Kratzen vom Rathaus

Sound Experience

Alright, John Coulton's folk rock love song cover of 'Baby Got Back' with everyone waving their lit DS's like lighters to the music has to be experienced to believed...

Addendum: Penny Arcade has a picture of John Coulton and a bit of the audience during this very song if you scroll down. Multiply it by a thousandfold for proper effect.

Well, What Do You Know...

They really do still call out; "All aboard!" before the train pulls away from the station. I thought that went the way of Pullman cars.

Too Much WoW

What does it say that as we were passing by a logging area, I was immediately reminded of Windshear Crag and started to scan for Venture Company loggers to pickpocket? I didn't realize how good of a job Blizzard did with making that area
realistic. Well, minus the goblins and giant spiders anyway...

Dunsmuir

Somewhere around 5:30 we stopped in Dunsmuir, which is somewhere in the Cascades. I was up to see it because my joints were acting up enough that I dug around in the dark for day clothes and went out to walk the hallway. (Not bad for it being close to pitch black in here- I wound up with Tony's shirt but still figured it beat my pyjama top.) Dunsmuir yard had one of those turntable thingees for the trains and it was made out of railroad wood. Made me wish I had a real camera- or just my nephew- on this trip. He's the big train nut. I also realized just what it meant to be in the last car, beyond the smoother ride that is. It didn't register last night, but this morning I watched dawn lighten the sky through the rear passageway door. It's the closest I'll ever get to that riding on the caboose fantasy we all have as kids. Besides, I got to see this amazing girder trestle built in 1901 (said so right on the head-rail) as we went across it. Being deep in the Cascades, outside of the towns the railroad track is just a track beaten through the alpine forest. It's awesome scenery. It's less interctive than being on the
bike though. I can remember several times in rain and wind looking over jealously as those trains came blasting through without any deference to the weather. Now I'm not so sure. Sealed windows make for a more aniseptic experience. It's still *really* cool mind you, but you don't get the sheer exhileration of being one with the environment. Then again, if it starts raining, I can sit in the comfort of my cabin and edit the word exhileration into something a little darker.

Places in Between

I love travel, particularly the slower forms. There's just something alluring about the state of flux, location becomes more a function of time and velocity than an actual piece of real estate. But I've found in all the really good journeys it's actually the other way around. Time and velocity don't really matter that much because it's no longer a question of arrival but of passing through. I'm somewhere in northern California or Oregon. It doesn't really matter where, we're headed north
and that's enough. We'll make Seattle sometime tomorrow night and as it approaches, we'll fall back out of flux and into the real world. For now though, we're neither here nor there. We are somewhere in between.

BTW

I have my PAX assignment and I'm tied in with Technomancer Press for the TerraDrive Live game. It sounds like a whole lot of fun in the vein of I love Bees, for those of you who remember the Halo 2 launch. Frankly, I had a whole lot more interest in ILB than in Halo, so I'm happy to be posted where I am.
People are already in faction and talking smack on the boards. Should be a whole lot of fun. I hear they're even going to try for a Guinness BoWR entry.

Countdown

Depending on how many holdups Union Pacific subjects the Coast Starlight to (the kind where the train goes on the siding and another passes, not the kind with guys wearing bandannas over their faces), I'll be boarding the train for Seattle in twelve hours or so. I'm very excited. I like trains. This is the first time I've been on an overnight run.
Since this is a long trip and it's also our Anniversary Trip (eleven years married and eighteen years together) we've sprung for a room. I'm sure it's a closet with bunk beds. But who cares? I've seen North by Northwest a hundred times and I'm fine with it. Besides, if we get bored, we can see if someone really can fit in the folded berth just like Cary Grant.

Ummm, Oops

Well, my last hiptop (sidekick) managed untold terrors and multi-state trips, deluges of rain, hail, snow, I think one dunking and heat that should have fused all of its silicon into glass. My latest one wasn't so lucky. I really shouldn't leave the house while under the influence of that magical combination of flu and allergies. But I did. And I thought, the day before I leave on our big trip the absolutely most efficient thing to do would be to destroy my usual means of communication with EVERYONE I know. There is also the side benefit that just about every piece of vital information I should have memorized in the last ten years is stored in it. Since I've therefore never ever actually bothered to memorize any of it, that could be lost as well. Bonus! In an effort to accomplish this both quickly and creatively, I let the little heepy get run over.  (Don't ask. These things just seem to happen to me.) Maybe it would have survived a mini or a little Kia or something- but it took the hit from a big ol' SUV.
Oh, man. I don't even want to talk about what a sickening feeling it was to hold the broken and bloody heepy in my hands and know I couldn't even inform Tony of the situation because not only was the phone gone but I'd never learned his latest number. In the end, I went to Lynn's house since I was on that side of the bay and stole her eeenternets to email him and tell him to call me on her house line. He laughed, which made me feel better about the whole thing, and I wound up chunking a huge amount down at the vile Tmobile store because there was nothing else to do. We hates TMobile. They are slimy. The replacement phone probably cost me double what an initial phone would because they don't give promotions on replacements. Happy Anniversary to me. But it's over and it's done and now I can get on the train tonight and still keep in touch and the actual anniversary isn't until tomorrow anyway.

How Does Entrapment Happen Again?

Oh, man, if you have never been to the La Brea Tar Pits and you're even a remotely scientific geek, you're missing out. This has been something I've wanted to do since I was a kid, and I found it was worth the wait. After I found it anyway. Lynn and I ditched Saturday morning traffic blocking up (the) 101 and went alternate routes overland- which isn't a problem because I am great at navigating. That is, I am great at navigating when I have the right destination. I looked at the map, found La Brea, said something to Lynn, looked back at the map and proceeded to direct us to the Natural History Museum because it was another set of three dots in the general vicinity. So much for me that whole navigating thing.
Anyway, when we pulled in the lot the first thing I noticed was the smell of Brewer Coat. They don't have that stuff out in California, so it was odd to smell it again. After seeing what happens to it in the California heat, I understand why they don't have that stuff out here. In the middle of the handicapped parking was a fenced off area. The Page Museum and the Tar Pits sit on about a block or so of downtown LA. There's not really much they can do about the tar, so wherever it bubbles up, it does. At some point they cordon it off with cones and when it reaches enough of an issue to warrant the trouble they fence it off. Eventually, as the tar settles it forms a tarry, oily lake worthy of a Stephen King novel or at least a short story- if you've ever read 'The Raft' then you get this sort of ominous feeling watching the water bubble up in them.
I pointed out how the tar had managed to single out the handicapped parking and that Lynn had better move quicker on her crutches- it was obviously culling the herd. Pit 91 was open and operational- that's where paleontologists are currently working- and it was fabulous to watch them do their thing. We strolled the park and I played in a couple of the tar puddles. It was awesome. The tar operates a lot like sticky quicksand, so when you put your foot in a very active puddle, it subsides enough to fill the imprint with water when (if) you pull your foot out again. On the less active ones, it's like walking in heavy mud or on one of those mega foam mats they sometimes pulled out for gym class. You sink, but not much. However, because there is little vertical resistance, it's hard to push off for the next step. When I was playing with a particularly active section, I mentioned to Lynn how on the website they mentioned entrapment still happened and that "and occasionally large mammals (dogs and humans)" were involved. She just laughed at me from the safety of the trail and replied "Oh, yeah? And how do you think that happens?" However, I really liked the pair of shoes I was wearing, so I didn't do anything too crazy. When we made it around to the BIG lake, which I didn't see at first because it was so big, I was reminded it wasn't all fun and games when I noticed pigeon wings in the tar. That's got to be an awful way to go, made that much more morbid by the mammoth statues on either end of the lake, one entrapped while his little mammoth family looks on in horror and the other about to innocently step to his agonizingly slow death. Cheery!
We wandered the park past the puddles, pits, and panhandlers (although technically, they were probably street performers) and headed in to the museum itself, which was cool although couldn't really stand up to the pits themselves for a rock-geek like me. Dire wolves seemed to be the usual suspect, which I can imagine since their lil doggie brains would smell food and override any caution they might have had. That's still SOP for pooches, which is probably why dogs are the only large mammals besides people trapped often enough to get a mention on the website. Anyway, it's a small, privately owned museum and probably in need of some funding. The animatronic sabretooth vs sloth was looking a bit dated but still fun in a nostalgic sort of way. The wall of dire wolf skulls was pretty impressive. They have pulled SO MANY bones out of these pits it's abstract. I know it was over a million. The final exhibit was a chunk of matrix removed from one of the pits and stored (ironically enough) at the Natural History Museum for many years. It was more bone than tar. I was duly awestruck. Even I could have found fossils in that and I stink at field work. I think I would have spent all day running around the place if we didn't need to hit the road home. Ah well, it's just an excuse to come back.

Mixed Message

The LAPD have tiny bumper stickers on their cars that say "Watch The Road." Seriously, you have to get right up on them and squint to read it...