ContraryBear

Good Television

2007-07-11T16:58:00.000+02:00

I think we must be in some kind of golden age of television, here in the 00's. Even if you put aside the astounding output of HBO, I've really enjoyed shows like Arrested Development and Heroes and Firefly and How I Met Your Mother and Dexter, and even gotten pulled into girlier stuff like Project Runway and Ugly Betty.

But HBO takes the cake. I've gotten to see Oz and The Larry Sanders Show and Curb Your Enthusiasm in small doses in the past and liked them a lot, but Jesus ... this year I've been catching up on some of HBO's well-regarded dramas, and they're fantastic. I've seen the first two seasons of Six Feet Under and the first season of Deadwood so far, and definitely plan to finish those series when I get the chance. And just this week I've finally been plowing into the first season of The Wire. I've been reading rapturous praise for the show from its small but passionate fan base for a while, and it always looked like it would be up my alley. So with impossibly high expectations, I've been watching it ... and I'm completely hooked. I love it. I even watched an episode before work this morning. When I'm done I'll be looking to convert non-believers and force them to borrow and watch my DVDs (or even better, buy their own to encourage more shows like The Wire). I wish I was home right now watching it.

I guess I'll have to catch up with that Soprano show too at some point. Good things lie ahead.

Overheard in Dublin

2007-04-20T17:16:00.000+02:00

So my lady and I were in Dublin last month to celebrate St. Patrick's Day, and I was reminded of how loud Americans sound when they're on holiday. Last May in Florence there were hundreds of be-flipflopped American college girls rhapsodizing about how they loved Italy because they were, like, so into the Renaissance. In Dublin we heard "I fucking love Spar.* Spar is the shizzle." Yep, these are my poeple.

* Spar is a cheap grocery/convenience store chain with outlets throughout Europe.

Mixology

2007-04-20T17:08:00.000+02:00

Last Saturday I was standing in a liquor store regarding my choice of vodka, which I intended to purchase for use in making White Russians. Overwhelmed by the variety, my eye settled on Absolut Raspberry vodka, and I thought "A White Russian with raspberry flavoring would be revolting". Then, the more I thought about it, the more tasty that drink sounded to me, until I ended up persuading myself to buy the Absolut Raspberry.

At home that night, I made a tall glass of raspberry-flavored White Russian. But first -- what to call it? I racked my brain to think of a raspberry-and-Russian-themed name and found none, but fortunately my fiancee was up to the task. Ladies and gentlemen, the drink is called a Rasputin.

(Sadly, the drink tasted a bit strange; the raspberry flavoring dominates at first, then the coffee flavor from the Kahlua kicks in and lingers. I was hoping for a happy marriage of the two, producing a creamy and delicious new taste. Alas.)

Celebrity matching

2006-10-06T16:00:00.000+02:00

www.myheritage.com has a service (requiring free registration) where they scan a photo of your face and match it with the closest celebrity faces. Observe:

I'm both Hannibal Lector AND Clarice Starling. That rocks.

Steaming

2006-08-21T12:59:00.000+02:00

So my lady and I had a mission last Saturday, to find a rice cooker/steamer to make it easier for us to make healthy meals at home. We went to several different stores and it was a funny display of Dutch cooking habits that every place had one or two rice cookers and ten to fifteen deep fryers. We eventually found a nice rice cooker/steamer combo at BCC, and have made two meals already in it -- rice, green beans and salmon Saturday night, and risotto Milanese last night. Both were totally delish.

So, I'm casting about trying to think of more things to steam -- probably going to do potatoes tonight. Any ideas? The steamer came with some recipes, but I'm sure people have come up with their own inventions that are quick and easy in a steamer. Let me know what you like to steam!

YouTubing

2006-07-25T15:37:00.000+02:00

Hola amigos,
Sorry it's been so long since I've rapped at ya. I've frequently intended to post again, but never got around to it. And for now, my post is going to be kind of lame -- I feel a burning need to link to my favorite YouTube clips.

This one is a delightfully silly video which accumulated a bunch of Darth Vader scenes from "Star Wars", but replaced his dialogue with lines from other James Earl Jones movies.

This one is a history lesson in the form of a song about America's most lethal president. Careful: the lyrics are profane and probably Not Safe For Work.

And this one is a video I took with my digital camera showing our cat playing pool.

Not much else has happened since I last posted ... well, lots of travelling (Brussels, Dusseldorf, Akron, Chicago, Krakow, Florence, London and Paris), and lots of sweating (unusually warm here in the Netherlands for the last month). More later.

Word nerd

2005-10-17T17:25:00.000+02:00

I am a word nerd. With some words I just adore the sound and the look and the mouth-feel, and I can't completely explain it. One word I keep thinking about lately is "ample". It just sounds so right. Some words are so closely linked in sound and root to their meaning that I cannot vizualize them meaning something else ... words like "abhorrent" and "lubricious" and "pizzazz" and "moxie".

It's great to discover foreign words that also hit the spot; I recently found out that in German "Morgenmuffel" is a person who can't wake up in the morning.

Another wordy thing I was reminded of recently is that Shakespeare invented tons of words in his plays. What a bad-ass. I know he was popular and influential and everything, but still -- 2000 words and phrases that survive to this day are credited to him. I'm so jealous. "Madcap". "Moonbeam". "Bloodstained". "Besmirch". "Hint". "Hobnob". "Scuffle". "Savagery". "Salad days". "Vanish into thin air". "Tongue-tied". "Short shrift". What a bad motherfucker.

And at the moment I'm also reading a history of the Oxford English Dictionary (did you know it took over 70 years to create the first edition?) The history is just okay so far. At least it's a lot easier to carry than the actual OED.

Random stuff

2005-10-13T14:36:00.000+02:00

I burned myself again last night while boiling noodles. I was standing over the stove, trying to break in half a stack of noodles so they'd fit in the pot, and when they finally cracked, my right hand jerked into the pot of boiling water. Fortunately I got lots of cold water on my hand promptly (after I got the noodles all squared away) so it looks like I'll avoid the nasty blisters I had from my last cooking incident.

Right now I'm listening to "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill", a CD which I only bought and got into a year ago, six years after it came out. I was just thinking about how it's not uncommon for me to catch up to cultural phenomena only years after they're relevant. I only really started to like "Beavis and Butthead" and Nirvana after their cancellation and Cobain's suicide, respectively. I'm probably almost ready to start appreciating "South Park" by now (in my defense, I've only rarely seen it, but I know many people who adore it, so I expect I will someday too). I'm skeptical of any heavily-hyped new thing ... it took me years to get around to reading the Harry Potter books (which I now enjoy).

I used to be legitimately worried that I liked the music that I liked only because it was (mostly) obscure; that being a snobbish culture asshole was more important to me than appreciating the innate value of things. I've decided that's not the case though. I'm definitely a snobbish asshole, but my snobbery is completely justified. People (and here I'm not talking to you, the blog reader, but the unwashed masses), get some taste why don't you!

My girlfriend occasionally peruses MTV when she needs some brain candy, and I've taken the opportunity to make a careful examination of the many and varied shows that they offer. My analysis: all of the shows on MTV are complete ass and I hate them, except for The Andy Milonakis Show, which is surprisingly watchable.

The Lauryn Hill album is really damn good, by the way.

Oh, and someone made a model of the Sears Tower using Jenga blocks. It's not clear if they used glue or something -- if not, that takes huge balls. It falls over, it could kill someone.

I have an addiction

2005-10-07T14:49:00.000+02:00

I have a severe addiction, and I've been a sufferer since I was about 1987 (or whenever it was that "Ultima 5" came out). I have an almost zombie-like longing to play computer games, and in spite of myself I'm always reading about what the cool new games are and then lusting after them. I used to be loyal to professional PC games, but the last couple years I've been trying more "indie" games (I have most of Chronic Logic's offerings), and last Christmas I was lucky enough to receive an Xbox for Christmas. The latter has allowed me to install Linux on my PC without impacting my game-playing possibilities (except during those times that my girlfriend wants to watch something on TV). My current obsession is Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which is hilariously profane, cartoonishly violent, satirical, varied, open-ended and has lots of great songs you can listen to. It contains voice work from Peter Fonda (as a spacy pot-growing hippie), Chuck D (as an angry DJ), Samuel L. Jackson (as a corrupt cop) and other famous people. It's practically the perfect game, except for the mild distress I cause my girlfriend when I run over innocent pedestrians willy-nilly while on the way to put out fires or initiate gang wars.

I've also gotten hooked on a couple of web-based games. One is Kingdom of Loathing, a low-tech role-playing game where the only graphics are the hand-drawn stick figures from the game's creator. It is nevertheless an engrossing, must-play-every-day experience -- KoL is both a funny parody of past RPGs while offering a challenging (if simple) role-playing experience in its own right. After you finish the game by defeating the Naughty Sorceress, you can "ascend" -- i.e. start the game over as another class, carrying over one skill from your previous class. Over multiple ascensions, you can build up quite a powerful character as you amass different class skills. You can also play "softcore" (where you can trade with other players and use items from your previous incarnations) or "hardcore" (where you have to find everything yourself, which takes far longer). I have two characters, one playing each style. You can buy and sell stuff from other players in the "mall" (which I do a lot) or chat with them (which I never do). Ingeniously, the game is free, but if you donate $10 you get powerful items which are prohibitively expensive if you buy them from other players within the game. I've donated $30 so far. Also ingeniously, there a loads of "leaderboards", both for big things like "most ascensions", and trivial things like "most martinis consumed" (mixing drinks plays a big role in the game). This gives every player a chance to be on some leaderboard by eating or drinking one particular thing to excess, or amassing a hoard of one particularly useless item. There are many facets to the goofy fun. I've taken a look at some other web-based RPGs like this, but KoL is by far my favorite.

The other web game I've been playing a lot lately is called Troyis. It represents another genre, the play-in-one-sitting Flash-based web game. I've played a bunch of them, but for some reason I've really gotten hooked on Troyis. It's a simple game where you just move a chess knight around a chess board using chess-knight moves, trying to hit each square at least once in 45 seconds. It's dead easy at first since you begin with a 3x3 board, but each level the board size increases by one, but the time limit remains the same. I've gotten up to level 10 or so (a 12x12 board), where you have to click frantically around to even have a hope of finishing in the time period. The first ingenious part of this game is that each board is missing some squares -- you don't have to land on the missing squares, but they're also not available for you to jump on to help you reach the ones you do need to land on. Each time through, different squares are missing, so you can't just learn one pattern as you play the game -- every game you have to take a different path to complete a board. The second ingenious part is that the game records your high score and tells you your global ranking -- I am currently the 1694th-ranked player in the world, just missing being in the top 100 among players in the Netherlands. The drive to improve one's ranking is strong, but after playing the game every day for a couple weeks, it gets very difficult to improve one's high score. The highest-scoring player has completed level 25 -- a 27x27-square board -- which I have a hard time accepting unless they cheated, which I think would be possible with some technical tomfoolery that slows down one's computer or otherwise fools the game into giving you more than 45 seconds to finish a board. It's still an absorbing and addictive game though. Try it and get hooked!

(Edit -- D'oh, I just noticed that the Troyis board never gets bigger than 10x10. That's a pretty challenging size to finish in 45 seconds, but not impossible -- you just have to be very good to do it about 15 times in a row to get to level 26.)

Movie trailers lie

2005-10-05T13:59:00.000+02:00

You ever watch a movie on DVD, then go to the extras and watch the trailers? It's eye-opening how misleading they often are. There's even a neat website which critiques movie trailers.

In that vein of trailer-based deception, I just found out today that there is a contest called Trailer Park where the goal is to cut spoofy new trailers for old films, using new music and editing to cast it in an entirely different genre.
This one was the winner: http://www.ps260.com/molly/SHINING%20FINAL.mov

Here are some other good ones:

http://www.ps260.com/Trailer/westsidestorytrailer_small.mov
http://www.ps260.com/elfollador/Scary%20Titanic.mov
http://www.movietrailertrash.com/views/demos/psycho_hi.mov

My Kick-Ass Brownies

2005-09-22T11:43:00.000+02:00

So right now I'm making brownies in celebration of my friend Jei arriving from the States this morning. I've been baking brownies from scratch ever since I got How To Cook Everything four years ago. At first I specialized in the Cream Cheese Chocolate Brownies, but now I've adapted the regular Chocolate Brownie recipe after some experimentation. Here's the variant I'm baking today:

250 grams butter
200 grams pure chocolate
2 cups of sugar
3 eggs
1 cup of flour
two pinches of salt
two capfuls of vanilla extract
a capful of pistachio extract
100 grams of white chocolate

Heat the oven to 190 degrees Celsius. Put the butter and pure chocolate in a saucepan and heat them over a very low fire, stirring to keep the chocolate from burning. When both are completely melted, put the mixture in a large bowl and stir in the sugar. Then stir in the three eggs until everything is blended. Add the flour, salt, and extracts and stir until the batter is mixed thoroughly (and should be a rich shade of practically-black dark brown). Roughly chop the white chocolate into chunks and add it to the batter. Put the batter in a baking pan (mine is about 9 inches by 13 inches) and bake for around 32 minutes. The duration of the baking is the only subtle part and may require some calibration before you nail the optimal time -- I've found that different ovens may run hotter or cooler than the temperature you set it at. The brownies are done if they don't wobble when you shake the pan, and you can stick a toothpick or a fork in them and pull it out clean. Let them cool for a while before cutting and devouring.

A lot of things can be tweaked to suit your taste, of course. I use brown sugar instead of white sugar if that's what I have around, and it seems to work fine. I used to always use almond extract instead of pistachio extract, but I think the latter imparts a subtler flavor; other extracts or liqueurs could be used as well. Instead of white chocolate you could add peanut butter chips or butterscotch chips or leave it out altogether (and in the last case, bake for a few minutes less). Bitter-sweet chocolate works fine ... I've also used a small bar of coffee or orange flavored chocolate in place of some of the dark chocolate to get a slightly different flavor. Experiment and report back to me!

Burning myself

2005-09-13T10:18:00.000+02:00

I recently suffered my worst kitchen calamity since I cut the tip of my left index finger off last year (as you do, when you're cutting onions with a brand new knife blessed with a frighteningly sharp blade). I was frying salmon filets in a grill pan, and I'd perhaps put a bit too much olive oil in. When I flipped one of the filets, I splashed my arm with several drops of piping-hot oil. Yowza, that hurt. More than a week later, I have an itchy constellation of red marks and peeling skin on my arm. At least the salmon came out well -- crispy on the outside, moist on the inside.

And I just repeated a horrible thing I did to myself earlier this year. You see, right as I'm finishing a shower, I like to turn the water temperature as cold as it'll go, and stand under it for a few seconds until I shiver and freak out and have to turn it off. But twice now, I've inadvertantly turned the water all the way hot while I'm standing under it, and the water gets quite hot in our apartment. Even worse than scalding my near-naked scalp is the feeling that I'm far too stupid to avoid damaging myself. That really hurts.

Learning languages

2005-08-22T10:53:00.000+02:00

My girlfriend and I had an exchange yesterday that reminded me that my knowledge of Dutch (and all other languages besides English) is Paris-Hilton-shallow:

Me, looking at the baseball results on the computer: "Jesus! My pitcher got murdered today!"
Her, slightly alarmed: "Really???"
Me, a bit abashed: "No, not really ... I mean, he gave up a lot of runs today."

The point being, my girlfriend (whose native tongue is German) speaks very good English, and even she still sometimes gets tripped up by expressions like that (although she is picking up the rules and jargon of baseball, so even those won't trouble her much any more). In stark contrast, my Dutch is good enough to get by in many common situations, but is still so poor that even if I understand the literal meaning of an expression, I'm very unlikely to grok the true meaning. The sweet seduction of beer, books, and the X-box leave me with little time or motivation to improve my language skills. My carefully constructed excuse for this laziness goes like this: I don't plan on living in Holland the rest of my life, maybe only a couple years more, who knows, so becoming fluent in a language that is fairly useless outside of the Netherlands and northern Belgium will have a poor payoff in the long-run. Thus, my failure to improve my Dutch constitutes sound long-term planning. See how that works? That's the result of years of convoluted rationalization.

But sometimes I wonder if improving my Dutch would be worth it for its own sake, both to improve my experience while I am living here, and for the intellectual boost of mastering another language. I kind of think it would be.

Here, for your enjoyment, are a few Dutch idioms that I have picked up in my time here:

"Schiet op" -- literally: "shoot up". In English: "hurry up".

"Ik keek met mijn neus" -- literally: "I looked with my nose". That's what they say for the occasion when you overlook something that's right in front of you.

"Lange tenen" -- literally: "long toes". A person with long toes is easily offended.

"Daar zit hij nu met zijn gebakken peren" -- literally: "There he sits with his fried pears". This is my favorite, although I'm not entirely clear on its usage. One plausible explanation I've heard is that it's the equivalent of the British term "Billy no-mates" -- i.e. a friendless person who threw a party and cooked up a dessert and everything, and nobody showed up, so the person is left sitting with the fried fruit.

Intelligent Falling

2005-08-17T12:58:00.000+02:00

There's been a lot of stuff recently about "Intelligent Design", the alternative to straight-forward evolution that is being promoted by American religious folks as an equally valid viewpoint that should be taught in grade school biology classes. As you might know, I'm terrifically interested in the theory of evolution, and realize that while it's the foundation of all modern biology, there are still quirks which remain controversial among biologists. So even though this Intelligent Design malarkey is a facade for getting a little bit of God into public schools, I still appreciate that it's asking important questions about evolution -- I myself sometimes wish I'd taken a different career path, one in which I'd be filling the gaps of knowledge about our evolutionary past. It's good to be reminded about the silliness of the movement behind Intelligent Design though, as I was in an article in this week's Onion about Intelligent Falling, the alternative to the theory of gravity.

And I'm back in the Netherlands after a short but fun trip to the States; we got to hang out in Cambridge and Boston with my friend Gary, and had a fun time in Akron for my sister's wedding. My girlfriend and I also joined my folks for an Indians game, my first in years, and despite some rain and bad Tribe pitching, it was nice to be back at Jacobs Field. I had a hot dog and got myself a new cap and my lady friend seemed to not object to her first baseball experience (although it was mainly the funky mustard that excited her, I think (understandably so -- you're missing out if you haven't had the stadium mustard in Cleveland -- I'm not kidding)).

Homeward Bound

2005-08-03T21:02:00.000+02:00

We are off to the U.S. soon, first to Boston to see the town and visit a friend of mine,* and then to my hometown of Akron to attend my sister's wedding. My little sister's wedding. That makes me feel a bit old. And by this time next year, I could be an uncle. That would be pretty cool. I'm a bit sorry I don't live closer, so I can hang out with the new chubbin, an exciting new blood relative. I would like to influence it while its still young. You know, teach him or her to appreciate baseball, and cooking, and free-market economics. The basics.

I'll also probably see one of my oldest friends, who I've known since I was nine. He'll be coming to visit in September, which I find terribly thrilling. He's never been to Europe, so there's a lot I'd like him to see. And I've had a loooooong visitor drought, which I'm glad will be snapped. It's fun to show people around and demonstrate my not-great-but-not-terrible Dutch in action. I guess we'll have to hit the Big Four Tourist Attractions in Amsterdam: the Anne Frank House, the Van Gogh museum, a coffee shop, and the red light district. And maybe a boat tour. Ho hum. But still! It'll be cool to show someone around Delft, and Rotterdam, and introduce him to Belgian beer, and bitterballen ... yeah, it'll be great.

* And also to see Coldplay right after we arrive, I found out today. We'll be bushed, but I hear they put on a good concert. I hope we stay awake.

Tomato sauce.

2005-07-27T10:37:00.000+02:00

Back when I was just a tadpole, cooking simple things in college, I used to buy Ragu pasta sauce to make with my pasta. When I got to graduate school, I got a little fancier, and I would buy fancy tomato sauce, and I would add diced onions and mushrooms and green peppers, and maybe some pork or chicken or something like that. I tried making my own tomato sauce once, but it just wasn't sweet enough ... and it was too chunky ... and it didn't seem right.

Fortunately, since I moved to the Netherlands I've stepped up my cooking quality, and I make my own tomato sauce now. Sautee garlic and onions (and peppers and mushrooms, if available) in olive oil til they soften, then add a can of peeled tomatoes and mash them up and let it simmer until the tomatoes break down and it all gets, well, saucy. Pretty easy, and super tasty (cuz I put lots of garlic in my sauce). I've been doing that for years, and never considered going back.

But jars of Hak pasta sauce (with veggies) were on sale yesterday, so I bought one and had it with my tortellini. It totally tasted wrong. Very very sweet, very mushy vegetables ... I could see the broccoli, but not taste it. It was good to try it and be reminded of the bad old days of sauce from a jar, but I'll not be buying that again, sale or no sale. I hereby implore my vast readership to experiment with making your own pasta sauce, perfect it, and never again return to the sugary Ragu of your youth.

Stumbling

2005-07-22T10:04:00.000+02:00

So I've been making good use of the StumbleUpon FireFox extension ...

Today I found this droll little equation proving that girls are evil.

Or how about high-resolution satellite photos?

Or a simple but nicely-done web-based paint program that lets you save and email your creations?

Or the Condensed Edition of Plato's "The Republic"?

I find great new sites every day. StumbleUpon isn't as structured as del.icio.us, but its very randomness is appealing. Yet another reason to use the FireFox browser.

Mosquitos, your enemy has a new name.

2005-07-19T12:59:00.000+02:00

And his name is ContraryBear.

Seriously, the three euros I spent to get one of those tennis-racket bug-zappers has been a great investment. It is somehow more satisfying to fry skeeters with a spark than a bang -- I used to use women's magazines to kill my prey. And it's not so messy on the walls. And less damaging to the Cosmo cover girls. I almost look forward to seeing mosquitos before going to bed now.

Perhaps I should just try and stun the little fellas and then release them back into the wild, so they can spread the word to their cursed cohorts ... but maybe it's best just to keep killing every one I see. It adds to the mystery, from the perspective of the outside mosquitos looking in. Keep 'em coming!

Bale is a great Batman

2005-07-17T23:55:00.000+02:00

So we went to see "Batman Begins" this last weekend, and I walked out pretty damn impressed.
I decided it was the best comic-book-adapted movie I've ever seen.
It sounds like I'm damning with faint praise, I know, but considering it must be tough to create an original story around the time-worn conventions and backstory that come with comic book heroes, I think they did a great job. Looking at Metacritic, I see that the reviews are mostly favorable, but ranging from enraptured to disappointed. Here's what I liked about the movie:

It seemed less cartoony, and more real, than other comic book adaptations. The Batmobile is like a tank. Christian Bale's Batman gets injured and makes mistakes. People go insane and die in this movie.
Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman are wonderfully understated actors. The whole movie has a deadpan sense of humor.
Cillian Murphy and Gary Oldman also deliver nice low-key performances. It's great when a movie has the confidence to pepper the supporting cast with good actors and have them be quietly creepy (Murphy) and melancholic (Oldman), with no hamming it up with one-liners.
The outdoor scenes in the movie were shot in Chicago, and I recognized a lot of it. The car chase in Lower Wacker, the bridges over the Chicago River, the skyscrapers and the downtown canyons -- all very enjoyable to me since I used to live there. Even the futuristic public transport was cool and reminiscent of the el.
Best of all: Liam Neeson's salt-and-pepper fu-goat is tremendous. I so want to be him.

It's not perfect ... my biggest bitch is that (as the reviewer in the Dallas Observer noted) Katie Holmes doesn't come close to having the gravitas to pull off the role of a district attorney. That cute pixie face has carried her a loooooooong way. But the movie still rocked, and I'm looking forward to more.

(Speaking of pixie-faced brunettes, we watched "Garden State" recently on DVD. I thought the movie was pretty good, and again my biggest complaint was the love interest. Natalie Portman just wasn't believeable in the irresponsible-mysterious-but-loveable local girl role. I don't know who I would have preferred there ... Drew Barrymore maybe? I have to watch "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" again to see if Juliette Lewis pulls it off. I'm sure it's a delicate balancing act, this role, but if I watch the movie and keep thinking "Jesus this girl is annoying", then any romantic chemistry is shot to hell.)

A local pub

2005-07-14T11:37:00.000+02:00

So I was out drinking in Rotterdam with a Dutch friend last night, and one place we stopped at was Cafe Rhythm. It's a grimy place on Oude Binnenweg, a bit of a biker bar that always played heavy metal when we were there before. It seems to attract a lot of alcoholics and drug addicts. The beer is cheap too, although they only seem to have Oranjeboom on tap, and Hertog Jan in bottles. Most of the people (including us) choose the latter.

Yesterday they were playing dance music -- a bit incongruous, but didn't seem to disturb the crowd. This is the kind of place where you see a woman bolt out of the ladies' room to run up to the bar and berate the bartender for toilet paper. It's also homey enough that a couple of old people can sit and slowly play checkers on the table by the front window. My friend and I decided this place had great character.

Wonders of the World

2005-07-14T10:12:00.000+02:00

So there's a guy with a site where he ranks the top 100 wonders of the world (and lists the top 1000 on another page). I think ranking these places is kind of silly, BUT it is fun to see how many I've been to, and which of the other ones I'd most like to visit.

By my count, I've been to 17 or 18 of the top 100. (It's been 20 years since I went to New York with my family, and I can't remember if we went to the Metropolitan Museum, although it sounds like the kind of place my Dad would take us. I guess if I can't remember it, it shouldn't count.) All of the ones I've seen are in the U.S. or Europe, except for the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto. I still have some travelling left to do.

I'd like to see just about every other Wonder in the top 100, but if there's one that really interests me, it's Dubrovnik. There's just something about fortified medieval ports which really gets me. I've always fantasized about being an archer on the rampart, shooting flaming arrows at attacking ships.

First Post

2005-07-14T04:50:00.000+02:00

Here it is ... my first blog.
Well, sort of.
I sometimes posted to a site here, but not really enough to call it a blog.
Is it?
I don't know.
I can almost promise that every subsequent entry will be more interesting than this one.