Category: travel

obama talks up high speed rail

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

amen to this:

“If you think about the Midwest, think about right here, what we’ve got is all kind of towns that we could connect,” Obama said. “All of these cities are, they basically take in the air about 45 minutes to an hour to fly.”

“But by the time you get to the airport,” Obama continued, “take off your shoes, get to the terminal, realize that your flight’s been delayed two hours, go pay $10 for a cup of coffee, and a sandwich for another $10, come back, you get on the plane, you’re sitting on the tarmac for another 25 minutes, you finally take off, you’re circling above the city for another half hour, when you land they can’t find your luggage, and then you get to where you’re going — by the time it’s all done it’s a five-hour trip! …So the time is right now for us to start thinking about high-speed rail as an alternative to air transportation, connecting all these cities and think about what a great project that would be in terms of rebuilding America.”

getting around europe is so much easier, because they have trains and a complete mass transit infrastructure. having given up my car, i can tell you that there’s nothing better than being able to get everywhere with someone else doing the driving. i hate it when i have to drive somewhere, such as when i visit my mom in florida.

let’s hope this is more than just campaign talk.

how not to be a douchebag tourist in nyc

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

via digg, this guide to not pissing off the natives while visiting new york city, if you care about such things. ok, so the title is too provocative, and the author has waaaaay too much attitude. but for the most part, the tips are spot-on.

many people don’t care if they piss off the locals. that’s fine. just don’t expect much assistance, and do expect to get barked at, at a minimum. you know the saying, “when in rome…”? that’s good advice. kirk and i act differently in new york than we do in paris, say, or tampa. it’s good form to adapt to your surroundings, and pick up on local customs. it shows that you are sensitive about ethnocentrism. kirk and i have traveled in many cities that famously hate tourists, and we consistently have no bad experiences and are frequently mistaken for locals, or at least people don’t think we’re american. i think that’s a good thing. you may not think so. if you don’t, do me a favor.

stay home.

it’s fun to read the comments at the linked article, by the way. so many people miss the point entirely. you can tell who the travelers are, and who the new yorkers are.

etcetera

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

» versions of “gypsy” i have seen/heard prior to last night:

— the rosalind russell movie version
— the bette midler tv version
— the bernadette peters broadway version
— the ethel merman broadway cast recording
— the genesius theatre version in kirk’s boyhood home of reading, pa

kirk could add:

— the tyne daly broadway version
— the betty buckley and debbie gibson version at paper mill playhouse

i don’t think he saw angela lansbury as mama rose, but he can correct me if i’m wrong.

at any rate, to say we had “gypsy” burnout would be an understatement. we really didn’t want to see it this past spring at genesius, but kirk knew people in the cast and we had season tickets, so we went and it was good. even though patti lupone was getting raves in the latest broadway incarnation, we just decided to take a pass.

we were sung out, louise.

but then we saw the tonys, and she performed, and she won a tony, and boyd gaines won the tony as herbie, and laura benanti won the tony as louise, and they were all wonderful and we got chills and so forth, so we looked at each other and said “ok, get the tickets”. so we did, and got a decent deal, and went last night. house was packed — a good audience that we didn’t have to shush. amazingly, i think some of them were unfamiliar with the musical; there were lots of audible gasps when baby june took off at the end of act one.

we really enjoyed ourselves. the staging was good — there was a tattered proscenium onstage which symbolically lifted at the end, making it a “play within a play”. i especially loved the interplay between herbie and louise. the actors gave that relationship an added depth i’d never seen. june was alternately manically perky when “onstage” and bitterly cynical when “offstage” — great job. the most world-weary and ancient electra i’ve ever seen — hysterically funny.

and patti lupone was indeed a marvel. force of nature. complete presence. all the adjectives. two standing ovations — at the end of “rose’s turn” and at the end of the play.

even if you think you never want to see this warhorse (“gypsy”, not patti lupone!) on stage again, it’s worth the money.

» dinner before the show at bocca:

no silly, not the sandwich shop. the italian restaurant in gramercy. very nice experience. we had the prix fixe: for me, pomodori (fresh tomatoes, sliced onions, avocados, olive oil), trota (trout with roasted bell pepper salad and grilled potatoes), and frutta e zabaione (strawberries and bananas served with sabayon); for kirk, polpettine (veal meatballs served with melted truffle, pecorino cheese and veal jus), straccetti (pan seared oregano flavored shredded filet mignon served with roasted cherry tomatoes and wild rocket pesto), and the aforementioned frutta e zabaione. i had a glass of white, he had a glass of red. espresso after dessert (please don’t have your coffee with your dessert, says the food snob. so tacky!) we skipped the bread in deference to kirk, but it looked great from across the room.

everything was incredibly delicious because they did a great job of the one thing i love to see in restaurant food — each dish was just a few extremely high quality ingredients chosen and combined simply and well. not fussy, not cluttered, very clean yet surprisingly complex. good job.

they have a nice drinks menu as well and seem to get an after-work one-drink crowd; kirk started with a really yummy basil-infused gimlet.

total bill with tax and tip was $145 — a splurge for us but worth it.

» weekend update:

we’re going to reading for the second weekend in a row.

last weekend we went, borrowed kirk’s father’s truck and went camping at hickory run state park. we’d planned to hike a lot and be all active, but we lucked into choosing one of only eight campsites that were on the park’s babbling brook (out of 300+ campsites; what were the odds?). so we sat by said babbling brook and read, thursday through saturday. left early saturday afternoon due to impending thunderstorms and saw a production of “the women” in ephrata, pennsylvania. very fun.

this weekend, we’re taking an old steam train with kirk’s parents. it runs from somewhere to jim thorpe, pennsylvania and basically takes the whole day doing it. sounds like a relaxing time — looking forward to it.

next weekend, kirk makes the third consecutive trip to reading for sweeney todd auditions. i think my reading visit streak will end at two.

ricketts [glen state park] rankings

~ jamie ~ 11 Comments

kirk and i spent three nights at ricketts glen state park in north central pennsylvania this past weekend through tuesday.

what an incredibly awesome place. we’ve been before, but this time we especially enjoyed every minute of the peace and quiet, especially on monday night, when we were the only campers in the park. and the cell phones don’t work there. love that.

we took advantage of the empty time to take a look at the campground, figure out the camping spots we liked, and picked a top 5. our positive criteria were seclusion, beauty, and space. negatives we looked for included being too near or (especially) at the end of a road (headlights in the tent — not good), being too close to the road in general, and close proximity to the bathrooms (too much noisy foot traffic). we labeled the ones we liked with “y” (for “yes”) and appended a “-” for a decent site with some problems, a “+” for great sites, and an “!” for the outstanding sites. our top five sites are all “y!” sites.

your criteria may differ from ours. if so, check out the details of the individual sites and plan accordingly. kirk took pictures of the sites we liked — they’re coming soon.

here’s a page where you can download a map of the campground, so you can play along at home.

there are two camping areas in ricketts glen: the big loop (sites 1-73) and the small loop (sites 74-120). the small loop sites are all knocked out of serious contention immediately. none of them border the water, some of them (sites 80-93) allow pets (no pets allowed in the big loop), and they are very crowded with no buffer zones to speak of. we gave three small loop sites a “y-” ranking: sites 101, 108, and 115. but they are strictly a fall-back position, in case the big loop is completely full. if the big loop is full, and these sites are gone, certainly there’s enough positive features at the park to still come. but it’s going to be packed with people, and you’re likely to have a less than optimal experience.

for the big loop, i’ll list only the sites that got “y-” or better. the sites not listed got knocked out for the aforementioned reasons.

big loop “y-” sites:

3, 5, 17, 23 (17 + 23 close to bathroom but big), 27, 33, 46 (27, 33, 46 at end of road, but on water), 49, 52, 54.

big loop “y” sites:

7, 9, 24, 26 (campground host site, near entrance), 34, 35, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 57, 71, 72, 73. all but 42, 44, and 71 are on or near water. 57 is at the end of a road but is so spectacular that it loses the minus.

big loop “y+” sites:

5, 20, 22, 29, 31, 56, 66. all but 5 on the water.

big loop “y!” sites:

21, 36, 37, 59, 61, 64, 65. there’s nothing wrong with any of these, in our estimation. site perfection.

and for the top five — again, culled from the “y!” sites:

#5 — site 64. at the end of a road, on the water, huge with no near neighbors.

#4 — site 59. secluded, on the water, huge surrounding area.

#3 — site 36. at the end of a road, on the water, huge, only site we saw with a constructed tent platform.

#2 — site 21. huge, on the water, secluded. the best part about this site is that the area behind the site drops down to the water, and then there’s a shelf right by the water. so you can sit by the water, and no one can see you. spectacular.

and the #1 site — #37. the huge site drops down from the road, so you are hidden from everyone else. and you have an enormous peninsula you share only with site 36, with water views on three sides.

there you go — our subjective opinions, explained. what do you think? leave a comment if you disagree, or have experiences to share.

getting caught up

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

with the holidays upon us, it’s been a while since i posted. here’s what’s been going on:

» we had a holiday/housewarming party. tremendous fun, attended by ~30 of our friends at one point or another. we had it on saturday 12/1 from 5pm until ???. the ??? turned out to be about 1:30am. old friends actually schlepped to riverdale, and given the number of manhattan-centric friends we have this was no small feat and a testament to the strength of our friendships. we also had quite a few new friends from the building. food cooked by us, some catering from the garden gourmet and mike’s deli at arthur avenue, lots of wine and spirits, duck fart shots (jack daniels, bailey’s, kahlua) courtesy of our friend suzanne, great conversation, good music, and some spirited wii competition.

» kirk and i flew to tampa to visit my mother. she’s in assisted living in sun city center, and it was a quick in-and-out short weekend, so please all my florida friends, don’t get upset that i didn’t visit you! she’s doing well, and it was good to see her, my sister, and meet my nephew’s new s.o. sherry. they just bought a house together. i know how they feel!

» kirk and i saw “the belsnickel scrooge” at genesius theatre in reading we visited kirk’s parents for the holidays this past weekend. kirk has to work the day after christmas, so we’re just staying home for the holidays this year. but we did want to visit them, and we had tickets for the aforementioned show, so two birds with one stone. the show itself was marvelous — it’s a pennsylvania dutch adaptation of “a christmas carol”, complete with the belsnickel. the belsnickel only visits bad children and beats them with a stick. talk about negative reinforcement. anyway, it was lots of fun, even for a non-pennsylvania-dutch-person.

» the apartment is pretty much finished. kirk did the last bit of painting (mainly window frames, and the bathroom). someday soon we’ll have the tub refinished, and at some point we’ll just redo the whole bathroom, but the big projects are done. let the myriad small projects commence.

» we saw kiki and herb at carnegie hall. last time they were there, we had tickets and forgot to go. not this time. it was a good show, with old classics and new material. nothing’s ever going to touch small intimate joe’s pub shows with kiki climbing over the tables, but it was thrilling to see them on that stage nonetheless. saw old friends as well — our friend jared, the show’s producer; and john cameron mitchell. saw alan cumming as well — what a cutie.

» we saw the radio city christmas show. it’s the 75th anniversary, and they’ve beefed up the show considerably. it’s a rockettes-fest — they are everywhere in the show, much more than normally. lots of new numbers, all good, along with the classics you want to see. and they are selling fantastic souvenir martini glasses with rockettes’ legs instead of the stem. we see the show every year, but this year was special. if you have any inclination to go, it’s a must-see year.

» we sent out our annual holiday cards. this was my year to send them, and i wanted to ratchet down a bit due to last year’s “kirk and jamie sing holiday songs” extravaganza, which was great fun but very time-consuming. it was a simple but elegant card printed on silver paper. if you didn’t get a card for some reason, and you think i would have sent you one, let me know. and if your cd is not playing correctly, let us know. we’ve had some reports of cd-burnout (i think the ones you burn yourself don’t last as long), and we’re happy to replace your old copy.

that’s the major stuff. happy holidays, everyone.

not going to dubai

~ jamie ~ 2 Comments

i’ve never thought much about going to dubai. it seems to me like las vegas in the desert, except that it costs much more to go there, and you can’t gamble. there’s shopping, but if i want to go high-end shopping, which i don’t, i have a whole nyc full of exclusive shops. there’s, i suppose, seeing the desert.

you get the drift.

anyway, after reading this article in today’s ny times, i’m quite sure i will never go. from the article:

Alexandre Robert, a French 15-year-old, was having a fine summer in this tourist paradise on the Persian Gulf. It was Bastille Day and he and a classmate had escaped the July heat at the beach for an air-conditioned arcade.

Just after sunset, Alex says he was rushing to meet his father for dinner when he bumped into an acquaintance, a 17-year-old native-born student at the American school, who said he and his cousin could drop Alex off at home.

There were, in fact, three Emirati men in the car, including a pair of former convicts ages 35 and 18, according to Alex. He says they drove him past his house and into a dark patch of desert, between a row of new villas and a power plant, took away his cellphone, threatened him with a knife and a club, and told him they would kill his family if he ever reported them.

Then they stripped off his pants and one by one sodomized him in the back seat of the car. They dumped Alex across from one of Dubai’s luxury hotel towers.

Alex and his family were about to learn that despite Dubai’s status as the Arab world’s paragon of modernity and wealth, and its well-earned reputation for protecting foreign investors, its criminal legal system remains a perilous gantlet when it comes to homosexuality and protection of foreigners.

The authorities not only discouraged Alex from pressing charges, he, his family and French diplomats say; they raised the possibility of charging him with criminal homosexual activity, and neglected for weeks to inform him or his parents that one of his attackers had tested H.I.V. positive while in prison four years earlier.

nothing like institutionalized homophobic ignorance to attract tourists to your desert paradise, right? any glbt person who goes to dubai has lost their frigging mind.

correction: anyone at all who goes to dubai has lost their frigging mind.

food on the florida trip

~ jamie ~ 4 Comments

kirk’s been doing a great job with the florida vacation recap, with more to come, so as promised i’m kicking in with a bit of a food overview.

dinner on landing was at a branch of the orlando ale house. big cheap beer and big cheap food — kirk had an extremely brown fried seafood platter, and i had a not-too-bad shrimp cajun fettucine alfredo thing, and $2 fosters on tap. slow service and a noisy atmosphere, although it was good to watch a bit of the tail end of the baseball game. food was edible but not much more than that.

friday of course was epcot food & wine festival day. yummo, as rachael ray would chirp. walk around the world showcase at epcot and eat appetizers all day. how can you beat that? while we didn’t eat absolutely everything, we put a pretty good dent in it all. each plate was ~$3, and kirk and i of course shared all plates.

in order of consumption, with occasional notes:

    » Peru: Cause de Cangrejo (crabmeat and sauce on a polenta-like cake); Arroz con Pato (rice with duck)

    » Canada: Canadian Cheddar Cheese Soup (cheesy and bacon-y); Maple Glazed Salmon with Roasted Corn and Arugula

    » Greece: Spanakopita

    » New Zealand: Lamb Slider (awesome gravy and scone-y roll)

    » Oklahoma: Three Sisters’ Soup (corn, beans, squash); Seared Buffalo with Scalloped Wild Onions

    » Morocco: Bastilla (like a samosa, with middle eastern flavors and phyllo dough), Walnut Baklava

    » Italy: Insalata Caprese, Lemonato

    » Germany: Debriziner Sausage with Sauerkraut in a Pretzel Roll

    » Turkey: Meze (can’t remember the specific ingredients, but this is definitely misnamed. meze means “appetizer” in Turkey, so it’s a generic description rather than a specific dish. come on, epcot. step it up.); Manti with Yogurt Sauce (a kind of turkish ravioli — this is a specific meze)

    » South Africa: Durban Spiced Chicken on a Skewer (nice Asian flavors); Bobotie with Mango Chutney (spicy minced meat with an eggy topping); Spice Cake with Marinated Fruit (best dessert of the day).

    » Ireland: Boxty (a potato pancake) with Bacon Chips and Kerrygold Garlic and Fresh Herb Butter; Irish Cheese Plate and Brown Bread with Apple Chutney and Kerrygold Irish Butter; Bunratty Meade Honey Wine (far too sweet for me but still tasty).

    » Chile: Shrimp con Pebre Salsa (like gazpacho with shrimp minus the liquid); Tomaticán with Manchego Cheese (tomato and corn stew). Both were outstanding.

my favorite was, surprisingly for me, oklahoma. they were there to celebrate their 100th anniversary of statehood. the three sisters’ stew was the most flavorful dish i had all day — absolutely delicious. and the buffalo was tender and tasty, and the onions were really strong and balanced the slightly gamy buffalo well.

that evening, we had tickets for the south african wine event, basically a big tent with about 25 south african wine producers, each of whom had 2 or 3 wines to taste. definitely took advantage of the spit buckets on that one. i like the wines but found them uniformly too alcohol-tasting (their wines averaged 14% alcohol, strong for wine). kirk is the wine guy, so maybe he’ll give details of the ones we liked. the food was buffet style — good but basically an expanded version of what we had sampled from the south africa nosh stand.

lunch saturday, with momfla, was at the festival de sabor in ybor city. big plates of asada-style pork, moro (black beans and white rice), yucca, and platanos (fried plantains). it was a booth run by a local restaurant, and unfortunately i don’t know which one, but the food was amazing.

dinner saturday was a papa john’s pizza in the room. we were exhausted, watching the baseball game, and craving convenience. not a bad pizza as chains go, but totonno’s has nothing to worry about.

lunch sunday, again with momfla, was in ruskin at by the bay cafe — mom and i had been before, but kirk hadn’t been. they specialize in real maryland crab dishes — soup, authentic crab cakes, etc. we had crab dip as an appetizer, along with an order of battered and deep fried portobello mushrooms. crab dip worderful, mushrooms ok. momfla had a small plate with broiled salmon (i think), kirk had crab cakes (all crab and practically no breading — good stuff) and i had blackened grouper (perfectly cooked, moist and flavorful). there were sides of coleslaw and potato salad, the choices we made from the list of sides — both were great in that mayonnaise-y, southern way. you never know where you’ll find quality food. this place is definitely worth the trek.

kirk and i wanted to have a great last-night-in-florida meal, just the two of us, preferably romantic, so we asked the desk clerk at the holiday inn express in bradenton for a recommendation. she chose the beachhouse on bradenton beach, and she could not have made a better choice. it’s old florida — they have a stretch of undeveloped beach, and you sit on it outdoors at a table, watching the sunset and the moonset, listening to an acoustic guitarist playing island-ish but not jimmy buffett music, drinking boat drinks, and eating wonderful food. kirk had never had conch before, so despite his aversion to bouncy food, we split an appetizer of conch fritters. the conch in conch fritters is ground, so he didn’t have to avoid the bounce as it wasn’t there. light, not at all oily, and delicious. next stop for kirk: gator tail. for the entree, we both had surf and turf. the steak was just ok (ribeye, not the most flavorful cut, though it was tender and well-prepared) but the grilled lobster was remarkable. perfectly cooked, unadorned except for the drawn butter. we had dessert (can’t remember what — kirk?) and coffee. service was attentive and friendly — our waitress gave us a customized list of local beds-and breakfast that we’ll probably check out come winter.

obviously, we ate very well on the trip. but extravagantly. i must admit that the excess affected me negatively — physically, emotionally, and spiritually. and on my return, i did a three-day brown rice fast and haven’t had meat since, except for using up some chicken broth in a weekend soup kirk made.

and then i read the omnivore’s dilemma, which kirk had bought and was lying about the apartment.

sometimes the signs are all pointing a certain way. i’m going to be vegetarian again for a while. we’ll see where it leads.

sioux city sux, not gay

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

from my yahoo! home page this morning:

City leaders have scrapped plans to do away with the Sioux Gateway Airport’s unflattering three-letter identifier — SUX — and instead have made it the centerpiece of the airport’s new marketing campaign. The code, used by pilots and airports worldwide and printed on tickets and luggage tags, will be used on T-shirts and caps sporting the airport’s new slogan, “FLY SUX.”

make lemonade out of lemons, and all. were they given any other options?

Sioux City officials petitioned the Federal Aviation Administration to change the code in 1988 and 2002. At one point, the FAA offered the city five alternatives — GWU, GYO, GYT, SGV and GAY — but airport trustees turned them down.

my god, how could you turn down “gay”? think of the glbt tourist dollars that could be coming your way. sioux city: the new p-town. key west of the extreme north.

you can’t make this stuff up if you try.

The Pedal-to-the-Metal, Totally Illegal, Cross-Country Sprint for Glory

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via daring fireball, a wired story about one man’s quest to beat the decades-old cannonball run cross country driving record.

from the article:

For nearly two years, Roy — a pale, shaved-headed, independently wealthy ectomorphic veteran of the Gumball 3000 road rally — has obsessed sleeplessly over every detail and thrown money at every possible electronic connivance. His mission is intended as a triumph of the mind over the base adrenal impulses of common speeders. His route is nothing like the careless line a spring-breaker might plot across a Rand McNally — it’s a painstakingly GPS-mapped and Google Earth-practiced manifest desti-document, waypointed mile by mile for detours, construction, and speed traps.

it’s an amazing piece of writing that hunter s. thompson would have been proud to hang his name on.

schneier interviews the head of the tsa

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

bruce schneier’s blog on security issues is one of my consistent favorites on the web. i love people who can take a subject about which i know little and care even less, and make it fascinating. schneier is one of those people (and rands is another).

anyway, schneier recently interviewed kip hawley, the head of the transportation security administration. to give you an idea of how it went, here’s the first question posed to hawley:

By today’s rules, I can carry on liquids in quantities of three ounces or less, unless they’re in larger bottles. But I can carry on multiple three-ounce bottles. Or a single larger bottle with a non-prescription medicine label, like contact lens fluid. It all has to fit inside a one-quart plastic bag, except for that large bottle of contact lens fluid. And if you confiscate my liquids, you’re going to toss them into a large pile right next to the screening station—which you would never do if anyone thought they were actually dangerous.

Can you please convince me there’s not an Office for Annoying Air Travelers making this sort of stuff up?

it’s a must read — one of the best-written things i’ve come across recently. thanks to daring fireball for linking to it before i got there myself.

the meat tray, part 2

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

nearly two years ago i wrote about my joy in receiving an enormous tray of meat as a prize in a raffle.

kirk and i were in reading, pennsylvania visiting his parents, and returned to the scene of the crime. the local fire company has an occasional sunday breakfast as a fundraiser. it features salted mackerel (can’t say i’m a fan of salty fishy breakfasts) but they have normal breakfast food as well.

and they sell chances for meat trays, a dollar a chance.

it was my first time returning since winning my original meat tray. i bought my one dollar ticket.

and in a room of at least a hundred people, i’ll be damned if i didn’t win the meat tray again. i’m two for two in the meat tray prize department. can’t get much better than that. what are the odds? at least 100-to-1 for winning each one. and lightning striking twice? pretty cool.

so sitting in my fridge, i have sausage, hamburger, pork chops, chicken, and steak. some of it is destined for the freezer, of course.

i think that eating meat must be my destiny.

la casserole–18th arrondisement, paris

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

this is the restaturant where kirk and i sang, ate, drank, socialized, and had an enormously good time until 5am. here are the pictures:

« click on thumbnails to view pictures »

“cerf”, a.k.a.
rudolph

huge filet
of beef

liquid
refreshment

la casserole
food fest

birthday
cake

birthday
cake

la casserole
food fest

la casserole
food fest

la casserole
food fest

la casserole
food fest

la casserole
food fest

more details to come!

i’m still here

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

i know, it’s been a while. it’s been quite a month.

first, my group of five people at my place of employment was cut to two. just my boss and me. so, as you can imagine, i’ve been quite busy at work, which spills over into quite busy at home.

you get the picture.

and then kirk and i were gone for a week and a half on vacation. paris and strasbourg. lovely, fun, and too many stories. i had the night of my life at la casserole in the 18th arrondisement of paris. i’ll tell you all about that. suffice it to say that i had an 8pm dinner reservation, and left at 5am. the next morning.

lots of pictures, lots of stories. lots to tell.

we’ll get caught up.

off to the woods

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

this is camping weekend, at french creek state park in pennsylvania.

although i’m sick as a dog, i’m looking forward to sleeping in a tent, in the cold and possibly the rain. for some odd reason.

being outside feels better than being inside, and this weekend, there’ll be lots of outside. a few miles of hiking should set me right.

right?

protecting valuables in checked luggage

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

gotta link to this–it’s a great example of playing by the rules, and thus gaming the system to your advantage.

put a firearm in with your valuables, and declare the firearm.

it doesn’t have to be a real firearm–a starter’s pistol will do. the article refers to expensive camera equipment, but it seems to me that this would work for anything valuable in baggage that you are required to check.

from the article:

A “weapons” is defined as a rifle, shotgun, pistol, airgun, and STARTER PISTOL. Yes, starter pistols – those little guns that fire blanks at track and swim meets – are considered weapons…and do NOT have to be registered in any state in the United States.

I have a starter pistol for all my cases. All I have to do upon check-in is tell the airline ticket agent that I have a weapon to declare…I’m given a little card to sign, the card is put in the case, the case is given to a TSA official who takes my key and locks the case, and gives my key back to me.

That’s the procedure. The case is extra-tracked…TSA does not want to lose a weapons case. This reduces the chance of the case being lost to virtually zero.

It’s a great way to travel with camera gear…I’ve been doing this since Dec 2001 and have had no problems whatsoever.

their rules. just play by them.

not exactly the mile high club

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

chilling story about two affectionate men on an airplane, who are confronted by a homophobic flight attendant.

evidently she took exception to their “behavior”, and when deservedly challenged by the pair, escalated the episode to terrorist-level to cover her ass, complete with a pilot’s threat to divert the flight.

one man had rested his head on his partner’s shoulder. and had blown him an air kiss.

shocking.

and of course, if you are in that situation, there’s nothing you can say or do. if the personnel on the plane say that you are a threat, even if they are incorrect and doing so only to legally protect themselves, then you truly have no recourse. who’s going to believe you when you protest that you were only air-kissing?

on planes, i’ve seen straight people fucking in their seats under a blanket. in tiny adjoining coach seats, no less. i’ve seen straight people go into the bathroom together and reemerge flushed a few minutes later.

i don’t condone that. i’m not much for pda. but you just know that if two straight people air-kissed, or even really kissed, or even tongued each other for a while, nothing would have been said. and i saw flight attendants actively ignoring the aforementioned fornicators.

this is the danger we face when we allow our freedoms to erode as we have over the past few years. this is exactly what’s wrong with the patriot act, and the like. rules that skirt the edge of what’s legal and appropriate and sensible may just barely pass muster if applied correctly.

but those same rules, if applied capriciously, ensure that people will be falsely accused, and maliciously prosecuted, and inappropriately sentenced.

and you can’t ever count on the rules being uniformly applied by always-reasonable people. some people will always use the rules to further their agenda, or to introduce their prejudices.

and this happened on american airlines, my carrier of choice, who has an excellent record when it comes to these issues.

i’ll have to see how this turns out.

fork in philly

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

kirk and i ate at fork (306 market street) in philadelphia on our recent long weekend getaway. it came recommended highly by philadelphia magazine in their “best 50 restaurants” issue, and a few egullet people liked it as well, so we said what the heck, and tried it.

not too happy.

for a restaurant that purports to be destination dining, there’s a lot wrong here. i’ll try to stick to criticism of my own meal, since i only had bites of kirk’s food, but i think he was even less happy than i was.

i started with ceviche. ceviche is supposed to be raw fish marinated in a citrus-based liquid that “cooks” it. what i got was pretty much sashimi in sauce. it wasn’t marinated long enough to have the flavor of the marinade penetrate. and one of the items was a raw oyster, which i’m pretty sure isn’t ceviche. to top it off, it was served slightly warmer than room temperature, which is not how i want my ceviche. at least room temperature, please. did it sit under the heat lamp? warm raw fish. ugh.

my main course was ahi tuna with vegetables. the vegetables (potato, fresh sliced heirloom tomato, slightly cooked fennel, and probably more i can’t remember) were nice in a very light and flavorful sauce, and the ahi was top-grade. the menu description mentioned cayenne, but boy did i get the cayenne. the ahi tuna was rolled in it, it got everywhere, and totally obliterated the subtlety of the rest of the dish. once i cut the outside of the tuna off, things got better, but i ended up with a little pile of uneaten tuna, which i should not have had.

dessert for me was a cheese platter. there was a nice selection of various cheeses–i like starting with mild, soft cheese and moving toward more pungent and aromatic cheeses, which is how it should be done. there was nothing great on the mild end, but i ended up choosing robiola bosina (a creamy soft cow’s cheese) for the mild end, a blu de moncensio (mildly salty cow’s blue) for the next one, and époisses for the last cheese. époisses is a very very pungent cheese–so pungent that it ruins your taste buds for anything that comes after it. but it is wonderful, in all its barnyard-tasting glory.

but you aren’t eating anything after that, at least not anything that you want to know what it tastes like.

and accompanying my cheese course was a card, listing all the cheeses and noting the ones i selected. a nice touch, if a bit expected at this level of dining. customarily, your choices are checked off, or numbered in the order in which they should be eaten. and the cheese should be arranged in order on the plate as well, from mild to pungent. my cheese was out of order.

someone moved my cheese.

and, worse, they numbered it époisses #1, robiola bosina #2, blu de moncensio #3. wow. i barely know what i’m doing on this level of dining, and i’m the first to admit i’m not a supertaster. but i know not to eat my époisses first.

and, to top it off, we had wonderful service until the waiter inexplicably stopped waiting on us just after the desserts were served. some giggly manager type came over and told us that she’d be our server from then on, except that she had to give tours of the space to some clients, but if we needed anything we should just yell.

ok then. it would have been nice if the waiter had come over himself and told us this, rather than just abruptly disappearing. and the weirdest thing was, he prepped our check and then was just hanging around the place–we saw him around for the next half-hour.

espresso at the end…giggly manager/waiter chick told us it was “on the house”, but i know that she was just too damn lazy to redo the check.

i know this all sounds a bit pretentious, and whiny. but kirk and i are not demanding diners–we’ve both spent too much time working in restaurants to be annoying when eating in one. having worked in restaurants, we have reasonable but exacting expectations, based on the level of restaurant we are in. although we don’t dine out at that level very often, we do occasionally, and we know what should happen, and what kind of food and service we should get.

and we didn’t get it, although we did get a big $200 restaurant check added to the amex, minus two cups of espresso. it’s just disappointing that, for one of the few times we splurge like this, things went so horribly wrong.

my advice to fork?

—trust your ingredients. all the ingredients were top-notch quality. don’t feel like you have to drown them in more and more spices and geegaws and thingys. i’ll let kirk tell you about the fleur-de-sel on the chocolate cake in the comments, by way of further explanation.

—train your waiters. i was the world’s worst waiter, and even i knew that you didn’t leave until your last table left the restaurant. the unannounced departure of the waiter was inexcusable, even if we had been a difficult table, which we weren’t.

—sweat the details. on this level, you present the cheese correctly. the waiter stays. the crumbs get swept. the ceviche isn’t really warm. i don’t ask for anything–you anticipate it. i don’t get told to “yell if i need anything”.

loved philly. hated this restaurant.

wonderful weekend

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

back to work today, although the weekend was, as the title says, wonderful. there’s a lot of residual happiness carryover, so it’s been a good day at work. children were the theme of the weekend, to some extent.

not that we had children. or took some with us. or found some there, and brought them home. but our interactions with them.

the first day was at six flags great adventure, in new jersey. as you’d expect, the park was full of kids. and even more than usual probably, because it was inner city camp day or something. there were hundreds of kids running around in matching “camp fill-in-the-blank” t-shirts.

and they were uniformly well-behaved, polite and a joy to be around.

you’d think they’d be going ape-shit, with little to no adult supervision and a park full of mischief to get into. and they had fun, don’t get me wrong. but they said “excuse me” and “please” and “thank you”. and when there was a group that wanted to ride a ride together, they’d ask people if they wanted to go past them in line. and when you let one or two go ahead of you so they could catch up to their group, they’d smile and thank you politely.

don’t tell me kids can’t be well behaved in public anymore. these kids were far better without their parents around than i ever was with my mom right beside me. someone’s doing something right there.

someone’s doing something wrong in mount laurel, new jersey though. after our six flags visit was cut short due to inclement weather (a definite theme for the weekend, unfortunately…), we checked into our hotel and drove to a nearby movie theater (the amc marlton 8) to catch a friday evening showing of “the lady in the water”, which was the best pick of the lot.

theater full of kids, all probably dropped off by their parents in lieu of paying a babysitter. and the kids were a terror. running up and down the aisles, screaming and yelling, talking on their cell phones and to their friends in adjoining seats and aisles. wouldn’t come close to being quiet, even after being shusshed politely and after loudly being told to shut up (that was me. i’m not shy about that sort of thing).

i know i sound like an old fart here, but it’s a public place and i expect, after having paid ten dollars, to be able to concentrate on the movie. i guess i’m spoiled by movie theaters in new york and by going to more expensive imax theaters, where people in general make only appropriate noise.

honestly, i’ve read all about the horror of going to movie theaters these days, and how people just have stopped going and use netflix instead, and i’ve never really experienced it.

now i have.

and the theater staff was useless. some kid not any older than the noisy ones stood there in the front of the theater listening, said nothing to anyone, and left. of course he’s not going to say anything to anyone. he’s a kid, and these are his friends. there needs to be an adult sent in, for adult supervision.

we left, and they did refund my money, though. i’ll give them that. but if i lived in that town, i’d never bother going back. i’m sure there were some kids in there that wanted to listen to the movie, too. i feel sorry for them.

don’t tell me that “they were just being kids”.

so were the kids at six flags.

magical mystery trip

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

we’re not taking a big vacation this year. just two small ones. and the first one starts today. in about an hour, actually.

we’re going to philly for a long weekend. actually there’s an intermediate stop along the way, today, and then philly for saturday night.

we have phillies tickets on saturday afternoon, and then a nice dinner in a restaurant i found through a bit of judicious research.

if i’m being vague about the details, it’s because the details are a surprise to kirk, so they’ll be a surprise to you as well. when i tell you about them. if i remember to tell you about them. not that it’s such a big deal, anything i have planned. but any kind of surprise is better than no surprise at all. and later in august, kirk has his surprise weekend planned for me. i know it involves camping, which will be cool, and hiking, which i’ve actually been itching to do a little of.

anyway, it’s off to avis to pick up the car, and then onward and upward. more to come later, maybe monday, but not before then.

sometimes two small things are better than one big thing.

the meat tray

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

i used to be vegetarian. hell, i was even a vegan for, like, five years or something. i protested on behalf of the animals for peta, lived my life as an example, gave away my entire leather shoe collection (including the most awesome collection of customized doc martens and goth boots from london that you can imagine), did all the “right” things.

now? i cook more and more meat at home, even though i hypocritically say quite often that i don’t really cook much meat at home.

this weekend, i won a meat tray. and damn was i excited.
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