Who?

Who was to this manor born,

but requested that he be buried in this rural churchyard grave?

Camera Trouble

My travels continue through the curious place I mentioned in the last post.

But there seems to be a problem with my camera now. Every photo has this white, dusty stuff spread across the frame. No amount of cleaning will eliminate it.

Below is a view of the river. They seem to fancy (see, I'm learning the local language) these shallow boats a lot. But I have no idea how they're propelled. There are no proper oarlocks (which they refer to as 'rowlocks'), no sails, and no motors attached.

And I couldn't suss  out by observing just how the boats are driven, as for some reason no one was using the boats today.

I wonder if any readers can figure out what town this is. There's a major university here. JP attended a major university which he said was not the one here. He described his university as nearly heaven on earth, and kept referring to this as 'the other place'.

I always thought 'the other place' was filled with fire and brimstone, but that is decidedly not the case here.

Update, sometime a little later:

Well, now this duck has appeared on the dock, and doesn't appear to be able to get comfortable. It's buried its head under a wing and seems to be waiting for things to improve. I assure you it's not dead, but merely sleeping. Lovely plumage.

Where Am I?

A few days ago I began a long trip involving planes, trains, automobiles, and quite a bit of walking, too.

Twenty-four hours later, I arrived somewhere, but with all of the connections, I've sort of lost track of where I am, so maybe my readers can help me figure that out. Here are some photos I snapped while wandering around in a daze yesterday.

The strangest thing is that I nodded off somewhere along the way and dreamt I had a beer in a pub with gonzo Ozzie journo Buff Staysail. He bent my ear about how he writes all of the posts for world-famous travel blogger, Captain JP, who Buff claimed is not an actual person at all. The peculiar things that extended travel does to one's mind.

This must be the debtors prison. It has big fences and walls all around it and everyone was saying that none of the prisoners have worked a day in their lives.

The prison is very heavily guarded. The guards wear funny hats and march around a lot. They must not be very reliable guards because they are constantly being changed out for new guards.

This is a place of very sly irony and understated humor. The gates of the debtors prison are elaborately decorated and covered with gold - which must have been paid for by people other than the inmates, none of whom, remember, have ever worked for a living.

More gilded irony in front of the debtors prison.

They have the world's laziest pelicans here. Most pelicans have to work pretty hard for their dinner, tracking fish and diving down quickly from great heights to catch every single fish they eat. These pelicans just open their mouths and expect someone to throw food in. But, they were close to the debtors prison, so maybe they've learned how to feed themselves without working from the prison inmates.

The people here must not have a very good sense of time. They've had to put up this enormous clock tower with a loud, annoying set of bells that ring - get this - every fifteen minutes. I have a cheap, Chinese clock at home that plays the same song. You'd think if they were going to the trouble of erecting such a big clock tower that they could have come up wih something more original for the bells to play.

Everywhere you go here, there are monuments and statues of dead people. I think whenever someone dies, they immediately build a monument and put up a statue.

They seem to like fancy bridges and peculiarly shaped buildings here. I have no idea why, but I've been here only two days, so still have a few things to learn. Buff Staysail didn't explain everything to me in that dream I had.

If anyone has any idea where I am or why everything is so strange here, I could use some help.

And oh, I almost forgot - you're not going to believe how they drive here, but that's for another post.

Walking The Walk

When did we forget how to walk?

No, I mean how to walk farther than from the parking lot into the grocery store.

When was it that we forgot how to walk a moderate distance - like five miles? Many adults today can't remember the last time they walked five miles. I'll bet there are lots of high school kids who have never walked five miles in their entire lives.

For tens of thousands of years, if you wanted to go anywhere and didn't have a horse, you walked. Period. Five, ten, fifteen miles - if you had to get there, you walked. You didn't complain about it - it was something you just did, like breathing, or hauling water from the well.

Serious walkers - like armies on the march or folks making pilgrimages - walked hundreds or even thousands of miles. Well OK, some of them may have complained a bit. After all, suffering a little is what making a pilgrimage is all about.

But that all started changing a mere hundred years ago or so. And now look at the sorry state we're in.

Think about it. If you told someone you just walked two miles to the grocery to pick up a box of cornflakes, what's the first thing they would ask you?

"Why, what's wrong with your car?"

(In California, they would ask, "You mean all of your cars are in the shop at once?")

At some of our larger shopping malls, people walk out to their cars, drive to the other end of the parking lot, and re-enter the mall because it's "too far" to walk from one end of the mall to the other.

If you think about it in a detached, objective way, this is a little sick - literally. We should be asking why we're not leaving the damned car in the garage and walking a piddling little distance like two or three miles. Our bodies evolved over millions of years to carry us, under our own steam, distances much farther than that. What are we doing to those bodies by protecting them from even this small amount of exercise?

Statistics are starting to prove overwhelmingly just what we're doing to our bodies. A lot of those statistics have to do with our diet. But most discussions of the connection between diet and rampant obesity also mention the lack of even the simplest exercise in our lives. And even light exercise like walking is proving to have nearly as much benefit as more rigorous running, cycling, swimming, or trying to figure out how Windows 8 works.

But why am I ranting thus?

Well two reasons, actually.

The first is that I started walking - for fun as much as anything - about a year and a half ago when I discovered I couldn't go more than about three miles without getting tired. That scared the shitake mushrooms out of me, after being able to ride my bike all day without too much fatigue just a few years earlier.

The second is that fellow blogger, Frogma, started posting about her personal 'NONgoal' to paddle and walk a hundred miles in a month. Hmmm, I checked my logs and discovered I'd been doing about 65 miles a month for most of last year and wondered if I could do 100 in a month, too.

So, I set my own NONgoal at the beginning of this month and just passed 100 miles a few days ago - coincidentally about when Frogma also logged 100 miles.

Being a bit more anal than Frogma, I guess, I set up a spreadsheet to log my daily progress, which I can now share with you here via the wonder of Google Docs.

In theory, it wouldn't be too hard to set up one Google Doc that allowed a number of bloggers to log their progress in the same place and compare results. But that sounds a little too competitive for the water blogging community I know. Or is it?

At any rate, outing my progress like this gives me some incentive to stay on task. I'll be updating the log every time I walk throughout the year, so you can follow just how well or poorly I'm doing, if you are terminally bored.

I could go on about what I like about walking, but if you already do some regular exercise, you probably know about the peculiar addiction that develops to this sort of thing, and about how you actually feel worse if you start missing too many days.

If you don't exercise, you are probably already pissed off by these arrogant, elitist, holier-than-thou skinny little shits with the bumper stickers that say things like, "I'd rather be jogging," so I won't piss you off any more.

But, you may have noticed that I like duking it out in the comments page, so feel free to vent.

Warhol Retrospective At Tate Modern

Sorry to intrude on the territory of London blogger, Captain JP, but I had to post a few words about the upcoming Andy Warhol restrospective at London's Tate Modern museum.

The controversial 20th century American artist who launched the Pop Art movement in the 1960s is perhaps best remembered for his posterized multiple image prints of iconic figures from American culture like Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, Muhammad Ali, and Elizabeth Taylor.

But the highlight of the Tate exhibit will be the first public showing of a recently discovered print of American sailing icon Tillerman.

I imagine JP will have more details for us when the exhibit opens in April.

A Snowy Morning

Whose garage this is I think I know.

His mind is focused elsewhere though;  

He will not see me stopping here  

As he curses at the snow.  

My little horse must think it queer  

To stop without a tavern near  

Between the woods and frozen lake  

The coldest morning of the year.  

He gives his harness bells a shake  

To ask if there is some mistake.  

The only other sound’s the sweep  

Of snow shovel and downy flake.  

The drive is lovely, long and steep.  

The dude has promises to keep,  

And drifts to shovel before he sleeps,  

And drifts to shovel before he sleeps.

Fish On Mondays

Say what you will about the internet.

It's turning our kids' minds to mush. It's replaced intellectual curiosity with The Google. It will be the end of books and libraries and literacy.

Well OK, maybe so, but let's set those trifling realities aside for a moment and look at the good side.

This looks pretty good, doesn't it?

Now, those who read my scribblings here and in the comments pages of the blogs I frequent will probably have noticed that I shy away from most discussions about cooking. It's not that I don't like the fruits of cooking, or the meats of cooking, or the seafood and desserts of cooking. It's just that I've never been much of a cook myself.

Discussions of things like beer basil butter generally leave me bewitched, bothered, and bewildered.

I am usually left in charge of charcoal grilling and have developed some survival skills there, but that occurs safely al fresco. In our kitchen proper, I'm strictly the sous chef. I do what I'm told and try to stay out from underfoot.

But, with the advent of the internet, that may be starting to change.

Over the weekend, our head chef and menu planner was looking for something different to do with salmon. A few months ago, she discovered a YouTube video on how to make homemade pizza and that has worked out well for us. So, this time, instead of scouring her collection of cookbooks, she headed straight for the interwebs.

The cool thing is that you don't need to be a culinary genius with decades of experience. On YouTube, helpful practiced chefs, both amateur and pro, walk you through all the perilous steps of preparation, just like Julia Child. But here, you can pause, rewind, and replay as many times as necessary so you can get the crucial details right without setting fire to the kitchen. And with the iPad, the video is right there next to your cooktop. Voila! Voici! Or voiever you want.

The video we found for pan-seared salmon over sauteed spinach, mushrooms, garlic, and tomatoes was done by an enterprising Jersey girl named Laura Vitale, who seems to have mastered the art of marketing herself on the interwebs rather well. I don't know what professional chefs would make of her, but her recipe - and more importantly her video - worked out superbly for us.

As usual, my wife did most of the heavy cooking, but, when I wasn't staring at where Laura was wearing her microphone, I learned a lot, too. I think I'm starting to gain the confidence to take on stuff like this, myself.

I even added a secret ingredient to Ms. Vitale's recipe.

Ten blogging points to the first one who spots it in the photo at the top of this post.