Where The Hell Is Phil?

Ice Art: A Critique

2009-03-08T22:34:00.005-06:00

I believe I've mentioned before how bad the art on ice bags can be. I see a lot of different brands of ice (albeit early in the morning, when I'm already in a bad mood and not very charitable), and I thought I'd show you a few of the things I've had to withstand. In my own ridiculous style, here follows a review of several of the most common ice companies' bag art:

Generic Ice Bag: Simple, but no imagination. Then again, no news is good news, and this is much better than some of the crap designs that follow. I give it a C, just as much for not being bad as not being good.

Macondo Ice: I'm not sure what a Macondo is, but I kinda like the name. I'm on board already, and the retro "Price Is Right" theme only adds to the presentaion. However, this ice is clearly not crystal clear, as the bag posits. Thumbs up for style, thumbs down for truth in advertising. Again, a C.

Snowman Ice: This is one of the ones I hate. Here's what is ostensibly a snowman, but he could just as easily be made of dough the way his legjoints work. He's standing on one leg on a block of wood amidst clawmarks from an unseen predator. Illogical, ill-executed, and just plain bad. Its only merit is that it's labeled 'ice,' and it does in fact contain ice. D.

Jack Frost Ice: Ugh. OK, how long will it take for designers to realize that powder blue and light red are colors that, when paired, should exist only in the 60s? And let's take a look at Jack himself. Wearing underwear on the outside is neither smart nor fashionable. His left arm seems to have been twisted into a stump, yet we can still see his left hand. And he's doing the HEEEyyyy point, which makes him a douchebag. And what's with his eyes? Instead of pupils, he seems to have the lost Sankara stones from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. This one gives me nightmares. F.

Subservient Eskimo Ice: This one, again, gives me the willies. Here's a random shape that someone thought would look like an igloo if that someone just drew a few lines on it and made a door at the bottom. This guy's not going to fit in there, even if there is a party picnic going on. And let's take a closer look at this dude's face. Those are sharp teeth he's got. This may be the elusive predator that took a shot at the wood-block doughman. Plus, again with the sparkling. Sparkling water doesn't sparkle, and neither does ice. But I am down with monsters where you least expect them. C.

IceWorks Ice: Now we're getting somewhere. We got art deco going on here. Little problem with the proportions with the buildings in the front (or are those ice towers?), but look at the fade work at the top. This is good work. However:

...at the bottom, the address of the factory is listed. Research Blvd., eh? If you have to build a factory on Research Blvd. to figure out the recipe for ice, you're trying too hard. Excellent execution, but lousy IQ. B.

Mireles Ice: OK, this just looks like the front of an 8th grade cheerleader's math notebook. Mireless is Spanish for 'look at this,' and I can't tell if that's ironic or not. Either way, I don't wanna look at it. D.

Home City Ice: We have some good art principles going on here, good use of negative and positive space, even if we are back to red and blue again. Home City... makes you think of where you live.. .a comforting setting in which to use ice. However, this is one of those that goes overboard with the description. Ice is frozen water. And here we have "Cube Size Ice Nuggets." Not sure if I want to have all that trouble in my glass. And something about not using the superlative of the word 'healthy' makes the slogan sound a little off. "Healthier than homemade! It's not the healthiest, but it's better that what you can do with your antiquated home ice-making equipment." Great art, but the wordage is a little on the snarky side. B.

Glace Ice: Now this one is just a pleasure to review. This is a first in all my years of ice looking-at: a three-color design. Blue, white, and off white, just to give the illusion of depth. This is a bear that actually looks like a bear. Also, the bag is translucent blue, which gives an extra touch of class. And, in a postmodern move:

...the bag is simply labeled 'ice,' in both English and French. Must be Canadian. A little pretentious, but the art backs it up. A.

North Hollywood Ice: They say when your enemy goes high-tech, you go low-tech. This approach also works here. You'd think that Hollywood would crank out a glitzy product, but what we have is a simple carriage. But it evokes the Old West days, where folk waited for the ice wagon to roll in and cool things off. You do most of the work in your mind here, but the end result is the same...an image of an oasis of cool in an unforgiving world of hot. No one's driving the carriage though, and that's a little spooky. B+.

Arctic Glacier Ice: Here again is good work. Three color art, albeit with red and blue again, but the darker blue doesn't clash with the red as much. A trap skillfully avoided. 'Premium ice' is a little overblown of a claim, but while we're on that, let's look at the back:

...where an even overblowner claim is made: inside-out frozen ice! Just how does that work? And when it's fully frozen, can anyone but an ice scientist tell the difference? And again they're bagging on us for not being able to use the power of temperature in our own homes, while giving us the 'crystal clear' line again, and check out 'hard-frozen.' Isn't 'soft-frozen' called melted? However, they self-deprecate enough with the next line that I'm willing to believe that they're not all jerks in the ad department. Great art, complicated and dubious science, and a joke. B.

Spanish Ice: This here says ice in Spanish. Don't believe me? Well just look at the penguin! Direct, and bilingual. Well, single-lingual, because it's not in English too. But the penguin dressed up. B.

Reddy Ice: They fell into the red/blue trap here, but the clean design and translucent work dig them back out. They should perhaps learn to spell. but the repetition of the Ds draws your eye in toward the snowflake. Design principles at work. B-.

Crazy Cubes: Now here's crappy. What colors are these? Yup. And as patriotic as that may be, whay exactly is crazy about ice? Or a cube, for that matter? A square six-sided object is about the most stable and predictable thing I can imagine. Plus, with all this GHB scare going on, do you really want crazy in your drink? I don't. Oh, but look where it's manufactured:

...yup, New Orleans. That explains it. And you gotta love the translation of "Cubitos Locos." Typical N.O. production...broken all up but with a lot of heart, and that's what gets this one by. C+.

Glace Ice (again): I don't know if this is the same company with a new design, but it's pretty good too. Stark blue with fade work almost makes you feel the cold, right? And look, a warning to keep frozen...why do all ice companies think we're complete idiots? B+.

All Season Ice: Thought I'd end on a good note. Now this is brilliant. Though one color, the clean lines and use of space knocks out the competition. The sun/snowflake icon is something you'd look at in a magazine or in a gallery, and here it is on a bag of ice. I'd get a tattoo of that. Wonderful. And no bigger-than-science claims about how technically proficient this frozen water is...just a reminder that you can use it anytime. It'll be there for you, whatever the season. Stellar. A+.

A Name To Live Up To

2009-03-01T22:34:00.001-07:00

Today I was the aft FA, and sitting next to me was a family with a small baby. "Cute," I remarked, watching his head bobble around. "What's his name?"
The dad grinned and flipped over his bib. Embroidered there was 'COBRA.'
That's gonna be one bad-ass kid. That is, until he meets someone named Mongoose in middle school.

Flight 3407, Buffalo

2009-02-17T15:55:00.003-07:00

Capt. Marvin Renslow, pilot.
Rebecca Shaw, first officer.
Matilda Quintero, flight attendant.
Donna Prisco, flight attendant.
Capt. Joseph Zuffoletto, off-duty crew member.

SPACE JUNK, TWO O'CLOCK!

2009-02-15T10:32:00.001-07:00

A satellite fell out of orbit this week, and on the weather report that HAL in the cockpit prints out, there was actually an advisory for space debris. Now THAT is my kind of weather.

Mad Libbing In Houston

2009-02-08T10:21:00.003-07:00

This last trip I flew with a British FA who we'll call Shona, because that's her name. She does model work when she's not flying, and so armed with the accent and the looks, she's the kind of girl that's going to get into whatever there is in front of her because she can. The second night we landed in Houston, and we all met downstairs to try to figure out what we were going to do for the evening. Shona pointed to a group of folk at the other end of the hotel lobby and said, "Oi, they luke loik an interesting lot, they do." She vanished for a moment, then came back exactly one moment later.
"We're goin wi' them," she said with a grin.
Turns out they were a group of Norwegian mud scientists, and we were going with them to do sushi. I'm going to say that again. Norwegian mud scientists. To be fair, they weren't all from Norwegia... one was a Scot, and some of them were good ol' Southern boys, including one from my home state. But 'sushi in Houston with Norwegian mud scientists' sounds more completely random, and that's what I'm sticking with.
Over dinner, the obvious question was asked: what's a mud scientist? Well, now that I know, I'll tell you...a mud scientist helps oil drillers drill holes in mud. Why do you need a scientist for that when everyone plays with mud from earliest days? Well, because when you drill a hole, you've got a big column of mud around the drill, and knowing the exact cubic amount and consistency of said mud is the difference between breaking the very expensive drill in too-hard mud and losing it altogether in too-soft mud. There's a lot to it, they explained, and they get paid infinitely more to know all of it than anyone would imagine. I giggled out loud that a company would pay someone, anyone to use a slide rule and an abacus to play in mud, and the Scottish guy said, "Great, innit? Now shut it and drink." And having been so ordered, I did.
They've all graduated by now, and are out on the force, mud-calculating. Go to it, guys... MUD AWAY!

Sundance

2009-01-20T10:20:00.002-07:00

A while ago, I met a girl in L.A. who was actually friends with another friend I met there. We call her Gallo, because that's her name. But it's her last name, and I'm not sure why we call her that. Anyway, she ended up dating a talented documentary maker, and he works at Sundance every year.
"Wanna come hang out?" Gallo says.
"Why yes," I say. "Yes I do."
Park City is where Sundance happens, and that's about half an hour east of SLC, through a great big canyon. It's a small ski town, and I'm sure you've seen pictures of the celebrities that swamp the place during the festival. We stayed in one of the local's houses. Turns out they do just like the locals in New Orleans do during Mardi Gras, which is to get the hell out and rent their houses out to yahoos that want to come have no space for parking and nowhere to go to the bathroom. And pretty much all you do for a week straight during Sundance is go see movies.
Well, you do if you got tickets seventeen years in advance. I hadn't. But I knew Gallo, and she knew Todd the documentarist, and so we got in to see Tyson, which turned out to be a surprisingly human view of Mike the boxer. Yeah, everyone knows he's the guy who bit that other guy's ear off, but when you hear him tell you that he was getting head-butted (which is an illegal tactic), you suddenly see it in the slo-mo replays, and you wonder how you could have missed it. Of course, cannibalism is probably not the best way to respond, but really, who can say what they would do in any given situation, blah blah blah. And the film reminds you that under all that goofy hoopla, he really was one of the most amazing ass-beaters of all time.
He looks funny in a tux. Yup, he showed up. Tuxedos are meant for people who can't lift Winnebagos. He was soft spoken and friendly, and answered the audience's questions in an amusingly frank way. And when someone asked him if he was meeting Paris Hilton later, he didn't kill them like I would have.
After that, I saw Elijah Wood on the street. He looked taller that I thought he would.
While we were walking back to the house, a car full of locals that couldn't get out idled up. I guess they were brain-dead, because they had spraypainted the car with the word LOCALS and were wearing no shirts in the 30 degree weather. And they all hung out the windows and continually screamed, "I WISH I COULD WALK AROUND WEARING A PEA COAT!" I'm pretty sure they were brain-dead, but I have to admit that just about everyone who came to Sundance (including me) was wearing a pea coat.
Sundance is now done.

EXTRA! EXTRA! ONE SINGLE HERO PILOT AVERTS ENTIRE DISASTER ON THE HUDSON!

2009-01-16T15:24:00.005-07:00

I know the pilot whose name you've already heard (along with First Officer Jeffrey Skiles, whose name you haven't) did a fantastic job getting this plane down in one piece and with no fatalities, but I also wanna say out loud that the three reasons that you have all these front page pictures of people standing on the wings of a floating plane are Doreen Welsh, Donna Dent, and Sheila Dail, the flight attendants on duty. The reason I want to say this is that no one else in the media did.

Sibling On The Slopes

2009-01-12T15:42:00.006-07:00

So my parents had taken my sister and me out to the slopes in Washington sometime in the mid-eighties... that's when we both learned to ski. I enjoy telling that story to Utahns, because when they hear I learned to ski in a building, they make funny faces. I've only gotten back into the snow since I've been here, and Renee hadn't skiied since. So I think we both suspected that, when she arrived here shortly after Christmas, it was going to be less of a vacation and more a slaughter. "As long as there's beer," she said.
She doesn't wake up until after one PM either, so we were both asleep as we drove up to Snowbird the next day. I explained as best I could about traversing and weight shift, about edges and cambers, but all she did was stare out the car window at the snow.
"That's snow," she says.
"I know," I say.
"No," she says. "But there's snow." When we actually arrived at the mountain, she kinda went into a little mini-trance. I had to put the beer in her hand.

We got her strapped into the board, and she practiced a little on the flat part at the bottom of the hill. Then we jumped on the lift, and when we got to the top, she fell right off. But what you have to know about Renee is that she trains horses, and so regularly falls down from a much greater height and with more velocity, and so this and every time she fell down, she came up laughing. First hurdle was getting into a standing position. For some reason, she just couldn't stand up without her feet slipping out from under her. We tried all kinds of stuff, including using me as monkey bars, but nothing worked. She finally arrived at this little maneuver:

And once she knew how to get up, she didn't stop. It was like watching me two years ago. I saw her get confused about the same things that confused me, grin at the same things I grinned at, and she got ice face about as much as I did. And by the end of the day, she was shredding pretty good.

And then there was more beer.

Planes Get Ice Face Too

2009-01-05T16:09:00.003-07:00

Christmas In The Valley

2008-12-23T15:40:00.004-07:00

Everyone I talked to recently is going home for Christmas. I pride myself on being backwards in most things, and so I made my family come to me.
Parents fly free for airline employees, and so my mother has been out to see me a few times now. Getting my father on a plane is a more difficult task, as he's been a pilot longer than I've been alive. Planes are a day at the office for him. But he ponied up and flew for four hours, and I met them both at the SLC airport.
First thing they wanted to do was go see where I snowboard. I think they wanted to see what would eventually become my final resting place. We stood at the bottom of the bunny slope and I pointed at this turn and that turn, saying how much fun it was. It took me a few moments to notice that they'd both turned a little green.
"We're buying you a helmet," my mom says.

I had to get 'em in the snow somehow, and snowboarding wasn't gonna be it. So we went tubing. My mother and I had done that last year, and my father went along with it, though if he was eager, I couldn't tell. This time a blizzard kicked up, and it stung all the way down for the two of us that weren't wearing the one pair of goggles I brought along. Dad had a good time, though he seemed to be looking for the beer cooler sometimes, because that's how we Southerners go tubing. And we had hot chocolate inside a yurt, which is a bizarre experience for three Louisianians.

And all too soon, they had to go back home. So merry Christmas from me and my family, and especially to my sister, who stayed home to take care of the horses so mom and dad could come visit. Your visit is next, and it contains a snowboard...

If You're Drinking, Captain, I'm Deplaning Now

2008-12-20T15:17:00.006-07:00

This couldn't have gone any better if I had done it on purpose.
It happened during our beverage service. I was the aft FA, which means that the cart was between me and the galley. It was a morning flight, which means we soon ran out of coffee. The forward FA, a great gal, headed to the galley to refill the coffee, and while she was there, a passenger asked me for a margarita. We make those things with mixers, none of which I happened to have in the cart, so I called the forward over the intercom and said, "Hey, can you bring me a margarita?"
She paused. "Really?"
Some folk in Utah just haven't come around to early morning drinking yet. "Really," I said. "Thanks!"
What you have to know about the intercom is that anyone can call anyone from anywhere. I waited for a few minutes, watching her doodle around in the galley, and eventually she got on the intercom and called the flight deck. She cocked her head, looked confused, and then headed back to the cart with the coffee.
"The captain just asked me to bring him a margarita, and I think he was serious!" she said.
Maybe I'm a jerk, but I never told her what really happened.

They're From The Wrong Side Of The Plane

2008-12-18T15:16:00.004-07:00

One of the things we say that no one listens to is where the life vests are. And in addition to not listening to that, passengers also don't listen to where the infant life vests are. On our particular aircraft, they're located in the overhead bins above seats C and D. That's how I say it. "The infant life vests are located in the overhead bins above seats C and D." Just like that. Some people say it differently, though, as I found out last week: this FA I was working with explained over the intercom that "the infant life vests are located in the overhead bins on the CD side of the plane." Oddly enough, for the whole four-day trip, no one was insulted.

Overhead Bin Games

2008-12-14T15:16:00.003-07:00

When you get on a plane, you put your stuff in an overhead bin. And I, not so very different from you, do the same thing. And because of this, two things always happen. First one is that there's always some Samaritous gentleperson who, on their way off the plane, mentions that someone left their bag, which is actually a good thing, but after 19 of those people, you just start nodding sleepily. Second one is that when I'm fishing my OK! Magazine out of my bag on a long leg, the person whose bag is on top of mine always stares at me as if I'm stealing something out of his bag.

Two Things I Haven't Shown You Yet

2008-12-07T15:43:00.004-07:00

I know I've mentioned that the Denver Airport is made out of a big tent, but I never got a picture of the inside of it until just now. Here, observe:

Also, I've talked about the de-icing trucks (which are actually emblazoned DEICE, but I spell it differently so no one asks me what a deese is), but I never got a picture of one of those until just now. Here one is:

Thanksgiving On The Bayou

2008-11-26T15:39:00.001-07:00

Actually got to see my family for turkey day this time. Flew in, got hugs, overate, and flew back out again. Apologies to those of you I didn't get to visit with. Happy Thanksgiving!

Crossing The Line

2008-11-15T17:40:00.002-07:00

I don't wanna say I've been at this job a while, but these days I can tell if I'm over Canada by just looking at the ground out the galley service door window. DAYOM I'm good.

My Octagenarian Serenade

2008-11-10T17:39:00.002-07:00

By and large, the elderly folk I get on the plane are OK. The average ones just sit there and I never notice them. A lot of them represent the best parts of their times, as in gentlemen passing drinks to ladies first and such. A few of them are epithet-shouting basket cases, and perversely, I usually end up appreciating them as much as dreading them. But every now and then, I get one that's a full bag of lit firecrackers, and Josephine was such a one.
Josephine was from New Jersey and she was headed back there, as she told me from seat 1B, right there in the front. I forget where she'd just been, but she'd have been able to tell you, and she had all kind of interesting stories about what I should do if I ever got to Atlantic City. The singing part of this story comes in when I realized I things would never line up like this for me ever again, and so I launched into the first verse of "Come, Josephine, In My Flying Machine." She had never heard of the song, but she was the kind that could get down with a moron in a polyester suit mangling century-old music. She wanted me to finish it, but that was all I knew.
I think this turned into a story about how clever I am, but I also think it doesn't count unless you know the whole damn song.

Hope We Have Insurance

2008-11-06T17:39:00.003-07:00

I think this Saskatchewan trip is cursed. Today as we were leaving, we had to wait two hours for a new aircraft to get ferried in because the ground crew ran into our original plane with a de-icing truck. Superficial damage, but nobody flies a plane that's already been in a wreck. The best part was that the plane had just landed and the passengers were still on it. Listening to the stories they were telling, I began to wish I'd been there too. How many people can say they were on a plane that got hit by a truck?

Give ME The Finger, Will You?

2008-11-05T17:38:00.002-07:00

I didn't see this happen, but it was too horrible of a story not to repeat. What you have to know is that that jumpseat of ours (which is the not-quite-as-comfortable-as-your-seat seat that FAs have to sit in) slides into the wall when stowed, and to deploy it, you have to slide it out and lock it into a slot on the other side of the flight deck doorway (or lavatory doorway, if you're in the back). The slot design is circa industrial revolution, and usually the seat is so gunked up that you have to apply serious force to it to get it to slide out. Having been given all this information, you can probably predict where this is going, but the horrible story part is this: on this last trip I heard over the flight deck radio that a plane had to return to the gate because a flight attendant sliced her finger off with the jumpseat. Ick. This job gets more and more mundanely dangerous every day.

Action Movie Weekend

2008-11-02T15:09:00.004-07:00

My first emergency landing. A hostage situation. This is one two-day trip that shouldn't have happened.
Day one. On our way into Bismarck, N.D., the captain called me and told me that the flaps weren't working.

ME: The flaps aren't working?
CAPTAIN: Nope.
ME: The flaps?
CAPTAIN: Yup.
ME: Not working?
CAPTAIN: You got it.
ME: Don't we kinda need those?
CAPTAIN: Usually.
ME: So what are we going to do now that they're not working?
CAPTAIN: Uh, land.
ME: Is it going to hurt?
CAPTAIN: No. I mean, probably not. It's just going to happen a lot faster than you ever thought possible.

Back in FA school, they trained us in a procedure called 'preparing the cabin,' wherein we announce to the passengers that we're all going to die, and then make them assume silly positions so that the coroners all laugh. I asked the captain if he wanted me to do this, and he said no. Just keep quiet, he said. Then, as soon as he hung up and I began to be quiet, he announced to the passengers everything he had just told me. I may never understand why he did that. Then we all buckled in and waited for the landing.
Fortunately, what's called a zero flap landing is one of the more common emergency landings, because flaps often don't work. Pilots train to do this in the simulator all the time, and not only did we all survive this landing, it was actually a hell of a lot of fun. Imagine a regular landing. Now press FF on that landing, and you get a zero flap landing. I asked later, and the captain said that instead of the customary one-hundred-fifty miles an hour, we touched down at about two hundred. I'm sure there were passengers that wished that landing had been normal. As for me, I never wanted to have another normal landing again.
Day two. When returning to the US from Saskatchewan, you have to go through customs in Denver, which means there's a small part of the Denver airport that is technically still Canada. And when we attempted to step onto US soil there, the immigration police did not let us.

US: Wait, what?
THEM: You can't come into our country.
US: OK. Why?
THEM: An earlier flight from your airline didn't provide the proper declaration documents.
US: We are providing the proper declaration documents.
THEM: Yes, but they didn't.
US: Uh, what happened to them?
THEM: We let them into the country.
US: You... you let them in because they didn't have their documents.
THEM: Yes.
US: And you're... not letting us in... because we have our documents.
THEM: We're not letting you in because you don't have their documents.
US: Why would we have their documents?
THEM: Because we need their documents.
US: Well, why can't you get their documents from them?
THEM: Because we already let them into the country.

The conversation the captain had with the border guards really did sound that stupid. Apparently, they'd been on the phone with our head honchos all day trying to get the documents faxed over from our HQ, and since the honchos never really got all that around to it, the guards held us hostage until they got their documents. They eventually got their documents. We eventually got into the country. What we eventually didn't get was lunch, because we spent our lunch break blindfolded in a tiger cage in the bowels of the Denver airport.
The lesson here is, always fly on a plane with working flaps, and always work for a damn airline that has documents.
The movie comes out next summer. Rutger Hauer plays me. They offered me the role, but I turned it down... I lived it.

Halloween!

2008-10-31T19:17:00.002-06:00

Mine All Mine

2008-10-26T19:56:00.014-06:00

You may remember that, some years ago, I mentioned that there's a copper mine just outside of the city here, and that I made an off-hand promise to visit this mine. I may also have mentioned that the only thing I had heard about this place is that they had trucks there with big wheels. Well, before I went, I did a little research, because I'm from the South and I've been to a monster truck rally, and if big wheels were all this place could offer up, then I wasn't going. Turns out this place is called Bingham Canyon Mine, and it's one of the ten largest man-made holes on the planet. A superlative like that is enough for me; I jumped in the car and headed out.

The internet map said 'drive south.' That's what I did. Eventually things stopped looking urban, and then stopped looking suburban, and then started looking secret military test site. There was very little in the way of directions out on site, so I just kept driving towards the big thing in front of me.

I was confronted by this sign. After an hour's deliberation, I flipped a coin and turned left.

Kept driving. Traveled up hills and through switchbacks. Paid a guard at a guardhouse to get through a big gate. He told me to keep an eye out for the Visitor's Center. I kept driving, and was soon confronted by this sign:

Again, I thought carefully... and when that didn't yield any results, I flipped that same coin, and turned left. Parked in a small lot next to a fence, and when I looked over the fence, I saw I was on a ledge overlooking the mine itself:

Wow that is one big hole in the ground. Certainly looked like one of the biggest ten.

This is the left side of the hole. I flipped a coin to see which side to photograph first.

This is the other side. It was quite amazing to see the whole thing at once.

The inside was buzzing with these little Tonka trucks. Seemed to me that if they wanted to move a lot of dirt, they should be using bigger trucks.
Behind me was the Visitor's Center. It had been on the left the whole time. I stepped inside and checked out a bunch of dioramas reminding me that hardly anything in the world would be possible without metal from this very mine. My TV. My radio. Even airplanes would not be possible without the copper, aluminum, and molybdenum outta this big hole. I'm just going to type that word again, just because it's fun to spell: molybdenum.
Watched a short propaganda film about the mine. It took me through the mining process, from finding trace amounts of copper in grand amounts of dirt to sifting and boiling the metal to cooling it into sheets and refining it. One of the more amazing things that I remember is that even the tallest building made by man wouldn't reach out of the top of the mine. That is one big hole.

On my way out, I noticed several displays I had missed while I was busy being amazed by a big hole. This was one of the first carts used to truck ore out of the mine.

Don't laugh at at its prehistoricism... you could have had to use this.

Also found that big damn wheel Creedence and everyone had been talking about. Again, it had been on the left. So I guess those trucks in the mine weren't all that small after all.
So now I've been to a hundred-and-fifty-year-old two-mile-deep hole in the ground. That's pretty cool any way you look at it. Except maybe if you look out of it. Then you'd have a long walk ahead of you.

I've Heard Of A Dummkopf, But...

2008-10-26T19:15:00.002-06:00

I'm a firm believer in the idea that you should always plan out a sign before you engrave it. At the McDonalds in O'Hare, they do not share my beliefs.

Many Tags

2008-10-23T19:58:00.002-06:00

This pilot here doesn't want his bag mistaken for a non-pink-tagged bag.

Slow Pumpkin At Play

2008-10-20T19:19:00.003-06:00

Usually at pumpkin carving time, I go for either an Ernie or a Bert. You know, a squat and round one or a tall and ovoid one. In both cases, I try to find one that's in pretty good condition. But this year, I saw one that looked like another pumpkin had punched it in the not-face. Well, I just couldn't leave it in that kind of domestic situation, so I swept it up and, when it came to design time, I just let the rumpled contours guide me. And you know what? It came out pretty good, if a little 'special.' So here's to those roughed-up pumpkins neglected in corners of pumpkin patches everywhere... may you all find your outer face.

Jackson Hole

2008-10-18T19:09:00.011-06:00

Jackson Hole, Wyoming, is perhaps the most amusingly-named place that we fly to. That said, it is also tied with Sun Valley, Idaho, for its reputation as having the most needy and posturing residents*. I mean, you know you're going to get some feather-boa Juliet Alpha who wants sparkling water light ice with a twist of lime if you're going to L.A., but Sun Valley? Where is that? Anyone found Sun Valley? Anyone know where it is? And so, it was with a little trepidation that I approached my first overnight in Jackson Hole.

First off, it's beautiful, and you can tell even before you hit the ground. It's clear why people of all annoyance levels would live/vacation/retire here.

The drive from the airport to town wordlessly steals 'Big Sky' status from Montana. And also, you can see Sheep Mountain, which is also known as 'Sleeping Indian.' Here he is. Shhh.

The town itself is rustic and small, wrought from wood and deer antlers. And when I say antlers, I mean antlers. This is where deer go to film deer horror movies. In the center of downtown is a square garden, and at each corner is an arch made of antlers. Lots of antlers.

How are there still deer here?

Along the main drag are shops and restaurants. You can buy turquoise, fur, and silver. You can stop in at a diner and get a burger. Or have a drink at the Million Dollar Cowboy. I think it's great fun to ask passers-by where the Million Dollar Cowboy is, because the sign out front is nearly as big as the bar itself. I think it's fun, but it usually embarrasses the crew. It's summer in this picture, so the mountain at the end of the street is green... but in winter, that's where you ski in Jackson. Snow King resort is what that is, and the hotel in which we stay is right at the foot of it.

The hotel is cowpoke chic, like the rest of town. The view from the balcony is amazing during the day.

And also at night.
So now I see what the big deal is about Jackson Hole. Seems to be a great place for poor, rich, or nouveau riche. I'll probably board there this winter. But if I order anything to drink, it'll be a regular damn Coke, and screw the lime.

*Now if you live here, then no, I'm not making fun of you. But I bet you know the people I am making fun of....

The Maine Thing - Day Two

2008-10-16T19:30:00.061-06:00

TEMPORAL NOTE AND APOLOGY: Now see, here again is how my life works. I just recently had a computer crash of some magnitude, and I backed up all my photos onto a CD. And when I got my computer back online, I went in to grab the pictures of Day Two, and they were gone. Day One is fine. All the pictures I'd already posted are fine. The really really cool ones I was going to post here about this trip, on this particular day... gone. Destroyed. Forever. Or so I thought. Because of my ridiculous OCD tendencies, I had backed them up in several thousand places and then forgotten where all of them were. It has taken me this long to find one. Sorry, and thanks for sticking with me. Prepare for Day Two.

Woke up and jumped immediately back on the road west, headed for the Cog Railway. Again, navigating only with Google Earth running on my laptop in the passenger seat, I managed to make it all the way back to New Hampshire.
Stopped in a town called Conway for two reasons. First was that there were a lot of old shops to peek into. Antiques. Copper weathervanes and such. Had a great time. Second was that the entire interstate system of New England chokes down to one stop sign in Conway, and you pretty much have to stop there.
Noticed some things I hadn't seen on my way through the day before. The stop lights in New England flash at you. In addition to the red light that tells you not to go, there is a white strobe about the luminance of the sun. It does get your attention... and then it permanently blinds you. Not sure that's an effective tactic. Also, the people there have a thing for stone wheels. Every third lawn has a giant stone doughnut poking up out of the grass next to the driveway. Not sure what that's about, but I'm not going to push anyone about their lawn decorations when ours are rusted out cars on blocks. There are Canadian flags all over, which is something I had never thought about before, but it makes sense... Canada is right there. And finally, every two hundred feet, there is a moose crossing.
Passed through all the national park lands again. Zoomed by Silver Cascade, and made mental calculations to see if I could take the Railway trip and make it back to finally climb that waterfall before dark.

Made it to the Cog Railway just before zero hour. The place is a log cabin-type museum/gift shop at the bottom of Mount Washington. The trains are just outside and the railway leads up the mountain.

The first train they ever used there has been retired, and stands as an exhibit next to the tracks. Here is 'Old Peppersass,' in all its awful repainted glory. You know, with a name like Peppersass, you get the feeling it must have been a hoot hanging out with the guys on the railway way back when in the 1850s.

The trains in use now look the same, kinda like old-timey coal engines (because that's really all they are), and are built back-end high, so they stay level as the tracks incline. Ours was the Waumbek. Not a lot of regular folk names for these trains, really.

They each push one train car, and when it was time to go, we all loaded up into ours.

Inside, the cars look as old-timey as the engines; small thin bench seats, sliding windows with brass latches, and wooden plank floors. The engineer in the car gave us a short history of the railway, the engineer in the train fired it up, and we were off.
Well, off I guess in name only. The Cog Railway trains move at an astounding two miles an hour. The trip up, in addition to being no small feat of old-timey engineering, is an hour-and-a-half-long endeavor, during which the train periodically ducks into short dead-ends so that the other trains coming down the mountain can barrel past. Apparently old-timey engineers hadn't researched braking systems all that well. We'll get to that.

I opened the window once, which was a bad idea in two ways. First, it's a coal-fired train, which meant that pungent demon-scented coal smoke came pouring into the car and made me public enemy number one amongst the passengers. Second, it's a coal-fired train, and little bits of laser-hot coal spit from the engine and fell on me. So, stinky and Swiss-cheese burnt, I learned that Mount Washington is best observed from behind a closed window. And through one of those windows, I got to see that all those little bits of coal had piled up along the track during its long life; at certain points, the bits were feet deep.

You're at a fairly steep angle the whole time. The small buildings alongside the tracks were built back-end high as well, and all had signs on them that read THIS BUILDING IS ACTUALLY LEVEL.

The front of the car is amusing. There's a doorway but no door. You can claw your way to the front of the car and breathe the fresh coal air while watching the tracks pass under you. The car engineer is outside on the small deck, kicking her legs off the railing.

There's also a bridge. It was the highest or longest or something in the country. I forget exactly what the superlative was that the engineer used, but she could certainly tell you. What I do know is that I sure didn't want to fall off of that bridge.

The scenery was amazing. The trees I had seen while driving were all mixed together color-wise, but from the mountainside, they appeared to group into great swaths of yellow or red or green. You can see the whole valley behind you, and another to the side of you, and past the other mountains in the distance, you can see more valleys, probably in Vermont and New York.

Further up, into what seems like the clouds, the terrain changes into rolling hills covered in wheaty grass and gray rock. Several cairns of stones stand in the mist, serving as landmarks for hikers. Very ethereal.
Struck up a conversation with a fellow from Newfoundland. Now, before I met this guy, I pronounced it like you do... NEW-found-lund. With the air of the slighted, he explained to me that it's actually pronounced New-fund-LAND, and that if you don't say it that way when you're actually there, the locals won't understand you. Also met two Indian doctors from Boston, and they were towing a tiny brown baby that climbed all over me.

At the top of the mountain, there's a small concrete outpost. There are a few radio towers, a restaurant, and another gift shop. The coolest thing up there is a sign that says you're at the top of Mount Washington, and the elevation. It's the highest place east of the Mississippi, I think I remember them saying. What is definite is that it's 6,288 feet in elevation, and that for the first time in my mostly Southern life, I finally made it to a summit of something. I have proof.

A word about the top of the mountain. One of the selling points of this tour is that you can see four states from the top on a clear day (I didn't know they were tiny states until I started driving through them, but that's still cool). When I drove through the day before, it was clear. The day after, when I was leaving, it was clear. But...

... the day I actually went up, it was so foggy that you could barely damn breathe. I was lucky to see my shoes.

But of course, that made for some really mysterious-looking pictures of the radio towers.

The weather here is supposed to be a big deal. Whoever tacked up this sign should really go hang out in Louisiana during hurricane season.
We loaded up again for the return trip. I had been wondering on the way up how they were going to handle this, but all those thin benches faced forward on your way up. Were we going to face backwards for ninety minutes on the way down? Nope. Those clever train builders built seats that transformed; the back of the seat slid down to become the seat, and now they all faced down the mountain. It was really cool, and you never saw so many confused people as they entered.

The car engineer had work to do on the way down. See that wheel there? That's the brakes. The only brakes there are in the car. She had to work the wheel all the way down so the weight of the car didn't overwhelm the train. She talked a lot on the way up. Not so much on the way down.

The sun came out when we were halfway down. Illumination only made the landscape more beautiful. This picture doesn't convey how big it really is. This trip is really worth the trip. I recommend it.
At the bottom of the mountain, we all disembarkated, and while I was debating whether or not to return to Silver Cascade, I noticed a wooden bridge halfway hidden away across the tracks. Intrigued, I slipped away from the crowd and across the bridge. A sign identified the trail beyond as Jewel Trail, and just a few steps into the woods, I was in the wilderness.

It was so quiet, I had trouble picturing the railway I knew was right behind me. Sat down on a log a few times and just listened to silence. Every now and then a bug chewed on something or a bird flew by.

The trail crested a hill and forked. I heard the sound of water and followed it.

Found another bridge. I have always wondered who builds these things. They're all usually constructed in the same style and out of the same kinds of wood, no matter what region of the US you find them in. I mean, when a road's getting built, you see who's doing it, and it's right there next to another road, but who hauls a bunch of timber way out into the forest and knocks together a bridge over a stream you can easily cross? I love that people do that. Maybe it's not people. Think it's elves? Or maybe really clever turtles? I dunno.

Enough about amphibious carpentry... here's the stream already.

I spent about half an hour there in the trees, marveling at what was here before people were, then I clambered back to the car, Silver Cascade forgotten.

Set Vermont in my sights and hit the gas. Saw the opposite sides of all the mountains I had driven past the day before. The trees were still amazing, just east-facing.

Cruised by a small graveyard built on a hill. It was so interesting that I had to stop and wander through it. Some of the death dates ranged back to the 1870s, and several women were referred to as 'dau't'r' of someone or other on the headstones.

Made it back into Burlington just as dusk fell. Encountered a fresh car accident. Now, I've driven some cars pretty hard, but how exactly do you do this?

Also discovered that in Burlington, they don't know what's to the left.
Drove around the city for a while, making a lot of right turns. The place looked a lot like Portland. George Washington-looking architecture and lots of statues. Finally found my hotel. Did you know that Motel 6 is also Econolodge? I didn't.
The next day I dropped off the rental car and headed back to Salt Lake, three states and one quest down. I may head back next year for the leaves. But I may skip the lobster.

The Maine Thing - Day One

2008-10-15T19:54:00.039-06:00

So you may have noticed that Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine are now not missing from the WTHIB Map over there on the right. If you haven't, then I'll just come out and say it: Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine are now not missing from the WTHIB Map over there on the right. I recently headed north and east for three days (again, L.M. is responsible), and this is half the story of those days.

This was actually supposed to be a four day trip. Day Negative One was scheduled for Austin, where I would attend a Scottish wedding at a castle. Let me say that again... a Scottish wedding, at a castle. That would be the second time in a month that I would get to legitimately wear a kilt. The reason I didn't get to go to this wedding is that a dumb gate agent let the plane to Austin go to Austin with two empty seats on it and me off it, after I had listed for the flight. "Oh, Ah'm so SAWRY!" If I see that lady again, I'm going to throw a building at her.
So, back to Day One. I got up early the next Colombian morning and flew to Denver, and then to Burlington Airport, which is on the western border of Vermont (by the way [and I'm only telling you this because I didn't know], Vermont is the one on the left side... New Hampshire is on the right). I had secured reservations for the two following nights, but this was prom night or something, and my reservations for this night were: the Burlington Airport. After a harrowing little-sleep evening, I jumped in my newly rented PT Cruiser knock-off and blasted east.
The plan was sketchy at best... go east. As I said, this whole trip is my mom's fault. After I told her I had been thinking of going to see the leaves change in New England, she scoured the web and found info on something called the Cog Railway in New Hampshire. It's a coal train that creeps up Mount Washington, and the view from the top was supposed to be spectacular. When I have no idea what to do, I'm pretty bad off, but when I have very little idea what to do, I can usually manage, and so that scant info was all I needed to jaunt off on another quest. Since I wanted to hit all three states while I was out there, I planned to start on one side, drive to the other side, and then drive back; it was a coin toss that sent me to Vermont first instead of Maine.
So I went east. You may remember me talking about my Bad Physics Days, where actions usually governed by physics stack up against me so comically that it's easy to believe whoever's in charge hates me. Well, for every screw there is an equal and opposite re-screw, and where I get karmic remuneration is navigation. I never need directions when I go somewhere I've never been. Every time I jump in a car and just drive in an unfamiliar place, I unerringly beeline straight to my destination. That has to make whoever that is in charge of the B.P.D.s absolutely bonkers. So when I say I went east, that is exactly what I did. The night before, I just got on Google Earth, memorized some interstate numbers and reckoned some driving times, and when I got in the car, I just went.

Immediately I saw why they make such a big deal out of the place. There wasn't much color yet because of the early morning fog, but the fog itself was fantastic. The road cut through a lot of rock formations, which made for great scenery. Lots of crows. Lots of covered bridges and barns. It was like driving around in a Stephen King novel.

Somewhere in there I passed through Montpelier, which is the capital of Vermont. And then, a little over one hour later, I crossed into New Hampshire. That's right... I traversed an entire state in an hour. Coming from where states are five and six hours across, I was not prepared for states you can see across. How weird.

Once I got into N.H., the colors started to appear. It's amazing, worthy of all the talk. Brilliant yellows and oranges right next to vivid greens. I knew the colors would be beautiful, but I just didn't know how much of them there would be. In Louisiana, when they say, "Hey, come outside, look at this cool thing!", it's usually cool, but about five feet long. These trees went on forever. From far away, the mountains looked like big piles of Trix. Not the newfangled kind, the tri-color classic from the 80s. There's a cluster of national park areas along the middle stretch of 302 in N.H., and I stopped along the way to admire that rock face up there. And when I turned around, there was a waterfall. Where I'm from, you have to drive for hours and then hike for days to get to a waterfall.

Silver Cascade is about two hundred feet off the centerline of 302.

There it is, a waterfall, right on the side of the road. There are dead animals on the side of the road where I come from.

This is looking back from it, toward the road. It's right there. The cool thing was that, even though it was so close, all you had to do was get in far enough and it was like you were miles away from anything. I had met the allure of New England.
I met a cute girl from Boston there, and she took this picture of me:

If you're that cute girl, yeah, I'm talking about you.

This innocuous-looking picture is actually a steeply-angled view up the fall. I thought seriously about climbing up there, but decided that I would like to break my skull on the second day of a two day trip, and not the first.

Managed to get back into the car and continued. Found the Cog Railway at the base of Mount Washington. I wasn't able to get a ticket for it for this particular day, so I did a fly-by instead, in order to find it better the next day when I did have a ticket. You could see the trains themselves from some distance off, chugging and smoking up the mountain. Passed through a town called Bethlehem. No, another one. The speed limit there is 35 mph. All I'm saying here is that, if you ever drive through there, you should remember that. Moments after my warning, and about an hour after I got into New Hampshire (including a stop at Dairy Queen), I set wheel in Maine. Having driven through Texas, I decided I could really get into this small state business. Maine is where the lakes started to happen.

This here appears to be a ski resort, but during hibernation.
Eventually I caromed by this tree. It was so breathtaking that I actually stopped on the side of the road and took this picture:

That is one orange tree. Made me look over my shoulder for Samara, and if you get that, you're as cool as me.
I had secured lodging in Portland, and when I got to the hotel, I was ready for a nap. A night in an airport and three states in three hours... wouldn't you be?

Woke up in time to hunt lighthouses at sunset. A goofy cartoon map of Portland I stole from the front desk led me a to a dock where was a lighthouse. Actually, it was more like a lightstub. This thing was maybe thirty feet tall, and had a name like 'the Pug' or something, I don't exactly remember. It stood guard at the end of a pier made of huge rocks. Amazingly, I made it all the way out (to touch a lighthouse with the same hand I touched a pyramid with) and all the way back in the dark, with not a single broken ankle. It was dark, like I said, and that's why I got no pictures of it. But it was real, I swear. One day I'll have to go back and hunt down one of those hundred-foot jobs that watch for Nor'easters and plesiosaurs, but for now, the Pug will have to suffice.
There was a restaurant right there are the foot of the Pug (or rather, the Pug was right there at the foot of the restaurant), and I decided that was the place I would finish off another long-standing quest of mine, which was to eat a lobster, in Maine, within sight of the Atlantic Ocean. And thirty minutes later, right there on the water, I tore into one.

It kind of sucked. No seriously, I don't know if they cooked it wrong, or if I've been spoiled by Louisiana crawfish, but this thing tasted like butter when I dipped it in butter, and that begs the question: what would it have tasted like not dipped in butter? Sadly, I was not brave enough to find out, and Nietzsche is not here to help us. So, quest ended, and knowledge gained: if a hot chick ever buys me lobster on the first date and expects me to put out, she will be disappointed.
After that, I toured downtown Portland. A really annoying thing about street signs in New England is that they tell you what street you're crossing, but not what street you're on. This way, you can drive for miles knowing exactly where you are, but having no damn idea where the hell you are. But with my karmic GPS in full swing, all I had to do was not think about where I was going, and I always ended up there.

This is an important guy (or girl... whoever it was was Roman and in the dark) holding down a pedestal next to the moon. Since the name of the city is emblazoned right there on the pedestal, I assume this is the very spot Portland was invented. And I guess it caught on, because they made another one in Oregon.

Here's a great and official-looking building. No idea what it is. But that tower at the top sure is ornamental.
On the advice of the front desk clerk whom I stole the cartoon map from, I grabbed dessert at Becky's Diner. Lobster is available there (as it is at every corner drugstore... it is Maine), and it was about a hundred and seventy bucks cheaper than where I ordered mine. So I drowned my sorrows in one of the best ice cream brownie sundaes I've had. I recommend this place.
Then it was back to the hotel to charge up for the next day's worth of driving, train-riding, and mischief.

Coming Attractions

2008-10-14T19:44:00.025-06:00

And while I was in Colorado Springs, I tried out the video function on my new phone by taking some random footage of Josh's kid Tristan. You should really never leave alone with random footage of anything, because things like this tend to happen:

Colorado Springs, And Some Kid

2008-10-13T19:08:00.010-06:00

You may remember that I have a friend named Josh. What you may not remember is that he once went to the Air Force Academy, and you may not remember this because I never said it. But he did go, and by go I mean attended rather than just visited for a weekend. That means he has horrible memories of the place. And through a combination of fate, circumstance, a military wife, and dramatic irony, he's recently moved back to Colorado Springs (where the Academy is), and so when I went to visit him a few weeks ago, of course I made him take me there and relive his four torturous years in blue wool.
We packed up his new kid Tristan and headed out for the campus. I don't have a kid, so I am raising one vicariously through Josh. I continually learn new things about babies, and the thing I learned this time is that babies are heavy. Josh explained that he'd been carrying the little monster since before he knew how to smile, and so was accustomed to the weight. I, on the other hand, had not seen Tristan since he learned to smile, and so after a while, I was sorry I volunteered to lug him around. Another thing I learned is that two guys walking around sharing a baby appear gay.

Josh showed me a big plaza where he suffered the indignities of being a freshman, but what I really came to see was this... the chapel building. I'd seen pictures of this place everywhere, and it was on the list of Places To See Before I Check Out. He explained to me that even though he's not religious, he'd go to church on Sundays because they killed you if you didn't. Apparently it's also your main base in one of the strategy-type video games Josh used to play, and when he was feeling sour about the A.F., he'd let the enemy blow it up.

The architecture lends itself to some amazing photo opportunities.

Out front, it's a chapel like any other, with big wooden doors and signs that say what the guy up front is going to say about the man up top this coming weekend. We finally got inside after some low comedy with Tristan's ATV-like stroller.

I thought the outside was amazing. The stained glass as seen from the inside is ridiculously beautiful, especially since you really can't see where it is. It's set into very small squares in the stone, and somehow magnifies the effects of light and color without being slapped across the entire side of the church. Here Josh, who hardly ever appreciates anything, appreciates that effect.

After the tour, we hit McDonalds, where Tristan demonstrated his latest talent, which is reaching out and picking up food by himself.

He's not necessarily too swift with it after that, but it's a start.

He was never at all sure what to think of me, though.

Irony

2008-10-08T19:06:00.001-06:00

Does it make me a bad person to think it's funny that a guy banged his head getting onto the plane the other day and he worked for a company that, if his shirt was to be believed, was called 'Ducke?'

Phil, World Traveler

2008-10-02T19:11:00.002-06:00

Forgot to show you guys this. It's a claim sticker that they put on my luggage from the bus trip back from Dahab. You can't say you've been all around the world if you don't have a cool sticker on your suitcase that's in another language. And now I do, and so I can.

San Jose Taiko - Part 1

2008-09-29T18:12:00.003-06:00

Maybe a week or so ago, I helmed a flight from SLC to Houston, and as I looked over the passenger manifest, I noticed a bunch of people going to BTR, which stands for Baton Rouge. I went back to investigate, and there they were, four girls with ridiculously-defined arms and shirts that read 'San Jose Taiko.' I figured it was a pretty good gamble that they were the San Jose Taiko and not just fans, and so I asked if they were going to BTR for a show. They said they were, and then they halfway flipped out when I told them what theater they would be playing at (what they didn't know is that I used to work at the Manship Theatre in downtown Baton Rouge, a fantastic new venue and also the only place in Baton Rouge where you could get away with a taiko show). The story of where I grew up ensued, and moved on to the story of their cross-country taiko tour, and ended with me being sorry I was going to miss their show in Baton Rouge and promising to catch a show someday, either on tour or at their home base in San Jose.
My dad is a big taiko fan, and my mother is a fan of music in general, and so I told them about they show, and they went. The next day they called to tell me that the show was great and that they got to meet the four drummers that met me. And my ex-boss from the Manship emailed to thank me for putting them in such a good mood for the show (though I think that between meeting a guy like me for half an hour and having the dedication to devote your life to pounding drums that are bigger than you for hours at a time, it's probably that second one that was responsible for the good mood).
I can recommend seeing an SJT show not even having seen one based solely on the 'bring it on' attitudes of Patti Jo, Meg, Britt, and Yurika. But soon I will be able to recommend a show because I have seen one. Stay tuned for Part 2...

Con Air

2008-09-26T20:55:00.001-06:00

Most of the passengers that get on our planes are regular free-roaming civilians. But occasionally, there will be an individual who, for whatever reason, owes a debt to society and is escorted by a few law enforcement officers. I've had a few prisoners on the plane so far, but I forgot I hadn't told you about it. A guy will get on board who looks like any other guy, followed by a guy with a jacket over his clasped hands, and then another looks-like-any-other-guy guy. The thing about the two regular guys is that they're police, and the thing about the middle guy is that his hands are not so really clasped as cuffed. They usually sit in the back of the plane, and things always go smoothly. The prisoner never wants anything to drink, I think maybe because the escorts told him he didn't, but they're always smiley and polite. That confuses me because they're going from one jail to another jail. The escorts are pretty amusing; a lot of the time they look like accountants, but sometimes you'd rather take your chances with the prisoner than with them. Of note is that, in the FA manual, it says that prisoners may not be cuffed to any part of the airplane, I guess so that if we land in the ocean (you know, that one between Wichita and Sacramento) and the plane fills up with water, the prisoner can get out too. But I just don't think I'm going to be telling a pair of police escorts their business, you know what I mean?
So far I haven't had a 'living weapon' prisoner in leg cuffs yet, but that will be cool when I do.

L.M. Goes To Seattle

2008-09-25T19:57:00.030-06:00

What you may not know about L.M. is that she grew up in Seattle. What you also may not know is that, in the airline industry, parents fly for free. My parents always told me that if it weren't for me and my sister, they'd be traveling all over the world... and now that I've got this job, the one chance to halfway pay them back for raising a hellion like me, they just sit on the couch and don't wanna go anywhere. Well, this time I cajoled L.M. into going to Seattle for the weekend, and so this is that story.
She flew from New Orleans, and I flew from Salt Lake, and we met at the airport. After we rented a car and checked into a hotel, our first stop was the Space Needle, one of my old favorites.

The elevator takes you up to the top of this thing in maybe forty seconds... that's fast for having to go 600 feet. This is me, being amazed by that fact. Or maybe the view.

That's an observation deck behind me there, and we observed.

That's downtown Seattle. And then there was this goofy building below. We had no idea what it was. But we'll find out by the end of this entry.

There's also a restaurant at the top, but it was booked solid, so we didn't eat there. But after several tries, I got this picture to turn out.

I also managed to catch some pretty cool sunrays off of whatever lake this is next to the Needle. Mom told me, but I forgot.

Back on terra firma, we unfolded a map and plotted a course for lunch. I must have taken a phone call here, because Mom snapped this shot of me. I don't stand on the ground when I don't have to, and it makes people nervous. I don't care... if the floor is ever suddenly electrified, I'll survive, and they won't.

Also found out that that funny building at the base of the Needle is the Experience Music Project/Science Fiction Museum, a place that we were already planning to go. So that was two things I knew where were in Seattle. I really wasn't any help with that map thing.

It's not a day in Seattle if you don't see an umbrella. We walked seven blocks and passed 85 Starbuckses. And eventually we ended up at Pioneer Square, demarcated by this totem pole.

The clever settlers that founded the city named it in honor of Chief Seattle so he would allow all these new white people to hang around, and so there's a lot of Native American decor about. The big deal about Pioneer Square is that it's where the Seattle Underground tour starts.
Thing is, we were early, so it wasn't starting yet. To kill some time, we wandered into a place called Utilikilts. These guys have brought the kilt into modern times. There are denim kilts for the average joe, canvas ones with tool loops for construction workers, leather ones for motorcycle riders, and so on. As I walked in, the nearest employee (who was, of course, wearing a kilt) shouted,"Welcome to Utilikilts... we sell freedom!" I wasn't sure if this was a place I wanted to be in with my mother. But it was too late... a guy in a dress had already grabbed me and was showing me the various unbifurcated wares. "Every kilt we sell holds 8 beers," this guy says. "Which one you wanna try on?" You know I was curious. You know that. So I point at the nearest one, and the guy snaps it open, faces me against the wall, and says, "Drop 'em." That's right. No dressing room. He wanted me to doff my pants in semi-full view of all the patrons. Of course I did it. Never pass up a chance to be pantsless in a room with 30 other people. It's part of the flight attendant creed.

This is me in a kilt. And you know what? The thing was damn comfortable. "Rock your hips side to side like this!" the guy says. "Know what that is? Air conditioning!" Mom was trying unsuccessfully to not giggle. I have a history of wearing strange clothes, and I probably would have bought one of these things right then and there save for one thing: the guy on the business card is a six foot two, 200 pound, dreadlocked monster, and I am a middling height and weight flight attendant with a 'men's contemporary' haircut. I could certainly pull it off, but it would never look normal on me. So, with regret, I threw it back on the rack.
I always post the web addresses of these crazy places I go over there on the right side of the blog, and most of them are pretty bland depictions of said places, but I encourage you to at least check out the FAQ section of Utilikilts. It'll give you a perfect idea of what the people that run the place are like.
By the way, you know what I have on under the kilt? Socks.
After I re-pantsed, we checked out the bookstore next door. Saw this sign. Apparently, everyone's heard of New Orleans.

Finally it was time for the tour to start. It began with a half-hour history lesson about the underground, peppered with digs at Tacoma, Seattle's rival city. The short version is that early town of Seattle was built on mud that had been piled on top of more mud, and so when the town became a city, City Hall decided to build up the downtown area ten feet or so to create a stable base so Seattle wouldn't slide into the ocean. Business owners said hell no, because their first floors would be useless then. City Hall, realizing it only owned the streets, responded by raising only the streets ten feet, building new sidewalks over empty air, and saying, "There. Now your first floor is the basement." This did three things... it kept Seattle on land, ticked off a lot of business owners, and gave birth to the Seattle Underground, which is the maze of tunnels under the sidewalks.
If you know the right doors, and have the right keys, you just walk right down in.

The place was half museum and half catacomb.

Pictures on the walls showed how the city looked in the old days, and there were several places where you could see what you were looking at underground in an above-ground photograph.

The other half of the place was time capsule/trash can of the ages. Since the underground began, people have been using it to get rid of things they didn't want above ground. Lots of old wood. Old doors. Broken and unidentifiable machinery. Several toilets, or in the parlance of the day, crappers. Did you know that the name 'crapper' does not refer to how you interact with this device? It's the last name of the man most often (and incorrectly) cited as the inventor of the toilet, one Thomas Crapper. That right there is one of two things... a really rotten way to go down in history, or a really amazing coincidence.

Here's a teller's cage from an old bank where miners collected wages. You can tell because, well, there's a sign that says 'teller's cage.'

That's where a teller used to go.

At several junctions, there are skylights made out of purple glass. The tour guide mentioned that the glass was originally colorless, but over the years it's become purple due to some complicated chemical process that I'm sure he went into but I wasn't paying attention.

You can see the purple more clearly above ground. And yes I stood on it. I just took my pants off in front of a bunch of strangers... I'm not scared.

The next day we headed back to the Experience Music Project.

It's a really great building. Inside, it's a museum of all things musical. There was a full-size stage where bands could play, and a restaurant. A piece of one of Jimmy Hendrix's guitars is in the museum. L.M. spent a lot of time in the hall devoted to Beatles knock-off bands. What you have to know about my mother is that she knows everything about music from maybe 1952 till sometime in the mid-eighties. Everything. I win every argument about 'who sang that song' by excusing myself under the pretense of going to the john and texting her for the answer. When I was growing up, there was a rivalry between my mother and some other lady across town for radio station Z98's daily trivia question, and Mom always reminded us that the other lady had a book. Mom was never wrong.

There was also a tornado made of guitars. It was a sculpture two stories high, and many of the guitars actually played themselves with the aid of clever mechanical armatures.
You may remember up there when we first discovered what the name of this place was, that there were three more words in the name: Experience Music Project/Science Fiction Museum. I think you know what half I spent more time in.
It was all here. Deckard's air car from Blade Runner. Original Starfleet uniforms from Star Trek. Forbidden Planet's Robby and Lost In Space's Robot having an intellectual conversation. Spacemen. Monsters. Aliens. Mom knew what most of them were, but for different reasons; I had grown up with these things, and she had watched me grow up watching these things over and over again. If my mother is slightly insane, it's my fault.
Some standouts:

R2 always cheers me up, no matter what. You know you're not going to lose if he's around.

And speaking of losing, you know you will if this thing is around. The T-800 from The Terminator is still the baddest-ass piece of hardware ever invented, now or in the year 2029. Let's all remember Stan Winston, who created this guy, the full-size dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, and a host of other monsters... he died earlier this year.
In what is only a half-non-sequitur, I watched The Terminator in Spanish a few days after I got back from this trip. I recommend doing this, even if you don't speak Spanish. Hilarious. Words on the screen in English are read out loud in Spanish, and so at the main title, the narrator says, "EL EXTERMINADOR!" Go watch this right now.
Last on the agenda was Ivar's Salmon House. This is a place that I think is on that same lake that the Space Needle is next to, and it's home to the best salmon I've ever eaten ever. No trip to Seattle is really complete without going here.
Seattle is a really great place, despite the constant drizzle and all the Starbucks. Go if you have a chance. And bring your mom.

Auto Affirmation

2008-09-23T21:01:00.002-06:00

You may know this by now because I've bagged on gate agents so much, but the process is: the gate agent comes out to the plane if it's more than twenty minutes before departure, and sees if we're ready to board by soliciting a thumbs-up. This is a two person process... one person cannot do it alone. Which is why I thought it was both funny and sad that yesterday a gate agent stumbled onto the plane while I was in the back and, obviously in a state of confusion and disarray, gave himself a thumbs-up and almost sent passengers out. WAOW. Some people really need to calm down.

The Museum Of Jurassic Technology

2008-09-21T21:01:00.027-06:00

So I made it back L.A., and it was time for Lucy to take me to another wacky place.
She really outdid herself this time.

The Museum of Jurassic Technology may in fact be the weirdest place I've ever been to. Ever. And that includes Manhattan. First off, it's free, because California has a legal deal to where all museums are funded by the government. Having worked in a museum, I think that's neat to see a place where art is not scraping by. Once you get in the door, it's a dark and claustrophobic maze. The whole place is the size of a shotgun house on the outside, but on the inside... I think I walked several thousand miles. And there are exhibits, but I'd be hard pressed to find a group that they all belong to.

This one's from an intial section that was nothing but stage dioramas. There's an eagle attacking no actors in this one. Also, for reasons that shall pay off later, it's here that you become aware of a strange barking sound from further along in the museum.

Next up was the cat's cradle room. Here they had (as pictured) several pairs of eerily lit wax hands displaying complicated string patterns. There were holograms of what I think were Inuit folk demonstrating more stringwork (because I think that's where that game comes from), and recordings of Native American-sounding language filtering in though hidden speakers.

More holograms in the next room. This video is in two parts; the first shows a cloud made of cotton that, when you look through these strange binoculars made of glass cubes, is home to a few gods that I think were East Indian. There were several of these exhibits, each one more random than the next. The next part is from a circular rack of bells that's mounted on the ceiling right behind the cloud gods. The chime sound you hear in both parts is the bells. They were Russian, I think, and quite wonderful to listen to.

Next, quite randomly, was a tea room. Lucy (shown here, smaller than actual size) and I had tea and played with the resident pair of greyhounds. Also, there was a door that opened onto the second floor roof, which was odd because I didn't remember going up any stairs.
The barking was louder here, and it wasn't the greyhounds.

This is the pope standing in the eye of a needle. This room included several needles with incredibly detailed figures carved and mounted in them. Goofy was my favorite, but that picture ended up blurry, so you're stuck with the vicar of Christ on Earth.

This next exhibit is my favorite, and so bizarre that I'm getting nervous about the prospect of even trying to describe it. Here, as you can see, is a stuffed fox's head mounted in a plastic case. He's not barking, but the barking is coming from here.

More glass binocular cubes are outside the case, and when you look through them...

... you see a tiny hologram of a paunchy man seated inside the fox's imagination.

This man is calmly seated and happily barking. This decapitated fox is constantly imagining a tiny barking man. I have no idea what any of this means. But I stared at it for about ten minutes, until Lucy dragged me away.

You know those funny Magic Eye pictures that you can never see? Well, the precursor to those things were called stereoscopic photographs. They were originally developed in WWII to assist bombers by adding a third dimension to a 2-D map. You had to use two polarized lenses to see the effect, and that's what those big things on my head are. This hall was full of pictures of different flowers that became 3-D when you had your aristocracy glasses on.

Yes this is mice on toast. One of my favorite rooms was the Vulgar Cures room. Here were old wives' tales made Rx flesh. In the old days, toast mice were a cure for sickness. Caution had to be taken to ensure the patient ate the whole thing, you know... lest they stay sick. Other cures were similarly hilarious/creepy. "Remove all clothing pins when attending a funeral, or the spirit of the dead person will be trapped in the pin and haunt you." "Place the bill of a duck or goose in the mouth of children suffering throat maladies. The cold breath of the duck will be inhaled and the complaint will disappear." One cure I don't remember the sickness for was to have the oldest female in the house sprinkle urine from a toothbrush onto family members to wake them up in the morning. Man am I glad I live in a new century.

Head Bonk Recoilers

2008-09-18T16:21:00.002-06:00

In this job, I get to see a lot of people bash their heads into things (and I'm not including pilots pulling the 'Guy Smiley' when they divert us). The cabin clearance is not quite six feet, and so right off the bat there I've got people cracking their skulls on the way in the door. That sounds like it really hurts, too... the door frame is made of very solid metal, and it goes POK! when folk find it with their noggins. It's mostly people in cowboy hats, which secretly makes me giggle because I was in high school when Garth Brooks ushered in the 'young country' movement with that damn song (and thus surrounded by suburban cowboy-hat wearing teens who probably could not even identify a cow) and to this day I scream a little when I see one of those hats or hear that song. I have to be sedated to go to Jackson Hole or Calgary. My apologies if you're at home on the range, and to recoup some karma, I'll warn you to doff the lid when you get in a small plane.
And on the non-lethal side, we've got the overhead bins. They're plastic, and so won't kill you if you bang into them, but they do make a terrific SPOCK! when someone makes contact. This has, however, led me to notice a phenomenon I like to call 'head bonk recoiling.' Like I said, the plane is very small, and so if you do hit your head, you're not going very fast because there's very little room to accelerate. But these people recoil like they're been shot with a gun that shoots planet-sized bullets, and some of them almost fall down not from the bonk but from the recoil:

VICTIM: Let's see, let me stand up here before the seat belt sign is--
HEAD: Tap.
VICTIM: OH DEAR LORD I AM SLAIN!
VICTIM slams onto the floor, skips three rows like a rock off a clear lake and somersaults into the lavatory.

I never, and I repeat, never, grow tired of watching this. Never. Maybe that makes me a bad person, and if it does, I'll just go to hell and amuse some lava attendants by banging my head on some stalactites.*

*Notice the correct terminology. Stalagmites are the ones that poke up (stalactites hold on tight). This is from the day I was awake in fourth grade.

A Very Short Wingspan

2008-09-16T21:24:00.000-06:00

Bet you can't figure out how this happened:

Houston Has A Problem

2008-09-14T21:22:00.002-06:00

If you're going to Houston, be careful. The airport has been invaded by giant space-faring cows.
Bring space hay.

Stupid Wheel Cart

2008-09-07T14:24:00.002-06:00

Today some lady got on the plane with way too much to carry, and handed me this thing to tag and stow in the cargo hold. It looked like a wheelie suitcase-carrier rack thing, and I tried to do what I usually do with tagged luggage, which is stick it the corner of the galley until all the people are done boarding. But this damn thing... it was all wheels. You couldn't lean it up against the wall, because it would slide down and roll away. You couldn't put it wheels-up against the wall, because it would still slide down and roll away. If I balanced it perfectly so the wheels didn't roll, they became a fulcrum and the whole thing would flap down over itself... and then roll away. I tried fifty different ways to just put this damn thing on the floor. It really became man versus nature there for a while. People put their stuff down and started to watch. Eventually I settled for just holding it there in one hand, sulking at my own ineptitude, while the rest of the passengers boarded. And the worst part? I have no idea what this thing was. How could something that cannot be controlled or contained actually help you in any way to carry anything else? I think maybe this lady knew that it was useless, because she was carrying all her stuff and this thing. Perhaps someone gave it to her a long time ago, and she just hasn't been able to figure out a way to put it in a trash can.
When I'm having a bad day, I sometimes envision the ramper trying to give it back to her.

Only The Best With Our Fish

2008-09-04T20:34:00.002-06:00

There are frequently stellar wits on the plane that, during the service, preemptively ask for filet mignon or some such. My stock answer is, "Oh, we just have Chilean sea bass today." Well, the other day, some guy preempted, I answered stock, and he laughed... and then after I served him a drink and asked him what he wanted for snack, he asked, "You say something about chili?" And you know what? I'm pretty sure he was serious.

Ha Ha

2008-08-27T13:47:00.003-06:00

I'm a double bad guy... I took this with the camera on my cellphone. See you in double jail.

Another Celebrity

2008-08-24T13:25:00.002-06:00

I don't follow that much wrestling. While I do have immense respect for their athletic abilities (whether the whole thing is real or not), I'm that rare breed of flight attendant more interested in sweaty semi-clad girls. But some wrestlers are so big (in both the physical and metaphysical sense) that even a non-fan is familiar with them.
This guy gets on the plane, and he's seat 1A in first class, right there in front of me. He's a big dude... I mean he barely fits in the cabin. He doesn't say much, but I notice that he's got a big skull ring on. That's cool. I support death jewelry. But on my second pass through the cabin, I notice that he's got a skull tattoo on one oil drum-sized calf. That's a little overkill, I think. Entertainer? Must be. And during the service, a guy in the third row excitedly asks me if the big dude up front is Stone Cold.

"Stone Cold" Steve Austin is a very nice fellow. That is, if you're not one of the hundred thousand people he's destroyed in the ring. I didn't let on that I knew who he was. He asked me about the job, and he mentioned that he'd traveled a lot. Said he preferred Texas. And after he deplaned, I found his cell phone in his seat. Great, I thought. He's gonna think I stole his phone. He's been civil all this time, and now he's going to drop an Atomic Elbow on me. But he thanked me without causing my death, and by name even. I don't know if he's still wrestling, but if he is, I'd watch him. Stone Cold is good people. You should meet him.

The Griffith Observatory

2008-08-21T20:43:00.015-06:00

My friend Lucy, who moved to L.A. a while back, has taken it as her solemn duty to bring me to a new and weird place every time I visit. So this time, the Griffith Observatory.

This place, oddly enough, is in Griffith Park, which is named after a Welshman named Griffith J. Griffith, who donated the land to Los Angeles in 1896 (tour guides mention that you can always tell where the park is at night because it's the only place in L.A. without lights.) He subsequently became enamored with stars, and commissioned an observatory in 1912, though it wasn't actually finished until after he died. Also of note is that this is where Arnold arrived from the future in The Terminator. That's all the encouragement I needed to go.
You have to drive up long mountain roads to get there, and parking was abysmal on the day we went, so we parked way far down and hiked up. We should have just time traveled.

It's done up in great thirties style, and is built into the side of a mountain, so that from the balcony that surrounds it...

... you can see the whole of L.A. The view is incredible, and we hadn't even gotten inside yet.

The Hollywood sign is right there on one of the adjacent mountains. Just look under the antenna.

Inside is a bunch of exhibits devoted to sky-watching. There is a pretty cool room that's really one big pinhole camera, and projects the sky onto a plate on the floor based on available light. You could move the 'pinhole' around and get different views of the city and sky. There was also, for no reason that I could discern, a huge pendulum. I think it was supposed to demonstrate that the Earth spins. I guess it's for people who don't want to look out the window.

This is a better look at the ceiling it hangs from. Pretty cool art, I thought.

There's also a planetarium, which they built after Griffith's death to fulfill his aim to include a theater where people could see films about the night sky. They hadn't actually invented planetariums until after he was dead, but upon it's invention, they stuck one right in. There was a huge crowd the day we went, and so we didn't get to see it.
And of course, there's a telescope, which is inside this rampart here.

Looks like this on the inside.

They had it pointed at Jupiter that day, I think. I think that's what I saw. It was a faint white dot. Didn't look a whole lot like the Jupiter in the astronomy books. But then, I support a planet's right to craft a whole new look for itself. You go, planet.
This place is great. Go if you're in L.A. ever. I think I actually enjoyed the outside more than the inside. But if you're there and you see Arnold, run.

Oxygenally Challenged

2008-08-20T21:20:00.001-06:00

Anyone think this is funny?

Directionally Challenged

2008-08-19T21:18:00.001-06:00

Anyone else think this is funny?

Thirty Seven And Three-Quarters Things I've Learned This Year

2008-08-15T22:43:00.003-06:00

Chrysanthemums are easier to kill than other things.
Pumpkins melt.
Ballet is cool when there are severed body parts in it.
Boston is a cool place even when you're not good enough to be in the Blue Man Group.
Some people drive vans on rocks, and I don't know why.
The Red Menace is taking over the airline industry, one letter at a time.
Some people can talk and vomit at the same time.
Squirrels are black in Canada.
Canadians do not use American money.
California features big trees.
If you have a beard, you don’t have to shave.
Mattresses are better when you don’t have to inflate them.
There’s snack food in Wichita, but not much else.
The SLC cemetery got some old dead people.
Time does not exist in a plane. But people still want to know what time it is.
People think you’re praying when you're in the aft brace position.
FA uniforms got out of hand in the sixties.
A blazer makes you look cooler than you actually are.
With the WTHYA map, I know where you are.
Gate agents still can’t count.
If you're in a hotel on Christmas, you may not remember where it happened.
There are no jetway drivers, only trainees.
Overpressurization is yet another way the main cabin door can kill you.
The flu still exists, but popsicles are gone gone gone.
Red beans make good dinner but crappy candy.
The main cabin door will drop crap in your eyes and make you blind.
Many parents on the plane think that their babies are in charge.
Bad jetway drivers can drive you insane. But bad tug drivers can crack your skull.
Some taxi drivers would rather stay in their taxi than get paid.
Rampers meow at each other and it’s funny.
Vancouver is fun to bike in, but I look stupid in a helmet.
Lost is the best TV show ever.
The Alamo is a lot smaller in real life.
Driving into a wall of snow is embarrassing.
Egypt is hot, sandy, cheap, and amazing.
Calgary stampede: ok. Oreo beignets: priceless.
Diving is fun and scary.
To get a million dollars, all you have to do is

Now... ON TO NEXT YEAR!

Two Years

2008-08-15T13:24:00.003-06:00

Well, today makes two years that I've been attending flight. I was gonna slap together a retrospective with lots of old clips from previous seasons set to 'Dust In The Wind,' but seeing as how it took me three months to slog through one week in Egypt, I'm just gonna let that stand as the end-of-year bash. Just let it be known that my office is still a galley and that I'm still enjoying it. Haven't gotten all fifty states yet, but at least I left the continent (and somehow found my way back). And of course, see the next post for the requisite list of things I've learned.

That's Why They Call It The Desert, Sweetheart

2008-08-12T13:42:00.002-06:00

In the summer, the Great Salt Lake evaporates. This is Antelope Island, or what is Antelope Island in the winter. Right now it's Antelope Peak. When there's lake there, only the dark part shows. Wow evaporation.

It should be mentioned that the not-dark part is the part that stinks. Holy CRAP I'm never going there in the summer.

Flight To The Center Of The Earth

2008-08-06T20:35:00.002-06:00

Today the pilots mentioned that we might have to divert a flight because of ash from the Aleutian volcanoes. I'd just like to take a moment to exclaim how awesome it is to work in a job where VOLCANOES are an occupational hazard. Thank you.

Why I'm Jealous Of Southwest

2008-08-02T20:37:00.001-06:00

OK. I haven't ever mentioned who I work for, so that if my chief ever finds this blog, she won't fire me. But I will tell you that I don't work for Southwest, so that I can then tell you that I'm jealous of them. Why, you ask? It's not the polo shirts and khaki shorts. I would look perfectly horrible in that getup, as I suspect most people would. Nope, I'm jealous that they get to say any damn thing they want. Things like, "There are fifty ways to leave your lover, but only four ways off my aircraft." Or one of my other favorites, on landing: "Whew." At my airline, we're held to more professional-sounding (read: stuffy) standards.
But the other day I jumped ship on a Southwest plane, and heard something I really really wish I could say. The FA was beginning the service, and asked everyone to please have their drink selection ready when she got to them. "We are all out of 'what do you have,'" she said. Damn I wish I could say that.

Summer In California

2008-07-28T13:48:00.001-06:00

Jay Leno Is Real, I Can Prove It

2008-07-27T13:16:00.011-06:00

Burbank is a cool enough place already. There's a great strip with plenty of good food places, as if you needed anything other than NYPD Pizza. But Burbank is also home to all the major TV studios, and if you call ahead to the hotel you're staying at, you can get tickets to things, like the Jay Leno show.

Whenever you watch The Price Is Right, you always see that you can write in for tickets for free at the end of the show, right before Bob would tell you about the spaying and the neutering. Well, I was always suspicious of that. Free tickets to anything, much less a cool show where you can get A NEW CAR... mmm-hmmm. There's a catch. Well, yes, there is a catch. See, the guys at the hotel go out and stand in line outside the studios at ten in the AM so they can give you free tickets when you check in. So you tip them like ten bucks to make it worth it for them to have done that. And depending on how early you ask for these tickets, there's regular tickets and standby tickets, and that's just like the airlines; if you're standby, maybe you get in, maybe you don't.

So I found myself standing in line out front of NBC Studios with a standby ticket at four PM, right before the show goes live at five.

Couldn't quite figure out how a free show gets stood in line for twice, or how a show that's live at five goes on everywhere else at ten. Anyway, the studio filled up, and it didn't look good for us standbys until one of the runners grabbed me and someone else and said, "We got no more seats."
"Aw," we said.
"But we can put you in the sound booth if you want."
"YAY!" we said, and so we got to watch the show from where it happened.
Seeing Jay's desk in real life is weird. It doesn't look real from any other angle but the one you see on TV. There's a guy out front whooping up the crowd before the show, getting people onstage to do whatever they think they can do well, and it's usually not all that good. And the stage manager counts down, Jay (who is pacing and actually looking quite nervous) gets ready, the lights come up, and show happens. The booth where we sat is right in front of the band, and so we got a good view of them playing. The sound engineer was a gray-ponytailed guy who was very nice but told us not to touch anything, especially any of his thousand bobble-heads placed strategically throughout the booth.
Kevin Costner was up first. He talked about a new movie of his called Swing Vote, and told a story about how, during JFK, he got to swim at the White House and Oliver Stone didn't even get to go inside. A comedian named D.L. Hughley was after him. Ever notice how comedians are impossibly funny on talk shows? Like every damn thing they say is funny? Well, here's a thing I didn't know, and I didn't notice this until the segment was almost over: off to one side of the stage was a guy with cue cards, and after D.L. was through saying one funny thing, the cue card guy would hold up a sign that read ASK ABOUT KIDS, and Jay would say, "So hey, I heard your kids are growing up these days," and D.L. would go off on some dumb crap his kids had done. I mean, I'm not taking anything away from comedians, because you have to be funny to get on the Jay Leno show, but that sort of explains why it's rare for there to be an embarrassed silence on a show like this.
Then they evacuated us out of the studio, and corralled us in a place out back with a bigger stage. A smart person would have taken a picture of the stage. But you have me to deal with, and I took one of the mountains it was facing.

I had no idea what was happening (because I don't listen to things people say... they told us who was next seventeen times) until damn Morris Day and the Time took the stage. That's right. Jungle Love. OH-EE-OH-EE-OH. It's funny how you can be not really a fan of something and then when they put you in front of a stage where that thing is happening, you become a fan. These guys are very large black gentlemen, and their suits are as pimp as they wanna be, and they played two mash-ups of their greatest hits, and it was fantastic. I had no idea I knew the words.
They stuck a few pretty people from the audience into a Pontiac on a raised spinning platform, and then whenever Jay would remind us that he was being brought to you by Pontiac, the pretty people would wave and smile glinting smiles. The crowd-whooping guy also returned to toss us little plastic footballs that read THE TONIGHT SHOW WITH JAY LENO and re-whoop us.
Then when the show was over, they ushered us out of the back of the stage, which was onto the front of the street, and we all just stood there, dizzy and smiling, not believing that we'd just seen the Jay Leno show. Or Morris Day and the Time.
Kevin Costner.... I'd believe that.

Fun With Counting

2008-07-20T12:49:00.001-06:00

You can't just take off with a boatload of passengers. If the captain, at any time, calls back and asks you how many people on board and you say, "Some," you get killed. Enter the PIN pad. PIN stands for Passenger Index Number, and it's where you write down how many passengers are in each zone on the aircraft. A zone is a certain number of rows; for example, zone one is rows one through three on most of the birds we fly. It only matters to the pilots how many are in each zone, because they plug that into their high-falutin' computer machine up front. All we in the back keep track of is how many skulls in the cabin.
The whole reason I'm telling you this is so you'll now know what FAs are doing when they walk through the cabin looking at you and then writing things down on a notepad (NO we're not taking drink orders, although there's always some wit who shouts, "I'll take a gin and tonic!" and ruins your count). And the whole reason I told you what I just told you is so that I can tell you this: today as I was moving through the cabin, counting and writing, I kept getting funny looks. And after the count was all done and I was putting the pad away, I noticed that some other FA had written SHUT UP I'M COUNTING on the back of it in big letters. Just goes to show you that sometimes you can be a juliet alpha and not even know it.

Modern Law Enforcement Equipment

2008-07-17T12:46:00.001-06:00

Here in Oklahoma City, the OCPD use only the most leading edge criminal-catching vehicles. Observe.

The Calgary Stampede

2008-07-12T13:19:00.004-06:00

So I'd always heard of this thing. But what, really, is a Calgary Stampede? Well, I had no idea before I'd been there, but Calgary is a cowboy town, as evidenced by by the people in cowboy hats and fringed leather jackets that greet you at the airport. And this time, the Stampede was in full swing, so I cowboyed up and went there.
One hitch. Summer. Summer weather the day before. Summer weather the day after. That day, hail.
In July? Seriously?
I mean cold. That's the other chief export of Calgary... misery in weather form. Once we were inside the big gates to the place, we spent most of the time running from the cold. You can't run from normal cold, but you can run from Calgary cold. You can see pockets of it, skulking around with tattoos and switchblades, freezing the slow and elderly. I still have a scar.
Inside, it's like a small town. There's food courts, markets, amusement parks. Stopped into several stores and tried on cowboy hats and fringed leather jackets. The Saddledome is a cleverly-named stadium that actually resembles a Paul Bunyan-sized saddle. Rodeos happen in there.
Problem was, it was too damn cold to do anything outside, and to do anything inside, you'd had to have bought tickets years ago. The place was lousy with country music stars, as you might expect. So we stayed outside and drank to escape the pain.
The whole experience was worth it for one thing, and it involves beignets. Being that, with Aviatrix's help, my reader base has expanded way beyond Louisiana, I'll explain that a beignet is a Cajun doughnut that's basically a small deep-fried pillow that you put powdered sugar on. If any of you not from Louisiana have heard of a place called Café Du Monde when talking about New Orleans, then yeah, that's where they make those, and of course I'm a fan. And at the Stampede, when I saw a booth selling beignets, a place outside of Louisiana (albeit in a country where Cajuns originally came from) I almost got one. I say almost, because right below BEIGNETS on the sign was OREO BEIGNETS. In anticipatory tears of joy, I asked the lady at the counter, and she said yup, there's an Oreo in 'em.
Had I died? Was this heaven?
The answer was yes. I measure food goodness in a) calories, b) preservatives, and c) how many I can eat before I throw up. An Oreo beignet is ridiculous in the first two categories, and as for the third, I could barely finish one. So there I was, being pummeled in the head with rain and ice, frozen solid except for my blood, which was by that point more than fifty percent alcohol, and reeling from a French confection-induced sugar high. YEAH go to the Calgary Stampede. I endorse it.
Now if I could just remember it...

Safe And Secure

2008-07-10T12:43:00.002-06:00

Well, I'm back home, and back on the job, and I really thought it would be weird to be back in the saddle again, but it really isn't. But I am pleased to say that the Security Threat Level is still holding at orange. I feel safe. Do you?

A Little Egyptian Weight

2008-07-09T13:01:00.006-06:00

Here's some of that Egyptian money. The red bills are, as you can read, one pound notes, and at this point in history, five of them equal a U.S. dollar. The green one is fifty piastres, two of which make a pound. Like a fifty-cent piece, only a bill. Weird. The two-tone coins are one pound coins, and the other three are various piastre denominations.

There. Now you have all the inside intel needed to stage a hostile financial takeover of Egypt. I had standing orders from my friend Michele (who I found the first KFC with way back when) to send her some of this money as soon as I got back... I think she may have started that takeover already. Move fast.

Day 9 Of 7 - Return Of The Phil

2008-07-08T15:37:00.008-06:00

Woke up to the sound of my phone alarm in a dark room with no idea where I was. In that way, it was just like the previous eight days. I stumbled (and since Jonathan and crew live in a loft that's poorly-lit even when there is electricity, I mean stumbled) down the Aztec pyramid-steep stairs and took a cold shower in the dark. In that way, it was just like the previous eight days. I'm telling you, if you can't afford to go to Egypt, hit N.Y. It's the same thing. Struck out on foot to find the Jefferson Street station, which the night before had been a right and then a left.

Half an hour later, I was not at Jefferson Street station. Nor was I, I think, even in New York anymore. And since I was supposed to be getting on a plane at seven that morning, this was a problem. Enter the new GPS-capable phone I had gotten maybe a week and a half before, to replace the phone I had destroyed in anger. When I was looking for new phones, I saw that this particular model could do GPS, and almost passed it by, thinking, "Aw, come on... when am I ever going to need this?" Well, boy was I glad I splurged this morning. As I was walking the unfamiliar streets, following my own progress via an overhead map on a thin electronic device, it occurred to me that maybe it took twenty years, but the future the 80s TV shows had promised us had finally arrived.
If you've read the blog this far, you already know how my life works. I don't even need to tell you that I made it to the airport, but was exactly two minutes late for the SLC flight that would have had plenty of open seats.
So, JFK airport, and for twelve hours. Four trips to Wendy's, three almost-made-its onto flights that turned out full, and several hours of phone calls to people I hadn't caught up with in a while. And then at seven that PM, I landed a flight home.
Four hours later, I walked in the door to my apartment, dropped my luggage, and took a real live and hour long shower. Glorious.
Egypt, my first real foreign country, and my first trip off the continent... done.

Day 8 Of 7 - Out Of Africa

2008-07-07T15:35:00.009-06:00

No nap. No pomp and circumstance. Right off the bus and time to go. It was time to leave Egypt for the first time in my life.
We grabbed a cab, and it drove us through Talat Harb Square (surprise) back to the apartment. Lebowski was moving out and leaving the country about two weeks after I was, and so we both ransacked the apartment looking for something to bring home to prove we were there. I stole some coins and a copper off-brand Zippo with a semi-nude Egyptian goddess on it. I say semi because she may have been completely nude, but was only visible from the waist up. Semi-present, possibly nude Egyptian goddess. If you go back to the entry where I describe the place, you'll see a small square painting on the wall of a guy with big eyes... I wish I'd gotten that. But it's still there. Oh well... like Maude says, I'll always know where it is.
Grabbed some baid for breakfast, and palmed the Coke bottle with the Arabic script on it. Yeah, I know everyone has one of those, but I actually went there to get mine. Cabbed it to the airport, and Lebowski saw me to the terminal, where we both exacted promises from each other to not be strangers for 13 years again. It's at this point that I have to thank Lebowski publicly for being a cool guy. Not only was he nifty enough to be in Cairo, he put me up for a week, and I know people who wouldn't do that after not having seen me for like a month. I wouldn't say I have friends in high places, but I sure do have some high friends in places. Wait... that didn't come out right.
Well, actually, maybe it did.
Story time. When I, as an airline employee, travel, I call ahead and put myself on the list, so that when I get there, they let me through security because I'm on the list. Failing that, I show them my ID card. Now that I've been through this story, I can authoritatively state that this is the way it works in America, and by implication imply that it works entirely differently in another country. I get to the checkpoint, and tell them I'm on the list. The Egyptian security guy says no, I'm not on the list. I show him my ID card. What is that, he asks me. And there I am, with my one flight that day leaving in an hour, stuck outside of security with my baggage now inside security. I'm not going to explain how I did what I did, because a) you might try it, and b) I'm not even sure how I did it, but I got through security. I will say though that there was a moment where I had a really clear vision of an Egyptian prison cell, made all the more accurate a vision by my accomodations of the last three days. But they bought it, and I got in. That's not a ding on Egyptian security, mind you... I'm just that good. The ding is that they took my Coke bottle and my nail clippers, but left me my aerosol bug spray can and my semi-present goddess lighter.

Got on the plane, and twenty minutes later, I took that nap I should have taken on the bus where that moron was baying and shoe-banging. And ten hours later I was in New York.
Actually, it was ten hours and another two hours... the two hours being the delay getting out of Cairo that cost me my ride to SLC by about a minute and a half. Luckily, I have more high friends in places, these particular friends being college buddies from Louisiana who moved to N.Y., and so I took the subway to their place. Now I've been to New York before, and have even been on the subway, but never by myself, and I got lost several times. I don't remember if you remember the hoopla a few months back about the Grand Theft Auto game that was just released, but it's based on a really detailed fictional New York called Liberty city, and it's so detailed that once I started to navigate like I was playing the game, I started getting places. Ended up at the Jefferson Street station in Brooklyn, which is where the crew lives. Jonathan met me downstairs, apologizing. "Sorry, man, our place is a wreck. We just lost power and there's no air conditioning." As we laughed about the old days inside, I noted it was a lot like Cairo.
Jonathan is part of a N.Y.-based comedy group called The Happy Workers, which is funny as all hell. He told me that he'd kill me in my sleep if I didn't mention that here (except for the hell part, because he's religious). They're currently working on Season Two, which means they've disbanded and all moved on to new projects. The project he's moved on to is an N.Y.-based variety show called Jefferson Street. Now, I'm gonna run the warning flag up right now; THW is uniformly dark, but Jefferson Street is rated IVAAGO for Intermittently Vile As All Get Out. Most of it is for general audiences, but there are a few sequences almost too biological to watch. You have been warned... now go check it out. And stay tuned to find out if I make it back home tomorrow.

Day 7 Of 7 - Wasting Away Again

2008-07-06T15:34:00.006-06:00

Like I said, the plan was to spend all day doing nothing on the beach, and as soon as I woke up, I put that plan into action. The one definite thing on the schedule was to stop by Sinai Divers and fill out the final paperwork for our dive cards. We ate breakfast first (lots of orange juice and cats) and then headed in. Your real dive card is something that you send in for by mail, and that takes a while, so you get a temporary dive card on the day of your dive (or the one after, apparently). It tells any PADI outfit what level diver you are, and to what depth you can dive. Bob helped us fill out our dive books as well. That's a small pamphlet that you write down your adventures in. Things like how long each dive was, how deep you went, where it happened... all the things I had forgotten already, even though it was the two days before. There's even a place for listing the fish you saw. Lebowski kept coming up with all kinds of fish I had not seen, and I theorized that I had been too busy trying to keep water out of my lungs to observe aquatic fauna in a clinical manner. That makes me eager to go diving again so I can see some fishes. Then Bob handed over our dive cards, and we were again officially divers.
The drinking began. I remember falling asleep in one of those conversation pit things, drifting between the smell of apple shisha and the sounds of the surf.
Later we discovered a bar with a name so foul I cannot bring myself to type it. Of course we went in. At the bar were a set of swings instead of bar stools and an Egyptian barkeep named Kal. In a British accent, he engaged us on every subject (Windsurfing: "It's the only thing you should ever do." The war: "A good try, but well, you did make a mess." The pyramids: "We didn't build those things. The ancient Egyptians did. We just found 'em."). He also had some amusing opinions about Dahab. "If you're here for more than one night, you're... you're going to get a shag. If you don't, you're just... you're just dumb." Lebowski and I waited till he turned around to pour something to hang our heads. We talked to Kal for a while, and it became clear that living on a beach just makes you a cool guy. If you're ever in Dahab, go talk to Kal.
The sun went down. We said our goodbyes to Darrin and Freeman and took a cab back to the bus station. I thought that the ride back would be easier because it was a night ride, and thus we'd be able to get some sleep. I was wrong in this assumption. First, before we even got started, a lady threw a fit because of where she was sitting. "I am NOT sitting next to a man!" she screamed. "I am NOT!" I am inclined to side with her, though, because I met a lot of Egyptian men that I would not have wanted to sit next to if I were a gal. And then about an hour into the trip, the driver put on a movie. I use this term loosely. This one made Morgan Ahmed Morgan look like Amadeus. Near as I could tell, this screeching horror was a vehicle for this Egyptian clown to scream loudly and bang things with his shoes for three hours. That's all this idiot did. And I don't mean Jim Carrey scream. I mean bray continuously, with no inflection and very little inhaling. That kind of screaming you do when you're nauseous and just want it to go away. He sounded like a sick cow. And he'd blunder across objects and look like he was going to use them, and then take off his shoes and start spanking them:

MORON (translated from the Egyptian): OH LOOK A PHOOOONE! OH LOOK A PHOOOONE! A PHOOONE! LOOOOOK! I THINK I'LL USE IT! I'LL USE IT! USE IT YESSSS!
MORON reaches for the phone, and then begins to bang it with his shoes instead.
MORON: PHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONE!

It only took minutes of this atrocity to get most of the bus petitioning for relief. "Turn it off! Hey, turn that down! Turn it off!" And either the bus driver didn't speak English, or he did and just liked the movie, or he did and didn't like us, because he continued to motor along happily while we suffered this howling and shoe-banging bastard for most of the trip along the Suez.
Somewhere in there, I nodded off. And when I woke up, I was in Cairo again, with only hours left in Egypt.

Day 6 Of 7 - Once More Onto The Beach, My Friends

2008-07-05T15:33:00.026-06:00

Woke up to the sounds of several loud F words from Lebowski's cell next door.
"We're late, aren't we?" I shouted through the wall.
"Yes!" he shouted back, between F words.
Blasted back down the beach to Sinai Divers, and found out Bob had been there and left. When he re-arrived, he asked us if we knew that meant we pay for all the beers. We sheepishly assented, and so began day two.
More videos. More tests. Then it was back into the gear and back into the water for Confined Water Dive Two. Felt a little more in control this time. I had discovered during the open water phase the day before that your legs are your primary means of propulsion and steering. If you wanna go, you kick repeatedly, and if you want to roll, you kick once, which spins you. Your arms are fairly useless except for grabbing stuff. And unfortunately, when you're kneeling underwater, your legs are no help, so I just resigned myself to spending most of the dive on my face.
More skills. This time we had to swim a good distance (20m maybe) without a breath, to simulate getting to the surface after running out of air. No problem with that. Bob also turned off our air tanks, so that we'd get an idea of what that feels like to run out of air. Feels just like you might imagine. You take a tug of air, and it's a lot harder to take, and then you take another one and nothing happens. Of course he turned the air right back on again, but it was still a little unsettling. And having done that, we worked on helping out a fellow diver whose air has run out. That was sort of the culmination of all the skills, that process. What happens is, a guy swims up to you and makes the 'throat cut' signal for "I'm out of air." You instantly stick your arms up so he can grab your spare regulator, because if you try to get it for him, you'll both bonk heads looking for it until he passes out. Then once he's got it, you lock arms like Roman soldiers, so that you don't get too far away and yank the regulator back out of his mouth. Then you both swim for the surface, and when you get there, he buys the beer. But you don't want to swim too fast to the surface, or you both explode, and in that condition, no one buys the beer.
The amusing part of this dive actually happened before that part. One of the skills is having to take your mask completely off underwater and breathe for 30 seconds, so you'll know what that feels like in case someone accidentally kicks it off your face. Sounds easy. I went first, and I decided that it would be a waste if I went all the way to the Red Sea and didn't open my eyes underwater, regardless of how much it hurt. It actually only stung for a few seconds, and then it was only semi-blinding. However... it seems humans are genetically programmed to not breathe underwater, and thus everyone has triggers that make you freak out when you're submerged. My particular one, as I found out, is having my eyes open. It was difficult to breathe through the regulator with nothing over my nose, but I was able to inhale calmly enough that no water went in it... at first. Soon the 'get out the damn water' reflex took over, though, and I became unable to control my lungs. They kept doing this hitching HUH HUH HUH HUH thing, and no matter what I did, I could not stop them. Only made it fifteen seconds, and then I gave Bob the 'ascending' sign, which, due to my previous behavior, he incorrectly interpreted as 'everything's fine.' So I reinforced the sign with a panicked blast to the surface just to make sure he got the message.
He caught up to me and assured me that that happens to lots of people. Lebowski surfaced just after, and exclaimed that I'm really funny while I'm dying. But I did notice that when it was his turn, he kept his eyes shut, the bastard. And I'll tell you, watching him do that test while I was waiting to do it again was not at all confidence-building. But with my eyes shut, I made it. And it was perversely satisfying to have found a limit, something that hardly ever happens in daily life.
Between dives, Bob gave us the swimming test, where you swim a certain length and also tread water for ten minutes. WOW it had been a while since I'd been in the water. Salt water is not friendly when you accidentally take a snarf of it. But after the test, while Bob went to pick up more gear, Lebowski and I busied ourselves with trying to dive down to this giant concrete thing that was half buried on the sea floor. We both only barely made it, once, and then while using our masks, we saw that there were freedivers just lying there next to it on the bottom, watching us and laughing.
Then it was time for the fourth and final dive, Open Water Two. Things didn't start well. As I was wading out, Bob started making crazy motions over my shoulder, and eventually reached past me and plucked a tiny bedouin kid off my back. He'd been taking hits off my regulator. But again, once we got into the blue, it was fantastic. I really regret not having had an underwater camera, because there would have been more pictures in this entry. Also, you'd have been able to see me all stuffed into SCUBA gear. One thing that struck me is that once you go beneath the surface, you're really there for the duration. If you have a minor annoyance, like the salt sludge that builds up in your mouth from mouth breathing for twenty minutes at a time, you just have to deal with it until it's time to surface. Also, during this dive, my vest kidnapped me. It has a valve at the top and at the bottom, so that you can let the air out if you're too buoyant. You just have to know which valve to open. If you're head up and you pull the top one, great. But if you're say, head down, and not quite smart enough to know that the air has risen to the bottom of the vest, what happens is the vest drags you spazzing to the surface while you yank repeatedly at the wrong valve like a moron. I'm not saying that happened, but yeah, that happened. Twice. Between being too high, too low, and a little slow, I was never where I was supposed to be. But I was in the Red Sea, and alive despite the water's efforts, and when I finally surfaced out of it, Bob shook my and Lebowski's hands. "Congratulations, SCUBA divers," he said.
Didn't keep me from leaving my tank standing up when we got back. Damn.
We hit the bar again, and between alcoholic remuneration, we found out a little more about Bob. Seems he lives just a few blocks over from where we were staying, and just bikes over when it's time to teach new folk to dive. And that's what he does for a living. That's what everyone in Dahab does for a living. It's a town of people who get paid to do what they love to do. That's probably what made him such an excellent teacher. If you're going to learn to dive, learn from Bob. And then eat at Joe's.
Headed back to Sindbad, where Darrin and Freeman had again found the girls. I suppose it's no coincidence Canadians speak French. Now I don't want to suggest the existence of divine providence, but there were four of us, and four of them, and after mixing and matching a while, we all paired off. Miriam was the girl I ended up with, and not just because she didn't speak English and no one else spoke Spanish; she was really pretty. During our conversation, which was halted haltingly more than once by my sluggish language skills, it came out that she was the only one who was not a diver, the only one who was not even interested in diving, and seventeen years old. Wow they grow them mature in Spain. Her age really didn't matter anyway though, because as fun as single-use romance is touted to be, I didn't damn know her from Eve and was perfectly content just talking to her about Spain. Plus, it allowed me to stow my crappy game and watch the other guys throw their crappy game.
About an hour after that, the girls executed what I can only term the Catalan Kiss-Off. They must have had some strange other country telepathy, because outwardly, it just looked like they all simultaneously stood up and waved goodbye. But inwardly, I imagine it went something like this:

MARIA: OK, I'm getting tired. CKO time.
CONSUELA: All right... my guy's a dud.
LIDIA: Not sure about mine. Come back to me.
MIRIAM: Mine's old. Nope.
MARIA: Not digging mine. Connie?
CONSUELA: Mmm... nah. Let's bolt.

The four of us waved as we watched them go, and then sat there in silence for a moment. "Well, that went well," Lebowski finally ventured.
"Club?" Darrin suggested, and we all nodded, thinking it would be harder to hear our resounding defeat over blasting techno.
On the way, we all came up with excuses why the girls hadn't fallen swooningly into our arms. Freeman put the spotlight on me about Miriam, and I shrugged that she had not been exactly legal. "Here she is," he quipped, and I had to admit that that hadn't occured to me. I wasn't in America, was I? Talk about BOOP you're elsewhere...
The dance club was very cool, although if you're trying to forget an instance where girls wouldn't talk to you, the very worst place to go do it is a place where hundreds of girls won't talk to you. It was set off from the beach down an alley, and the door to the place was a giant dreamcatcher-inspired gate that rotated to let you in. Inside it was desert island Tiki hut, and in back there was a balcony that you could only get to by shaky rope bridge. A rope bridge, by the way, is the perfect thing to have in a dance club full of drunk people. I could barely get across it, and I surf turbulence. I'm sure there's a compound fracture in that place three times a week.
After a few Sakaras, we all retreated to our cells, and I prepared for my next and final day in Egypt, during which I planned to do nothing at all but sit and watch the sea.

Independent Of Independence Day

2008-07-04T23:43:00.001-06:00

This was the first 4th of July I celebrated 24 hours of outside the U.S. I don't think I even saw a U.S. flag that whole day. But I spoke English, does that count?

Day 5 Of 7 - Parting The Red Sea, Only This Time Not For As Good A Reason

2008-07-04T15:30:00.033-06:00

Woke up with no damn idea where I was. A fall onto a concrete floor from a concrete bed will do that to you. Managed to open the padlocked-on-the-inside wooden door and saw this.

Still didn't have any idea where I was, so I looked to the right.

I experienced a vague recollection that the gravel had not been raked the night before, and that there had not been some dude sleeping behind the bush. Still mostly confused, I looked to the left.

Now I remembered. Water. Red Sea. Dahab. I'm in Egypt. I'm supposed to go get in that water today.
Lebowski's door was wide open. After ten minutes or so of my version of call to prayer, he woke up, and after ten minutes or so of certain commodity, he threw on his flip-flops. There was a tense moment as he looked from his shorts and flip-flops to my shorts and black Skechers and black socks, and then back to his shorts and flip-flops.
"You, uh... those aren't beach shoes," he finally settled on.
"Nope," I admitted.
"Did you... did you bring any?"
"Nope."
"Do you even own any?"
It was here that I launched into my beach curse story. I bear an ancient curse having to do with beaches. I am basically safe around pools and man-made lagoon-type structures, but any time I get near naturally-occurring water that I can't see the bottom of, I get cut. The most famous of these stories happened in Biloxi, where a couple of high school friends picked me up out of the water for a 'three strapping doughboys carrying Mae West' photo, and then threw me as far as they could. An un-cursed person would have landed in one of the billions of water in the Gulf of Mexico. I myself landed on a barnacle-encrusted concrete pylon. Seriously, the barnacle-encrusted pylon to water ratio in the Gulf of Mexico is insane, but I found one. So I limped back a hundred yards to the beach, right leg numb except for the tickling of used hypodermic needles in the water, and when we all made it out onto the sand, we saw that my right big toe had basically been split to the first joint. In shock, I could think of nothing funnier to do than run up the beach screaming, "SHARK!" And so it's gone with every encounter with a beach, before and since.
Lebowski hadn't moved for the entire story. Finally, he said, "So, you're telling me you don't own any beach shoes is what you're saying."
We headed out for breakfast, flopping and clomping, respectively.

In daylight, Dahab is an intriguing low-tech beautiful. Like I said, it's basically a main drag following the water, but in the dark I hadn't been able to see the brickwork. There are concrete buildings and thatched-roof huts, and every so often a broken-down storefront with three tourist police smiling at you. In this shot, you can barely see Saudi Arabia in the distance. You'll also notice they managed to get the trash near the trash can, and that's because there was one, a feat unequaled in the whole of Cairo.
Found breakfast in a seaside tent. This was one of the few places that had an actual table and chairs. I mention this so I can mention how they did it everywhere else. The Dahab standard is a 'conversation pit' kind of thing, where they make a big square out of four palm tree logs, throw pillows and blankets over them, and stick a small table in the middle barely big enough to put your legs under. If you lean back against the logs, that fits nine people and their requisite shishas. Like I said, low-tech, but neat. The thing about chairs is that cats go under them. It's like sitting on a boardwalk and dipping your feel in a tide of cats. Now and again, one would jump up in Lebowski's lap, and he would brush it off like it had the plague. I am a cat person, and so I wondered why he would do that until one jumped on my lap; this thing looked at me sweetly with the one eye it had, and showed me its brain through its other eye socket. I think it may have had the plague. I followed Lebowski's anti-zombie-cat stance for the rest of breakfast which, oddly, featured bacon.
And orange juice. Did I mention that?
Grabbed some aqua socks from a vendor. In keeping with my beach curse, I suspect I may have a flip-flop curse. I used to wear them when I was little, up until the time I got the bottom of a broken Coke bottle stuck between the heel of the flip-flop and my actual heel. Yeah ouch. Since then I have given any possible curse very little room to work, and so, aqua socks. I never go in the water without some, and you'll remember I wore a pair in the Salt Lake. However, a thing I discovered about aqua socks is that when you wear them outside of the water (which I had never done before), they're hot and cumbersome and generally stupid. I think I should have risked the curse and gone with the flip-flops.
We began our search for a reputable diving outfit. Until this very point in my life, I had thought little about diving. I like to swim, but I've never been that interested in throwing on heavy and expensive equipment in order to paddle around with some fishes. But Lebowski had just been diving in Iskanderun, and had been bitten by the diving bug. He convinced me with very little arm-twisting. His experience, though, prompted us to place emphasis on the reputable in our search for a reputable diving outfit:

LEBOWSKI: Hi, I'd like to go diving.
EGYPTIAN: I am diver.
LEBOWSKI: Are you a certified instructor?
EGYPTIAN: I am diver.
LEBOWSKI: Um... I'm not so sure about--
EGYPTIAN: Let me ask you question. When you breath under water, you breathe like this?
EGYPTIAN hyperventilates.
EGYPTIAN: Or you breathe like this?
EGYPTIAN breathes long and slow.
LEBOWSKI: The... second one?
EGYPTIAN (clapping him on the back): You do fine. Come on.

Miraculously, Lebowski survived that diving adventure, and even more miraculously, wanted to go into the water again. We cruised up the beach, checking out various dive shops:

US: Hi, we'd like to go diving.
EGYPTIAN: You not think about cost. What you want to pay?
US: NEXT.

US: Hi, we'd like to go diving.
EGYPTIAN: Let me ask you question...
US: NEXT.

US: Hi, we'd--
EGYPTIAN: WELCOME TO EGYPT!
US: NEXT.

Finally we arrived at Sinai Divers. Inside was a man who intelligently explained the dive process and assured us that they were a member of the Professional Association of Diving Instructors, or PADI. Lebowski looked at me. I looked at him. We had found our outfit. An hour later, Bob, who was one of the instructors-on-demand, arrived, and we began.
The SCUBA Diver certification, which is the first and lowest PADI certification, requires four separate dives, all of which themselves require movie-watching and written test-passing based on the movies. You learn things like how air occupies less space and becomes more dense the further down you dive, and what to do when your ears complain about that. You learn about SCUBA equipment, how to put it on, and how to troubleshoot it. And you learn basic emergency procedures, like what to do if your air goes away at ten meters. Oh yeah, did I mention everything was metric? Instead of pounds per square inch, the SPG (submersible pressure gauge) reported to me in atmospheres. Wacky.
We passed our tests (during which Lebowski may or may not have helped me cheat on the math part), and then Bob took us out for Contained Water Dive One. You're supposed to do confined water dives in a pool, but since all we had was the sea, we just didn't go out as far into it. A word about suiting up... and that word is 'uncomfortable.' The wetsuit is skintight, wet, and made of rubber. It's like... well, it's like a wet skintight rubber wetsuit, you can imagine what that feels like. And there's two of them, one with arms and legs, and another without that goes on top. Pinch city. And the equipment is, outside of the water, heavy. I'm guessing we lugged an extra 50 pounds (I have no idea how many kilograms that is) down the beach to the water. If you're an experienced diver, you can run through the checklist pretty quickly, but as we were new, Bob made us do it slowly, and every second you're standing in the hot Egyptian sun in two skintight rubber wetsuits with stupidly heavy gear on is a second you're dying. Bob was good-natured enough to smirk at our pain.
Safety checks done, we flopped our way into the water. Things immediately cooled off and became less heavy. But in trade, a new wrinkle; I could no longer move. I mean, sure, I could flap around, but nothing I did did anything else. Having never been in the water with weights and a BCG (Buoyancy Control Device [a damn inflatable vest]) on, I hadn't yet figured out what motions translated into what resulting moves, and so it was a lot like being a baby again. Just kick and wave and hope something happens.
You can't prepare for being able to breathe underwater. Bob warned us that we couldn't, and I knew this, but still, I was not prepared. We threw our regulators in (that's the chewy piece of the airhose that goes in your mouth), deflated our BCDs, and sank. And there I am, kneeling on the sand, surrounded by water, and damn breathing. Bob gave us a few minutes to get used to it. The videos all stress to keep breathing, because a) it's generally a good idea, and b) if you don't, your lungs can explode. I discovered a third cause for non-breathing; you forget to. It's amazing to be completely submerged and listen to the hiss of your equipment telling you you're not drowning. Of course, it wasn't all beer and pizza. For one, I was weighted wrong. Since you are wearing a damn inflatable vest when you dive, they strap a beltful of lead weights to you so you can sink when you want to. Every diver knows about how much weight to wear, and how to wear it. Unfortunately, the only way to learn this is to do it wrong several times until you get it right. Weighted like I was, when I was kneeling there underwater, I kept drifting forward onto my face. Doesn't seem like much of a hassle, but when you don't quite have the coordination to get back up again, it's a pain. Another thing was that my mask wouldn't seal. You'll notice that pilots are all clean-shaven, and that's because their oxygen masks have to seal, and a beard breaks the seal. Soldiers do the same thing so their protective gas masks seal. Well, I have a beard now, and the low end of the dive mask seals across the top of your lip. Problem. And believe it or not, the diver's solution to that is Vaseline. You just smear some across your moustache, and you're disgusting but good to go. We actually got started a little late because, oddly, none of us had any Vaseline on us, and the pharmacy was closed because the guy running it had been called away to pray. And once I got in the water, I discovered that either I have a destroyer-class moustache, or the Vaseline trick just doesn't work all that well.
In short, I definitely needed the time Bob gave us to get used to things.
During the Confined Water dives, you go through a list of several skills, proving that you'll be able to perform them if you ever have to. One of them is how to put your regulator back in if it ever falls out or gets kicked out of your mouth by another diver. You might think (as I did) that it's an easy thing to put something back in your mouth, but the mask seriously limits your peripheral vision. When that thing falls out, it's gone, and because of all the gear you're wearing, if you don't know where to look to find it, you're in trouble. How to clear your mask if water gets into it was of particular interest to me. In fact, by the time we got to that skill, I had already been doing it for fifteen minutes. Once enough water gets in it to get in your way, you look up, pull the mask off, and blow bubbles into it. That puts enough air in it to seal it back onto your face, and then you can see again. And having regular water get into your mask is bother enough... salt water from the Red Sea? Well, that's like bleach in your eyes, and if you get a snort of that stuff up your nose, game over. Lebowski and I both got a taste of that as we were using the snorkels to get to where we did the dive. Bob told us to make sure to blow the snorkels out before we breathed in for the first time, but I had a feeling he knew we had so much on our minds that we'd forget, and he certainly was watching and laughing when we both simultaneously took in a honking blast of sea water and had a face explosion. It must be amusing to be an instructor.
After we finished all the skills, we left the water, trundled out gear back to the dive shop, and watched more videos. Then we geared up again (the repetition, I suppose, was to get us accustomed to the gear), and did Open Water Dive One. Open Water dives are a sort of free-roaming reward for getting past all those skills. And it was amazing. It was trouble at first, though, even getting below the surface. See, when you breathe in, you become buoyant, and you can't sink when you do that. But what's the first thing you do when you're about to go underwater? You take a deep breath is what. So in addition to deflating your vest and having the right weights, you also have to control your descent with your breathing. And, strangely, it's not a constant thing; for the first ten feet I mean three METERS, it's really hard to sink, and then for the next six meters or so, it's easy. And after that it gets hard again. Something about the density of the water, I dunno. But after the first few tries, I got my naturally buoyant self under the surface, and like I said, amazing. Bob led and we followed. He consulted his dive computer often (it straps to your wrist, but don't you ever call it a 'watch' to a diver's face), which told him how long we'd been under, and checked with us just as often. You use hand signs under water, because of course you can't speak. An amusing thing is that the OK sign is what they use for OK, and the thumbs-up sign, instead of meaning OK, means 'I'm going to the surface.' So Lebowski and I both erroneously reported that we were ascending several times.
You're at peace is what you are. Once you get the feel of maintaining your level in the water by inflating/deflating your vest and using your lungs, you're completely free. Exactly the opposite of how you were out of the water, weighed down by all the equipment. Swimming comes easier than staying in a kneeling position, and it's mostly legs. Your arms are for checking your gauge. A typical exchange went like this: Bob turns to us and signs, "OK?" We both sign, "Ascending," followed quickly by, "OK! OK!" He smirks behind his mask, and then points to me. "What does your gauge say?" he signs, putting two fingers in his palm. I flop around looking for my gauge, which is at the end of a hose just like the regulator, and read it. 120 bar, it says. I make the football 'time out' sign, which means 100, and follow that with two fingers: 120. He points to Lebowski, and I crane to see him through the mask, even though he's right beside me, and I get to see how funny I looked flapping around looking for my gauge. Bob says, "OK," and begins to swim again. Another sequence I got familiar with was pointing to my ears and making the 'comme ci comme ça' sign, which means 'I can't clear my damn ears.' Apparently, my sinuses are rated to 40,000 ft, but not much good below sea level. Bob would sign for us to descend a little, and suddenly I'd get a white-hot spike in both eardrums. The videos say you're supposed to pinch your nose and blow into it to equalize the pressure (the same thing you do if you have problems in a descending aircraft), but for some reason, I couldn't get it to work. Eventually I figured out that I personally have to turn each ear to the surface and clear it individually, but until then, it sucked.
The water was very clear, and there were schools of fish about. They swim around you, but you can never quite touch one... they're skittish. We saw Nemo fish, and several lionfish (Bob interlaces his fingers and flaps them, which is the sign for lionfish, and points to an angry bundle of brown fins under a rock). To tell you the truth, on the first dive I was really too occupied with staying at one level and keeping the damn water out of my mask to look around, but I got a good sense of why people do this. At one point, I realized I didn't have to stay right-side-up (or, I suppose, top-side-up), and rolled over to face the surface for a while. As long as you have one hand on your regulator, you can do that forever. I haven't experienced anything in life yet that's quite like looking at the surface of the ocean from several meters under it. Very surreal.
The dive lasted a forever-long twenty minutes, and then we stepped back out into the air. Three SCUBA tanks and the accompanying gear is too heavy to carry, so they have a trolley for that purpose. Looks like an industrial-strength baby carriage. And we all three hauled that thing from from the dive end to the shop end of the beach each time we went out. I got whistled at once by a foreign hot chick on the way, which made it worth it. It was either me or Lebowski she whistled at. I like to think it was me.
We capped off the first day by buying Bob the beers we owed him. SCUBA tanks are filled with compressed gases, and are thusly potentially explosive. You don't want to drop one. So you're supposed to lay it down every time you walk away from it. Bob explained that every time he caught us away from our tank and it was standing up, we owed him a beer. I managed to make it through the day, but Lebowski was not as lucky. But he's rich and I'm not, and after a while we were all three of us drunk, and so it all worked out.
We retired to Sindbad, where we caught up with the Canadians and the Barcelonans and drank even more beer. I looked upon it as a survival trick at that point; whatever amoebas I had ingested that day could not possibly survive immersion in Sakara. We attempted to wow the girls with our first dive story, and they responded by telling us in attractively accented English that they were of the several-levels-up certification intimidatingly known as 'divemaster.' Darrin and Freeman chuckled behind their hands. During the evening, I had occasion to visit the bathroom and discovered that, because the water pressure is so low, you have to put toilet paper in the waste basket instead of flushing it. Not as horrible as it sounds, or at least I didn't think so at the time. I was pleased to see someone had modified the sign on the door:

PLEASE PUT TOILET PAPER IN WASTE BIN laden

Sometime after that, we stumbled back to our concrete cells and I don't even remember falling asleep. Day Two was tomorrow, and I had to be ready.

Day 4 Of 7 - Journey To Way Over There

2008-07-03T15:29:00.030-06:00

When Lebowski finally woke up, he did so with two ideas. One was to hop on a bus to Iskanderun, commonly known as Alexandria, and the other was to hop on a bus to a place called Dahab. Both of them involved a bus. Only one of them, however, involved a ten-hour bus ride. So I voted Iskanderun, because a) he said it had cool antiquities to look at, b) it has a funny name, and c) it did not involve a ten-hour bus ride. We packed our backpacks and headed out.

Again, we hoofed it past Talat Harb square, because it's on the way to everything. Eventually we found the bus station. I'm sure he knew where it was, but I didn't. Like I said, our original plan was to tackle Iskanderun, but for reasons I never quite de-Egyptified, we couldn't get on that bus. I just remember Lebowski cursing up a storm at the ticket agent, and the two Egyptian Army soldiers behind him smiling at me and mouthing the F-word making fun of him. So, plan B... Dahab.

You'll notice the bereted fellow in the lower left corner. He's tourist police. Here he is again.

They kind of hang out in large concentrations of tourists so they can be on hand to make sure nothing untoward happens, like you accidentally getting on a bus to Sudan. I was particularly interested in the way they all seem to have different models of weaponry. This guy here had what I suspect was some variant of AK-47, but some police had MP-5s or even Mauser-looking pistols. In the U.S. you get accustomed to authority figures having the same uniforms and equipment, but over there, I guess you just go to work with whatever they issue you, or whatever you have lying around the house. Also, U.S. police usually have their smoke wagons holstered... Egyptian police twirl theirs around when they're bored. A touch unsettling. Lebowski was kind enough to wait till the fourth day among them to tell me that most of them probably don't know how to use a rifle. Jerk. These guys also direct traffic occasionally, but whereas U.S. cops use these big cheerleader movements to tell you when to go, tourist police rarely raise their arms past their sides. Most of the 'come here,' 'stop,' and 'go that way' occurs very subtly at thigh-level, and looks like nothing more than a nervous tic. Pretty amazing to watch it at work, but I can't even imagine having to be legally held to those microscopic signals.

We hopped on the bus at maybe two PM. This is our view of the bus. I had to look at it for ten hours, so you have to look at it too. On the way, Lebowski filled me in on what Dahab was and why we were going.
I was unaware of this, but there's a second part to Egypt. I had always thought it was a vertical block with a northeastern chip missing, kinda like Missouri. Turns out that not only is there a piece there, it's shaped like a falling piece of pizza. This is the Sinai Peninsula, home of Mount Sinai, which is where Charlton Heston was given the bylaws of the National Rifle Association on stone tablets. It's also the site of the 1967 war between Egypt and Israel. We didn't see this, but Lebowski assures me that there are stretches of desert there strewn with dead tanks. Sinai is also across the continental shelf, so technically I hit Asia on this journey too. Ha ha.

There's Egypt, and Sinai. We cruised along that WTHIP-colored line past a lot of arid terrain (always wanted to chart my adventures on a map like in the Indy movies). Looked a lot like Tatooine for more reasons than just my wanting it to... they filmed the Star Wars movies in Tunisia, which is just a few countries west of Egypt. The Suez Canal was off to the right for a while. Dahab, Lebowski explained, is a dive town halfway up the other side of the peninsula, and by dive, he meant 'go in the water.' He'd been there once before, and said it had instantly become his haven from the chaos of Cairo.
There were TVs on this bus, and soon into the trip, they began playing an Egyptian movie called Morgan Ahmed Morgan. The only way you'll be able to fathom the insanity of this movie is by following that link to the trailer on YouTube. From what I was able to piece together from my limited understanding of Egyptian Arabic and what I was able to blatantly make up, Morgan Ahmed Morgan is an Egyptian goofball living a bumbling sort of double life; rich corporate mogul sometimes, unassuming college student other times. With the help of his friend Afro, he gets in over his head in one situation after another, and only manages to get out of them by virtue of the fact that his full name spoken aloud has a tendency to spur dance sequences. Seriously, no one ever calls him Morgan, Ahmed, or M.A, or Buddy. "Hey, is that Morgan Ahmed Morgan?" "Why yes, it is Morgan Ahmed Morgan!" "Morgan Ahmed Morgan? Where?" "That's him over there, Morgan Ahmed Morgan." "No way! Let's have a crazy New Delhi-style dance sequence!" Armed with Afro's ability to start food fights and a song called 'Oh Shee Wah Wah,' Morgan Ahmed Morgan chases modestly after the lovely Hot Teacher, and generally wins over everyone with his so-bad-it's-good dancing and his full name. At the end, there's a dance-off between opposing factions of students (the good guys have cool moves, and the bad guys have just as cool but choppy robot moves), and Morgan Ahmed Morgan brings them all together literally, rising up out of a crowd of them as if he were on a mechanical pedestal. At the time, I was annoyed by this movie (partly, I'm sure, because the driver had the volume turned up to DISINTIGRATE), but the more I watch the trailer, the more I want to go out and rent it.
That got followed by some Tom and Jerry. These particular ones were so old that I think I actually saw Tom meet Jerry in one of them.
The sun went down. We passed what I'm pretty sure was the much-invoked B.F.E. We stopped in a town at the point of the peninsula called Sharm El Sheikh. The only thing that was there was a cigarrette store and a bathroom, and there were kids outside charging one pound for admission.
We finally rolled into Dahab at about midnight. Lebowski and I had struck up conversations on the bus with Darrin and Freeman, two journeying Canadians, and so we all took a cab to the beach section. By cab, I mean we all jumped in the the bed of some Egyptian's truck for a pound each. Knowing that that was what 'cab' meant, I should have reasoned what Lebowski meant when he said we would be staying at a 'hotel.'

This entire room, including the bed, is made of concrete. The Hotel Sindbad is a former bedouin camp, and was re-made into a beachside hostel/hotel when the originally bedouin-settled town of Dahab went legit. This place was, and I mean barely, a north-south row of concrete boxes loosely connected to an east-west row of concrete boxes, across a gravel sidewalk from a set of camp showers. It's funny that how well you handle scary things is usually directly proportionate to how far from home you are... I opened the squeaky wooden door to this rough-hewn prison cell and, instead of running far far away, I said, "Great, I'll bring in my stuff!" Might have been because it wasn't a damn bus.
Lebowski moved his gear into the next cell and then we sat outside for a while listening to the surf and the absolute quiet. I watched the froth of the sea in the dark while he imbibed a certain commodity. He admitted several times during my visit that he had regrettably become jaded to the things Egypt had to offer while living there, and was enjoying seeing me see things for the first time. One of them, he said, was the way I reacted to how he put our new location in perspective:
"See that water?" he asked.
"Yes," I said, because I was looking at it.
"That's the Red Sea." Then he pointed out over it. "See those lights on the other side?"
"Yes," I said, because he was pointing at them.
"That's Saudi Arabia."
BOOP I am way elsewhere.
We caught up with our stout Canadian allies at the hotel next door, who were on quest for Sakara. We met some girls from Barcelona, who were staying in the concrete boxes across from Darrin and Freeman, and in halting English, slightly better Spanish, and abysmal Arabic, made introductions. We invited them to join our quest, and they declined, which was the sensible thing to do, because saying Sakara is better than Stella is still not saying much. The beach section of Dahab is basically a riverwalk-type street along the beach, crowded with restaurants and shops. The design of these places is great; you'll see depictions of ancient Egyptian gods goofing around with Nemo the fish and characters from Disney's Aladdin. We found a tent that was still open, settled out on the beach with drink and shisha for a while, and then we headed back and hit the concrete.
I had some rest to get... I had found the Red Sea, and tomorrow, I was going to get in it.

LAWREEEENCE!

2008-07-02T23:52:00.004-06:00

Lebowski got to an internet cafe and beamed me these.

Watch out, they spit.

Day 3 Of 7 - Big Piles Of Rocks In The Desert

2008-07-02T15:27:00.040-06:00

Yup, call to prayer woke me up again. Nope, still didn't understand what they were shouting. But that was all right... I woke up knowing that this was the day I traveled several hundred miles for. Today I was going to touch a pyramid.
Found a different place for breakfast this time, and a new kind of breakfast... tameea wa baid. Tameea is that cored-out half-a-pita-bread thing, and it's usually served with falafel and salad in it. Now is the chance I've been waiting for to tell you the salad story. Among the things they told me to avoid while they were shooting me full of vaccine was salad. The salad itself is not bad, but it's the only vegetable that retains most of the water they use to wash it, and that water is hive to several amoebas, all of which are evil. The funny part is the de-amoebafying agent they suggest... bleach. That's right... if you must have a salad in Egypt, throw that sucker in on the gentle cycle and you'll be fine. I didn't. I'm not a fan of regular lettuce, much less the kind you have to pick lint out of. Anyway... a baid is an egg, and that kind of tameea has hard-boiled eggs instead of falafel, and some kind of refried bean substance. Really good, if a tad Mexican. I mean, Mexican is great. I just didn't think Egyptian food was Mexican food. But there you have it.
After that, we stepped back down to Talat Harb Square (which seems to be the middle of everything in Lebowski's hood) and grabbed a cab. Have we talked about the different cabs yet? The yellow cabs are the safe ones. They have meters in them, and you don't have to worry about anything... you just get out and pay what the meter says. The black ones are a bit different. It's still a car (basically), and there's still a guy in it that drives you around, but there is no meter... you have to agree on a price before you get going. I'm not that much of a jerk, which means I'm a lousy haggler, but from our earliest days together I've known Lebowski has jerk supreme tendencies. I'll clarify the grammar there... I don't mean he has supremely jerkish tendencies; I mean he is a jerk supreme, in the way that Taco Bell means when they say Burrito Supreme. He's a great guy, but when the situation calls for it, he steps up the jerk, and I salute him for it. One of those calling-for situations is haggling with a black cab driver (again with the clarification... a person of Egyptian descent driving a black-colored cab). Lebowski's opening denial always features the F-word. That's another thing I salute him for. It's just fun to watch him go, really, because he's nailed what I call the attitude shift of haggling. See, to do it right, you start calm, you get angrier and angrier as you get closer to the final price, and then as soon as you agree, you're instantly friendly again. So, after several F-words and an attitude shift, we were on our way to Giza.
Giza was a lot like San Antonio, except with less Texans. There was a lot of modern town surrounding a really really old part of town. I think that made it actually more exciting, because as you got closer, you could see pyramids peeking up over top of places to get bottled water and really bad hats.

There's a fence around the pyramid section of Giza, and that separates you from three pyramids and the Sphinx. Everything touristy in Egypt is government governed, and so as I was to discover, you always get the same ticket with a holographic Egyptian seal on it. A round symbol, I mean, not the animal. Then after they tear the ticket, you're in, walking the same ground that pharoahs walked. First, you go through the remnants of what was not but looked a whole lot like a Roman temple. Lots of columns, lots of open-ceilinged and narrow halls.

Don't you hate it when the picture gets took before you're set in your pose and you end up looking floppy?

Then after you find your way out of there, there they are. Three pyramids and the Sphinx. I was not prepared. I don't see how anyone could be. These things are almost as old as we are, and you hear about them from the time you're a kid... and they're right damn there.

The Sphinx has always been my favorite. I've always hated the story (true or not) about how whatever occupying force used its nose for rifle target practice, and that's why its face is nearly missing. In pictures, it looks huge. In person, less so... it's about fifty feet tall. Quick fact: The Sphinx is named after the Greek monstrosity of the same name, and that name actually means 'I strangle,' because of what it did if you got the riddle wrong.

A thing I was surprised to learn is that the back of its head doesn't slope. The way it's all set up, there's really only one angle from which to take a picture of it, and so the pyramid behind it always makes it look like the back of its head sweeps back farther than it does. Here's what I mean:

And from a more different perspective:

A stupid thing about that one picture-taking angle is the ubiquity of the folks I came to call Barnums. Named after the famous P.T. Barnum, who made sideshows the thing and who once guided people to an exhibit he called 'The Egress,' which is in fact Latin for 'the exit,' these guys stand around a tourist spot and do anything from catcalling to walking with you to getting right in your damn way in order to show you something that you can already see yourself and then ask for a baksheesh, which is Arabic for tip. And of course, there's a Barnum in this one picture-taking spot, who advises you that this is a great spot to box the Sphinx.
"You stand here, box Sphinx. Box, like this." And he puts up the dukes.
I did want to have a picture of me boxing the Sphinx. But I didn't want the same forced perspective me-fighting-the-Sphinx that everyone has, probably because this yahoo has been standing there the whole time, and so I did something else.
"No, no, you box. Box Sphinx. Like this!" And he puts up the dukes.
I tried to ignore him. I really did. But he just kept getting in the way of the camera until I just gave up and took the boxing-with-the-Sphinx picture. I erased it later. Ha ha.
Here, incidentally, is a view of the Sphinx you never see.

Again, the three pyramids behind the Sphinx are fenced off. You can get to them, but that requires renting a camel. No, really, you can rent a camel. Actually, they come to you; the camel guides accosted us several times in the 'you box with Sphinx' vein, causing Lebowski to rev up a few more F-words. He'd just done that tour a few weeks ago, and assured me that a) the pyramids don't get any bigger up close, and b) your flanks are never the same after three hours jammed into a camel saddle.

This picture cost us ten pounds. The bedouins (who we'll talk about again in exactly one paragraph) are indigenous folk who don't actually live anywhere... they just hang out at the pyramids and show you stuff for baksheesh. And if you take a picture of them, you're supposed to baksheesh them. Thing is, they're kinda like the cats in that, if you take a picture of anything, they're in front of it, and then baksheesh. I think these guys probably clear 60 thou a year. Remember those bedouins we were talking about one paragraph ago? Well, they have a racket, and it goes like this: they set up at the prime viewing spot for the big pyramid (the one with the cap at the top [which is actually the second-biggest pyramid due to a really big optical delusion]), and because of this, you eventually wander into their net. They approach you and put their Arab headdress on you (that red checkered thing), and then if you're wearing a hat, they put that on their head. It's really funny to see a man who calls the inhospitable Egyptian desert home wearing a pink Minnie Mouse ballcap. Then they put you on their camel or donkey and kidnap you. Yeah, first they steal your hat, and then they steal you. Go back a bit and focus on that 'put you on the camel' part. They don't just point at the thing and make 'get on that' noises. This man picked Lebowski up by the biceps and plunked him onto a donkey. Leboswki is not a small guy... he's the kinda guy I want on my end of the barfight. And this guy deadlifted him, while he was quietly talking to another guy, and put him on this donkey. Along with Lebowski, I want the bedouins on my end of the barfight.
I was lucky (or unlucky) enough to get a camel as vehicle du jour. You know how you watch a nature show and, if there's a camel on it, all they ever talk about is the way they stand up and sit down? Well, that's because it's bizarre how they do it. When they're lying down, their legs are all buckled up under them, and then when they stand up, they go up back legs first and then front ones. That may not sound too bizarre, but wait till you feel it from the saddle. They're so tall that you can't mount one while it's standing like a horse... they have to be sitting when you get on. And so when they kick up their back end, it happens fast, and so if you're not ready to throw yourself back violently against the camel's spine, you're going over the handlebars. I'm proud to say I didn't go over. Though I may have revved up an F-word.

After you and the other kidnappees are properly seated, the bedouins guide you over to the pyramid viewing spot, steal your cameras, and take pictures of you on your monster in front of the pyramids. It really was a cool experience, well worth the baksheesh. I still haggled though. And lemme tell you, when the camel sits down, it does it even faster than when it gets up. I kinda knew it was coming, though, because I noticed all the bedouins gathering up and pointing to where they thought I was about to land. I'm even prouder to say I stayed in the saddle all the way down, without actually even holding on. Oddly, I seem to be a natural with camels. Lebowski was not so much the donkey natural, and so was unceremoniously removed from his mount in inconceivably strong bedouin style.
This is where that picture of me on a camel in front of a pyramid would go if they'd stolen my camera and not Lebowski's. Stay tuned.
Regrettably, I have to mention the heaps of trash. They're there too, at a four thousand year old monument, once the tallest human-created structure and the last existing wonder of the world. McArabia cups, plastic bags, dot-matrix printer paper. They're their pyramids, I reminded myself again. It just stung a little to see them so ill kempt.
We headed to a juice shop while we figured out if we wanted to go inside the one pyramid you're allowed into. It's embarrassing to say, having grown up in the South, but I had never had fresh-squeezed OJ. Because of this, orange juice had always been so-so to me. But this guy just cuts an orange in half, jams it in a masher, mashes, and gives me a glass. It was the most amazing thing I've ever tasted, besides that octopus that one time. I could not believe this juice had come out of an orange. And so, for the rest of the trip, everywhere we went, I got some OJ.
We decided we were tired enough of the Barnums not to cram ourselves in a small underground room under several million tons of stone with them, and so we checked out a rug school across the street. Rug School is what it said out front. We're still not sure exactly what it was. Had rugs inside it. Had people making rugs. By the way, that's incredible to watch. You know those three-inch looms you made out of popsicle sticks in second grade? Well, these ones are ten by twelve, and feature as many threads as there are tons of stone in pyramids. The guy we watched weave explained that he had been working on this particular rug for a year. Next time you notice a Persian rug under your feet, think about that. They never did teach us anything, but they did try to sell us a rug, and that's when we left.
Negotiated a black cab price to get to Sakara, which is where more pyramids are. Along the way, just outside of Giza, we saw this:

Half an hour later we arrived at another dead temple...

... and also the Sakara pyramid, famous for its stair-step edges. It's so famous it's on the Sakara beer label.

This thing is a lot older than the Giza ones. They theorize that they are so old that the Egyptians hadn't quite figured out how to engineer straight edges yet, and so built them in levels. That's technical ignorance I'm inclined to forgive, because look at the size of that thing. This one is in an open area, and you can just walk up to it and touch it. And that's what I did, putting another quest to an end. An ancient Egyptian put that rock there right there where I found it, and I touched it.

There were plenty of ruins around the site. They were kinda set up like a city street. We played on these ones here. Was strange to me that they weren't fenced off and protected with laser trip-wires. All they had were a couple of tourist police that would yell half-heartedly at you if you got too close to something important. These ones they didn't care about.

During Lebowski's F-word-laden negotiations with the black cab driver, he'd secured his services for the entire trip. Which means that when we came back from the pyramid, he was there playing backgammon with all the other black cabbies waiting for their Abercrombie & Fitches. That's just how they all spend their day when they're not driving the tourists. This will become important and potentially life-ending later.

The next stop was Memphis. OK, I admit it, I sat around trying to think of a clever way to make a joke about the name of this place, but they all came out granddad, so I'm just not doing it. This place had a series of very tall statues of Ramses. One of them was about thirty feet high, and I'm embarrassed to say I missed it because it was hiding behind a tree. It's really weird to look at a tree and slowly notice that there's a giant pharoah peeking out from behind it.
The biggest Ramses is gone from the knees down, and is so big that he's lying down. They've built an observation deck around him.

It was outside this stop that the incident occurred. Our cabbie had found himself a group in which to hang, and as we drew closer, it became apparent that one of the gentlemen, a fellow we'll call Big Crazy, had become incensed with him for a reason that never got cleared up. At first there were stares, and then mean faces, and then threats, and then yelling, and eventually a lunging stranglehold. Three of the smaller guys dashed over and hauled Big Crazy off into a hut, and Cabbie just sat there like he had good sense. A pattern emerged, wherein Big Crazy would mouth off from inside the hut, Cabbie would smartly return fire, and Big Crazy would stomp out, dragging his attendants three, until they could calm him down and get him back into the damn hut. Lebowski and I were just putting our heads together about how to get Cabbie out of this when a new wrinkle appeared in the pattern; Big Crazy came staggering out with a loaded box cutter.
"Knife," I quietly say to Lebowski. He nods back, and I assume from his reaction that this is something that happens in Egypt all the time, and so I lean back to watch the show.
Big Crazy never got all that close to Cabbie with the box cutter. He didn't have to, though. I mean, it was already bad enough; there's ten people there, one of whom is an old lady who is whapping both the combatants on the head, but of course it's got to be the ten-foot-tall one who has the knife. But Big Crazy did get so angry that he couldn't quite stay standing up straight from all the ire, and as he flailed he became a sort of maypole with the three guys hanging off of him.
Lebowski and I got as close to Cabbie as we could (which was not too close, because there was a killer pointed at him) and tried to draw him off towards the cab. Sometime during this process, Lebowski completely destroys my sense of calm by exclaiming, "Oh crap, dude, that guy has a knife!" After several jousts, we get Cabbie into the car and we speed off, Big Crazy tearing after us in the rear-view.
Nobody said anything for about five minutes. Lebowski finally stammers, "You all right, dude?"
Cabbie hauls out a box of Cleopatras and says, "I need cigarette. You want?"
Ten minutes later, everything was fine. Welcome to Egypt.
Next was the Imhotep Museum. I should mention that, when you see the word museum, you probably think cold and dark hermetically sealed establishment of enormous size, but in Egypt, this word means small, mostly open-air badly converted three-bedroom house. There were a lot of ancient Egyptian figurines and relief carvings, and even a few cubit rods, but what I think you really want to see is this:

That is exactly what you think it is. I don't know this guy's (or girl's) story, but he really looked like he was just sleeping. He was a little sunken, and of course gray, but the preservation was amazing. He was also very short... maybe five feet even, maybe. One of his toes was missing. I hope he was already dead when he lost it.
Lebowski and I decided that was all the history/knife fighting we could take for one day, so we cabbed home to Talat Harb. I practiced crossing the street till dusk, and then we checked out some of the shops. I wish my camera battery hadn't died just then, because then you wouldn't have to take my word for how funny the liquor knock-offs are. We strolled up to a display window filled with what at first looked like Johnny Walker Red. On closer inspection, the bottles were not quite the right shape, the labels were slightly crooked, and read JOHNNY WADIE. Next to those were bottles of BAGARDI rum. These things were hysterical, and I bet you can find pictures of them on the internet right next to those FAIL picture sets. Perhaps in them.
Another thing I haven't told you yet is that, sometime during this day, I grew tired of being Amriki and became Spanish. You see, in Arabic, Phil is pronounced 'feel,' which is the Arabic word for elephant. So when they curious passers-by asked me, "Ha, you Amriki, ha? What you name?" I would reply, "Felipe! Soy España!" This would, of course, result in several soccer players' names being lobbed at me, and I'd have to look to Lebowski for help because I don't know crap about sports. "Why don't you be Russian or something?" he finally grumbled.
After dark, Lebowski explained that one of his favorite things to do is grab a soda in the old fashioned bottle and drink it on the street corner, because you really can't do that in America anymore. So we bought a couple of Bebsis and leaned up against the bricks like cheap hoods and talked about the old days. Soon a group of scary-looking guys wandered up, and one of them started talking to us. I was able to pick out a few words, and it seemed like he was asking if we preferred one or the other. I remembered these words quite well from when I was studying Arabic, because they're the words you want to learn first in any new language.
The Bebsi vendor leaned out of the booth and nodded sagely. "He talk about genital system."
We very quickly got across which team we played for, and the guys burst out laughing. "You Amriki, ha!" they all said before skulking off.
I went to couch that night shaken, stirred, and having touched a damn pyramid.

Day 2 Of 7 - Adventure In The Two Cairos

2008-07-01T15:22:00.026-06:00

The next morning started early. Like five AM early. Remember that mosque right outside the flat? Well, mosques do this thing called 'call to prayer,' and it's basically either a live guy or a recording of a live guy telling Muslims that it's time to pray. Roughly translated and in musical half-steps, it goes like this:

"Iiiiiiit's time to pray to GOOOOOOOooooOOOooOOOOOOOOD! Yeah, right now's the TIIIIiiiIIIIME to pray to GOOooooOOOOOOoooooOOOOOD! GOOOoooOOOOD PRAAAaaaaaying time like right nooooOOOOOOOOOW!"

Lebowski tells me that some of the bigger mosques have famous Muslim-world singers do their calls to prayer. In perspective, that's a little like Celine Dion howling at you five times a day from Our Lady Of Perpetual Mercy down the street. But the important part here is that this particular mosque is the smallest mosque in Cairo, and as such, it seemed to have mosque envy, meaning its call to prayer was the loudest of any mosque in Egypt. Waking me up. At five AM.
We'll go on. Just before we headed out for breakfast, the garbage guy showed up. I call him the garbage guy because he had an actual name, but I forgot it. There is no organized system of garbage collection in the part of town Lebowski lives in (don't know if that's Cairo-wide), so people looking for work just pick a building and collect trash in it for money. Like independent contracting at the lowest level. Again, my American self spent a few minutes trying to figure out a better way to do things until my new and emerging world self realized that that's just how they do here.
On the way to breakfast, we saw this guy bringing pita bread to the restaurant he where he works.

Yes, that's a damn door on his head. Yes, that's one million pita breads on the door. And yes he's on a bike. I followed this guy for six blocks just staring. Egypt seems to be all about doing what you can with what you have hanging around. And there were a lot of these guys doing things like this. In Egypt, a talent like this gets you gofer work. Anywhere else, it gets you into Cirque du Soleil.
Lebowski's favorite breakfast spot is a koshary restaurant. They make one thing, and that's koshary. It's either a small bowl or a big bowl of spicy macaroni with various Arabic objects mixed into it. Seeds, nuts, flowers, things like that. Really good stuff. Had more Bebsi with it. Lebowski tells me a story about a place he saw in Luxor, a pub they did up to look Irish. They still use Ps in English signs even though they don't have P in Arabic, I suppose because it makes the sign look authentic. But they're not quite sure how to use them, and sometimes they use B interchangeably, and so the sign out front of this place read 'IRISH BUP.' I could have published a book on just the funny signs I saw in Cairo. One I wish I'd gotten a picture of was a hubcap place that had a sign out front that read FAG. I hope it was an acronym.
And while we're obliquely alluding to homosexuality, let's clear this up. A lot of people here have heard that folk in Arab countries walk hand in hand down the street, male/male and female/female. It's true. But it's not what it looks like. There was a subtle difference between the male couples I'd seen in N.O. walking hand in hand and these Egyptian guys trucking along arm in arm. After much thought, I think I've figured it out, and I'm gonna try to articulate it without offending anyone here. Egyptian culture seems to be a very young culture... not in age but in attitude. Here in the states we've all grown up, and are mostly cynical about everything. It's hard to just walk up and talk to someone in a bar because what if they're too grown up to talk to me? Our thirst to get out of our teens so fast has aged us into isolation. But over there, the cultural rules seem to have kept everyone young. Covered women means more schoolboy mystery for longer. Less money means less look-what-I-got-and-you-don't. The whole place seems to have a fifth-grade playground ethic, and in a good way. So when I saw guys trying hard to dress like George Michael strolling around linked at the elbows, it was simply the male version of a couple of Ya Ya sisters giggling at life.
And hey, if you are gay, it's the perfect cover, so everybody wins. There, I think I did that right. Anyone offended?
After breakfast, we just hoofed it around for a while at street level. Not arm in arm or anything. Just couldn't do it. But I did see the Nile for the first time. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it looked like a river, a lot like any other. Little wider than the Mississippi. But it was knowing what that river had been there for that made it amazing. Same river that pharoahs had dipped into, you know? I didn't touch it. It had amoebas in it. But I looked at it pretty hard.
Also learned to cross the street. The drivers aren't any less supersonic in the city, and there are no crosswalks. You absolutely cannot cross the whole street at one time, because there are so many drivers. So there's a technique to it. Lebowski learned to cross using the human shield trick, wherein you just latch onto an Egyptian who's already crossing the way you wanna go, and stay behind them so that if anyone gets hit, it's them and not you. The way you do it alone is you wait till one lane is clear, and then dash to the first broken line, and stay there, cars whizzing past you on either side, until the next lane is clear. Frogger players from the 80s will have a clear advantage here. And so it goes until you're across, or flat. Actually, the drivers can spot you if you're not Egyptian, and so they'll flash you and slow down if it looks like you don't know what you're doing. Still a hair-raising experience though. I ate crow on that one because I had previously bragged to Lebowski that since I could cross the street in New Orleans, I could cross one anywhere.
Found a bank in which to change my American dollars to Egyptian pounds, or livre égyptienne, abbreviated everywhere as L.E. The French name is a throwback to the French colony days; a bartender later explained to us that the Egyptian people are subtly burned that their forerunners practically invented civilization, and then lost control of it to almost every other culture that walked by. There are (currently) five pounds to one dollar, and that's the only reason I could afford a trip like this on flight attendant pay, ha ha.
You might have caught the word Coptic in the previous entry, and I didn't know what it meant either. Means Christian, and though it is illegal in Egypt to promote Christianity, it is perfectly permissible to build churches and worship. There is a section of town called Coptic Cairo (or Old Cairo), and that's where we took a train to next.

This is the women's traincar. You can ride on whichever train you want if you're a woman, but you're likely to get harassed if you do, and so only women can ride the women's train. That's the downside of that young culture I was talking about... you know how boys who don't know how to talk to a girl they dig will pound on them on the playground because it's the only way they know to relate? Well, it can be like that when a girl walks down the street here. The men make this noise that I can only describe as 'hey baby' as spoken by a cobra... it's a stuttering hiss that probably hasn't ever impressed a woman ever. I wouldn't say it's a juvenile approach. Unsophisticated, simple, direct... those are things I'd say.
Coptic Cairo is laden with very old Christian churches, as you might imagine. The one we stopped into was St. Virgin Mary's Coptic Orthodox Church, also known as the Hanging Church, because it's balanced on top of the ruins of an ancient Roman fortress. The church itself is pretty old, going back to the fourth century.

Pretty amazing place. Again, it's not what the place is, but rather how long it's been there and what's happened in and around it.

They also seem to have a real thing for St. George in this church, one of the only saints I could pick out of a lineup. Here, St. George feeds a stick to a lizard.

Outside of the church is, surprise, a cemetery. Another thing that seems to be the same in other countries is people's need to build places to go to when they wish people weren't dead.

Stopped off for coffee right outside the church. They call a coffeeshop a kahua in Modern Standard Arabic (from the word for coffee), but an ahua in Egyptian dialect. So not only do you have to learn Arabic, you have to learn Egyptian Arabic. Which is scary only until you realize that someone from the Midwest would be confounded if a Southerner asked them to put awl in their car.

We were not the first to our table.

After that, we hit the local market. More shishas, more carvings. Found this mosque. Note the somewhat anachronistic neon sign and loudspeakers.

Also met this goat.

In one of the shops, we met Tariq, who asked us to call him Ta Ta, which neither of us could bring ourselves to do. He mentioned that he was closing early today because his first daughter had been born last night. Congratulations, we said. In his happiness, he had lowered prices... would we like to buy something? Lebowski bought a shisha (which, by the way, is a hookah [or water pipe], if I hadn't mentioned that yet), and I bought a carving of the god Seth, because he's the bad guy. And for the record, I'm not going to say that Ta Ta smoked Lebowski up right there in the damn shop, but I'm certainly not going to not say that.
We got roped into a perfume tent a few meters down the street. Got some Arabic lessons from the shopkeeper, and some culture. "We all like... like five fingers," he said, holding up a fat hand. "We all different, but we all the same." We mentioned that we had met Tariq.
"Tariq, he tell you he have daughter?" he says.
"Yes," we say.
"Tariq, he not even married," he laughs. Welcome to Egypt. Later we stopped by Tariq's place to pick up the stuff we'd left there, and Lebowski couldn't help relating the 'five fingers' anecdote, much to Tariq's face-falling.
You know how, in horror movies, you get into the bad situation you're in by having said previously, "Oh, let's just keep going. It's just a few more blocks." Well, that's how we got from the market to the hood. We just kept exploring until we realized we were completely lost and surounded by locals. Right as our sense of adventure congealed into absolute terror, a group of old and grizzled Egyptians beckoned us over to their ramshackle coffee table. Coffee appeared, and shisha, and the game was on. Somehow we got through an hour of conversation with a few older gentlemen with a full set of teeth between them, a few younger guys who assured us they were not Ali Baba, and several flocks of young kids in soccer jerseys who wanted nothing more to bop us lightly on the head and say, "You Amriki, ha!" One man kept pointing to me, making the international nose itching sign for cocaine, and saying, "You California, ha!" If you'd asked me what surreal meant one week before then, I would have provided the wrong answer.
At one point, one of the men quietly asked Lebowski if he wanted to buy a certain commodity. Lebowski did, and so he went away with him for the longest twenty minutes of my life. My Arabic was put to the test. But I survived, and so did he, and we left our new friends with thanks and well wishing and a small amount of certain commodity.
On the way back to civilization, we saw this:

Yes, that reads Subrman. Also, one of the tourist police, seeing that we were coming from a shady part of town, came to ask us if we were all right. Egypt has police, who wear black, and then a separate faction of police called tourist police, who wear white, and whose sole function is to protect feeble-minded tourists from getting welcomed to Egypt. We'll talk more about them later. We struck up the obligatory "You Amriki?" conversation, and talked for a few minutes. And when we left, he gave me the double face kiss. You know what that is... the European kiss on both cheeks thing. I definitely feel fortunate that I already knew what that was, because I'm not sure what would have happened had I freaked out while a rifle-carrying guy was trying to kiss me. But I threw him a quick double-peck back, and now all I have to do now is look at myself in the mirror every day for the rest of my life.
We headed back home, and the sun went down. Lebowski knew a girl who knew this other girl, and one or the other one of them was having a party that night in downtown Cairo. After an hour of trying to find out whether she had said 13 or 30 on the phone, we found the place, a swanky tenth-floor apartment. All nationalities were represented. Dutch guys, Swedish girls, Egyptians, an Alabaman, and various others; I personally struck up a conversation with an Irish Australian girl who spoke flawless Arabic. If you'd asked me what surreal meant three hours before then, I would have provided the wrong answer. I spent a while drinking a Stella (not Artois, just Stella... it's Arabic for 'crappy but local') and staring off the balcony into Cairo. Boats flashed neon from the Nile, horns honked from below, and signs I could not read offered me products I did not know. I was finally Elsewhere.
During a lull in the party, Kareem, one of Lebowski's Egyptian pals, grabbed us and led us to a rooftop bar where, over the late 90s strains of Backstreet Boys and Tracy Chapman, more shisha commenced. It's a thing you can get at any table at any restaurant in Cairo, from five star to wicker chairs. You just order it like a drink, the shisha, and what particular flavor tobacco you want. There's regular, apple, mango, and a few others. The popular one is apple, or tufah as they say. What you have to know about me is that I'm not a smoker. Never have been. I just prefer air is all, and with the high-speed acrobatics I sometimes perform, I usually need more of it than most humans. I have never smoked a cigarrette. Nary a breath of smoke has greeted these lungs. But there, on a rooftop bar in Cairo, I couldn't not try it. So I did. It was a little like a flaming shot of apple-flavored NyQuil. My esophagus buzzed for about two hours after. I don't think I'd ever do it again, but it wasn't all that bad. I much preferred making the aquaintance of Sakara, which is the other and more better local beer, named for one of the pyramid sites. It was during all this that Kareem let us in on the Egyptian secret of architecture. Most of the buildings you see downtown are in a state of low upkeep...

... and the reason for this, Kareem explained, is that there's a tax on buildings that are completed. So, they just construct a building about 80% or so, and then leave it. It does makes sense, but it's Egyptian sense.
When I left the bar, I was a little smarter, a little dumber, and very amused.
Finally it was time for bed. Or... couch. But first, I had to get through the shower ritual.

Cairo is not any hotter than Arizona, nor any more humid than Baton Rouge. It's just that you can take a shower pretty much anytime you want in the aforementioned places. If you're a foreigner in Egypt, taking a shower is pretty much a decontamination procedure in a hostile environment; the water has bad amoebas, and they will give you that thing you get when you go to other countries if you eat them. So you have to make damn sure your mouth is closed in the shower. Try remembering to do that next time you take a shower.
Luckily for me, Lebowski's bathroom was afflicted with what I termed 'nights and weekends water.' The showerhead provided a very unenthusiastic dribble of amoeba-laden water that became only slightly more enthusiastic around seven at night. That means that since very little water was coming out of the showerhead, very little water was going into that mouth of mine that was supposed to be closed. It was cold water, sure, but after a day in Africa, you kind of want that.
Drifted off that night to the sounds of Cairo again, slightly more at home than I was the night before.

Day 1 Of 7 - Cairo, City Of The Living

2008-06-30T15:15:00.028-06:00

Woke up early in the Colombian morning to catch a four hour flight from SLC to JFK in New York, and from there, a ten hour marathon to Cairo. The first leg was uneventful, but lemme tell you two words about the next leg; first class. How it works is that if there are any open seats in first class, they'll put employees there if we're traveling standby, I suppose in an effort to balance out the fact that, if there are no seats, we're stuck there at the airport.

First class on a 757 is large; not only does it have more seats than our turboprop plane, you could fit the whole turboprop plane inside it. The seats are less airplane seats and more recliners from The Sharper Image. There's a pop-up TV screen with free movies on it, and if you can figure out how to damn un-spring it from the armrest, the day is yours. I was a little apprehensive about being in an airplane for ten hours until I realized that I do that pretty much four days a week, and without sitting in a cool chair.
One of the things I will remember until I die is the sight of the continent on which I was born receding under me, giving way for the first time to strange new blue.
My embarrassing story about my first time in first class is this; when the FA came by to take my order for dinner, I picked the steak. Later she came by with a tray with shrimp on it. I'm a big believer that life sometimes gives you what you really wanted, so I shrugged and chowed down on the shrimp, and then folded up my tablecloth. The FA breezed by again and, seeing the folding, asked if I was not going to be joining them for dinner.
"Wasn't that it?" I asked.
Nope, she explained. Just the first course. Welcome to first class, ha ha (I'd probably be no good at the opera, either). This was a good steak, airplane or not. You're not allowed to drink while you're in uniform, which I was traveling in, but the funny thing about a uniform is that if you take off your epaulettes, you're no longer in uniform. Red wine, white wine... yeah, I had some of that.
After I made sure dinner had stopped arriving, I reclined the seat and slept fitfully over the Atlantic.
The sun rose way faster than I expected (since we were flying right at it), and we landed at Cairo International. A quick trip down the stairs and I stepped out onto Africa.

This is an entry visa for Egypt. As you can see, one can be yours for $15. After hearing the woes of people trying to get an American visa, I was unprepared to be able to just buy my way into a country.
My friend Lebowski was waiting at the airport. As is the way with old army buddies, we had previously hailed each other by last name, having lost our first names to our good Uncle. We recognized each other immediately, depite both of us having hair. He grabbed a cab and, on the way to his place (after more than a decade of knowing each other), we settled into first names.
Cabs are cars, and cars in Egypt are crazy. I'm sure you've heard stories about how they drive in other countries. Stories with words in them like unsafe, reckless, and deadly. I'm here to tell you those words are untrue. Alarming, maybe. In Egypt, there is no such thing as your driver's ed instructor's 'space cushion.' It just isn't there. They drive right up until they almost touch another car, and then stop. It's the only way to merge the way they do it. You see, there are no lanes, no stop signs, and no traffic lights. They drive by flocking. At different times, roads are two, three, four, or five cars across, depending on the collective intelligence of the drivers on the road. Traffic circles are one way and two way depending on who needs to go where. Horns are less an expression of anger and more echolocation. At times, our driver would mumble a request to merge to the driver to his left, who was five feet away from him through both their windows. It was amazing to watch.

Lebowski's place is awesome. It's a small furnished flat on the fifth floor of a building in downtown Cairo. As I discovered, certain words mean different things in different places, one of which is furnished. In America, it means having furniture placed in the apartment by the landlord. In Cairo, it means having the stuff the previous tenant left behind. None of this stuff was Lebowski's. In fact, there was a bench with a secret compartment under the seat, and inside, Lebowski and his girl discovered letters from the 70s detailing a romance between a former denizen and his lady. He's planning a book about that.
What I haven't told you so far is how you have to get to the fifth floor. There is an elevator. Lebowski called it the Elevator Of Death. You see, the door to get into it is not part of the elevator. It's a glass door that belongs to the floor it's on, and when the elevator starts moving, you can reach out and touch the door as it vanishes below you. You can touch the concrete floors as they go by. It would not be a stretch to lose your arm in this way, nor would it be a stretch to open the door on the seventh floor and fall to your death into the shaft. Just a week before I got there, Lebowski was present for a rescue mission involving a little girl who had gotten stuck in the EOD and had climbed out of a hole in the ceiling and was screaming from the roof.
Incidentally, the ground floor button read T, which we reasoned stood for The Ground Floor.

Lebowski and I caught each other up on our post-army lives on the balcony. From there, you can see a Coptic Church (that clock tower on the left), and any number of people milling about five stories below.

You can also see the smallest mosque in Egypt, which is right below his flat. This will be important later.
After I took a short and well-advised nap, we grabbed a cab and and headed out. First stop was Talat Harb square, home of one of those amusing traffic circles, and also where we picked up Lebowski's girl. Then we blasted over to a market called Khan al Khalili. Picture the French Quarter done up in Islam Onion Top and you've about got it. The trash must be mentioned here, because here's the first time I noticed it. Cairo is beset with trash. Besotted. There are piles of garbage hip-high in the streets. I was carrying an empty water bottle and looking for a garbage can, and as a ploy to get me into a shop, one of the merchants took it from me, saying, "Here, I throw away for you," and lobbed it over his shoulder. At first I thought typical American thoughts like, 'Why don't they clean up their trash?' But then it slowly dawned on me that that's just how they do over here. I'll clean up my USA streets, and you can do yours like you wanna. Live and let live. The cats must also be mentioned. No wonder the ancient Egyptians worshipped cats; every time they tried to worship something else, one of the sixty million cats got in the way of it and was accidentally worshipped. These are not fluffy American kittens... these are rode-hard-and-hung-up-wet killers done up in Canopic jar sleek. They'll let you pet them, but if they sense food (or fear), they'll have an artery open before your heart causes that to be a problem.
The merchants are hilarious. To get you into their booth, they'll say anything. "What you need? I have what you need. You don't think about payment. How much you want to pay?" I don't look remotely Egyptian, so inevitably the conversation turned to where I was from. "You Amriki?" they would ask, and when I nodded, they would welcome me to Egypt. A word about this welcome. I didn't know it then, but in the coming days I would come to understand that WELCOME TO EGYPT is sort of code for YOU'RE ABOUT TO BE TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF or HEADS UP, GUYS, WE GOT A SUCKER HERE. Most of them made sure I knew they were not Ali Baba. "I not rip you off, I no Ali Baba!" It was great fun to let them tell me a price and point at them slyly, saying, "You're Ali Baba, aren't you? You are!" and watch them shrug back with, "No! No Ali Baba!" Another thing they tended to do is assure me that I was going to get an 'Egyptian price.' "You no worry, you no pay a lot. I give you Egyptian price." For what that means, see WELCOME TO EGYPT.
Occasionally, they would for no reason I could discern, welcome me to Alaska.
After looking over a lot of small carvings of ancient Egyptian gods, tiny pyramids, lamps and shishas, we cabbed home and realized we were hungry. Lebowski mentioned a few options, and one of them, believe it or not, was McDonalds. I know, I know, I came halfway across the damn world to experience new things... but I felt that that one of those things was 'how the hell do they do McDonalds in Egypt?' and so I caved.

McDonalds damn delivers to your door in Egypt. Kofta is a meat food which contains lamb and goat, and the whole thing was wrapped in pita bread. This was my first inkling that every country in the world has Mexican food. Pretty good. We washed that all down with a couple of Bebsis. What are those, you ask? Factor in that Arabic has no P sound, and you'll get the picture.

Then it was time for bed. I stretched out on the couch next to the air conditioner, which in Cairo is an open balcony, and for the first time in my life, fell asleep under an Eastern sky.

Egypt, Or Why I Went There In The First Place

2008-06-28T10:09:00.000-06:00

Well, those of you who speculated in an African direction were correct; I went to Egypt. But why pick Egypt for a first trip outside North America, you ask? Well, I'll tell you. I caught up with an old army buddy by email recently, and he happened to be studying Arabic in Cairo, and as I happen to have a) not seen him in twelve years, and b) fly places very cheaply, I decided to see what sand tastes like over there. What follows is a slightly inaccurate and very long-winded account of my week in Egypt. Prepare yourselves.

Sprechen Sie Stupid

2008-06-25T10:02:00.002-06:00

The other day I noticed that the passenger safety card reads "any passenger that does not speak or read English must not sit in an exit row" in three languages. The funny part is that one of the three languages in which it does so is English. That's not going to stop a Spanish speaker from letting me know he's in the wrong row. What it's going to do is confound me for hours each day as I try to figure out exactly who the target audience of that one English sentence is.

Much Ado About Buttons

2008-06-23T09:55:00.001-06:00

There are a lot of buttons in the galley. Hardly any of them do anything. Turn the potable water on and off. Heater on and off (which doesn't actually work, necessitating the 'bag of coffee' trick). Light on and off. However, on the third or fourth leg when I start to get really bored, I start working the buttons like they really do do something as passengers are enplaning. I mean like I'm in a Navy jet. Like three buttons with one hand and two more with the opposite elbow, like I'm rebooting Windows. "Welcome aboard, sir... wait, hold on a sec... OK, got it. Welcome aboard." Behaving like this does three things. One, it amuses me. Two, it makes the passengers think I am way more technically proficient than I am. Three, it instantly identifies other flight attendants traveling out of uniform, because they're the ones looking at me funny for wrestling with the coffee machine drain valve.

Where The Hell Will Phil BE

2008-06-16T02:26:00.003-06:00

Typhoid and tetanus, left arm. Hepatitis A and B, right arm. Two weeks from now, I'm finally leaving the continent for the first time in my life. Can anyone guess where I'm going? Those of you who know, keep everybody else in suspense.

How Your Angels Get Down Like That?

2008-06-14T21:53:00.000-06:00

Saw Cameron Diaz at an airport in the Northwest. She looked a lot like Cameron Diaz.

Music For A Space Train

2008-06-12T02:31:00.001-06:00

WARNING: If you don't already think I'm a dork, you will after this entry.
Anyone who has ever seen a minute or two from Avatar: The Last Airbender or Naruto will know that Japanese animation has a distinct look. Those who go back far enough to have seen Voltron will know that a little better. If you remember Battle of the Planets or saw the first run of Speed Racer, you know that even more better. Japanese people and American comic book hounds call this stuff anime. But in 1977, a Japanese comic book artist named Leiji Matsumoto let loose with a movie version of the TV show he had spawned with a long-running comic book series called Galaxy Express 999, and it was the first anime I had ever seen while I was old enough to think, and I don't think it's too much poetry to say it changed me.
Again, my mother's fault. My dad had come across a betamax copy of Star Wars (this was before it was Star Wars Episode 4: A New Hope) and instantly regretted it because, from then on, I watched it seven times a day for several years. In what I suspect was an effort to wean me onto something anything else, my mother sat me down one day in front of Showcase (the forerunner to HBO for those of you who thought HBO was the forerunner), and said, "Here's a new cartoon, it looks interesting!"
It was. It's the story of an orphan named Joey Hannacannabobbakannana Smith, whose mother was killed for sport by the evil Count Mecha, who is (wait for it) a machine person. A mysterious woman named Maetel appears and gives him a ticket to the famed Galaxy Express (which is a steam train that travels through space, naturally) so he can get a machine body in order to better take on the Count. Along the way he meets up with a space Swede named Olaf, a potato-looking gunslinger named Sundown McMoon, and legendary space pirates Captain Warlock and Queen Emereldas. And he also sees that becoming a machine saps your humanity, much to the later chagrin (and eventual destruction) of the entire machine factory planet. This was animation, but not like ours; people got naked, bled, and died (not always in that order), and a twelve-year-old kid with a cosmo pistol was more than enough bodyguard for anyone. My mother instantly regretted sitting me down in front of this movie because, from then on, I alternated Galaxy Express and Star Wars seven times a day for several years.
I was in high school when Japanese animation finally hit our shores with enough force to stick. Suddenly Blockbuster had an anime section, and it was then that I learned that each English-dubbed version of an anime had an original Japanese counterpart, and that they were not always alike. For example, Joey's actual name was just Tetsuro, and they just used that long and silly name to cover up some vile things he said that they didn't want to translate. Olaf was definitely not Swedish (nor was his name Olaf), Sundown's name was Tochiro, and he didn't actually die of what the English version called "an incurable space disease," and Captain Harlock most definitely did not talk like John Wayne. Several characters changed the plot slightly by saying completely different things, a few characters got clipped unfairly, and what I think is the climax of the entire film got scrapped altogether.
One thing that was the same in both versions was the music. Composed by a guy named Nozomu Aoki, this was like no cartoon score I'd ever heard. Sure, with the benefit of 30 years of hindsight, some of it sounds like the Love Boat, but aside from the bongos and the jazzy trumpets, this stuff is fantastic. Tetsuro's lone cello motif is adventurous and tragic at the same time, Maetel's high violin hints at a past Tetsuro can never quite regain, and Harlock's battle march is cheesy enough for a pirate who steers his spaceship with an outboard boat wheel and still somehow you can't stop humming it. Most people know that John Williams uses something called leitmotif to describe movie characters with musical themes, but Aoki also uses it to describe places; several cues will pass in one location before you realize it's all been the same theme, but orchestrated differently; for example, in Count Mecha's Time Castle (ain't sci-fi great?) the same slow creepy music that underscores Tetsuro's infiltration later becomes the pizzicato rhythm during their shootout, and also the off-kilter violin background for a certain character's tremulous suicide march.
The music is the reason I'm bothering to bother you all with any of this. You see, I'm a big fan of film scores, and after searching for this one for most of my life (first on record, then on cassette, and now on CD), I have finally found it. I'm listening to it right now. I doubt that any of you have seen this movie (with the exception of L.M., who has seen it enough for all of you). And even if a few of you have, I doubt you remember the music. But if there's even one of you that does and wants to know where to get it, after decades, I can finally tell you where.

Flight Attendants Do It Faster

2008-06-11T02:26:00.000-06:00

Also want to take a moment to say that I regularly go five hundred miles an hour. I think that's cool. It certainly does somehow make picking up mysteriously damp napkins up off the carpet while on my hands and knees a little easier to take.

Tempting Fate With Vegetables

2008-06-11T02:24:00.000-06:00

Just wanted to let you all know that, for the first time since I was nearly destroyed in March, I drank a can of tomato juice. This is less bragging and more just so someone will know it wasn't drugs when I turn up dead in my LA hotel room tomorrow afternoon.

Don't Let The Door Hit You!

2008-06-10T00:45:00.004-06:00

Again, I must tell you that I engage in hyperbole a lot. Most of the things I've posted about on this blog never happened, and of those, none of them happened anywhere near like I said they did. But today, I deftly avoided serious physical harm, and again it had to do with the aircraft door.
We pick up the aircraft in the morning, and there's a little yellow sticker on the door-closing button. The FAA is mad about little yellow stickers. That's what they put on anything that doesn't work. It's got a little number on it which doesn't mean anything to anyone, and the cryptic phrase INOP. We theorize that it means inoperative. But if you can put a seventeen-digit number with four hyphens on the sticker, can't you just spring for the whole word 'inoperative?' INOP has become an industry-wide joke. "Sorry if I can't count the passengers today, my brain's INOP." "We're not getting out of here today, one of the wings is INOP." And so on.
I digress. And now I'm going to digress further, to tell you how the door-closing button works. It's hydraulic, and the amount of power used to close the door is variable, based on how the pilots set it. So if the door isn't lifting all the way up to where I can grab it and shut it, I get to scream at the pilots, "IT'S NOT WORKING! I NEED MORE POWER!" I love it when I get to do that.
Anyway, the door is not lifting at all on this particular day. And when that happens, you need to get one of the rampers to close it for you when you're ready to close up. I had never actually done this before. When we were ready to go, I flag down a ramper who happens to be a nine-foot Samoan chick, who gives me a stoic nod when I ask her if she can close the door.
Like I said, what usually happens when I press the button is that the door lifts up to where I can grab it, and then I shut it by hand. That requires me to be right there in the doorway. However, when the rampers close the door (as I found out today), they lift it up until they can fit under it, and then dive at it like a cannonball, slamming it so hard that the entire plane rattles. It is important to note that at no time during this violent process can they see if a flight attendant is in the doorway.
The bottom step of the door is, when closed, forehead level. It's solid steel, with an edge as bluntly sharp as the devil's sense of humor.
You can see what's going to happen here.
I sure didn't. I saw the door come up, heard the servos whining way faster than I had ever heard before, and then a voice in my head screamed BE SOMEWHERE ELSE RIGHT NOW. It's that same voice cats hear, and I did the same thing they do when they hear it; I flung myself somewhere anywhere, which happened to be back across the galley, and the door crashed shut in my wake. It is with no hyperbole that I state that, had that thing hit me, it would have broken my skull. And had I survived that, I would have carried an awesome pirate scar for the rest of my can't-feed-myself life.
The other flight attendant had been on her way to the galley when this happened, and she actually had to dive out of my way when I dove out of the door's way. And she turned to the passengers in first class when everything stopped moving and asked, "Did you guys see that?"
And all of them said in unison, "Yes we did!"
Like I always tell people these days, it's nice to finally have a job where my agility counts.

What Do I Have To Do To Get A Drink Around Here?

2008-06-07T00:13:00.004-06:00

This is how my life works.
We get to LAX at around nine PM. What you have to know is that the van driver for the hotel in which we stay here is legally stupid. Instead of oh, I don't know, stopping at the hotel shuttle stop (which, by the way, is called a STOP), he just slows down and looks the wrong way to see when he can get back into traffic. This, while you're waving at him to pick you the hell up. I have had to chase this guy more than once. I love throwing a few rapid-fire right hooks at the glass van door while he's going fifteen MPHs, because he's never really expecting someone to knock on the door while he's moving. I guess we're not supposed to do anything other than just stand there confused while he drives off to smoke weed with all of his other van-driving buddies. You should really see the look on this jackhole's face when I do that. And then while he pushes us over trying to get to our suitcases, hoping for a tip so he can buy more weed, he explains (in an accent that derives from no country anywhere) that he's not supposed to stop wherever we happened to be standing that time.

DUMB: No you see, no you see, I canna stahp dah. I canna stahp dah. No leega.
ME: You mean, the Hotel Shuttle Stop?

It's always this game in LA. Call the hotel, they say they a van is already there. You call them on that, and they say, oh no, I'm sorry, Mr. McFly, I meant, I meant a shuttle will be there in fifteen minutes, and we're just starting on the second coat. An hour later, Jackhole the Van Driver blasts by ignoring you. And if you're new to this game, it can last all day. That's the fun, you see.
So you know what kind of mood I was already in at ten fifteen when I finally got to the hotel and my fifth floor room. All I wanted was a drink. That's all. Not even a real drink; a Sprite, for crying out loud. I gather some non-Canadian change and go out to the vending machine. I press the Sprite button to make sure it's not sold out, and it shows a price. Great. I toss some money in. SOLD OUT, it says after I've pumped in several hundred nickels. Holding back a roundhouse kick, I get my change back and head down to the fourth floor. This mother says SOLD OUT already. I hike up to the sixth floor. SOLD OUT.
Seventh floor, SOLD OUT.
Eight floor, SOLD OUT.

Ninth... floor... SOLD... OUT.

Tenth... floor...

And so the tour de hotel went, until the twelfth floor machine finally coughed up a Sprite. At this point, I was boiling mad, because my personal philosophy is that any machine that does not perform its function should be destroyed, publicly and immediately. Remote doesn't work? Burn it. Cell phone doesn't get reception? Shatter it. Printer doesn't work? Stomp it. I mean, you got one thing to do in life, and you don't do it. Like, say, a van driver that doesn't pick up people. So I let loose with that roundhouse kick. It makes an extremely satisfying THUCKA-thucka-thucka up and down the hall. And then... THEN... there's someone there to attend to the machine.

WELL MUSCLED HOTEL CLERK: Everything all right, sir?
ME: ..................

It was evident to me that no one had been to service these machines in a long while. And as soon as I kick one, there's a guy there to defend it. Never mind that I shouldn't be kicking things in public. ALSO never mind that this was the one machine that had actually worked. Actually, maybe it was just karma for being dumb in public. Never mind. Pretend I didn't write this.

Product Placement

2008-06-04T15:19:00.002-06:00

From the Phoenix Airport, where they know who likes what:

And While We're Calling Attention to Different Names For Things...

2008-06-03T14:32:00.004-06:00

... back home it was the 'interstate,' but here in the West it's the 'freeway.' I forget if I've mentioned that. Makes no sense to me, because in Louisiana it doesn't cost anything to use them, and I know you can get into another state on them here. Boggles what little mind I have left.

Utah Department Of Unsubtlety

2008-06-03T14:16:00.000-06:00

Back in Louisiana, they would always announce a 'traffic accident' on the radio traffic report. Here in Utah, they call it a 'crash.' That's why I love Utah; the Man is there to stop you from drinking real beer, but he's got no problem with anyone broadcasting a mental picture of fire and eyeballs for the young and traumatizable masses. Cheers!

Aisle Racer GO!

2008-06-01T21:25:00.004-06:00

When you see me in uniform, you might think I'm a professional with my mind rooted firmly in my job and my priorities in place. This is what you're supposed to think. What I'm actually doing, while you're inside the terminal thinking this, is running full tilt up and down the aisle in the empty plane. It's one of the more unexpectedly thrilling things I have access to these days. The armrests are damn two feet apart, and at full speed, if I make the slightest miscalculation, I end up upside-down in a window seat three rows back with a splintered tibia and my severed patella jammed into my ear.
The pilots hate this. Even though the plane weighs several tons, I'm enough to bounce it like a trailer you're not currently invited to.
Now if you ever board a plane and the flight attendant is breathing hard, you'll know what's up.

Air India

2008-05-25T21:37:00.001-06:00

Coming back from Vancouver to L.A., I expected another random celebrity. What there was instead of that was fifty Indian folk. There are two things I noticed on this flight. The first is that Indian folk all seem to immediately take their shoes off on a plane. The second is something I've decided to call Curry Feet.
That said, I had a ball. I used to know a girl who taught me enough Hindi to get in trouble, and so when the guy in the last row decided he was going to try to knock the props out from under me in Hindi, I answered back, and BOOP I have fifty uproariously laughing Indian friends. "You come India," this guy continues. "Not bad plane like this. Big plane India. You friend! You come India!"
It's always a party on that flight.

Vancouver By The Spokes

2008-05-24T21:48:00.004-06:00

This last month I bid for Vancouver trips, and boy did I get 'em. I was in Vancouver every time I took a breath. And so this last time, I actually got out of the hotel room and got into it.
Took a bus downtown to the island. That's what the locals called it, 'the island.' How you're gonna drive a bus to an island is beyond me, but after half an hour and no water, we got there. Hit a bike shop and rented some hideous bikes, along with some equally hideous helmets. Vancouver has a helmet law, and this law ensured I didn't talk to a single girl the entire sojourn.

The bike shop folks pointed us towards a place called Prospect Point. What, I decided after an hour pedaling uphill, they had omitted in their information was that Prospect Point is a damn hour uphill. It was worth it, though... the restaurant at the top is the literal high point of Vancouver, and the view is astounding. We sat on a balcony that juts out over the road we'd just biked up, and out past the trees was the harbor, and then the Pacific. Fantastic.

Also met a beluga whale at the Vancouver Aquarium. Here, she's saying hi. That's a fat whale.

After a harrowing ten-minute traffic slalom back down the hill, we traded in the bikes for the keys to the city streets. Got a faceful of chocolate cake at a place called True Confections. One of the crew split off to take the bus home, and the beer drinking then commenced. It gets a little hazy after that, but what I think I remember is that we sampled a Canadian beer that you should never ever drink. Unfortunately, what I know happened is that I forgot the name of this beer. And so I apologize to Aviatrix and all my Canadian readers for this lack of warning.
Vancouver is awesome. I can see why so many people rave about it. There's still a crazy bridge there that I'm told I have to see, but beyond that, Vancouver is done.

The March For World Domination Continues

2008-05-15T00:13:00.001-06:00

Someone in Hawaii is reading. Another Australian. There's one in Sweden. And is that the Philippines? This is cool. Say hello, all. And not to be leaving out the folk in the Americas who have carried my collection of airplane dumbness far and wide. I can barely see the U.S. for all the readers... awesome!
Need to find me some Russians. Or Chinese people. Or Indians. Now that I think about it, perhaps that continent's a dead spot because none of those languages use our letters. Or maybe vodka and mah jongg are just more fun than this blog. Consensus?

Don't Tell Me What I Can't Do

2008-05-13T23:58:00.000-06:00

My loyal diehards will remember that when I first moved to SLC and really didn't even live anywhere yet, I bought a huge widescreen TV. Priorities are what made me do that. However, while most people watch TV on TV, I don't. Video games and DVDs are what that thing is for... it's never recieved a broadcast signal.
Until now.
Recently I became a 'Lost'-head. I think it was genetic. I haven't watched TV since the Army cured me of it in 1995. But one morning in March, I just woke up needing to know what the hell those people were doing on the island. So I found the ABC website and whomped through one season a week until I was caught up, and then stayed current by watching new episodes on TV in hotels or watching them online the next day. I am not a patient person, so when I'm not on a trip and have to wait a whole day to see an episode, I just sort of stare at the screen all night, imagining what's going to happen on the show and lamenting that I haven't bought an antenna yet. Well, last week, it occurred to me that while my TV doesn't have an antenna, my stereo does. So I did some wire-yanking and re-configurating, and lo, we get signal. So I watched my first TV show on my own TV. And it only took two years!

Any 'Lost' fans out there? Identify yourselves.

NOT Cleared To Taxi

2008-05-11T23:52:00.003-06:00

I always bag on airport personnel other than FAs. Well, now I'm gonna bag on us. One of us, actually, and not me. A pilot told me a story the other day in which a new FA, having just gotten her ID that lets her down onto the runway, threw on some sweats and went jogging on the runway. After the damn police tanks surrounded her, she explained that it just seemed like a great place to run.
For some reason, I just have this feeling those sweats were velour and had PINK printed across the butt.

As Close As You Wanna Get

2008-05-09T22:04:00.007-06:00

Those of you who watch the news know there's been a lot of tornadoes lately. Know where those things come from? Not the tornado factory. That's what I thought too. They actually come from clouds that pilots call cells. So when there's bad weather, what you have is one or two jerk cells hovering over your city throwing tornadoes at you all day. A few days ago, we flew over one of these things at night, and I had the chance to break out the camera; yes, it is sixty seconds of a black cloud at night, but the every-now-and-then lightning is pretty cool.

WARNING: usually, there's an obscure association hidden in the titles of my entries, so if they don't make sense, think about it for a while. Not so with the music over the videos. It's just what's in my head as I'm editing. Don't blow a gasket looking for higher meaning.

A Wise Guy

2008-05-07T10:16:00.001-06:00

Seem to be getting celebrities like mad now that the gate is open. Ray Wise sat down in first class the other day. You may not recognize the name, but you've definitely seen him in something; among one thousand other things, he was Leland Palmer from 'Twin Peaks,' and is now V.P. Hal Gardner on '24.' But what I recognized him from was his turn as bad guy Leon Nash from RoboCop, one of my all-time favorite movies.

He was a very polite and intelligent guy, which threw me off, because Leon was a total sleaze. Taught me a few things about how bad chlorine is in drinking water. Broke my own rule and told him I liked him in RoboCop, and he said being in that was great fun.
Come on, Mark Hamill. Come on Mark Hamill.

Humor For The Obtuse

2008-05-06T10:15:00.001-06:00

Today there was a Finnish girl in the last row. Anyone else think that's funny?

REMEMBER THE... SOMETHING!

2008-05-04T00:16:00.006-06:00

Every time you overnight in San Antonio, there's always talk of going to the Riverwalk. Somehow, it never happens. Some pilot's meeting up with his wife, someone's a slam-clicker, the world is ending, something. But this last time, the other three crewmembers were go, and damn if I'm gonna mess that up. So we hopped a bus and blasted downtown.
We found this charming but cannon-holed mission on the way there. Can't remember the name. But there was a big fight there. General Santa Ana (who was a Scientologist) won that fight, even though his troops were wearing appallingly hot and unfashionable wool uniforms. The place is smaller than it looks on TV, though the actual borders of the mission extend a lot further. And present day San Antonio has encroached on it so much that it's actually hidden between banks and coffeeshops. Guess there's no market for conquering religious outposts these days. But if there's ever an opportunity to go down swinging in a fight to the last man at McDonalds, I'll be there, and on the losing side.

Inside, it looks like this.

And also like this.

And this too.

After that, it was Riverwalk time. For those of you who have never been there, it's not just a clever name... you actually walk along a river. Couldn't tell you what one, but it is a river. I have a proof.

It's a clever setup. You go down to steps from street level to get there, and each time you come to a street, you go under a bridge. So it actually happens right in the middle of town, but doesn't take up any room.

It's a beautiful walk. Trees, water, stone walkways, hot chicks, everything. We stopped in at a Mexican place (imagine that) for lunch, and when I say one, I mean two; the wait was so long that we split up and got in two different lines at two different places, and then jammed on the one that buzzed us first. There's lots of stores too, and hotels. One day, I'm gonna go stay a few days at the Riverwalk... that would be cool.
Also, there are ducks there too. Why did I never notice this about America?

Another thing about San Antonio is that there's a new Raising Cane's at the airport. I have so far enlightened several pilots. And yet another thing is that there's a Pappadeaux there. Really good Cajun food. I actually bid several San Antonio trips this month just to go back there. Ate dinner there with a Canadian FA, and she had never seen anyone eat boiled crawfish. Having grown up in Louisiana, I'd never thought about it, but as I saw the face she made when they brought it to the table, I realized that yes, I am preparing to eat a heaping plateful of bugs.
Ate 'em anyway. I'm good people.

This Winter In Snowboarding

2008-05-02T20:38:00.005-06:00

Instead of making you all endure a snowboard update every two minutes or so, I figured I'd wait till the end of the season and write one big cohesive blowout. That way, if I died an ignominous death at the hands of frozen water, you wouldn't hear about it.
This was the first year I got to try out my new rig... a pair of Burton Moto boots and Burton Mission bindings on a 2008 Burton Air snowboard. The boots and bindings I got last year at a Spring sale, where amazingly I met Casey, an old friend of mine from Baton Rouge who'd moved here to Utah while I wasn't looking. Like right down the damn street here in Utah. The board is new, and has kind of a story... the short version is my mother bought it for me, and the long version is that my mother's father, who skied right up until he died, smiled down on her as she bought it for me with her inheritance. And so it's kind of a gift from both of them, and I often thought of them as I was blasting out of control down the mountain this season.
This was also the first year I went snowboarding with a goatee. Discovered that it actually freezes to your face above a certain altitude. And it feels frozen for the rest of the day; it's like a phantom ice beard for hours after you've thawed.

Last year I didn't really venture past the kiddie slope, but this year I went higher, prodded by boarder Casey, his girlfriend Roxy (a lifelong skier whom he calls the Queen of Death), and my own pride. Caromed down steeper runs, and learned a little more control at higher speeds. Learned about a little thing called ice face. Ice face is when you wipe out and your board sprays snow all over your face. It seems kinda funny and innocuous, but then the pain begins... it's ice, and it's on your face (hence the name), and you can't get it off because you have gloves on. So you have to sit there with your face freezing off, waving your arms and keening like a fairy, until it melts. Solution: do not wipe out.

Also saw something I can only describe as a bra tree. Again, it's a fairly straightforward name... on one of the lifts, you pass over a tree strung with about fifty brassieres. After much internet research, I discovered that brassieres come from naked girls, which are about the last things you would expect to encounter outside in the winter, much less in groups of fifty. I cannot account for this tree. However, I kept a close eye on it.
I also learned how to drive (and how not to drive) up a mountain in snow. It's a spooky feeling to try to pass a bus on a mountain road and suddenly your wheels start spinning and you start drifting backwards. Another dumb thing I did was slide into a snowbank. I was wheeling into the parking lot, and as I made the turn, my wheels thought it would be funny to go a different direction, and they drifted me into a ten foot wall of snow. Couldn't get the car out... wheels would only spin. And naturally, there was a whole parking lot full of people there to laugh at me when I finally tunneled out the window. Luckily, several of those people were buff college guys who helped extricate my car while I maintained a high state of embarrassment.

The last time I went out this season, Casey and the QOD brought me up the the tip-top of Snowbird. You can see over the whole Salt Lake valley, all the way to the mountains on the other side. It's a jaw-dropping view. And the ride down is equally as jaw-dropping, but in a different way... your jaw gets blown off your face by the sheer speed. There were several times I was sure I was going to die. On a narrow path with a wall of ice on one side and a steep cliff on the other, you can't brake... all you can do is continue going the speed of sound and not turn. But I learned as I went, through powder and ice, and though I had some pretty spectacular falls, I kept up with Casey and the Queen, and made it to the bottom each time. And now I can say I'm an intermediate snowboarder.
Next year, double black diamond. I am unstoppable.

That Was Easy!

2008-05-01T23:11:00.000-06:00

400!

2008-04-25T00:14:00.000-06:00

Can't believe it's been a hundred posts since that dumb 300 picture I put up. Couldn't think of anything significant about the number 400, so I'm just going to say yay 400.

The Dumbest Cab Driver On Planet Earth

2008-04-24T23:50:00.001-06:00

I can't even believe this happened.
We finish the day in San Antonio, and it's midnight when we get out of the airport. The hotel shuttles usually pick us up, but they stop running at midnight, and so the standard procedure is to grab a cab and the hotel pays for it. We know that. Cabbies know that. We approach this cab guy, who looks at us like we're trash and indelicately lobs our suitcases in the back. The crew shares a look at that point which says there goes the tip. We get to the hotel and as we're getting our own stuff out of the cab so as to prevent any further cab driver damage, I explain to him that they'll pay him at the desk.
"No, I no go eensigh. Joo paigh me here," this man says.
"All you have to do," I repeat slowly, "is take the reciept inside, and the guy at the desk will pay you. The hotel is paying for you to bring us here."
"I no go eensigh," he says with a defiant foot stamp. "Joo have to paigh me ousigh."
"It's ten feet to the desk," I say. "We'll even show you the way."
Defiance. Foot stamp.
The captain intercedes with very little effect. In fact, the only effect this intercession has is to further enrage the cabbie. He shouts, "Joo saigh you would paigh me!" This is actually something none of us said, because we knew the hotel was going to paigh him. And while he's shouting this, he's trying to point at the one of us that said that thing we didn't say, and can't figure out which one of us actually spoke to him at the airport. He just keeps repeating that one of us said we would pay him and pointing back and forth between us. We eventually just headed inside, thinking that he would follow, and then get paid at the desk when we all arrived there. Instead, he stood right there by the cab, shouting that we needed to pay him.
While we signed in at the desk, I peeked out the window. He was just sitting there in the cab, not at all coming inside. He was still there when we got in the elevator.
Does any of you have any idea what the hell this was all about? It's killing me.

Will Ya Wait Already?

2008-04-22T23:45:00.003-06:00

Today, during the captain's howdy speech, this customer service agent gets on the plane after we've gotten everyone on board and wants me to make an announcement to see if a particular passenger is on this plane. I say sure, and stand there to wait until the captain is done. But the CSA stares at me for a moment, then makes little shooing motions. She wants me to make the announcement now. On top of the captain's announcement. Besides that being a technical impossibility because of the way the interphone works, it would be just plain rude. And every one of you has been blasted into the next seat by the way-too-loud speakers we announce over; there's no way this lady didn't realize there was an announcement already going on.
There's a planet CSAs come from. But it isn't this one.

The Exit Row Sleeper

2008-04-21T23:36:00.004-06:00

Checking with the exit row passengers is something I usually approach with a feeling somewhere between trepidation and outright annoyance. See, there's up to four people I have to put this question to: "Are you willing and able to assist in an emergency?" And very few just say yes. We're about to take off, and they want to chat with you. Or they don't want to actually say yes. Or they want to make you ask them again because of the 'times question repeated = personal importance' formula. But my favorite... my absolute favorite is the jackhole who's sleeping in the exit row. I don't want to shake this guy awake because he might have just closed his eyes for a moment, so I ask the question loudly, hoping to snap him awake. That never works, because he's always in a coma. So I get three almost-yesses from the other people and then have to wake this guy up and ask a second time.
You know exactly what he does then; blearily finds me with his eyes, squints, sniffs, and says, "Whaa?" This makes me ask a third time, and by that time I'm ready to just throw him out the emergency exit then.
Why can't we just put passengers in cryo-sleep like in space movies?

FAIL

2008-04-19T02:13:00.002-06:00

You can find some pretty funny stuff on the internet. For example, look up 'FAIL.' You'll find pictures of all sorts of dumb things people have done while they were attempting to do something cooler, and these pictures are only eclipsed in mirth by ones found while searching for 'EPIC FAIL.' Here's one I found that applies to me (and no I did not do this).