More La Loma love

I'm happy to report that it is still possible to get a decent chicken taco in Ann Arbor (or at least Ypsilanti).

How does he reach the pedals?

I guess Michigan will give a license to just about anybody.

(Taken outside of Northside Grill, Ann Arbor, MI)

Valediction

Next week sees the departure of two of my favorite people from Ann Arbor -- one for the summer and the other for good -- BH and JC.

Since I plan to be moving away myself by the end of the summer, chances are I won't be seeing either of them anytime soon after this weekend.

Last night I had dinner with JC. Here's a picture of the two of us, taken on my birthday a few weeks ago:


Tonight I had dinner with BH along with a couple of other friends. She and I rode together in the backseat of our friend's car where I took this picture:


I don't know what it's like to have biological sisters, but I can't imagine it's any different from the way I feel about these two. Both have been privy to my rants and ramblings, and with either of them around, female opinion was never lacking. I recently introduced them to each other, and to my delight, they got along. (One never knows.) But of course, then the volume of female opinion doubled (in both senses of the word "volume").

Dinner tonight was at Dalat in Ypsilanti, and while there, I snapped this picture of jalapenos on the table. It seems an apropos tribute to both of their personalities:


I'll miss you guys!

Beautiful in the post-nuclear sense

This past weekend I made it down to the nearest park located on one of the Great Lakes.

Actually, there are two parks that vie for this title. One, Lake Erie Metro Park, is located at the mouth of the Detroit River -- saying it's on Lake Erie is debatable and depends on where you consider the lake ends and the river begins. The other, Sterling State Park, is fully on the shores of Lake Erie but five miles down the road from Lake Erie Metro Park.

Both are a little short of the sand duney beauty of the parks alongside Lake Michigan on the other side of the state, but they do in a pinch.

Sunday I made it to Sterling State Park. Walking along its clamshell-strewn beach about an hour before sunset:


In the background, the cooling towers of the Fermi 2 nuclear power plant. If you don't look too closely, though, you can almost imagine you're on the ocean.

Wacky science illustration

Does this look funny to anyone else?


Leave it to scientists to put a metal fez on a cat and sit it in front a TV.

P.S. If you're curious for details, you can check the original reference here. The pic above came from Figure 1.

A little post-tax day reflection

One thing I always find pleasant about the Michigan tax return-filing process is coming up to the definition of "home": "the place you intend to return to whenever you go away".

As someone who tends to over-think things, I always stop and smile when I get here.

For one I love the careful legalese in the definition. When you leave home, or any place for that matter, you have no guarantee you'll return -- the definition doesn't say "the place you will return to". But you can always hope to return, and the definition captures this sentiment -- "the place you intend to return to".

If anything's lacking in this definition, though, I think it's mention of the time frame. Take my hometown of Carrollton, Texas, for instance. My parents still live there, and I hope to visit them for years to come. While I'm there I like to sleep in my old bed and see what's left of the old neighborhood, including the yards and alleyways I used to cut through when I was young, the fields I used to play in and explore, and the houses of old friends where I wasted lazy summer afternoons.

I'd never want to lose that connection. Being in Texas I feel grounded, in touch with who I am and who I was, conscious of the reference point against which I can measure how far (or close) I am to coming full circle and fulfilling purpose.

But all that's obviously long-term stuff -- I only go back to Texas once or twice a year. On a daily basis, I'm happy just to make it back to my apartment, crash on the floor to the sound of the TV, and have a few Baked Lays.

In defining "home," maybe a more useful question to ask is what constitutes "going away". Is that leaving my apartment in the morning or leaving Texas when I was 25?

Sticking up for Silvio

Last Friday night -- sometime during that post-2 a.m. hour known as "after the bars close" -- I buzzed into Silvio's for a slice of pizza with my friend JC. One of Silvio's twin grown-up sons, Gio or Romeo (they're identical), was working the counter, and I was happy to see one of my favorites out, the margherita.

"Doo-eh mar-gaa-reeta," I said. Actually, I didn't say that, but I wish I had. Being in Silvio's always makes me wish I spoke better Italian.

JC ordered a slice of something too, and Gio (or was it Romeo?) put the slices on paper plates and slid them into the window to the back kitchen.

No sooner had the slices been coaxed into the oven than Silvio himself emerged from the back. He shook my hand, but there was only a trace of his usual smile. Something was clearly upsetting him.

In his other hand he was holding a newspaper. He shoved it into the space between JC and me.

"Greasy!" he exclaimed.

I had no idea what Silvio was talking about, so I started glossing the page. Pictures of pizza. Numbers. Pictures of random people. Okay, it was a review -- I got that -- and from Silvio's reaction I was guessing it hadn't gone well. (Here's a link to the article sans pizza pictures.)

Turns out the local community college -- a place I'd formerly respected and enjoyed (having taken tai chi and attended numerous book sales there) -- had rated a panel of pizzas from five area pizza places. Silvio's had ranked second-to-last, but most damning were the comments:

One reviewer, the college president, "rated Silvio's Organic Pizza as his least favorite amongst the pizza places reviewed, but found them 'most unique'".

Another reviewer, a journalism student, "ranked Silvio's last in all categories, and described it as a, 'slice of grease…it slid all over my hand when I picked it up'". (By the way, Mr. Fitzgerald, what's the "it" in that sentence? Your sloppy writing?)

Silvio informed us that he'd sent over a pepperoni, a margherita, and a truffle oil pizza. He couldn't understand where "greasy" had come from.

JC -- who I'd taken to Silvio's before and was also an ardent supporter -- launched into a tirade of four-letter words making it perfectly clear what she thought of this so-called newspaper, the people writing it, and anything else that happened to be related. Silvio started going on simultaneously about the quality of the ingredients he was using.

To me the problem was this: The reviewers hadn't ever seen REAL PIZZA. It was as if you'd taken a group of kids who'd grown up on Chicken McNuggets and given them Chinese drunken chicken.

Like I've pointed out before, the margherita has three things: tomato sauce, a few slices of fresh mozzarella (Silvio gets his from a small farm in Connecticut), and some fresh basil. It's simplicity itself. But when you take people who have been getting taste-bombed their whole lives by chain-store pizza scientifically formulated to elicit maximum neural response, how do you expect them to react?

Just take a look at the website of the winner, Benito's. It boasts the "Big Benito" with "20/Foot Long Slices! Over 100 Pepperoni!". I don't even know what "20/Foot" means: Is that pepperoni density? 20 slices per square foot maybe? Or did they mean "20 foot-long slices"? That doesn't sound good either. And let's not get started on how "pepperoni" is technically uncountable: You can't have 100 pepperoni. Pepperoni slices, yes. Pepperoni, no.

Garbage web authorship aside, the message seems to be "Get a huge amount of stuff". But do I have to eat a huge amount of it to appreciate it?

Now look at Silvio's website: "Silvio's sauce is based on fresh organic herbs and organic tomatoes. The flavorful crust incorporates fine olive oil and is made with organic flour exactly the way Silvio's father made it."

You can't expect people who grew up with a pepperoni density mindset to immediately appreciate "fresh" and "organic". It takes time, time to shift their taste buds out of fifth gear and go slow. You know, chew. Don't inhale pizza. Taste it.

I made these points Friday night, but in the end I don't know if either JC or I succeeded in making Silvio feel better. I know a ton of people like his pizza, but sometimes all the reassurances in the world can't beat out a few lines in print.

Luckily there are other reviews out there.

To the guy who called Silvio's "greasy": You can duke it out with the reviewer from The Michigan Daily who said, "I liked how clean the pizza was. Not greasy at all. And the menu is the best I've seen. There are a lot of really creative combinations that I want to try."

Don't worry, Silvio -- we got your back!

A day in the life

I've been tempted lately. Tempted to think my life is normal.

When I first got to Ann Arbor, I had a pretty good idea of what normal life looked like. I'd been teaching for three years, and I had a routine down that included a shave every morning and the evening news every night.

I kept this up for a while when I got here, but eventually my routine started growing its own legs and hair, becoming more organic, fitting itself more to the work and less to the times that people see on the wall clock like 9, noon, and 5. Bedtime went from midnight to 2 am to 4 am and back to 2 am again. Meals were taken sporadically. TV shows became impossible to follow from week to week because I was never reliably home during prime-time.

Now that I'm nearing the end of grad school, I hope I've reached some kind of equilibrium, but I'm not sure I'd call my days normal yet. Feel free to register an opinion after reading these select highlights from my day yesterday:

8 am: Woke up, worked on PowerPoint presentation for lab meeting

12:30 pm: Biked to the lab

1 pm: Gave presentation at lab meeting

2:30 pm: Met with advisors, talked about presentation

3 pm: Had multiple cups of coffee, worked on laptop

7 pm: Discussed future post-doc positions with labmate JR

10 pm: Bought groceries at Hiller's (cold cuts, soup, cereal, yogurt), talked to friend BH on the phone

11 pm: Stopped by Silvio's for pizza, chatted with Silvio, worked on laptop

12 midnight: Had an espresso at Rendezvous Cafe, worked on laptop

1 am: Worked out at the gym (rowing machine, 30 minutes)

2:30 am: Got home, listened to podcast of the news, fell asleep

Sweet'N Equal

"Makers of Artificial Sweeteners Go to Court"

I love this news item out of today's New York Times. (Stew's synopsis: The makers of Equal are taking the makers of Splenda to court over Splenda's claim that it's "made from sugar".) This story's got so many angles that pique my interest, I hardly know where to start:

1. It's high-stakes, like World Series of Poker Texas Hold 'Em on ESPN, except the stakes here make the million-dollar pot on WSOP look like peanuts. We're talking a $1.5 billion industry.


2. It's about language, grammar, words, all that good stuff that appeals to the Latin major in me. The Splenda people claim there's no way a person could mistake "made from sugar" as meaning Splenda is sugar. Hoo boy!


3. It's about science. Apparently there are dozens of ways to synthesize Splenda, and only some of those start from table sugar, a.k.a. sucrose. So, it's more accurate to say Splenda "could be made from sugar". Makes you want to bust open your organic chemistry textbook from college too, doesn't it? I thought so!
   


4. It's about the deceptions of modern living. Like the fake fireplace at Starbucks that burns but consumes no wood. Or the produce at Whole Foods that appears to be sitting in wicker baskets straight from the fields. Or TVs that more and more closely approximate real life -- which, ironically, occurs away from the TV. (Until there are TV shows about TV, that is. At which point I'll know I'm in hell.)
   

Check it out! (Here's the link again.)

Picture parade

In lieu of any good stories lately -- which never seem to draw that many comments anyway -- here's a selection of pictures that have wound up on my Canon S230 lately.

The Anson Brown Building on Broadway here in Ann Arbor. You might be interested to know that this building is (a) the oldest commercial building in Ann Arbor and (b) reputed to be haunted.

The back of a door in the Undergraduate / Science library on Central Campus. I like the strong industrial design -- it almost persuaded me to go to the North Lobby even though that's not where I wanted to go. I also dig that Japanese robot anime look, like it came straight out of Robotech. Or a really bad sci-fi / horror / slasher movie.

Dim sum place-setting at Great Lake Chinese Restaurant on Carpenter Road between Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti. Good lighting. Note the incongruity of the Starbucks cups of my coffee-swilling comrades. Way to fit in, guys!

Orchid (1/3) from the Palm Sunday Orchid Show in Livonia last weekend. My mother's a big fan of orchids -- she's got dozens of them in planters all around our house in Texas, many from her youngest brother in Taiwan ("Baby Uncle" we used to call him) -- and I've got to admit, I find them intriguing too. In a genetically freakish kind of way.

Orchid (2/3). Menacing. Like one of the monsters from that god-awful movie, Starship Troopers.

Orchid (3/3). Just plain ol' bizarre. Way to go, Mr. Orchid Breeder!

Kudos

... to all of you who made it out this weekend for my birthday -- where we can define "weekend" as Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.

Special thanks to:

BH -- Did we really just have dinner together three days in a row? Love you, sis, but I'm going to need to not see you for about a month.

JC -- You also came through for me three days in a row. Loved hanging out with your family Sunday -- easy to forget what real life is like in grad school -- thanks for reminding me. Oh yeah, love you too, sis, but I'm going to need to not see you for about a month as well.

CS -- For trying to hook me up with the Korean bartender last night, despite knowing that she had a boyfriend. Not sure if that was for my benefit or for your entertainment. And for keeping your misogynistic tendencies and general craziness under wraps.

AB -- For following up on CS' efforts to hook me up with the Korean bartender by telling her she and I would have "beautiful babies". And for trying to class things up a bit whenever they threatened to go a little too prole.

SB -- For the nice phone call yesterday afternoon. I'm still sweating.

SM -- For pizza. And beers that came out of nowhere.

You're all aces in my book.

<-- || -->

So ends Year 31 and begins Year 32. (This makes me 31 by the way most people account for age.)

I've decided Year 32's motto will be "Citius, altius, fortius" -- you can look it up if you're unclear on the meaning. As befits this motto, midnight passed with me on the rowing machine.

As I rowed, I thought back to people who helped me through Year 31.

Here are some of them, alphabetized by last name: AB, SB, JC, BH, YI, RK, JL, AM, SM, JR, CS, KS, MS, CW. Thanks, all. If I've left someone out, the culpability is entirely mine.

Anyway, keep your fingers crossed for Year 32 which should bring some seismic changes. As a fortune cookie I received recently said: "You will soon make an important decision." Really? Just one?

Real news, fake news, what's the [delta]?

Okay, check this out:

I support the occupation, and the occupation alone, because when we start to support the troops, we pave the way for irrelevant concerns about their families back at home. Before you know it, questions about who is and isn't going to be home in time for Christmas will be interfering with the crucial decision-making process of our commander-in-chief.

Makes sense, right?

Guess where it's from?

The Onion, ca. 2005 (source).

You have to worry when fake news sounds as reasonable as anything in real news.