This week I watched Murder on the Orient Express from the 70s. Its been in my queue forever so I was glad I finally got to it.
So it was surprising to see it would be shown on the Amtrak train on our way to Portland (where I am now. Here's to mobile blogging!).
Despite how odd it is that the movie would come up again in the same week, I think its even odder to play this movie on a train. Isn't that a bit like showing a movie with a plane crash in flight?
Mary and I are going to spend Saturday in Portland. We'll be on the train in the morning and back by night, thanks to a 2-for-1 deal with Amtrak.
I'm expecting Travel Scrabble will probably make the journey with us. But we're definitely looking forward to a nice day in Portland (especially when it's supposed to be in the 70s if not 80s). Powell's here I come!
Also check out Peter Callaghan's article on the Seattle to Portland Amtrak trip. They expect to be able to cut Point Defiance out of the trip and save 6 minutes. Callaghan's right, it's a very nice 6 minutes, but it's part of an overall plan to cut the trip between Seattle and Portland by 1 hour. That's really fast and makes the trip shorter (just barely and depending on how fast you drive) than going by car. That's a good rail system.
This raunchy puppet musical was surprisingly funny. I know a few "non-theater" types who greatly enjoyed it, so I was looking forward to it going in.
As we've done in the past, we bought the soundtrack before going. For a show like Spring Awakening, this helps make the show clearer. Sometimes the words get muddled on stage and it's better to know a little bit in advance. With Avenue Q, however, I actually wouldn't recommend it. Some of the joy of the show is its audacious lyrics, and I think maybe I knew too much going into it.
In general, the songs were very funny, the characters and puppets were surprisingly well crafted and acted (with a few notable exceptions). And the Sesame Street style interludes on the two TV monitors were handled well.
If anything really didn't work for me it was the character Christmas Eve, the Japanese therapist. I would even go so far as to call her a failed character. I understand what the creators were going for, but it just didn't work. There are good ways to poke fun at stereotypes, but Christmas Eve was no different that Long Duk Dong from Sixteen Candles, and even not so far apart from Mickey Rooney's horrendous Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany's. And it's bad when I reference a stereotype from 1961 (which was outdated even then).
It just didn't work. (And I don't think it's the actress. Her voice and songs didn't work on the soundtrack either, which was made by the original Broadway cast.)
But the show is very good and I definitely recommend it if you happen to be in NYC or London's West End. Although I hear now that it's closed at the Wynn in Vegas a national tour has started up too. Just be prepared for "full puppet nudity" and some dirty talk and you'll fine.
As you might be able to tell by the pictures below, we were all over New York today. Battery Park, Ground Zero (they're already starting to rebuild), Midtown, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Central Park, and a Yankees-Mariners game (which we lost 5-1).
Plenty more coming, including Avenue Q. tomorrow night. It's been pretty cool, and the Yankees game was downright chilly. But other than that we've managed to avoid the rain we got hit with last night.
Looking forward to a fun weekend ...
Looking toward right field from our seats at the Yankees game. This is the last year for the current Yankee Stadium. You can see the upper lip of the new stadium in the background.
Even though it looks like blue skies in the picture it was dark-ish and cloudy when I took this picture. I think that's a result of the lights. Judging by the fielders, the Mariners are up to bad. Not that we were able to do much. Although our 4 errors in the first three innings means we were worse in the field than we were on offensive. Not a great game.
This is from the roof garden at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Central Park is in the background.
We're heading to New York for a long weekend, which is going to be awesome! Activities will include watching the Mariners play the Yankees at Yankee Stadium (it's the last season for Yankee stadium) and seeing Avenue Q (the musical, not the Avenue).
Plus lots of walking. We leave Thursday. I'll probably Twitter from there when I can with blog posts every so often. That said, I can take pictures with my iPhone and post them directly to my blog, so I might do that from the road, too. I do like travel blogging.
This weekend we'll be up in the great Woodinville Wine country for Passport Weekend. Thinking ahead, 11 of us have rented a van which will shuttle us from winery to winery while we get our fill of wine and cheese.
We did passport weekend the same way last year and had a blast. And now with the sun predicted for today ... it's going to be a great Saturday.
I'll be catching the Mariners playing at Yankee Stadium the first week of May and the tickets just arrived! This is the last year for Yankee Stadium, so it should be fun to see it before it goes. Happily, the trip is also going to coincide with the TriBeCa Film Festival, so we'll probably try to catch a flick if we can.
It's turned into a big group of us going. There will be 10 (10!) at the game and 5 of us over the weekend.
I'd never been to New York until November '06, then I went again in August of '07. And now I'm going back in '08. Making New York an annual trip would be just fine by me ...
Mary has assembled a Picasa album of our trip to the Puerto Rican island complete with handy explanations of each photo. Looking at it I already want to go back ... sigh ...
For the general sake of my reputation, you won't see me venturing too far off my normal topics here, because I'd hate to really come off as totally ignorant. Take the elections in Pakistan. I got nothing. No idea what it all means.
But then there's Cuba, where today Fidel Castro announced his resignation (first posted on the Internet before anywhere else if you can believe it; how's that for high-tech communism?). In the late winter of 2000, I actually went to Cuba. And perhaps you remember there was a bit of a stink in Cuba at that time, because the US was still months away from giving back Elian Gonzalez (remember him?).
My time in Cuba was short, only three days, but it was fascinating. I arrived in Santiago de Cuba on the southeast side of the island from the water, on a 125' schooner actually. Things didn't get off to a good start when we raised the Cuban flag up the mast, as a sign of respect. Unfortunately, it went up the mast upside down, a declaration of war (my trust lab partner noticed the red star in the middle of the otherwise symmetrical flag was pointy-end-down).
But as to Cuba itself ... I rather liked it and liked its people. For a short time I walked the city and just looked in shops and hung out in plazas drinking bottled Coca Colas (a real surprise to find it available there, let me tell you).
Come time for the US Embargo to end and Cubans will be the best mechanics in the world. All the taxis are American cars from the 1950s that are still running. One opened up the hood and showed off the Soviet radiator that was installed in the Cuban engine of a 57 Chevy. When they need a part, they melt a piece to replace it.
And the people were very cool. It's an interesting thing, I should mention, to have everyone think you're German or British and be surprised that you're American.
The important thing about romanticizing Cuba, though, is to remember that the country is still--unquestionably--run by a dictator. Having been there, I will tell you that any soft-heart people have for Castro is misguided. The first Cuban I met, the harbormaster at the marina, said almost immediately after shaking hands, "I don't talk about religion or politics." One Cuban who a group of us kind of befriended was nearly arrested for bothering tourists, and we all had to vouch that he was welcome in our group. I saw a missile in a lettuce patch pointed north (really). Cuba is not a free country and its government and leader should not be romanticized (most especially Che, who might have had a good movie made about his motorcycle ride, but was rather a butcher after that).
But sipping that Coca Cola there got me thinking. I think the Embargo is a load of crap. If we really want to change the country, now that Castro's retired we need to take the opportunity to shake things up. George W Bush could actually pull off something pretty great if he opened Cuba the same way Nixon opened China. If we really want to help the people of Cuba, lifting the Embargo would be the place to start, and now we have the political excuse to do so.
They won't stay communist for long, as China has showed with their slow transition away (which still has a couple hundred years more ahead of it). Instead of withholding, I think we should be flooding the country with tourism and capitalism. I know there are problems on the state-to-state level of that but in terms of changing the "hearts and minds" of the Cuban people, I think it's not a bad way to go.
Last summer, Mary and I were faced with a dilemma. We wanted to do a tropical vacation, but where?
The all-inclusive resorts didn't beckon for a number of reasons, but the main ones being that it would just be too crowded (and expensive). On the other hand, going to some remote isolated destination where there aren't many tourists has its own problems.
Which is when we found Vieques. Ever heard of it? I hadn't. Turns out it's a small (very small) island just east of Puerto Rico that is part of the US. One end of the island was a shelling range for the Navy, so it--understandably--didn't build up much tourism. In fact, now that the Navy is gone, it's remained relatively empty. No mega-resorts, no cruiselines. Nuthin'.
Our room is on the beach in a converted house with 4 apartments in it. The island has some incredible attractions: nearly empty beaches, wild horses running around the island, and bioluminescent bays (read:glow in the dark water).
It's going to be awesome. We leave Thursday. I doubt we'll have a lot of internet connectivity, but if there's a chance to post some pictures we'll be sure to. Meantimes, check out the link to Vieques above. The wikipedia article has some good stuff in it, including some awesome pictures.
Just three more days!!
It's not just Duluth, as I blogged about earlier this week. St. Paul, Minnesota, has a lot of similarities to Tacoma as well.
It's growing up in the shadow of its more prominent, more artsy neighbor Minneapolis, very much like us. It's downtown core has been hurt in recent years (actually more recent years than Tacoma). Their urban malls closed and now getting businesses back in to the core is a challenge. Like Tacoma they are worried about departing businesses: 3M in their case, which just announced today that they are leaving St. Paul). They also have the random famous person who grew up there that they now idolize (Charles Schulz, creator of the Peanuts).
I do appreciate that St. Paul has given substantial power to their neighborhoods. The district councils have a fair say over land use issues. All the times I've stayed in the City, both downtown and out of downtown, I've had a good time. There's a lot going for it, and they are really self-consciously pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, just like Tacoma. The same city pride that exists here most definitely exists there.
It's a cool place.
Link to St. Paul, MN on Wikipedia
Flickr photo from user Clairity
What does Duluth, Minnesota, have to do with Tacoma? A lot, I think. It's about half our size, but is a major Great Lakes port. Its downtown is built on the same kind of sloping hill as Tacoma's, the have their equivalent of the Esplanade, and it has a cool historic and industrial lift bridge at the base of its downtown (seen above) ... plus their newspaper is called The News Tribune (confusing right?).
Having been there this week, I will also add that it feels a lot like Tacoma too. The old brick architecture, the industrial history is very evident, as it is here.
They have a couple things going for them: where Tacoma's slope levels out on just one street--Pacific Ave--Duluth has a couple of streets at the base of their hill. Their lift bridge is also still functioning ... so much they even shut it down for a day every year for a big party mid-span. I also noticed a core of hotels in downtown. Duluth does have pretty good tourism from what I can tell, a lot of it is from Midwesterners going north to Lake Superior and the Boundary Waters on vacation--Duluth is a good stopping point for that.
They have plenty of disadvantages to Tacoma, of course. Starting with the weather, of course. Not only is it damned cold, but when Lake Superior freezes over all the port traffic stops, which isn't that convenient. And they are a long ways from anything else, whereas Tacoma is pretty well connected--thanks to Sea-Tac and our proximity to a major metropolis...
Anyway, it's interesting to see other cities around the country similar to Tacoma.
Link to Duluth on Wikipedia
(Flicker photo of Duluth Aerial Lift Bridge from rrazor)
Tomorrow I'm getting up bright and early for a winter's trip to the heartland. First, it's a night in Minnesota with Joe. On the schedule: chess and the big football game on a big TV.
Then Sunday it's a trip north. Like way north. Like to a small island in Lake Superior that--were I traveling there a month later--might have an ice road connecting it to the mainland. So it'll be cold. But I'm cool with that. 3 days on the frigid North Shore of Wisconsin (technically a little ways past the North Shore) for New Years Eve.
Then it's back to the Twin Cities, where we'll stay in St. Paul for three days. I'll be dang close to the Iowa caucus, but I've decided there's not much I can do to help Obama if I go, so I'll just be a news junky that day and mercilessly check online updates. He may not need my help: his new speech is really really damn good.
Then it's back to T-town next weekend and then 2008 gets underway.
Looking forward to it.
So I haven't blogged since Tuesday (which is totally my bad, I'm sorry; I view every day without a blog post as a day I didn't do my job).
Since then I've been working on a few different projects. I have added another 5,000 words or so to my novel, and bumped that up to about 43,000, which is very exciting.
I've started and finished The Kite Runner, which was a good book that I would recommend. Looking forward to the movie.
I enjoyed a really great party at Suite133. The open house started at 5:00 and I left at 11:00 or so. It was a blast.
I also had the inspiration to write a sonnet about the Heidelberg Brewery for Exit133 on Friday. That was a great time, but took up most of Thursday night. I'm not sure I've actually written a sonnet before, so that felt good because it turned out none-too-shabby.
I might come off as a bit of a historic preservationist nut in it, which isn't true. It's just hard to get a complex development argument into 14 lines of rhymed iambic pentameter. I do like the Heidelberg and I would hate to see it go, especially because it has been a bad year for historic buildings (although the good news about the Luzon is pretty heartening). I don't really mind the Courtyard by Marriott although I know a lot do. But the impact it has on Tacoma is very high (thanks to my tourism days for better understanding how that works). What I don't like is another one that takes a cool old building with it.
If the new building created a cool new design concept, possibly with historic tax credits that might be available, I'd be all for it. (See why it didn't all fit in the poem?)
And this weekend I headed out to Ephrata, WA, in the middle of the state for a night with the extended family. I do find Eastern Washington to be very beautiful, but judging by how good it felt to be back ... well, this is a pretty good side of the mountains too. After the trip Mary and I had lunch in Seattle with our friend, Deborah, who was visiting the area from Utrecht in the Netherlands where she lives. So a good weekend!
I'll try to be better about blogging this week ...
I'll recap the awesome weekend quickly.
We left at 10:30 from Tacoma on the train and pulled in just before 2. We sat for about 45 minutes in front of Chambers Bay waiting for our "sister" train. I didn't know what that meant. But it's so much different than traveling by air. Three hours in an airline seat and three hours sitting at a table reading and playing Scrabble are two very different things.
We got in, walked to the hotel and then started exploring Portland's Pearl District (which is awesome!). Lots of wandering, lots of browsing, not much buying, but that's ok. We had a late dinner at a great Italian restaurant and then headed off to bed.
Sunday we had breakfast at Jake's and then spent the requisite few hours browsing Powell's. Because how could you not? And then wandered the town a bit more after that.
The train ride back made it all the worth it. It was dark, traffic looked heavy, but there we were, once again reading and playing Scrabble in the lounge car, when I could have been staring at the dark freeway feeling tired. The trip back was only 2:45, too, so not much longer than the drive would take.
It was a very cool weekend away!
There is something very nice about seeing Tacoma from the air during take-offs and landings.
Part of it is the joy of picking out tiny little buildings, but there's also a peacefulness to the scene, too, which primarily comes from the Sound, I think.
I used to fly pretty regularly between Minnesota and Sea-Tac when I was in college and the Sound was always distinctive, even at night, when the land was only defined by the lights and the water by its absence. It's hard not to really appreciate Tacoma and its environs when you see the Olympics, the blue Sound, the trees ... etc etc. On the other hand, even on a crappy day like today when you have to play peek-a-boo with the clouds to get any kind of view I still enjoy flying home. It feels pretty good.
We spent yesterday on a driving tour around LA. Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, and out to Malibu even. We spent a few hours in Santa Monica especially, which is really cool. And in the evening we went to very nice outdoor mall called The Grove. (No famous people in sight, though).
Our morning before the driving tour was nice, too, as we went to the rooftop deck of the hotel and had breakfast with all of the City spread out in front of us. Great views from Sunset Blvd overlooking the rest of LA. Though there was a bit of a haze that made me recall "the Cloud Wall" in Winter's Tale because it cut the views off so distinctly.
We also had a low-key dinner at Mel's Drive In, one of those in the chain where American Graffiti is partially set.
So all in all, it was a pretty great LA experience. Malls, beaches, pools, palm trees, traffic, famous people, movie lots and television studios, plus a day at Disneyland ... pretty much what you go to LA for.
We left Anaheim early yesterday and rushed north to Burbank so that we could arrive in time for our 11:20 tour of the Warner Bros. Studio. If you've ever done the Universal Tour, Warner is nothing like it. Our tour group was "full" with just 13 people and you spend most of the 2 hours and 10 minutes on the working lot of Warner Bros., unlike the tram ride you get at Universal.
I really like the Warner tour. When I did it 10 years ago with my dad and my sister we did it during the summer so there was more flexibility in where to go, but this time it was pretty cool to have shooting going on around us.
After lunch there we crossed the freeway and parked at NBC studios, where we had tickets at will-call for The Tonight show (thanks, Lynn!). The area we waited is the same that I was in for an NBC tour (also 10 years ago, I think). And it hasn't changed at all, which was rather odd.
Anyway, the Tonight Show taping was very cool. Mary and I were put near the back but still had a great view. Jay Leno was pretty funny, Halle Berry was kind of a dud, and then we were surprised that Greg Grunberg (who?) was Matt Parkman from Heroes, also on Alias, and with a brief cameo in the pilot of Lost (killed by the monster).
So that was very cool. Later we saw him drive off through the stage exit at NBC.
From there we went to our very cool hotel (Le Montrose in West Hollywood via Mulholland Drive and Laurel Canyon (both movie titles, incidentally) where we checked in and then admired the view from the rooftop deck and pool. But pretty quickly we left again and drove Sunset Blvd all the way to The Arclight, perhaps the coolest movie theater in the country.
Last year I talked my way in to a sneak preview of Scoop there and as we were leaving we saw Katherine Heigl dining.
This year we saw two recognizable faces. Doris Roberts, from Remington Steele and Everyone Loves Raymond; and Joaquim de Almeida, who was on Season 3 of 24, and played the pacifist French general in "Behind Enemy Lines" (although pacifist and French might be repetitive when talking about American action films).
We also caught a late show of "Michael Clayton," a very excellent movie with George Clooney.
It's a driving tour today!
PS--Jenny, to answer your question Pirates seemed pretty similar to what it used to be, except there were a few robotic Johnny Depps around. Not much different from the old ride, I'd say.
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