Travel

That was my first impression of Anaheim, and nothing I saw in the subsequent five-days did much to revise that initial judgment. Granted, I saw only a narrow slice of the area (basically, a two-mile stretch of Harbor Blvd.), but what I did see looked eerily similar (except for the foliage) to the suburban hell in which I grew up and from which I spent my twenties trying to escape. ...

I am in California (Anaheim or to be really precise, Garden Grove) for the Association for Educational Communication and Technology conference. There's an odd disjunction (mentioned by Stephen Downes in his opening keynote Wednesday night) between the sedate academic atmosphere of the conference and the natural disaster taking place all around us. While Anaheim proper has not been hit by the wildfires, you can smell and often see the smoke from them when you are outside. The view flying into John Wayne Airport was even more striking. It's strange to have that kind of destruction hovering just at the edge of your consciousness while sitting in a presentation on, for example, knowledge life-cycles....

I am just back from an all-too-brief trip to the New Jersey shore (my people simply call it "the shore") for a multitude of birthdays: daughter's, father's, niece's and nephew's are all within a few days of each other. Besides the family time, the trip was a whirlwind tour of beloved foods that, if they exist at all outside of New Jersey/the Delaware Valley, do so only as pale shadows of their true essence: paper-thin slices of Nirvana from Mack and Manco's and a brimming tub of caramel decadence from Johnson's on the Ocean City boardwalk; a perfect turkey hoagie (no cheese, no mayo, just a dash of oil and vinegar) from Brady's Hoagie Dock; a trio of Philly soft pretzels from a stand in the airport. ...

Oops. Looks like I slept through the month of June without blogging. And I can't blame ill health either. For one reason or another, I got off to a slow start the first couple weeks, and then was on my vacation in Paris (poor me) with just limited enough Internet access to justify blowing off the month entirely. I am back home now, though, and have every intention of buckling down and getting back to my previous standard of erratic posting. ...

Last week was our spring break, which we spent in Germany visiting relatives. It was one of those trips I deride others for making—we spent almost as much time on planes and in airports as we did actually visiting—but we were fulfilling family obligations and were working within a limited window. We did manage to take a little side-trip by train to Hannover to visit an old friend of Sylvia's, and I was struck yet again by the difference between Germany's rail network and our own. In Germany, one feels that one can get almost anywhere by train, stations are central and easy to access, and tickets are relatively inexpensive (we used the Niedersachsen-Ticket for our trip: 26€ [approx. $35] for the entire family any distance within Lower Saxony, including Hamburg and Bremen). America is big and things are spread out, but even in a dense commuter corridor like the northeast, I've found trains to be inconvenient and severely limited. Getting to Manhattan from where my parents live in South Jersey necessitates driving into downtown Philadelphia (to catch Amtrak) or driving almost halfway to New York and catching a commuter train from an outer suburb like New Brunswick. Of course, there's more to this issue than just the rails. Trains thrive on concentrated urban centers, which have been diluted or even excised from many of our cities and towns by half a century or more of automobiles' primacy in America. I don't think we could adopt a public transport approach in many places even if we wanted to. And of course, outside of pinko tree-huggers like myself, we don't want to. So we'll keep our cars and drive off into a sunset of traffic jams, suburban sprawl, and lifeless downtowns.

I am in the midst of a holiday visit to my ancestral homeland, which involved a 12-hour car ride. When driving long distances, I find the choice of places to stop to be a crucial one. While any old gas station may address the basic physical needs of traveling, spots that can provide a bit of mental relief from the tedium of driving are less common. That goes double when traveling with small children. A couple trips ago, we discovered the Queen City Creamery in Cumberland, MD, an old-fashioned soda fountain cum coffee bar and deli that has become a must-stop break point for our periodic Kentucky-New Jersey pilgrimages. It's very conveniently located just off I-68 in downtown Cumberland and provides an oasis of actual atmosphere in the desert of fast food chains and travel plazas one usually finds on the Interstate Highway System.

Earlier this week, I was in Austin for a brief business trip, I took the obligatory trip downtown to 6th Street and had a lovely dinner at the Old Pecan Street Cafe. The blackened redfish in étouffe sauce was very good—flaky without being and well-spiced without being punishingly hot—but the Crêpes Pecan—basically a pecan pie wrapped up in a crepe and topped with (real) whipped cream was superlative.

I am on vacation at the moment in Montréal, and aside from the nagging of my prematurely arthritic knees, I'm having a great time. We've rented an apartment in the Plateau Mont-Royal—a large residential district north of the downtown and student quarter and east of the actual 'mountain' for which the city is named—and the location is terrific. We look out on a pleasant little square and are around the corner from a pedestrian street full of ethnic restaurants and cafes, just a couple blocks from a metro stop. From here, we've been able to make forays in many directions: we've taken the kids out to the Biodôme at the Olympic Park, gone shopping at the food market in Little Italy, scoped out Chinatown, and strolled the old city and Vieux-Port. The tourist stuff is nice, but probably the biggest pleasure for us is just the urban fix. Living in rural Kentucky gives one a new appreciation for small amenities like being able to buy good bread just around the corner. ...

By a curious sequence of serendipities—being sent to a conference I'd had no plans to attend, overhearing a stranger's conversation about his evening plans, and arriving at the ticket window just after a number of reserved seats went back on sale—last Thursday evening I found myself smack in the middle of Row F of the Brown Theatre in Louisville for the New Pornographers/Belle & Sebastian show. I was, in a word, well chuffed....

I am in Atlanta for the SITE conference. I don't like being away from my family, and I shudder to think how much work is going to be waiting for me when I get home, but there's at least one advantage of being here: the hotel has Cartoon Network on cable. I've been rediscovering the hilarity of Futurama (it's as funny as The Simpsons; I don't know why it has never caught on in the same way), and staying up later than is really healthy to watch the Adult Swim lineup of Witch Hunter Robin, Big O, and Cowboy Bebop (Inuyasha is in the lineup too, but it doesn't do much for me). I knew Cowboy Bebop from before, having previously spent a while staying up later than was healthy to watch its combination of sci-fi, hard-boiled detective, and humor. The other two are new to me, but intriguing. Witch Hunter Robin is a noirish supernatural detective series. An in-house promo describes it, I think, as X-Files meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer with Carrie thrown in. Accurate enough. Big O is just plain weird. Based on the grand tradition of Japanese Giant Robot cartoons, the series throws in a piano-playing android maid, a one-eyed butler/robot mechanic, and a bizarre plot of stolen memories. Anyway, it's probably good that I won't be able to watch when I get home. I need my sleep.