Restaurant Review: Marigold

The unmistakable sign of a fantastic meal:

I'm back in Sydney for the week doing research. On Saturday, I took multiple trains out to the Western Sydney Records Repository, in a far western suburb called St. Mary's. It was basically four stops from the end of the line, which in this case is the Blue Mountains. According to the charming archivist, they originally built the sprawling center (it looks and feels a little bit like a military base) out there about forty years ago never expecting to open it to the public. But their other public center happened to be located on some of the most prime real estate in Sydney, and they were renting, not owning. Once they were essentially priced out of most of that space (they retain a small office in the CBD) they opened the repository up to the public. But given that it takes two hours by public transit to get out there and back, it's a wonder anyone gets out there at all. But the collection is pretty terrific, and (unlike the National Library), they let you take digital photos of the documents. So I spent most of Saturday taking snapshots of old inspectors' reports from the NSW Department of Education. It was quite fun. I get to make the pilgrimage again on Thursday and again next Saturday.

However, the highlight of the trip so far has been without a doubt this morning's brunch. My friend R, a political scientist from Berkeley, is also in Australia this fall gathering data for her dissertation, and yesterday was her birthday. So, along with Australian friends B and S, we went out on the town, dancing at The Palms (which really merits its own review, probably on a less family-friendly blog than this) and then out for post-dancing cocktails. So this morning, a big greasy breakfast was definitely in order, and R and I found it in Chinatown.

I had been having intense cravings for "yum cha" (that's Australian for "dim sum") for about two weeks. B recommended Marigold as the best place to go. The restaurant, located at 683-689 George St in Sydney, is on the fifth floor of a building on the edge of Chinatown, a very short walk from Central Station. Actually, it is on the fifth and fourth floors of the building, but the fourth floor is only open for yum cha on Sundays. It was not immediately apparent to us why they would pay rent for an extra floor that they only use once a week, but we decided to go to the mysterious fourth floor since it was Sunday. There was a line, but it moved very quickly. The elevators and the lobby were packed both when we arrived, around 12:30, and when we left, about an hour later, with a good mix of Chinese and non-Chinese clientele. Auspicious!

We were seated after about a five minute wait, but before they had bothered to set the table. So the waiters laid out a tablecloth and place settings while we were seated at the table, somewhat maladroitly, I might add. Inauspicious!

Well, auspices be damned; the food was outstanding. We started with a plate of what looked and tasted like croquettes, but the filling was a garlicky ground pork mixture with water chestnuts. Then, we took a plate of what I guess you could call Chinese shrimp crepes, essentially 2-3 whole shrimp wrapped up in long rice dumpling skins drenched in soy sauce. The shrimp were outstanding, incredibly fresh, and the skins and soy did not compete with the flavor.

The rest of our meal was pretty standard dim sum fare: spring rolls; vegetable and shrimp dumplings; and siu mai. We initially thought the vegetable dumplings were vegetarian, filled only with chives, water chestnuts, and mushrooms, but further bites revealed morsels of pork strewn throughout. Both shrimp dumplings and spring rolls were artfully executed. The real stars, however, were the siu mai. Probably the best I've ever had. The pork was juicy and tender, with no gristly bits strewn throughout.

With our stomachs a bit unsteady at the outset, we passed on some of the more interesting options. One particularly aggressive server came by at least three times proffering scallops fried in won-ton skins. Another offered us a quartered duck, while variations on a theme of chicken feet passed us by in a pungent haze of vinegar. Another woman was ladling up two varieties of tofu out of big buckets. And the dessert cart was topped with colorful cubes of Jello adorned with, for some odd reason, Norwegian flags.

I would heartily recommend Marigold for a good Sydney yum cha. Especially if you top it off with a nice half-hour walk to Newtown in the unexpected sun, which is what we did afterward.

Not in Kansas Anymore

Overheard on the Nightly News just now:

"This campaign is going to last six weeks. That's quite a long time. Is there a risk that Australians will grow tired of it and tune out?"

Meanwhile, American primary season is barely three months away!

The Australian federal election has finally been called for November 24, and you can just feel the excitement! All of the advertising has suddenly become campaign commercials, and the Liberal Party (i.e., the conservatives) just announced their election platform of A$34 million in tax cuts. Labor leaders (including the uninspiring Kevin Rudd) are sitting on their perceived lead and trying not to make any mistakes. And the news this evening started a series of profiles of "swing districts" that are every bit as uninformative and boring as American profiles of Ohio or Florida (tonight we learned all about Eden-Monaro, and the beleaguered foresters of Queanbeyan). So, um, it's hardly foreign at all! In fact, one could say it's sort of a depressingly familair, albeit compressed, version of American politics...

Manly -- September 23, 2007

Another exciting day in the library today. This time, it was poring over the conference reports of the Australian Teachers' Federation from 1964-1978. Yes, it was exactly as exciting as it sounds. Summary: Give us more money, give us more money, give us more money. Don't give the Catholics money! Give us more money. Weeellll....OK, you can give the Catholics money, as long as you...Give us more money. The worst of it was that the reports were all bound up in an enormous hardcover volume that weighed about ten pounds and was extremely unwieldy, especially toward the ends of the volume. And naturally, I somehow managed to strain my left forearm manipulating it during photocopying. Who knew libraries were such dangerous places?!?

Anyway, it's not so bad that I can't type. But this is just much more pleasant:
That's the view from the ferry to Manly on the way out. On the way back, just before docking up at Circular Quay, I shot this composite of bridge and Opera House:
Manly, by the way, is gorgeous. I hopped right off the ferry and went to the Manly Fish Market, where within fifteen minutes I had a packet of fish and chips and plopped myself down on the beach. It was a beautiful sunny spring day. These last two pics are from Manly; the first is of the main (oceanside) beach, and the second is on the harborside strand near the ferry docks.

'Roos on the Loose!

I've got a bunch of stories and pictures from my (amazing!) trip to Sydney last weekend which I promise I'll post soon. But now, for something completely different...

Yesterday, I went with K. and A. and some of their friends down to Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve just south of Canberra for a barbeque and some hiking. And I finally saw some Australian wildlife! To wit, kangaroos and emus:
It was about time, too. Inevitably, in conversation with Australians (and others, like the philosophy graduate students who've been here for a while even if they're transplanted from Europe or New Zealand), people always ask me whether I've seen a kangaroo yet. And they'd always be shocked when I told them that, no, I hadn't. Apparently, because of the drought, the kangaroos have been creeping in closer and closer and have started dining at night on the cricket ovals in various parts of Canberra. So I was feeling really embarrassed not to have seen one yet. Now, I can say that I have in fact seen a kangaroo.

Tidbinbilla has one of the highest concentrations of kangaroos in all of southeastern Australia, and as we were heading back to our car later in the afternoon, we were treated to a spectacle of an entire mob of kangaroos out grazing on a field:
Wildlife aside, the landscape in Tidbinbilla is generally beautiful: a sort of austere pastoral wonderland. Tidbinbilla was basically burned over during the bush fires 4-5 years ago, which left it with some great old gum-tree skeletons:
The wide-open horizons aren't too shabby, either:

A Report from the National Library, and Then Some

Back again, and I've got some more pictures from around town. I'll start out with this shot, taken just down the road from my apartment, which features both the leafy broad streets of Canberra and (in the background) the Testra Tower, one of the most notable features of the city. I suspect it's the tallest structure in town, and it looks over the city from a perch high on Mount Black. Because it's omnipresent, it's a great orienting device when you get lost on the twisty roads. (Telstra, incidentally, used to be the national, government-run telephone service, but was privatized during the 1990s. Australia has been on something of a privatization binge during the past decade.) Anyway, Telstra operates the tower, which you can climb up (I haven't yet). Telstra also runs nationalistic TV ads attacking their rival, Optus, for being a predatory Singaporean company. I bought my Optus sim card before I learned of their nefariousness, though my week-long ordeal getting my phone credits up and running suggests that there may be some truth to the ad.

I took the rest of these pictures on my way home from the National Library of Australia. Honestly, the Library is pretty much amazing. It has the most user-friendly (and comprehensive) electronic catalog I've ever had the pleasure of using. It has the largest collection in the Southern Hemisphere, as I learned today. It also has some amazingly gregarious patrons, including one 60ish lady who invited me to a Salvation Army party at the end of October, which you better believe I am going to attend. Even the architecture is, by Canberra standards, very stylish:

The inside is even nicer, with stained glass in the lobby and a sleek glass-enclosed cafe.

I've been spending most of my time this week at the Library digging up old government documents, obscure conference reports, and the like. The real find so far has been a 1969, state-issued book of Scripture readings for primary students (a.k.a. elementary schoolchildren) replete with chapter and verse. It's nothing out of the ordinary--nothing you wouldn't expect to see at a Sunday School, for instance--except for the government imprint. Such is my lot these days: getting excited over children's books from 40 years ago.

The other neat thing I found was a collection of New South Wales primary curriculum guides from 1925, 1952, 1959, 1970, and 1975. (There's one from 1941 that I'll need to get in Sydney when I travel there one of these weekends.) Unlike the U.S., where curriculum decisions are made at the local level, here curriculum standards are determined at the state level, so you get a uniformity that is unheard of in America. (It makes the research job much easier, too!) Anyway--though this has nothing directly to do with my research--the difference between the 1970 and the 1975 guides is pretty outstanding. It's as if the Department of Education suddenly got taken over by a hostile band of developmental psychologists. All of the curricula through 1970 were very structured, subject-focused (English, mathematics, social studies, etc.), and full of recommended readings for each grade level. In 1975, the entire syllabus is almost pure theory: filled with very broad statements about the goals of education, child psychology, and almost entirely content-free. It's an amazing, and amazingly abrupt, shift. The funniest part is that, in 1977, the New South Wales Department of Education also issued a booklet entitled Aims of Elementary Education, which, upon opening, is essentially written in the style of a children's book, with lots of pictures of smiling kids, about twenty words of text per page, and really big pages. Yet this is presumably aimed at an adult audience. It's entirely bizarre.

The walk back to my place is long: around 45 minutes. Normally I take the bus, but today was not too cold and I was feeling like the exercise. The Library is on the south side of Lake Burley Griffin, which divides the northern, commercial, center of Canberra from the southern, governmental, center. The lake was created by damming a muddy creek, so swimming is "not recommended" according to the guidebooks. When I asked roomies K. and A. about the idea, they laughed in shock and said, "Are you crazy?" Which I guess means the guidebook authors were being polite. In any event, to get home I have to cross the long bridge across the lake, which gave me the chance to take a set of shots of the lake just before sundown:

(I'm experimenting with composite, panoramic shots this week. If you like them, I'll try to do more now that I've figured out how to do them on my primitive photo software.)

In the shot, the inescapable Telstra Tower is on Mount Black to the right. Center, the arch is part of the National Museum, which is just below ANU, and which is supposed to be terrific. I'm hoping to get there this weekend. My house would be somewhere at the very far right of the picture.

On the way into town, here is a view of Canberra's central business district as you approach it from the national capitol:

I think I told someone that Canberra is kind of like if you took downtown Madison and plopped it in the middle of the suburbs, and I think this picture captures that pretty well. The downtown is decidedly low-rise. There is a big circular, essentially decorative roundabout at the end of the bridge, around which downtown Canberra wraps, which makes the city feel yet further spread out. So, downtown is what it is, which is, alas, far less exciting than government-issued Scripture readers from 1969.

Well, that's almost enough for now, but I'll leave you with this: I learned, last night, as K. threw an impromptu dinner party (A. is at a training in Kuala Lumpur for two weeks), that Canberra is apparently renowned for its pornography. According to the dinner party guests, the Australian Capital Territory's biggest export for years was pine trees. When the city was being built, they planted huge pine forests all around it to serve as a commodity. Most of those forests burned a couple of years ago (apparently, pine needles don't decompose well in Australia) during bush fire season. So now, I am told, Canberra's biggest export is now porn. I am further told that, if I go to the Fyshwick neighborhood, I can see all manner of strip clubs and brothels (prostitution is legal here, too) and "studios." I fear K. now has it in his head to take me to Fyshwick to see the sex shows. Stay tuned...

First Pictures from Canberra

I've finally gotten around to taking some pictures of my daily routine in Canberra, so here they are for your enjoyment:

This picture is of the O'Connor Shops, hard by my apartment (you can see the apartment complex immediately behind the shopping complex if you squint really hard). Canberra is an exceedingly spread-out city (thank you, Garden City movement) made up of dozens of "suburbs," each with a little commercial district at its center. Apart from the commercial district, the rest of the suburb is, well, suburban: lots of large lots and lawns and parks and absolutely nothing to do. I suppose I'm fortunate in that the O'Connor Shops contain All Bar Nun, one of the best bars in town, plus a little overpriced grocery store, a great fish-and-chips shop, and a decent Vietnamese restaurant. But it would be nice if there were more to do at close range. Well, maybe once things warm up in a month or so I'll be able to venture further on my new used bike.

The rest of these pictures are pictures of the Australian National University Campus, about a 15 minute walk/ 5 minute bike ride from my apartment. (Sorry, I took them all at dusk on my way to a lecture, so they're a bit dark.) This is the main entrance to the campus that I pass by every day on my way into campus. The university (or, as the perpetually-abbreviating Australians say, "Uni") is actually a hybrid of two colleges, one a research-only campus and the other an undergraduate teaching college. This means that an appointment in the research school means no teaching responsibilities. Sweet deal, eh? The Social and Political Theory Program resides in the research school, which means that the faculty are available pretty much all the time, and make regular appearances at morning and afternoon teas (an innovation that American universities could certainly stand to import).

Much like UC-Berkeley, ANU has a creek running through the center of it. Much unlike Berkeley, the creek is not surrounded by beautiful redwood groves, but rather by large willow trees and grassy lawns. (If you've noticed a strong British influence on the university so far, you win!) When I first arrived, everything was pretty much dead and brown, but it's greening up bit by bit as spring approaches. If this picture is any indication, I'm sure it will be quite lovely and pastoral come October. Like the rest of Canberra, the campus is spread out and garden-like to a ridiculous degree, which means that it's a good ten minutes from the main gate to my office (see below).

This picture shows the Student Union, which contains a number of restaurants, shops, and a bar. The bookstore (not pictured) is across the street. Earlier in the week, this plaza was mobbed with students handing out pamphlets for the elections for student government. I got a kick out of telling them I wasn't eligible to vote, and watching them look confused. One of the shops on the ground floor is a bakery which sells an astounding array of meat pies. At A$3 a pie, they're one of the only bargain lunches around, incredible delicious, and extremely unhealthy. So I eat there pretty much all the time.

This is Chifley Library, the main library for the campus. It's a fairly small library compared to Berkeley's Doe Library, but they apparently keep a remarkable amount of stuff from before 1990 in reserve storage someplace in New South Wales. This can be frustrating for the researcher trying to track down back issues of Melbourne Studies in Education or Victorian Historical Review, but it gives the library a nice -- surprise! -- spaciousness. The librarians are very friendly, by the way. One of them invited me to join her film club after I asked her whether it was possible to view tables of contents of journals otherwise on reserve storage in the bowels of the Outback. (The answer was no.)

This lovely building is the Coombs Building, home of the Research School of Social Sciences, and home to me when I'm working on campus. The building is designed -- I'm not kidding about this -- in the shape of an organic molecule, with three interlocking hexagonal sections. Offices are numbered, as a result, based on section of the building, floor, and office number. As you might imagine, this is incredibly confusing. To make matters worse, the architects decided to design it so that the floors in the various sections don't align with one another. So the entire building is a patchwork of half-staircases and blind turns and irrational numbering. Oh, and it's also under construction so as to make it accessible to the disabled, which as you might imagine means essentially tearing the whole building apart; this only adds to the chaos of trying to find your way around.

I was feeling awful that I kept getting lost until last Monday, when I went to a meeting with a professor. He took me downstairs to introduce me to some colleagues in economics, and even he got lost along the way. And he's been here for upwards of twenty years! Really, what can I say: modernist architecture 1, humans 0. On the plus side, there's an awful lot of money sloshing around in this building, and I've got a fantastic office with two pretty cool European philosophy students (one studying political philosophy, the other the philosophy of mind), so it's all good once I find my way to my office...

Finally, we come to one of the newer (and cooler) buildings on campus: the Medical Research Building. For some reason, the lecture I went to see on religion, tolerance, and terrorism was held in the lecture hall in this building. The lecture wasn't so hot, but the building was pretty great. (And the lecture room was very nice, too.)

So, there, in a nutshell, is a guided tour of my daily walk to work. Now that I've finally finished up those American hangover papers, I'll be around here more frequently, at least for the next couple weeks before I shift over to the National Archives and National Library during the week. I biked over to the government section of town this afternoon, but didn't take any pictures. But never fear, once I do, I'll post them here for you to admire. Until then!

Sunday's Fun Religious News from Australia

One of the fun things about being over here is that, despite Australia's secular image and self-identity, there is still an awful lot of religion in the local news. Today, while waiting for fish and chips at the shop across the road, I happened across four fun religion stories in the Sunday Telegraph:

ITEM!!!

Labor Leader Kevin Rudd spoke last week to religious leaders, burnishing his Christian credentials:

Last week, Rudd addressed the Australian Christian Lobby, and he was a prominent member of the Federal Parliamentary prayer group.

He has previously declared the Christian faith, along with a commitment to social justice, to be one of the guiding principles of his life.

"For me the Christian faith is an undergirding (sic) principle,'' he said.

Today, he is being accused of hypocrisy after admitting to getting plastered and hitting up strip clubs in New York.

ITEM!!!

Assemblies of God to begin advertising during Australian Idol (link not available).

ITEM!!!

Australia's friendly skies are not so friendly, if you're Jewish:

Sydney executive David Moses has lodged a complaint with [QANTAS], alleging the [flight attendant] repeatedly made derogatory comments about Jews, even after discovering that Mr Moses was Jewish.

[...]

He said the steward had complained to him about an elderly French passenger who had become agitated over the provision of a wheelchair for her husband on arrival.

Mr Moses said the attendant had turned to him and said "Jews''.

When he asked what she meant, she had replied: "That's what you get when you deal with Jews.''

[...]

After he told the steward "I am Jewish'', Mr Moses said she responded: "Well, you better go and tell her that she's letting your team down.''

But, of course, I've saved the best for last:

ITEM!!!

University of Western Sydney cafeteria defines "halal" inclusively, to include bacon:

A CATERING company has apologised to Muslim university students after trying to sell them "halal bacon and egg rolls".

University of Western Sydney students had been suspicious for months about the authenticity of food labelled "halal'' at campus canteens.

Their concerns were unexpectedly proved correct when in-house catering company UWSConnect offered "halal bacon and egg rolls'' at the Bankstown campus.

Down Under

I arrived in Australia yesterday, and am slowly getting myself up and running. A few notes:

• You apparently don't get contemporary in-flight entertainment on United flights to Australia. The fare for my trip included some movie with Richard Gere as a 20-something; Wall Street; Shrek (the original); and some movie with Sandra Bullock crying a lot and hugging two young girls. Fortunately, I chose to read Bill Bryson's In a Sunburned Country and was enormously entertained instead.
  
• Australian customs and immigration is far more assertive and aggressive even than American customs. Dogs running up and down the waiting lines, really intense questioning about fruits, veggies, etc. It was not a speedy process.
• The flight attendant on the short hop from Sydney to Canberra was 6'5" and named Kylie. Somehow, this seemed appropriate.
• Apparently, Australian magpies will play the role of the American rooster in this adventure. They sing at 6AM, with a call that sounds not unlike R2D2 short-circuiting.
• Regrettably, the housing stock in Australia appears to have been designed by the same folks who designed California's--that is, under the impression that it never gets cold here. So my room loses heat at an incredible rate at night. And it is not warm here either; temps top out around 50-55 degrees during the bright sunny day, but dip below freezing at night. I'm going to have to buy some additional blankets this evening, I think.

It's been a good trip so far. I've got a bank account, internet access, and I've set up my spacious though partially magenta room. Roomies K. and A. seem very congenial and outgoing. Today, I'm off to acquire a cell phone and to introduce myself to the fine folks at Australian National University. I'll post more about Canberra and those adventures later.

San Millan de la Cogolla -- June 2, 2007

Here are a few pictures from around San Millan de la Cogolla, in the Rioja region. San Millan is famous as the "birthplace of the Spanish language," if memory serves because one of the first monks in Spain to write in the vernacular lived in one of the area's two monasteries, in around the eleventh century or so.

The first pictures were taken at Yuso, one of the two monasteries (the other, Suso, was closed). The latter were taken on the way back to our hotel in Haro, when we stopped off at a berm of wild poppies, which are everywhere in Spain in early June.

Burgos Cathedral -- June 1, 2007

I learned a thing or two about my patron saint today...

This picture shows the main entrance to Burgos Cathedral, one of the greatest in Spain. We hit it on the first day of our trip, some three hours after I arrived in Madrid from New York on an overnight flight. Mercifully, L. did all of the driving up from Madrid (two hours) so I was able to sleep in the car and actually enjoy the cathedral. Even on a trip that included the grand Cathedral at Santiago de Compostela, this cathedral was a high point, especially its exquisite treasury of medieval art.

Much as you can't get very far around Florence without running into all kinds of statues of Saint Sebastian getting shot full of arrows, you can't get far around Burgos without running into paintings of Saint Jerome (a.k.a. San Jeronimo). Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your point of view), Saint Jerome didn't meet with a grisly death, so instead he's usually depicted looking tormented, reading and/or translating the Bible, in the vicinity of a skull (symbol of meditation). For his labors, he is now patron saint of archivists, librarians, and students. So it's somewhat appropriate, given my impending journey, to devote this post to the many terrific depictions of Saint Jerome that fill Burgos Cathedral:


As cool as St. Jerome is, however, he can't hold a candle to the best piece of art in the treasury. Ladies and Gentlemen, I am proud to present...

Disco Jesus!


I mean, is there really any doubt that this version of Jesus is not just bringing light and truth, but bringing it?

Santillana del Mar -- June 3, 2007

Santillana del Mar is a small town in the north of Spain which is, its name to the contrary, not located on the ocean. It's an extremely well preserved medeival town, near the famous (and closed to the public) Altamira Caves, which means it gets quite a bit of tourist traffic during the day. It empties out at night, however, which is when we experimented with night photography:

For some reason, the black and white ones always turn out the best at night. I think it's because they capture the two-headed nightwalkers that the color shots just can't...

Spain's War on Speed, Part II

No photos this time, just a friendly travel advisory:

You know how, in the U.S., you'll often see signs that say "speed monitored by radar," and it's just kind of a general warning that a cop might be sitting behind a berm waiting to catch you for going too fast? Well, in Spain those signs actually mean something. All over the country on the motorways, Spain has installed little boxes that monitor your speed and take pictures of your license plate if you go too fast. They then mail you a speeding ticket, and deduct a set number of "points" from your license. (Enough deductions, and you can't drive anymore.) However, as part of the surveillance law that enabled these boxes, the authorities must notify you of any unmanned radar installation. So when you see a big sign warning you to slow down, you can be sure that one of these radar-camera boxes is about a half-mile down the road.

The good news is that once you figure out what the boxes look like, you'll know when you've passed one of them. Then, you can resume whatever speed you were traveling before.

Spain's War on Speed, Part I

Here's a clever idea:

Photo taken on the road between Fuente De and Potes, Cantabria, Spain, June 5, 2007.

These mechanisms are all over the north of Spain. To reduce the number of drivers who speed through little towns, these traffic lights are attached to a radar gun that automatically turns them red if the approaching car is traveling above the posted speed limit. Once the driver slows to the permitted speed, the light turns to a flashing amber.

While very annoying, I think this is actually one of the most effective traffic control devices I've ever seen. Lots of American small towns could really make use of them, I think--though then again it would probably make it a lot harder for the local police to issue tickets!

Gaastra, Michigan -- May 28, 2007

This is the first of a series of posts I hope to do featuring pictures from various travels I've done. I enjoy photography, though I'm not particularly good at it. So any tips on improving the photographs (in the comments) would be greatly appreciated!

This post contains four pictures from the town of Gaastra and its surroundings, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, which I visited back at the end of May on a swing through the Midwest. The area has a generally depressed farming economy and a few remnant mining and timber operations. Like Vilas County, just over the border in Wisconsin, it has begun to transition into a service-vacation economy; the area is dotted with small glacial lakes and kettle moraines, which make it prime location for summer cottages and recreation for Midwestern city-slickers.

This picture was taken in the town of Gaastra in the local playground. This swingset was the best-maintained piece of equipment in the place. Tire swings were pretty common when I was a kid, though today they're considered dangerous because water collects in them and breeds mosquitoes and other nasty things. (Here in San Francisco, all of the playgrounds are nice and safe and made out of colored plastic.) But not in Gaastra, where the tire swing still reigns supreme:


This next picture was taken just outside of town. The soil in this part of the country is littered with rocks, courtesy of the retreating glaciers of the last Ice Age. Farmers had to clear them all by hand. Sometimes they used them to make neat stone walls like this one:


However, typically there were so many of them that they would also just create enormous piles of rocks in the middle of the field and just farm around them:


(Incidentally, the above setting is one of my favorites in the area. The light wasn't ideal when I got there, but I plan to go back and take a few more next time I'm in the area.)

Finally, there's this shot. For some reason, barns with smiley-faces are a fairly common sight in the Great Lakes region (also watertowers with smiley-faces). So are barbed wire fences. So this shot brings the Midwest's two great tastes together, in one "good fences make good neighbors" taste sensation...

PapaRatzinger Blog!

So, Blogger has a button you can press to take you to a random blog. I just pressed it and came up with this:

http://paparatzinger-blograffaella.blogspot.com/

There's a particularly charming picture of the Pope sitting in a verdant garden buried in there, like something out of a Robert Herrick poem.

Anyone speak Italian? I'm curious to know if the blog has any insights into the Pope's recent attack on the legitimacy of Protestant and Orthodox Christianity. Between the Supreme Court's recent decisions on race, religion, and free speech; and the Pope's slow-motion repeal of Vatican II, soon we'll all be partying like it's 1960!

Ctrl-Alt-Del

Is this thing still on?

I had very good intentions of maintaining this blog on my three-week vacation back in May and June, uploading some photos from the Midwest and Spain and commenting on my journeys as I went along. The pace of my travels kept me from doing it in real-time, and since I got back I've been swamped with work and preparations for my trip to Australia. A quick summary of what's been done on that front since June 12:

• Bought plane tickets
• Found a place to live
• Whittled my prospectus into something remotely researchable
• Began to set up the financial side of things
  

Beyond this, I'm revising a paper, writing a paper, and gathering data for two more papers I hope to write in Australia. Oh, yeah, and working as an RA on a very cool project looking at the brief heyday of hospital rate-setting commissions in the 1970s and 1980s. So, keeping busy!

I'll try to post some pictures from Michigan and Spain in the near future.

PupusaQuest Restaurant Review: Mi Tierra

My rear tire died yesterday, so today I went to get a new one installed. While I was waiting for them to service it, I wandered down the street to get lunch. My destination: Mi Tierra Salvadoran and Mexican Restaurant, 324 South Van Ness Ave, San Francisco.

I had actually eaten off of Mi Tierra's menu before, during a catered lunch at CUAV several years ago. It was good but not particularly memorable. Today, however, I went straight for the pupusas.

I am on a quest to find the perfect Bay Area pupusa. Mi Tierra is the sixth restaurant I've tried, but the first I've reviewed. Previous venues include El Patio, Balompie, Platanos (SF and Berkeley varieties), and Panchita's. [I'll try to revisit these locales and write up reviews in the coming months.] The verdict: there's lots to like, but the overall experience is not as good as Balompie or El Patio.

Mi Tierra is spacious and brightly colored. Spanish telenovelas play on a large-screen TV in the back. I ordered (as is my wont) two loroco pupusas and a Diet Coke. The total bill was $5.60.

First, the good: The pupusas themselves were large and tasty. Mi Tierra uses more loroco than many other places, which gives them extra flavor. And they were not greasy or overcooked.

The problem lay in the accompaniments. I was intrigued by the curtido because it was made with jalapenos and hot chilis. Unfortunately, despite this, the slaw lacks flavor. It also lacked crunch, and some of the cabbage bits looked decidedly old. Likewise, the salsa was thin and runny.

In sum, the pupusas themselves compare favorably with the pupusas at El Patio and Balompie. However, the overall combination of pupusa, curtido, and salsa falls a bit short in terms of flavor and freshness. I'd rank Mi Tierra third in my pupusa rankings:

SF Pupusa Rankings
1. Balompie
2. El Patio
3. Mi Tierra
4. Platanos (Berkeley)
5. Panchita's
6. Platanos (SF)

How to Test a Folk Theory

For all aficionados of the five-second rule, this New York Times piece is fun must-reading:

Prof. Paul L. Dawson and his colleagues at Clemson have now put some numbers on floor-to-food contamination.

Their bacterium of choice was salmonella; the test surfaces were tile, wood flooring and nylon carpet; and the test foods were slices of bread and bologna.

First the researchers measured how long bacteria could survive on the surfaces. They applied salmonella broth in doses of several million bacteria per square centimeter, a number typical of badly contaminated food.

I had thought that most bacteria were sensitive to drying out, but after 24 hours of exposure to the air, thousands of bacteria per square centimeter had survived on the tile and wood, and tens of thousands on the carpet. Hundreds of salmonella were still alive after 28 days.

Professor Dawson and colleagues then placed test food slices onto salmonella-painted surfaces for varying lengths of time, and counted how many live bacteria were transferred to the food.

On surfaces that had been contaminated eight hours earlier, slices of bologna and bread left for five seconds took up from 150 to 8,000 bacteria. Left for a full minute, slices collected about 10 times more than that from the tile and carpet, though a lower number from the wood.

In my opinion, the scariest bit in there is the bit about the longevity of salmonella in your carpet. Scary, but perhaps not surprising. So there you have it: another cherished folk theory bites the dust, courtesy of science.

A Mission Statement of Sorts

This scene, from Arrested Development, is one of my favorites:

Michael: Speaking of which, where's your child?
Lindsay and Tobias: [laughing] We don't have a child, Michael! [suddenly serious] Oh.
Lindsay: Did you mean Maeby?
Michael: I did mean Maeby.
Tobias: Well, she’s hardly a child, is she, Michael?!
Lindsay: Yeah, and we know where she is. She’s with her debate club, and they’re on their way to Sacremende for the semifinals.
Narrator: She wasn’t. And a Google search of the word “Sacramende” only came up with this:

I always get a kick out of the idea that Maeby Funke is on her way to Sacremende, not just because it shows up Lindsay and Tobias' terrible parenting skills, but also because of what Sacremende represents: an imagined, untraceable other world where the rest of her life takes place. Nobody in AD is ever really sure where Maeby is. She's constantly ditching school (and getting expelled for it), leaving work at the banana stand early, and living a secret life as a successful film executive. A great deal of her life takes place offscreen--in Sacremende.

This blog is the place where I will make a little bit of my own "offscreen" visible to the world. I'm fortunate to have several trips to distant lands in the coming year, so I'll be making myself scarcer than usual. So Postcards from Sacremende will be just that: updates and dispatches, new things I've found, probably more than a few banal observations and lame pop-culture commentary...from my various travels. This will include comments on restaurants and food, parks and natural adventures, cities and towns, and my research. As the post below suggests, there will probably be some politics thrown in as well, though I'm really going to try to keep it to a minimum. This isn't a political blog, after all; there are plenty of great ones out there already.

So that's what I hope to accomplish with this blog. We'll see how well it goes...

Uploading Images: A Test

Here's an attempt to upload an image to the blog. We'll see if it works.

In honor of yesterday's news about Chevron settling a suit for illegally dealing with Saddam Hussein during the sanctions era, I've chosen this old favorite Get Your War On cartoon (featuring everybody's favorite and most competent former Chevron board member) as the test image. Love ya Condi!

Dispatches from Sacremende

Another voice screaming into the void, another country heard from. Into the great unknown, where a google search returns no results...