Category: Places

This evening I’m going to Cambridge to see Haruki Murakami read, and get M’s copy of Kafka on the Shore signed.

Tomorrow I go home. I am nervous about going home, although I’m not entirely sure why. It feels like I’m going back as a failure after six years on my own, even though I don’t really think I’ve failed. But what do I have to show for the past six years, years in which relationships have come and gone, in which friends have died and given birth, married and divorced, broken down and reassembled themselves? What do we have to show for all of it? A portfolio and a resume and a little bit of money saved up, I guess. Experiences. I suppose there isn’t really much you can have to show.

I’ve always regarded Indiana as a land of homespun wisdom, sweet corn, and eighteen kinds of pie, but with books like Jesusland, about the travails of an interracial family living out there in the 80s, I began to wonder if its friendly reputation concealed some kind of dark underbelly.

Yes it does. Oh, my, yes it does. Apparently, according to several news articles, this is for real: A bill that would ban unmarried people and gays from getting IVF donations. (Apparently doesn’t require this if you’re planning on being the parent of the child– only for donations which would mean that one genetic parent wasn’t involved after the birth). But still– something that would require you to go through a placement agency to adopt a zygote? Something which could deny you that permission if they thought you weren’t religious enough, or didn’t have good taste in flooring, or had too-good taste in flooring and and might like the flooring more than the child and try to return it? Sure, I’ve often said you should need a license to raise one of those things, but I was joking!

Fortunately, the news articles note that “Indiana Lawmakers Seek to Ban, Control Assisted Impregnation”. So unassisted, miraculous impregnation is still in the clear.

Bookdwarf and I have a secret code that served us particularly well throughout our vacation in Spain: whenever we saw someone wearing a particularly ridiculous outfit, we would tap or squeeze hands three times.

This was very useful because there were a lot of ugly tourists, but also because the full-on mullet is very much in fashion in southern Europe right now. Among the young radicals, it has morphed into a mullet consisting of dreadlocks or even a mohawk of dreadlocks. A lock-hawk, if you will. The hipsters, they amuse endlessly.

I am back in Beautiful Slummerville after nine days without so much as an email or voicemail. It’s been lovely. I called my parents from the airport and they said “Huh, so that’s where you were. We were wondering.”

I learned a few phrases of Catalan, such as “cafe amb llet” and “vi negre.” I also learned that tapas have become such an elaborate thing that a new, less-formal bar-snack trend is taking hold: pintxos (the tx is pronounced as ch, this being an originally Basque bar-snack). Pintxos consist of anything you can toothpick to a small slice of bread. and are self-serve. At the end of your snacking the bartender counts your toothpicks and you pay. Usually its between one and two euros per toothpick. They are getting increasingly elaborate, of course.

Over the next few days I will post reviews of restaurants, embarrassing stories, pictures of my horrible, horrible black eye, and also Bookdwarf and I will post reviews of books that we read over at her blog.

Moving to a new city? Need some guys with a van? How about a cost-of-living analysis? Restaurant reviews? The Not for Tourists city guides to laundromats, grocery stores, and places the locals go?

Nah, you need to know which neighborhoods have the most HotOrNot.com personal ad customers.

I’ve determined that today’s route to Waltham was not the most optimal.

Who cares if it’s true? It’s funny! In the Netherlands, police aren’t quite sure what to do when they find people misbehaving in parks. The Dutch have a strong tradition of live-and-let-live, so obviously the first thing to do when you have a problem about public behavior is to discuss it and reach consensus. And then you get news reports like this: Eric Droogh, who is director at the Veluwe National Park, said: “A national debate on wild sex parties in the countryside is essential.

Or, What’s the matter with Kansas? In which some guy runs a dingy women’s health clinic in the inner city (a.k.a. abortion clinic, since too few people go for actual preventive medicine or birth control), and gets accused of all sorts of horrible things by his employees, and loses his license.

Right wing media reports: HE EATS BABIES

The local free weekly provides a nuanced (a.k.a. “unread”) take: A bad doctor in a bad clinic becomes a straw man for the anti-choice crowd to push way too much regulation onto one particular procedure. The mainstream media mostly ignores it. What I want to know is, when is my health-care provider going to start offering discount prices on Wednesdays?

My brother is living in La Paz, Bolivia right now, which is not the calmest place to be at the moment. He and his friends have taken the following pretty impressive pictures. If only they’d use Flickr rather than other picture services. Here you go: Lake Titicaca and environs, Cochabamba and environs, and the Festival del Gran Poder in La Paz itself, a festival of folklore, dancing, and parades, during which the people have set aside political arguments– we’ll see how long the break lasts.

Politically it seems to me that the senate’s compromise– high taxes on foreign investment in hydrocarbons, but not nationalization– seems like a good one, since nobody is happy with it. The test will be whether the various interest groups are willing to accept that the other side is equally unhappy, and that’s an outcome that doesn’t look easy to predict.

Harvard University is in the news again, and again, and again. Today’s WSJ article on Harvard was written by a graduate of my own Haverford, who closes the article noting that in a Wall Street job interview, the interviewer began by looking at his educational record and saying “”Well, if you read it quickly enough, it looks like it says Harvard.”

Of course, being confused with Harvard isn’t such a bad thing. A friend of mine, Spanish, was at a party when he referred to a friend of his at Yale. Of course, with a Spanish accent on the Y, it sounded like “jail.” Confused by the negative reaction, he insisted: “No, jail is a very good school!” Presumably one studies in the School of Hard Knocks.