The Massholes Have Landed

LL and I are in Pennsylvania and happy to be out of the car. Very, very happy. We didn't hit any traffic and actually made very good time, but it's still a long drive. Our GPS unit, AKA the Lady in the Box, decided to throw a tantrum a few miles outside of Scranton but hey, who hasn't thrown a tantrum or two around there?

Our rental car for the trip is a 2009 Chrysler Sebring. It would make an excellent golf cart. Still, it got good mileage and we've arrived in one piece. That's all that matters.

Our hotel room is quite adequate for our purposes for the evening... sleep. Tomorrow's going to be a tremendously fun day.

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A Few Irreligious Thoughts to Ponder

You've probably heard by now about a certain presumptuous jackass of a columnist named Jim Griffith who writes for the Newnan, Georgia Times-Herald. Griffith has achieved 15 minutes of Internet infamy by penning a column entitled "A few religious thoughts to ponder." In it, he explains how terrible Thanksgiving is for atheists:

Thanksgiving must be a terrible time for atheists. They have no God to thank.

They do not have the privilege of gathering with family and friends to express gratitude by saying: "Praise God from whom all blessings flow." An atheist on his deathbed faces serious uncertainties. Gazing upward, he pleads: "Oh God, if there is a God, please save my soul -- if I have one."

The column was found out and replied to by a series of atheists objecting to such nonsense and, after less than two days, the newspaper saw fit to close the comments so that no more respondents could rake Griffith over the coals for being, as I said, a presumptuous jackass. I've checked other items in the newspaper, including other columns by Griffith, and none of them have had their comments closed after many days or weeks. Just this one. Apparently, the Newnan Times-Herald didn't want too many atheists to have the chance to debunk Griffith's garbage by mentioning how they celebrate Thanksgiving — at least not in a forum that locals were likely to see. It just won't do for a newspaper to report inadvertently that atheists celebrate the holiday in much the same way that non-atheists do and that the atheists are, after all, human beings with families, affections and gratitude. At least, it won't do for the small-time newspaper to reveal these truths to the residents of Newnan, GA.

As a result, those of us who didn't have the chance to respond to Jim Griffith's "few thoughts," which I suspect are a very few, at the paper's website during the 36 hours in which the opportunity to do so was available will have to do it elsewhere. I'll do it here.

I have a lot of things for which to be thankful this year, and not a single iota of it requires or has anything to do with any deities whatsoever.

Like many people across America, regardless of their beliefs, I will be joining my family to celebrate the holiday. LL and I will be leaving within the next couple of hours to head to north central Pennsylvania, just as we did last year. You may not see it readily, but there's a lot of gratitude embodied in that last sentence.

First off, I'm thankful for having gotten through another year during which a blindly religious president mismanaged the country in which I live into numerous hardships. I survived that year despite the existence of religious radicals in other countries who would like to see people like me dead... and when I say "people like me," I mean Americans. They want to inflict pain upon us because their religious fundamentalism calls for violence against people with whom they disagree. I'm thankful that this faith-stuffed anti-intellectual will soon be a former president and that his replacement might actually turn out to be a person of intelligence and ability who could wind up improving things, even if only a little. 2008 hasn't been a very good year for my country and I'm glad it's almost over. I'm thankful to the 7,000,000 people, too, who may well have changed the course of history during the last election. We shall see what really happens in the months and years ahead, but I'm thankful for at least having the hope that it won't be the same as what's gone before.

I'm thankful that I'm getting to spend another Thanksgiving with my sister, niece and brother-in-law. My sister and I had no contact at all for more than a decade, and this was in no small part due to religious belief. My parents found much to hate about the world and about differences of opinion and about people who are different from them thanks to their faith, you see, and they disowned first me in part because of that faith. They told my sister that I was a drug addict, that I was in jail and probably dead, to make as sure as they could that she wouldn't try to find me. When I finally tracked her down, I learned that she had been similarly disowned for the grievous sin of falling in love with someone of a different faith than that of our parents — even though neither my sister nor he practiced any religion at all. When they got married, nobody from my family came to the wedding other than myself. I gave the bride away. Tomorrow, we'll celebrate Thanksgiving together, along with my rather precocious niece and the rest of our non-traditional clan, none of whom are particularly religious and several of whom are outright non-believers. How could I not be grateful for this? The only involvement of a deity here, at least the imagining of one, was to drive people apart.

LL is coming with me, of course. This year, we celebrated our twelfth anniversary together. LL comes from a country in which religious differences led to a generation-long civil war in which members of her family and friends of her family died in terrible and inhumane ways. Her cousin, for example, was detained by a Syrian-backed militia, hauled away to Syria, and tortured for years. She spent long stretches of time huddled with her family in an underground parking garage hoping to avoid being shot or blown up by Syrians and Israelis and their proxies — all on the basis of ancient religious divisions. Survive it she did, though, and this year she became a US citizen and voted in an election for the first time in her entire life. I am thankful that LL is here with me, relatively safe and about to enjoy the holiday. I'm thankful that she survived a long and terrible war, that she made it to the US, and that she's stuck by me all these years, through the best of times and the not-so-good.

I'm thankful to the university I attend and to the people there who give of their time and knowledge as I grind away at earning a graduate degree. There was a time in my life, not so long ago, during which I never thought that I could get this far. I worked hard and here I am, but the opportunity had to be offered by others, too. I have that opportunity and am grateful for it.

I'm thankful that Tycho, a lizard who has practically been family, has survived another year, despite last year's unwarranted death sentence. He's sitting near my shoulder as I write this, probably wondering when breakfast is coming. Alas, the weather is too cold for Tycho to make the trip to Pennsylvania with us this year. He's going to be rather bored with no humans to entertain him for the four days we'll be gone. Tycho has worked out a lot of things in his long lizard lifetime, but how to work the TV remote isn't one of them. I expect that he'll spend much of his time asleep. In any case, he's exceeded the average lifetime of a member of his species in captivity by nearly a third now and is still in good health. Thank you, Tycho, for sticking around for so long. There will be lobster roaches and macaroni and cheese when we return. I suppose someone could argue that some deity is allowing Tycho to go on living. You know, Lizard-Jesus or HerpAllah or something. That would be a very childish person, but I'm sure someone who will read this will have the thought cross their mind.

Which brings me to another bunch for which I'm thankful, and that is the many people who have fought and are still fighting to reverse the ever-threatening flood of irrationality that might otherwise engulf us all and snuff out the light of the Enlightenment. They keep us progressing, sometimes at great cost. They're the ones who hope to remove the motivations for these religious wars and faith-based familial decay, who object to and dissect and defeat all the magical thinking that is only a hair's breadth away from complete ascendancy at times. I'm grateful to the teachers, the scientists, the historians, the living human memory-banks who remember the past and dedicate themselves to our not repeating it.

There is more — much more — but I have to get ready now to hit the road. It's a long drive from here to there. All things considered, I'm thankful to be making that six hour schlep today.

And you know what, Jim Griffith of the Newnan, Georgia Times-Herald? I'm even grateful to you today. You've given me one more reminder of how low we humans can sink if we decide to measure the worth of others with yardsticks designed and built of our own narrow views. You're a good cautionary example of just how wrong we can be, and thus how wrong whole societies can go, when our eyes get so full of our own self-esteem that we place ourselves in judgment of the rest of the world based on nothing but the desire to be thankful to anything other than that little fraction of humanity it is our privilege, and sometimes our burden, to actually know.

Like the majority of Americans, I'll be celebrating Thanksgiving with a ridiculously large meal on Thursday evening. Like those millions of other Americans, there's something else I'll be doing early on Friday morning. It's then that I will be thinking most of Mr. Griffith.

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Finally in State College, PA

I really must keep in mind that drives to central Pennsylvania never take the 6 or 7 hours I think they will. I left Worcester at 10:30 AM and didn't get to my hotel until about 9:30. Traffic jams added a good deal of extra time.

I was considering having a drink down at the bar, but I don't even think I'm up for it. I have to be up early for tomorrow's foray; the bus departs from Penn State at 8 AM and as I don't know my way around I'll need to leave myself a bit of extra time.

I'm too road-weary to write anything coherent right now, but I am here. Thankfully, the hotel has given me a room right above a courtyard where students are drinking. I'm sure they'll lull me to sleep at any moment now.

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Off to Pennsylvania for MSA Meeting Today

I'll be hitting the road and Pennsylvania-bound in just a few hours for the Mycological Society of America conference at Penn State. My companion for the trip is a postdoc from the Pfister Lab at Harvard. Don Pfister is himself receiving an award from the MSA for excellence in teaching. Considering that the hapless postdoc will be trapped on the road with me for about seven hours, I fully expect some of that excellent knowledge to diffuse into my brainpan. In any case, I have to be careful around Harvard people. These ivy leaguers are a rowdy bunch.

The conference program looks excellent, with lots of interesting talks and posters. David Geiser is writing an unofficial conference blog. I'll be updating from the conference as well.

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No Wachusett Wednesday This Week

Due to inclement weather, this week's Wachusett Wednesday has been canceled. I am rather bummed about it. Instead of field work, I'll instead be purifying the PCR products from yesterday's gel and cleaning up/aligning the Sarcodon sequences, all of which is OK but hardly a substitute for being in the field.

In all likelihood, my next venture into the field will be on Sunday. That's the day of the Mycological Society of America foray at Lock Haven University. A lab and equipment is being graciously made available after the foray and throughout the duration of the conference, and I expect that I'll have wireless access at my hotel, so I'll be able to blog about the foray and provide photos and info about my collections as usual at that time.

sigh.

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Reasons to Be Cheerful: DNA, Expeditions and Mycological Society Meeting

It's the little things in life sometimes that bring the greatest pleasures... at least when one revels in being a geek.

The first thing I need to do today is to clean up some DNA I have waiting in the freezer. Among them are the rDNA sequences from Diaperis maculata. Once I've cleaned the DNA I'll be able to load it onto a plate and will get the sequences back and be able to add them to my alignments. I'll know a tiny bit more about the evolution of fungus-associated Coleoptera. This is enough to make me look forward to a Monday. It's the little things... and D. maculata is only 5-6 mm long. That qualifies as "little."

I also have to start work on securing permits for the collecting expedition in September. Two months should be enough lead time, hypothetically, but one never knows with bureaucracies. We just need a couple of good sites to work at, though. I'll probably put feelers out on more than we'll actually use. That way if the process gets too long and we get turned down for a couple of sites at the last minute, we'll still have a couple of back-ups. Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.

Speaking of science-related travel, it's only a month until I hit the road for Penn State and the annual Mycological Society of America meeting. It's the largest gathering of professional and amateur mycologists in the nation and promises to be a great time. I'm looking forward to the whole program, but I have to admit that I'm particularly tickled by the opportunity to collect in Pennsylvania, a state in which I've never forayed before. I'm even hauling my industrial-strength dehydrator on the trip so that folks can preserve specimens. The abstracts look like there will be some very interesting talks on fungal evolution and informatics tools. Folks from my lab are doing four of the presentations, I think. I'm not one of them yet (I've just started gathering data!) There are also a couple of talks by David Maddison that look like they'll be particularly interesting stuff. Days of full immersion... I can hardly wait.

Are any readers planning to attend MSA this year? If so, I'd love to meet up for a drink or two.

If you're new to this stuff and this is the first you're hearing about it and you'd like to attend, you can still register for the meeting. Even if you're a novice, you couldn't ask for a better opportunity to learn about fungi. Please consider joining us! If you're a newbie and can make it in time for the foray on August 10, I'd be more than happy to hang out with you in the field and help you get better acquainted with the various chitinous life-forms you'll encounter. I'd consider it a privilege to do so, in fact.

Today, and the next couple of months, are going to be great. Wonder-Geek Powers Activate!

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Reminder: Thank God for Evolution Tour of New England

A reminder to New Englanders that Michael Dowd, preacher and author of Thank God for Evolution, will be swinging through southern New England this month:

• June 6-8: Rowe, MA (Rowe Center Workshop, Kings Highway)
  
• June 19: Willington, CT (Willington Public Library, 7 Ruby Road)
  
• June 22-23: Woodbury, CT (Mattatuck UU Society, 122 S Pomperaug Ave.)

I'm planning to attend Dowd's talk in Willington. I don't think for a moment that I'll agree with everything he says and I'm not making any endorsement of his ideas on either religion or science. Nonetheless, I think Dowd may be an interesting speaker from what I've read about him in the press regarding appearances elsewhere in the country. I'm curious to hear about his proposed resolution of empirical evidence and Christianity.

If any readers in the Worcester area would like to attend the event, let me know and we can share the ride to Willington. The event itself is free, but if fellow attendees are willing to share the investment in gasoline, I won't object in the slightest. If you'd like to come along, send an email to dowdinwillington [AT] mycolicious [DOT] com.

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Birthday Weekend in New York

I'm back from a wonderful weekend in New York City courtesy of LL. This birthday turned out to be perhaps the best ever, though I've had enough of them now that it's beginning to get hard to remember them all. Still, returning to the city of my birth and places I (mis)spent my youth for the first time in so long was the best anyone could ask for. I made it a point not to spend any time online, so those who left comments will understand the delay in getting them posted and regular readers will forgive the lack of updates since Friday. This one entry will make up for all of that, though.

I'll break it all down by day for ease of writing, because there's a lot to cover.

Friday, Feb. 29
We arrived at our hotel, the Diplomat Motor Inn in Rockville Centre, at about 1:30 PM. After checking in and dropping off our stuff, we headed straight back out the door and drove to All American Burger in Massapequa. Back in my days as a teenage burnout on Long Island, I spent a lot of inebriated hours hanging out in the parking lot of this place scarfing down ridiculous numbers of their so-bad-they're-amazing hamburgers. My poison-of-choice was the double-double, which is what a double cheeseburger is called by the locals, contrary to the menu on the website. LL and I each got one and they were exactly as I remembered. LL was somewhat less than impressed, and I guess it's an acquired taste. Imagine an oversized White Castle burger and you've got the idea. For me, anyhow, this was an absolutely necessary bit of nostalgia. For LL, it was an experience akin to a root canal, I think.

When we were done eating, we headed to the neighborhood in which I lived. First, we headed over to the high school from which I graduated. It hasn't changed much, at least not from the outside. The kids still look the same, right down to a sprinkling of those who seem reluctant to let go of the heavy metal look I remember from the 80's. Yes, the big hair is still there. We next cruised past my parents' house which is now covered by bright yellow aluminum siding and entirely devoid of trees. A large silver SUV was parked in the driveway; I've no idea who lives there now. Our last stop in Massapequa was Pine Street Park, where I was once knocked unconscious with a beer bottle to the back of my head by a well-meaning friend who was trying to help me meet a girl we who was hanging out with us in the park that night. The knocking-out part worked fine, but I never did get a date with her. Ah, memories and the blank bits between them.

We took a drive around town past the former homes of people I used to know and then were done with Massapequa. On the way out of town, we stopped off at the Sunrise Mall (now Westfield Sunrise) to pick up a few things we needed, including a new hat for me. The mall no longer contains a movie theater, though there is a full-sized Wal-Mart there. Wal-Mart is everywhere.

A side trip to Amityville was necessary, too, so that LL could say she's seen the house upon which The Amityville Horror is based. People still live there (without any voices telling them to get out, I might add), and they've had a lot of trouble with trespassers taking photos of the place in the past, so I didn't do it myself. We just drove by. The address of the house has been changed and the distinctive Dutch windows removed to help discourage tourists such as myself, but being a local I still know which house it is. No, I'm not going to tell.

A little more driving around ensued and then we headed back to the hotel to get ready for dinner. LL tried to find someplace using her laptop, but we discovered that our room didn't have a wireless connection. The only rooms that have wireless at the Diplomat, it turns out, are those right next to the lobby, so management offered us a deluxe room with a jacuzzi and we decided to take it. It was right above the lobby and came with a complimentary bottle of Sambuca di Amore and two shotglasses. How could we say no? We were completely exhausted by this point, so we decided to have dinner at the TGI Friday next to the hotel. I had a large and potent scotch and soda while we waited for our table. Needless to say I was ready for bed by the time we'd finished, and that was it for Friday night.

Saturday, March 1
We set out early for Brooklyn. The plan was to take the Long Island Railroad from Baldwin to Jamaica, then change to the subway and get to Flatbush and DeKalb for breakfast at Junior's. That didn't work; someone had either jumped or been pushed in front of a train at Jamaica. Either way, the train we needed wasn't going to be running for hours to come. We turned around and got the car and drove to Junior's instead. It was 11:30 by the time we got there, having been lucky enough to not only survive driving on the Belt Parkway but to find a parking spot right within a few yards of the door as well. If you've ever tried to find a parking spot near Junior's on a Saturday morning, you know how close to miraculous this was.

The last time I had breakfast at Junior's, I was with my long-deceased grandfather. I haven't been back since he died, but I still remember the place vividly. It was a tradition; whenever I was at my grandparents' place on a Saturday, we had breakfast a Junior's. It hasn't changed a bit, even though the place caught fire in 1991. I ordered Scotch kippers with eggs and onions and LL had corned beef hash with poached eggs. Someone told me a couple of years ago that breakfast no longer came with an assortment of mini-danishes and rolls. They were wrong; that still happens. I bit into a Junior's prune danish for the first time in a generation and it was every bit as good as I remembered it. That taste brought back so many memories of my grandfather that it was all I could do not to start crying right there in the middle of a busy restaurant. Who would have thought that a prune danish could do that? It did, though. All of breakfast was that good and that memory-laden. Junior's was also the last place, and still the only place, I'd ever had kippers.

I needed to pick up some mints after breakfast; few things make for horrible breath moreso than kippers and onions. I crossed the street to one of those literal hole-in-the-wall newsstands that dot New York while LL picked out souvenirs (I got a Junior's t-shirt and a sweatshirt, too!) It brings up a point; everyone knows the myth that New Yorkers aren't friendly, but it isn't true. I wound up in a conversation with the guy in line in front of me and then in a second one with the leathery-looking Korean woman who runs the stand. See, it isn't New Yorkers who aren't friendly... it's the people who commute into the city from Nassau County. It was true back when I lived in Brooklyn and then in Nassau County and it's still true now; New Yorkers have a tendency to be outgoing. They live with crowds and often in close quarters. Folks from Long Island bedroom communities, on the other hand, never have to develop the interpersonal skill set that makes life in the Big City not only possible but enjoyable. That's a generalization, of course, but it's a pretty good rule of thumb.

After Junior's, we drove out to Coney Island. This was one of the two big stops for me on this trip. I hadn't set foot in Coney Island for many years and I was dying to see the place again. They say that Coney Islanders get sand in their shoes and never get it out again, and that's true. Sooner or later, we all have to go back there and see what's become of the place. The Boardwalk (and let's face it, folks, there's only one true Boardwalk and lots of imitators) is our Mecca to which we must make a reverential pilgrimage at least once in our lives should we ever leave it. More than a few of us go through some life-changing experience on the Boardwalk. We might have our first funnel cake our ride our first roller coaster or even lose our virginity there (ahem), but there's always something that anchors us to that place, and so we're like spawning salmon that swim upstream to get back to the place of our birth.

Of course, when we get there we have to complain at least a little bit about how it's changed and how much it's decayed since we last saw it and why hasn't anyone fixed the place and saved our favorite landmark of youth. For me, that mostly came as the result of a trip to the "Original" Nathan's. Those quote marks are intentional, because the hot dogs served at the site where the real Nathan's once stood are now the same ones you can buy at any supermarket or food court. They're cooked in the same way they're cooked anywhere else; gone is the open grill where they once singed perfectly over fire. That grill is where the cash registers are lined up now. I got a hot dog there and you know what? It sucked. I could barely digest the thing and was sick that night because of it. There's not much point to going back there again for me, aside from maybe taking a picture of the outside of the place. It's just a fast food chain store now, no better than a McDonald's. Sad to say, Nathan's finally betrayed Coney Island.

Still, the Boardwalk itself was much as I remembered it, though Astroland has now closed down and is never to reopen. Soon, it will vanish and a casino will rise in its place. I'm of two minds about that. On the one hand, I wish that Coney Island could be what it used to be — amusement park, beach, low-brow grunge, burlesque shows, the Coney Island that started out sometime early last century and was still clinging to life when my parents lived there, and which was still at least on life support when I grew up there. On the other hand, maybe a casino is just a natural evolution. There's no way a Coney Island amusement park could ever hope to compete with a Six Flags, and would that be any better, anyhow? Who knows; maybe a casino can revitalize whatever else is left on the Boardwalk. As it stands right now, we could only find one gift shop there — and it didn't even have postcards.

Because it's still winter, everything was closed. It was still amazing to be back, though, and I took lots of photos:

1-3: Shots along the boardwalk showing LL and I and the parachute jump. I could see the jump from my bedroom window when I was a kid in Coney; it's in much better shape now than it was back then. The parachute jump is to Coney Island, and maybe to New York, what the Eiffel Tower is to Paris.

4-6: Some close-up shots of the parachute jump. The last one is taken from the base of the jump toward Astroland and the Wonder Wheel.

7-9: The Wonder Wheel itself; shot #9 is in the same park as the Wonder Wheel, Deno's Wonder Wheel Park (warning: the web page is kind of a pain in the neck). I don't know if it's going to stay open when the new casino comes in or not.

10-12: A shot from the Boardwalk toward the "Original" Nathan's, the Cyclone from the New York Aquarium parking lot, and another Boardwalk shot.

13-15: Three shots of the ruins of the old public bath. I think. I'm actually not sure what this old building is. It's a beautiful bit of decay there on the Boardwalk, though, and if anyone can tell me what it used to be with certainty I'd appreciate the info.

16-18: Two shots of a very friendly walrus and a not-so-friendly electric eel at the New York Aquarium. The aquarium is almost certainly the most successful thing still standing on the Boardwalk. I used to go there a lot as a kid; I think that electric eel might be the same one I remember from when I was about 10.

There are a few more Coney Island pictures in this album if you still haven't had enough.

After our visit to the Boardwalk, I took a shot at seeing the house I lived in as a kid in Seagate, just a bit more than a mile from the Boardwalk. Back when I lived there, the "gate" consisted of a security guard in a sort of toll booth. Now it's a major piece of wrought iron with razor wire at the top and high fences going all the way around the community. There was no way even to walk in, let alone drive, so I didn't get to see the old house. Considering what an armed compound the place looks like now, I probably never will, as much as I'd like to.

After a day in Brooklyn, we headed back to Long Island and got a bit of rest back at the hotel. We ventured out again for dinner at a Thai restaurant in Valley Stream called Seeda. I was in the mood for Thai and there aren't too many Thai places in Nassau, which is probably good for Seeda. The food was adequate and the service was bad — slow, curt and inattentive. The place was crowded and noisy and even though it was small, getting the attention of the wait staff was nearly impossible. I wouldn't bother with it again. Seeda bills itself as the best Thai food on Long Island, but I have a hunch that's as meaningful a title as being the smartest person at a Bush family reunion.

Sunday, March 2
At 9:25 AM, the precise time at which I turned 42, I was standing on a platform at Penn Station and waiting for the uptown A train to take LL and I to the American Museum of Natural History. The Museum is a pivotal place in my life; it's probably the single entity most responsible for getting me interested in science, particularly in biology. I wonder how many kids it has had that effect upon over the years. I couldn't wait to get back there again after all these years.

We met up with my sister and her family there; my niece even made me a birthday card on purple construction paper:

In case you find that writing hard to read, it says:

Moo Poop Moo Poop
Moo Poop Moo Poop
Moo Poop Moo
Poop Moo Poop
Moo Poop Moo!

I mean, you'd think a 15 year old could do better than that. Then again, she's only 4 now, and in fouryearoldese I'm pretty sure that means "Happy birthday." Either that or she thought the whole thing was a bunch of bullshit. Could be either one...

We didn't get to spend much time with my sister's family, though. My niece got overtired and overstimulated and completely crashed, so they had to take her to one of the quiet parts of the museum while LL and I forged on. The displays have changed a lot since I was a kid and the whole place has largely been modernized, but it's still that same old wonderfully dusty old museum I'll always love. We stuck mainly to the biology-oriented sections, but we'll do more of the anthropology-related parts next time we go which, now that we're within easy travel distance, certainly won't take another twenty years.

Again, there are lots of photos in this album. Here are some highlights. Readers can figure out for themselves what's being shown here or ask. It's pretty self-explanatory, really.

We spent the whole glorious day in the museum, almost from opening until closing. After that, we bid our goodbyes to my sister and family and headed back out to Long Island for dinner at the Nautilus Cafe in Freeport.

The Nautilus was terrific. The food was just excellent; we started with raw oysters on the half shell and Asian calamari. The latter was perfect; spicy and sweet and enough to make me want to dive face-first onto the plate which, come to think of it, I practically did. We both got seafood combination plates with lobster tails, scallops and shrimp stuffed with crab meat for an entrée and split an order of asparagus hollandaise for a side. For dessert, I had key lime dream and LL had an almond "cake" which, as far as I could tell, contained nothing like flour and was pure, sweet amaretto with almond frosting and several other almond-flavored things. The service was flawless and friendly. The wine list wasn't bad, either. I had a couple of glasses of Italian Pinot Grigio with dinner and LL had a tawny port with dessert. Everything was solid from start to finish, and Nautilus Café turned out to be the perfect place for my birthday dinner. I really couldn't have asked for more.

We lingered there until about 10:00, then headed back to the hotel to collapse into a very, very deep sleep.

Monday, March 3
Breakfast at Bagel Cafe III at the corner of Atlantic and Ocean in Freeport was OK; they have real bagels there. We didn't want to get caught in rush hour traffic, so we passed a couple of hours at Three Streams Preserve (officially, it's called the Massapequa Preserve, but nobody called it that when I lived in the area). There's not much to say about the place, really. It has always been a popular place for teenagers to drink beer and do other things of which their parents do not approve, so parts of it are littered with old beer cans and bottles and other places are in good shape. I know I did my share of partying in the place when I was a disaffected 16 year old, and the tradition continues.

We got on the road at about 10:30 AM and took our time getting back, so we didn't get home until about 3:30 PM, when we discovered that our cable and internet services had been accidentally disconnected when our upstairs neighbor moved out while we were away. It took until this afternoon to get that fixed, and now here I am writing the longest single blog update I will probably ever write.

Our most excellent weekend has ended now. LL is fighting a cold she probably contracted while riding the subway and my fingers are falling off. Tomorrow, it's back to the grind.

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Going to New York

In celebration of my birthday, which falls on Sunday, LL and I are taking off tomorrow morning to spend a few days in New York City. It will be the first time I've returned to the city in which I was born in quite a number of years.

Some specific plans are still up in the air, but I know many of the places I'm going. I'll be spending my birthday proper at the American Museum of Natural History with my sister and her family. One day will take us to Coney Island, the neighborhood in which I grew up. I'm planning on walking the Boardwalk for the first time in well over two decades and grabbing a hotdog at Nathan's. I'd also like to see what's left of the house in which I grew up; I still remember the address. We'll also be making at least one trip to Junior's, and very likely two (one for breakfast and one for cheesecake). I would like to work in a trip to Katz Deli, too, and maybe take LL for a walk down 18th Avenue in Brooklyn; I'm sure my Lebanese partner will feel right at home in the Hasidic neighborhood, but where else would we get good potatonik, I ask you?

In an ideal world, we'd be able to see a midnight Rocky Horror in Greenwich Village, but the theater at which it used to play is no longer playing it; I understand it's now the property of the Discovery Channel. LL has never experienced a live Rocky Horror, and I know she'd appreciate it. That's another thing I haven't done in years that I'd like to do at least one more time, come to think of it. Still, it must be playing somewhere... maybe on Long Island? We're going to stay out on Lawn Guyland to save a bit of money on the hotel but still have ready access to mass transit, plus there are a couple of stops I'd like to make out there as well.

Thinking about all this is making it very hard to concentrate on anything "important" today. The worst part is that I still have to teach lab starting at 6:00 this evening! How am I going to maintain any kind of focus for three hours when me brain has already gone to NYC?

Meh. I probably won't. I can't wait to get on the road!

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A Bad Day for Making Plans

My efforts to meet local people just aren't panning out tonight. First there was the canceled Greater Worcester Humanists meeting. Now I've just found out that the meeting of frequent Pharyngulite sci-bloggers is going to take place on Friday night.

I leave for New York on Friday morning. I won't be able to make that get-together, either.

I'm no less excited about the trip I am taking, but I'm simultaneously bummed about the one I won't be taking. It's times like these I wish I could be in two places at once.

I think it's about time to give up on today.

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Bodies in Framingham: Dissecting Ourselves

LL and I attended Bodies: The Exhibition in Framingham. The exhibit has been somewhat controversial, I didn't find the exhibit itself to be disrespectful or particularly exploitative. Intense, certainly, and understandably too much so for some. These are, after all, dead bodies and body parts. On the other hand, the opportunity to see the real thing and the detail that embodies is worthwhile for those who don't have an emotional reaction. Personally, I've seen both models of the intricacies of human anatomy and the real thing as well, but never like this. The exhibit makes clear how everything works, what it looks like (sans the gooeyness of a dissection), and how much can go wrong with it all.

By their nature, many of the displays are quite dramatic. Seeing a human body split down the middle and turned about so that the two halves face one another is bound to have an impact, after all. It's not every day we get so direct an image of what's inside of our own bodies. Seeing the preserved bodies posed in ways that demonstrate what's going on when we're engaged in activities such as sports demonstrates starkly and beautifully what's going on when we do these things. Moreover, the various dissected specimens provide a glimpse of the tiny details, from the bewildering intricacy of the circulatory system to the gross and meaty musculature. One of the things learned from the exhibit, frankly, is that we all look a lot like pastrami inside under the right circumstances. Various displays also demonstrate what cancer looks like, the damage done by atherosclerosis, and the injuries caused by excessive alcohol and tobacco consumption. We may be works of art, but we're awfully delicate ones.

At the end of the exhibition, there's the opportunity to get a close-up look at a few internal organs to the point that one can handle the plasticized specimens. The polymer used to replace the tissue is surprisingly light and waxy to the touch. I closely examined hepatic ducts, for instance. How often does one get the chance to get so up-close with what is essentially the inside of one's own body? While popular media and superstition have made such things a topic of awe to an extent, placing upon them everything from prohibition to fear, this aspect of the exhibition strips that away in a particularly effective manner. We can hold our heart in our hand and inspect the very things necessary for us to live without the interference of our innate fear of death.

Overall, the exhibit was part science and part art. It's a collection of contradictions, beautiful and macabre. It's the reality of ourselves, and therefore it's going to be too much for some of us. Bodies brings us face-to-face with life and death in frank terms, and that requires a certain degree of maturity and detachment even as the viewer finds himself staring right into the folds of an ultimately realistic human brain. Personally, I found nothing about the exhibit to be exploitive or disrespectful. There was nothing of a circus atmosphere to the displays. I'd certainly recommend a visit to those who feel that they can handle it. It's not for everyone, but it's a real eye-opener for the right sort of person.

Note: the photos used in this entry are screen captures from the videos on the Bodies website. Photography is prohibited inside the exhibit.

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Providence Tomorrow; Whatever Happened to the Worcester & Providence?

Our original plan was to spend tomorrow at home and head over to do the family thing in Providence on Tuesday, but we've been talked into going over a day early. The plan now is to get the oil changed in the car in the morning and then drive over. We'd been hoping not to drive The Beast, but there isn't a train we can take directly from Worcester to Providence; we'd have to go to Boston first. The train ride would cost $50 and take 2.5 hours each way, not counting time spent waiting between trains. That's crazy; Providence is only 45 miles away! Taking a bus doesn't leave us in much better shape. We're driving.

Considering that there is a Worcester and Providence Railroad that still exists, I'm a bit amazed that it can be so difficult to catch a passenger train to Providence. It shouldn't take any longer, nor be anymore expensive, to get to Providence than it is to get to Boston. But there you have it; we're driving.

Our first stop will be Lovecraft's grave, then over to the relatives' house. We should be back, and I should be back online, sometime on Wednesday.

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Thanksgiving 2007

LL and I spent Thanksgiving with my family. We started out with Thanksgiving dinner in upstate New York and then moved on to another Thanksgiving in central Pennsylvania at the Nittany Mountain KOA camp, which is owned by my sister-in-law and her partner. Yes, two Thanksgiving dinners. I don't remember the last time I ate so much. My family is rather non-traditional; aside from my sister and brother-in-law, nobody is married to one another, so we're all partners, but still family. I'm not sure what that means, if anything, but I think we've all sort of come to the same conclusions about the institution of marriage in general. It's an unusually diverse group of people, too, in terms of ethnicity and education and everything else. We're certainly not the typical 2.2-kids middle class model. We can certainly eat, though.

LL and I stayed in the cabin shown above. One of the first people we met at the camp was a nearby camper who goes by the name of Snooky. Snooky is obsessed with blowing leaves. He spends whole days, from sunrise to sunset, with his leaf blower. Things could be worse, I suppose... he could be obsessed with an axe. To say the guy is eccentric is probably an understatement. Meeting him made me wonder if Stephen King has ever written a story about a leaf blowing maniac.

Of course, there were other things to do beside blowing leaves. My niece, for instance, prefers playing miniature golf to just about anything else. She has her own rules for the game, the first of which is "I win!" When she got tired, she had the good fortune of free and unlimited access to the camp store, so she could always "sugar up" on candy and hot cocoa when she started getting tired. I've sat through hurricanes that packed less energy than that kid. For her, the long weekend consisted of miniature golf, Spongebob and sugar. Oh, and telling all the adults how to play whatever game she made up at the moment. It's too bad none of us had nearly the same energy she does.

There's a petting zoo at the camp. LL made friends with a couple of goats. My niece, for whatever reasons, wasn't generally too interested in the animals. Not all of the animals present were from the petting zoo; my brother-in-law's mother (my aunt-in-law? I still don't know the proper kinship term) brought along her pug, Zeus. Also present was a ridiculously friendly three-legged cat; he lost the fourth leg in a jaw trap some years ago and makes do with the remaining limbs as best he can. There was also a very hyperactive Maltese named CD and a few other critters lurking about.

What family gathering would be complete without at least one faux pas? Ours took the form of a social misstep by my sister-in-law's partner's daughter's boyfriend (I dare anyone to give me the kinship term for that relationship!) delivering a line about how mean Arabs are while LL was sitting at the table. This was made a bit funnier by the fact that the guy is half Italian and half Jamaican himself and was meeting the family for the first time. It was all taken in stride with good humor and a quick comeback from LL resulting in a blush and an embarrassed "Oh, are you Arab?" from Alfredo, the boyfriend in question. I don't think anyone will be letting him live that one down anytime soon.

We stayed at the camp and ate ridiculously well through Saturday night, then left early on Sunday morning to begin the trip home. I decided to take a detour through Binghamton on the way to check out a few places that were part of my life about 20 years ago when I lived up there. The first stop was at 160 Conklin Avenue, a house that I lived in during my first stint at university. I lived there with five other students, including one girlfriend, in a sort of commune that resulted in the place being called Helter Shelter. There were a lot of drugs and craziness. The place is essentially the spot where my life absolutely went to pieces and I felt a need to revisit the site of the most traumatic time in my existence. It hasn't changed at all. In fact, it looks as if it hasn't seen so much as a coat of paint since I left in 1988. To me, it seems a dark, brooding, decaying place, perhaps a bit Lovecraftian in its presence. It's like a combination of fossil and historic landmark in my life. Standing there at the corner of Conklin and John was surreal; I felt as if I were dreaming, especially because LL was there with me. My room in the house was the one with the windows just above the door in this photo. The door itself was the spot where, in 1987, a guy named Jimmy Puccio drank a votive candle full of hot wax thinking it was a shot of tequila and then passed out. He's probably long forgotten about the incident, wherever he is now. If there were such a thing as ghosts, this house would certainly be haunted by the spirits of many acid trips, not to mention some devastating heartbreaks. I wouldn't want to be the poor slobs living in it now in that case. In my mind, at least, this is a place with much mojo.

After my pilgrimage to Helter Shelter, I headed to the SUNY Binghamton campus. Everything was closed and parking was no problem. We visited College-in-the-Woods, dorms I'd been tossed out of years ago after my roommate and I accidentally set a fire in Oneida Hall that got the place evacuated at 4 AM in the middle of a winter night. You see, we wanted to find out whether Bacardi 151 was really flammable, so we filled the cap of a peanut butter jar with the stuff and lit it. It ignited, of course... and then my roommate jerked his hand away and knocked over the entire bottle onto my desk. That set off the alarms and destroyed a couple of my textbooks and all of my notebooks, too. The next day, we were told that we could no longer live on campus. We wound up finding a place in Johnson City, right on Main Street. That's what's shown in the image to the right; our apartment was the top floor of the building to the right of the one with the "1892" decoration on the top. I lived there for about a year with my roommate, Duncan, as well as the son of the Fijian ambassador to the United States. After that year, I took some time off from school. By the time I got back, Duncan had graduated and I wound up living at Helter Shelter. The store with the blue awning, now a clothing store, used to be a sub shop called The Pig Out. It had the best spiedies in all of Broome County, and I'd been hoping to take LL there, but it's gone. Actually, most of the storefronts on Main Street are empty these days. Downtown Johnson City is a very sad, desolate place. Even Fat Cat Books, an institution for Triple Cities comic book and RPG fans, moved out of downtown. The building it once occupied, just across the street from my old apartment, now sits empty.

We spent some time poking around the area and then got back on the road home. Along the way, we got hungry and stopped for lunch in Cobleskill. Not wanting to hit the usual fast food places, LL chose our lunch spot, a diner on route 9 attached to the Colonial Motel — the Diner Motel. Not the Motel Diner, mind you, but the Diner Motel. Seeing that they'd gotten the name wrong on the sign, we probably should have known better than to eat there... but we went ahead and did it anyhow. I ordered grilled chicken on a pita, expecting something like a gyro. What I got was a piece of grilled chicken on a pita and nothing else. This was easily the most literal lunch I've ever eaten. It was exactly one piece of chicken breast on half of a pita with no lettuce, no tomato, no onions, no nothing. LL ordered a proper gyro, but that was bland and useless, too. After lunch, we agreed that the best thing about the food we'd just had was that it probably wouldn't make us sick.

Because our own GPS unit is in the shop for repairs, we were traveling with a loaner. Quick qord of advice here; avoid the Mio GPS like the plague. We told the thing to avoid toll roads and, as if to punish us, it took us on the most backwards, time-wasting route home possible. At one point we even wound up on a dirt road (Tory Hill Road) somewhere near Central Brunswick, NY. We were trying to avoid taking the Mass Pike, but we finally gave in and took it and paid for that mistake by getting stuck in a traffic jam that easily added close to hours to our trip. We finally got off 90 and picked up 20... but that was backed up, too. The final insult came when we got off 20 and onto Stafford Road, just a couple of miles from home. I was pulled over by a cop because I had a license plate frame. No kidding; license plate frames are technically illegal in Massachusetts, and this particular cop decided to stop me because of it. Luckily, he gave me a warning instead of a ticket. By that time, though, we'd been on the road for more than twelve hours. Ugh. We left New Columbia, PA at 6:00 AM. By the time we got back to Worcester, it was 8:30 PM. It was an awful trip. Next year, we'll do things differently. I don't know how, but I'm not doing that haul on a holiday weekend ever again.

The weekend was great, the road trip sucked, and I'm now functioning on 3.5 hours of sleep, having awakened at 1:30 this morning for no good reason I can fathom. I have to teach lab until 9:00 tonight, too. It's going to be a looooooooooooong day.

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Preparing for Tryptophan Overdose and Giving a Few Thanks

LL and I were originally planning to leave town for Thanksgiving weekend today, but plans were changed and we're headed out tomorrow morning instead. We're off to visit my sister and brother-in-law's family for Thanksgiving dinner in upstate New York. The following day, we're all headed down to a campground in Pennsylvania owned by my sister-in-law. We won't exactly be roughing it, though; we'll be staying in a heated cabin with a nice bed and a hot tub available. We're looking forward to a fun weekend and I'm particularly looking forward to seeing my niece. I'll have my camera, of course, so be prepared for numerous photos come Sunday, when we'll be returning home.

Tycho has been taken to a babysitter (lizard-sitter?) while we're away. LL has put together a care sheet for him that I wish I could post here. It includes such statements as "give him a piece of satin and he'll be your best friend" and "if you have some mac-n-cheese, put it on a plate for him." Note that the crooked veterinarian had prophesied that he'd be dead by now. Instead, he's going strong and apparently about to have another shed, which means that he's still growing. One of the things we're thankful for this year is that we still have Tycho in our lives.

Generally, today has been an unusually lazy day. I didn't have much to do, so I didn't do much and I've enjoyed the heck out of it. That's not to say that I didn't accomplish anything at all today, however. I managed to get an Intelligent Design Creationist to admit that he really didn't know what he was talking about on a forum discussing Florida's new science standards and the opposition of the Polk County School Board to them (they want to teach intelligent design nonsense, of course). Who knows... perhaps this person will make an effort to actually educate himself rather than uncritically accepting Michael Behe's junk as valid science. I can dream, can't I?

I don't know that I'll have net access from tomorrow through Sunday. If not, I'd like to take the opportunity to wish American readers an enjoyable Thanksgiving. The rest will have to settle for my hoping you have a nice day. Wherever and whomever you are, it's not a bad idea to thank people every so often.

So, thanks to LL for moving to our third state together this year so that I can take a shot at fulfilling a lifelong dream.

Thanks to the folks I work with at my new university for taking time out of your busy schedules to bring me up to speed on oh-so-much that I need to learn. You guys have been terrific, every one of you.

Thanks to the people online who educate me, who point out my errors so that I can learn from them and who do so in a good-humored way.

Thanks to all the people out there who expend so much energy in defending reason from the darkness that will always threaten it, people like Eugenie Scott and PZ Myers and Wes Elsberry (whose name I may never spell correctly!) and Nick Matzke.

Thanks for reading, one and all.

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