Friday, August 04, 2006

Greetings from Ohio

Well, Tim definitely trumps me (let me count the ways...) with respect to current location, but only I have Caltech writing a press release about my research. So there! Anyway, on to the subject at hand...

I remembered where to get good coffee and free wireless (actually, two different places to do both of these things), and now I finally have the chance to sit at one of them for a while and be able to do things online in a little less of a rush. I am drinking my "blended Ernest Hemingway" (I just love the drink names at Kerouac Korner, and I may also partake of the Galaga machine they have here...). I am also listening to the Dodger game, which please me as well.

Greg Maddux had an awesome debut for the Dodgers yesterday: he pitched 6 hitless innings. The game was delayed by rain (and presumably that coincides with the 6 innings pitched) and actually didn't finish until after I arrived at my hotel. Most of the last couple innings occurred during my cab ride from the airport. However, I did hear the score in the cab---we were playing the Cincinatti Reds and the cabby had the news on---and got to watch the last at bat. (Aside: I'm listening to a commercial for Snakes in a Building [aka, World Trade Center] and Nicholas Cage's attempt at a New York accept is amazingly bad. It's sounds closer to a Boston accent...) Not to jinx us, be we've won 6 in a row entering today. Because the NL West is so weak, we didn't get buried so we're back in the pennant races (for both the division and the wild card).

Yesterday, I was wearing my 'Cthulhu for President' t-shirt. While waiting to pick up my checked-in luggage, one person asked me about that. I gave him a short version of the explanation, and his friend (who was wearing a Harley t-shirt and looked like a ZZ-Top groupie) gave me this looked that indicated that I was too freaky for him. Thus the conversation stopped, but that's ok because I didn't feel like talking to them anyway.

2 comments:

Lemming said...

For great coffee and free wireless on Kaua'i, might I recommend Small Town Coffee? It's located just North of Kapa'a (I believe), and is more of a local stop than a tourist joint. I got to drink a mighty-fine hot cocoa while checking my email, with a backdrop set by a young kid and old man discussing techniques for catching and preparing exotic fish. Also, some surfer bum came in and did some excellent classical music performances on the keyboard (piping it through his MacBook--mad props). As we left (the place was closing) they were setting up for some sort of band practice--from the sound of it, it was the first time they were going to be playing together, and no one knew what was going on. ^^

Mason said...

One of the few unfortunate things about my time in Maui is that I was unable to find good espresso drinks where I was. (It's likely that one of the nearby hotels had them for a steep price, but none of the hotels I checked had an espresso machine. Maybe 6 years later it's different, but the one coffee place I could actually find wasn't any good. So I just had more macadamia nut smoothies to compensate...