This was a rather busy weekend I just had. On Friday night, I was DJing with Maya at FNW, and that really went pretty well. We had a good selection of music, with lots of favorites, plus some new stuff that hasn't been played before. In addition to Museum of Idiots, we played Tiger Rag as a one step, People Change (Rockapella) as a two step, and Brave Combo's Chopin waltz in C minor. Quite fun. I danced rather less than usual, but it wasn't too bad, since I was splitting the DJing with Maya.
On Saturday, Miriam and I went to Sacramento for Neal and Michelle's wedding, which also included us setting up and taking down their chuppah as well as doing a reading from The Song of Songs as part of the ceremony. In the evening there was a dance (mostly swing) and some performances (mostly dance, some music). It was fun and I got some good swing practice, but staying out late and then driving back from Sacramento made for a long day.
Yesterday we heard Klez-X at an afternoon house concert. Then there was Arsenic and Old Lace at the Stanford Theater. Both were quite enjoyable, but at the end of a sleep deprived weekend, sitting for two hours in a dark theater pretty much zonked me out.
Today I am very sleepy, so I'm staying home.
Monday, September 20, 2004
Friday, September 17, 2004
A Short History of Nearly Everything
After finishing A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, I feel like "nearly everything" is much closer to "practically nothing" than I ever expected. Don't get me wrong -- this is a fantastic book. But more than anything else it rubbed in the fact that our vast collection of knowledge is really just a tiny tiny part of everything there is to know. That's very humbling, though it's also exciting to know that there's so much left to discover out there.
Another thing that was struck me a lot was the extreme tenuousness of human existence, and how much we are at the mercy of the Earth and the Universe. For instance, a meteor several miles wide could be hurtling through space towards us and we would have no clue about it until at most a few months ahead of time, and then only if someone was lucky enough to be looking exactly in the right spot at the right time. More likely, we'd notice it when it entered our atmosphere, about one second before it crashed into the Earth with devastating effects.
Then there's Yellowstone, which is considered an active supervolcano. One of its eruptions a couple million years ago was large enough to bury the country in about 20-60 feet of ash. Its major eruptions average about one every 600,000 years. The last one was 630,000 years ago. Not the sort of thing one really wants to dwell on, in either sense of the word.
Of course, not everything in this book was quite so scary. Some of it was simply fascinating. I am, of course, referring to slime molds. These things are amazing. Check it out:
Overall, the book was an absolute delight, and I'm especially glad I got it as an audio book. Bill Bryson has a very enjoyable writing style that has very distinct similarities to Douglas Adams (an effect heightened by the narrator's British accent). I literally laughed out loud at numerous points throughout the book. The narrator is Richard Matthews, who is undoubtedly my favorite narrator yet encountered. (See my earlier comments on The Piano Tuner.) So anyway, read it or listen to it. It's awesome.
Another thing that was struck me a lot was the extreme tenuousness of human existence, and how much we are at the mercy of the Earth and the Universe. For instance, a meteor several miles wide could be hurtling through space towards us and we would have no clue about it until at most a few months ahead of time, and then only if someone was lucky enough to be looking exactly in the right spot at the right time. More likely, we'd notice it when it entered our atmosphere, about one second before it crashed into the Earth with devastating effects.
Then there's Yellowstone, which is considered an active supervolcano. One of its eruptions a couple million years ago was large enough to bury the country in about 20-60 feet of ash. Its major eruptions average about one every 600,000 years. The last one was 630,000 years ago. Not the sort of thing one really wants to dwell on, in either sense of the word.
Of course, not everything in this book was quite so scary. Some of it was simply fascinating. I am, of course, referring to slime molds. These things are amazing. Check it out:
When times are good, [slime molds] exist as one-celled individuals, much like amoebas. But when conditions grow tough, they crawl to a central gathering place and become, almost miraculously, a slug. The slug is not a thing of beauty and it doesn't go terribly far—usually just from the bottom of a pile of leaf litter to the top, where it is in a slightly more exposed position—but for millions of years this may well have been the niftiest trick in the universe.So it's as if these things are going around transforming from single cells to animals to plants. How cool is that?
And it doesn't stop there. Having hauled itself up to a more favorable locale, the slime mold transforms itself yet again, taking on the form of a plant. By some curious orderly process the cells reconfigure, like the members of a tiny marching band, to make a stalk atop of which forms a bulb known as a fruiting body. Inside the fruiting body are millions of spores that, at the appropriate moment, are released to the wind to blow away and become single-celled organisms that can start the process again.
Overall, the book was an absolute delight, and I'm especially glad I got it as an audio book. Bill Bryson has a very enjoyable writing style that has very distinct similarities to Douglas Adams (an effect heightened by the narrator's British accent). I literally laughed out loud at numerous points throughout the book. The narrator is Richard Matthews, who is undoubtedly my favorite narrator yet encountered. (See my earlier comments on The Piano Tuner.) So anyway, read it or listen to it. It's awesome.
Tuesday, September 14, 2004
An Optional Appellation
The East Bay Friday Night Waltz is coming up in a few days, and it turns out that I am co-DJing this time around. It's really Maya's gig, but I volunteered to help pick out and arrange the tunes. This gives me a chance to try and squeeze in a lot of music I've been wanting to dance to for a while. (It's not all making it into the final revisions of the set list, but really, if I just get to waltz to Museum of Idiots, I'll be happy.)
What amuses me most so far about DJing is the notice on the website, and in the reminder emails for the dance. Maya's full name is listed normally, but I'm just "Graham." It's like I'm famous enough not to need a last name or something. Goodness. Or else whoever wrote it up just doesn't know my last name. But I don't think any other Graham's are going to be jumping in to take my place, so it's all okay.
What amuses me most so far about DJing is the notice on the website, and in the reminder emails for the dance. Maya's full name is listed normally, but I'm just "Graham." It's like I'm famous enough not to need a last name or something. Goodness. Or else whoever wrote it up just doesn't know my last name. But I don't think any other Graham's are going to be jumping in to take my place, so it's all okay.
Wednesday, September 08, 2004
Michael Crichton's Travels
Travels is a book that has been recommended to me for a while (thanks Case!) and I finally got around to reading it before and during my Costa Rica trip. This is by the same Michael Crichton that wrote Jurassic Park, Andromeda Strain, etc. but this book is more autobiographical than fictional. It was extremely different from what I expected, but I think I ended up loving it even more because of that. Which is, of course, why I should remember not to put too much weight on expectations.
The book doesn't even begin with much traveling. The first 80 pages or so are all about going through med school. (Did you even know he was a doctor? I sure didn't.) I figured I was going to get bored and just slog through that part, but it turned out to be fascinating. The chapter called "A Day at the BLI" was about different women's experiences in the delivery room, and packed more punch per page than anything I had read in a while. It was also interesting to read about how he views our responsibility towards our own health, and how we affect it by our mental and emotional states, as well as our physical states.
After med school, he gets to the actual traveling part of the book, which tends to be pretty adventure-oriented travel: climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, scuba diving with sharks, crossing a landslide in Pakistan, etc. But after a bit, you realize that there's more going on than just scooting around the world. There's a lot of self-observation happening, too, particularly regarding relationships with the various women going through his life at these times.
Also as the book progresses, he starts exploring different types of experiences as well. When staying in London, he visits the Spiritualist Association of Great Britain nearly every day, evaluating the different psychics there and trying to determine the validity of the phenomena he observes. Later, he goes to meditation conferences, and energy work sessions, and learns to see auras. Some of this material is more fascinating to me than the stuff that I expected the book to be about. I particularly recommend the chapter on "Cactus Teachings." The postscript to the book is the text of a talk (never delivered) to the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, about why he believes there is some validity to certain psychic phenomena.
I've already got Mom and Lacey lined up for borrowing my copy of the book. It's definitely going on the "highly-recommended" list.
The book doesn't even begin with much traveling. The first 80 pages or so are all about going through med school. (Did you even know he was a doctor? I sure didn't.) I figured I was going to get bored and just slog through that part, but it turned out to be fascinating. The chapter called "A Day at the BLI" was about different women's experiences in the delivery room, and packed more punch per page than anything I had read in a while. It was also interesting to read about how he views our responsibility towards our own health, and how we affect it by our mental and emotional states, as well as our physical states.
After med school, he gets to the actual traveling part of the book, which tends to be pretty adventure-oriented travel: climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, scuba diving with sharks, crossing a landslide in Pakistan, etc. But after a bit, you realize that there's more going on than just scooting around the world. There's a lot of self-observation happening, too, particularly regarding relationships with the various women going through his life at these times.
Also as the book progresses, he starts exploring different types of experiences as well. When staying in London, he visits the Spiritualist Association of Great Britain nearly every day, evaluating the different psychics there and trying to determine the validity of the phenomena he observes. Later, he goes to meditation conferences, and energy work sessions, and learns to see auras. Some of this material is more fascinating to me than the stuff that I expected the book to be about. I particularly recommend the chapter on "Cactus Teachings." The postscript to the book is the text of a talk (never delivered) to the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, about why he believes there is some validity to certain psychic phenomena.
I've already got Mom and Lacey lined up for borrowing my copy of the book. It's definitely going on the "highly-recommended" list.
Monday, September 06, 2004
Arenal and La Fortuna
For our last excursion, we all went on an overnight trip to La Fortuna, to see Volcán Arenal. The top is often covered with clouds, but we could actually see a lot of it when we got there. And the next morning it was perfectly clear, which is pretty unusual, I think. It's still an active volcano. You can't see the lava during the day time, because of the sunlight, but at night you can see flashes or streams of bright red heading down the mountain in the distance, or bouncing sparks as boulders tumble and collide. 
The volcano itself is off limits of course, but the park surrounding it has some great hiking trails. The variety of terrain there is really interesting. We started off in an open, brushy sort of area, with sandy soil, and then it switched to forest. After that were the lava fields with lots of great rocks to clamber over, and then more forest. And that was just in about an hour of hiking. I would have liked to come back for a full day there to explore it more thoroughly. On the way back, we were caught in the rain and got rather soaked before we made it back to shelter. But that was about the only time on the whole trip that happened. For the most part, the raining happened when we were on buses, or inside, or only had to go a short way with our umbrellas. Pretty lucky for the rainy season of a tropical country, I'd say. 
The next morning we wanted to go see a butterfly garden. Our guidebooks only listed some that were too far away, considering we had a bus to catch that afternoon, but we had seen signs for something that might be closer. Asking around town, we were pointed in the opposite direction of the signs (maybe they were decoys), where we found Eco Centro Danaus a few km down the road. Danaus is the Latin name for monarch butterflies, and they do raise butterflies there, but the whole thing is a beautiful little ecological preserve with lots of other animals and plants. When we got there, a batch of people were just leaving, and we were given a private tour for just the three of us. The caterpillars of some of the butterflies there were amazing, being three or four inches long and looking like little dinosaurs. Some of the cocoons were interesting too, like the ones that seemed to be made out of gold. And the butterflies were beautiful. Some were large enough that you could hear their wings flapping as they went by, like birds. Among the non-butterfly critters we saw were sloths and poison dart frogs (both of which we'd seen before), a bat sleeping under a leaf, a boa constrictor, and some poisonous snakes (including a fer-de-lance). The dangerous ones were in enclosures, of course. There were some great plants there, too. Our guide pulled a few leaves off a tree and had us smell them. We couldn't quite place the smell, but as soon as we chewed a bit of the stem we recognized cinnamon. I could have munched that all day. Luckily we had it before the píper leaf, which is an anesthetic and turned our tongues numb with just a little taste. All in all, it was a very cool little tour.
After that, we headed back to San Pedro so I could get packed up and ready to leave the next day. Lacey's still down there, though, and presumably still having fun.
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