David Gessel
Maple Leaf Club YUL
The Maple Leaf Club at the Montreal airport (international side) is small, but as elegant and well kept up as the international and domestic clubs at YYZ. Maple Leaf clubs always have soup and salad (after 4:30), which is generally quite good, and always seem to have a good selection of cookies and other treats.
They also have decent free alcohol including good beer (draft Guinness) and a good selection of liquor. My preference is for the Crown Royal. The bathrooms are clean (small at YUL). There’s free “DataValet” wifi, but I couldn’t get an IP address at YUL (generally it works, but the service isn’t particularly snappy).
Star Aliance Gold gets you in, but you can also buy access with your ticket for small extra fee – something like $15, which is a lot cheaper than buying a few drinks at an airport bar. Plus free soup! Can’t go wrong with free soup.
Air Canada 777 with funny lighting
I took an Air Canada flight from Toronto/YYZ to Montreal/YUL on Friday. This is basically a regional flight – LA to SF, 54 minutes… but it was a two class 777, completely full. The plane was brand new and very nice inside. It had color-varying LED lighting inside. I noticed it had changed blue mid-flight, and then it cycled to a few other colors as we landed. Very festive.
Car Kisses Truck on 401
Oops.
Ford Taurus X Rental
Rental car review
- I used the backup sensor in a parking lot – a good thing as the car is long and has poor visibility out the back.
- It has an outside temperature indicator which I like.
- The seat moves all the way back when you take the key out, and then back to where it was for us old people.
- The tailgate opens and closes itself, which is kind of absurd and overkill but fun in a gadgety way.
- The engine is fairly powerful (Canadian rentals seem to be more powerful than US rentals – my .ca Grand Am would spin it’s wheels embarrassingly easily, whereas my .ca.us Grand Am in LA was kind of anemic).
- It’s quiet and comfortable.
- The rear seats fold into the floor of the car – just like a mini-van.
- The stereo had an analog input and a 6 CD MP3 changer
- It has Microsoft Sync – more on that below.
REN Chrysler in LA
Carolyn and I attended Matthew Barney’s REN shoot at the ephemeral REN Chrysler dealership at the intersection of Rosecrans and Bloomfield in Santa Fe Springs yesterday.
It was a very impressive show, fun to watch and at moments quite exciting, though largely staged for the cameras. The former RV sales lot was converted to an amazingly convincing Chrysler dealership complete with stationary on the walls, sales targets, car dealers and pictures of the employees of the month.
The performance started with the synchronized arrival of sections of a marching band which aggregated in the parking lot. The effect was pretty cool, with timing and distance and location of the different elements spread over a huge distance and slowly coalescing, all lead by marching band leader (and composer) Jonathan Bepler, who I’ve known since grade school but hadn’t seen in person for decades.
An iconic Chrysler Imperial was revealed as a funerary casket, a procession pulled by a few dozen strong men, as Egyptian slaves might have hauled stone blocks, down from the roof of the building and through the parking lot.
The imperial wended its way into a showroom to trade places with a gold firebird and then to its demise at the teeth of a deforestation machine, the showroom fitted with bullet-proof glass and lots of crickets for the purpose. The glass, amazingly, proved strong enough for the flying car parts and crow bars, but was not quite proof against the stabilizer feet of the gigantic excavator. We were perfectly located for that moment.
The remains of the imperial were ritually collected and we joined the staff in the parts department for the final procession involving scarabs, a beautiful woman, and a surprisingly large funerary drape, especially surprising given the orifice from which it was extracted.
The depth of detail of the performance was extraordinary. No simple write up can do it justice and I can’t imagine that even a small part of every carefully prepared element can make it to the final film. The details made walking through the performance an exercise in discovery – from post-it notes in the office, to the illuminated Chrysler signs as tunable Taiko drums, to the dealer tags on the cars in the lot everything was meticulously prepared over four weeks. Then a day later it was gone.
Eat Vulva at SFO
The Eat Vulva meme continues at the SFO RCC.
Changing Gates at DEN
Inexplicably, flight 505 was moved from one empty gate in Denver to another empty gate a little further down.
And the herd said “Moo.”
Rental review Pontiac Grand Am
- Quiet – Not the quietest – a lot of road noise gets through on rough roads like the post-winter 401.
- Comfortable – Not bad, not as ass fondling as the Volvo…
- Basic amenities – Power everything, but no outside temperature reading. I like knowing the outside temp.
- Stereo – loud and sounded fine.
- Security – the trunk is big and secure.
Florida
Homer might call it America’s Wang but Florida isn’t all bad.
Inspirational Books
New Scientist had a good article in the 10 April 08 issue about the formative books of the youth of 17 leading scientists. I found the most compelling Sean Carroll’s recommendation of One, Two, Three… Infinity.
It reminded me of a book that I remember reading in 4th grade that had a huge influence on my development: The Curve of Binding Energy.
I was already interested in nuclear physics and was motivated to read it. I think the book either inspired or reinforced many things that have become central parts of me; in particular an appreciation that understanding how things actually work gives one the ability to manipulate reality in a way that people who are less aware of how things work expect. Understanding things is lifetime power and (ever more importantly as I get older) a source of amusement. It illustrated how much fun being able to solve problems could be; the subversive (not merely empirical) value of knowledge.
I also learned how to make a mediocre nuclear weapon. Something that has made me a bit of smart ass ever since: if you know how to make the most fearsome weapon on earth it’s hard to be too intimidated. I wrote a paper in 9th grade describing how to build a weapon based on what I remembered from the book. About that time a student at Princeton got a lot of press for making a model nuclear bomb but using toothpaste instead of U-235, coincidently reinforcing my sense of significance.
After high school and after working as a programmer at a health physics company for a summer (and spending some formative time at a nuclear physics lab at U-Penn in grade school) I was one of a small number of nuclear engineering students on the fusion track at MIT. The Curve of Binding Energy inspired a love and appreciation of Nuclear Physics (and a sense of knowing something special) that only an act of congress could crush. When I was a freshman congress canceled funding for TARA, the tandem mirror experiment at MIT that about half the grad students I had just met were working on. While I dropped my FORTRAN efforts in support of FULIB and turned to robotics and eventually computers, I still ended up getting a degree in physics, course 8, not too far in practice or theory from course 20. And in no small part thanks to John McPhee and Ted Taylor.