pictures

The Road Trip of Awesome, which began a few days ago—sorry I couldn’t tell you about it, Internet, but the blog was broken for a while there—has already taken me from Vancouver through Seattle and Portland, to San Francisco for a while, to Los Angeles, and today to El Paso after a major drive across California, Arizona, and New Mexico.

Total distance covered so far: about 4000 km (2500 mi).
Total money spent on gasoline: don’t want to think about it.

To sate your insatiable appetite for road trip photography, you’ll just have to wait until more photos can be taken, edited, and uploaded. You can visit the full gallery here; as for right now, please allow me to whet said appetite with a few choice tidbits:

Tomorrow: Ciudad Juárez and then San Antonio!

Across Canada, people protested the recent decisions by the CBC to axe the only remaining radio orchestra in North America and change the character of Radio Two away from classical music as a major focus. At the protest in Vancouver, about three hundred people showed up: this was the biggest turnout in Canada, but this is, after all, the city that is the home base of the CBC Radio Orchestra. Many important people in the Canadian music scene—not just strictly classical music—were there to address the crowd and lead us in very well-tuned protest songs and anthems and chants.

The full album of pictures is here (I’m slowly migrating my photo software to Plogger). Here are some ‘best of’ hits:

Also, check out Adam Abrams’ blog post, with which I express my complete agreement, as well as his photo album from the event. Also, if you have Facebook, check out the event page for the nationwide protests, as well as the Facebook groups for classical music at the CBC and for the CBC Radio Orchestra. Also make sure to check out the web site for Stand on Guard for CBC.

My own foray into celebrating Pi Day was a failure because I screwed up the crust. So instead I made French toast out of a challah I had baked last week. Almost as tasty and mathematical. However, I’m glad to see that somewhere, Pi Day was observed with all the mathematical and nerdly gravitas that such a day demands: at the University of Oregon, where students held a ‘protest’ to commemorate the holiday and all the serious issues it raises.

Photos courtesy of Ian Gowen, University of Oregon. Licenced and used under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

I’m back from Rome, safe and sound, though not really so healthy—I seem to have contracted the flu somewhere over the Atlantic. Oh well, it’s given me some time to start the arduous task of selecting editing the 2500+ photos I took, amounting to about 3.7 gigabytes of data. I am going to put these up by theme, starting with today’s installment of amusing and interesting signs (modern, not ancient or papal) in and around Rome. More photos and trip happenings will be recounted and posted as my schedule permits.

It is really good to be back in a country where you can cross the street without fear of being run over by two dozen mopeds.

The origins of many traditions—especially religions ones—are shrouded in mystery, like the prohibition against eating kitniyos on Passover among Ashkenazic Jews or my family’s practise of tearing the challah at the Sabbath table and passing it round from person to person, round and round the table, thus getting everyone’s germs on everybody else’s holy bread. But there’s one tradition we have of which I do actually know the origin: at the conclusion of the Sabbath, we say havdalah over hard liquor and then extinguish the candle in it, thus setting it on fire. (This is totally kosher, by the way. You don’t have to use wine for havdalah; as long as you make sure to recite the shehakol blessing over it, you can use anything you want other than water.) At any rate, this started when I was spending Shabbos with some people—I don’t remember who they were—and they did this, and I thought, gosh, that was so pretty and fun, we should do it next week when I’m back home! And we did.

Here’s this week’s flaming liquor signalling an end to this Shabbos. (I ran out of vodka last week, so I’ve switched to Canadian whiskey—Crown Royal, if you’re curious—until I can be bothered to go over to the liquor store.) A good week, everybody!

Happy last night of Hanukkah!

‘One for each night, they shed a sweet light…’

(Click for full-size image.)

Getting up this morning and seeing that it had resumed snowing, your humble correspondent braved the wet, the cold, and the snowy to take a jaunt around the neighbourhood and hopefully produce a photo or two of some notable Vancouver landmarks. Please enjoy the result! (I’m getting to think that there is some kind of secret Federal law that prohibits construction of government buildings unless it can be done such that their bilingual signs will at some point be covered with snow, thus preserving the cold and frosty image of Canada, or something.)
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Some time-separated pictures of the snow today in downtown Vancouver, progressing from early day (upper left corner) to late afternoon (lower right corner). Click for full-resolution pictures.
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