Kinship, as you might be aware, is defined differently in various cultures all over the world. For example, the !Kung people of the Kalahari have only 36 names for men and 32 names for women, and you are considered related to people who have the same names. For instance, my sister's name is Maria; in !Kung society, that would mean the same incest taboo that prohibits me from marrying her also prohibits me from ever marrying *anyone* named Maria. (So, from the !Kung point of view, one of my college relationships was incest. But what can you do, you know?)
I bring this up because I realized yesterday that I belong to a kinship group I never realized before.
I was almost done with my beach run when I noticed that the ocean had washed up a set of keys onto the shore, a set of keys that looked suspiciously like the ones that ended up at the bottom of Mendocino Bay in the Valentine's-Day-gone-awry story with Keiko. Given the way the currents work on the coast of California, it is actually possible that my keys could one day wash up on the beach in HMB, so I stopped to pick them up.
But alas, the car key, though it looks a lot like mine, is a little thinner. And the key fob, though it looks like mine, is a little squarer. And the housekey that's attached, though it looks like mine, is a little rounder. Plus, there's no office key attached.
I examined them for awhile. Whoever owned these keys must have lost them a while ago, based on the amount of rust on them. Then I tucked them into my pocket and kept running. I felt good. Not because some foolish dude lost his keys in the ocean; that was a terrible experience and I wouldn't wish it on anyone. But rather, I felt good because I realized that there's a whole different group of people I'm related to out there that I never knew about before.
And so I say to you, foolish, foolish dude, who was surely doing something pretty obviously stupid, probably against the wishes and sound advice of your girlfriend, when you lost your keys into the ocean, I say to you: you are my brother. And there must surely be more than just the two of us- a whole family of foolish brothers, scattered far and wide throughout the world. To you, my brothers, I say: you are always welcome here in HMB.
But if you should ever come for a visit, I'm going to insist that we stay safely on land...
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Awesome cloud action...
Check out this movie from the beachcam on March 3rd, especially toward the end of the day...
Monday, March 15, 2010
At last, someone who understands me...
This weekend I flew to Harrisburg, PA to visit Jill.
The flight there started as usual- planned to go to the office before heading to the airport, but didn't allot enough time and had to rush, arriving at my gate moderately early, at least by my standards.
Now, you can't fly directly to a place like HBG from San Francisco. And, there aren't a whole lot of airline options. I chose Delta, which I basically never fly, since it was cheapest by far. Delta, you may remember, bought out Northwest a few years back. Northwest, I am sad to say, I have flown many a time, and as near as I can tell, that airline has never once in its entire misbegotten history flown an on-time flight.
Thus, when Delta bought NWA, I wondered if the relative competence of Delta would be dominant or recessive in the merger. This would be my chance to find out.
My flight to Detroit started out a modest 15 minutes or so late, which id definitely not the end of the world, and compared to most of my experiences with NWA, a stunning success. Just based on that flight, it was hard to tell if the 15 minutes was just random variation, or the slow infection of Delta with the disease of NWA incompetence.
Then, on the 2nd flight, a 54 minute flight from Detroit to HBG, we hit a flock of geese on take-off. It makes a surprisingly loud thumping noise. It is, I might add, disconcerting to hear your airplane suddenly start making an odd thumping sound while it's taking off.
So, now we have a problem: since we just hit a flock of geese, and "Sully" isn't flying our plane, we need to land and have the plane inspected. Except, we have to finish taking off. And then we have to get out of the takeoff lanes in the air. And then, we have too much fuel to safely land, so we have to do doughnuts around Detroit's airport until we burn off enough fuel to be allowed to land.
My problem with this is: if you're worried the plane might crash because of damage to the hull/engines, why are you going to make us circle forever above Detroit? I mean, granted that at this point, if we do crash we have very low odds of actually hitting the 5 buildings left in Detroit that are actually occupied at any given moment, but still, it's a 54 minute flight, so if you're going to make us circle for 35 minutes burning fuel, couldn't we instead burn the fuel by, I dunno, FLYING TO HARRISBURG??
By the time we land back in Detroit, we've been in the air 44 minutes. And I am now convinced that incompetence/being constantly subject to weird star-crossed turns of fate is the dominant gene in airline mergers.
So, we taxi to a stop on the runway. Of course, there's no gate for us. We wait for a gate. Then, they finally find a spare gate for us, and commence the inspection. For the record, the inspection process seems to consist of the following components:
1) Jimmy comes out of the basement with his wrench and gives ol' Betsy a few gentle taps here and there to verify structural integrity. (approximate duration: 5 minutes)
2) The proper forms are located, delivered to the captain, filled out by the captain, and filed with the proper regulatory and insurance agencies. (approximate duration: 45 minutes)
I was really hoping someone would fire a frozen turkey into our engines, but alas, no such luck.
Thankfully, ol' Betsy passed her inspection, so we tried again to take off, and this time managed to do it without hitting anything. And so, I did eventually make it to HBG, a couple hours late.
Since it poured pretty much nonstop the entire time I was in HBG, we didn't get out too much, but we did have dinner with Denni, an old friend of Jill's, and her husband Steve. It was a nice dinner, at a Tuscan restaurant owned by a woman whose level of service was absolutely exemplary. And apparently, this morning Jill received this feedback from Denni:
"Did you get the message from Steve and I? He’s great; unbelievably handsome, normal, fun, smart, normal, interesting, normal, and did I say normal???!!"
At last.
At long last.
Someone understands that I am indeed so normal, it's worth saying 4 times in just one sentence. It's so great to get that from an unbiased source.
Other than that, we mostly stayed in. Dinner at a fantastic French restaurant Sat night, with the best veal meatballs I've ever tasted, and then we hit one of HBG's few clubs. Apparently, there is little enough nightlife in HBG that we made it onto the website showing the local scene:
Just 2 normal folks out on the town.
Sunday was Alice in Wonderland, which I very much enjoyed. Johnny Depp is always fun to watch, even if he's always playing variations on the same theme.
Sadly, I had to get up at 430 this morning to catch my flight back here. By the time I get home tonight, I will have been up almost 24 hours straight. Good to know I haven't lost all of the stamina that got me through college. And life in LA. And grad school. And life in NYC...
The flight there started as usual- planned to go to the office before heading to the airport, but didn't allot enough time and had to rush, arriving at my gate moderately early, at least by my standards.
Now, you can't fly directly to a place like HBG from San Francisco. And, there aren't a whole lot of airline options. I chose Delta, which I basically never fly, since it was cheapest by far. Delta, you may remember, bought out Northwest a few years back. Northwest, I am sad to say, I have flown many a time, and as near as I can tell, that airline has never once in its entire misbegotten history flown an on-time flight.
Thus, when Delta bought NWA, I wondered if the relative competence of Delta would be dominant or recessive in the merger. This would be my chance to find out.
My flight to Detroit started out a modest 15 minutes or so late, which id definitely not the end of the world, and compared to most of my experiences with NWA, a stunning success. Just based on that flight, it was hard to tell if the 15 minutes was just random variation, or the slow infection of Delta with the disease of NWA incompetence.
Then, on the 2nd flight, a 54 minute flight from Detroit to HBG, we hit a flock of geese on take-off. It makes a surprisingly loud thumping noise. It is, I might add, disconcerting to hear your airplane suddenly start making an odd thumping sound while it's taking off.
So, now we have a problem: since we just hit a flock of geese, and "Sully" isn't flying our plane, we need to land and have the plane inspected. Except, we have to finish taking off. And then we have to get out of the takeoff lanes in the air. And then, we have too much fuel to safely land, so we have to do doughnuts around Detroit's airport until we burn off enough fuel to be allowed to land.
My problem with this is: if you're worried the plane might crash because of damage to the hull/engines, why are you going to make us circle forever above Detroit? I mean, granted that at this point, if we do crash we have very low odds of actually hitting the 5 buildings left in Detroit that are actually occupied at any given moment, but still, it's a 54 minute flight, so if you're going to make us circle for 35 minutes burning fuel, couldn't we instead burn the fuel by, I dunno, FLYING TO HARRISBURG??
By the time we land back in Detroit, we've been in the air 44 minutes. And I am now convinced that incompetence/being constantly subject to weird star-crossed turns of fate is the dominant gene in airline mergers.
So, we taxi to a stop on the runway. Of course, there's no gate for us. We wait for a gate. Then, they finally find a spare gate for us, and commence the inspection. For the record, the inspection process seems to consist of the following components:
1) Jimmy comes out of the basement with his wrench and gives ol' Betsy a few gentle taps here and there to verify structural integrity. (approximate duration: 5 minutes)
2) The proper forms are located, delivered to the captain, filled out by the captain, and filed with the proper regulatory and insurance agencies. (approximate duration: 45 minutes)
I was really hoping someone would fire a frozen turkey into our engines, but alas, no such luck.
Thankfully, ol' Betsy passed her inspection, so we tried again to take off, and this time managed to do it without hitting anything. And so, I did eventually make it to HBG, a couple hours late.
Since it poured pretty much nonstop the entire time I was in HBG, we didn't get out too much, but we did have dinner with Denni, an old friend of Jill's, and her husband Steve. It was a nice dinner, at a Tuscan restaurant owned by a woman whose level of service was absolutely exemplary. And apparently, this morning Jill received this feedback from Denni:
"Did you get the message from Steve and I? He’s great; unbelievably handsome, normal, fun, smart, normal, interesting, normal, and did I say normal???!!"
At last.
At long last.
Someone understands that I am indeed so normal, it's worth saying 4 times in just one sentence. It's so great to get that from an unbiased source.
Other than that, we mostly stayed in. Dinner at a fantastic French restaurant Sat night, with the best veal meatballs I've ever tasted, and then we hit one of HBG's few clubs. Apparently, there is little enough nightlife in HBG that we made it onto the website showing the local scene:
Just 2 normal folks out on the town.
Sunday was Alice in Wonderland, which I very much enjoyed. Johnny Depp is always fun to watch, even if he's always playing variations on the same theme.
Sadly, I had to get up at 430 this morning to catch my flight back here. By the time I get home tonight, I will have been up almost 24 hours straight. Good to know I haven't lost all of the stamina that got me through college. And life in LA. And grad school. And life in NYC...
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