Celeste's Breadbox

Just like all the others

I had to listen to a bit of Air America today, just to see what it was like. Maybe it's because I've never really listed to talk radio at all, but I found everything I heard to be just as pig-headed, arrogant, uninformed, and downright rude as their right-wing counterparts. I don't even think Rush Limbaugh would be as rude to Ralph Nader as Randi Rhodes was today. What the hell is wrong with people voting for a candidate they feel most represents their ideals? Isn't that what our democracy is supposed to be about? I'm sure if she'd even let him get at word in edgewise (who's that jerk that's always telling people to shut up on his show? it was just like that) Ralph would have crushed every arguement she had. But that's just it, she didn't have an argument, just an agenda. No different from Lars Larson.

I'm holding out a little bit of hope for the Lizz Windstead/Chuck D show in the mornings, Chuck D's tha man, and Lizz is pretty cool too. But if they're going to try to be an alternative to right-wing talk radio, they're going to have to act different too, and so far they haven't been able to do that. Someone needs to sit them all down with Terry Gross to learn how it's done right.

Profiling Update

I have more information about my spam profiling problem. The software that's causing it is Amika Guardian. No one I've talked to knows anything about it, and the ISP that was blocking me hasn't responeded to my e-mails. I've run a bunch of tests, from the same SMTP server, same IP address and everything, and it hates mail sent from Eudora for some reason. All the other clients I've tried have gone through without getting labeled as spam.

WTF? Maybe I should talk to Qualcomm, maybe they can raise a stink about it. I'm pretty sure Amika will ignore me since I'm just a nobody and not an admin. Now poor Aaron's been having to run with the spam filter off just to get my mail, and it's starting to get annoying.

Internet Profiling

I've been profiled. For nothing else than the fact that I use a non-standard e-mail provider, and a non-standard e-mail client. All of a suddent every major ISP I have tried to send e-mail to has labeled my e-mail as spam. I have had my e-mail account for like 10 years, I have never abused it, and that server is tight as a drum and I'm sure no spam could ever go out of it. But as of Friday my address (and probably the domain) have been blacklisted by Speakeasy, Erols, Indra, and probably a million other ISPs that I don't mail to on a regular basis. But what really gets my goat is that it DOESN'T flag mail from any client besides Eudora.

Eudora has always been over-compliant. They have offered security and filtering features years before other clients. They've been a little off the mark for the last couple of years, but honestly. WTF? Anyone know a way to get off a blacklist? This is really driving me crazy. It's not like I don't have other e-mail accounts and clients to use, but I hate change, and I'm not going to change over something as stupid and petty as this. The worst of it is that I don't know if someone's received an e-mail or not. I don't get any warning, the message just vanishes into the whatever. I'm so mad I could scream.

Yeah, so if you were expecting to hear from me over the last couple days, uh, sorry. Grumble grumble grumble.

Brian Greene - my super duper hero

Bless you Jemiah, for letting me know that my favorite pop-superstar physicist was reading tonight at Powells. We knew it was going to be a packed house, so we got there nice and early and got good seats. The crowd was typical Portland: mix of students, scientists, teachers, and the curious, and weirdos. I admired how well Brian handled the question about whether or not angels lived in the Kolabi-Yau-shaped dimensions. He also had some very eloquent and strong words about the Hubble being de-comissioned while it's still providing valuble data. I did get one good question in, if the gravitation "leakage" between dimensions could account for dark matter. He said it was possible, but he personally wasn't in that camp. I am though, I've read some convincing articles.

While waiting in line to have my book signed (now I have both signed first ed. hardbacks) there were some girls from the local Catholic school who were being all giggly and awestruck by Dr. Greene. I was holding it in, I mean, I am like 33. Some people act totally stupid about pop stars and actors, and some of us go nuts for physicists. He's gotta have the biggest, squealiest girly fan club of any physicist ever. Maybe it's just 'cus he gets to be on TV a lot. It was TV that turned me on to him, thank you Charlie Rose.

Now all he needs is a rock band (oh, wait, he has a string quartet, that will do) and a jet car (don't know about that, but I doubt it, he lives in NYC) and he'd be Buckaroo.

Safari: Day 3

Part 6: Ngorogoro Crater

Uh, OK, where was I? I've stupidly gotten distracted by a) work, b) planning a trip that's not going to happen for like 4 months, and c) absolutely stunningly goregeous weather. But I must finish my story! Where were we? Oh yeah, Ngorogoro Crater.

Down, down, down the crater wall. The road reminded me a bit too much of the road down to Echo Park, in Dinosaur, but this time we had 4-wheel drive. (By the way, if I haven't mentioned it before, Ngorogoro is a caldera, not a crater, but people have never been terribly accurate about geographic names.) You can see right away why the animals in the crater rarely leave. The rim and walls down to the bottom are pretty heavily forested, but the bottom is almost totally flat and grassy. Once you hit the bottom you start seeing the animals, and they are everywhere. Mixed herds of zebra, gazelles, wildebeeste, buffalo, ostriches. The herds are so big and and there are so many in such a small area, you can't tell where one begins and the other ends.

With all this food around, especially since a lot of the animals were having their babies about this time, you'd expect that there would be some predators. Yep, quite a few more sleepy lions, furtive jackals, bold heyenas, and lots of birds of prey. Most places eagles prefer hanging out in trees, but since there weren't many tress, this family of tawny eagles decided to have their little domestic dispute by the side of the road.

We did see a rhino, one of only 17 left in the country. I get so depressed just thinking about it. Ngorogoro is the only place they remain, because it's so well protected. Gone are the rhinos of Arusha park, just down the road, one of whom once had the gall to charge my grandmother. All the rhinos at Ngorogoro are tagged, have 24-hour surveilance, and personal bodyguards. I don't hold out much hope for their genetic pool though, they're way to isolated here to survive for too long.

After driving around in bizarre spoke-pattern circles for hours, we stopped for lunch at Ngoitokitok Springs for our picnic, and wouldn't you know it, the place was swarming with black kites, and idiot tourists feeding them. It was at this time that Aaron had his second piece of chicken swiped by the "little bastards." An elephant also decided to mosey through the site, but people were less stupid about that. It's not hard to realize you need to get out of the way, and not mess with, something that huge. (The black specs in this photo are the bloody kites.)

After lunch we had our real treat of the safari. Joseph and the other drivers were jabbering away on the radios, if I'd been listening better I would have heard it: "duma" (cheetah). He stops the truck and points, but all I see is a jackal in the grass. Wait, beyond it, there she is. Oh, there's another one, and another, and another. The cubs are pretty big, almost adult. They're moving down a little gully, so we drive up a bit further for a better view. They're just walking, then the cubs start getting a little playful with each other, acting like cats. Mom's just letting them, taking it easy, saving her energy. And they're coming closer, and closer, and they're right next to the truck! One of the cubs gets a little excited and decides to make a run at a baby wildebeeste. He wasn't too serious about it, but if he had been that calf wouldn't have stood a chance, he was moving way too fast. I felt like Jeff Corwin whispering "look at that, look at that, look at that" over and over again. What a thrill. This photo is of a cub, taken with my 3X digital, so you can tell how close they were.

After that, there really wasn't much that could thrill us, so we packed it in and left the crater for our next lodge, Gibb's Farm. We wanted to get there early so we'd have time to just kick back and enjoy. It really was a treat, the flowers (and the insects on the flowers, including hummingbird moths), the coffee trees, the gin and tonic, the view, the birds, everything. If anyone reading this has any plans of visiting the Ngorogoro area, this is the place to stay. They grow/raise most their own food, and the meals were fantastic.

That night it rained like hell, their first good rain of the season. We had planned on taking a walk into the Ngorogoro park (the farm borders it), but with the rain we thought it might be too muddy, so we kicked it in the morning. But, since it was the first rain of the year, the ground soaked it all up like a sponge, and was not muddy at all. So we took a short walk up the side of the crater, through the rain forest. It was extremely humid, and overcast, so not the most pleasant conditions, but still enjoyable after all that riding in the Cruiser, of finally being able to hike. I spotted a duiker, and there was evidence of elephants, but that was about it.

That afternoon, after an extended shopping stop, we boarded a little plane to Dar es Salaam for a few days stay before our next trip to Zanzibar. There's not much to say about Dar, so I'll skip it. Just hanging out at mom's house, doing some grocery shopping, watching CNN and being grateful for A/C. Being on the coast, Dar is hot and humid, and being the capital it is sprawling, congested and the country's nexus of crime. Yeah, so we didn't go out much. We needed a little stationary time after the safari anyway. Next time (and there will be a next time) I'm going in for a trekking safari. It's nice to cover a lot of gound in a truck, but I really would have prefered to be at ground level, be able to go my own speed, and be able to stop to observe the smaller creatures.

Holy Shitake!

Awesome food-based travelogue of the author's trip to Taiwan.

I want dumplings! NOW!

Safari: Day 2

Part 5: Serengeti, Day 2

This last week has been really busy, and I haven't had much chance to finish writing up my travelogue, and I'm starting to get worried that I'm not going to remember all the details. I'm already having a hard time remembering what happened after that first action-packed day.

After breakfast at Kirawira, Joseph told us he got us into a different hotel for the next night, which was more in the area we wanted to be, Ngorogoro. So that was a big relief, and meant that we could take it a little easier this day. Driving around the Serengeti that day was pretty much like the previous day, mostly the same animals and same sights. Even saw probably the same pride of lions that we had seen the previous day. One interesting stop was a rescue bridge over the Grumeti river. The bridge was a little rickety, and strewn with baboon crap, but it was one of the few chances we had to get out of the car.

For lunch we stopped at the official visitor's center, built around a nice kopjie, and inhabited by hyraxes and pygmy mongooses! (Sadly my mongoose photos got messed up, so you can't see how totally adorable they are.) The visitor's center is well done, and not in the usual preachy and heavy-handed way most of the newer U.S. national parks are. Most of the displays were just good science. I particularly liked this mural depicting the huge tasks that the park's staff have to handle every day.

We took a detour off the beaten track after lunch to the Gol Kopjies which are a "limited use" area that you have to pay an extra $10 for access. We hadn't seen cheetahs yet, and Joseph swore we would see cheetahs there or he'd give us our $10 back. It's a gorgeous area, a string of large kopjies with vultures, sectretary birds and eagles in the trees, and pink and purple lizards all over the rocks. After circling a few of the kopjies we spotted a group of rovers in the distance, which always means there's something at least a little interesting there. As we got closer and closer to the group we couldn't see anything, until Joseph stopped the car and pointed to one of the rovers and said "Cheetah, there." Sure enough, stretched out under the rear axle of the truck were a cheetah mom and two cubs.

There was a fresh kill on the ground between our truck and theirs, so we speculate that the guys had stopped to shoot the family at the kill, and after they were done eating the cats crawled under the car where it was shady for a little nap. The guys in the truck spoke French, and had professional cameras, and said they had been there for over two hours. They couldn't see where the cats were, and didn't want to move for fear of injuring them. In the end all it took was turning the engine over to startle them away, and they loped off to find a more secure place to spend the rest of the afternoon.

On the way back to the main road we saw another cheetah mom with cub or two sleeping in the shade of another kopjie. So we definitely got our money's worth for the detour. As we were approaching the main road we saw some kind of tallish brown thing projecting above the grass, and speculated what it could be. Bustard (a large bird, common on the plain)? Antelope? Maybe an ostrich laying down? As we got closer we could finally make it out: a large, lazy lion asleep on its back with a foot up in the air.

As we were checking into the lodge at Ngorogoro that night, there was some confusion when the clerk disappeared to go get the manager, and we're left thinking "Oh no, not again." But he just wants to apologize, sincerely, and humbly, for the reservation scew-up the night before. He takes every opportunity to apologize, at dinner, breakfast the next day... He's actually very nice, and we did get very nice rooms and excellent service. I'd say we got rooms with the best view of the crater, but I think they all had the same view, and it was spectacular.

After a few drinks and an excellent meal, we retired to our room and I had to spend a few minutes out on the balcony watching the stars (so many! and the Southern Cross), and the bats! We could hear a few night birds around too, but never managed to spot them. So ended our second day, not as spectacular as the first, but at least we didn't have any surprises, and managed to relax after the chaos of the previous night. And we had the whole next day to explore Ngorogoro Crater.