insightful observations and cogent commentary on all the really important things in life ... and some of the less important things
Sunday, October 4, 2015
The New Trip Pics Are Up! The New Trip Pics Are Up!
Sunday, August 2, 2015
Before I Forget...
1. Arsenal
Yes, things will finally come together for the Gunners, and things will fall apart for their main rivals.
2. Man Utd
Close, but no cigar.
3. Chelsea
The wife's favourite team will have more than its share of problems, and their manager's verbal antics will lose a lot of their ability to distract.
4. City
They'll just barely squeak into the last UCL position, after another tumultuous season of melodrama on the sideline.
5. Spurs
Sure, why not?
6. Liverpool
My favourite team has really not inspired me to believe they can get back into Europe. Their signings, as much as their inability to retain the top people they've had (Suarez, Sterling...) reflect their diminishing status in the world of European football.
7. Saints
And this time, they won't start off surprisingly high in the standings and then fade; they'll just putter along slightly above mid-table.
8. who cares?
Thursday, June 25, 2015
Winnipeg? Winnipeg!
Polar bears all over the place |
Wednesday, June 17, 2015
I Licked the Bowl.
166 Boulevard Provencher
St-Boniface, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
Looking for une aventure française in St-Boniface, the French-speaking area of Winnipeg, this is the place we ended up when it turned out our first choice closes early, our second choice turned out to be Japanese, and our third (considered only briefly, and only because It Was There) was Chinese. In all honesty, there was nothing particularly French about this place, beyond some distracted obeisances on the menu, and the definite article introducing the name of the place.
Inside is a counter, and an aisle lined with a few tables leading to a larger, darker room that doubles as an intriguing live-music venue and giant-screen TV auditorium. Our server delivered three menus each, one being a drinks list. He ran down an enticing list of daily specials, brought our drinks, and took our order: the pasta of the day, and a pulled pork mac-&-cheese.
I can't exaggerate this: these were both truly delicious dishes. The pasta was penne in a wine sauce with chicken that was OHHH so good. Seasoned with basil and cooked with tomatoes and, I would say, a little cream, the chunks and shreds of chicken distributed throughout were relegated to providing texture, in a departure from meat's normal starring role. Yet the chicken performed admirably in a supporting role where the sauce is the breakout star.
The service was excellent, from both servers on duty.
The place is done in a simple, unaffected way, going (successfully) for a cool-place-to-hang vibe; the atmosphere was marred only by a giant television playing an NBA Championship game. (Had it been the Women's World Cup I'd be willing to overlook it.) And the prices were about what you'd expect in town, and very reasonable for what you get.
Thursday, May 28, 2015
An Unexpected Bonus
So, feeling a little restive, I decided I would strike out toward the east and visit a few of the less interesting counties in the country; specifically, two of the five counties in Colorado that I haven't already been to. And then, since I'll be out that way and already bored, I'll go up into Nebraska and travel through three of the remaining counties in the western part of that state, before stopping off in Cheyenne to visit the grave of someone who was, in life, very important to me.
My wife decided to come along. So we drive over to Yuma county and up to Sedgwick county, and into Nebraska, to Garden county. Then we turn left along the North Platte River, planning to head west to the next two counties, then to Cheyenne.
So there's a "police emergency" on the road, and we have to detour along a couple of mud roads (they've had way more rain than usual out this way lately), then up a paved road, across the railroad tracks, back to the road we were on.
What we hadn't realized was, the paved road we took at the end of that detour was the road we'd planned to turn onto going the other way. Of course, there was no sign at the mud road's end, so we didn't realize that until we came to a sign that said "Chimney Rock, 12 miles."
At that point we checked the map and learned that we were off course. But (1) travelling in this casual fashion means every intersection is an opportunity to change plans; and (B) the general rule of thumb, only recently articulated but long in effect, is that if you are close enough to see a sign like that, you're close enough to go see it. So we went to see Chimney Rock.
I've known for decades that Chimney Rock is a locally important landmark, and that it had something to do with the Pioneers. That's about it. Now I've seen it, and understand why it's an important place in our National story. Out there on the treeless plains of this continent, there are very, very few reference points; and very few Conestoga wagons were equipped with GPS. And this was all before cellphones, you know. So having a distinctive and easily visible landmark would have been very important to those folks trudging the plains alongside their oxen. And this is, certainly, distinctive.
There's nothing else out there that it might be confused with.
So that brought a little interest to this county-counting drive that I'd expected to be barely a distraction.
Then, in order to get back on course for that last county in western Nebraska, we had to go up the road a piece --- not very far --- to Gering. And there, on the far side of Gering, was Scotts Bluff. Not the town of Scott's Bluff, which I'd been to 30 years before (by accident), but the National Monument. Well. Who, in their right mind (a classification which, I like to kid myself, includes me), would pass within three miles of even the most meaningless National Monument and not at least get a stamp for the ol' National Parks Passport?
Scott's Bluff, it turns out, is big and beautiful and interesting, and all of you should go. It's actually two bluffs, separated by Mitchell Pass. There's a nice road that takes you up to the summit on the northeastern side, where you can walk the easy paved trails and soak up an appreciation of what travelling was like for those people who settled this country. Well worth the $5 car permit fee.
Mitchell Pass, between Sentinel Rock and Eagle (?) Rock |
Thursday, April 16, 2015
The Coming Thing? I Hope Not

I've heard it said that the technological advances in hand-held digital video recording will lead to a flurry of low-budget theatrical releases done in that way. Elsewhere, NY, seen last night at Houston's Worldfest International Film Festival, is, I think, an example of that method.
It results in a good movie ruined. An interesting story of casual everyday betrayal, with superior writing by Tom Wilton, solid, well-crafted performances by the four principal actors (especially Andrew Ruth, who plays Todd --- which I probably liked best because, it turns out, he's from Austin), and of course the vibrant youth culture of 21st-Century Brooklyn combine to give this film great potential.
Wilton's script is filled with the sort of gratuitous profanity that many real-life 20-somethings mistake for sophistication. Even at three decades' remove, I can remember that feeling. What is noteworthy in the movie's use of coarse language is that it avoids reaching the point of gratuity: it is a natural, organic part of the world these people live in. It calls attention to itself, but quickly loses the power to shock or offend.
Jennifer arrives in New York; we see her first at Grand Central, expecting perhaps to be met, but finding no one there. She comes across as a small-town girl lost in the Big City, with all the prospect for disaster that such a situation evokes. (She's coming from Boston, she says, though apparently she learned little about city living there.) She must make her way to a friend's place in Brooklyn, but again, no one is there. She passes the time waiting in a bar, where she meets Todd and has an exuberant one-night stand with him before she at last meets up with her irresponsible and inconsiderate host, Christine. Jump ahead two years, and Jennifer has apparently fallen into a comfortable if not passionate relationship with Ethan. When Ethan's roommate moves out, he takes in a replacement ... who turns out to be Todd. At this point, the groundwork is well laid for the central tension of the movie.
I've often marvelled at the ability of good scriptwriters to sketch out the parameters of relationships with a few carefully crafted scenes and a few well-honed lines of dialog. For all the sketching and crafting in this movie, only fifteen or twenty minutes are needed. This seems to me to be a mark of admirable judiciousness, as in that time the three principal characters --- Christine is but a sidelight -- become fully fleshed out. But the impressiveness of it is almost lost in the mindnumbing camera work. Faces blur and fade in and out, as though only a poorly-designed knock-off digital camera is judging distances. Images shake side to side, and up and down, as if the technician holding the camera is coughing or giggling, or maybe just zoning out. Two or three minutes of this on America's Funniest Home Videos is watchable; 88 minutes of it on the big screen is barely endurable.
Add to the mix the questionable sound-editing choices made. I admit to making the assumption that the sounds we hear result from choices, and not simply the default mode of taking whatever the microphone happened to pick up and slapping it on the DVD as a finished product. Street noise, wind noise, jet engines passing overhead; all threaten to overwhelm the dialog in the exterior scenes, while interior scenes are cluttered with background conversation, interminable snatches of music (some of it good), and what sounds like the faint thrum of chain saws in adjoining apartments.
Despite the sound and visuals, the movie is a well-conceived work that, unfortunately, comes across more as a film-school project than a theater-worthy production. If that does turnout to be the future of movie making, I will be glad to stay home and watch snippets on You-Tube.
Wednesday, January 21, 2015
Sweden In Pop Culture
Based on these sources, I can confidently report that Sweden is a cold, dark country populated almost exclusively by depressed drug addicts, depressed alcoholics, depressed former drug addicts, depressed unmitigated perverts of every stripe, and depressed police officers with failed or failing marriages. This general population is divided between the honourable poor, who are depressed, and a smaller group of sleazy and thoroughly dishonourable middle-class people, who are probably depressed when not torturing their fellow Swedes with their extreme behaviour. There is, perhaps, a scattering of glitterati who spend much time abroad to avoid being depressed, returning home only to indulge in their many and varied perverse passions.
Being a Texan, I know just how accurate these sorts of generalizations about a place often are.
Old Pictures Posted
Over the last few months I've been puttering with my scanner, mostly digitizing old photo prints, & have posted some of the better ones to Picasa albums.
I've added some pictures, new and old, to the South Texas album

Pictures from the PCB Tour through England, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria & Italy in 1984 are up
A few pictures from the 1991 trip to Mexico ...
.jpg)
and from the 1994 trip to Mexico
and just a few from the 1999 trip to California to see the USA win the women's World Cup
Most of the photos from our three-week tour of southern Germany are glued into a photo album, but I managed to find a few loose that I could run through the scanner. You'll find them here.
Some pictures from various trips taken in 2006 are up now.
So are a few from our first trip to Yellowstone & Grand Teton, in 2005.
There may be others; I don't really remember which ones I've posted in the last few months & which have been around a long time. Feel free to look around at all my albums.
Sunday, November 2, 2014
Tuesday, October 14, 2014
Something Really Good
I was enough taken with Ludlum's book that, over the course of perhaps the next two years, I read everything he had written to that point. Then I found, almost by accident, that he wasn't the only person in the world who wrote exciting spy stories; and when I discovered Frederick Forsythe, I learned that Ludlum wasn't even the great writer of the genre. Day of the Jackal and The Dogs of War had so much more texture than any good story from Ludlum that I developed a sort of snobbish disdain for Ludlum's mere works: diverting, perhaps, but nothing like literature. And then I encountered Tom Clancy -- his early works, before he started taking on all kinds of generally less capable writing partners. (Everyone is less capable than Clancy.)
And then, suddenly, I ran out of exciting international spy stories to read. Oh, a few people wrote some good stuff: Ken Follette was okay sometimes, not so good other times; but his historical sagas are much better entertainment. Some of Clancy's more recent collaborations are entertaining and reasonably well written. But books by Vince Flynn and David Baldacci and Daniel Silva, popular though they may be, are relatively insipid and thin; they are to spy novels what Disco was to music. Every time I hear about a writer of books of this type, I check it out, snob though I am, because I love the ripping yarns. But I'm generally disappointed. Most of the books of this genre seem to have been written on a deadline, by people who can barely write for a newspaper. They are the reason God created public libraries, where you can avoid wasting money on books that utterly fail to live up to the blurbs.
The other day, I picked up a book at the library called Dead Eye, by a writer I'd never heard of called Mark Greaney. (He may be the only published writer without a Wikipedia entry. He is, even more surprisingly, one of those "generally less capable writing partners" of Tom Clancy.) This book has turned out to be a truly exciting, engrossing story, written with great texture and sufficient detail to really satisfy the lust for (presumed) authenticity. (If he could resist the urge -- his own, or more likely his editors' -- to state the obvious in melodromatic one-sentence paragraphs, he'd be close to excellence. In any case, he offends far less often than Flynn, Baldacci or Silva.) The character development is succinct and effective; the plots are convoluted but nicely drawn, no action or turn of plot requires some character to do something out of character, and there is no hoary reliance on deus ex machina. The story is coherent, the dialogue sounds real in your head, and the action is gripping. Greaney is a new writer of spy thrillers that I can whole-heartedly recommend. I just hope his production can keep up with my appetite.
[His other books, to this point, are The Gray Man, On Target, and Ballistic. I expect to buy and read all of them pretty soon. I'll probably even consider the three books he co-wrote with Tom Clancy.]
Sunday, September 21, 2014
Saturday, August 9, 2014
End of the End of the Road
There is a reason why they call it "The Grand Canyon":
We arrived at the North Rim on a foggy, drizzly morning, and even in those conditions it was a magnificent spectacle. It was too early to check into the lodge, so we drove up the road to the few viewpoints accessible by car: Imperial Point, Roosevelt Point, Cape Final, Vista Encantada. We stared off into the distance, as the fog rose and fell, toward hoodoos and mesas and great piles of eroded rocks, things with romantic names like Jupiter's Temple and Freya Castle, and we were amazed.
Eventually the fog lifted, and we were amazed again. Words fail me.
The Colorado River used to run red. Since the dams built across it above the Canyon, it's now a mundane shade of greenish-brown for most of the year.
While we were there, we took a hike along the Widforss Trail, which goes west from the road along the rim of the canyon to join with another trail near an overlook at the top end of Transept Canyon.
This formation is called a "temple."
Transept Canyon |
When the fog lifted |
To see the rest of the pictures from the Canyon, click here.
Beginning of the End of the Road
What that means |
After that, we went back and fetched Buttermilk and forced her to indulge in some ice cream from the C-Store in town, then dragged her up to the little miniature golf place for a round. (I won't mention who won; I've already taken all the bows I'm going to take.)
In the evening, the Perfesser mentioned that he wanted to try something called a "poutine," which we had seen on menus in a number of places. It was described as french fries covered with sausage gravy, and he thought, repulsive as that sounded, that we ought to at least try it. After all, we wouldn't go to Delaware and not try scrapple, would we? We recalled, perhaps incorrectly, that Bob's Burgers & Brew in Ferndale had had it on their menu, so we went to the Bob's location in Birch Bay ... which didn't have it. Not only did they not offer it, the hostess wasn't entirely sure what it was. "Is that that Canadian thing with the gravy? Yeah, we don't have that." Ah, well, so we have at least one thing in Canada to look forward to besides the 2015 Women's World Cup.
What that means |
Then it was back to the condo for a last round of margaritas.
Morning comes, and off we go. On the way down to Sea-Tac, we stopped off at Burlington in response to the powerful and ineluctable call of Lafeen's Donuts. This time, it looked like hundreds of people had read and believed my previous post, as the display cases were stripped nearly bare. I could not, therefore, get an exquisitely light French cruller, nor a thick, fruity apple fritter; but had to settle, regrette rien, for a chocolate-dipped old fashioned doughnut and a blueberry fritter. (It's been almost a week and writing this makes me think of contacting them to enquire about a care package.)
Then it was down to the long-term parking where I'd stored my little convertible during the Group Tour. A quick goodbye to Church Lady and the Perfesser (because by now the rental charges on the anemic Rogue were accruing hourly), then throw our stuff in the Roller Skate, and we're off for home, the long way.
The first order of business was lunch, which we had at Las Palmas, a Salvadoran restaurant just down the street from the parking lot, where I had eaten a pretty good breakfast two Sundays before. Salvadoran food is similar in many ways to Mexican food, of course, but with a tropical twist that makes it identifiably different, certainly from the Tex-Mex variety that's so common in my home town, and from the more exotic varieties that are available in many places in south Texas. My own experience with Salvadoran restaurants back home is limited -- I can only think of two that I've been to, though I've been also to Honduran and Costa Rican restaurants, which I think are indistinguishable in any meaningful way from Salvadoran cuisine.
What that means |
Our lunch wasn't quite as good as that breakfast, but it wasn't bad. I had a spinach papusa and a papusa revuelta (if memory serves): beans, beef and cheese on a thick, pillowy tortilla. Both were ordinary-good, neither was exceptional in any way. Overall the place was good enough to recommend but not good enough to recommend heartily ... except that it was cheap. And when I compare the prices I've seen around Seattle to the prices I'm used to around San Antonio, I think Las Palmas is an excellent place for lunch.
N.B.: Las Palmas appears now to be out of business (2020).
After all the build-up to Snoqualmie Falls -- it was on the list of Things To See four years ago, and again two weekends before, and I never managed to get up there -- you would think a curmudgeon like me would have been disappointed. I wasn't. It is a beautiful waterfall, in a nice setting, with a pleasant lodge above it and not really all that many people for a magnificent summer Friday near a big city. In fact, I wish it had been another day, when I didn't have to get back in the car and head on down the road. It would've been real nice to have spent more time there.
We drove, top down, across eastern Washington. Boy, was that a mistake. Generally, my rule is this: if it's not raining, the top will be down if the temperature is more than 70 and less than 94; between 55 and 70, and between 94 and 97, it depends on other factors; but at 55 or less, and 97 or more, the top will be up. But then, I usually have air conditioning. Not this time, so I left the top down even though it got to 103, and nary a cloud in the sky. (Some smoke from the continuing wildfires, but that hardly qualifies as the silver lining in that particular cloud.) So when we pulled into Baker City, Oregon, we were a little crispy around the edges. (After that, no matter the temperature, if the sun was up, so was the top.)
Baker City is a charming little community in eastern Oregon, once a stop on the Oregon Trail, later
Geiser Grand Hotel |
twilight in Baker City |
compare this to May 2013 |
There aren't a whole lot of towns in Utah south of Salt Lake, but Panguitch, a town I stayed in with a friend a couple of years ago, is a pleasant little town with almost all the motels in Southern Utah (it being 20 miles from Bryce Canyon and close also to Zion National Park, Cedar Breaks, Grand Staircase-Escalante, Capitol Reef, and the North Rim of the Grand Canyon). It also has at least one good restaurant, the Cowboy's Smoke House. (Don't get the brisket; it was dry two years ago and is still dry, but the sausage is very good and the pulled pork is outstanding. So is the service. The prices are reasonable but they only take cash. They're open, and packed, until 10.)
What that means |
(This is getting too long for most people to bother with reading, so I'll break it off here and continue it on another post.)
Thursday, July 31, 2014
A Nice Place to Live, But I Wouldn't Want to Visit There
for maximum coherence, read all the posts from this trip in order, starting with THIS ONE.
After a day off from touristic pursuits (to do laundry, shop and watch a soccer match on TV), we took a day trip up to Vancouver, British Columbia. We drove inland to the border crossing north of Lynden, Washington (where there was no delay to get across) and went by the set of the current television show "Bates Motel," which airs on some cable channel. (We had thought it was the set of the movie Psycho when we planned the excursion, not having carefully read the place description on line.) Then we headed into the city.Vancouver skyline |
The bartender greeted us cheerfully, and then was never seen again. It being another gorgeous day, we wanted to sit outside, but they only had two-tops there, so we pulled up to a high table just inside the wide open doors. Naturally there were televisions all over the place, so we couldn't entirely avoid watching; but at least they were showing British sports, such as you might have to see in an Irish prison: darts on one screen, golf on the other. (Darts, it seems, is as abstruse as cricket. Scores seem to go up and down at random, and we couldn't tell just by watching whether a throw was good, or otherwise.) Our waitress brought menus and drinks quickly. So far, so good.
The menu includes such overpriced traditional Irish fare as sliders, flatbreads and nachos. These are the things we ordered. (As Hispanics have moved farther and farther north, I have more or less rescinded my rule against eating Mexican food north of Round Rock, but then, this wasn't really Mexican food. Let's call it cucina-inspired.) Church Lady and the Perfesser both went for the pulled-pork sliders. They report that the little burgers had good flavour but not a particularly good texture, neither moist nor dry, just vaguely unsatisfying: too little meat, too little slaw, too much bread. "Disappointing" was the word used twice.
Buttermilk's flatbread was better. It had a topping of pulled pork with pineapple salsa and jalapeños on a crispy layer of bread. The topping was adequate in quantity, though more meat would have been unobjectionable, and the crust maintained its integrity throughout the meal.
My nachos were interesting. They were made from a number of small tortillas, cut in half and fried, then stacked in a jumble on a plate. Toppings of meat (pulled pork again), corn, onions, peppers and jalapeños were scattered across it, then dosed with a drizzle of sour cream. The menu referred to "lots of cheese" on the dish. There was, arguably, the promised amount of cheese, but it was mostly in one part of the plate, as though the arm doing the scattering of ingredients had tired towards the end and just abandoned the effort. Because of the interlacing of the nacho chips, the dish was a little hard to eat, but that produced the rare yet desireable result of allowing me to finish lunch after the Perfesser, who is reknowned for his deliberate approach to meals.
What does that mean? |
We almost didn't learn any of this about the food at Cielli's, because the service was so very bad. (I was reminded of a rude comment of a friend, years ago in Mexico, who told a waiter that we had received lo mas pinche servicio. It would have applied here, but we were all too polite to express ourselves except through the gratuity.) We did not get our food before we had reached the point of calculating how much we should leave for the drinks if we walked out. It was easily a half hour between ordering and serving, during which time we learned nothing about darts scoring either. It would have helped our mood, to say nothing of the tip, if our waitress had come by to check on us during that long wait, or to let us know there would be a delay. Instead, she studiously avoided so much as looking in our direction; she devoted herself to the farther sides of the room, the exterior tables, and the areas behind the kitchen door. She was not a good waitress.
pretty building, not much inside |
What does that mean? |
What's that mean? |