Musing's musings

Arrived safely

Despite having to get up well before the ass-crack of dawn, today was one of the better traveling experiences I've had recently. Next to no traffic anywhere on the way from home to airport, some lovely and interesting scenery to look at along the way (including a spectacular fog bank on a lonely country road before dawn, and a lovely line of clouds along the eastern horizon before the sun actually came up), the plane had something like 50 empty seats (meaning I got a row all to myself, and moved myself from aisle to window), left early, arrived early, a quick taxi ride from National to the hotel, which is just a stone's throw from the White House and the National Mall. Quick check-in, unpacked, checked in for the conference, then back up to my room to change into shorts and outdoor gear, followed by a quick schlep down to the Mall and a nice walk to the National Archives--where, I'm happy to say, the Constitution is still safely preserved (and my new camera does a much better job of photographing it)!

A lovely reception after the final "pre-conference" conference session tonight, but I'm still feeling a bit peckish. Thinking about heading down to the hotel bar for a nosh and an adult beverage or three. Tomorrow will be a full day, though I don't have anything scheduled for the last session--and I do have a night tour scheduled for 6:30, starting at the Willard Hotel, so maybe I'll drop by the Old Ebbitt Grill for dinner beforehand. Sure hope I get some equally good pictures tomorrow night!

Elvis has left the building

I'm heading out to O'Hare to catch a plane to Washington, DC for a few days. I'm sure the conference will be great, and that I'll come back with all kinds of useful information to pass on to the people who need it. Mostly, however, I'm looking forward to a chance to get away from the office and relax a little bit. I'm hoping to do quite a bit of writing and polishing on my exam paper draft: I'd like nothing better than to be able to hand it in when I get back, though I'm not committing to that. I'm also looking forward to visiting some of my favorite DC haunts: the National Archives, the World War II memorial, and the like. I've got a nice new camera and I'm eager to see what it can do for me in such great public spaces. Not that I have anything against my trusty little Sony, but it definitely had its limitations. I'll be back home, Deo volente, on Wednesday.

I'm not getting it

As I was driving along various interstate highways this afternoon, traveling from home to the conference where I'll be spending the next couple of days, I noticed small signs placed along the roads at infrequent intervals. Alongside the usual "Eisenhower Interstate System" plaques, there are now plaques commemorating the 50th anniversary of the system--which took place in 2006, though I don't remember seeing the signs at all until this trip--and thus far, I haven't seen any similar signs anywhere but Illinois. It'll be interesting to see if I see any of them when I cross the river into Missouri on Tuesday for the second day of the conference.It isn't the anniversary that's confusing me, though, or even the fact that the signs don't seem to have gotten put up in time for it. It's the caption that's on them that's got me scratching my head: "A Symbol of Freedom." Huh?

When I think of symbols of freedom, I think of the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Statue of Liberty, the Magna Charta, the Liberty Bell, the Emancipation Proclamation. Stuff like that. A system of highways, not so much. I'll wager I'm not alone in that, either. It would be interesting to see the polling results on what the phrase "symbols of freedom" conjures up in people's minds, both here and around the world. I'd frankly be amazed if the interstate highway system even made it into the top thousand responses.

Perhaps, in the mind of whoever it was that designed the signage I saw today, the interstates represent the freedom of U.S. citizens to travel around the country without restrictions. That was the only associational link I could come up with between freedom and the interstate system--and it's quite a stretch. Or maybe they were just looking for something quasi-inspirational to put on the signs they'd already ordered for the 50th anniversary, and some lame-brain in the Department of Transportation thought maybe linking it to patriotism would work. (That does seem like the sort of thought you might expect a Bu$hevik appointee to have, doesn't it?)

Wow

Everywhere you turn in Yellowstone National Park, there's something to see. That something is usually spectacular: be it waterfalls, rapids, hot springs, geysers, fumaroles, mud pots, richly colored bacterial mats, stunning vistas, or gaggles of wildlife, it's just around the corner at this place. Sometimes literally. Just a bit inside the west entrance to the park is a bald eagle nesting area--for which motorists are required to slow down to 15 mph and not stop for the quarter-mile stretch of road directly in front of the nest closest to it. In four trips in and out by that entrance thus far, we've seen one eagle all four times--and this afternoon as we were leaving, the nesting bird's mate was perched on a branch of a nearby burnt skeleton of a lodgepole pine. That alone would be worth the $25 admission fee. (I can say that, since, as an annual pass holder, I don't pay entrance fees. But I'm certainly getting my money's worth this year, no question about it!)

Literally no one knows how many waterfalls there are in Yellowstone. Every time someone goes looking, it seems they find another one to add to the list. In two days, by my count, we've seen at least half a dozen. Here are a couple of them: first, the Undine Falls, four miles east of the Mammoth Hot Springs:

The river beneath the falls does some spectacular twists, but I just couldn't get a wide enough field of view to get a decent shot showing that perspective. Next are the Lower Falls of the Yellowstone, in the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (about which more later). These are the second most-photographed spot in the park, after Old Faithful:

God loves us and wants us to be happy

That's our conclusion after a satisfying day's travel from Cedar City, Utah, to West Yellowstone, Montana. (Distance: circa 570 miles; travel time, circa 8.5 hours--with stops and some construction delays.) We got here around 5 this afternoon after a beautiful drive through the intermountain west, up hill and down dale. The weather was balmy (though there are some clouds banking up to the west and we might get some brief showers or a thunderstorm tonight).

Thanks to a recommendation from a colleague of mine at the office, we had a simply fantabulous dinner at the Bar-N Ranch just outside of town. The setting was great, the scenery was magnificent, and the food was superb. I'll add my own recommendation to my colleague's--if you're ever in the vicinity of West Yellowstone, try them out. But do call ahead and make reservations. We checked the website and didn't see anything that said they were required or even recommended--and since we were there early, they were able to seat us. But we've already put in our reservation for a farewell dinner this coming Thursday night. (Be sure to pat Dave the dog on the head, too!)

Plans for the park haven't yet crystallized. I expect we'll drive over tomorrow and get the details from the rangers and then decide what we want to do. Heaven knows there's plenty to attract us--and given that we're both a little banged up, we may not get much of a chance to go hiking, but even driving around and gawking would be just fine with me right now.

To Zion we will go

I arrived safely in Las Vegas Thursday night, though a bit later than originally scheduled. First there was a crack in the pilot's windshield which took about an hour to replace. When they finally let us board and we were all ready to go, there turned out to be a problem with a radio, which meant another delay of about half an hour. So I got in around 6:30 instead of 4:30. We had a little contretemps with the dinner situation too, when we got to Anna Bella's and discovered that they were closed for vacation, much to our regret. We wound up at Sergio's instead, and the food was just as good there, though rather more expensive.

We got an early start (for us, anyway ;-9) yesterday, and made it to our hotel about 40 minutes before curtain time for The School For Wives. It was quite good: the cast was energetic (and the principals quite acrobatic), though I did find the rhyming translation a bit uneven in spots. I absolutely loved the harpsichord music they used during the intermission and also some of the mimed bits of the play.

We had dinner last night at the Garden House again--I highly recommend their cream of spinach soup, and the baked brie was quite good, too. I could have done without having to overhear multiple repetitions of essentially the same phone call from a young man seated near us who was celebrating a new job--and apparently had to call everyone he knew to tell them about it while inhaling or otherwise ingesting his dinner. Dessert was out of this world--a "ten pound" chocolate cake served with vanilla bean ice cream. But get the half slice--it's big enough for two!

Othello last night was superb, though I'd have enjoyed it more if I hadn't been quite so warm and hadn't had a recurring twitch in my left leg. My only real complaint about the performance per se was that it was occasionally difficult to hear some of the actors when they weren't facing outward toward the audience, but that was mainly an issue in the first half-hour or so. (At least, I don't remember noticing it after then.)

We ended a little past the stated time of 10:55 p.m., but managed a quick trip back to the hotel and collapsed around midnight. The plan for today, such as it is, involves a trip over to Zion National Park (which we usually visit every time we're out this way, we love it so much). We haven't really decided what we're going to do in the park this year; depending on the weather, we may just ride about on the shuttle and see what looks interesting and reasonably cool. We're hoping the little bistro-cum-gallery that we discovered in Springdale (just outside the park) a few years back is still there--we're dying to try another one of their great fondues. Perhaps I'll have some pictures later.

Exit leftward, singing

My apologies for the dearth of posts lately: it's been that busy, between the start of the summer four-day work schedule at NIU, plus commitments on both of the two Fridays thus far that I've allegedly had off from work, plus a ton of proposals to get out the door. I haven't had the time or the energy to do much blogging when I got home.

Today, however, I start my summer vacation. The airport limousine will pick me up in four and a half hours and whisk me off to O'Hare, where I'll be boarding a plane for Sin City. My best buddy Dave will pick me up at McCarran, we'll swing by his house to drop off my bags, and then we're off for a fabulous meal at our favorite Italian restaurant. I believe I can confidently predict that, after the meal, we'll repair to his house, drink a few beers, solve most of the world's problems between us, and then toddle off to bed somewhere around midnight.

Tomorrow morning after breakfast and a bit of repacking, it's into the truck to head north along I-15. We've got tickets to three of the plays at the Utah Shakespearean Festival (Molière's The School for Wives Friday afternoon, and Othello that night, followed by The Two Gentlemen of Verona on Saturday night). I imagine we'll pop over to Zion or do some geocaching on Saturday before the show.

Sunday will be a travel day. Our big destination for this trip is Yellowstone National Park, which both of us visited when we were small children, and which neither of us remembers all that well. We're definitely looking forward to spending several days absorbing the beauties and scouting the trails. The day before Independence Day, we head back. We'll probably spend some time at Grand Teton National Park on the way back, and we're planning to stop somewhere in Utah for the night--it's almost 800 miles from Yellowstone to Las Vegas, and while that's certainly doable in a day (particularly out west, where interstate speed limits are 75 mph and traffic typically moves faster than that), it would be a very long day and we'd be wiped out by the time we got back.

Then some kind of celebration in Vegas for the holiday, and then it's time to come home. Ten days in company with one of my best friends in all the world, surrounded by all manner of natural wonders and interesting history to explore. I'll wager I'll have a few dozen hundred pictures to bring back with me, and plenty of new stories. And it's just possible I might post a few of either or both here, as the opportunity presents itself.

That said, however, I'm really trying to make this a vacation. I'm probably not going to be checking in every day. That will mean that if you do comment here, it may take some time for it to show up, since comments are still moderated. Be patient: I'll get around to it eventually!

Catch you on the flipside.

In lieu of actual content

Given that I'm (a) cold and (b) depressed as shit, I'm stealing this meme from Emily at Incertus:

Clearly I need to get out more. If only the Department of State would cough up a shiny new passport for me...

Well, and winning the lottery or getting on Jeopardy! would help, too. Not sure I'm going to get a third invite to try out for the latter, either, given my less-than-stellar (according to me, anyway) performance on tonight's online tryouts. How in hell could I forget Nina Totenberg's name?

It's time for TSA to put up or shut up

Just ahead of the busiest travel week of the year, the Transportation Security Terrorist Supply Administration has major egg on its face, in the wake of a report showing that screeners routinely missed potential bomb components in covert tests across the country:

In one set of tests, however, investigators were stopped for having items in a bag larger than quart-size but were allowed to proceed through a checkpoint without being forced to transfer the items to a smaller bag. At another airport, a screener stopped a tester carrying a small, unlabeled bottle of medicated shampoo, saying "it could contain acid," but did not recognize an actual liquid explosive carried separately by the tester.

In other examples, an investigator carried coins in his pockets to trigger a hand-wand and pat-down search but brought bomb components through without notice.

This is not a surprise to anyone who travels frequently. I can't count the number of times I've been standing there, shoeless, in a security line, and heard a passenger ahead of me or in an adjacent line being warned about personal care products that are in containers too large to be carried on under current regulations, or not in the stupid bags that we're supposed to use, even as I walk through the scanner with a forgotten pocketknife in my jeans, or unbagged containers of liquids (hand sanitizer, saline nasal spray, or decongestant--obviously, I'm a terrorist) in my carryon bag. Our airport security is a classic case of swallowing camels and straining at gnats.

Predictably, the GAO report that announced the findings of the tests calls for even more stringent measures. I would argue that we really ought to drop the premise that the TSA is contributing anything worthwhile to airline security and completely revamp the way we handle security screenings. The answer is not to make passengers show up naked and banning carry-on luggage altogether, though I'm sure there's a bureaucrat who's proposed something along those lines. The answer is to get serious about what we're looking for, what we need to worry about, and who is likely to carry it.

We can throw out the assumption that it is only scarybrownpeople or Muslims Islamojihadifascists that we need to worry about: not only are those assumptions racist at base, they're fundamentally stupid. Sure, al Qaeda is significantly pissed at us right now--but they're hardly the only ones. And unlike the TSA which is living proof of Newton's First Law of Motion (specifically the part about inertia), al Qaeda and other serious terrorist groups are smart enough to think ahead and recruit ordinary-looking, innocuous white people to carry their water (or whatever) onto our planes.

We don't need to worry about shoe bombs. Not only was the only person who ever attempted such a thing caught, have you ever tried bending down to do anything with your shoes in the average economy-class airline seat lately? It would be significantly easier to hold a 10-person orgy in an airplane lavatory. U.S. airports are, to the best of my knowledge and in my experience, the only ones in the world where passengers are required to take their shoes off to go through security. (And I can't believe the number of people I see going through without socks on, standing barefoot on floors that God knows who has tracked up with God knows what kind of nasty gunk.) Yet, strangely in the TSA's view, I feel safer flying out of Charles de Gaulle in Paris, or Ben Gurion in Tel Aviv. I may not have to take off my shoes in either of those latter airports, but I'll damn sure get more than a cursory look from the security personnel, and they will actually look at (and sometimes into) my luggage. Repeatedly. It may not be as geek-cool as some of the high-tech scanners TSA is apparently wanting to deploy, which would allow them to virtually strip passengers passing through security checkpoints, but unlike the high-tech toys, the security measures in Paris and Tel Aviv actually appear to work.

Neither, unless I'm flying back to the United States, do I have to limit the size of the liquid containers I bring on board with me, or put them in a plastic bag. (Really, what the hell does that do to facilitate the screening process?) In my more cynical moments, I'm inclined to suspect that TSA uses such measures more as a public-relations campaign to lull travelers into a false sense of security.

And that, I suspect, is the crux of the matter right there. TSA seems to be far more interested in appearing to be effective than in actually being effective. And that's not acceptable. I'm willing to put up with a few inconveniences in return for a reasonable expectation that I will not be injured or killed in a terrorist action when I board a plane to go on a vacation or business trip. But there are limits to what I'm willing to put up with without griping--and I have absolutely no patience for purely cosmetic measures. Given that, on a good day, TSA screenings appear to be good for little more than providing the illusion of security, I'm growing less and less willing to continue putting up with them.

Now I know how a sardine feels

Of all the traveling I've done these past 12 months (and there's been a lot of it--I've racked up more than 17,000 frequent-flyer miles since January), I think today's was the suckiest. My day started off badly when my limousine driver called me at a quarter to six this morning to say he was downstairs waiting for me. I was just about to step into the shower. (Fortunately, I'd gotten up a little earlier than I'd planned on, and was mostly ready.)

That little contretemps over, we had an uneventful trip in to the airport, which was jam-packed. I haven't had to wait in line that long even to go to Paris this summer. (And why is it, I wonder, that I always seem to wind up in line behind groups of the most clueless travelers in the universe--people who can't find their boarding passes, don't notice that there are six open kiosks waiting--and 100 impatient people behind them--and so on?). It was far too warm in the airport, and the seating area at my gate was jammed. As was the plane to Denver.

We boarded on time, and I found myself in what was supposed to be a window seat. The notable thing about the seat was its complete lack of a window. Instead, I had a bulkhead where the window should have been. Instead of having the recess where the window should have been, this bulkhead stuck out about four inches, making it very inconvenient for my left shoulder. My right shoulder was inconvenienced by the left shoulder of the gentleman seated in the middle seat, which made for a very uncomfortable flight for yours truly. That discomfort was not helped any by the fact that after we pushed back from the gate and taxied for 15 minutes, we spent another half-hour in a holding circle while they tried to download (or upload; I never could hear the captain's announcement clearly, despite having a speaker almost directly above my head) our weight balancing information.