Barcelona Day 1 Part 2

Just some pics from our first day.

Over a doorway

Over a doorway

Even the underside of the balconies are decorated.

Barcelona street

Decorous house

I liked the cactus.

Love these gargoyles.

Such beautiful architecture

St. George slaying the dragon

More gargoyles

View of the cathedral

Reflection of the cathedral

Cathedral spires

Church bells

Old and new

Picasso drawing

Barcelona Cathedral

Tapas are everywhere!

Our metro stop - such a wonderful system

Independence protest

Gaudi house

Yes, this is where we get the English word "gaudy" from.

ajfdkalj

Loving the palm trees

Spanish are proud of their explorers

None more so than Christopher Columbus (Colon) - but no mention anywhere of his atrocities

Magellan was the first to circumnavigate the globe

Guy who wiped out the Incas

No arms, no arms

A maritime legacy

Christopher in front of Christopher

Columbus

Columbus monument base

Columbus monument base

Barcelona Day 1 Part 1

Christopher Columbus Monument - Barcelona, Spain

It's been more difficult to post pics than I thought - not because there is no wifi, as it is everywhere - but because we've just been on the go meeting so many great people that we never sit down to post them.

After flying over to Paris on the world's largest aircraft - the Airbus A380 - we changed to a plane that was so old it still had ashtrays in the arms of the seats, and we were off to Barcelona. Having slept very little on the transatlantic flight (on which we watched the good but creepy Foxcatcher), I caught a half hour or so of sleep until we reached the Pyrenees Mountains, and from then on the scenery was beautiful and the skies were clear.

And then I saw it.

It shone beneath us as it always does, the Mediterranean, my own siren that calls for me when I'm away so that I must return again and again. We flew along the coastline over mountains for at least a half hour, and I traced the outline of the bull's head that makes up Spain. Our flight trajectory was such that we had to fly past the entirety of Barcelona and circle around the mountains to the south before heading back to the airport.

Barcelona marina

As a result of EU customs, we received a French stamp in our passports rather than a Spanish one, somewhat disappointing to a collector of passport stamps! (I already have several French ones and no Spanish ones, this being my first time in Spain.) Anyway, we got out of the airport and into the city easily. Barcelona public transport is excellent. Our hotel is a half a block from a Metro stop and quite charming! I was surprised at how nice it is given its pension status.

We were dead tired but determined to fight sleepiness and set out for an aimless walk. We're a block from the marina so we ambled down that way and looked at the millionaire yachts and navigated through myriads of people down to the Columbus Monument.

Copyright violations, anyone?

After this winter, the sun felt exceptionally wonderful, and we were able to walk without jackets and feel the sun on our skin, something I didn't think would happen ever again. Natural warmth? It was shocking. And palm trees. Palm trees.

We had no real destination, which was great, and when we reached the Columbus Monument, we headed up the Rambla, a famous street in Barcelona that is closed to traffic aside from the hordes of tourists of which we were a part. Wow. Talk about crowded.

The bottom of the Rambla is full of street performers painted from head to toe in all colors of the imagination. To be honest, there's not much of interest along the street, aside from the opera house, which we later toured.

Flea market at Columbus Monument

We were running on no sleep but it didn't matter.We were running on happiness.

La Rambla

It didn't take long to get oriented to the layout of the city. I barely used a map. It helped that signs abound. Barcelona is as cosmopolitan as any other large European city, but the people are so nice. I mean exceptionally nice, not like in other big cities where natives will snap at you if you're a tourist. And the Catalan language is, as I found out when we went south, easier to understand than Spanish, at least for me who has a decent level of proficiency in French.

Catalonia independence movement is everywhere.

I knew the independence movement was important in Cataluyna, but I was surprised to see as many independence flags hanging from the windows. They were everywhere. Some people even had printed banners made up. I suppose when your economy is doing so well and the southern part of the country is dragging you down, you'd have feelings of separation. (Sounds familiar to an American...)

Of course I'm going to notice the politics. And of course Chris does not. I think we need fewer borders in this world, not more, so these kind of regional independence movements seem to be counterproductive to me. I was kind of rooting for Scottish independence, but that was more to say shove it to the English, who created so many problems in the world. Then again, so did the Spanish Catholic monarchs from Madrid, who treated the Cataluynans poorly throughout their history.

A building on La Rambla - notice the independence flag hanging on a balcony.

No hand, no problem, I have ice cream!

We spent much of Saturday just wandering and getting oriented. By 5:30pm, we were having a beer next to the cathedral and taking a break, when fellow Reds fan and Barcelonian Carlos messaged me and asked to meet that evening. We were jet lagged and tired, but of course - we had been planning to meet to watch a Reds game since I decided to come to Spain all those months ago.

Plaça del Rei, Barcelona, found on our wandering

Plaça del Rei, Barcelona, found on our wandering

That evening we met for beers at a bar on Placa del Cataluyna. I brought my laptop to watch the Reds game with Carlos and his wife, but the wifi was too slow in the place and endless buffering led us to go to his house in the suburbs and watch the rest of the game. They were so hospital to us. We went out for pizza after even though jet lag was getting the best of us, and then they drove us back to our hotel in the city. It was a fabulous time.

Independence flag on Plaça del Rei

Here are a few more pics from day 1:

Liceu Opera House

The Rain in Spain Falls Mainly on the Plain

I had this dream last night - the rare good dream - that I received the passport I've been waiting for in the mail. It was a normal, blank passport, and stuck inside was my old passport with a hole punched in it like my first passport in real life, which was returned to me after renewal. I assumed this would be the case this time around.

Alas...while I scrambled to open the door this morning hoping that my passport was being delivered, I discovered that, in fact, it was my new passport, but also that my old one had not been returned to me, the one with all but one page full of stamps and visas, nearly half of them being Lebanese. Those stamps and visas are badges of honor; I do hope that it will be returned, and the webpage does say they may arrive separately.

I was getting anxious - we leave for Spain in less than three weeks. Spain! I have never been but have wanted to go for a long time, because everything I've ever heard about Barcelona is great and I remember the Gaudi cathedral from the 1992 Olympics and I was fascinated by George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia and because I took Spanish in high school and because I've wanted to see Andalusia since I started learning about the Middle East and Muslim culture and because I read Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, especially because I read The Sun Also Rises.

For awhile I had the sentence "The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain" in my head but could not remember what it was from. Was it something they said to us in school to teach us about rhyming? And what does it even mean? Does the rain in Spain fall mainly on the plain, or does it also rain in Barcelona and in the mountains? Is it referring to Spain as a desertous country? Is desertous a real word?

Thanks to Google, I "remember" it's a song from My Fair Lady, when the professor and the colonel are trying to teach Eliza proper English pronunciation. Chris and I watched that not too long ago, which probably put it into my mind.

As it turns out, the rain in Spain falls mainly in the northern mountains. That bodes well for us having a nice sunny trip, though if the extended weather forecast for Barcelona is correct on my phone app, it will rain on our first day there. Fortunately, for once, the extended forecast is often wrong.

I've spent all day jumping from one website to another, trying to figure out where I want to go and how I want to get there and all that stuff. I mean, our plans are to go to Barcelona, Granada, and Seville, with a daytrip to Cordoba from Seville, but aside from our nights in Barcelona, the plans are pretty flexible. On purpose. I've never been one to have set itineraries - you miss out on so much that way.

I was thinking about renting a car. I've never driven a car in Europe - or any foreign country for that matter. Even when I took a daytrip to Cuidad Juarez, Mexico when I was driving from California to Texas, I parked my car in El Paso and walked over the border. I don't really like driving in the US (and don't have a car), so I definitely won't like it in places where the road signs look different. However, we have to get from Barcelona to Granada somehow, and driving down the coast of the Mediterranean and passing through small towns we'd not see on a plane or train is something that sounds very appealing to me.

So I began looking for other things to see. The drive from Barcelona to Grenada is eight hours without stopping, and if we drove, I'd want to stop many, many times. Given that we only get eight days in country, I'm not sure I want to take a full day to drive, even if it means seeing those little towns. I may go ahead and get the international drivers license and rent a car for a day in Barcelona and go to Montserrat monastery or Costa Bravo or some place within two hours of Barca. We'll see.

I ordered a nice camera, something I've been wanting for many years, and I bought two lenses for it, one that is for long distances. The camera should arrive within a week; I will have to practice with it before we leave. I'll post the photos on the Tumblr site. I may try to go to the second Nats game, and if I do, I'll definitely take a lot of photos.

Another prep I did today struck me as odd. I added an international data plan to my April phone bill so I can use my phone without worrying that I'll get a $400 phone bill from posting too many photos when we're traveling. You can actually get a global plan that costs $30 a month, but these days, sadly, I don't travel enough.

I also went through all of my travel toiletries to see what I needed to purchase. This led to me basically packing for the entire trip, or at least choosing all of the clothes I will be bringing. April is a difficult month for packing because the weather can vary greatly. It will be in the high sixties in Barcelona but in the high seventies in Andalusia, with nighttime Barcelona temperatures requiring additional clothing. I packed some t-shirts I know I won't be wearing here in Washington for the next three weeks, including the Reds won I also wore in Amalfi, and I loaded up the socks and underwear because I have plenty of those to last me for the next three weeks. I'll pick up a couple of things at the store tomorrow, but otherwise, I'm ready now.

Dressing up our perspectives on the world

“The debate about #TheDress is simply a question of color and light. It turns out that perfectly sane humans disagree on this point. Now imagine that the question is about something more factually complex, like, oh, I don’t know, whether Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapon or not.” - Dr. Daniel Drezner

I had fun with The Dress yesterday. Every now and then the internet can be a fun place, and sometimes we just need a day of stupid. First it was the llamas, which were funny in their own right, but the dress? Now that was fascinating.

Three-fourths of people saw the dress as white and gold. I saw five types of people on the net yesterday – blue and black, white and gold, blue and gold, no comment, and those who proclaimed that they were too good to partake in such an idiotic debate. The last are the worst. Definition of buzzkill, unwilling to have fun because they think they’re too cool for fun or too smart for such frivolities. I feel sorry for them.

It turns out that the dress is actually blue and black. Buzzfeed found another picture of the dress, one in which the white balance isn’t skewed to screw with our minds. The dress comes in four color schemes, actually, and none of them are white and gold – although there is a white and black one.

I tried to see the black and blue, but I could not. I put the picture into Photoshop and found that the color in the photo was indeed gold and not black, but it turns out that simply had to do with the white balance in the picture. The woman who took the photo (for a wedding, nonetheless), did not do a good job of capturing the image. The lighting was bad. I thought the dress could be blue and gold, or that maybe the blue only looked blue because of shadows, but I never could and still can’t see the black until the white balance is adjusted.

I trusted Photoshop in the absence of another picture of the dress and was surprised one didn’t pop up sooner. I tried looking for one, but having no information about the dress or the store, I failed in my Google search. So I went with the information I had after my Photoshop “research.” But I was never certain, because with a white balance adjustment, that dress looked blue and black. I was hoping some other “researchers” would come up with another picture, more evidence that the dress was indeed one or the other, and found the Buzzfeed article this morning.

Daniel Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts University and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, looked at the macro level, applying The Dress debate to the bigger picture of how we perceive and debate more important issues. I was thinking about this same thing when I went to bed last night, confused as to why people saw the dress as black and blue and wondering why I didn’t see it that way no matter how much I tried. I wanted more information, needed more sources, before I could come to a conclusion about the reality of the dress.

Most people did not. They saw it one way or the other and that was that. Moreover, they considered the other side as wrong. There is no better example to explain politics than The Dress debate.

Arguing with Americans about Israel-Palestine or Islam in general is like this. I have stood in the store and have held the blue and black dress in my hands and have seen it with my own eyes, but there are those who have only seen the skewed picture and swear it is white and gold despite never having seen it in person. They view the dress only through the media and swear they are right even though I tell them that I’ve held the dress and I know it is blue and black.

That’s how the “I Stand with Israel” or the anti-Muslim crowd is. They’ve never been to the Middle East, but they’ve seen it on TV so they think they know it. Those who have been there are wrong because the pictures say otherwise. They may have read a book (like my Photoshop example) and so they think they have the answer, but they don’t pursue other sources that may give a different view of things. Mostly they rely on propaganda – their friends say it’s white and gold, so they think it’s white and gold, too.

I’ve lived in the Middle East. I know that most Muslims are no different than you or I as Americans or Westerners or whatever label you want to give to distinguish “us” from “them.” Most people in the Middle East, even those who live under oppression, want the same things as we do – steady jobs, good schools for their children, good health care, safe environments for their families…In the US, all we see of the Muslim world is death and destruction. That’s a skewed white balance thanks to the media. That’s not reality. Islam is not inherently more violent than Christianity, as anyone who has actually read and understood the Bible knows. Socioeconomic conditions have given rise to fundamentalism, conditions brought about by accidents of history, the results of our world wars, imperialism, the discovery of oil, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a host of other occurrences that can probably be explained more by chaos theory than anything else. Islam is just a convenient ideological banner under which these maniacs operate, and there’d be far fewer maniacs if socioeconomic conditions were better.

Regarding The Dress, I used the Photoshop, too, but I also did some other experiments, adjusting the white balance and finding that I could see how it could be blue and black.  I never picked one side when I was learning about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, either, always seeking more information from more sources, reading a lot of books from all perspectives, traveling to the Mideast, talking to real people whose lives are actually affected by the conflict, visiting refugee camps, and learning what color the conflict really is. I know that one side or the other isn’t right, that both sides have good and bad arguments, and that the only way to fix the problem is to get both sides to actually listen to the other’s perspective for once and take a look at all the evidence. It’s not “Team White and Gold” and “Team Black and Blue.” Look at all the evidence, and you’ll find out that both sides are right and both sides are wrong, too. The picture really is white and gold because of the white balance, but the dress really is black and blue in the store.

Unfortunately, as the simple example of The Dress shows, most people aren’t willing to consider alternatives to their own perspectives. This is why we can’t solve our problems. We choose conflict, because it’s the lazy thing to do. We choose sides based on a lack of or unwillingness to learn from all the sources available to us. We choose labels, and for the life of me I can’t figure out why that is, though I suspect it has to do with our insecurities and feelings of vulnerability. These choices make life so much harder than it has to be and create so much unnecessary suffering in this world. Why do people always need an enemy?

10 ways to write better travel blogs: a critique of the travel blog industry

There is nothing I love in the world more than traveling. I love it even more than baseball. The area of my travels has not been extensive - I've never been further east than Jordan, nor further south on Africa than Egypt, and I've never set foot on the South American continent. Still, I consider myself well-traveled, having not only visited 24 countries (many multiple times), but having lived in four countries outside of the United States. Yet, I've missed a great deal of places I'd love to see, including Machu Picchu in Peru, Angkor Wat in Cambodia, and Zanzibar in Tanzania. The problem is that with so many places to go and so few vacation days to do so, I have to make tough decisions on where to visit. My last trip, which sadly was two years ago, was to show Chris the city that possesses my heart, Beirut, and to visit the Amalfi Coast and see one of the sites I've always dreamed of visiting: Pompeii. In April we are going to the city that was tops on my list to visit - Barcelona - as well as southern Spain, where periods of history that fascinate me took place, that being Moorish rule and the Spanish Inquisition, as both have a profound effect on our world today.

I've often envied those who make their living as travel writers and who get to travel the world while working. For some reason, I've never figured out how to make that happen. I mean, I've been able to travel for work, but with the very notable exception of living in Lebanon, it was never enough. In my first job in DC, I was denied the promotion that would have given me more travel, and the program that I had developed and specifically picked Tunis to hold it in was given to the new program officer. It wasn't because I had done anything wrong; it was because I had three bosses in four years and the one who passed on me didn't know how much I had held our department together. I'm still bitter about it, because I really liked working there. I'd go back, too.

But working in development isn't travel. It's working. It's meetings, reports, and deadlines. It's bureaucracy and management. Travel bloggers write for a living, and though they have some deadlines and obligations to meet, they are pretty much on their own. To write for a living while traveling, well, I can't think of anything better. Increasingly, though, I've started to look at many of these blogs as lacking something. When they write about their travels, they write about what they ate and how they got there, but too often they miss the people. Then the reason I've never been able to make it work dawned on me. It's about substance.

See, even though I've never published a book, I still consider myself a writer. I still wish to persuade, still wish to teach, to help people look at the world outside their bubbles, to make them feel and to arouse empathy within them. When I write something about traveling, I want to show people what these places are like, and more importantly, what the people are like who live there. I want to relate my experiences and my own growth as a human being, and I want to build bridges to worlds that most people will never see. While I don't see anything wrong with marketing your blog, far too many today forget that the whole purpose of blogging is content. You wouldn't write a book without substance; why are you maintaining a blog without it?

A lot of travel bloggers get paid by companies to take trips to certain destinations and then write about those destinations. Some of them disclose this information. Others do not. While the latter are probably bad people in real life, the former can push a certain hotel or tour company to the point where the entire trip seems inauthentic. Still others are paid to market travel gear or guidebooks or tickets of some sort. That's fine, unless it's coming at the expense of content. That's what I couldn't do. It takes me long enough to write a post - spending several hours a day selling products is, well, selling out.  Some travel bloggers spend most of their time trying to sell their ebooks. Those are the worst.

Even the content itself is often junk. Look, for example, at the Matador Network, a major travel website. Go there and you'll be advised on what social media not to use if you're having an affair in Italy, or you'll learn how to drink like you're in the Outback. There are sections for family and kids, luxury travel, sports and adventure, trip planning, language and study abroad, and only one section dedicated to culture and religion, but that culture section isn't about the people in the places you go. It's about you, the traveler, and the section is full of listicles. Nomadic Matt is another big travel blog, but it suffers from the same "12 things not to do when you travel" posts. You can go through pages and pages of blog posts and not find one about the people who live in the places traveled to.

I know that travel bloggers make money from their blogs and that these kind of posts earn traffic. Maintaining a blog is a lot of work, and these days you have to pay attention to search engine optimization, social media, affiliate marketing accounts, and analytics in addition to actually providing content. It's tough to write every day, especially if you aren't traveling. But if you are traveling, there's no reason you can't provide some good stories on a weekly basis, even if it's only a reflection on why there aren't more cows in Bulgaria. And no, it's not "10 reasons why there aren't more cows in Bulgaria."

I went through dozens of the top travel blogs, and few of them focused on the travelers' interactions with the people of the places they visited. Few spoke much on their histories or the socio-political climates or even what matters to the people who live in those places. I mean, what is your point in traveling if you aren't experiencing the people? What does it matter if you see the Brandenburg Gate if you don't care what it represents or how it has affected those who lived behind the Iron Curtain? Why would you travel to Egypt to look at ancient wonders without concerning yourself with the instability there now? If you don't understand the country's history or the current political climate, you don't get the country.

Don't get me wrong - there are PLENTY of great travel blogs out there that tell of their experiences. They are hard to find because they focus on telling their stories rather than SEO and marketing. I know a thing or two about this area since it is my profession now, having moved away from development and into digital media while working in Beirut. Despite knowing what I should be doing to attract more readers (and more clicks to ads), I don't do it, because it detracts from the writing. It detracts from the story and the people.

Exile Lifestyle avoids all the bad habits and writes for writing's sake. He focuses on experience. There are no ads, no annoying listicles, and no photos - you can see his photos on his Instagram account. The minimalism of it all is refreshing.

Velvet Escape has a whole section on people, although the length of time between these types of posts is weeks to months.

Here's a bit on the Sami people in Finland, which is better than "12 facts about reindeer," but it isn't told from a traveler's perspective. Of course, on the same site is "10 reasons why you shouldn't date a Mexican man."

Here is a good post about a visit to the slums of Manila. Slum tourism is a disturbing trend among travelers, but this woman didn't write the typical "it was inspiring" kind of post. She is genuinely explaining what she felt and learned. I learned a thing or two while reading it.

Some of my favorite travel memories are the time I spent in a small Lebanese village with some older Lebanese men while they distilled arak or the evenings we had in Veliko Tarnovo with a group of Bulgarian friends or the tiny church we climbed to on a hillside outside Amalfi, Italy where the priest invited us to have limoncello. These people, not monuments, are the reason travel is worthwhile. To know them is to know something of their history and culture. To know them is to humanize parts of the world that seem so distant when you're not there. Why do Americans think the entire Middle East consists of evil people who want to kill us? Because they've never been there and make entire judgements based on what they see in the media. That's no different than what Arabs do when they see a story on their news about Ferguson, Missouri, and assume we're all in the KKK. 

So we're going to Spain, where I will meet up with a Barcelona native whom I've never met to watch a baseball game. Chris and I will head down to Andalusia after a few days, not only to visit the "monuments," where a clash between Christian and Muslim civilizations took place more than 500 years ago, but also to meet people we don't yet know exist and find some out-of-the-way local bars to chat with strangers, all of which I'll write about here. If I mention the hotels we stay in, it will be because of the hospitality or because we had an interesting experience in them. When I mention the things we say, it will give historical context in more than two or three sentences, and I won't neglect to wax upon the implications on our conflicts and events of today. I won't be giving tips on how to save a buck or writing "10 tricks to smarter packing" or use the word "quaint" to describe every nook and cranny of the trip. If we miss seeing a tourist site, so be it, because it's about the experience.

The New York Times published an article a couple of years ago about how much travel blogging has changed. Change doesn't have to be bad. Twitter and other social media can make our lives better, but we just can't forget the substance. Otherwise, what's the point?

Tropical Capricorn

Once upon a time I left winter in Washington for winter in Beirut. Ok, well, twice upon a time, but once was entirely my own choice. Sure, it gets "cold" there - fifties on the bad days - but it rarely is uncomfortably cold, and you can choose winter by going to the mountains, where snow is plentiful.

In the northern half of the United States, and increasingly so in the southern half, you can't choose winter. It exacts its wrath upon us regardless of our preferences, rendering us completely helpless to control our lives as we think we control them. Snow days, traffic delays, filthy cars, hibernian temperatures that make you forget what it feels like to be warm...the weather dictates what we can and cannot do.

Perhaps it is that feeling of helplessness that causes so many people to fall into the abject abyss we call depression. Call it cabin fever, call it seasonal affective disorder, call it melancholy as they did in Shakespeare's time. Winter stinks.

Usually it's the light that gets to me most, but it when February rolls around and the days seem like an eternity longer than they were in December, that's not the issue. No, with February it's the fed up kind of feeling. We've already been suffering for a few months and we know spring is right around the corner but the waiting continues and there's nothing we can do about it. Usually Washington is better around mid-February and you're getting fifty degree days regularly, but now we're struggling to even get above thirty and today we're not even reaching twenty. It isn't right.

Spring Training started yesterday and temperatures are in the forties in Florida, so there's not even refuge there. I suppose Miami is still warm and sunny - I still have no desire to go there except to check another ballpark off my list. I would, however, consider the Keys, which have been romanticized in my mind by Hemingway. Images of that long bridge frighten me, however. It wouldn't prevent me from going there. If I weren't going to Spain in April I'd definitely get on a plane
to what might be the most insane state in the US, where "Florida Man" does something stupid every hour and Skittles are considered deadly weapons, all to get away from the frozen tundra that has come over our nation's capital.

What I don't understand about all of this cold weather is how many people in this country are completely clueless about climate change. It's second grade science. That thing you stand on called the Earth is what is warming up, not the temperatures. A warmer earth means the oceans warm up. In second grade you learn about water and air currents. Warmer oceans shift air currents, which are part of what gives us our climates. Very simple stuff, yet some people can't grasp it. At least most people finally get that it is happening, but years of propaganda by those wealthy narcissists who know they'll be dead by the time the situation is bad enough has already taken their toll on the health and security of our nation and the world.

I am perfectly fine with living in a shack on a tropical island to live out my life. I wish I had grown up near the ocean so I had at least some idea of the skills one needs to eke out a living on the beach. Right now even working on fishing boats seems appealing to me. I'm sure there will be some affordable property available in Havana in my lifetime, a nice little fixer upper that I can renovate and open as a B&B, which will be adorned with photos of Hemingway and Omar Linares and whatever memorabilia I can find of the Havana Sugar Kings, the Cincinnati Reds AAA affiliate in the fifties before the revolution. I can drink at  La Floridita and La Bodeguita del Medio, two of Papa's favorite watering holes, and never, ever have to worry about snow. As long as they put a minor league baseball team back in the city - or move the Marlins 90 miles south - I can be completely happy. At least until a Category 6 hurricane blows my house down.

New laptop, maybe I'll write more now.

Last year at some point, my house was robbed. There were no signs of forced entry, so I'm assuming that a particular roommate left the door unlocked as she was wont to do. They took my bike and two others, a glass of change (the glass had been dear to me as I got it from a pub in Dublin on a trip with some community leaders from both sides of the Irish conflict), and my laptop, a refurbished Dell that I had struggled to have delivered after buying it on ebay. Since I had bought the laptop as a replacement for my old one that died, there wasn't too much saved on it that was lost; most of my files are saved on an external hard drive. (I have yet to become a cloudhopper; I'm still creeped out by the fact that someone could get to my half-finished novels and whatever else because that stuff is stored on servers located elsewhere.)

We have an outdated old laptop of Chris's brothers that we can't update because no one knows the administrative password and because it runs on XP, which is no longer updated by Microsoft, so I needed a replacement. Given my struggles with ebay, I wanted a brand new one. Soon after I got a new job and was issued a Macbook Pro, which I don't like and which has confirmed my suspicions that Apple fans are tools who have been fooled into thinking they're using a superior product by the emphasis on style and the fact that initially they didn't get viruses (because not enough people were using them to make it worthwhile for people to develop viruses for them.) If I needed something from the web that I couldn't do on my phone, I could use the Mac. I wanted my own but couldn't decide what to buy.

Last month I read a review on Gizmodo about the Dell XPS 13 and I finally knew what I wanted, so I bought it right away. I just received it yesterday and already know it is the right choice. I needed a laptop for our trip to Spain in April and this is the ideal machine for travel, as it is smaller, but not so small that I can't type on it, as so many of the new ones are. The 13 inch screen is a good size, too - you wouldn't feel squinty trying to watch a movie on it. What's more, it features the kind of mousepad that Mac has - one of the redeeming qualities of the Mac - on which you can scroll with two fingers and the right and left click are not separate buttons. I bet I'm one of the first non-techy people to own one. It's going to sell well.

Cauliflower - who knew?

Yesterday, I came across an article with recipes about strange uses of cauliflower. The idea is to substitute cauliflower for carbs like breads, potatoes, and even tortillas. There have been a few recent studies linking our over-consumption of carbs to high cancer rates, and with the gluten-free scam going on, the rush to fill the carb void is great. I'm not totally sold on the link between carbs and cancer, although you could convince me that it's the corn we consume, mostly in the form of high fructose corn syrup. (Most people don't realize that the average American diet is 90% corn.)  Anyway, this whole anti-carb fad has led people to find alternatives to carbs, and as a result, we get things like cauliflower pizza crust and cauliflower tortilla chips.

Early yesterday afternoon I clicked on the link in the article for cauliflower chowder. I'm a big soup person and make killer soups. (No, really, ask Chris.) I couldn't get it out of my mind for the rest of the day and my commute home consisted of planning how I would make it last night. I've never really made any kind of chowder, though I do make a potato soup that is similar to the cauliflower concoction. Normally I don't use recipes or pre-packaged broth - I usually boil onions, peppers, and carrots in water and add Worcestershire to make my broth before adding the rest of my ingredients, and sometimes I'll have leftover chicken bones to use. But when Chris was sick at the time of his opera auditions, I purchased some canned chicken broth in a desperate attempt to fix his voice before his appointment, and I still had a can left. I feel like I cheated for using it, but it was easier than buying a chicken and boiling the bones! The recipe itself was a guide for me on how to use cauliflower instead of potatoes, and I really only followed the idea of the chowder and modified everything else.

I got off the train and headed straight to the supermarket. They had ONE head of cauliflower in the entire produce section, and it was an organic one that someone had put in the broccoli section. I'm not kidding - I was diligent in my attempts to find more. That one head was just sitting there waiting for me to take it. The original recipe didn't call for broccoli; adding it was my idea. So was the jalapeno. There were no shopping baskets to be found, and I ended up struggling to carry a head of cauliflower, a bag of broccoli crowns, two jalapenos, garlic, two packages of bacon (only one for the soup - but it was on sale for three bucks off, so I grabbed a second one), a giant bag of shredded cheddar, a half gallon of milk, and a bag of pistachios that had nothing to do with the soup but was on special. The rest of the ingredients - flour, chicken broth, black pepper, Frank's hot sauce, salt, and Aleppo pepper I had at home.

I was starving, and I needed the bacon grease in the early stages of cooking, so I cut open the package and had that bacon frying before I even had the cutting board out for the veggies. I ended up frying nine pieces of bacon and eating three of them. (Or maybe it was more. That's what happens when you eat your lunch at 11:30am.) At the same time, I was steaming the cauliflower, because I had to get that soft enough to mash it up. I probably steamed it for twenty minutes while I chopped up four large cloves of garlic, a small onion, and the jalapeno pepper. I chopped these very finely - it's important in getting the flavor right so a big piece doesn't overwhelm any bite you take. The smaller you can get the pieces, the better. In the same stage, I combined 2 tablespoons of flour with a fourth of a cup of chicken broth - this I got from the recipe because I wouldn't have known how much flour to use for thickening. You have to whisk it in a bowl.

To sum up, at the end of stage one, I had a plateful of bacon (six or seven pieces - I really did go crazy with eating it as I cooked it), a bowl of flour/chicken broth, finely chopped garlic, onion, and jalapeno, and a head of super soft caulflower. It was time for stage two.

I added the garlic, onion, and jalapeno to the skillet full of bacon grease and let that cook while I mashed up cauliflower until it looked like mashed potatoes. At the same time, I steamed two small broccoli crowns, but would later discover that one was enough. When the veggies were sufficiently sauteed, I poured the entire contents of the skillet into a soup pot, including the bacon grease, then added the mashed cauliflower, two cups of milk, two cups of chicken broth (what was left of the can), the flour/chicken broth mixture, a generous amount of black pepper, probably a tablespoon of salt, a tablespoon of Aleppo pepper, and I can't even guess how much Frank's - only tasting can get that right. I cooked that on high not quite to the boiling point before adding two plus cups of shredded cheddar and turning the heat to low so it could simmer. By then, the broccoli was soft enough, so in what can only be described as half-mashing, I broke up the broccoli into small pieces and added it to the soup. Then I broke up the bacon and added most of it, saving a few pinches to put on top of the soup for a garnish. I let it all simmer for about five minutes before serving.

Neither Chris nor I could understand just how good the chowder was going to be. It kind of blew our minds. I guess the serving size is six because I had two bowls, he had three, and I made him save the last one so I could have it for lunch today. It was filling, too, but I had a second bowl anyway because it was so good. My only regret is that I didn't double it so we'd have some left for the whole weekend.

Bumble Humans

Nintendo was founded in 1889.

Yes, 1889. It started as a producer of Japanese playing cards. Rather than lobbying its government and producing propaganda about the evils of new technology that made its cards a thing of the past, not only did it evolve as a company over time, eventually coming to embrace video games, but it became a leader in the industry.

Here in America, we fight tooth and nail to keep outdated (and dangerous) products when we have the technology to do it better. Industries like coal and oil control our government and have actively worked to brainwash the dull-minded portion of our country that new technology such as solar and wind power are some kind of evil conspiracy and that regulations such as the amount of toxins we pump into the air or the pesticides that are killing our pollinators are some sort of government oppression.



Intelligent beings wouldn't continue to pump toxins into the air, damaging the oxygen levels necessary for life, or use pesticides that kill the bees and butterflies that are necessary to pollinate crops so we have food to eat. Did you know that farmers are now renting bees for the growing season because there aren't enough to pollinate the crops? Say it aloud: farmers are renting bees to pollinate their crops because they killed the other bees with their pesticides. Farmers are renting bees to pollinate their crops because they killed the other bees with their pesticides. Ludicrous.

Adapt or die. (That's real capitalism.)  Because the biggest industries in the world refuse to adapt, real people will die. They are dying. Air pollution kills 7 MILLION people a year, according to the World Health Organization. That's just air pollution. Wait until the rental bees start dying, too.

I watch story after story of Americans whining about how regulations hurt their businesses. Human life has no value to them. Adapt or die. If you aren't intelligent enough to run a business in a smart way that treats human beings as human beings, you have no business running a business.

Speaking of regulations, it floors me that so many Americans look at something like maternity/paternity leave as a "burden on business." What's more mindboggling is how they can't wrap their heads around the fact that there are only two countries IN THE ENTIRE WORLD that don't require all businesses to allow paid maternity/paternity leave. I realize that many Americans think the rest of the world lives in tents and rides camels, but given that that is not true at all, how do you think the rest of the world operates? How is the rest of the world able to conduct business if they have to grant paid leave to new mothers and fathers? Why do they value human life more than we do?

Adapt or die. And stop whining about taxes. You have it pretty damn good here. But it could and should be better.

Are we still in the Dark Ages? The Dark Ages - have they not ended?

Education as commodity

Ezra Klein has published a column entitled, "Why a college degree shouldn't be a commodity" in today's Wapo.

It's sad that an article like this even has to be written. A university is called a "university" because the whole purpose is universal knowledge. That someone would think a liberal arts degree is worthless is indicative of the economic brainwashing this country has undergone in the last few decades, where money is all that matters.

I've said it before and I'll say it over and over again - majors like business, journalism, and education should be taught in trade schools separate from a university or should be part of a degree in economics (an actual science) or perhaps psychology for "management" for business majors or the subject which one is writing about or teaching about for journalists and teachers. If you are employed to write about politics, you should have a degree in political science so you know what the hell you are writing about. If you're teaching math at any level, you should have a degree in some form of mathematics.

I wouldn't hire a person who has a "degree" from a for-profit "university." It says a lot about your character that you wouldn't go to a real college.

We've discarded the science of thinking for the pursuit of "things." It's why people don't care that they're destroying the planet, or that we've come to outlaw feeding the homeless and we call poor people "lazy" or we think that health care is a privilege or why religious nuttery is taking over our politics. It's the reason that ideology is triumphing over ideas, why our government is in gridlock and our nation divided. As we discard the humanities, we discard our humanity.

Study what you want in school, not what will make you the most money. The value of life is in how you experience it and the bonds you have with others, not the house you live in or the car that you drive.