Lesbians sue Lesbians

Saw this article today about the people of Lesbos, Greece - home to the ancient Greek poet Sappho (who praised love between women, hence the present-day term lesbian) - filing a lawsuit against a Greek gay persons association for using the term 'lesbian' in their name. After scratching my head and checking my calendar to make sure it wasn't April 1st or that I had secretly been redirected to the Onion, I cracked up. Seriously? I guess the crux of the argument is this:

"My sister can't say she is a Lesbian," said Dimitris Lambrou. "Our geographical designation has been usurped by certain ladies who have no connection whatsoever with Lesbos," he said.

But this part in particular I found pretty confusing/funny:

Lambrou says Sappho was not gay. "But even if we assume she was, how can 250,000 people of Lesbian descent — including women — be considered homosexual?"

First of all, thanks for clearing that up, Dimitris. Second, huh? I'm not sure how that logic could possibly make any sense. Is that really what he's concerned about? Just in case he's wrong and Sappho was gay, maybe a quarter-million people thousands of years later that happen to live in the same area might also all be gay? And isn't it a just a little to late to suggest that LGBT women stop calling themselves lesbian? I mean, the cat has long since left the bag on that one, I'm afraid. Hasn't that term been in use for hundreds of years now? (According to wikipedia, since 1732, was in the 1890 Oxford-English Dictionary). Anyways, good luck with that, Lesbians.

The Brewery

You may remember from an earlier post that we started brewing our own beer this year, after getting the necessary equipment as a Christmas gift from Kate's brother, Mark. It's been really fun so far brewing (and drinking) the three batches of beer, along with the batch of hard cider (that's Kate's favorite). To date, we have made:

• an American Brown Ale (think Newcastle but more delicious)
  
• a Brown Porter (not quite as dark and potent as normal Porters)
• Hard Apple Cider (with a chardonnay yeast)
• a German Honey Hefeweizen

While visiting in April my Dad got to try the first two, although the porter was stubbornly not carbonated yet, even after the normal 2 weeks in the bottle that is standard to get carbonation. Consequently, it wasn't very good. I'm happy to report that the porter is now (finally) carbonated and quite tasty - has a nice toasted aroma and flavor with a healthy amount of coffee taste in it as well. Until they invent scratch and sniff computer screens or Smell-O-Vision makes a comeback, this picture will have to do.


Our latest creation, the hefeweizen, has the opposite problem - it's already carbonated after only 5 days in bottles! I'm hoping I didn't add too much priming sugar (which creates the carbonation in the bottles) - because this wheat beer had a lot of trub in the fermenter, we ended up with less than the expected 5 gallon batch size, so I had to scale down the standard 3/4 cup of priming sugar accordingly on the fly. Hopefully we won't have any future posts describing the exploding bottles in our hall closet. I'm encouraged about the hefe because even after a short time in bottles it has a nice full, smooth flavor with noticeable honey/wheat taste, but none of the banana or citrus that we don't really like in most commercial hefeweizens. Since I can't fully justify drinking two beers tonight just to enhance the multimedia aspect of this blog post, I'll just give you the picture of this one from when we were measuring the alcohol content of the hefe, which turns out to be 5.7% (by vol), incidentally.

The next batch on the docket is a red/amber ale recipe I found online that's received rave reviews from other homebrewers called "Fire in the Hole." I'm not exactly sure how it got that name, but I'm hoping it lives up to its billing! Come visit and we'll treat you to a pint or two.

San Francisco mini-game wrapup

Now that the mini-game/puzzle hunt we did in San Francisco earlier this month is completed, the group that organized it has posted a 'wrapup' page with all of the puzzles, their solutions,
a map from the info booklet they provided, and some "travel puzzles" that were shorter puzzles designed to be solved as we traveled from location to location around the city.

If you're interested, give them a try yourself - the solutions are there but hold off as long as you can, you'll enjoy getting them yourself. Some knowledge of San Francisco is sort of useful (but the map provided should be sufficient), particularly in getting the final answer words from Clue #1 and a start on Clue #3. For Clue #1, we were actually provided with lego pieces glued together in the shapes shown, so it was a little more fun to play around with than pieces of paper (and we didn't have to cut them out). Similarly for Clue #2 we got little colored foam pieces instead of the same on paper that you see in the pdf. Clue #4 is a beast, so unless you want to put an hour plus into solving that one you might want to pass. Also, it should be noted that we had to use an almanac to solve some of these.

Anyways, I hope you'll enjoy trying some of these, or the travel puzzles, or maybe just looking at them. There are some pictures from other groups linked on the coedastronomy wrapup page, but if you don't want to see solutions to some of the puzzles, don't look at them.

Again, thanks to the coed astronomy group, and hopefully we'll get to do another one of these puzzle hunts in the future - it was a lot of fun and good brain exercise!

Mini-BANGing around SF

Phew! What a busy and exciting weekend! Aside from spending a great day in Napa, with Gordie, Amanda, Brenna, and Cassidy (all from Vermont), Kate and I took part in a San Francisco puzzle hunt, a.k.a. "mini-BANG," or Bay Area Night Game, a irregularly scheduled one-night puzzle hunt/race that maybe 10-20 teams of 4-8 puzzlers compete in, primarily for the fun of solving these creative and elegantly designed puzzles that the organizers put a lot of time and effort into. This one was "leisurely" in that nothing was scored (so non-competitive), and it was during the day. It was a blast! Our friend Marc organized it, and in addition to us and Marc, our team had another friend Mark from work (and a SF local, which helped immensely) and our friend Rich from Kate's boardgame group. I can't post too much about it yet as they are running the mini-game this coming weekend too, and don't want any info leaking out. But stay tuned for more details and maybe some of the puzzles themselves to see how you would have fared. Thanks to coedastronomy for organizing a super-fun hunt! In the meantime, here's our team poring over puzzle #4 in a San Francisco pub...

"Professional" Hockey

Wow, I have never seen something like this happen in a pro sport. Maybe in street basketball or touch football, but even then this kind of stuff is pretty frowned upon. From game 3 of the playoff series between NY and NJ earlier this week, specifically watch the guy in blue pester the goalie:



Yipes, even his own teammate comes over to tell him how ridiculous he's being, or so it appears. Interestingly, the NHL apparently quickly amended its rulebook so as to keep this kind of screening from happening again. It will be interesting to see if this Avery guy survives the postseason, let alone ever dares to set foot in New Jersey again.

And also, Kate and I get to go to game 5 of the Sharks-Flames series in San Jose on Thursday! Should be exciting, it's currently tied 2-2. Assuming there are some power plays in the game, we'll get to see more of our favorite part of Sharks games.

In case one video game at a time is too boring...

This is kind of crazy - wire a single Nintendo (SNES in this case) controller to control 2 emulators of different games simultaneously. The video is a little scratchy, but it gets the point across, and amazingly goes on for 40-some minutes - supposedly he beats both games (I didn't watch that far). Any of you Nintendo gurus out there think you could do this?



And if you haven't checked out MAKE before, it's worth a look-see for you "do-it-yourself" types.

Worst ticket promotion ever?

From the Sacramento River Cats' homepage. You decide:

Jumbotron finale

OK, I promise - last jumbotron update. But it appears that everything finished at the Nationals Stadium on time for W to throw out the first pitch on March 30. Hope I get to catch a game there this summer!

Madrid Musings

Traveling between La Palma and the US, you basically have to stop overnight in Madrid going both directions, because of how the flight connections work. On the way outbound this meant little more than a shuttle to an airport-area hotel, a quick meal, and a short jet-lagged sleep before getting on a plane the next morning. Coming back, however, I had enough time to take the subway in from the airport area to downtown to wander around for a few hours, eat a Spanish dinner, and see some of the sights.

Mostly I walked around the downtown area, from Callao along Gran Via to the Puerta de Alcala, down past the Prado and the Jardin Botanico, then back towards Plaza Mayor and Puerta del Sol, in case you're at all familiar with the city. It's a surprisingly modern city with a typical "downtowny" feel, but in other senses it's very different from US cities I'm used to. The architecture of the grandiose apartment buildings, government ministries, and palaces are a very nice backdrop for wandering the city streets.

Unfortunately, I didn't have enough time to go into any of the museums, being there only at night. The Prado, above, was a surprisingly bland building considering what's inside it, but I guess you could say the same thing about the National Gallery in DC. I particularly liked the maze-like manicured hedges around the back of the Prado - made me think of Harry Potter V - but I couldn't get a good picture of them. And there is an impressive cathedral right behind the Prado too.

Wandering around downtown Madrid you can't help but pass a handful of these restaurant/bar/deli type places called, as you can see, "Museo del Jamon." You probably don't need a Spanish-English dictionary to know that translates to "Museum of Ham," and in many ways that's exactly what it was. Those Spaniards sure like their ham. I guess they are famous for it, acorn-fed Iberian and Serrano Hams and whatnot. Anyways, these places cracked me up not only because of the name, but because the insides held a bustling counter jammed with patrons ordering wine, beer, ham sandwiches, chorizo, and other late-night snacks of the ham-variety. I could go on, but plenty of other American travelers in Madrid have had the same experience and documented it better than I probably could. One such example of a good recreation of the Museo del Jamon experience is this blog entry - the pictures there are from the one I actually went inside to explore. In looking around the internets for other folks' descriptions of the Museo del Jamon, I found one in particular that I found pretty hilarious. The article's title is "A Quest for Vegan Food in Spain," so you can probably tell where this is heading. An excerpt:

"Unlike Americans, who intently close their eyes to the graphic details and images of slaughtering animals for food, Spaniards do not blanch at the thought or sight of eating a rotting corpse. Typical of bar-restaurants is the spectacle of pig legs, from the top of the thigh to the bottom of the foot, hanging behind the front counter. One of the grisly legs is ensnared in a cutting block to slice pieces of flesh for the sandwiches or tapas. The Spaniards apparently love ham, as one regularly passes ham specialty shops called Museo de Jamon that, true to the name of “ham museum,” look like a slaughterhouse inside and feature every imaginable way to dismember, display, and consume a pig. If pig is not to the Spaniard’s taste, there are always the seafood shops that feature a glass window of lobsters, crabs, squid, and other ocean delights waiting for the human command to boil them alive. Author Carol Adams writes about the “absent referent” of animal bodies in food consumption in order to mask the reality of death and suffering. While this may be true for Americans, the animal referent is unflinchingly present for Spaniards enjoying menu delicacies such as “blood pudding” and “brains.”

This is all very true. In La Palma we went to a great seafood restaurant where you pick out the freshly caught fish that you want, they cook it up and bring it over to your table, where they chop off the head and tail and debone it before putting the fish on your plate.

Another thing about food in Spain, maybe Europe in general, is that all of the waiters seem to be men, while all the "busboys" were women. Hmmm. Wonder how that worked out.

One last note about differences between Europe and the US that I was keenly aware of requires a switch over to the topic of sports. Given that the start of baseball season rivals (perhaps has surpassed?) Christmas for me in terms of amount of excitement generated, I spent a little time trying to find Red Sox-A's scores on European TV while overseas. Alas, no baseball. The sports that I was able to watch included:

• Women's curling - actually very exciting, especially when the Canadians were playing as I could actually understand them as they discussed the strategy behind their shots. They just barely pulled out a win to beat the Japanase team, Ari.
• Track cycling world championships - this is the velodrome event where you ride a fixed-gear bike around a wooden track with banked curves. Sounds a little mundane, but it can be pretty dangerous at times, too. Kind of neat, but apparently the euros eat this stuff up, as it got top billing for several days. More on this below...
• Snooker - a billiards style even where there's more little red balls than I can count, some other colored balls, and all the guys wear bow-ties. That's about all I know. Yes, this was on TV.
  
• MotoGP - crazy fast motorcycle racing. Think indy-car but with two wheels, where your knees scrape the ground on the turns.
• European basketball - only saw a little bit of this, and perhaps I have some latent American "Dream-Team" snobbism going on, but man they were bad. Kind of amusing to watch, but in retrospect I much rather would have watched Davidson's improbable run to the Elite Eight.

It was kind of neat to see some of these new sports. Especially the curling, where in the US you only really see that for 15 minutes late at night every 4 years during the winter olympics. I was actually glad that I had seen some of the track cycling championships too, because as it turns out my neighbor in seat 18D for the 12-hour flight from Frankfurt to San Francisco was none other than Jennie Reed, fresh off a bronze and gold-winning performance at said track cycling world championships, which were in Manchester, England. Pretty neat! A very nice girl to oblige my curiosity despite being exhausted after a weekend of competition and a missed flight, it was fun to hear about her sport, her performances, equipment, etc. She even showed me her medals! If you missed the Eurosport broadcast of her win in the keirin event like me, you can see it on YouTube. Congratulations, Jennie! I'll be sure to root for you in Beijing this summer.

La Isla Bonita

One of the first things I did upon starting my employment at Lockheed was to work on a little project building a piece of equipment for use at a solar telescope atop La Palma, in the Canary Islands. After a trip out there to install the equipment, I was quite certain that I would never return to the Canaries, but as it turns out I got a second chance to go out there after revisiting this project to refurbish the original device. So last week I flew some 6000 miles east from SFO to Frankfurt to Madrid to La Palma, with this bomb-looking thing (correct picture now, sorry) as carry-on luggage (actually that part went surprisingly smoothly).

La Palma, with its beaches and mountains, is a haven for European tourists, particularly German and British middle-aged outdoorsy types. The picture above is of Los Cancajos, the area where I stayed - it's the complex in between the two stairstep looking buildings. The black sand beaches give away the island's volcanic origins. The island is basically a giant volcano (actually kind of a string of volcanoes of decreasing dormancy), with the observatories up at the top on the edge of the caldera, where the atmospheric conditions are better for staring into space. You can see the SST (where I was working) as the small squarish building third from the left, standing out against the blue ocean background.


As you can imagine, getting from sea level up to 2,400 meters (7,800 feet) involves a road with lots of twists and turns. Especially one that does it in some 30 km. Here was my commute for the few days we went up to the observatory:

The combination of the narrow curvy roads with blind hairpin turns every 50 feet, sudden fog, random boulders in the road, and the crazily haphazard occasional Spanish driver made this one of the more knuckle-paling, arm-tiring, concentration-demanding drives I can remember. It was beautiful, though, going from the coastal zones up through alpine forests into the above-treeline volcanic lunar landscape at the top. Here's me at the end of a little day hike one day, at the Roque de los Muchachos, the highest point on the island. Unfortunately the undercast, while neat in and of itself, was obscuring what would otherwise be a spectacular view across the caldera when I took the picture.

In addition to working up at the observatory, we had a free day to go explore the southern end of the island, where the more recently erupted volcanoes are.

The one shown above is Volcan Teneguia. The top photo was taken during its 1971 erupution, which shot ash and rock into the air and covered large areas around the island's southern tip with fresh lava flows. Below it is my picture from our visit - pretty cool to see the comparison, I think. Also kind of interesting was - and I think you can see a little of it in the picture, if not it may be more visible here - how the ocean on the East (left) side of the island was windswept and choppy, while the water West (right) or the island was smooth, and there's a clearly visible line extending basically due south from the island's tip where these two sections of Atlantic ocean meet.

I couldn't end this post without mentioning how awesome orange juice is in Spain. Man, those folks know how to do it right. It's delicious, and the prevalence of fresh-squeezed OJ is amazing. The hotel restaurant had self-serve juice squeezing stations, with baskets of oranges next to them for you to juice to your heart's content. Zuma de naranja was a menu item everywhere, even McDonald's at the Madrid airport, where they had machines that took a few oranges and juiced them, producing a cup of fresh zuma. Mmmmm. Almost didn't come back. But I guess all good business trips must come to an end, and while I was sad to see the sun set on my last day on La Palma, it's always nice to come home.

As usual, you can check out additional photos from my trip on my Picasa (one 's') page.