Recently in Travels Category

In my copious spare time these last few weeks, I gave a Tech Talk to some local users' groups in Google's Ann Arbor office, "Test Driven Development in Python: A Quick-start Approach". I was deeply impressed at the quality of technical folk I met there, some of whom had actually written some of the programming frameworks I use at Google. I took some pics of the audience from the speaker's POV, my first use of an iPhone for such an application.

Winston Tsang was kind enough to have taken some of his own photos of the event; I particularly like this one:

Time to pop my head back up into the blogosphere. I've got a few moments to mention what many of my friends have known for a while: I've moved to New York City for school, as an undergraduate (junior) transfer student in biochemistry at Columbia University, pre-med. These last few months have been among the busiest of my life to date... scratch that, these have indeed been the busiest.

I bit the bullet and did the Facebook thing: it was damned near useless to me before, now it's indispensable. Having spent far too much time there, I'm turning my attention back here. More later, stay tuned...

Gunshot taken at 7:07am east Texas time, photo shot taken at 8:43am, Tuesday last week:

As mentioned in a previous post tonight, this was taken from about 110 metres, from a blind near an identified hog trail, on a very large ranch of a friend of mine. I waited for 20 minutes before determining that none of the hog's clan would be following in his hoofsteps before calling my buddies (also in blinds about a mile from mine) for retrieval.

We are born, so to speak, provisionally, it doesn't matter where; it is only gradually that we compose, within ourselves, our true place of origin, so that we may be born there retrospectively.

Rilke, as quoted by Coetzee, as quoted by Donald Ritchie, as collected in "The Japan Journals", as editted by Leza Lowitz
p441

Last week, I took a coyote, a feral hog, and assisted in a friend's take of another feral hog, using one 150-grain Remington Core-Lokt in .308 caliber shot from a Jeff Cooper edition Steyr Scout in each encounter. This particular round (or remains thereof) I dug out from underneath the skin of the one I took:

This particular round hit the hog midships, high, and completely busted the spine, spleen, and vented the lower lobes of the lungs, causing pneumothorax evidenced by a "deflating balloon" sound when I first moved the hog carcass. Intererestingly, the lead core seems to have punched through the hog, leaving the copper jacket:

Here, I show the path of the bullet, taken by the hog from about 110 metres, entering starboard and (partially) exiting port:

You know, in this shot, I look almost as (literally) knackered as the hog itself. East Texas is hot and humid this time of year...

Once again:

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

Robert A. Heinlein
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long

One of the pleasures of having a Netflix subsription is being able to add oddball titles to my queue, click-and-forget, and receive it later as a "surprise." One such title is a short wine documentary, "John Cleese's Wine for the Confused":

Wine snobs, beware: Monty Python's witty John Cleese aims to educate the masses with this enlightening, snoot-free wine guide. Cleese guides wine novices through the basics -- finding wines you like, getting the best value, and serving and storing wine at home. His vintner's tour includes lessons in wine vocabulary and identifying subtle flavors. Not a fan of snobbery in the least, Cleese also reveals how to cork up condescending sommeliers.

Unlike a commentator in the IMDB entry, I'm not surprised Cleese would do such a documentary: in the early 90's, working for a company in London, I found the tedium of mandatory training videos greatly lessened with Cleese as presenter. He has an impressive resume of this type of stuff.

OK, made-up word time: "casinarcology", from "casino" and "arcology". If you've been to Las Vegas, you've seen them, mostly Steve Wynn's properties, e.g. The Bellagio, The Venetian, etc. And unlike Paolo Soleri's Arcosanti (which I've visited), a never-to-be-finished boondoggle staffed by grad students suckered into paying for the experience of "finishing" his vision, a casinarcology works.

As far as I know, I made this word up recently. It's a bit cumbersome, but it's mine.

Some friends of a friend started a geographically-oriented business review site, Yelp.com, with an apparent emphasis on restaurant reviews (but an ontology supporting very many more categories.)

I've joined on her recommendation, and have been surprised to discover just how useful it's been already: I've found some nearby places I'd never considered before, and am now using to drive some of my purchases at local specialty shops.

Now, whether Yelp is another Next Big Thing remains to be seen. It's a closed system, with no apparent provision for RSS syndication of the content we the users add to the review base, and relatedly, no leveraging of microformat standards such as hReview, a serious issue (thanks to Mike Linksvayer for pointing me to this recently.)

Yelp seems to have purchased a GIS-oriented business database, and coded some Google Maps integration into their interface. Rather nice, but entirely US-oriented, with no indication they're ready to scale into the English-speaking markets of Tokyo (big expat and traveller population) and other locales.

Speaking of which, I just tried inviting a good friend, an American living in Panama who could be a productive member of the Yelp community, and he sent me back this, reprinted with his permission:

'Hi Russell,

These morons ask for a zip code and won't accept my sign-up without one. I see this sort of shit all the time. When are US geeks going to get a clue the the US is not the world and that not everyone who has internet also has a "zip" code? So Thanks, but no thanks. I won't sign up with jingoistic idiots. Please feel free to pass along my exact words, if it pleases you.

Regards,
Sandy'

Wow. Well, he does have a point. I see this as one of those "We weren't planning to be so successful" scaling issues. Can't count the number of times I've seen this. I think the Yelpers really should have generalized their GIS integration to allow world-wide registration, from the very beginning. I have lots of friends in Europe, Asia, and South America who won't be able to join due to this and related issues. Maybe agitating in the Yelp forums about this might help; I've noticed they do tend to pay attention to issues of interface (e.g. marking businesses as closed or moved) so they may listen. Of course, they may be planning some kind of world-market rollout, but it would help if they advertised that somewhere prominent.

In the meantime, I'm going to use the hell out of it until and unless it ceases to be interesting. It's a much more convenient place for me to bulk-load all those pictures of food and storefronts I take in my travels, more so than the Movable Type blogging interface I'm using here, and since most of my reviews are locale-specific, it's probably a better place for my rants and raves about local businesses (and ones I visit in other cities.)

I've caught the "Billion Monkeys" meme from my English blogger friend Brian Micklethwait (whom I met during my London sojourn in the early 1990's), who coined the term to describe those who take digital photographs of, well, others of those who take digital photographs of others. Here's one from my trip last spring to Beijing, a tour guide in the Forbidden City:

Still going through my burgeoning archive of travel photos. Here's a ride I took - a bungee chair - in Beijing's Wangfujing shopping district. The guy on the chair is not me:

I'd had a bit to drink when I decided to do this myself; the boisterously friendly Chinese guy who shared the chair with me (since it was cheaper for 2, cheapest for 3) was plastered. I bought a copy of the video taken by the elderly, cage-mounted VHS camera, without having taken into account (I'd been drinking, remember) that the camera was recording in PAL format... doh! Eventually, I'll get it converted to NTSC, or directly to MPEG. Should be fun to see.

I've been too busy to blog the last few weeks: heavy school load and lots of travel. Your guess where I was last weekend:

Four weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending a Halloween party in Manhattan. I wasn't prepared with a costume, unless you count my normal get-up below as, um, "Visiting Silicon Valley Guy." On the left is Perry Metzger who is, ahem, a eusocialist insect:

As I write this, I'm seeing live footage of the aftermath of the jetBlue Airways flight which just made an emergency landing of an Airbus with a stuck nosegear at LAX. What an amazing landing! Hell, the pilot & first officer kept the aircraft exactly in line with the runway's centerline, right to the very end. Whoo hoo! You guys rock!

I'm just about to crash soon, having come back from the first of a multi-day Bujinkan training seminar by Arnaud Cousergue of Paris (Vincennes, actually) at the Bujinkan Martial Arts Center in Sacramento, a couple of hours' drive from here.

That's Dr. Pete Lohstroh, a UC Davis reproductive biologist, and myself. Pete's interested in medical nanotechology too, by the way, but that's deliberately off topic. I really do meet cool people in this art.

The shiner I acquired Thursday night is even more pronounced in this photo, but it doesn't hurt at all anymore. On a related note, Arnaud ended the day insisting on the use of padded training weapons through the end of the year, for various reasons with which I entirely agree. To that end, on the way back from Sack-of-Tomatoes to Saint Jose, I stopped at the Home Despot near the Sacto dojo and acquired the requisite materials:

- a $1.97 bag of thin 6' bamboo rods from the Garden section
- a $1.97 6' section of 5/8" inside diameter foam copper pipe insulation

I then duct taped 3 pinky-width lengths of the bamboo together at 9-inch intervals, put that inside the foam, and placed styrofoam caps at the ends, duct taping those. I finished by taping the entire thing lengthwise.

Looks surprisingly good, and not at all like a late-night vodka fueled project. I took photos of every step of the project which I will be posting in a few days.

Time to crash now.

I'm rested now and recovered from last weekend's attendance at the 4-day tactical shotgun course at Front Sight Firearms Training Institute near Las Vegas, Nevada. I surprised myself by making Distinguished Graduate, so I'm now qualified to come back to attend the 4 Day Advanced Tactical Shotgun course. On the second day of training, Greg Carroll snapped this pic of me after the two of us had done our respective runs through the outdoor canyon "clean the hostage takers out" simulator exercise:

The (visible) firearm is my Benelli M1 Super 90, with a nylon tactical sling and a GG&G M3 Tactical Illuminator mounting rail in the 2 o'clock position on the foreend, not the 10 o'clock position GG&G recommends on their website (experience in a previous course having shown me that, as a right-handed longgunner, the 10 o'clock position allows the light to bump on.)

I'd last done a tactical shotgun course about 4 years ago, and so I was quite interested to see how training doctrine had changed in respect of that weapon at Front Sight. The men in the evolution I attended - those 13 in the class who were there for the full 4 days - were all at least previous attendees at another weapon systems class (e.g. defensive handgun, practical rifle) so the class was run at a slightly accelerated pace befitting the audience. Attendees were about evenly divided between cops, active duty military (a Marine heading back to Iraq soon) and private citizens, all of whom were treated exactly the same by the instructional staff, the excellent Chuck Burnett and John Pierson.

One difference I noticed was the much heavier emphasis on incorporating movement, keeping the fight dynamic, and training that way to the limited extent allowed in the "square range environment." I was particularly pleased that, after the Monday (4th day) afternoon skills test, and the "load and go" indoor tactical simulator, I was allowed to do several rounds of 2-man team shooting on the move, with my new friend David L. Loads of fun, and I was pleased to find that a walking skill I'd been cultivating the last few years, walking fast with very short tank-tread heel/toe action to keep the hips and shoulders on level planes, allowed me to get good hits moving both forward and backward, without muzzle bob.

I'm at a level of membership at Front Sight that allows me to take any firearms course free for the rest of my life, much like some golf club memberships. So, I get to take these courses again and again, which allows me not only to revisit, revive, and refine my skills, but also to work out equipment issues. I've discovered I really don't like the Lyman TacStar SideSaddle mounted on the left side of the receiver: it catches on my clothing, when loaded it dampens recoil (and hence reliability) on this recoil-operated weapon, and with the standard provided cross-receiver screw, was coming loose even though I'd installed it properly and Lock-Tited it. I guess a couple of thousand rounds will do that to the Lock-Tite. That, and I'm leery of over-tightening that screw for fear of impeding bolt travel. Oh, and there's the issue of potentially "egging out" the screw holes on the aluminum receiver. My friend David assures me that, should I care to keep the SideSaddle, I can send the weapon to a gunsmith who specializes in Class 3 firearms with aluminum receivers, experienced in setting up weapons to resist receiver failure, but I'm going to switch to keeping my slug rounds on a belt carrier anyway.

Nor am I going to solve the "problem" of having extra ammo by changing out the tube magazine from a 5 to an 8 round capacity. This is my home invasion repellant device... if I can't solve The Problem with what's available in that weapon, then I'm in a very serious situation indeed. I'm more and more preferring lighter, more maneuverable weapons the more I train, with as few bells and whistles as I can get away with. I've heard more than one long arms instructor over the years comment on how students will arrive at a course with their all-singing, all-dancing Space Gun rigs, everything mounted everywhere, only to find themselves quickly shedding equipment after the first day... especially when training in the 105 F degree desert heat. Heh.

Recommendation: check out Estate Cartridge's low-recoil 12-gauge 9-pellet 00 SWAT loads. I've used this buckshot at a previous shotgun course, and had made the decision to attend this most recent course with too little lead time to order more of the same for this class. So, I had a mere few dozen of them to use at various times during this course, instead using a mix of Winchester and Federal buckshot for most exercises. No comparison. At half the price of Federal, the Estate-branded cartridges gave outstandingly tight and nicely distributed (e.g. no annular "donuts of death") patterns, turning heads on the firing line and eliciting a number of "what are you shooting, man?" enquiries.

I had the pleasure of remaking the acquaintance of at least one old friend, who was taking a course on an adjacent range. Additionally, I was happy to have a couple of libertarian friends, longtime (but previously untrained) gunowners, take the full 4 Day Defensive Handgun course on the same weekend. Both men, Alan and Chris, came away from the experience very much more competent than when they arrived.

A week ago, I caught a short segment of Fox News' business anchor Neil Cavuto interviewing Eric Anderson, president and CEO of Space Adventures, who was promoting his company's Deep Space DSE-Alpha program, a privately-funded Soyuz-based circumlunar expedition. I noticed, not for the first time, a surprising skepticism about private space travel from the normally highly pro-free enterprise Cavuto, who seems to be nurturing a serious blind spot on the matter, a dangerous case of NASA-romanticization.

Me, I'm sanguine about the DSE-Alpha, and hope to see Anderson's enterprise succeed. In the meantime, someone needs to buy Neil Cavuto a copy of Victor Koman's "Kings of the High Frontier." Abolish NASA, get the government out of the space business, and let people like Anderson do their thing without subsidy or interference.

Another image from my recent trip to Beijing, this one a sign at Beihai Park admonishing visitors not to do or bring certain things into the park. I'm still trying to figure out what it all means. One is a pictogram apparently forbidding rifles in the park:

Seen in an elevator in the office building where my friend Serin works:

In the heart of Beijing is the huge, well-stocked Wangfujing Bookstore. If you need maps, there are thousands of them available on the first (ground) floor, just inside the main doors. English-language books can be found on the 3rd floor. Here's a pic I snapped with my Treo 650 cameraphone:

Not only did I indulge myself with scorpions in Beijing last week, I also had snake meat and silkworm pupae. I've eaten plenty of snake, and this one was undistinguished (they're usually pretty rubbery), but the silkworm was new to me: a soft, pulpy interior in a paper-thin skin. I didn't have more snake later, but I did follow up with another silkworm grub skewer a while later.

Beware, beware of Baijiu! Within my first two hours in Beijing, I was taken out for kebabs and beer by my friend Serin. We met this affable guy, Ken, who'd enquired "Naguoren? (where ya from?)" and offered me one of his sealed shot glasses of baijiu. This was an 80-proof (40%) standard formula. After two shots, he brought out a bottle whose name translates from Chinese simply as "56 Percent." We shared that bottle. Apparently, I pulled out my Sony CyberShot to Capture the Moment:

I tried red eye reduction in iPhoto in an attempt to clear up my eyes in this photo, but apparently, the red-eye in this case is not a camera artifact.

I paid dearly the next morning for this act of intercultural male booze bonding, comparable only to an episode I experienced after boot camp, half a lifetime ago, when I swore, "I'll never drink that again."

With an endorsement like this, I had to visit. It surprises me to find out that this palatial facility (literally: it's on the grounds of the Summer Palace) is not listed in Frommer's.

One afternoon last week I rented an electric boat and plied around the north lake in Beihai Park. After returning the craft to the boathouse, I came across this guy doing taijiquan near the shore, practicing a jian form:

When he'd finished several iterations of the same form, he walked over to the bench where a couple of older women had been watching intently. He then started pushing the tip of the jian into the bench near them! What the hell?

Ah... it was a collapsing practice piece, neatly converting into an 8-inch assembly, which he then slipped into the carry pouch his wife held out for him. Neat! I wanted one of those jian then and there, but didn't have time left in the trip to shop for one. Rest assured it's on my shopping list for my next Beijing visit.

A little walking-around food (or "little food that was recently walking around") in Beijing's Wangfujing: Yanjing beer and scorpions. These little buggers are actually very good indeed. I've had scorpion once before, a different variety with a thicker, blacker thorax, in Thailand, also spiced, and also very good.

Last night, before leaving Beijing, my friend Serin and I had a late night snack at a small neighborhood shop specializing in kebabs and Hui specialties. It was pretty chilly outside, so we ordered some comfort food, such as this mutton bone soup, with the shafts cracked to expose the marrow, straws provided for convenience:

I'm a big believer in getting out of town on spring break:

Today after work I headed up for Thursday night Bujinkan training (the weekly outdoor session, which I'd been missing until recently due to school), and had a great time tonight. Before heading to San Francisco, I did a quick search for late night coffee shops with free wireless internet access, located within a reasonable drive of the training park, and found the Samovar Tea Lounge in the Castro/Mission district.

I'm sitting there right now, having "Russian High Tea" way too late in the day. Service includes all-you-can drink high-octane self-serve tea from - you guessed it - a samovar: "dilute to taste" is the operative term. This place is genuinely cool, and I highly recommend it.

About the "just because I can" thing: an acquaintance of mine, Marc Stiegler, once wrote in one of his novels that it's vitally important to maintain a childlike sense of wonder about the world. Here I am, sitting in a friendly place, an oasis of light in the darkness, warmth against the wind, music from the walls, and good food I would never have thought of making myself, talking to people in other cities on a 4-pound device that I use to bring me money... life is a good thing.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about my discovery of the cactus pear as an edible fruit. Here's a picture of that succulent delight:

This weekend in Half Moon Bay, I picked up a small bag of an intruiguing fruit I'd seen many times in several deserts, but never taken the time to investigate eating, the "Cactus pear," better known as the "Prickly pear" in the American southwest. I tried the Mexican variety known as Roja Pelona, a deep beet-red fruit the size and rough consistency of kiwifruit, less overbearingly sweet and with larger (edible) seeds than the kiwifruit. Delicious! It's interesting to note that the Israelis grow these too, as per Daniel Rogov in his "Cactus as an Edible Fruit":

With their large flat pads, their thorny fruits, and flowers that blossom annually, the sabra cactus is an inescapable and charming part of the Israeli landscape. Because the sabra cactus, which is a member of the genus Opuntia, grows easily in the sandy and limestone soils of the country and because the direction of its grown is easy to control, these sprawling cacti are planted by farmers as windbreaks and to divide their own fields from those of their neighbors. So well known are the plants that one of the best known regional stereotypes compares the personality of native born Israelis with the fruits of these cacti. According to the image generated by this stereotype, both are tough and thorny on the exterior but sweet and soft inside. Both the fruits and the native born Israelis are known as "Sabras".

Peggy and I visited Pescadero (south of Half Moon Bay) today, eating at a local place, Duarte's Tavern, which has been around since 1894. As an appetizer, we took some Hog Island oysters, which were quite good, though not as fresh as from the Hog Island restaurant at San Francisco's Ferry Building which we visited a couple of weekends ago. Later, heading back inland - and into warmer weather - we stopped off in Mountain View and happened upon this year's Small Brewers Festival. Next to the big top tent, an acoustically raucous place, is an alley with some fine lusty fare on offer. One of the food vendors was a group of Mexicans selling - among other things - barbequed oysters. We paid $6.50 for 3 huge oysters fresh from the grill, soaked in a fantastic garlic butter, and were blown away by the sensation... we'd had nothing like it, ever.

So, what do we do? We head home, where I fire up the barbeque and she headed to the market to pick up some oysters, to see if we could replicate the oyster recipe. One bottle of Chardonnay later, we think we need to head back to the festival tomorrow (after a morning at the shooting range) to research the recipe again. It was good, but something's different... some rice wine vinegar, maybe?

Stayed tuned.

A few days ago, Monica White pointed me in the direction of the Quent Cordair Fine Art gallery in my own neighborhood. Today, I find out about an exhibition in the neighboorhood of St. James Wood in London (which many years ago was my neighborhood too): Jack Vettriano, at the Portland Gallery. Sounds very interesting indeed... too bad I can't see it in person anytime soon. Of course, some of Vettriano's work seems like the type of thing that the Cordair Gallery might carry someday. Hmm....

About three weeks ago, I wrote that my friend Monica White had indirectly informed me (through her blogroll) of the existence of the Quent Cordair Fine Art Gallery in Burlingame, California, about a mile from San Francisco International Airport.

Well, on Saturday - on a whim - I suggested to Peggy that we head up to the gallery for the short remainder of the afternoon. We arrived about two hours before closing... and left about an hour after closing.

I'd called ahead to confirm that the gallery was, as indicated on their website, indeed open for the afternoon. When we arrived, a friendly lady greeted us and, upon hearing my voice, recognized me from my call-ahead. When I mentioned my name, she remarked that it sounded familiar, and that she'd actually - somehow - come across my blog recently and had even recommended that a friend of hers named "Carter" (whose contact I welcome) contact me about gun-related issues! I was happily astounded. I quickly found out that this friendly - and sharp - lady is Linda Zimmerman, the director of the gallery.

Linda spent the better part of three hours talking with me about the purpose of the gallery, the only one of its kind in the world, specializing strictly in high-quality painting and sculpture of the Romantic Realist variety (see Ayn Rand's "Romantic Manifesto" for an in-depth introduction to the genre.) I was deeply impressed at the operation, the selection, and the director. The storefront has had 8 years of profitable operation, but its recent years of online operation alone keep it sufficiently profitable that it can continue in business, without diluting its collection with low-quality pieces which would otherwise meet "school of art" requirements or with technically high-quality pieces which are outside those stated requirements.

The gallery itself has on display about one-third its total collection, the other two-thirds of which is in storage, but pieces of which can be viewed by the seriously interested. The walls are arrayed with paintings, as would be expected, and a number of bronzes are also on display. Linda encourages a healthy, tactile approach to the sculptures: touch them. At one point in our long, animated chat, she took my right hand and placed it on the hip of this statue, "Gratitude" by Danielle Anjou:

This is a lovely piece, and was strangely reminincent of the 1987 Boris Vallejo cover art for the Robert A. Heinlein novel "To Sail Beyond the Sunset," itself a triumphalist riff on Sandro Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus." I love it, probably as much as Monica White loves Bill Mack's alto-relief sculpture "Forever," which was not on display the day I visited... but which I hope Monica can eventually acquire.

Linda and I talked each other's ears off, happily, while Peggy enjoyed one of the overstuffed leather couches near the front of the gallery. We talked about the business of art, and the multifarious ways the gallery has connected Romantic Realist artists, including the recently immigrated Chinese master Han Wu Shen, with deeply appreciative customers, including passionate-but-temporarily-impecunious college students who've arranged payment plans for their "must have" pieces. We talked about a great many other things, with most of the conversation led by Linda cheerily educating me in the business of her gallery, and with me responding with semi-articulate "Wows!" and "Cool!"

I do plan to spend quite a bit more time in the gallery, and may even hold a party of friends there in the near future. Yes, I did say "party"... anyone interested? It would be a great excuse to gather a few dozen of my closest friends and acquaintances in a fantastic setting near the near San Francisco. This is a very real possibility, since Linda did say that the gallery encourages people to hold their parties there. I'm thinking sometime in September, when my good friend Tom Burroughes is in town visiting from London with his girlfriend: first a morning sailing on the Bay (Tom's a qualified yachtsman), then shooting at the range, then a catered affair that night - after cleaning up - at the Quent Cordair Fine Art gallery... sounds like good living to me.

Last weekend, walking the very walkable streets of San Francisco with Peggy, I couldn't resist this shot of One Maritime Plaza (formerly known the Alcoa Building):

Yet another reason I keep a very small digital camera in my pocket whenever I leave the house. Hmm... I'm wondering if my good friend and New Yorker Perry Metzger does the same? I'd certainly love to see the occasional building or street shot from New York City on his blog.

If you have the opportunity to do so, visit Hog Island Oyster Company in San Francisco's Ferry Building and eat a dozen or so of their excellent Tomales Bay oysters (including Kumamotos, one of my favorite varieties.) I normally don't dip good oysters in any sauces, but I was converted recently by their version (which has rice wine vinegar as its base) of a Mignonette which was superb. Their clam chowder is also fantastic - expensive, but worth every penny - and made unlike any you've ever had elsewhere. If you prefer your seafood with a good beer, they've got North Coast Old No. 38 Stout on tap.

I found this place, off the beaten path in San Francisco's Chinatown, on a visit several weeks ago with a friend: Hang Ah Team Room, which apparently has been a feature there since around 1920. The food is fantastic, service is friendly and personal, and the prices are half what I expectecd them to be, an opinion shared elsewhere in this SJ Mercury News article: "Eating Cheap in SF."

Many have heard the now-famous quote by H.L. Mencken, "Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." Well, here's another instance of it in action, reported by The Guardian: "Britons caught on camera as shots of cruise ship orgy shock Cyprus."

A few days ago, my friend Glenn Cripe told me about this fascinating business venture: The Liberty English Camp (Lithuania).

My wife Peggy just got back from 9 days travelling between New York, Boston, Washington, and Philadelphia on a "planes, trains, & automobiles" trip with her older brother visiting from Hong Kong. She mentioned some the killer deals she'd seen for bus service - the "Chinatown to Chinatown" service - on some bus company between New York and Boston, for only $10!

Well, sitting here writing, I just now saw a little newsclip on Fox News mentioning the service, which is run by a company called Fung Wah Bus. The busses look cleaner and newer than the rolling homeless shelters run by Greyhound, and the latter's lobby organization, the American Bus Association, is freaking out, claiming the new bus company (and Chinese ones like it) must be doing something wrong, "cutting corners" and such, and snidely insinuating that the Chinese company is operating illegally, since it's running daily service rather than "charter".

I say give the Chinese companies our business. Screw Greyhound, the Amtrak of the busways!

When Monica and I spent some time in Malaysia it was an interesting experience.

We were in the capital, KL. Something to know about Malaysia is that it is the most Westernised Muslim country. As an example, people from the fully fundamental places that want to experience 'Western Decadance' will be allowed to go there by their government because it is not a secular country under the surface.

Most of my recollections about it were negative. I was there with a Chinese friend. Something to note is that Malaysia has three predominant cultures - Malay, Indian and Chinese - in that order of population. Wealth and power, however, goes in the opposite direction with the 3-5% of Chinese owning most of the country.

There's a major reason for this. The Chinese people (on the whole of course) work damn hard, and the Malays don't - they don't need to. There are laws saying that there must be X% of Bumis (the local name for Muslim Malays) working in every business and other such crap.

I also tried to put an ad in the local paper but couldn't because it needed to go to a government office to be "checked" before being printed - they had true government censorship.

As to the people, I'd never seen so many women covered up before. In Australia there are many Muslim women around so you can get used to it even if you don't like it. Seeing this many in a place that for all other appearances was Western (ie: in the malls with Nike stores or in the KFCs) was weird. (Incidentally the fashion was to wear a dark dress with a white head scarf... when you look down the mall over their heads at them (I'm tall and they are generally short), and when they cluster, they look like lots of little bowling pins ready for a big bowling ball :)

We grilled (nicely of course, just in case) a taxi driver as to why they don't eat pork, even though there were good historical reasons for desert dwellers not to eat pork due to trichinosis, but no longer. And also why women have to be wrapped up.

His answer was that pork has things in it that are like cancer. If you eat it even once you will die, not right away, but you will have long term problems.

As to the women, historically it's just to protect their beautiful faces from harsh winds and sand storms, and now it's just a fashion - nothing more.

Yeah... right. that's why I saw many beautiful Chinese women in short skirts and business jackets, or thousands of beautiful Indian women in saris or other dresses but NEVER in three weeks saw a single Malay woman uncovered.

Matthew White

pacifist monotheistic zealots
My taxi driver yesterday was a zealous muslim. Upon finding out I'm jewish, he spent the entire drive to the airport ranting about religion, citing the Bible, Torah, and Koran. On the plus side, his angle was all about how the christians/jews/muslims are brothers following slightly different interpretations of the word of the one true god. While he was clear about how his way is the right way, he was also clear on the importance of peace and brotherhood and how any terrorist (whether bin Laden, Bush, or Sharon) is acting contrary to god's will.

It was still creepy and weird, but at least he was creepily condemning violence instead of creepily advocating hate.

Patri Friedman