Various

Random recent pic. La Pedrera, Sierra Guadarrama. pretty nice.

1. I couldn't figure out how to watch football last year. The pay services primarily work in the US, and it seemed impossible to find links to games online. Some Irish bars show American football. The problem is my game is always the late game, so I would have to get on the metro, ride into the city center to be there for kickoff at 10:00pm, blow 25 euros on pints and then one of two things would happen. Option 1: Its tied in the fourth and the bar closes because it a slow sunday night. Option 2: The bar takes pity on you an stays open, but the metro line you need to get home stops running at 1:30, leaving you stranded.

But I have watched the last five games (all wins by the way) in my own home, start to finish. If you live in Europe and suffer my plight of last year you need to download 2 programs: stream torrent an sopcast. Then go to myP2P.eu and find a link to your game. These ain't the best broadcasts, often the image sucks, or you get kicked off (like me last night), or it takes 20 minutes to get it to work. But its something, and for that I am thankful. I watched a game which was commentated by two Danish guys apparently sitting in a bedroom. Sometimes its an English feed with a couple completely unknown NFL players commenting, with some middle aged British guy. Its cool just for the surrealism.

2. Spanish douche style: Spain has their own special douche fashion. It's pseudo hip-hop (late 80's), part frat boy, part Miami vice and ALL douche in spiky hair gel flavors. They rock the popped collars, pink shirts, and faux hawks. Some of the older ones grow pencil line beards. The hairstyles can only be described as Vanilla Ice, with lines etched in or white sidewalls. There is almost always: 1) a shaved part, 2) a spiky part, 3) short shellac spiky bangs glued to one half of the forehead part. There is also multiple face piercings, always with white or black beads instead of naked metal. This might be accessorized with a kefiyah, aka a paisley "jihad" scarf like back last year when Rachel Ray became a jihadist in a dunkin donuts commercial, maybe even in douche pink or turquoise...though i have noticed that that is fading. Its so '08. They are fond of tight Don Johnson color tees, and this is commonly worn under an all white ensemble featuring a fur lined hooded jacket. They have these incredible pants over here, which manages to simultaneously mimic skinny jeans and gangsta sag. The trick is that the waist actually fits, and the legs are tight, but the crotch of the pants is almost own to the knees. Its like when a toddler has shit in his diaper.

3) We made plans to travel in France and Andorra between x-mas and New Years. New Years in this town:
beat that, chump.

4) Strange anthropological observations: In the metro or trains stations sometimes its so busy that the escalators get real crowded. Like most places, people are lazy and would rather wait in a line to ride an escalator than take the stairs right next to it. I don't blame anybody, some metro stations are better than the stair master. That's not the wierd part, this is: the escalators break often, and when they do everbody crowds onto the stairs and avoids the escalator. I see a broken escalator as a perfectly servicable staircase, some people could climb the stairs and others the escalator so there wouldn't be 10,000 people all on top of each other. But they avoid the non-running escaltor like its dangerous or illegal or something.

5) Lard Alert: I knew I needed to drop a few pounds but I was shocked when I found out I was over 210 pounds!! My eating habits have always been somehwere in between cookie monster and Bacchanalian orgy. But I stayed reasonable thin by exercising alot. Gradually, my spartan exercise routine got replaced by a spartan train ride to and from work and a spartan work-eat dinner-have a beer or two-sleep lifestyle. The month long trip to the states didn't help much, since me and my old friend Thai-food-that-doesn't-suck had to become reaquainted. Thats not even mentioning Mexican food and plenty of it. Most Americans have no idea just how incredible unlimited chips and salsa is, they just take it for granted. Well I'm telling you A-holes, its awesome and you won't know that 'til you go somewhere it doesn't exist and it will hurt your soul. It will make the baby Pancho Villa cry. But awesome aside...all of these things had resulted in my highest weight ever.

So my plan is simple but effective....1) Skip the beer. I am allowed to drink beer if i go to a party or if we're out for the night. But I don't need three hundred extra calories just because a beer sounds delicious after work. Tough but necessary. 2) Exercise pretty much every day. the weather and my broken derailleur is not favoring alot of cycling right now, but we go to the gym twice a week, and i started running again. I've worked back up to 6 mile runs, and I don't even mind it in fact its fun. So we've been back a month and I'm at 200 pounds now. I need to drop at least another 5. Lard sneaks up on you.


6) I haven't had alot of beaurocratic nightmares lately, plus i try not to dwell on annoying shit (it ain't good for me), but this one is so frickin' funny...Becky finally got her national ID card this morning after entering the country last February. Since it took so long it will only be valid for two months, and its already time to renew.

Julian Sayarer

...just read about this guy on a blog. He is closing in on the world record for circumnavigating the globe on a bicicyle at an incredible pace of 111 miles per day. He's been riding for 149 days and is now in the states before returning to France to finish.

http://www.thisisnotforcharity.com/index.html

Hot pocket

Do you remember the jingle from the television commercials for hot pockets? I don't mean all of the lyrics...but it was a call and response thingie, where the response is a three note "Hot pocket!". I've adapted it for everyday use. If you get perfect liftoff on your next farmer blow, you can sing "Snot rocket!". Did you just buy a motorcycle? "Crotch rocket!" If you just discovered there's another wall outlet behind the dresser..."Light socket!" Did you just run interference on that douchey guy that's trying to get with that girl you like in sixth period "Cock block it!". It need not be applied only for things ending in "...ocket" either. it will work for many 3 syllable combinations, especially when its two words, the first being monosyllabic. "Sock monkey!" There you go, my gift to you, a multipurpoe jingle to enhance your day, every day.

speaking of vega$

this rocket from my past courtesy of greg. i still have a copy but its nearly completely faded. binion's horseshoe, that monument to the old & real vegas, used to have a glass case with a million dollars in cash in it. for years you could go get your picture with a million bucks, for free.

Could have just gone to Vega$, ok maybe not

I guess its time i got around to writing about our trip to Italy. Three independent parties had suggested that we could skip Venice- we've seen it in the movies after all, and theres one in vega$ anyway. Our Australian friend David told us it smells like the diaper wiff we always get in our local train station (false, Aluche rocks the stench by far). Other folks told us its expensive as hell (true) and absolutely full of douchey tourists like us (true). But heres the thing, theres no other place like it, except of course the one in vega$. Amsterdam also has some canals but the charcater of the city is totally different. Also Venice is not that crowded outside of the top five tourist destinations. The secret is that Venice, in its impossible to navigate entirety, is the destination, not some cathedral or museum (one caveat here: the Palazzo Ducalle does have five Bosch paintings...just something to think about). i enjoyed every second of wandering the streets and bridges, Becky had dreams about being lost there, which was true most of the time. You will pay with your own organs for a gondola ride (had to do it)and see so many other kidney-less tourists doing the same, that it feels like you're on a water ride at the Epcot center. Despite the kidney loss and the hordes it was pretty fun, our gondola guy was funny and weaseled into several pictures. On the other hand you can bring an old soda bottle to a wine shop and have it filled with wine for a couple bucks. it's kind of like my old fantasy of 7-11 selling big gulps of beer. So you can destroy the other kidney fairly cheaply. Go to Venice if you can, its cool, bring organs. Oh yeah whenever you order a coffee or a beer, it costs more to have it at a table. So remain standing unless you want a 5 euro coffee.


Next we went to Florence, Pistoia, Pisa, and the Tuscany region for a few days. In the cathedral (the Duomo), there is an enormous cupola with a painting on the inner surface. I'm pretty sure it was modeled after the cover of a Dio record, or maybe it was Grim Reaper. Seriously, there's demons eating people alive, the nine rings of hell, the judgement day and all of that. I guess this is supposed to frighten you into christianity. Later we ran into the fake David by Michelangelo. Why the fake David? Well, the real one was moved inside of a different museum to protect it from vandals. But who gives a shit, I already saw that thing in Caesar's Palace. Renaissance art doesn't do much for me. It just seems to be about inexplicable gratuitous nudity, rippling muscles, oversized hands and feet and undersized penises. I understand that it was a big change from relatively flat medieval art lacking perspective,it emphasized the human form, and occasionally portrayed something other than Jesus but you know I think I like medieval art - granted theres only so many Jesus's I can bear to look at. Anyways- David- he looks like Jay Cutler, the most overrated cocky dickbag of a quarterback ever. I hate Jay Cutler, and Denver Broncos are so much harder to hate now that he's gone. The Boticellis were worth seeing though, and no Jesus, just good ole paganism. I was so sick when we went to Pisa, we just turned around and left after we finally got there. Tuscany really was beautiful, its medieval towns are surrounded by open countryside in contrast to alot of places. Food was decent but it won't make you do a backflip like everyone tells you. I'll take enchiladas or chilis rellenos anyday.



Finally we went to Rome. At first it was just mediocre, we were tired and kind of in the "I've seen so much stuff I'm failing to appreciate Rome" rut. Things were pretty, including nice views from some famous steps, some famous fountains and plazas (more renaissance, woohoo), but it wasn't stunning. Not until we blundered into the Pantheon. That is a legit 2000 year old Roman temple still standing, with columns like redwoods. Its the sort of thing that our country likes to copy in all of its official buildings, but this is the real thing. The next day we visited the Colliseum, and the adjacent archaeological park. The park consists of the Palatine Hill and the Forum. We had a book which said most visitors leave the forum underwhelmed. Of course my previous knowledge of the forum was gained at Caesar's Palace- its a place with Gucci and Louie Vuitton stores, animatronic statues, and a fake sky that changes. Turns out the real forum is awesome, I don't know what kind of dolt could leave there underwhelmed. It's a junkyard of columns and foundations, arches, and temple fronts. Every rock fragment in sight was a piece of an ancient building. I've never seem anything remotely similar. Everywhere you go in this part of the city there is some excavated something several feet below the modern street level. It may be a gladiator training facility, a reconstructed tile floor, or a colony of nasty feral cats. After all this the Vatican was so unimpressive, except the pope mummies were pretty intriguing. The impression you get is: WHAT DISGUSTING WEALTH!!! When they pass around that plate for cash, you can rest assured they ain't feeding those freeloading poor people with the cash. They spend it all in dipping popes in molten gold and encrusting them with rubies. We blew off the Sistine chapel entirely because we suck at being tourists.

..by the way i'm getting lazier about pictures, these are all Becky's pics.

Dear jerk sauce:

OK, I just got back form a geek conference in England, now we are off to Italy tommorrow. The tourist trifecta: Venice, Rome, Florence

We will be in the States from 30 Sept until the 26 Oct. That first week of Oct we will be in Michigan. Then we'll fly to phoenix and stopover briefly in Flagstaff. Then its 2 weeks of field work in Northern Arizona and Utah, with a pass through Moab. We will again pass through Flag to return the car rental, then continue on to Vegas for the final few days of our stay in the good ole US of A.

So contact me by email, and we'll catch up. Vegas friends can also reach me at my folks house in the twenty somethings of oct.

Friends in Europe and the States who were considering a visit: november is still pretty open. let us know whatever you decide.

Galician food review: did we eat like kings or peasants

Months before going to the North, a basque guy told us we would eat like kings. I told him we are vegetarians, so we will probably eat like peasants. Because of the apparently excellent seafood (oxymoron in my opinion, how can you even approach it with that stench?), Galicia especially really has the rep for good food. There are actually pulperias, which means octopuserias. The north ended up somewhere in between king and peasant for us silly stubborn vegetarians, as we still relied heavily on pizza (only good for about four days in a row…), but there were significant improvements in some areas.

1) Pan Gallego: FINALLY, we went to a place where people eat brown bread, and they hand it out like it’s air. You don’t buy a whole loaf, because they are baked into rounds of like a half meter in diameter. Graded on a worldwide basis, this bread gets a B. It’s not exactly German barley bread, or brown Irish soda bread, but it’s a solid effort. I have heard lots of Europeans disparage American bread, because they think we only eat airy wonder bread. But every grocery store in the states has good reasonably fresh brown bread sometimes with walnut, sunflower seeds or any of many other interesting ingredients. American bread is excellent if you buy the right kind, which is not hard to find (as I said…..every grocery store). In contrast, all I can say is that in general Spanish bread is basically something you keep around in case you run out of toilet paper. Most Spanish bread is bland white bread, which is kept uncovered all day so that if you don’t buy it in the morning you can etch glass with it. If you succeed in biting through it you find that it is full of powdery sawdust. For the first time in my life I do not routinely buy bread when I go to the store. Not so with pan Gallego, graded on a curve for Spain this bread gets an A.

2. Queso de Tetilla: This is the nun’s tit cheese, named so because it is often made in convents and has a characteristic breast shape, complete with a nipple. Recently we had a british visitor who was a cheese enthusiast, so my Spanish coworkers were trying to explain the tetilla. He thought they were saying that the cheese was made out of human breast milk. In general cheese is an area where Spain does pretty well, and In contrast to bread totally kicks the ass of the US. To this day I still don’t understand what “American cheese” is nor do I want to. All I know is that United Statesians simply prefer an English cheese, cheddar. In our defense, we are clever enough to add chilis into a cheese, so although our time honored traditions are weak, our innovations are strong. Our standard cheese we buy in Madrid is queso Manchego, which is a blend of sheep, cow and goat milk which runs along a gradient of aging. This one is good, especially the curado, considering its the cheapest thing in the market. I don’t know a lot about the somewhat more expensive tetilla, but we went to markets where old ladies were selling super fresh cheese alongside all manner of local produce. Contrast this with Madrid’s frankenfood imported from Almeria’s creepy white tent agricultural system. I have confidence in the quality of the Galician cheese. I bought one that seemed to be smoked a bit, although this was subtle. It was good and versatile and reminiscent of Gouda, and of a similar softness. Like gouda its a little bland, but if that’s what you are looking for the cheese gets a B+.

3. Galician white wine: You are served a teapot-like thing and then drink it out of bowls. I think we had one from the Rias Baixas region, but as I am a wine ignoramus I don’t really know. It was a white wine, which I normally don’t like. This one gets an A-, damned good but I’d still prefer a decent beer.

4. Galician beer: Estrella Galicia replaces the hegemony of Mahou and Cruzcampo in the north. All three of these are complete garbage, so its hard to notice the difference. Ocassionally, Galician bars will have a portugese beer on tap, Superbock. For a medium light lager, Superblock absolutely crushes all Spanish beers that are not made in Barcelona. So Galician beer gets a C+, only on the merits of the occasional presence of the neighboring country’s beer.

5. Pimientos de padron: When I first came to Spain I had no hot sauce, and nothing more exciting in the roomie’s spice cabinet than paprika and black pepper. I went to the produce section of the grocery store, and asked if they had pimientos picantes. I was directed to a bag of pimientos de pardon. I was so pissed, they were about as hot as an icicle down the front of your pants. I showed them to my roommates, who were afraid of them because apparently most are not hot, but occasionally there is a wild ass one in the bunch which melts your face like a laser. Knowing the Spanish take on chilis I was skeptical to say the least, as some Spanish people think their patatas bravas are spicy (only once did I experience spicy patatas bravas and those were not in a restaurant). I have seen pimientos de padron as a tapa before in Madrid, one of the few truly vegetarian ones. But tapas aren’t usually free in Madrid, so I was reluctant to shell out 4-6 euros for a small dish of food that wouldn’t come close to satisfying my nutritional requirements, and despite everyone’s recommendations would not even be hot…at all. I mean no detectable capsaicin, like an Anaheim chili.

So with some trepidation I finally tried the things in Ferrol, just down the road form Padron which is the source. As I predicted, I never encountered a hot one. But John did and Becky did. Basically all these are are whole fruits, stem and all, fried and salted so that the outer skin is a bit singed. You eat it whole except for the stem and the former sepals, like you wound a pepperocini. I had no idea what I was missing because these are truly awesome, at least in Galicia. The flavor is somewhere in between fried okra and New Mexican green chili, without the potential slime problem of okra. We had them like four times, I want some now. A.

6. Galician breakfast: I keep harping on this, and I am aware that different cultures do different things, but the Spanish breakfast is wholely inadequate. It’s not that the foods are bad, there just isn’t enough calories or volume. The toasted bread with crushed tomato and oil of the south is largely replaced by croissants in the north, both of which I totally enjoy, but even if I was a 5 year old girl I would still be hungry. This is not a matter of culture, it just doesn’t make biological sense. Bodies need fuel BEFORE making demands of them, even if the demands are only a normal workday. This becomes especially poignant when you are cycle touring. Riding a bike all day you can rip through 4000-10,000 calories. If you burn more than you have in the tank you go into a caloric deficit and begin eating yourself. Once you go down this path (called “bonking” for the “bonk” sound you make when you fall down and can’t get up), it takes hours to recover even if you then have a giant meal. People undertaking endurance activities know that you eat before you feel hungry, because if you feel hungry you can expect your day of activity to end shortly. The problem in Spain is that if you ask someone if they have something else available to eat (meaning more substance) they look at you as if you can’t possibly be asking that. Of course, the kitchen isn’t open yet…why would the kitchen be open? D+ (the croissants are tasty with jam and butter at least, make sure and eat the butter you will need the calories).

7. amount of food. with the generous giving away of bread for lunch and dinner, and the generally larger size of the food, I wasn't walking away hungry from meals not called breakfast. So this was a big upgrade. B.