Presidential Debate

The Guardian's comment on who is winning, about half way through the first debate between Obama and McCain.

Scorecard so far: Barack Obama is winning if you measure by substantiveness of answers. John McCain is winning if you count number of years spent in a Vietnamese jail.

Lone Ranger Highway

In Lancaster, which is in the North of LA County, there's a road that's been designed to play the Lone Ranger them tune* if you drive on it at 55mph. I only heard about it because the people that live there hate it, and it's being resurfaced. Luckily, thanks to the power of Youtube, you and I can experience it. ('Cos it's 70 miles from here, and I can't be bothered to go there just for that.)

*Or the William Tell Overture, if you are more culturally sophisticated.

The Penny Game

At the boys school, they are having a fundraiser which they call 'The Penny Game'. Each grade gets a jar, and they can put pennies into their jars. Whichever grade has the most pennies wins an ice cream party for the grade, and the school keeps the money, and makes a profit.

So we dutifully emptied the jar that we throw change into and counted out 200 pennies, bagged them and gave them to the boys to take to school.

But this is America, and in true American style it's possible for someone richer and more powerful than you to crush all your hard work, thereby destroying your hopes and dreams. And it's just the same in the penny game. You can add coins and bills of other denominations to the jars that belong to other grades - and these count against that grade. So someone sticking two dollar bills into our (first grade) jars cancels our two sets of 100 pennies. So, along with 100 pennies each, we packed the boys off with four dollar bills each - one each for second, third, fourth and fifth grades. And if they look like they are doing well, there are plenty more where they came from.

Pet Problems

Last weekend the boys and I went to the Fiesta Ballona, a carnival in Culver City, with expensive rides run by grumpy people. We didn't stay long, 'cos the boys were in bad moods, but we did see the Spam Truck. I'm sure there's a joke about getting free Spam, or more Spam, or something, but I can't think of one that's not so obvious that it isn't funny.


Anyway, the boys wanted to have a go on a stall, most of which were extraordinarily expensive and probably brief. The one that wasn't was throwing ping-pong balls into glass jars, 'cos it was a dollar for 7 balls, and it's impossible to win, so we were safe. Ignoring the fact that it's impossible to win, Alex won a goldfish. Which is bad enough, 'cos we've supported the person at the fair who probably doesn't treat his goldfish as well as he might. Plus it means we've got a goldfish, but at least that meant we could leave the fair.

(We had spare ride tickets, so I tried to find an underprivileged looking child to give them to, but every child I saw who looked potentially underprivileged had a $20 free ride bracelet on. Eventually I gave them to an overprivileged looking child, who was just arriving).

So now we have a goldfish, called Cutefish by Alex, who gets naming privileges for winning it (because it's so cute, apparently). Except Daniel calls it Freddy the Fish, much to Alexs chagrin. (When I was young, we had chickens in the garden, and each child was allowed to name one. I name mine 'Zodiac', after the rusting and derelict Ford Zodiac parked at the end of the neighbour's garden, My ever loving sister's decided to call it Sadie, much to my chagrin. So maybe it's genetic).

I went to the pet shop to buy some goldfish food, where I found that goldfish are 25c each. That's about 13 pence in old money. So we somewhat overpaid for our goldfish, by a factor of about 4.

Anyway, pet trauma number two was that Karenzander the (male) rat had a lump growing on her side. So we took her to the vet, once we found a vet who had sufficient rat expertise. The vet diagnosed a case of 'lump on side' which needed to be sliced off, in an operation. So he was duly booked in to the vets, and had to be taken there at 7:15 on Friday morning, which seemed a little excessively early to me.

The logistics of the day were very complicated, Daniel had a friend around to visit, and Alex was at Ana's house, so the various children had to be taken/fetched, and then we had a vague plan to go out to the Souplantation, so we weren't quite sure how to fit all this in.

But we forgot! This is America! The vets open at 7:30 in the morning, and close at 9pm (on weekdays); 4:30 on Saturday, and 10-4 on Sunday). So we went out, and I went to collect the sick rat from the vets.

Karenzander is now back in the rat house, but we've divided into two so that he doesn't feel obliged to fight with Karen while he recuperates. We are supposed to wash the injury with a hot compress twice a day. That's going to prove an interesting challenge.

A new rat is considerably more expensive than a goldfish - I think they are about $4. So overpaying for the goldfish by a factor of 4 was nothing. It cost $39 to have the vet look at the lump, and tell us that it had a lump, and needed to be hacked out (we knew that), and $265 to actually hack out the lump.

Licking out the bowl

Sometimes I try to pass on my hopes and dreams to the boys. And often it fails. Today was one of those days.

The boys and I made chocolate brownies today (fat free!). Well, we opened a packet from Trader Joe's, stirred in some yogurt (?) and put it in the oven.

When I was little, one of life's most pleasurable pleasures was eating the remnants of cake (or whatever) mixture was left in the bowl and on any implements. It always dismayed me and my siblings if the person doing the creating was too diligent in scraping mixture into the cake tin, so today I was deliberately unconscientious. Even more unconscientious than usual.

I gave the boys spoons (I didn't even make them get their own), and they set about the bowl. Alex had one small sample from the spoon, and said it made his throat hurt. Daniel had two or three, before saying it was too salty for his tongue.

River Inn

In Big Sur, there is a place called the River Inn, which has an inn, a cafe, several shops, a pub, and things like that. It also has the cheapest food we found in Big Sur - a vegetarian burrito for $6 (although I had guacamole in mine, for an extra $1.25, and jalapenos, for an extra 50c, but given that a sandwich anywhere else was $12, it was still cheap).




Anyway, the interesting thing about the River Inn is that they place chairs in the river, so that you can cool your feet whilst eating your (cheap) burrito.

Despite the fact that it was a river, it had pond skaters (or something like that) in it. They had to spend a lot of time skating upstream, and then they would be washed downstream again.

Here are a couple of them, ermmm, cuddling.

Monterey

When we visited Big Sur, we actually stayed in Monterey. We did that because there aren't many places to stay in Big Sur, they are expensive, and they were full anyway. So the Holiday Inn Express it was for us.

Monterey is a fairly touristy kind of place, it has an aquarium, and other things, and the main street for that sort of stuff is called Cannery Row. It's one of these places that used to be full of industrial stuff, and now has been transformed into something that attracts crowds - presumable going through a difficult period in between. I suggested that, given that lots of people went to Monterey for the sake of going to Monterey, we might go and look at it. Susanne said that we were members of the Long Beach Aquarium, and it wasn't like it was in the book anyway, and so there was little point.

One of the many lovable things about Susanne is that she assumes that if she knows something, I must know it too (or almost all of it). For example, I was supposed to know about 'the book', but obviously didn't know quite enough to know that it wasn't like the book.

I enquired further. "The Book" is called Cannery Row, and is by John Steinbeck. It describes the life of Cannery Row (which used to be called Ocean View Drive) where sardines were canned (surprise there) and pressed to make sardine oil, and the workers were largely Asian.

Why we would want to go there if it still was the place where sweating workers processed sardines into cans, I'll never know. But if they weren't there, squeezing sardines, it wasn't worth looking at, apparently.

Look! Cannery Row is on Google Books.

Pacific Coast Highway

The Pacific Coast Highway is about 200 miles of quite impressive scenery (and about 100 miles of dreariness, but we don't photograph that). Here are some pictures.

This is a mountain, and our car (45 mpg on this trip!) (That's US gallons too.)

A beach. There are lots of nice looking beaches along the PCH. One of the reasons they look nice is because there is no one on them, and there is no one on them because there is no way of getting to them. You are discouraged by big fences and signs saying "Private". Sometimes you are discouraged by signs saying "If you climb down here and get stuck, we will want a lot of money to get you out."
Water, hills.
Clouds which were blowing up the mountain from the sea. Obviously you can't see that, 'cos it's a photo.


More sea, more inaccessible coastline.


This might not have been on the PCH, but it was near.

A bridge.

Elephant Seals

We drove back from Big Sur on the Pacific Coast Highway (that's the PCH to us locals). On the way there are lots of places to stop with interesting things to look at, but when we had 300 miles to drive it had to be pretty interesting.

We drove past one parking lot with a lot of cars in it, and when we were past, we saw that the cars were there because there were elephant seals on the beach. We made a U turn, and went to look at the elephant seals - as did about 50% of the cars that headed in that direction.

The boys weren't feeling great (they had colds) and refused to get out of the car. I had to tell them that the animals had mouths a little bit like Dr Zoidberg's before they would.




David Attenborough never had the problem of children kicking the fence he was resting his camera on. (Also, I've got no sound on my computer right now, so I've no idea what that sounds like).

Madonna Inn

We went on a trip to Big Sur last week. On the way, we stayed at a place called the Madonna Inn. I thought that that might have something to do with either religion or popular music, but in fact it was founded by someone called Alex Madonna. There's a Google Map with a photo of it here.

Every room in the Madonna Inn is different, and has a theme. Several of them have rock waterfall showers (I still don't really understand what that means). We didn't know what we wanted, so we took pot luck and got the San Francisco room.

I don't know what was San Francisco about it, but it was very red.

The lightswitch was carefully covered with wallpaper, ensuring that the redness wasn't spoiled, and that you couldn't see it.


We had a red leather sofa in our room:


And an ornate metal bed (the boys had a similar metal bed).

The place was vast - it comprised several buildings. Here is Susanne, Alex and Daniel in front of one of them.


And here is another. Notice the stone chimney.


The interiors of everywhere were done out in the same sort of elaborate, opulent style. Here is the pastry shop / cafe (where we had breakfast).

Alex and Daniel's favorite thing was the urinal in the cafe. It was a copper trough, and when it flushed, the water poured over and turned a metal water wheel.


They had a postcard for every room, with a photo of the room. Not that you can really see, but here they are:



And here's Dan standing on a rock. (Notice the pink lamp post).

Computer Problems

The boys have OLPC laptops - laptops designed for children. They are, in many ways, great machines. They are fairly childproof, they don't have a hard disk, so they don't mind being dropped, they are pretty waterproof, there are no sticky out bits to break off and no holes to shove stuff into. They can't get viruses, and if they can, you can wipe the operating system and reinstall with a memory stick, and the whole process takes about 20 minutes. (Obviously, you only use Google Docs and Gmail, so there's no worries about it not saving stuff).

One tiny drawback that they have is that the mouse pad doesn't work if it's even a tiny bit wet - our children aren't bad at washing their hands, but they're not great at drying them, so this is occasionally a problem.

On Sunday we were driving in the car (coming back from Monterey, but that's another blog post). Alex was using his computer (that's another thing about OLPC computers - great battery life) in the car when suddenly, and without warning, he vomited on it, himself, the car, and anything else in the vicinity. We stopped (conveniently he did it just before a car park with bathrooms to aid in cleaning up) and started the clean up process.

We'd finished when we realized we hadn't cleaned his computer. And we couldn't see it. Then Daniel said "My mouse doesn't work on this computer, because it's wet."

Nerdy Hotel Room Joke

404: Hotel room not found error.

ABCHomeStore Review

I ordered new beds for the twins from ABCHomeStore, and I've never experienced such a crappy company.

Beds are fairly big, and fairly heavy, so we couldn't really ask them to be left with a neighbor. They took about 8 days to arrive (fair enough, they had a long way to come), and they rang to make an appointment to deliver. They couldn't do a time when we were in (partly 'cos we were about to go away for a couple of days), and said that they would charge us for storage if we couldn't be in. Eventually we found a time when we could be in, and they could deliver.

They came, and there were three boxes. I thought that was curious, as had ordered four things, so I rang, and was told that it wasn't a problem because the two beds were in one box. I thought it was kind of light, for two beds, but didn't worry.

When I opened the box, lo and behold, there was one bed in there. I rang them up and asked about this. They said that I shouldn't have signed for it if it wasn't complete (I was hardly going to open the boxes first, to check everything was there, and then sign for it). They said that they sent two beds, and it wasn't their fault, and it wasn't their problem, and I should phone the delivery people. They claimed that the delivery people weighed the bed at every stage, so would know if a bed was missing; the delivery people seem to know nothing about this.

As far as the delivery people were concerned they said that they had been asked to deliver three cartons and that they had delivered three cartons, so it wasn't their problem.

As far as ABCHomeStore was concerned, I was lying, so they didn't care.

They claim on their website that "Honesty, integrity, and quality are the values that we've built our business on." Which smells like bullshit to me.

To be expected ...

From the LA Times

Christian biker gang members charged with attempted murder

Police say the charges stem from a fight last week at a Newport Beach bar, and the victims are members of the Hells Angels.

If you're going to call yourself "Hell's Angels" it's only fair to assume that Christians are going to try to kill you.

Reunited

We saw Ana for the first time in a few weeks at a birthday party. We thought that Alex and she would have forgotten about each other (in the way that parents do with their children, although their children aren't usually 6 when that happens). However, she'd been away visiting relatives for a couple of weeks, and apparently hadn't stopped talk about Alex.

Alex was in the play structure, which was, as these things tend to be, very mazelike. They spent a little while pursuing each other, only to pass with mesh in between. Finally, they were reunited in that most romantic of places, the ball pool.

They were very pleased to be back together again.

The birthday party proper happened in a different room. Almost all the children sat on one table together where they ate pizza and cake. Alex and Ana sat on another table, mostly on their own.

Prices of Prius(es)

Conventional wisdom says that the second you drive your new car away from the dealer, its value drops by X (where X is a scarily large number of pounds / dollars / local currency).

According to Wired, that's not true of Prius(es). We could, apparently now sell our fairly new, 1200 or so miles Prius (extra gloat: I think we've filled it up with gas twice) for more than we paid for it.

Earthquake

We had a proper earthquake. It was centered in Chino Hills, which is about 30 miles West of here, and had a magnitude 5.8. For comparison, 5.8 is the strength of the aftershocks in the recent Chinese earthquake, and we don't need to worry about buildings falling down until it's above 7. (And the Richter scale is a log scale, so 7 is about 20 times stronger than 5.8). It's described as moderately strong.

At first I thought that someone was moving very heavy furniture around, and then I realised that furniture doesn't come that heavy. Then I realized it was an earthquake, and forgot what I was supposed to do (climb under your desk is the usual answer, but under my desk is such a collection of wires, computer, and general crap, that might be more dangerous).

The internet response was impressively fast, the map on the USGS website was updated within about 1 minute of it ending. Google Blog Search had found blogs that mentioned it within 20 minutes, the LA Times had a story within an hour, with photos.

Cellphones stopped working, I guess because everyone in the universe tried to use it, but I called S on the landline, and that worked fine.

I haven't heard of any injuries, except that the sister of someone who works here, who lives in Chino Hills, had a cabinet of china fall over.

[Update #1: It was only 5.4, not 5.8].

[Update #2: The boys were bowling at the time, and they didn't notice. I asked them if it made their bowling balls go the wrong way. They said that their balls went the wrong way without an earthquake]

Health and Safety

For reasons to boring to explain here, I'm staying at Essex University, in the 'de luxe' student accommodation. De luxe means, in this case, that one still has a plastic impermeable mattress, pillow and duvet, and electric storage heaters, with a control knob that goes from 'random' to 'not labelled' - combined with the quality of the bedding, means that one wakes up most nights either in a pool of sweat, or shivering. However, luxury means that we have an en suite bathroom and shower, ensuring that the pervasive dampness never quite leaves the room. Any mention of any of this in front of anyone who is staying in the regular (tourist class? economy?) causes howls of derision, and makes them throw things. So I'd better stop.

The kitchen is festooned with more health and safety type notices than I've ever seen, anywhere. We are warned not to:

• Warm baby food in the microwave (or if we do, we are to stir it extremely well), warm liquids in the microwave only in unsealed containers, and to beware of superheated water from the microwave. (That's on a sticker on the wall).
• On the microwave itself we are told that we are to ensure it is kept in a dry, grease free room (so our bedrooms are out).
• We are not to dry clothes on the heaters - or indeed place anything within 8 inches of the heaters. And to be generally careful with them.
  
• The blinds, most of which are over the counters, have string control things to open and close them. We are not to allow children to play with them. (There's one of those warnings on every blind).
  
• We are not to leave chip pans unattended (can we leave anything else unattended?) We are supplied with kitchen implements, and they do not actually include a chip pan (or a toaster, but that's another blog).
  
• If we do leave a chip pan unattended, and it catches fire we are to put it out with the fire blanket. And then not touch if for 30 minutes.
• We are not to put broken crockery in the bin (the people who empty the bin might cut themselves on it, and then we may be liable for their injuries, we are told).
• There is currently a 'danger: wet floor' sign on the door of the kitchen, because the floor was mopped three days ago (which made it wet) and the sign has not yet been removed.
• If we do ignore all these signs and require urgent first aid, an ambulance, the fire brigade or anything else like that, we can dial ext. 2222.
• But if we ignore all the signs and require first aid that isn't urgent, we dial 2225. So when bleeding I need to make an estimate of the time it will take before I expire, and then judge which number to call. But what if my definition of non-urgent is 30 minutes to exsanguination, and theirs is one hour. Will they be liable? Will I? Who are 'they' anyway?
• On the front door, we are told that smoking is permitted in the flat. Luckily for us, elsewhere we are told that smoking is not permitted.

Barracudas? Pah,

After a long hard day at the coal face of drug dependence research, I was in the bar and rewarding myself with a mojito. Someone said “I’m going to go and look at the sharks before I go to bed.”

Oh for flip’s sake. I’ve been worrying about barracudas which can (at most!) chow down on a finger or two of mine, and it turns out that swimming in the same water as me were sharks, which (if the movies are to be believed, and I’m not sure they ever lie) would bite me in half, swallow the lower half and let the upper half get washed up on a beach somewhere.

So I went to look at the sharks. It turns out that they shine a light onto the water, which has two effects: First, it attracts fish, so the sharks come and eat the fish (you’d think that would put some evolutionary pressure on the fish to go somewhere else – maybe in a few hundred generations they will). The second effect is that people can see the sharks. Now, I’m no ichthyologist, but there were four or five big fish shaped things in the water, one of them was very dark grey, and the others were sort of pale gray, and they were swimming about in what I would have guessed was a shark like fashion. They were four or five feet long, and wouldn’t have been able to bite me in half, which was something of a relief. Although I suspect that they would have been able to bite off my whole hand, rather than a finger or two.

Biting Barracudas

I'm in Puerto Rico, at a conference. Work extraordinarily hard - I presented my poster from 8 to 10 this morning, and have just come back from a presentation, and it's now 9:20. To reward myself for working so hard, I went for a swim in the sea today.

Someone (wearing goggles) swam to me, and said "Do you know what barracudas look like?" As I didn't have access to Wikipedia at the time, I had to admit that I didn't.

He said that he might have seen a barracuda, but he wasn't sure. And he thought that barracudas didn't bite. Although he wasn't sure about things that weren't barracudas, but looked like them. And now I've read the Wikipedia entry, I know that if they do bite, the worst they will do is take off a finger or two. So it's back in the sea for me tomorrow.