Supper clubs: Wisconsin supper clubs - chicagotribune.com

This makes me want go out for a steak in the midwest:

Supper clubs: Wisconsin supper clubs - chicagotribune.com

My Brother's 100 Greatest Artists of All-Time

In response to VH1's 100 Greatest Artists of All Time, my brother put together his own list. He made four slide shows set to music of his band, The Prowlers, to count them down. You might not agree with all of it, but it's pretty interesting, not to mention a lot of work. Here they are:

#100-64:


#63-43:


#42-24:


#23 to #1:


My only quibble is the absence of one of my heroes:

Puppy vs GSD

A brief brawl captured at the Ah-Shi-Sle-Pah WSA a few days back.

 

It's Good To Be King!

I'll be danged, but I've got something in common with bat shit-crazy Sarah Palin. I was reading an article the other day about how her handlers immediately delete any content from her Facebook page that challenges her message (full article here). At first glance, you might think it's so typical for people like her to systematically suppress any point-of-view that does not promote her brand. I had the same reaction myself.

Now, several days later, I find that my opinion is the exact opposite (no, no, no, she's still bat shit-crazy--that part hasn't changed). Rather, I've come understand that her Facebook page is not an open public forum. It's her private page to use as she sees fit. I've come to this conclusion because of a reader comment on this very blog that was both off-topic and contrary to the purpose of my blog. It occurs to me that I am God on this blog just as SP is God on her bat shit-crazy Facebook page. This is my blog, and I will decide what is published.

Honestly, it is not easy to make comments to this blog. First, you have to have a Google user ID to leave a comment. Most of my 7 or 8 readers do not have a Google user ID. Further, I do not check this blog regularly. This makes it very difficult to engage in any sort of conversation. I don't get any notification when someone leaves a comment. Despite this, it's always nice to see the odd comment here and there (examples: "Wow! Great pictures!" and "So sorry to hear about Floyd. I fell in love with him when Karen and I drove to Chicago with Floyd and Salty."). Comments of this kind are highly appreciated.

Earlier today, I became aware of a comment to one of my posts that was only tangentially on-topic but which really only served to promote the commentator's personal views on an unrelated subject. Being a good liberal, my first instinct was to allow the comment to stand as a kind of freedom of speech/exchange of ideas sort of thing. On further thought, I realized that this is my personal, private blog. Readers are permitted to read and comment on my blog only through of my benevolent sanction. This is not an open, public forum.

So go ahead, leave your comments. If they please me, they will stay. If not, I'll delete them. It's a free country.  You can always start your own blog if you've got something to get off your chest.

The New Standards Holiday Show!

From the Star Tribune:

THE NEW STANDARDS
Dec. 3-5: If you think it's fun hearing these rockers-turned-pop-jazzists reinventing modern classics by Britney Spears and Arcade Fire, you should hear what they can do with some of the oldest standards in the holiday books. Co-vocalists Chan Poling and John Munson -- of the Suburbs and Semisonic/Trip Shakespeare, respectively -- and their ace-in-the-hole vibraphonist Steve Roehm always use the season as a good reason to bring out some guests. The other names are still TBA, but no matter. The Saturday show (Dec. 4) sold out in a flash, so they added both a Friday-night set as well as a lower-key, family-friendly Sunday matinee. (8 p.m. Dec. 3-4 & 2 p.m. Dec. 5, Fitzgerald Theater, 10 E. Exchange St., St. Paul. $20-$32.)

CHRIS RIEMENSCHNEIDER

Worlds Collide at the New York Debut of the Supergroup Afrocubism -- RollingStone.com

This is Eliades Ochoa's latest project. I sure wish I could seem him someday before he gets too old.

Worlds Collide at the New York Debut of the Supergroup Afrocubism -- RollingStone.com

Dinosaur Bones!

I have been visiting places like the Bisti Badlands, the Den-Na-Zin Badlands, the Ojito Wilderness, and the Ah-Shi-Sle-Pah Wilderness Study Area regularly now since the early 90s. In recent years, my interest in these evocative landscapes--places with hoodoos and petrified forests and thousands of hidden surprises--has really increased. At this point, every few months I drag some lucky (hapless?) companion (usually Lisa) off to see one of these places. They are so easy to photograph and so unexpected. From a distance, they appear to be a gray blur--the last place you might hope to see something interesting. But on closer inspection, you find amazing color patterns and unbelievable rock formations and treasures in every corner. From my very first readings on these places back in the early 90s, I was aware that there were fossils in these places. My first reference on the subject was "The Sierra Club Guide to the Natural Areas of New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada." Back then, when I was still a cow-eyed Iowan who feasted on dreams of open spaces and exotic wilderness, I would read passages from this book like, "Petrified logs and dinosaur fossils record a more productive era" (regarding Bisti) and, "Petrified wood and fossils are abundant" (regarding De-Na-Zin). As someone who had never found even an arrowhead in a cornfield, I would ask myself, "If I went to one of these places, could I find a fossil?" Or better yet, "Could I find an actual dinosaur bone?" I would honestly fantasize about such things. I have since learned that famous dinosaur fossils have been found all over the San Juan Basin (e.g. the duck-billed dinosaur and a sub-species of T rex both at Bisti/De-Na-Zin and the one of the biggest dinos of all, the Seismosaurus in the Ojito Wilderness near Albuquerque).

Upon my first visits to Bisti/De-Na-Zin, it was obvious that I could at least find petrified wood. The stuff is everywhere. But still I have fantasized ever since about finding a dinosaur bone. Consider how the Ojito Seismosaurus was found: It was found by a couple of hikers just like me (a short account here and a 25 minute video here). If some other random hiker could stumble into something cool, why not me? Regarding the Ah-Shi-Sle-Pah WSA, I am aware from some internet searches that there are ongoing dinosaur digs every year led by a Robert Sullivan, a paleontologist from Pennsylvania. From a paper of his and from the website of one of his proteges, I know that Ah-Shi-Sle-Pah has been a fertile fossil-hunting ground for everything from fish scales to turtles to numerous dinosaur bones. Of course from my own experience, I know that there is petrified wood everywhere.

One big problem I've got is that I have absolutely no fossil-hunting knowledge. I know that many fossils are simply bone fragments or badly weathered teeth, but I have no idea when a small fragment of rock is a fossil or just an ordinary rock. Every time I visit one of a badlands, my hiking companions have to listen to me endlessly wonder, "How do you know if these rocks are fossils? Is that a turtle? Are these really petrified wood or are they bone fragments? Are we standing on bone fragments right now and don't even know it?" I talk this way extensively throughout each visit ad nauseum no doubt to my companions' eye-rolling boredom. I'm always wondering, thinking about cool fossils, but aside from huge petrified tree trunks, I'm completely clueless. My only hope has been to find a bone, something that was large and obvious. I'm quite sure that the small, hard-to-ID stuff is all over, hidden in obvious plain site. Big bones, on the other hand, are not so obvious. My problem is that a big bone has always been my one true hope. It's a bit like playing the lottery. Winning a second ticket is not so hard. The odds aren't that bad. However, a big jackpot is so unlikely that it is essentially not a real possibility.

So here is my winning lottery ticket. We didn't just win another free ticket. Nor did we win a $110 million payload. It's probably more like a $100,000 jackpot. It's pretty good, but not good enough to quit my day job.

We spent all day this past Saturday at the Ah-Shi-Sle-Pah WSA. Mostly, we went to take pictures and enjoy a good safe place to go camping with the dogs. We hiked about all day Saturday and got a handful of decent photos at sunset (to be posted later). At the end of the day, we had supper and decided we'd had a enough and that we'd pack up and go home first thing in the morning. When morning came, however, I had a change of heart and dragged the gang off for one last short hike into a previously unexplored section near our campsite. Since it was a short hike, we took very little water and just my camera. The great irony is that we didn't take the GPS. A GPS is often quite handy in these trackless badlands as a way to get back to your vehicle with minimal fuss, but for this hike, it seemed unnecessary. We were confident that we would be navigating a route out that would not be too difficult.

Twenty or 30 minutes into the hike, I was distracted by a couple of minor piles of petrified wood situated up above the wash in which we were walking. I guess petrified wood never gets old. Plus, who knows what you might find when you walk up to investigate the site? We climbed up about 10 feet above the wash to investigate. In this case, the petrified wood was not very interesting. As a result, we started wandering along the clay mounds looking for an easy route back into the wash when we walked right up to our great find. It is maybe 12 inches long with a large number of bone fragments scattered off on one side. It is maybe two inches wide at the widest point. It is a bone, without a doubt. It is made of rock. It's not an old cow bone. Is it a dinosaur bone? Damned if I know, but I hope to find out. Without a GPS to mark the spot, I'll have to rely on my pictures and memory to find that spot again. Luckily, I think it will be a very easy spot to re-find. The lay of the land in that area in now tattooed onto my brain.

First thing this morning, I contacted Robert Sullivan, the paleontologist from Pennsylvania who visits Ah-Shi-Sle-Pah each year. He wrote back and expressed an interest in seeing this specimen but not until his next visit nine months from now. He noted that it's a worthy specimen to visit, but it's a bit beat up. After that, I called the BLM office in Farmington, and spoke with the Sherrie Landon, the staff paleontologist at that office. She has expressed an interest in going out sometime soon to see the specimen in situ, as they say. Hopefully, we'll be able to organize another trip in the coming weeks. Naturally, I think this is really cool.

Here are the pix. I've doctored them a bit to make the bone stand out from soil. The soil is gray. The bones are also gray, but with a bit of a reddish-yellow cast. I emphasized the red in the pix to highlight the bones. Lisa's water bottle is 8 1/2 inches from top to bottom. Click on the pix to see them full-sized.

Museo Reina Sofia: Still Not Done Right, But Done Better

A year ago, we spent our first few days in Spain in Madrid. My natural goal was to share of the highlights and secrets (as I know them) with Lisa. El Prado? Check. La Plaza Mayor? Check. La Puerta del Sol? Check. And so on. On our list was the Museo Reina Sofia, but we didn't quite get that one right. The Reina Sofia is a modern art museum with a notable collection of works by Picasso, Miró, Dalí, among others. Being a modern art museum, it is full of the whimsical and inexplicable. I believe that the most famous work at the Reina Sofia is Picasso's "Guernica." This Wikipedia link gives an excellent overview of the painting, but in general, this painting was Picasso's response to Franco teaming up with Hitler to allow the German airforce to practice dive bombing techniques on a live (and defenseless) population during the Spanish civil war.

A year ago, like all good tourists, we visited the Reina Sofia. Our big mistake was that it was a Monday evening about an hour before closing. I think we paid roughly 10 Euros each to enter (equivalent to roughly $28 at the time). Our primary goal was to see "Guernica," but we got distracted along the way. Just as we were getting close, about 15 minutes before closing time, they started shooing everyone out of the museum. We tried to swim upstream against the flow of exiting patrons, but eventually security stopped us and made us leave, only a few rooms away from our target. This was a good lesson in how not to spend your money while on vacation.

This year, we would not make the same mistake. Having hit most of the big Madrid sights a year ago, this year, we were able to focus on the Reina Sofia immediately upon arrival. Better yet, on Sunday's it's free! Don't worry, we still made plenty of financial blunders this year as well, but at least we got to see "Guernica" as planned.

Here are some pix from the Reina Sofia from both this year and last year. I think the hanging sculpture of the guy hanging from his teeth is really cool. Like most casual admirers of art, I'm dumbfounded by the blue canvas, but I think that such minimalist odes to abstraction are required in modern art museums even if I can't understand them.


From 2009: The Atocha trainstation at sunset just outside of the Reina Sofia.



From 2010: All modern art museums require some sort of wild sculpture at the entrance.



From 2009: The hanging sculpture in the stairway. A favorite of mine.



The inexplicable blue painting.



A more interesting, but still inexplicable blue sculpture.



Let's hang some household junk from the ceiling and then challenge you to not call it "art."



These are propaganda posters from the Spanish Civil War. Having read extensively on this subject, I find these quite interesting.


Here's a Dalí followed by some detail shots of the same work:






Another Dalí. I'm not really sure if these are safe for work or not.


Picasso.



When we got to "Guernica," we joined about 80 others visitors and took non-flash photos of the painting. I took several shots, including some detail shots, just for fun. When taking photos in most art museums (assuming you're allowed to take any photos), the light is usually so poor that you cannot take a decent photo. Any sensible person would just buy a postcard to get a quality shot of whichever painting strikes your fancy. Still, I like to take my own phots just for the fun of it. In this case, using my fancy-dancy super turbo-charged Canon with dual overhead cams. This must've singled me out from the rest of the point-and-shoot masses, because after a few photos, an attendant came to me and told me that photos were not permitted of this particular work. I was a little dumbfounded because there were 80 other people all taking pictures of this same painting. So I replied, "Pero todo el mundo está sacando fotos aquí!" (But everyone's taking pictures here!). She told me that she couldn't control everyone. Aside from the camera, I'm not sure why she picked me out of the crowd. After she spoke with me, I saw the little sign at the back of the gallery that indicated that photos were not allowed in that particular room. Honestly, I don't understand why cameras are permitted anywhere in museums of this caliber. On the bright side, I think my pix of Guernica, especially the two close-ups are acceptably decent. Here they are:

The Five Meanest Airlines

My friend Ulpi just linked me to this post of the "Five Meanest Airlines" from some survey or other. Of the worst five, I've had recent problems with US Airways (bumped), American (stolen jamon serrano from checked luggage), and Delta (Neo-Nazi employees).

Spain Uniform

I have adopted a very regimented uniform for my trips to Spain. I have a two pairs of travel pants that I wear and roughly five or six different shirts. My favorite pair of official Spain pants dates back to my first trips to Spain in 1999 (or thereabouts). The shoes are brown walking shoes. The pants are tan or green. The shirts are some kind of subdued solid color with a understated pattern. This uniform matured fully in 2006 out of a desire to look not quite so American. It's not so much that I've got a problem with being a US citizen. Rather, I'd prefer to minimize being pigeonholed immediately. This is crazy, I know, being 5 feet 14 inches, but it's a step up from the classic American sneaker/short ensembles that I wore on my first trips to Spain. As I look back over my pix from the last three trips, I see the same two pairs of pants over and over and the same shirts over and over. You'd have a hard time telling that there were multiple trips. You can see the same outfit in these two pictures.

Here I am with Mom and Brad in a bar on the Plaza Mayor of Utrera in 2006. I had a vague interest in visiting Utrera because my favorite flamenco singer, Fernanda de Utrera is from that city. Also, an acquaintance of mine, El Yiyi, a flamenco singer based in Santa Fe who is also from Utrera. I wanted to see this mystical place from which so many flamenco musicians arise. It's mostly industrial these days, but the plaza was nice enough.


Here I am four years later with Lisa on our honeymoon sitting on the Plaza Mayor of Cardona. We just missed their yearly festival by a couple of days. Each year during the festival, they make a bullring in the main city square. On the day we arrived they were in the process of dismantling the temporary stadium that served as the setting for this picture.

The Honeymoon Begins and Ends

Overdue. We got home from Spain over a month ago, but still no pix. It's that damn puppy's fault! Plus, I'm lazy.

We left for Spain on 9/11/10. The morning we left, we fried up a small plate of pimientos de Padrón to gobble up before we left. We also took this picture. Pimientos de Padrón are little peppers (we'd call them chiles here in New Mexico) from Galicia in Spain. They're sweet and super tasty when fried in olive oil and served with sprinkled with sea salt. Spaniards, in general, do not like spicy anythings. These pimientos are generally not spicy, but maybe one in 20 packs a bit of heat. This is part of the fun, since eating them is a bit like Russian roulette, especially for the people who don't have high tolerance for heat. Of course we love them all. When we visited Spain last year, a package of seeds for these pimientos ended up in our luggage somehow, so we tried to grow them. We didn't have much luck, but we did get this small plate of pimientos that ripened up right before we left. Oddly enough, a month or two prior, we discovered that these peppers are the hot treat (i.e. "hot" as in trendy) at the Santa Fe Farmer's Market, with many vendors selling them.


Our honeymoon ended two weeks later on 9/25/10. On our return flight we encountered a Neo-Nazi Delta gate attendant in Atlanta who swore that Lisa's suitcase was too large to carry on the plane. This was despite the fact that this particular suitcase was purchased specifically because it does meet carry-on dimensions. This all led to an ugly scene at the gate in Atlanta that ended with Hitlerina extorting $25 from us to gate-check the bag before we would be permitted to board the flight. The picture below shows Lisa's bag a couple hour later upon arrival in Albuquerque clearly fitting in the Delta carry-on measuring device. You cynics will accuse us of having tampered with the bag, but this is not true. Not one tissue was removed before we took this photo. This incident prompted us to write a withering complaint to Delta for their mistreatment. To their credit, they did refund the $25 and give us each a $50 voucher, but you can still be sure that next time this happens, I'll get video of it as it happens. Bitch.



On a happier note, we soon arrived home at Jennifer's house where we presented our nephew Diego with a complete Real Madrid soccer uniform: