lani and the <a href=”http://thraxil.org/images/gerbils/“>gerbils</a> are safely in Austin. i’m back in nyc, and i assume tuck is back in new hampshire by now.
all in all, a fantastic road trip. it would take me hours to cover the whole thing, so you’ll have to settle for the abridged version here.
we packed up the car, picked up tuck’s visa downtown and left nyc around 13:00 on tuesday. after a brief stop at a waffle house for dinner, we got to anthony and heather’s place in chapel hill around 23:00. there we <a href=”http://thraxil.org/images/2003/08/south/imgp0430.jpg.html”>drank</a>, talked, and drank some more late into the night.
friday we drove through mississippi down to new orleans. mississippi is pretty unremarkable. flat. hot, and not much to see from the highway.
new orleans is fantastic though. beautiful architecture, giant cypress trees, weird palm trees, delicious spicy seafood, and filled with old cemeteries and ghost stories. these days, the city seems to be designed around mardi gras. it is absolutely filled with hotels (most of which are empty during the off season) and touristy shops. it seems to be perfectly legal to walk down the street with a cup of beer (everyone does), and bourbon street is like one giant frat party. i think i’d rather have tabasco sauce ground into my eyeballs than go to new orleans during mardi gras, but any other time of the year it is beautiful.
on saturday, we drove around the garden district looking for the cemeteries. since we hadn’t actually been smart enough to find addresses beforehand, it took us awhile. we did eventually run across Lafayette Cemetery #1. but it had closed an hour before. there was a bookstore next door so we went in and bought a map. we also learned that Anne Rice’s house was right down the street. with the help of our new map, we were able to track down the St. Louis Cemetery #1, which is one of the more famous ones in the city and holds the tomb of Marie Leveaux, the ‘Voodoo Queen’. unfortunately, that one also closed about 20 minute before we got there.
somewhat discouraged, we decided to just take off and head for texas. taking a southern route through the bayou, we followed tropical storm erika west. before sunset, we took a small detour to go check out the gulf of mexico. picking a spot on the map at random, we ended up going through a bunch of sugar plantations to the little port of Louisa. there we found a small state park with a beach. some kids were fishing for saltwater catfish, and the sun was just <a href=”http://thraxil.org/images/2003/08/south/imgp0568.jpg.html”>starting to set</a>. the air was so humid you could drink it, but it was gorgeous.
at that point the one tragedy of the trip occurred. my camera was starting to get full, so i went back through the old pictures looking for ones to delete to make some space. somehow, i managed to hit the wrong combination of buttons when i wasn’t paying close attention and deleted every picture on the camera in one move. i’d copied pictures over to a laptop a couple nights before in memphis, but everything since then, including all my pictures of new orleans and the bayou, were gone.
we stopped driving that night just inside texas in the town of Beaumont. the next morning, we got up early and kept going west through <a href=”http://thraxil.org/images/2003/08/south/imgp0574.jpg.html”>houston</a> and san antonio. we decided that since tuck had never been to mexico and might not have another chance, we should make a side-trip down to a border town. laredo was only a couple hours off our path, so off we went. since we had the gerbils with us and weren’t sure if they would cause any problems with crossing the border, we decided to just park the car on the US side and walk across a <a href=”http://thraxil.org/images/2003/08/south/imgp0582.jpg.html”>bridge </a> over the <a href=”http://thraxil.org/images/2003/08/south/imgp0583.jpg.html”>rio grande</a> to the mexican side. it was about what you’d expect from a mexican border-town. filled with street vendors all trying to sell the same touristy crap and people coming up to us seeing if we were interested in cheap prescription drugs. we wandered the streets for a bit, bought some tequila and turned around. getting into mexico involved paying a 50 cent toll. getting back into the US involved paying a 25 cent toll and showing some id to demonstrate that we were american. the customs guy said that we needed to pay some small taxes on the booze, but the booth where we were supposed to pay was empty, so we just walked past.
had some really bad burritos in san antonio and were finally in austin at around midnight. unloaded the car, met lani’s new housemates, slept a couple hours, and tuck and i were off to the airport to come home.
general observations:
the south is very hot. especially texas. texas, i felt, was pushing the limits of where human beings could actually live without air conditioning. when you turn off the air conditioning in the car during the day, you can instantly feel the temperature climbing and it reaches unbearable levels in about 10 seconds. i will never complain about new york being hot again. i will also be somewhat less skeptical about reports of spontaneous human combustion, especially if those reports come from texas.
billboards in the bible belt are funny. the pattern basically goes: Christian Gift Store, <a href=”http://thraxil.org/images/2003/08/south/imgp0465.jpg.html”>Fireworks Store</a>, Bible Factory Outlet, Adult World XXX Superstore, “God’s Way is the highway”, Casino (in louisiana at least), Gun and Knife Show, Adult video and book store, Bible Factory Outlet, Discount Cigarettes and Liquor.
once in a blue moon, reading the comments on slashdot actually turns up something interesting.
like this gem which points to the SEC documents filed by SCO. reading through them is quite enlightening. in the last couple weeks, the top executives seem to have dumped a lot of their stock. isn't anyone in the government paying attention?
i'm beginning to agree more and more with Michael Crawford that we should put the SCO executives in prison for stock fraud and extortion.
i actually found myself implementing Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm in some code yesterday. imagine that. actually using something learned in a data structures and algorithms class for real-life, useful code.
if i get really ambitious, maybe i’ll throw in some Floyd-Warshall or Johnson all-pairs shortest path stuff. (though for now, iterated Dijkstra appears to be more than fast enough and isn’t even remotely the bottleneck in the code)
lani has decided to give up her glamorous temp job in NYC and go to grad school at UT Austin starting this fall.
while it will be sad for me to see her go, i can at least look forward to one thing: road trip.
in mid august, we’re taking a good 5 or 6 days and driving from NYC to Austin, Texas. we’ve enlisted Tuck to come along and help out with the driving (since i don’t really drive). the plan is to take our time and explore the interesting parts of the american southeast. definite stops for us are Memphis and New Orleans.
other than that, our plans are still pretty open-ended. none of us have really spent much time in the area so we don’t know what the cool places to see are. if you know of interesting sites that are roughly between new york and austin, please suggest them. are there any scenic roads that we should try to incorporate into our route? are there any areas that we should carefully avoid? any tips for yankees making it through the deep south without experiencing Deliverance first hand?
also, since none of us are terribly wealthy at the moment, we’d like to do this as cheaply as possible. a big chunk of our expenses will probably be hotels. unless we can find couches to crash on. we know people in richmond, va, and chapel hill, nc, but other than that we have no friends in the region. so if you know people who might let us sleep on their floor for a night, let us know that too.
Perhaps its an obvious variation of frigging, but one doesnt feel the need in the English-language ecosystem for such a variation, and words dont typically get any traction unless they meet some need, if only for novelty. Admittedly, in a spoken diatribe, fricking sounds a bit more percussive; is that enough? Interestingly, frigging is almost always slurred into friggin, while in fricking the -ing is sounded out fully.
i think it’s basically ‘frigging’ pronounced with a faux scottish accent. at least in my experience, it first came into popular use in the US in the early to mid 90’s because of the SNL skit with Mike Myers about the scottish store. you know, “we have three sizes: wee, not so wee, and FRICKIN HUGE!” it seems to have had a resurgence lately, i think because of the Austin Powers movies. so i think we can safely blame Mike Myers.
found a <a href=”http://www.floridatoday.com/!NEWSROOM/peoplestoryA1172A.htm”>fascinating article</a> about an ex-military satellite image specialist who thinks he’s spotted a brand new oil pipeline running from the fields in southern iraq out through kuwait.
at the end of the article, he also makes a couple interesting points about the importance of the weather on the sept. 11th attacks. i do remember noticing and discussing with coworkers that the weather that day was absolutely perfect. at the time it seemed tragically ironic that something so horrible could happen on such a beautiful day. if this guy’s right, it could <em>only</em> have happened on a beautiful day.
tuck, angela, and i went up to syracuse for hellfest 2003. 3 days of hardcore and death metal. over 100 bands.
it was fantastic. the festival was really well organized and run. they had things set up with 3 stages. two of the stages ('A' and 'B') were right next to each other and they would be setting up on one stage while a band played on the other. a third stage ('C') on the other end of the fairgrounds had the smaller name acts. most bands played for about half an hour each except a couple of the bigger names which played for 45 minutes or an hour at the end of each day. the advantage of the setup was that there was almost no wait between bands. someone was playing at all times on at least one of the stages.
the bands were amazing. there were no real disappointments. standouts were Darkest Hour, Walls of Jericho, Lamb of God, Anti-Flag (who were excellent to see on the 4th of july: “you’ve gotta die / gotta die / gotta die for your government? / die for your country? / that’s SHIT!”), In Flames, Bouncing Souls, Shai Hulud, Dead to Fall, Jude the Obscure, Brother’s Keeper (they announced that they were breaking up and hellfest was their last show ever), The Locust, and With Honor. but seriously, pretty much every band i saw was good.
the crowd was just as impressive as the bands though. crowd participation and enthusiasm was mind-blowing. even after three solid days of moshing in 95 degree heat and clouds of dust (one of the few negative aspects of the weekend was that the fairgrounds were really dusty and it was hard to see or breathe quite often. i think i have gravel in my lungs now and all weekend my snot was black), they were still jumping around and stagediving every chance they got. at every single band, even the obscure Stage C acts, there were people going crazy jumping on stage and they all knew all the lyrics to all the songs.
i brought my new toy along and took a ton of pictures. it was hard to get very many good shots though. for many of the bands, the mosh pits were extremely violent and took up such a huge area of the floor in front of the stage that i really couldn't get closer than about 100 feet without risking getting my camera and my skull destroyed.
aside from going to hellfest, i would recommend that you just stay out of syracuse. driving around that area was a nightmare. they seem to have the most confusing system of roadways imaginable. there were hidden exits, ambiguous or just missing signage, an overall twisted street layout that felt like it had been designed by a spider on benzedrine with a cruel streak, and everything looks the same. we literally spent hours driving around just trying to do simple things like finding a convenience store or getting back to our hotel. every turn that we were supposed to make we would manage to miss the first time around and have to back track to it. just when we'd get back on the right track, we'd suddenly find ourselves in an exit only lane and have to spend half an hour just trying to get back on the highway (a process that would usually end up involving about 14 turns). it wasn't just one or two cases of bad design, the whole area seemed to suffer from it.
our gerbils managed to get mites somehow. not a big deal but annoying to the poor little guys.
so last night, lani and i instituted a little mite holocaust. we took the gerbils out of their cage and let them run around in the bathtub while we disassembled the cage and cleaned it thoroughly. then, before they went back in, we sprayed each of them with some kind of anti-mite spray.
in the process we’ve learned several things about baby gerbils:
baby gerbils are the slipperiest objects known to man. if you pick one up and don't complete enclose it with your hands it will launch out of your hands like it was fired from a gun with absolutely no regard for its own safety and paying no attention to how high up it is from the floor.
baby gerbils are, as far as we can tell, indestructable. making a parachute free descent of 5 feet onto a hard tile floor (thanks to #1) startles them for a second but otherwise seems to produce no ill effects (to the gerbils at least. lani and i both had mild heart attacks).
if you turn the baby gerbil onto its back in the palm of your hand it seems to hypnotize it and it will lay there without moving indefinitely. if you ever need to transport baby gerbils, this appears to be the way to do it without them going aerial on you.
