any case, the two saleswomen/musicians/dancers seen here performed a brief "recital" which was a lot of fun. (Only $250,000 to have one custom installed in your home!)
From there we went to the American Museum of Natural History, which, I was surprised and pleased to learn, is in large part a memorial to Theodore Roosevelt. TR's great achievements are commemorated in murals in the main entry hall (his Nobel Prize-worthy peace negotiations in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War and supervising the construction of the Panama Canal), and also awesome is the impressive similarity of the entry hall to Rome's Pantheon--someone smart was definitely working on that project. (The exhibits themselves are, of course, also marvelous.)

I was about to write that the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh could hold its own with respect to the dinosaur collection, but was outgunned on the murals, but than I remembered that good old Andrew Carnegie is painted in as the black knight of industry at the Oakland museum. And there's another room which is like an inverted (atrial) Parthenon. Pretty good for a little town like the 'Burgh, I think.

Trip summary: New Haven!

2008-01-04T01:50:00.000-05:00

After arriving in the U.S. on December 13, I arrived in Chapel Hill after the interment on December 15 and spent two tranquilo days at home, mostly reviewing the 18 months' worth of mail and other assorted junk I hadn't had a chance to look at since June 2006. Then I flew off Monday morning for New Haven to hang with Ted a bit.

Compared to Texas, North Carolina is somewhat in the North, and within the territorial limits of the People's Republic of Chapel Hill, the ambiance feels very culturally northern, but crossing the 40th parallel reminds you what it is to be a Yankee, especially when there's snow on the ground.

The New Haven Green might more properly have been renamed the New Haven White, at least temporarily, for the 2-3 inches of snow that had fallen and the thin layer of ice that had frozen over. I had a great time talking on the phone with various people while faux-ice skating (skittering on the icy layer in my sneakers).

I crashed at my brother Ted's room at Yale, which was lovely but, um, cozy (not to say cramped), especially with me taking up the couch. His roommates all seemed like terrific guys and tolerated me well, given that it was a tight fit as is and it was finals time. One night Ted took me to the Saybrook basement and cooked up some delicious Japanese-inspired soup. On other occasions, I ate at local eateries and at the Saybrook dining hall, which memorably featured a waffle iron that would inscribe a big Y on your breakfast. Deliciously Ivy League!

During the days I mostly wandered around and appreciated the urban infrastructure and architecture.

I also saw what exhibitions and museums were open on that, a week with a low density of events. But the Peabody Museum and its dinosaur collection were great as ever.
Then it was time to get the train to the city.

To-do list for the next two days

2008-01-03T00:17:00.000-05:00

What's on my agenda before I head back to Honduras:

Shop for new clothes
Restore Thunderbird data from backup CDs circa July 2006
Get iPod headphones replaced (hopefully for free) at the Apple Store before the cord snaps
Review and upload photos from Philadelphia/New Haven/New York/Washington/Delaware/everywhere etc.
Print photos of my Educatodos students at Wal-Mart or similar place
Write more for this blog, including post the sonnets I was going to write to sum up each week I am here
Help make reservations for mom and dad's trip to Honduras in April
Download podcasts re: Iowa results!
Call various friends while I'm still in USA cell phone territory.

Happily done already:

Sketch out itinerary for 4/08 trip
Eat way too much
Sit on the Internet for hours on end

Travels, busyness

2007-12-31T17:27:00.000-05:00

I had been hoping to add entries over the course of my vacation but this is the first chance I had, or rather, the first chance I've taken advantage of it. Regardless, it's been a fun if busy time in Philadelphia, Smyrna, Chapel Hill, New Haven, New York, Washington and Smyrna and Chapel Hill again.

And while I am disappointed in the people whom I've called and who have not called me back before I leave United States cell phone coverage, you still have five days left to redeem yourselves!

And who else is excited about the Iowa caucuses?!