A Stitch in Time

While playing a game of the nominally non-contact sport of ultimate frisbee yesterday, my chin met the side of one of my teammates' head. It didn't really hurt, but I was bleeding more than I would have liked. Three stitches later, everything is back to normal.

Angel and Pelican

June 9 | 4:45 pm | Paris

Tapenade Rubbed Steak

I was looking for a good, simple grilling recipe on Sunday so I turned to the cookbook that has never let me down and found an interesting approach to steak. You take a piece of steak (in my case, a one and a half pound of boneless sirloin steak) and spread a healthy amount of black olive tapenade all over the meat. You then wrap it up in plastic wrap and let it sit in the fridge for a few hours. To grill it, sear it on each side for a few minutes then let it cook over indirect medium heat until it reaches the desired level of doneness. I cooked my steak for just under an hour and it came out medium to medium rare. The tapenade imparted a lot of flavor to the meat without overwhelming it. I'll probably try this recipe with some other meats since it came out so well.

When You're Here, You're Family

This story is a couple weeks old, but I couldn't resist commenting on it. The NBC affiliate in Providence did a story where they called the Rhode Island Department of Tourism's toll-free number and asked a variety of rudimentary questions about Rhode Island and discovered that the people answering the calls knew next to nothing about the state. For example, when asked where one could find a good Italian meal in Rhode Island, the operator recommended the Olive Garden in South Attleboro, MA. The calls were being handled by a call center in Kansas City, MO so it's not surprising that the people fielding them knew nothing about Rhode Island.

In defense of the Department of Tourism's outsourcing choice, the toll-free number is not designed to be a tourist hotline; its only purpose is to allow potential visitors to request a travel guide. That being said, they probably should set up a second level of support staffed by people with local knowledge to assist callers who had questions about their visit to Rhode Island.

Grizzly Adams

I found this collection of Sports Illustrated's most usual covers a while back, but I still feel the need to comment on this cover in particular. It was kind of shocking to see an SI cover story starting a discussion about whether or not it would be a good idea to deliberately wipe out the wild grizzly bear population of North America. Even if SI still deemed the outdoors a worthy topic for a cover story, I can't imagine that they would ever consider debating the deliberate extinction of a species. I read the article, and while the author takes an anti-forced extinction position, he views the eventual extinction of the grizzly as a forgone conclusion. Nearly 40 years after this article was penned, the grizzly has been removed from the endangered species list (at least, in Yellowstone National Park), so overall, the grizzly's future has been somewhat brighter than this article predicted.

Wall E. Weasel's

I've read some reviews that have put Wall-E on the short list for best picture of 2008. While I wasn't quite that enthusiastic about it, I still thought it was a good movie. Like all good animation, it works on several levels. It's got fun stuff for the kids, not-so-subtle references to 2001 and other pop culture ephemera for the adults, and killer animation for people who enjoy movies solely for their visuals. Like most children's entertainment that is in any way creative or interesting, it has generated a fair amount of controversy. This is all pretty silly, of course. I think that the real message that Wall-E is trying to convey is the old adage about how the unexamined life is not worth living. All of the characters in the movie are forced at some point to choose between the comfortable status quo and the unknown. My one complaint is that after building up all of this tension, the ending is somewhat anti-climatic and unsatisfying. Perhaps they were just keeping the powder dry for the sequel.

Love Is

I've been using last.fm's "love" feature to flag songs that I love in order to inform their music selection algorithm about my tastes, but I've also been using it as a way to keep track of interesting artists that I've heard for the first time on last.fm so I can go back and explore more of their music at some point in the future. Needless to say, I was kind of bummed when I learned that last.fm doesn't provide a feed of your entire loved music history. Fortunately, a fellow named Jamie Thompson is hosting a little last.fm loved music feed service that anyone with a last.fm account can use to create a feed of their entire loved music history. Here's my feed. I've also added it to the right-hand side of this blog underneath the blogroll.

For Eyes

As you can see (unless you need glasses), I have recently joined the those in need of corrective lenses club. I probably joined the club a while back, but I didn't get my eyes checked out until recently. I don't know when I first noticed that my vision was starting to degrade, but it was obvious by last fall when I was in China and my brother and his surgically enhanced eyes were able to easily read street signs that I could barely decipher (pretty amazing, given that he doesn't even know Chinese). Even though my vision is still pretty good, I notice a remarkable difference when I put on my glasses. Everything more than a couple feet away from me is noticeably sharper. It's nice to be able to see in HD again.

Sandwich Artistry

I've always been a big fan of sandwiches, and I discovered a new favorite on our trip to Europe. I discovered it at the Schönbrunn Palace snack bar of all places. It's simple, a baguette with Brie a couple strips of green pepper, and a healthy amount of fresh cracked pepper. I was very hungry when I had it for the first time, so it's not surprising that I found it so delicious, but I've made it a few times since getting back home and it still tastes great. Bon appetit.

LRU For Dummies

I needed a Least Recently Used data structure for some work I was doing so I went out to see what I could find in the open source world. I have used the LRUMap from Commons Collections before, but I was hoping to find one that makes use of generics. I checked out Google Collections, but they don't have any LRU data structures (yet). Fortunately, I check out the JavaDocs for LinkedHashMap on a hunch and was happy to discover that Sun already implemented an LRU algorithm in LinkedHashMap that can be enabled by setting a constructor parameter. They even provided a protected method that can be overriden in a subclass to create a fixed-size LRU map in fewer than 10 lines of code. The JavaDocs explain it all if you're interested.

Liberte Egalite Fraternite

June 8 | 3:23 pm | Paris

The Horror

I recently picked up Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. I'm not entirely sure why I decided to read it, other than it's one of many notable works of literature that I've never read. I went to the library looking for a work of fiction, but beyond that, I didn't really have anything in mind. I enjoyed the book, but I had a few problems with it. The first was that I picked up the Norton Critical Edition, which clocks in at 420 pages. The story itself is only 70 of those pages. I failed to consult the table of contents before diving into it, so I thought that it was a novel-length story. I tend to read longer stories differently than shorter ones. I don't pay attention as closely at the start of a longer story since I figure that the first 20 or 30 pages are just going to start developing the themes and characters that will be fully fleshed out throughout the course of the book. Once I was 20 or 30 pages into Heart of Darkness, I was almost halfway through the story. I didn't realize how short the story was until I was about 2/3rds of the way through it, at which point, I had no desire to go back to the beginning and read it more closely.

My bigger problem was the extent to which the story has been woven into western culture over the past 100 years. It's hard to approach a work of literature from a fresh perspective after you've already seen it parodied on Seinfeld. While I didn't read much of the source material, criticism, and historical information presented in the other 350 pages of the Norton Critical Edition, that which I did read was in some ways more interesting to me than the story. I'd still say that the story is required reading for any student of the scramble for Africa.

Correction

I used to read letters to the editor pretty religiously, but I've all but stopped reading them over the past couple of years. I guess I used to find them mildly amusing, but I grew tired of the inane and barely coherent arguments that are the bread and butter of typical letter to the editor writers. Fortunately, I skimmed the letters to the editor in today's ProJo because I came across a surprisingly good and informative letter to the editor. It's a refutation of several of the great myths of Rhode Island history, including one that I've perpetuated on my blog. As it turns out, the law passed in Rhode Island in May of 1776 only repealed the requirement that all government officers swear allegiance to the king; Rhode Island didn't actually declare independence until July 18, 1776 when the legislature ratified the Declaration of Independence.

Independence Day

I finally made it up to Boston for the 4th of July this year. I've wanted to catch the fireworks in Boston ever since I lived there, but for various reasons, it never worked out. I wasn't sure if I could still be impressed by a fireworks display, but I have to admit that they take things to another level on the 4th up in Boston. They had fireworks that lit up the sky with smiling faces and cubes when they exploded. They had fireworks that slowly floated back down to earth on balloons. They had a grand finale so massive that the smoke from the fireworks that exploded at the beginning of the finale practically washed out the explosions at the end.

One of the great things about the 4th of July is it's a pretty low-key holiday. The only things that are expected of you are eating, drinking, and watching explosions. I was pleased that even in Boston, one of the few legitimate 4th of July destinations, everything is still pretty low-key. With the exception of the crowd, the "celebrity" guests, and the sheer volume of firepower on display, it really wasn't any different than watching the fireworks at a park in Anytown, USA.

Iron Man

After two unsuccessful attempts, we finally caught Iron Man last night. With the exception of the Batman franchise, Michelle is usually more excited about comic book/action adventure movies than I am. While we both enjoyed Iron Man, I definitely liked it more than she did. It's not a theatrical masterpiece, but it's highly entertaining and incredibly whimsical. I suspect that most people don't go into superhero movies hoping for whimsy, but as an unabashed fan of the 1960s Batman TV series, I have always loved superhero movies that don't take themselves too seriously and constantly wink at the audience. If that's not your thing, Iron Man still has enough explosions and high-tech gadgets to keep up appearances.

West Side Story

Yesterday, I biked to work for the first time at my present job. It was actually the first time I've biked to work in seven years. This is the first job I've had in a while that has the facilities to support bicycle commuting (showers and bike storage) and is close enough to home that I can still make it to and from work in a reasonable amount of time when traveling by bike. I really should have done this a lot sooner, but it's taken me a while to find a good bike route across the west side of Providence. I figured out most of the route that I wound up taking last summer, but at the time, I felt like it had a couple of high traffic chokepoints that I wouldn't be able to make it through so I started looking for a new route that went up the more bike-friendly east side. After trying a friend's route across the west side that involved riding across Federal Hill, I decided to give my old route another try. After fighting the traffic on Dean St., riding around Olneyville Square suddenly didn't look so bad. As it turns out, the traffic on my route is not as a bad during the weekday commute as it is on a Saturday morning, since the most of the high-traffic areas are commercial districts that don't see as many shoppers during they week as they do on weekends.

Here's a link to the main section of my route. It goes from Park Ave. and Cranston St. to Branch Ave. and Charles St. I don't actually follow the route that I've mapped out between Park Ave and Webster Ave; instead, I follow the Washington Secondary Bike Path.

Hopefully, I'll be able to bike to work at least a couple times per week for the rest of the summer. It takes me just over twice as long to bike as it does to drive (40 minutes vs. 15). Unless gas prices shoot up by a couple more dollars per gallon, I'm not really going to be saving myself much money, but I should get some good exercise.

Alice Again

One of the fun things about blogging is that after you've done it a while, you'll start to notice patterns in your writing that you never would have expected. When I started blogging, I never expected that I would have so much to say about Alice Cooper. To wit, while walking around the shopping mall inside of Vienna's Gasometer a few weeks ago, I noticed that it had its own walk of fame. Since Falco and Ahnold are the only Austrian celebrities I can think of off the top of my head, I wasn't surprised that I had never heard of anyone in the walk of fame. Nor was I surprised to see that one person in the walk of fame that I did recognize was Alice Cooper. Normally, I might have a little pity for an aging rocker who decided it was worth his time to let a second-rate Austrian shopping mall immortalize him in their walk of fame, but I feel like Alice Cooper's enshrinement was more of a labor of love and whimsy than desperation.

We were driving home after our flight back from Vienna when I discovered that the local classic rock radio station is now airing Nights with Alice Cooper (only on Saturday nights, sadly). One of the deep cuts that Alice treated us to was one of his own, a song I had never heard before called "I Love America". It's essentially a less profane, cold war version of "America - Fuck Yeah!". It's not all that funny or clever, but it's distinctly Cooper.

The Ice Harvest

After hearing about Gavin Weightman's The Frozen-Water Trade: A True Story shortly after it was published in 2003 and having my interest rekindled after noticing a small sign on an old warehouse in Charlestown commemorating the frozen water trade while walking the Freedom Trail in 2006, I finally got around to reading the book. The book is largely the story of Frederic Tudor, the man who was largely responsible for creating the ice industry prior to artificial refrigeration. Before I heard about this book, I had no idea that people ever harvested ice from lakes and rivers and stored it so it would be available during the warmer months. I had heard of icehouses and iceboxes but I guess I never really thought about where the ice came from. When I learned that Tudor shipped ice to the Caribbean, the American South, and even to India without artificial refrigeration, I was astounded and it was that astonishment that led to my interest in the book.

Once I was able to wrap my head around the idea that the ice trade, the book didn't really have much else to offer in the way of shocking realizations. The book devoted some space to one of Tudor's partners, Nathaniel Wyeth, who was responsible for most of the technical innovations that made it possible to harvest large volumes of ice from frozen lakes and ponds in an efficient and cost-effective manner. Once that was worked out, the ice business was like any other weather-dependent business. Tudor exploited the technical advantages that Wyeth provided to harvest more ice in less time at a lower cost than his competitors, but in the end, his success had more to do with the network of relationships he built around the world and his refusal to cede any ground to his competitors.

The most interesting thing about the whole story was not the supply side of the ice business; it was the demand side. The US was the first country where year-round access to ice in all climates was considered a necessity instead of an extravagant luxury. While there certainly was demand for ice in the tropical climes of the Caribbean and India, ice was still seen as more of a luxury good. Even today, American's attitudes towards ice differ from the rest of the world. Sit down at a restaurant anywhere in the 50 states and the first thing that you'll get is a tall, cool glass of ice water. American brewers have spent so much time and money trying to convince customers that their beer is the coldest that it's become the stuff of parody. The books doesn't offer any explanation for American's love of ice. It might be good old American exceptionalism, but I have my own theory. The climate of the eastern part of North America is a lot more variable than that of Western Europe. The average temperature in Philadelphia during the summer is about the same as the average temperature in Rome during the summer, but Philadelphia gets much colder in the winter. There's really nowhere in the eastern US that has comfortable weather throughout the winter and the summer, so it makes sense that in addition to the obvious demand for summer ice in sweltering American South there would also be more demand for summer ice in Northeastern US cities than anywhere in Western Europe.

George Carlin

I knew this morning when I heard that George Carlin had passed away that I would read many tributes in the blogosphere today. Certain deaths really resonate in blogging world. Generally, they feature men who did great or at least interesting things while living by their own credo and not worrying too much about what the rest of the world thought of them. I suspect that deep down, this is how most of us bloggers would like to see ourselves remembered and therefore, it should come as no surprise that we feel the need to mourn the passing of the great elders of the tribe to which we aspire.

I'm not going to eulogize Carlin because I'm not that familiar with his body of work. I liked the pieces of it that I managed to catch, but I never really sought it out. I will mention that I was just thinking about what he was up to and how old he was after his name came up in a conversation I had with some friends about Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (in which Carlin plays Rufus, of course) on Saturday. I'm not suggesting that the act of me thinking about George Carlin for the first time in a few years led to his passing 24 hours later, but it is strange how things like that happen sometime. Perhaps Carlin once did a bit about this phenomenon.

Das dritte European Impressions

I can't look at the tiles on the roof of Stephansdom without thinking of the Jamaican Flag. Apparently, it's a rather recent addition to the church.

Vienna was full of European soccer fans while we were visited since it is one of the host cities for the 2008 Euro Cup tournament.

Of all the countries whose fans traveled to Vienna for the tournament, Poland had the largest and most vocal contingent.

I've never felt more connection to my Polish heritage than I did while riding the U Bahn with a horde of Polish soccer fans in full regalia on their way back from the stadium.

For a city that was packed with European soccer fans, there was surprisingly little rioting going on while we were there. Many of Vienna's more delicate landmarks, including the Burggarten, were closed to prevent them from getting trashed.

This was the first time I've ever visited multiple countries on an overseas trip and it was interesting to see the contrasts between Paris and Vienna that I probably wouldn't have noticed had I visited them on separate trips.

I didn't see a single street musician my entire time in Vienna. I was disappointed, but I chalked it up to the Euro 2008 tournament.

The grounds at the Belvedere Palace were not in very good condition and even if they were in good shape, they wouldn't have been anywhere near as impressive as the grounds at the Schönbrunn Palace.

The art museum in the Oberes Belvedere had a decent collection of German Expressionist paintings, but it was not as rich of a collection as I would have hoped for a city that was so important to that movement.

I'm better at passing as a European than I imagined. The flight attendants on our intra-European flights generally addressed me in German before English. Vendors on the streets of Vienna guessed that I was Polish, Russian, and German before American (as long as I hadn't said anything to them yet).