Tag: Travels and Other Places

Friday Chat From The Road

Here I am in the lobby of the Comfort Inn in East Greenbush NY a little east
of Albany (an excellent
spot I might add) when what do my eye’s perceive? Gary’s
lament:

(trembling slightly….)
but, Alan, if you’re on
the road…wh-wh-ooo wiiilll run Friday chat? We, we we gotta have our
fix…..
(shakes, shudders, pale trembling face…)

So it is both
with a warm heart and yet a feeling somewhat like coming to terms with one’s
stalker that we have today’s Friday chat from the road:

  • Highway hotels are a favorite thing of mine. They play much the same role as
    airport terminals. You are in transit. It is not like a resport hotel or one in
    your favorite destination for an urban fix. Gotta have a pool, gotta have
    snacks, free breakfast and a gas station nearby that doesn’t give you the
    creeps. This particular gas station here has large bottles from nearby Ommegang
    as well as a Dunkin Donuts outlet. You got to love that: local craft for the
    beer during the Phillies and Braves and generic international for the morning
    zap. This sort of travel is also something in that style of being nowhere and
    anywhere. I really have no time to learn anything about East Greenbush NY and I
    do not want it foisted upon me. I want pleasing dislocation because by 10 am
    I’ll be gone. Like a Gordon Lightfoot song with someone who will bring you more
    pillows if you just dial the front desk and ask.

  • While on the road, even if just since 4 pm yesterday, you immediately get a
    sense that you don’t know what is going on. US sports talk radio doesn’t help.
    Why Canada can’t sustain a sports talk radio network when every city over 75,000
    in the US has its own local guy going on about the local team is beyond me.
    Yesterday I got a very good hour from WHEN 620 on the AHL team for
    Syracuse, the Crunch, and their prospects in the upcoming first round of the
    playoffs against the Mantiboa Moose. Imagine the guy in Syracuse who is fixated
    on taking apart the Manitoba Moose in four: Crush them! Crush them!

  • Apparently, according to Dick, George gave Dick and George the right to
    declassify information in an executive order. But
    Dick won’t say when they used it, who else has the general power and won’t (I am
    assuming maybe) show anyone the actual executive order. This is a lot like a
    general warrant, something barred by the US constitution, which was an
    appointment of an officer by the British pre-Revolution to search anywhere
    anytime on suspicion. It is much better for accountability and transparency to
    make folk write down on a piece of paper what facts exist and why they are
    relying on a power in like of those facts so that there is something to test the
    use of the power against. One would hope that the executive order would contain
    a test as well – a purpose which justifies declassification – so that if the
    purpose does not exist then a declassification would be unwarranted. And the
    scope of the disclosure as well. Not defining who gets to
    know     is fairly stunned, like the time Dad let the mouse out of the cage
    without shutting the door to the room. Lots of scurrying where you never
    expected you’d be scurrying.

  • If the Jays really are good this year, I know I will bandwagon with the best
    of them, I will say I liked them when – and frankly having watched them when
    there was nothing else to watch during the Jose Cruz Jr era I am owed that
    right. But it sure is depressing listening to them beat
    the Red Sox     for the second night in a row. Tonight, however, Ichiro is
    at Fenway. I love Ichiro. I try to excell at all things in life if only to be
    like the tiniest speck of grey in the shadow of the man that is Ichiro. I will
    drive though southern Vermont and New Hampshire today on highway 9 in an
    Ichiro-like manner.

Well, there you are time to get the DD java and
wake everyone up. Miles to go before I see the sea.

Easter Week

An excellent picture from the BBC this morning, most excellent because of the trendy girls in to the back and right who are looking at the black wizardy lads.

Easter week has often meant in my adult life hitting the road as it will this year, seeking a little saltiness and a little spring. As those little blue spring flowers are popping up here now, who knows what there will be to see in the Mohawk Valley or around Worchester, MA as we travel through. God forbid a leaf on a tree but maybe a daffodil.

Once, I knew it was spring because I was reading The Master and The Margarita as a way to renew myself. Silly lad, as now or at least for four of the last six years, spring does not start unless I have been in the company of Mainers. Remember when I used to post short short movies? Well, it is three weeks early but one can only hope to see a spring day like this again.

Ah, My People

Things are a wee bit different in the old country:

…South Harris residents argue the Sabbath must be strictly observed as a day of rest. Some left marks of their disapproval at the quayside. Yellow tape bearing the words “Caution Keep Out” had been tied across the ferry slipway and several posters bearing the words “remember the Sabbath day” were posted on surrounding signs and buildings.

Just another reminder that I am going to aych-eee-double-hockey-sticks along with the rest of you lot fer dayin mony a wicked deed like taykin’ the ferrrrry ona Sundee. Badjuns alla ye.

Japan Freaks Out

I couldn’t think of anything else to say about this news from that bastion of democracy somewhere below your toes:

Most foreigners visiting Japan would be photographed and fingerprinted under controversial legislation approved Tuesday by the country’s cabinet. Children under 16, diplomats and permanent residents — such as ethnic Koreans born in Japan — would be exempt from the requirements. The government wants the bill voted into law during the current session of parliament, which ends on June 18. If the law is adopted, advance lists of passengers and crew members would also be required for all airplanes and ships arriving in Japan.

Yumpin’ Yimminy! Strike another country off my list of places to visit. I say we make each Japanese traveller do tongue twisters upon landing in Canada. Or jumping jacks. It will be of about as much use and will be more entertaining.

Off To Canton

Off to do my part for NPR by helping NCPR think about what it might do with the internet. I am really looking forward to this but I am a bit worried about my Cantonese.

On the up side, I have established where the ales are, have scoped out First Prize Hots for the way home and also plan to buy some tickets for the big game against Yale on the 20th. It has been two years since we were there for a game.

How Much For The Ferry?

Bad news for whoever has a soft spot for the Rochester to Toronto ferry bought by that US city’s Council just this spring:

The city had set aside an $8-million cushion but had to borrow an extra $2-million from ferry operator Bay Ferries Ltd. to keep afloat. On Tuesday night, the City Council voted 7-2 to borrow $11.5-million more to keep the ferry in business next year. Bought for $32-million at auction, the five-story-tall ferry was re-launched June 30 after running for just 11 weeks in 2004…Fewer than 100 passengers had boarded the 774-seat ferry on sailings last month.

I really hope that that was a 100 person per sailing average but, still, there are big problems with spending or borrowing 21 million within the first year on a 32 million investment. To put that in context, 53 million USD is the equivalent of 13.7% of the entire budget [Ed.: watch it – there’s a .pdf under that there link] for the city for the year 2004-05.

North Korean Photos

A rare view of life in rural North Korea is shown at the BBC where pictures an anonymous western business person was allowed to take are posted:

I could travel more or less where I pleased for my work, and even though we always had translators and minders, I was rarely prevented from taking photographs. I am under no illusions about the nature of the state. What I saw was how North Koreans live and work.

Omnitopia

Ian has been on a bit of a roll lately. Today he raises the question of standardization and homogenization of commercial culture on the road:

But on a long road trip, the understanding that you are never more than fifty miles from a Wendy’s chili (low fat, kids!) or the 100% positivity that the Starbucks in Barstow has hazelnut syrup can be… oddly comforting. I’ve railed against predictability and ninnyism my whole life, and yet I am given succor that there are 12,804 places to get a large fries with McDonalds’ bizarrely tasty hot mustard sauce. Omnitopia offers sanitation, can always provide a bathroom in moments of desperation. But it also means you will never try that fascinating-looking Mexican place three miles off the freeway. You will stop frequenting that indie bookstore, but why bother when Barnes & Noble lets you read on the couch in the aisle? Holding a Starbucks latté, for that matter?

While that attraction to the familiar is there my reaction to travel is the opposite. I want to find that Mexican place and add it to my own set of stepping stones as I travel across the river. The more I travel often through the same places the more I find the places I don’t expect to find there. So now I know there is a guy making “Syrians” in the centre of New Hampshire, that Di Pietros in South Portland, Maine is a little friendlier than the pizza is good, that there is such a thing as a chocolate Boston there, too, and salt potatoes in Syracuse and Cambodian diners here in Kingston. That is one reason why I have come to dislike the train or the plane as well. The car comes with brakes you get to use yourself. I plan to use them, too. I have to head into the Big Smoke overnight Thursday and I may stop, oh, about fifty kilometres off the 401 at an old church in the country for six small bottles of the finest pale ale in Ontario.

Sometimes it does not work out. Like the bad bathrooms. Like the roads you shouldn’t have taken. Like this summer’s side trip to the Connecticut shore where we had a hard time finding the spot until we found Mystic and the Sea Swirl. It is all about the hunt and it just takes time.