A Long Time Gone

I know I've been quite negligent in blogging---so many things have happened these past months. Here's a brief recap:

1. Ben gets a Mac. A good friend of mine, Dean, works for Apple. (He designed the little antenna in your iPod which lets you connect to the internet.) As such, he gets a pretty ridiculous employee discount, which made the MacBook affordable. Now, I typically hate it when people gush about how much better the Mac operating system (OS) is than Windows. And, believe me, it's not that much better. In some ways it's actually worse---for example, you have very little control over the places where you save things, and the power manager is pretty sub par. iPhoto and iTunes are easy to use, but you can only store music and photos where Steve Jobs says you can store music and photos. The "sleep mode" isn't very good, and it runs the battery down pretty quickly. There are several pluses, however. OSX (the Mac operating system) is just a front end for Unix, which means that executing stuff from the command prompt and ssh-ing into other computers is pretty easy. The apps that people have built are also very nice. For example, there's a program called Papers, which builds a database of all of my scientific papers for easy browsing. All in all, it's better than your average laptop. The operating system is good, the components are good, and it's easy to replace simple things, like hard drives and RAM.
2. The Trip Home from California. Bryanne and I drove from Palo Alto to Columbus in April, making a stop at the Grand Canyon for a spectacular sunrise and a plethora of Japanese tourists. The vistas were, of course, breathtaking: We also found other things of interest, including some dinosaur footprints in New Mexico:
3. Bryanne and I Celebrate 1 Year. ...by going to the zoo! (It's been a good year, in my opinion.) The Columbus Zoo is great, and they have some very good exhibits. These fruit bats look kind of like my dog Lefty: I made a new friend, with a goat: I really like the moose exhibit, although the mooses were pretty inactive: Bryanne's favorite are the frogs:
4. A Chorus Line comes to town. Bryanne's good friend Matt is the company manager for the national tour of "A Chorus Line". We'd seen the show in Detroit in January, but this time they came to Columbus. The production is very good. Typically the whole point of the chorus is to blend in, and be completely faceless, yet the show is about giving the chorus dancers some actual face. Some are looking for their first break, and some are looking to keep living their dream as a dancer, however low the pay, and however small their chances. Anyway, Matt and his husband Sandro were in town for the weekend, (which was our anniversary, too), and they joined us for drinks:
5. Ben Dundee World Tour 2009. Currently, I am sitting in the Columbus airport, about to embark on a European Adventure. I am attending a conference in Hamburg, and it was actually cheaper for me to spend two weeks in Europe, than to spend just 5 days in Hamburg. I fly into Hamburg today, and fly out on the 15th. The conference runs from the 6-10, so I'll have a few days before hand to spend exploring the city, as well as a few days after the conference ends to take a side trip to Amsterdam. I will be sure and keep the blog updated with pictures and accounts of my exploits.
   

More SF Adventures

Bryanne took some more pictures of our San Francisco escapades, and I figured I should post them.

This is my friend Nadir and I, with the main star of the dinner show that we caught on Saturday night.

All in all, it was a wonderful weekend---a great way to spend Valentine's Day.

Meet me in San Francisco

After a mere five months of being an $8 train ride away from one of America's most unique cities, I finally made it into San Francisco for a long weekend. The occasion, of course, was Valentine's Day, and my girlfriend Bryanne flew in from Columbus.

Saturday night we went to a dinner theatre, Teatro Zinzanni. My friend Nadir is the drummer and was able to score us tickets at the "Producer's Bar". We sat next to a facial surgeon from Las Vegas, who was one of the acrobat's boyfriends (her name, appropriately enough, was Tatianna). After the show, we were able to meet several of the cast back stage. Anyway, I'm sure Bryanne will have some (compromising) photos from the show.

During the day on Sunday, we headed over to the Mission District to grab lunch, and check out a few shops that drove Bryanne wild. This is one of the areas of town that hasn't been completely gentrified, yet. If you're not familiar with this word, it's more or less what happens when gay people move into an old part of town.

First, it starts out as a part of town where only meth addicts and artists (who can tell the difference?) can afford to live. Then, coffee shops show up because meth addicts can't pawn espresso machines, and the artists are too poor to take a cab uptown to get a latte. This officially begins the revolution---property values begin to rise, more trendy shops start to pop up (where else do gay people and artists shop?), and eventually the meth addicts can't afford their rent any longer. Ultimately a Whole Foods store opens up, thus completing the process. Of course, the gays and artists are long sense gone, and all that are left are guilty white people, who complain that the same process is happening in another part of the city. This ostensibly leads to white people pushing for laws that prevent property owners from charging their tenants market value for their apartments, which stalls the process and creates a situation advantageous for the meth addicts. (For more info, see here.)

There was still a bit of time before dinner (which Bryanne was in charge of), so we caught a cab over to Haight/Ashbury, for to see the epicenter of marijuana culture in America.

(Bryanne has some better pictures.)

After a bit of marveling at the uses of hemp, we got back to the hotel room for a quick shower and change of wardrobe for dinner,at McCormick and Kuleto's. I had monkfish stuffed with chorrizo, in a chimichurri sauce. It was wonderful. Even better was this (according to Wikipedia):

According to Seafood Watch, monkfish is currently on the list of fish that American consumers who are sustainability minded should avoid.

I guess that made it taste even better. I won't go into detail about what "sustainability minded" even means (what a fucking joke).

Although the weather was mostly uncooperative, we did manage to get a bit of sightseeing in on Monday afternoon.

I was able to get a pretty decent deal on a hotel room on the Embarcadero, the street which runs down the eastern edge of the city, along the bay. The expensive rooms in the hotel looked out across the bay, onto the Bay Bridge, and the Ferry Building:

After a lunch by the bay, we caught a trolley back down to Fisherman's Wharf, where we had been the night before. We walked along the piers, where a solid commercial fishing industry still seems to thrive.

We walked down the waterfront, past shops that were more or less generic, and people who were more or less copies of people whom I had seen before in Baltimore, or Galveston, or New York. Of course, not every shop was a Hooters or a Vietnamese woman selling sunglasses---Bryanne and I found a nice bakery where we enjoyed some fresh sourdough bread and a cappuccino.

The sun began to sink, clouds started to gather again, and we headed back to the trolley stop. As we walked down the waterfront, past street vendors selling fried calamari and hot, boiled crabs, I couldn't quite help myself...

And, of course, I would be remiss if I failed to come up with the obligatory pictures of Alcatraz:

and of the Golden Gate bridge:

All in all, it was a wonderful weekend in the city---good food, good company, and a healthy dose of culture.

Bornstein Family Thanksgiving

Last week I headed back to Columbus to spend Thanksgiving with the Bornstein family. We typically have a small affair in Galveston, with 5-6 people, but early reports form intelligence officials had the Bornstein count at 24ish.

I arrived in Columbus on Monday night---it was quite a shock to remember how cold it gets in Ohio. I got on the plane in San Francisco at the temperature was in the mid seventies, when I got off of the plane in Columbus, it was mid thirties. I, for one, am perfectly happy knowing that snow exists somewhere in the world. I am also perfectly happy knowing that that somewhere is far away from where I reside.
Bryanne's father works for the NHL team in Columbus---he is an expert on concussions, and is employed by the Blue Jackets to keep hockey players from playing through the pain. Consequently, they have season tickets, and I caught a couple of hockey games while in town. I had never really watched a hockey game, and I have to say that it is a fast paced and exciting sport. There's not a lot of strategy when it comes to offense or defense---in this sense it is a bit like basketball, where you rely mainly on the ability of the defense to react to the offense, rather than on the ability of a coach to predict what the offense will do. It looks like (to my untrained eye) that you have to rely a lot on individual players doing their jobs. In a sport like football, though, playcalling and game management is much more important.
Bryanne's mom was very prepared for Thanksgiving dinner. She baked four pies the night before, and had ordered two ten pound turkey breasts from the turkey farmer at Columbus's North Market, and had them brined. The day of Thanksgiving just involved cooking the turkeys, and preparing the various side dishes.
Of course, I have to have my grandmother's zucchini casserole, which is actually pretty easy to make. It's like Atkins friendly stuffing: there's zucchini, red bell peppers, onion, garlic, bread crumbs, parmesean cheese, breakfast sausage and eggs in it. Basically, you boiled the zucchini until it gets mushy, then saute the peppers, onions, sausage and garlic and dump everything together in a big mixing bowl and mash it up. I boiled the zucchini in chicken stock instead of water. Then you add an egg or two, some bread crumbs, and I added some parmesean cheese. Put the whole thing in a casserole dish and top it with parmesean cheese, and bake it for a while until it's firm and delicious. I think it went over pretty well.It was a pretty grand affair, if only 14 of 24 people actually made the trip to Columbus. Mrs. Bornstein got the opportunity to showcase her new table, and there was more than enough food and pie to go around. Overall it was a wonderful week off, although I did sneak some physics in at odd times.

Monterey Bay Aquarium IV: REAL fish

So, without further ado...

Everything until now has been mere foreplay, the amouse bouche before dinner, the open fifths from the string before the conductor gives the downbeat...

Bottom Fish.

Most of these fish I've never seen before, nor would I have seen, as they aren't your typical aquarium fare. This means that I don't know, nor do I remember, most of the fishes names. The one above is some type of goby or blenny, I think, and it was in the tank with the Dr. Seuss Sea Anemones.


A lot of the fish weren't very colorful---not the typical blues and yellows and reds that one would expect if going to a tropical reef exhibit.


The Aquarium also had a dedicated flounder exhibit, with several different species in several rather large tanks. These two guys, above and below, are the same species. The flounder has a remarkable ability to match the bottom, regardless of the color---of course, anyone who's been floundering can tell you that. I had never seen such drastic variations in color back to back, however.


There was a whole tank dedicated to garbage---specifically, the ability of nature to utilize whatever shelter is available. I'm not sure what the point to this was, other than to encourage people to throw empty bottles into the ocean:

These gobies got along quite nicely in their improvised homes. It is even interesting that the darker goby chose the darker bottle (below) and the lighter goby (I didn't get a good picture of him) chose the lighter colored bottle. I don't think that this is a coincidence.

This is a shovelnose guitarfish, which I have never seen in person before. They live along the west coast, but I think there are species which live in the Gulf of Mexico.

I'm not altogether sure what kind of ray this is, but it looks like a cownose ray, which we catch from time to time off of the beach in Galveston.

This was another impressive exhibit. What they've done is actually opened the egg case of a skate (a type of ray) without disturbing the embryo, and then closed it against a piece of glass. The result is an actual look inside the egg case:

This is a wolf eel, found in cold water reefs. You can see a stupid person's camera display at the bottom:

This is a lingcod, wihch is a bit difficult to see:

This is a bit better picture.


And this is what it looks like after it returns from the dead:


There were tons of exhibits with little fish living in little crevaces, which occasionally popped out to see what was going on:

This is some species of blenny, again.





Kelp Fish.

There were several tanks dedicated to the kelp forests which the Pacific Coast is famous for. The next few pictures come from the third largest display in the whole aquarium. There are several species of fish in this picture, but the one I liked was the white sturgeon, in the middle. These guys are famous for their eggs, which rich people call caviar.

This is a leopard shark, one of few sharks which can live without moving constantly. For some reason, most sharks lack a mechanism to efficiently force water over their gills, which means they have to keep moving to keep water flowing. The leopard sharks (aparently) have the ability to just lay around. In the Gulf, we have nurse sharks with the same ability.

The second largest display in the aquarium was dedicated to the kelp forests, as well. I can't begin to name all the species in the tank, but this is a California Sheepshead, much less conservatively colored than the sheepsheads which live in the Gulf.

I'm not sure what this bruiser is. It looks like some sort of grouper or seabass.

These are some perches and rockfishes. I have much better pictures of rockfish below

This is also a rockfish, although unrelated to the ones above. Actually, I think this is also called a cabazon, but I am probably mistaken.


Tropical Fish.

Of course, no aquarium would be complete without the canonical reef exhibits. These fish were quite impressive, though, even if I have seen them before.

This is one of my favorites, called a butterfly fish.

This is the moray eel picture I promised. His teeth are very impressive. They are stalkers---the way they hunt is to hide in a hole and dart out when something tasty swims by. The long teeth ensure that the tasty thing can't wiggle away.

This is another one of my favorite fish, called a yellow tang. I just like yellow, I guess.


Rock Fish.

These guys are apparently quite tasty, and were fished to near extinction. They are sometimes called snapper, but I think they are not related to the deep water fish that we know and love (to eat) in Texas. This is a canary rockfish.

I can't help but think how he'd taste sauteed in butter, with some crab meat piled on top...

Nearest I can tell, this is an olive rockfish. I wonder if you can taste the difference?

This is called a bocaccio, I think.

This is a china rockfish. I tried to get more pictures, but they all turned out blurry.

Blue Water.

Anchovies!


I think this was my favorite exhibit of them all, the pelagic species. I didn't get very many good pictures, mostly because the light was low, and I didn't have a camera which would allow adequate shutter speeds for the low light conditions. I did get a FEW pictures, though. This is an ocean sunfish, flanked by a bluefin tuna to the left.

I was able to get some video, though. In this video, you'll see some (500+ pounds) bluefin tuna (sometimes called "fatty" tuna or toro), a 300+ pound yellowfin tuna (commonly called ahi) , some Pacific Barracuda, a few mahi mahi (sometimes called dorado or dolphin), and maybe a few other fish.

Here's a quick track list:
0:00 Pacific Barracuda.
0:12 Big Bluefin Tuna.
0:17 Huge mahi mahi
0:25 More Bluefin
0:31 Big Yellowfin Tuna
0:47 Bluefin (top) albacore? bottom
1:02 More Bluefin
1:04 Big mahi mahi again
1:18 Two big bluefin
1:28 Great picture of mahi mahi
1:32 School of albacore



Finally, this is a short (2 second) video of the full tank, with emphasis on the great hammerhead shark, which I've never really seen in the wild before.



There's still a few more posts to make on Monterey Bay Aquarium---it was THAT awesome.