This Month in Globes

A roundup of globe-related items. Obviously, I've got a thing for maps, as does my buddy Bruce in a different kind of way; and a globe is a very special kind of map indeed.

I. GPS Visualizer

Back in June, I posted about the Great Circle Mapper, a cool tool for drawing the true direct paths across the globe on flat maps, and I used it to show the goshawful business trip I was heading off on. Well, I think I went on an even more extreme trip last month, and I found an even cooler tool to visualize it: The GPS Visualizer. This site lets you plot all sorts of geographic data on all kinds of maps, but for me, the killer app was the ability to create a KML file that you can use with Google Earth. How cool is that?



Don't have Google Earth yet? Get it now. Don't wait. It's free. It's here. Don't finish reading this blog until you get it. Here's a view of my around-the-world slog in pretty colors. It looks pretty serene from way up above the pole, but it was 22,613 miles and 51 hours 10 minutes in flight over 16 days. Ugh.



II. The Mystery of Hitler's Globe

There was an interesting bit in the NYT this week that begins dramatically enough:

BERLIN, Sept. 16 — Hitler’s globe is missing. Wolfram Pobanz, a 68-year-old retired cartographer, is positive that it’s not the one in the Deutsches Historisches Museum, with the Russian bullet hole through Germany, and he can prove it.

It's the story of a different kind of Nazi hunter and his quest for a particular globe. Good commentary on the power of media and of cartography. And Charlie Chaplin, too. But the mention of a Russian bullet hole through Germany (can you see it in the photo behind Pobanz? I'm not sure.) sent a momentary chill up my spine and then made me think of

III. Ana Ng

The first four lines of the first and possibly best song on Lincoln, They Might Be Giants second and possibly best album:

Make a hole with a gun perpendicular
To the name of this town in a desktop globe
Exit wound in a foreign nation
Showing the home of the one this was written for

In the commentary on this song, one reader claims to have created a pair of superimposed maps showing what is exactly opposite what, but the link goes somewhere else. Please let me know if you have such a map, lest I find myself compelled to make one myself.

IV. I can has kartografy?

I'm not going to even try to explain the Lolcat meme, but I will say that I think LOLMaps is an incredible body of work on its own. It's visually arresting and politically aggressive, taking on urban sprawl, borders, neighborhoods and the Bush administration with kaleidoscopic maps, humor, rage and bad spelling.

In the words of creator Nikolas Schiller,

LOLMaps combines various historic maps & my geospatial art with popular image macro phonetics popularized by LOLcats, LOLgeeks, LOLgays, LOLpresident, LOLlibrarians etc. It also combines some of the “All of your base…” text as well as some Latin words used in old maps. As this project continues I expect the maps to get more creative and go beyond just bad grammar and combine some new elements (probably a Google Map with all the maps georeferenced) and produce a few more maps of this ilk. ... The background for each page still pulls a random “zoom” from around America, which creates an interesting cartographic juxtaposition by mixing actually places with humor and in some cases political statements.

There are currently 51 LOLmaps with 143 different backgrounds which gives LOLmaps 7,293 different viewing combinations.

Some of my favorites are #3, #16, #18 (above) and #48.

Waistline Phone Line

I'm on record for several disparaging remarks about the effectiveness of advertising in in-flight magazines and in-flight radio programs, so I was as surprised as anybody when I actually ripped out and saved this bit from JAL's Skyward magazine:



If the fine print is too fine, I'll summarize: People in Japan are getting fatter, and some healthcare outfit is piloting a program where users send in cameraphone pictures of things they're considering eating, and the service sends back nutrition information to help guide the would-be dieters.

I was hoping this would be an application of some fancy food-recognition AI, (Something like IBM research's super-cool Veggie Vision) but it seems to be dependent on a bank of nutritionists, so it's not as scalable as I had hoped.

Seems like a useful service in any case. I wonder which will evolve first, food-recognition AI, or calorie and cholesterol detectors for mobile phones?

Here are eight things I considered consuming over the last few weeks. I ingested seven of them. Can you guess the odd one out?

And soon I'll hear old winter's song

Returning to North America in September from almost three weeks in Asia after leaving in August, I found Autumn staring me in the face. I could see the change in the light and feel the chill in the air. It's good to be home. It's my favorite time of the year.

In mid-September
I saw the first autumn light
Casting hard shadows

From low in the sky
Cold shadows, bright white brick walls
Autumn's first sunset

Returning home, I
Smelled a new smell, realized
It was always there

Rain

It rained a lot on this last trip - monsoon, typhoon, and just plain downpour. Here's a sample from a small shrine at a big brass Kannon statue outside of the Sensoji temple in Tokyo's Asakusa area, not far from the street where they sell the plastic food that you see standing in for menus all over.



Yes, it's a video. Click play and turn on the sound so you can hear the raindrops.

Tip O'Neill Smiles Upon My Travel Plans

As you may know, I was nervous about the fullness of my passport, and my fears where confirmed with one heartless stamp at the Italian border. So, upon return from Italy, I had less than three weeks to get my business visa for India, which meant getting a new passport or at least new pages so there would be someplace to put it.

The bad news is, there is unprecedented (and apparently unexpected or unprepared-for) demand for passports due to recent rule changes for US citizens travelling to Mexico and Canada, causing massive backlogs and delays.

The good news is, if you live in a city with a passport agency and have time and money to spend on the project, you can get what you need without that much fuss. Just make sure you bring a large novel. Next time, I'm going to read Midnight's Children.

After a few calls around and some web surfing, I had a plan: go to the Tip O'Neill building and get more pages, then immediately FedEx passport to the expediter who would deal with the India Consulate and ship it back.

Visa photos: $20
Passport rush fee: $60
FedEx to expediter: $22
Consular fee: $95
Expeditor's fee: $95
Copay for polio and tetanus vaccinations: $10
Copay for anti-malarial prescription: $10
Time spent waiting in line looking at photos and paintings of Tip O'Neill: 3 hours, 30 minutes
Work time missed running all these errands: 1 day

I haven't even left town and I've already spent over $300 on this trip. Let that be a lesson to all of you about planning ahead.

So here it is, my old 24-page (1-24) passport augmented with 24 brand-new, slightly off-center pages (A-X). The new pages are not quite the same size as the old ones, and they stick out a bit, but they should keep me going for a good long time. The purple thing sticking out on the right is the India visa, good for multiple entries over one year.

Pizzeria al Puffo

Those last couple of posts seemed kinda eggheaded, so here's Pizzeria al Puffo in Muggia. "Pizza a taglio" is "pizza by the slice" but I have no explanation for ether the smurf or the wheelbarrow. Right here in Cambridge, there's a place that serves puffo ("smurf") gelato. Go figure.

Girolamo Savonarola

This dramatic statue in Ferrara depicts Girolamo Savonarola, a fiery reformist Dominican priest of the 15th century. Still somewhat controversial today, Savonarola organized the "Bonfires of the Vanities" in which Florentines burned their books, fancy clothes and other too-materialistic possessions. This crowd might or might not have included Michelangelo and Botticelli tossing their own work on the pyres.



After some disagreement with the Medici pope Alexander VI, Savonarola was excommunicated and subsequently arrested, tortured and executed in Florence. To deprive his followers of any relics, the authorities threw his ashes into the Arno. Despite that, there are statues today, and some even call Savonarola a saint.

In the short time that I loitered in this piazza, several people had their photos taken in front of the statue, but despite my urging, none struck Savonarola's pose. I wonder how many knew even as much about him as I've gleaned.

Campanilissimo

The Italian word of the moment is campanilismo.

Translated by BabelFish as "parochialism," campanilismo refers to local pride or patriotism, sometimes very local. If you ask somebody where she's from and she says "Boston" or "New York" that's not campanilismo. If she says, "Southie" or "Washington Heights" you've got a campanilista on your hands.

Campanilismo is derived from campanile, which is a church's bell tower like the 14th Century one pictured below in Florence, the work of Giotto.



Britannica suggests that the name sticks because it's from local boosters bragging that their bell tower is taller than the one in the next town over, but this piece from L'Italo Americano indicates that the campanile is a symbol of a locality, like a church is the symbol of its parish.

Italia Unrealita

I was talking to a colleague about Italy and he described a sense of unreality visiting there, how every street looks like a movie set and every vista like a postcard, and how it takes a honking car or beeping cell phone to break the spell and re-locate your head in the present time. I don't know if I feel this way all the time, but here's a view in Florence, looking South across the Arno at dusk, more or less the same time and place as these pictures.

Mobile Photo Blogging Geek Notes

I sometimes rankle when people ask technical and process questions about how I make photos rather than talking about the aesthetic content. But let's face it, the photos of late haven't exactly been art, and it presents an opportunity for some tech notes.

I've been carrying my usual film camera, but won't get the film back for several more days so let's talk about the digital shots. Geek notes on my film process another time. I've also been carrying a T-Mobile Dash and using it to take 1.3MP digital photos - largely of food - and email them to the blog. (With Blogger, you can set up an email address, yourblogname.secretword@blogger.com which posts anything you send to it, which is a lot easier than using a mini web browser on the Blogger site.) The photo quality is just good enough for quick and dirty documentation, and the keyboard and connectivity are just good enough for quick and dirty blogging. There's a convenient setting in the phone for reducing the size of photos (1.3MP = 1,280x1024 native) to save bandwidth, which isn't cheap when roaming on GPRS. But it has an odd side effect.

Here's the photo from the recent tomato post, as originally displayed by blogger:

The odd thing is that there's an IMG WIDTH tag set for 320, but the image is only 300 wide, so it looks fuzzy. Let's remove that tag and look at it at 300 wide.

A little better. I wasn't expecting much from a little phonecam, but when I looked at the photos on my iMac, I was pleasantly surprised. Here's a comparable size reduction saved at a much higher quality. The 1.3MP file was 332k, the phone crunched the file to 16k for emailing, this version is 128k.



And finally, here's my usual treatment with some color correction and cropping.



That's more like it. Yum. Now, the question is, should I go back and re-do the photos from the last ten or so posts? I already went in and removed the IMG SIZE tags, but I see there's more that can be done.

Soul Delay and Dyschrony

Not too long ago, a buddy mentioned in passing that William Gibson had a theory of jet lag postulating that your soul can't go as fast as a jet and takes some time to catch up with you, causing much discombobulation. I traced this to Gibson's 2002 novel, Pattern Recognition, which I bought and and recently read, you guessed it, in an airport and on a flight. The theory shows up on the very first page as the protagonist wakes up in England at an ungodly jet lagged hour after flying from New York.

She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.

The soul delay theory comes up a couple more times but certainly isn't central to the plot. Later on (the story takes us from London to Tokyo and back and then to someplace else that would be a bit of a spoiler to name) somebody asks her if she's still on some other place's time. The reply, "I think I'm all on my own time now, but I don't know what time that is."

While the novel was a good read, I wasn't particularly moved or impressed by it, but I had to give some credit to Gibson for throwing jet lag into the mix. Such things don't usually concern globe-trotting fictional heroes. It adds some humanity.

I'm pretty agnostic on the soul thing, but I can definitely relate to the "on my own time" sentiment. I wear a two-dial watch (the quest for which is worthy of its own post) but sometimes get pretty mixed up about which dial is where, and just where it is that I am.

Referring to Wikipedia, I found some interesting bits about jet lag. For one, it's also called desynchronosis, dysrhythmia, and dyschrony. Also, it seems that low doses of Viagra can help with Eastbound jet lag but not Westbound. In tests on hamsters. WebMD provided the usual tips around good sleep practice and the "one day per timezone" rule of thumb for recovery time.

So, if it takes your soul one day per timezone to catch up with you, can we calculate the speed of soul? Timezones are much bigger at the equator than elsewhere, but let's use the book's example of New York to London, a trip of about 3,451 miles. Divide by five days for 690 miles/day or 28.76 MPH. Assuming the soul follows the air route and can't just pass through the earth in a straight line. That's pretty slow. A train or bus trip from Boston to NYC - about 200 miles in three and a half hours - would leave you without a soul for over an hour. Which goes a long way to explaining some of the characters around Port Authority in NYC.

But enough picking at Gibson's poetry. Here's my formula for minimizing jet lag impact: 11:00 PM. That's the magic point in time for me. When going West, you're going to get tired early - try as hard as possible to stay up till 11, but no later. When going East, you're going to want to stay up all night - go to sleep an 11, no earlier. Medicate if you need to. Spend as much time in the sun as possible. But if you stay up to 11 and go to sleep at 11, you stand a fighting chance the next day. Repeat as needed.

Obviously, this is simplistic (ignoring for example the timing and duration of flight) and not for everybody. It's my first full day back after 10 days in Europe and I've got about another hour to go to 11 and it's going to be a close one, but I think I hear the rubber band connected to my soul starting to slacken.

Se non rallenta, vomito

I bought Rick Steve's French, Italian & German phrasebook largely because it included that phrase, which means, "if you don't slow down, I'll throw up."

Driving on the Autostrade (that's Italian for "Autobahn" which is German for "place that swiftly separates the quick from the dead") in the above pictured rental Smart ForFour (they were out of my first choice, the ForTwo - which has half as many seats and apparently about the same horsepower as its anemic big brother) I wished that Rick had included some notes on non-verbal inter-vehicle communication. On the A4 between Milan and Venice the left lane was a solid caravan of tailgating German cars hell-bent on getting to their vacation destinations on schedule at any cost. And the right was parking lot of eastern-european long-haul trucks.

"Se non le piace come guido, si tolga dal marciapiede" ("If you don't like the way I drive, stay off the sidewalk") is a useful maxim for urban driving. Despite the ForFour's shameful lower gears, after a while I was getting the hang of it and if not for my consistent use of turn signals I might occasonally have been mistaken for a local motorist in the streets of Trieste.

After the Tuscan Sun

Dusk over the Arno. Everybody else is shooting the other way towards the Ponte Vecchio but the light is gone and the bridge is too far away. Always know the time of sunrise and sunset and if possible the phase and times of the moon, too.

Fun Food in Ferrara

I am not making this up. According to the guidebook...

Ferrara's interesting foods with unusual histories:
...
The Bread (Ciupeta) In the 16th century, the Dukes of Ferrara led a luxurious court life. The Dukes' cook served for the first time a kind of twisted bread, the birth of "Ciupeta", whose shape is a combination of male & female sexual symbols.

I will say that the bread was rather flavorless, unsalted bread being typical of this part of Italy, and that the cappellacci were far more sensually inspiriing.

Castello Miramare

Archduke Max built it on the Adriatic then went to Mexico and got killed by Juarez. His wife Charlotte of Belgium painted pined and went mad. Gotta love the XIX century.

I'll take the one on the right

I like a restaurant that wheels out a tub of fish to show you what's fresh that night. The waiter called the little silver one "tonno" but I think it was a mackeral. They grilled it with olive oil and pomodorini and I didn't care what it was called.

Flight of the mousse

There's just not enough time to eat everything. that's why I love grazing, small plates and tastings. After a fine dinner of seafood (risotto frutti di mare and local grilled fish) and some very local wine (the waiter pointed to the hills above the city) my translator was blotto and I was too weak to resist the cute busgirl's invitation to try some chocolate mousse.

This was a recommended but modest restaurant so I was not expecting a fancy dessert. So wonderfully wrong! A selection of chocolate mousses, clockwise from top right:
+ coffee with tiny roasted beans
+ ginger with shreds of candied ginger
+ balsamic vinegar(!) with little puddles thereof
+ dark chocolate in a chocolate shell

There's definitely something interesting about the Viennese stamp left on this Italian and slavic town.

Living large in the land of lycopene

These fantastic looking tomatoes are called "cuor di bue" or "ox hearts."

Stick with the specialists

Salami misti at the ham bar in Trieste. The darker one is wild boar.

They stamped on the last blank page of my passport.

This is going to cause me some difficulty.

Film safe in airport x-rays; photographers might not be in NYC

There's always a little nervousness around a trip, especially at packing time. Do I have enough underwear? Do I have the right underwear? And for the past few years, can I put this in my carry-on bag? Can I put this in my checked luggage?

I think I have the underwear thing under control. There's always washing in the hotel sink or going to the eurogap to buy more. I have the carry-on liquids thing under control. I have my official EU 1 litre baggie containing the essentials: mouthwash, hand sanitizer, hydrating spray, moisturizing lotion, and a bottle containing a few of each of the critical in-flight drugs and supplements: benadryl, nyquil, melatonin, famotidine and lomotil. Electronics will be easy. This is a vacation, so no laptop and no beard trimmer. I'm traveling light, so no noise cancelling headphones, ipod or digital camera. All I need is cell phone, charger and adapter. Check.

Now I get to the tough part: camera and film. You can't put film in your checked luggage, they zap it with serious industrial x-rays that are said to fog your film to heck. The carry-on luggage scanner says it's safe up to 400 speed but I don't trust them. I use a lead-lined bag rated to 1600 ISO for my precious Tri-X. Here's the ambitious plan: ten rolls for ten days plus the partial roll that's in the camera already. I'm unlikely to shoot it all, but it would really suck to run out at an inconvenient time or place.



I know from past experience that whatever kind of scanner they use, it can see right through the bag. One time they asked me if I had a camera in there along with the film (I did) and another time, I could see the monitor and the film canisters were clearly visible. So far, I've experienced no damaging fogging, and I've dragged some film through four or five airports worth of scanners in this bag. So maybe the bag manufacturer is full of it or maybe the scanners really are film safe. I feel better using the bag.

As traveling with film becomes less common among the general public - it's probably almost extinct already - I expect more and more raised eyebrows and scrutiny at security. Not the kind I'd get if I had different genes, but the kind you get when you have strange, meticulously-wrapped packages.

Undue scrutiny of photographers brings up the news that New York City is considering rule changes that would require a permit to photograph and film in public places , recently brought to my attention by by a local ace photographologist, who deserves a special shout-out on her b-day, the party for which I lamely missed by spending the evening folding socks and zip-loc'ing film.

I don't know if this is really the thin end of the wedge against free expression or just some misguided legal CYA maneuver, but I don't like the sound of it. If you like to make pictures in NYC, you might want to look into it. Follow LKB's link for more info and a petition you can sign.

The only place you see rubber stamps in use these days

It's happening again. My passport is dangerously full but nowhere near expiring.

Once you get a couple of full-page visas, it's not that hard to fill a passport if you travel internationally a lot for work. Or for any other reason, I suppose. And a passport is good for ten years. Unlike the pages pictured here, most stamps are placed more or less within the lines, which leads to just four countries per page. Right now I have one full page and two pages worth of fractional space available.



I'm going on vacation soon - that'll probably yield two stamps, one entering the EU and one returning to the USA. But then, not too long after I get back, I have a business trip coming up that will use up a whole page for a visa, and at least 3/4 of a page on stamps for three countries, leaving (Have you been keeping count? What was the name of the bus driver?) less than a page margin for error or for additional stamps over and above the visa.

This makes me nervous. Sure, I can probably get a rush order for a new passport or at least some new pages - it's business travel and the company will pay. But what if I don't and what if I'm halfway around the world at some border and there's no space for the stamp? Do I get turned away and deported? Can I even get back into the USA if there's no place for them to stamp? Will they just stamp my hand and order me not to wash it until I get back to the USA? Will I pay some trumped up administrative fine?

Thinking about it, paper passports and ink visa stamps are looking pretty antiquated these days. There's already a barcode and I hear RFID isn't far away. But there's a bit of old-time cachet to having a paper passport, especially one full of stamps. And a certain vanity, too: not only am I blogging about it now, but the last time this happened (January 2006) I declined to get the 48-page passport (standard is 24) because I was afraid it wouldn't fit in my snug Shanghai Tang passport case. Go figure.

I am a loyal disciple of the SeatGuru

I shouldn't be telling you about this site. The more people who know, the less my competitive advantage is in knowing. But information wants to be free, and at SeatGuru.com, some very valuable information is provided completely free.



SeatGuru.com tells you the subtle and not so subtle differences between the different seats on a couple hundred different aircraft across dozens of airlines. Being allowed to choose your seat on a flight doesn't mean much if all you can tell from the map is window, aisle, middle, bulkhead, and exit row. SeatGuru has saved me untold angst from seats that don't recline and window seats that don't actually have a window, while enlightening me with an extra inch or two of legroom here and there.

Have a look at what SeatGuru said about my seat on last night's flight:



This was spot-on. I was able to stretch my legs out - possibly even farther than if I had gotten upgraded to what passes for first class on a domestic flight - and they also got very very cold. And because of poor planning, I had to shell out $5 for a salad when I got the munchies mid-flight. The SeatGuru predicted all of this. I am impressed and indoctrinated.

Now when will the airlines get with it and license SeatGuru's intel instead of using their own pokey seat-picking screens? Maybe people would even pay more for the Guru's recommended seats...

Inside and outside the smallest hotel room in Munich

I tried to leave early, but my ticket did not allow it, so I hopped on the S-Bahn and checked into the cheapest room I could get at the Platzl.

It's right off the Marienplatz in the old center of the city.

I can see the Eiffel Tower from my hotel room window

It's right under the giant lamp that made me keep the curtains drawn all night.

See it?

This post is not about the iPhone

It's about something squarer, greasier, more desirable and more affordable. If you want iPhone news, read it from someone who cares.

I'm talking about 蘿蔔糕 or lobag gow or luobo ga-o or lo baak gou or just plain glorious twice fried turnip cake.



That's right folks, I'm talking about Turnip Cake. Right here in East Ocean City. It's good with tea and it rhymes with

Wait, that's not what I meant. I meant, I've enjoyed this dish for years at all sorts of dim sum houses in Boston and New York and here and there. But I had some in Hong Kong and it knocked my socks off. So much so, I'm going to include the photo a second time.



You see, turnip cake is mostly turnip, with some scallions and bits of chinese sausage or dried shrimp, fried up then steamed then fried again and served with some sauce. Like a potato latke in many ways, greasy and celebratory and filling. The ones I get in the USA are usually about the size and shape of a pack of post-it notes, 3 inches square or so, and frequently underdone in the middle. The better places fry them right on the cart, but they sometimes hurry and undercook them.

In Hong Kong, at a random and nameless place in a mall in Causeway Bay, they take the humble turnip cake seriously. It's served in small cubes to maximize the crispy fried surface area, tossed together in a nest of taro or something. They're light on sausage and not very greasy. And there's a hint of chile heat in there somewhere, making sauce an afterthought. Just amazing. Crispy, starchy, aromatic, and cheap.

Stick a candle in there and call it birthday turnip cake. It's that good. Go get some this weekend.

Further appreciation of Victoria Harbour from the Star Ferry

I never get tired of this bouy. That's the Wan Chai convention center to the left, near the hotel where we usually stay.


Foggy Sunday morning.


The top of IFC2 (88 floors) is just out of the clouds.


Last ferry on a dark night.


On a cloudy night, the sky and water reflect the light show.


The bow of the ship.

It's all fun and games until the mafia turns your dinner party into a casino and sings a few songs.

I like internationalism and multiculturalism. I like the breaking down of borders and mixing of cultures. But sometimes, things just clot up together in a really confusing way and it feels like you've been pantsed by progress. (More important pants-related news here.)

A couple of days ago, I flew from Paris, where I was meeting with PR firms and getting rained on, to Munich, where I had a meeting set with more PR types. But I was invited to some unspecified evening event with one of our German distributors. Apparently, we had participated in their Hausmesse, and I was just in time to join for dinner.

The Bahn workers were on strike, so I took a very efficient but expensive taxi from the airport to the hotel, and then another to the site of the event, the Flugwerft Schleißheim. I suppose if I had taken the time to google it, I would have known that I would be dining in a large aircraft hangar. A hangar full of vintage German aircraft. Curse you, Red Baron!



Not even a vintage Fokker and a DC-3 can keep 150 high tech resellers away from a free buffet. I was just getting comfortable with a glass of South African Cabernet when the light contemporary DJ music was interrupted by the sound of gunfire. Well, I'm pretty sure it was fake gunfire, but still pretty alarming during dinner among military aircraft.

The party was crashed by a band of euro-ambiguous actors portraying Al Capone and his merry band of molls and ganefs. Picture the villians from the first Die Hard movie. In high school drama gangster costumes. Speaking German-accented mock Italian.

Having generally menaced the catering staff and taken control of the party, the mobsters proceeded to sing a few songs. First, "Bad Bad Al Capone" to the tune of "Bad Bad Leroy Brown" then "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend" and "We're in the Money," which served as a segue to the evening's final act of terrortainment, a casino night, as the gangsters handed out chips to each of their hostages and started dealing cards.

I sure was happy that the trains were running the next day so I could get into the heart of historic Munich and post this entry from the safety and comfort of Starbucks.

Sea and Sky

Sorry I've been out of touch since HK, things got pretty crunky in Singapore and I was sick by the time I hit Mexico City. But anyway, the film is back and I'm going to post some more HK harbour shots under various conditions. Also going to update the media ticker and try to get some housekeeping done before the next flight, which is tomorrow. Paris and Munich for three or four days of meetings.

The View from Aqua

Those of you who think that business travel is all expense-account glamour are sadly mistaken. But once in a while, we do go someplace nice.



Aqua is an Italian-Japanese restaurant in a penthouse-like space in Kowloon, looking South across the harbour at Hong Kong island. I had a reimagined Timballo, a bundle of rigatoni on end, stuffed with duck confit and wild mushrooms, and a cocktail called "anxiety" composed of vodka, pomelo and grapefruit with a bit of brown sugar.

The Star Ferry

I'm a big fan of public transportation, and one of my favorite examples is the Star Ferry that links Hong Kong island with the Kowloon Peninsula. For a fare of HK$2.20 (about 20 US cents!) you get fast transportation and amazing views. I take it every chance I get. I shot mostly film on my last couple of trips across, but here are some digital shots in and around the ferry to tide you over.

Who doesn't enjoy a good game of Elephant vs. Gorilla?

My money's on the gorilla - he looks like he really wants it.

Rainy morning in Wan Chai, again.

Wangs outnumber countries

I was dozing off while watching CNNi the other day and half-asleep, I caught this headline, "Wangs outnumber countries" on the crawler. Snapping to attention, I learned that the billion-plus mainland chinese are overwhelmingly named one of just 100 surnames and that it's illegal to just create new ones. There's a propsal to allow couples to combine their surnames to make new ones to cut back on confusion. I managed to source that here.

So how many Wangs are there? The item above puts the figure at 93 million. The CNN report noted that if the Wangs of China (and I'm sure there are many overseas, in Taiwan and Singapore and beyond) were to form a country, it would be more populous than Germany, with 82 million. Wikipedia has the whole list.

Further, I estimate that the putative Wangistan would have a GDP of around $630 Billion, putting it on par with Taiwan and Turkey. (Photo credit: Ennis)

For those wondering, Wang and Wong are the same name, with Wang being the more common romanization for Mandarin speakers and Wong for Cantonese speakers.

They do eventually shut the lights off

even in Hong Kong. This is 4:30am or so, a bit before sunrise.

Great Circle Mapper

How cool is this? A site that maps out great circle paths across the earth. Disclaimers aside, it gives a good idea of the most direct path from here to there.

In other mappy news, this page answers the burning question, "Where is the largest island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island?" We truly live in an age of miracles and wonder.

Rainy morning in Wan Chai

7am and 80 degrees already. It's too early for the crush of commuters that will be surging from the train and ferry terminals soon. As I walk along the elevated walkways I pass old women doing tai chi and old men doing nothing. At an outdoor pool, young men swim laps in the rain as their coaches or parents stand at the edge of the pool under umbrellas, watching gravely.

A woman is slowly swinging a shiny sword with a green tassel hanging from the pommel. It seems like a bad idea to try and take her picture, so after watching for a while, I look down and see this driveway.

This is not how I like to start my day

but it doesn't look so bad outside, at least not from inside...

Three Views of the Nagano Bakery

They opened this European-style bakery in 1948. Imagine what this neighborhood might have looked like then.

That's the reflection from the curtains of the hotel room in the last photo.

Crunky update

Crunky is now available in convenient individually-wrapped chunks, of, umm, crunk?

Tokyo, very early Tuesday morning

It just goes on and on...

Early Monday Morning, Tokyo

The good news is, in Tokyo you can get a good cheap umbrella almost anywhere, and they always provide long plastic bags to put your wet umbrella in when you go inside a building.

I don't know either, but I just had to buy them

I think they're scissors of some sort. I'll be sure to put them in my checked luggage just in case.



.

Crunky!

As I mentioned, in Japan there seems to be a lot more interest in dark chocolate among the common people than in the USA. Dark chocolate versions of candy bars, both domestic and imported, are common. This is a good thing. Kit Kat, one of the most international candy bars with many variations, comes in two dark varieties in Japan:




As is typical of dark matter, the darker variety of Kit Kat is also smaller and rarer. The darker side of the Japanese dark chocolate business is that they are tolerant if not outright supportive of that charade known as "white chocolate." And that were not enough, there's even green chocolate:




Green tea chocolate, to be precise. I'm happy to report the actual article is not quite as "camouflage" looking, but unfortunately it tastes enough like green tea to be bitter and enough like white chocolate to be cloying, and not really at all like actual chocolate or green tea. There are many peculiar fruity variants available. Visit the Japanese Kit Kat store site for the gory details.

VanK, if you're reading, I do have to point out that a box of Exotic Hokkaido Milk at each place setting would look quite smart at the wedding. Drop me a line soon if you want me to pick any up.

What's "Crunky," you ask? Well, that's probably the subject of a whole other post (so what will I call that post??), but you can start here and then here (items 2+3) to begin to understand the nature of crunkiness.

I am not as cool as Garr Reynolds

Not by a long shot. I'm in a Tokyo hotel working on presentations. Here's Garr in a Tokyo hotel working on a presentation. Notice the difference? He posts videos of himself talking about the 1-7-7 or 1-8-8 rule while I'm revising presentations that seem to work on the 0-8-12 rule. Is that a pythagorean triple? Garr would not be at all confused by the Japanese version of Blogger. But enough whinging, it's time to finish the slides and go in search of chocolate. Here's one amazing thing about Japan: you can find dark chocolate versions of almost every candy bar in almost every convenience store!

This is going to be difficult

Finally, I've got some time to blog. You know, quality time, like when you're jetlagged out of your mind at an hour when the only things to do outside the hotel are or should be illegal? So I log on to blogger, and here's what I get:




As you're reading this, you know that I have managed to muddle through. Not by figuring out how to set the language back to English (failed), not by using some fancy translation tool (too lazy), not by calling room service (still considering it), just by muddling through with some decent visual memory of how the blogger UI is set up and the grace of graphic buttons being the same in Japanese and English. Another good trick is to look at the links - URLs are still written in ASCII.

Google knows who I am, if not by cookies, then by the fact that I logged in. Google knows where I am, probably by IP address. But Google does not realize that I cannot read where I am.

Two semi-aerial views of Malaga

Malaga is Picasso's birthplace. There's a museum there containing a fair sample of his works, few if any of which were actually created in Malaga. He left at the age of 14 to go to art school in Barcelona.


From the Alcazaba fortress.

From the balcony of Hotel Larios.

Sorry to dip into the back catalog, these are from December 2006. I'm still here in town, at least for two more weeks before the next big trip.

Chicago River Architecture Tour

Trying out a warmer tone. Looking East on the river.


Under the chocolate-scented bridge.


Mies' IBM building and a bit of Goldberg's Marina City.

The Sky Over Vienna

Der Himmel Über Wien

Where am I?

The forces of globalization are on the march

It's a good thing they have a guide, or they might smack into a wall.

I passed it twice a day for three days and then I saw it

...just outside the usual frame of attention.

Light at play in Vienna

High and Low at the Cafe Demel

Just days ahead of passover, my mind returns to pastry-filled Vienna, where I sampled the famous sachertorte at the Demel pastry shop. Read about the history of the dessert and its name in this turgid wikipedia entry.

The Demel, on a busy slightly touristy shopping street near the Stephansdom cathedral, is a crowded, gilded coffee and cake shoppe, with a glass walled kitchen. While I ate the Demels Sachertorte, I watched a young apprentice repeatedly apply frosting florets to a wooden practice cake, check her work, and wipe them off to start again.


This photo doesn't do much justice to the cake, as my cameraphone lacks the "food porn closeup" setting I've been seeking in a full-size digital camera. Personally, I could have dispensed with the layer of apricot jam entirely, but it was hardly noticable under the ganache-like icing. The cake was a bit dry - that's why the Viennese pile on the cream - but satisfyingly chocolately. The espresso, as with most of the coffee I had in Vienna, was perfectly composed.


Back to the glass-walled kitchen for a moment. See that, in the center towards the bottom of the photo? Near the seam in the glass? Yes, that. Yes, it's a bust of Bill Clinton. Executed in some sort of candy. I think he's saying that he feels my marzipain. And who's that other candy bust? Kofi Annan? Thabo Mbeki?

At any rate, I bought a small Demel Sachertorte in a wooden box and brought it back. I served it at book club. Slightly dry for the travelling, it was a nice finish to the meal. And the box was the perfect size for sending the leftover Wensleydale cheese back with one of my guests.

So for those about to start a week of potato starch, nut flower and [most dreaded of all] cocoanut-based desserts, get your fluffy leavened goodies whilst you can and hope that nobody's sculpting your likeness in almond paste to sit unnervingly next to the macaroons.

I'd like to buy a vowel

Struggling to read, speak and understand the local language is part of the fun of travelling, but being completely unable to pronounce the word for ice cream is just plain cruel. That's not the name of the shop, that's the name of the frosty dessert. And 10 Slovak Korun is less than 50 cents!

Hofburg

Archways, parade grounds
So very imperial
Vienna in spring

Vienna is a great, compact city

Almost everything you would want to see is all on the same street, Einbahn.

The photo lab folks have temporarily bungled my film - again - so I have nothing but a couple of phonecam pics to share at this point. Maybe I'll scan some ephemera or my expense report.

Sorry I've been MIA

Work got a bit out of hand, and I've been out of town.



My assistant has been holding down the fort, and we'll be getting back to you shortly.

Churros y Chocolate / Ноча на Нева

Thanks for the kind feedback on the night shots. I looked back in the archive because I was sure I had more, but found few. Here's a minor mashup of Spain in 2007 and St. Petersburg in 2003. Bet you can guess which is which, but can you guess who had better ice cream?

Lunacy

Were you lucky enough to see the lunar eclipse today? I didn't, but a month ago, I saw the moon over Southern France.

I like dark skies and I cannot lie. Other shooters can't deny.

In other news, it looks like Forbes agrees with me on the XM-Sirus merger.

Viva Europa

I got the film back from the 36 hours of relaxation I managed to squeeze out of the tail end of an otherwise grim business trip to Cannes. I'm really enjoying the inky blackness of shooting Tri-X at night, hand-held, underexposed and not even pushed. Here's the ferris wheel in Nice again, with the Mediterranean beyond it.

Note that the snack stand, in the Easternmost few miles of the French Riviera before the Italian frontier, is serving up crepes, popcorn, cotton candy, my beloved churros and a few unidentifiables. Despite the illustration near the upper left corner, no sign of "le hot dog."

Earlier that day, I crossed the border between France and Italy without a passport at over 100kph, instantly bargaining down my linguistic crime from abject butchery of French to mere aggravated assault on Italian. Viva Europa.

The view from the pool

Not at my hotel, but at the Nazarine Palace at the Alhambra. I'm always looking for an angle that doesn't include any tourists, and also one that's not in everybody else's vacation photos. I suppose that if you search Flickr, you might find the same shot, but this one is mine. No camera lenses were harmed in the making of this photo.

Winter sun's shadows
Move in mysterious ways
Calligraphy melts

Salon de The

This "tea bar" has some
desserts, but very few teas.
Tall hookahs for all!

Night in Nice

My ideas about the Cote d'Azur were formed by repeated viewings of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. When you're on a business trip in the middle of winter, Beaumont Sur Mer it's not. Nice seems to be in the process of getting ready for carnivale but otherwise relatively sleepy. They even turned off the ferris wheel by 10pm.

Cannes in Winter

Tiny frozen dogs
skitter to keep up with their
old crones in fur coats.

Quiet morning in Tangier

The trouble with vacation is that if you do it right, you need another vacation immediately after. Instead, I came back to a big pile of fresh, steaming work leading up to a three-day all-day meeting. Today I finally had a peaceful morning at home.