It appears that our cat, Karma, is much improved health-wise since receiving the radiotherapy last month. We got a ticket in the mail from the San Diego Animal Imaging and Treatment Center saying that it was time for his “post-op” checkup, and our local vet says that he’s better on all counts, including some factors we weren’t very hopeful about, such as his heart murmur. Excellent!
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Although it isn’t true, it appears to me as though Allan Holdsworth‘s talent sprung fully-formed from the forehead of the music god. I’ve been listening to Road Games and, man, that’s one of the best unreleased albums I’ve heard recently.
I’ve been attempting to channel A.H. for many years – not to be a total clone, just to try and expand my guitar skills a smidgeon. On the peice I’m currently working on – Painting Abstracts – I think I got close to something reminiscent of his inflection and tone. I told Lisa about it and she said she hadn’t heard enough of his music to know what to listen for.
So I made up a compilation CD of what I think are some of Holdsworth’s essential tracks, ostensibly for Lisa to listen to, but I’m enjoying it myself.
“Please dress appropriately next time you come here.” The man said to me. I looked down at what I was wearing- black pants, a beige high-necked sweater and a knee-length black coat. Huh? I blushed furiously. He meant my head should be covered and I should be wearing a skirt. I don’t like being told what to wear and what not to wear by strange men. “I don’t work here- I don’t have to follow a dress code.” I answered coldly. The cousin didn’t like where the conversation was going, he angrily interceded, “We’re only here for an hour and it really isn’t your business.”
“It is my business.” Came the answer, “She should have some respect for the people who work here.” And the conversation ended. I looked around for the people I should be respecting. There were three or four women who were apparently ministry employees. Two of them were wearing long skirts, loose sweaters and headscarves and the third had gone all out and was wearing a complete “jubba” or robe-like garb topped with a black head scarf. My cousin and I turned to enter the room the receptionist had indicated and my eyes were stinging. No one could talk that way before the war and if they did, you didn’t have to listen. You could answer back. Now, you only answer back and make it an issue if you have some sort of death wish or just really, really like trouble.
Young females have the option of either just giving in to the pressure and dressing and acting ‘safely’- which means making everything longer and looser and preferably covering some of their head or constantly being defiant to what is becoming endemic in Iraq today. The problem with defiance is that it doesn’t just involve you personally, it involves anyone with you at that moment – usually a male relative. It means that there might be an exchange of ugly words or a fight and probably, after that, a detention in Abu Ghraib.
If it’s like this in Baghdad, I shudder to think what the other cities and provinces must be like. The Allawis and Pachichis of Iraq don’t sense it – their families are safely tucked away in Dubai and Amman, and the Hakeems and Jaffaris of Iraq promote it.
At the end of the day, it’s not about having a Sunni or Shia or Kurd or Arab in power. It’s about having someone who has Iraq’s best interests at heart- not America’s, not Iran’s, not Israel’s… It’s about needing someone who wants peace, prosperity, independence and above and beyond all, unity.
Source: Riverbend gets a dress code
is what I’d like to deliver on the man responsible for this:
We know where he lives, too.
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/ny-wocheck0120,0,532599.story?coll=ny-world-big-pix
Saw a good headline under the fold of the LV Review Journal today. “Court Refuses to Hear Case of the Brain-Damaged Woman”.
I agree with them. There’s only so much Nancy Drew that one can take.
Bernard was in town and phoned us up, out of the blue. Would we like to go see The Musical Box at the House of Blues? I actually knew roughly who they were but I had no idea they were in town.
As I understood it, their current tour was playing songs from Genesis’ “The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway” period.
I was familiar with a couple of the pieces of music on the album but most of it was going to be new to me. Of course we told Bernard Yes! we’d love to meet up with him and see the show, and we’d meet him at the box office and then go have dinner somewhere nearby prior to the performance.
The performance itself was kind of odd. My first impression was that it was cheap and tawdry looking, although there was nothing wrong with the music at all. The drummer was excellent, he looked and sounded just like Phil Collins, uncannily like him in fact. From our seats we couldn’t quite make out what keyboards the Tony Banks Sound-alike was using but they sounded very authentic.
I enjoyed the show more and more as it progressed (pardon the pun). In fact, I’d quite like to see it again.
Later on I looked up these guys on the web and found out that rather than just a cover/tribute band, The Musical Box are a group of French Canadians who specialize in performing (or “re-staging”) complete concerts from the touring history of the progressive rock group Genesis, complete with props and effects that are as-close-to-original-as-possible.
Now I understood why the stage looked the way it did. They really were trying to go back in time and reproduce something exactly as it happened. Well, I don’t know if this is more honorable than just playing cover songs and enjoying the music. It’s an admirable effort, and I don’t know if they succeeded in their goal or not but it was an excellent show.
The TV in the hotel room woke us up at 6:30 am, which was what we’d told it to do the night before, so I give it full marks there.
I groaned as I got out of bed. My arms and shoulders ached, my bum throbbed, and the backs of my thighs protested. The last time I went go-karting must have been years and years ago, with the Cornerstone guys, and I think Josh and Derek were there too. Well, I remember being sore afterwards then too.
I showered and went down for a last breakfast before coming back up to the 4th floor to pack away my pajamas and and toiletries. We came down to the lobby with our baggage and checked out. We’d ordered a taxi for 8:00 am. The lobby was full of kids. They appeared to be several sports team from England, or something like that. They weren’t all wrestlers! Some of them must have been. But we found our taxi OK shortly after they started filing out to their bus.
On the way to the airport we saw some wonderful images alongside the river, with mist hovering over the water and the rising sun lighting up some old brick buildings. I wished I hadn’t packed my camera. Our taxi driver knew the best way to go and we were soon at the terminal.
Before we could check in we had to go through an interrogation by a U.S. immigration official. This was fairly serious stuff: She started out straightforwardly, asking what our reasons for travelling were, etc, but before long she was asking for evidence of the conference and did I have a business card, and other questions that I don’t remember now but at the time I felt like every answer I gave was incorrect. By the end of it we were both pretty nervous, and L had our marriage certificate handy in case we needed it. Finally it was over and we were allowed to approach the check-in desk.
We wondered later if our varied forms of travel and ports of entry – along with our two passport nationalities – had made us stand out as worthy of inspection.
Our flight was due to leave at 11:10 am but when we got to the gate it was all shut up and we had to wait. People arrived at a steady rate and soon they opened the gate, we queued up, showed our boarding passes and then we could go through the glass fence and sit down. We looked for a handy power point to top up our laptops but decided that it wasn’t worth it.
We left Frankfurt airport in bright sunshine and clear skies and headed West. As we crossed over the Channel I looked for the “white cliffs of Dover” but I couldn’t see anything that might be them. I did notice that we appeared to be going to fly right up the Thames Estuary and over central London. And shortly, we were. I looked intently for some landmarks. “I’ll orient myself later by that big white round thing…” I thought, under the impression that I wouldn’t be able to make out any real detail. And then I realised that the big white round thing was the Millenium Dome… and then everything snapped into focus and I realised what I was looking at.
I saw Westminster Bridge and Big Ben, where we had stood with Mitchell on the first evening. There was the commons, where that guy was protesting…
Westminster Abbey, looking spiky, and Victoria Street which led back to the train station…
And there was St James Park, and the Birdcage walk, and Buckingham Palace!
And then, unmistakably, Hyde Park, with the curly Serpentine and Kensington Gardens with the Round Pond. And… was that the Albert Memorial?
But it was drifting steadily behind us and my eyes were watering and I couldn’t recognize anything anymore. England slipped behind us as the aircraft flew Westward over the Atlantic Ocean. I dozed and read more of my book. There may have been a meal of some sort. I kept looking out my window and eventually there was something there – a very distinctive land formation that we couldn’t figure out from the map in the back of the airline magazine:
(Later we determined that it was Cape Cod Bay and that we were heading South-West, about to fly over Boston.) A little bit later I was sure I recognised Long Island and sure enough, eventually Manhattan slid past our window in the distance. I couldn’t make out any particular building.
It was another couple of hours before we landed at Atlanta. I wish I could say that our connection was uneventful but it wasn’t. For a start I messed up the customs form and we got “picked” to be interviewed. We thought our bags were going to be searched but instead we had a *very* casual conversation with a security guy who was very interested in the fact that we were computer software people and eventually he waved us through without further inconvenience on our part. Lucky us I think. Except that then we had to go through security which was just horrible, just the worst ever. Shoes off, belts off, laptops out, and L got the PCMCIA eject lever on her laptop bent as she tried to get it back into the bag. We changed over our remaining Euros into a scarily depleted number of dollars and scrambled to find our connection flight.
I don’t remember much about the flight from Atlanta to Vegas but obviously we arrived safely. It was only two weeks since we’d left but it felt like a month. The drive home was uneventful, and the house, when we arrived, was peaceful. We’d have to change that: we’d pick the cats up from Creature Comforts tomorrow. We’d deliberately arranged to take the day off from work because we knew we’d need a day to recover.
Saturday was free of sessions but packed with entertainment that R had organised for the speakers. First up was Go-Karting. After brunch we all piled into a bus and drove off to a warehouse somewhere in Frankfurt, where an indoor go-karting track was located. We had a great time, with two trial races to settle the final line-up, then followed by a “real” race. I did ok. [Update: Apparently the most-used muscle in go-kart racing is the Gluteus Maximus. I kid you not. Very sore the next day!]
Back to the hotel for a freshening up, then into the bus again, for a trip out to the airport, where the Boeing Simulators are. Heh. They’re pretty good. You get to dress up in white overalls and booties like the Intel Engineers, then climb aboard a replica of one of several different kinds of aircraft. We got the 747. We sat up in the business class and enjoyed the experiences of losing cabin pressure; aborting take-off; a forced water landing; and exiting the craft via the giant inflatable slides. They are fast slides. You can burn your hands from friction which is one reason why the information cards tell you to cross your arms across your chest when you jump out.
On the way back from the airport the sun went down. I snapped a picture out of our hotel window, a simple shot of the Frankfurt skyline, looking away from the city.
That evening we were all invited to a wonderful dinner hosted by Hans and Gaby Lochmann. This is a regular conference event, apparently, but the first time I’d been there. Wow. It was also the first time I’d ever eaten roast goose, red cabbage, and some exquisite fluffy potato dumplings. Divine eating and wonderful hosts. Thank you!
Repacking everything acquired on this trip wasn’t such a big deal as we thought it might be. Thanks to L’s skills and the Amazing Expanding Bag, everything fit.
This was our second day of presenting material to people who were probably expecting something different. I think we presented the material as well as we have ever done. The attendees were a different group of people, but again I think they had the same expectations as those who came to our Tuesdays sessions. Some got it, some didn’t. We did our best.
This evening R held the Speaker Dinner at the back of the restaurant. Yummy food. And ice sculptures.
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