No Middle Name

I’ve considered Molly as a child’s name before. Apparently, it is not only a very white-sounding name (Alison’s in the list too), but it’s also a common name for cats and dogs. Arg.

Photos from the cabin are posted!

I especially like this one of Michael.

There was drinking, fire, board games, lots o food, and the obligatory Saturday Night Charades.

Books: Disgrace J. M. Coetzee (well-written in simple prose — laden with symbolism — disturbing without being overly dramatic — I highly recommend it)

It’s been a long time since the last post here, mostly because I’ve been on business travel for the majority of May. I’ve been to New York, Toronto, and Indianapolis. In between, my mother came to visit on mother’s day. In total, I’ve seen three new babies. Bea Maynard, Zachary Beckman, and Colin Frantz. You know it’s 2007 when your friend sends the first picture of her son to you via her cell phone

on a related note, I added the video plug in to my Facebook profile today and uploaded this short video taken from IE cell phone while I was on a business trip in Toronto .
Elevator Music — who exactly thought this would be a good idea?

Oh, And I didn’t even mention that I was in Houston and Austin somewhere since the last post as well. when I was in Austin, I went to a film festival called Cine de las Americas and sat next to one of the directors of the film I watched, Hector Ulloque Franco. he’s a nice guy with an optimistic view for Bolivia’s future. His film was about the most recent presidential election in Bolivia, and the support the main candidate got from coca growers.

See:
Hartos Evos Aqui Hay: Los Cocaleros de Chapare

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Random ridiculous web stuff
“I think we’re dead!” Cop caught smoking dope on 911 tape

Will it blend?
Can you turn a toilet flapper into a smoothie?

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I’m embarrased to admit this, but for the past few years I’ve been actively tuning out media hype. This means I’ve been actively avoiding reading Harry Potter, didn’t make an effort to watch CNN , and avoided the local news broadcasts at any cost. If I had to hear one more story about how my toothbrush/refrigerator/skin lotion/whatever was going to endanger my health or harm me in some other way, my eyes would have rolled out of my head clear onto the floor. I HAVE been occasionally reading the WashingtonPost, and sometimes BBC news — supplemented, of course, by John Stewart and Stephen Colbert. (Along the same lines, I avoided learning about blogging for some time, simply because it had become suddenly trendy. ) Now that I’m back in the marketing business, I feel it is my duty to stay on top of what’s changing in this world. That, and I have this nagging voice telling me I’m being a bad citizen of the world by tuning out what’s going on around me –even if a lot of it is idiotic or depressing.

Along with the complete crap news about Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears etc. etc. , I’ve been missing some good things. Harry Potter, it turns out , isn’t bad just because it has a fanatical following. OK, I’m probably the only person who has only read two books in the series, so maybe I’m not the best judge, but I found those two to be entertaining.

Anyhow, the point of all this is that now I’m trying to make an effort to stay up to date with the latest trends on the web. I’ve started watching YouTube, read BoingBoing daily, just set up a Facebook profile, am trying out the new Google analytics and am generally paying more attention to what’s going on with Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and things Web 2.0 (though that moniker still irks me — it’s more like a new era, not a version release)

and so, here are the things I’ve found new and interesting since I’ve started paying attention to the world again.

SpeedBit Video Accelerator
Well, duh, who doesn’t one to their YouTube video to download faster?

Facebook
The interface is slick. They’re making some smart moves. Keep an eye on them. I think they’re going to get even bigger.

The World Is Flat
I bought this book finally. Will let you know how it is.

TED talks – some of the most engaging content on the web

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Books: Burn by James Patrick Kelly, My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult, Nobody’s Fool by Richard Russo, works in progress by Nick I’llcompletelyspellyourlastnamewrong Tax
Magazines: Fast Company, Wired, Science, Rachel Ray Every Day
New to me music: Spoon, Ghostland Observatory, Leroy Justice, Ben Gibbard (live, with the most god-awful audience at the 9:30 club in DC)

The Today show talked about why we dream of losing our teeth
I haven’t been gossiping, just listening to lots of it, so I’m ruling this interpretation out.
http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/17876281/

Time covers Stephen Prothero
“The Case for Teaching The Bible”

Both of these were released AFTER I wrote about them. They know I know the hot topics!
Or maybe, just maybe, the media doesn’t do any original reporting anymore. What one covers, they all cover.
Hooray for the mass media conglomerate!

San Francisco
In February I was in San Francisco for the AAAS Annual Meeting, the highlight of which was being able to see all of my west-coast pals again. Working long hours while your boyfriend is vacationing is much more tolerable when your friends come to entertain you at lunch time. This time around I got to see where everyone lived, played Wii tennis (whee! totally addictive), and enjoyed the beach in the middle of winter. Not quite warm enough for a dip, but much more pleasant than snow.
More photos.

I had high hopes for Larry Page’s speech at AAAS, but he’s not a dynamic speaker and I left early to go to my meeting with the Linguistics section. I’m told that the Q&A section wasn’t exactly riveting either, but that there were a couple of embarrasingly odd people in the audience, one of whom asked Larry to help end global warming by turning off his heat and wearing a down jacket all winter. If you’re interested, the speech is posted at YouTube. I can’t sit through it long enough for the whole 68 minutes to load to get to the Q&A I missed.

MarketingSherpa E-mail Marketing Summit
Last week I was on the road again, this time to Miami, for some professional development. Traveling to warm-weather locations in February is really spoiling me — now I know why retirees travel to warmer climes in the winter. Came back with some great ideas for the office — I’d recommend this conference to all marketing professionals who have an online component. Email can work well as a sales and marketing channel, but only if done right. Done poorly, and you can hurt your company more than you help it. Working on my own notes, but for now here is a conference wrapup from MarketingSherpa>>

Sleeping with Gorillas Will Give You Crabs
For the most part, the journal Science, which I work for, has a somewhat stuffy academic tone. So it amuses me when in contrast the news writers get a bit feisty. I shared a recent story from ScienceNOW, titled “Gorillas Gave Us the Itch,” with my friends and elicited responses such as: “So, you’re saying our ancestors had beer goggles?” and “Maybe I shouldn’t have slept with that really hairy chick.” Even the experts couldn’t keep from speculating, as the story notes that Vincent Smith, a cybertaxonomist at the Natural History Museum in London, says the study “raises some interesting questions about what gorillas and our hominid ancestors were doing in such close proximity to share each other’s lice.”

World Religion
Just today, one of my friends pointed me to a survey on world religions found at the beginning of this story.
The Gospel of Prothero
A Boston University professor argues that Americans, though ‘spiritual,’ are woefully ignorant about religion.

I believe that most of the world’s problems are rooted in misunderstanding, not evil, which is one reason I commend Stephen Prothero‘s quest to enlighten his students with a world view on religion. The more we understand other cultures and religions, the more it becomes apparent that at our core human beings are more alike than different, and the easier it is to bridge any divides that hinder communication, collaboration, and ultimately peace.

Coincidentally, Thursday I had picked up the most recent issue of Time magazine from the grocery store, which contains the article “Behind the Sunni-Shi’ite Divide.” I was curious to learn more after one of my friends told me that Sunnis have a saying “Trust a Jew before you trust a Shi’ite”. The statement is totally offensive, all around, but I like it because it illustrates succinctly how screwed up and complex the conflict in the Middle East is. I believe that peace in the Middle East has to come from within, but if Americans even want to attempt to help, they can’t have failing grades on their knowledge of world religion.

Related interesting stuff
On PBS “To Live and Die in Gwinnett County,” about a controversy over the construction of a muslim burial ground.
New Hampshire Public Radio “Cremation Nation” — Windows Media Player file that starts with a fascinating overview of the cremation process, COMPLETE WITH CREEPY CREMATORIUM SOUND EFFECTS, and includes an interview with Stephen Prothero. Did you know that the cremation rate in New Hampshire is twice the national average? Or that the bones get ground up after cremation to make the “ash”?

Losing your teeth in a dream
Apparently, this dream is as common as the dream where you are naked in class or stuck unable to run. For me, though, my first tooth-falling-out dream happened this week. Vaguely recalling that there was all kinds of theories on the symbolism of losing your teeth in a dream, I googled “losing teeth dream interpretation” out of curiosity and found this site. Fear of getting old seemed to be the most common interpretation, though I rather like the idea that it may mean I’m about to come into a lot of money.

In the interests of posting these before 2008, here
are links to my holiday photos, sans commentary.

Christmas with the Chandlers and DiCenzos
My dad took these.
I took these ones.

New Years with the McNews

My grandparent’s wedding photos and some other miscellaneous pics

And, if you want to laugh your butt off, listen to this, submitted by my friend Alvin.
Desi woman catches husband cheating

So, the last time my parents visited, they presented me with a couple of boxes of papers I had hid in their attic from high school and college. I finally sat down to go through it all, and only had the heart to throw out about 1/20th of what was there. I could have done better. I mean, really, when am I going to need my AP Calculus notes? Probably never. Some of the more interesting finds were the script from a play my AP Spanish class performed in which we were the hispanic version of the Brady Bunch. The script was decent, but the film we produced to submit to a competetion held by Plymouth State College was horrid. We were embarrased to submit it. The teacher thought we had lost our minds. And yet, we won. Some day that video cassette will come back to haunt me. “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia, siempre es Marcia!”

I also found some art from my high school art class, Dutch lessons from my friend Iwan, the results of a computer matchmaking service circa 1995 run by a high school computer class, a children’s book I wrote for Spanish class “Sr. Paloma Visita el Campo” (think”Country Mouse, City Mouse”), and some spectacular science report covers I hand-drew in my pre-Photoshop days. I’m sure the logic was to dazzle with the cover so that the teacher would be more forgiving with what was actually written inside.

Wired has a post on Dance Dance Immolation, which I saw my friend Bort play at this year’s Burning Man. They also have a 6-word short story from one of my favorite sci-fi authors, James Patrick Kelly.

On Saturday, I failed yet again to find a Geocache in which to store the travel bug I have been hoarding at my house for the past several months. Mr. Teef is getting hungry, because I can’t find even the simplest of caches.

I’ve been traveling so much I am starting to get confused about where I am, what time it is, and what the temperature should be outside. Lima was one hour behind Fairfax, foggy and mild. Iquitos was one hour behind, HOT and HUMID. San Francisco was warm and sunny and three hours behind. Fairfax was downright cold, near freezing, when I returned. Then it warmed up some and rained. Now I’m an hour behind and it’s hot again, though dry. ‘Course, we fell back for Daylight Savings Time last night which means that when it is 6 o’clock pm here, my stomach thinks it is 8 pm. It doesn’t help that in my travels today there was Seattle’s Best Coffee in Atlanta, See’s Candies in the San Antonio airport, and a Walgreen’s with signs PRIMARILY in Spanish and secondarily in English right near my hotel. Melting pot indeed.

I made the mistake of opening the door to my townhome and speaking to some local Jehova’s Witnesses a few months ago. At the time, I was amused because I got to have a conversation in Spanish with them. I am no longer so amused. They have been back at least 4 times, each time leaving pamphlets with an increasing tone of urgency (in Spanish). The latest one asserts that the end of false religion is approaching. The pamphlet points out that SOME religions believe in REINCARNATION. And other TOLERATE GAYS. Can you believe it? The Watch Tower Society definitely does not condone this, at least not according to the pamphlet they left me.

But they do, apparently, believe that some multi-headed beast will soon take vengance on non-believers. Image scanned from actual pamphlet, left this morning.

No sooner had I returned from Peru with bugbites and bloated intestines, than did I get on another plane and travel to the opposite coast of the US.

Now, working at a trade show can be incredibly dull, but the California Science Teacher’s Annual Meeting was kinda fun.

First, I got to see my pals Weaver, Ben Brown, Katie, Chris, Brooke, and Kevin. They made my evenings so much more enjoyable. This photo was taken by Ben after we had eaten at a fabulous Italian place and decided to stuff ourselves some more on gelato. The day I adjusted to the new time zone was the day I left for home, so I was falling asleep throughout the meal. And oh, did I mention that some strange guy gave our table a bottle of wine for “waiting patiently” to be seated. Very odd.

Went to a comedy club on Saturday night and got some laughs watching Jim Norton. Raunchy humor. I should really go out and see standup more often.

Also, I got to see the MythBusters on Sunday morning. They made me laugh by showing some un-airable clips. Flatulence is funny.
Do Pretty Girls Pass Gas?
Lighting the Emission
Watch them before they are yoinked off of YouTube.

I’m so far behind in posting to this blog. And I’m off again tomorrow to San Antonio for work, so forgive the brevity.

Photos of the trip are here:
Lima to Iquitos
Iquitos to Lima

This trip reinforced my feeling that it is time for a new camera. The delay from when I press the button to when the picture is taken on this camera is just too long. And the zoom is not great. And the new cameras all do video. And the price of a digital SLR makes me cringe. *sigh*

Anyhow, Herb and I had a fantastic time. We transitioned slowly to the Spanish-speaking world by passing through the Miami airport on the way down. It seemed that nearly 4 out of every 5 people we passed was speaking Spanish there. Once in Lima, we got ourselves safely from the airport to our hotel. Though we were warned several times that tourists have been targeted in taxis for smash-and-grab theft (through the taxi window, taking the bags off your lap), we managed to make four trips from and to the airport without incident.

Speaking of taxis, I had forgotten how silly drivers in Peru can be. Politely honking their horns at every intersection they come to, presumably to warn pedestrians to get out of the way. Though really, they seemed to do this even when no one was around, so I think they may have just liked the sound of their own horns. In addition to that nonsense, we survived one hair-raising taxi ride – we picked only taxis with official-looking lit-up signs on top, but whoo boy, the inside of the one that took us to the center of Lima was a mess — missing the handles to open the windows, beat-up dash, non-funcioning seatbelts. We zoomed past other motorists on the expressway, tailgating behind someone traveling in the right-hand lane. Our driver even managed to piss off the other taxi drivers. However, we arrived at our destination safe and sound, and we tipped the guy extra not because the driving was great, but because he forgot to add in the gringo tax (10 soles had to be the same rate the locals paid) and his poor beat up car looked like it could use some repairs.

In Lima we saw the Museo Arqueologico, Plaza Mayor, outside of the Catedral, and the inside of San Francisco, which includes some neat catacombs. We ate cebiche and drank pisco sours. We even ate at a sketchy local place and had milanesa de pollo (fried chicken, thinly sliced) with rice and soup. The food there was good, but SOMEPLACE ruined our digestive systems along the way, and that was probably the place that did it. Hard to know for sure, though.

Herb raved about the Coca-cola that contained sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup, and we both found ourselves munching on Frac cookies whenever we got hungry. Inca Kola remained off limits though. I’m all for living like the locals, but that stuff numbs my senses with bubble-gummy sweetness.

Lima, on the whole, is OK, but I have no great desire to go back and visit anytime soon. The jungle, our real destination, proved to be so much nicer.

We flew out from Lima to Iquitos at an ungodly hour in the morning. We had to leave the hotel at 2:30 am to be at the airport 2 hours in advance of our flight. The Lima airport is as modern as you can get, with nice stores, sparkling floors, and LCD displays. The Iquitos airport is a world apart. It has one runway, rusted out hulls of abandoned planes nearby, and a couple of baggage carousels. We were greeted by a representative from the Muyuna lodge, and he transported us from the airport to their offices in downtown Iquitos. It was nice not to have to pick out a legit taxi driver or haggle over the price of our trip into town.

Once at the Muyuna office, we met our guide for the week, Moises, and he gave us a quick tour of the surrounding city blocks. Iquitos is a city of about 400,000 people, and is only accessable by boat or plane. Since there is no cheap way to import goods, it is relatively expensive to live there. Iquitos prospered during a rubber boom in the early 1900s, and sadly it doesn’t look like the prosperity lasted. There doesn’t seem to have been much progress made to keep the city clean or improve infrastructure.

From Iquitos we hopped a boat 3 hours upstream at a pace of about 35mph. We stopped along the way at one village, where they had a “toilet” (aka, hole in the floating house that emptied directly into the Amazon, in which there were many children swimming). Our lodge, a little further up the river, off a tributary of the Amazon, was quite nice. Running water was pumped from the river into our cabin, and though there was no electricity, kerosene lanterns lit the walkways and our cabin at night.

The heat and humidity were what you would expect in a tropical rainforest near the equator. The sun had a ferociousness that I’ve never felt before. It was like sitting directly under a food-warming lamp.

While in the jungle, we took many tours up and down the river in the lodge’s motorboat, pausing to look at birds, bats, sloth, river dolphins, caiman, iguana, frogs, tarantulas, and to fish for piranha. We took only one long hike, sweating and getting eaten alive by mosquitos despite wearing three different types of insect repellant. Permetherin on our clothes, slow-release DEET lotion on our skin, and picardin spray wherever we missed before heading out of our cabin for the day. On the hike we saw a pygmy marmoset, spiders, bullet ants, army ants, and leaf-cutter ants living in the biggest antill I have ever seen in my life. There were also termites, and some nasty-looking hornets that we had to creep by. We also learned about some of the medicinal properties of the local plants. One was good for wounds, another for snakebites, for example.

Recalling my previous trip to a rainforest in Bolivia, I asked our guide if any wild pigs were around. He said no, we would have to go to a slightly higher elevation to find them. He then proceeded to tell me how he was out hunting with his friend and his dog when he was about 11 years-old, in an area of the Amazon that was closer to Equador than we were. His dog went after the pigs, and the pigs got the better of the dog. They ganged up on it, surrounded it, and ate it. Nasty, nasty animals.

By far one of my favorite things to do in the jungle was to go out on the boat at night and watch the bats swoop down to catch the insects that flew in front of our floodlight. They were quite common, and Moises thought we were crazy to be so fascinated by them. I suppose I would be the same way if someone started to ooh and ahh about the squirrels around here, which are so commonplace I barely notice them anymore. Then again, we have bats in Virginia too, and I sit out and watch them from our deck at night even though I’ve seen them many times before. To each his own.

Another nice thing about our jungle tour were our travel companions. We left Iquitos with two other couples and stuck together as a group for our four days there. Wayne and Ingrid were about our age. Wayne is Australian, Ingrid, Chilean, and they had just moved from Australia to Chile. They had been there for about 3 months, and Wayne was still working on learning Spanish. Ingrid’s English, on the other hand, was impeccable. She had been in Australia for the past 6 years, and met Wayne through a diving club at the University she attended. Duncan and Maura were a bit older than us. Duncan is English, Maura, Irish, and they are now living in Ireland. Maura had a fantastic accent. I’m hoping that we get to see some of their photos soon – Wayne especially was taking pictures of EVERYTHING and I’d love some nicer shots of the animals my zoom lens was too weak to catch.

Our tour of 4 days and 3 nights was probably just about the right length of time in the jungle for anyone who is not a hard-core outdoorsman. The weather there was harsh, and by the end both Herb and I were ready to get clean and cool again. I was fed up it with the mosquitos, ants, and horesflies taking chunks out of me as well.

There are more little side-stories to this trip, but I can’t possibly write it all in the amount of time I have before I head off to San Antonio in the morning, so that’s it for this topic for now.