The Quiet Ripple Defines The Pond

I do not like staying in conference hotels. Especially in the US where they tend to be soulless Hiltons and Marriots attached to the conference facility. Worse still, if the conference is in San Jose, which is a car city, because even if you leave the huge conference center, Hilton/Marriot conglomerate, you are confronted by a six lane boulevard and a feeling of hopelessness.

I search for a cheap motel on El Camino and find one, The Valley Inn, perfectly attuned to what I wish from a San Ho hotel experience. Here are some Yelp reviews:

“Worst hotel I’ve ever stayed inn. Very crusty old and not maintained.”

“This place by far was the worst place iv stayed.. Over priced no chair tv doesn’t work.”

“Simply the worst hotel I’ve ever booked. Customer service was beyond non existent & the “Owner”/”Manager”/”Everything” as he called himself on the phone was an idiot at best.”

“I have to say that if there were laws about truth in advertising these people would be in jail.”

It was very scary. All night people were trying to open my door. The doors do not close…

I love old style motels and the Valley Inn is perfect for me, it is cheap, has personality, has louche people hanging around, women who,after dark, say “What you got for me honey?”

Before the sun goes down

My key

my plug-hole

Best room in the house

I am at the AAAS meeting, which is immense fun. I catch up with old friends and colleagues, listen to mind-blowing talks and spread the OIST gospel.

Vint

Bill Slowhand Cabbage

I also go to the Exploratorium in SF to talk about the future.

Mary, Melissa and fat man

The best restaurant in SF is in the Exploratorium. There are amazing views out over the bay. Just settle in, eat excellent food and watch the boats go by, like er sitting on a dock on the bay.

Melissa,Silva Rob.
Thanks Youhei for the photos.

So I go down to Stanford in a rented car. I get the car through a website: https://relayrides.com/  It is fun. Individuals rent out their own cars and you choose which car you would like, normally through an algorithm involving proximity and price.

I get to SLAC and wallow in nostalgia. Lots and lots of old friends. Melinda and I are walking down a corridor when Burt Richter, Stan Brodsky, JoAnne Hewett and Marty Breidenbach came out of their offices at the same time.  What a corridor! We all cried on each others’ shoulders. Thanks to everyone who gave me such a warm Californian welcome. The air is full of helicopters – Obama is coming to the university later in the week.

I go quickly to Palo Alto Bayshore to photograph advocets. I go to Big 5, the best shop in the world, http://big5sportinggoods.com/store/ and then to the bank. Somewhere along this route my incredible camera with the really amazing 400mm bird lens is stolen from the car. Palo Alto is not Okinawa. How? I don’t know but I think I had to lock both doors on the rental individually or by some informed slight of hand on the doorlocker thing. Don’t worry I got my revenge on that car.

I make a very bad decision.

“Why drive back up 280 when you could drive through the redwoods up 84? Pass Alice’s Restaurant and cruise down to the ocean as the sun is going down and drive up the wild Pacific coast line into SF, er instead.”

I take the wrong option.

Cruising down to the ocean as the sun is going down on a very wet and muddy 84, the back of the car just slides away. I try to correct, which makes things much, much worse and in a nanosecond I am plunging off the side of the road. I collide with a baby redwood. I thought I was going to die. I survived but not the car.

Let people steal my camera, would you?

I am Ok. Thank you seat belt and airbags. This is the first car accident I have ever had, except for one on Jura.

You are totalled.

bald like me

I suppose I should have checked the tires before I set off.

I have always worried about going to Heaven. I mean, what can you do for eternity without getting bored?  Maybe if Heaven was only for 10 insane years it would be a more attractive proposition.  Even that is probably too long. Maybe a couple of weeks in Heaven followed by a few hours of Hell with the resultant “Oh, Thank God!” upon returning would provide necessary variation.

This is just a lead in to another heavenly morning spent in the Kezar Bar, which is close to our house. The bar is so named because the mighty Kezar Stadium used to stand right in front of it.

Original home of the 49ers

The stadium, just at the entry to the Golden Gate park was demolished after the 1989 earthquake. You will remember it featuring in the last scene of Dirty Harry. Hard to imagine it having been there now.

Anyway I have written about the delights of the Kezar before:

https://spikekalashnikov.wordpress.com/2010/11/28/secret-vice/

This time I have just got of a plane from Tokyo and have being lying wide awake since 4:00 am. I realize that the Plucky Losers, or Scotland, are playing France in a couple of hours. Off go Ben and I. We establish ourselves in the warm bar with the other fetishists,  who fall into two groups. Rugby freaks wearing old rugby jerseys and football freaks of whom there are many more. They occupy the front room and wear Liverpool FC jerseys with Gerrard 8 on the back. Yep, Liverpool are playing Everton at the same time as the Plucky Losers play France. We are in a bar in San Francisco.

What is Ben staring at?

At this.

Full Irish Breakfast

Black pudding, white pudding, 2 eggs, bacon, hash browns, sausages, tomato,toast. People are drinking beer, Bloody Marys and shots. We don’t drink. I am getting old – it is 8:30.

Two beautiful young women, both of whom have truly outstanding, er, postures, swoop back and forth with trays of breakfasts and drinks. They are happy and welcoming and very aware of the effect their, er, postures are having on the menfolk. Watching tennis drives the eyeballs from left to right, from left to right. Watching rugby in the Kezar drives 50  eyeballs away from the screens to the left, as one of the barmaids breasts her way out of the kitchen bearing trays of happiness. The eyeballs then follow her to wherever she is going and then lock back on the screens again. It is a circular motion that is repeated every few minutes throughout the match.

Scotland lose in a plucky sort of way. However how close is this to Heaven?

Ben goes to work and I stroll back home past yellow Mimosa and kind of magnolia colored Magnolias. I come across a library on Page that I had not noticed before.

I read th NYT and San Francisco Chronicle.

The front page of the Chronicle has a story by David Perlman, whom I first met  at CERN in 1989, when he was 70. Do the math. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/feb/21/local/la-me-perlman-20130222

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

I suppose Heaven could be watching rugby in the Kezar, followed by sojourn in a library with  little touches of Hell to recalibrate.

I have to leave our Open Campus early to go to the University of Hiroshima to bumble my way through a talk. I go Naha-Fukuoka on an aircraft, subway to main train station, Shinkasen to Hiroshima, then  change to second Shinkasen to Higashi-Hiroshima.

The platform at Fukuoka station

So what? you enquire. Well, believe me a lot can go wrong negotiating travel in Japan when you are illiterate and dumb.

When the train rolled up to the station, I looked her in the eye.

When I arrive at Higashi-Hiroshima, to be met by 2 HU folks wearing OIST T-shirts, I feel like Indiana Jones.

Inside Japanese high-speed train.

Delightful time at Hiroshima University characterized as usual by the extreme gentility of my hosts.

It is really cold here

We have a farewell celebration and, of course, a celebration of James becoming a Gringo. I go up to a Chinese supermarket on Irvine on Ben’s bike and buy two huge, very angry, Dungeness Crabs. They are in my backpack on the ride home and they struggle hard to regain the briny depths. Strange feeling having a living pack.

Sorry!

I also go to Lucky’s to buy a rib of beef. You can eat so well here.

Free, if you buy a 5 pound box of detergent

The menu is fresh crab with ginger, lotus root and bok choi, followed by rib of beef with mashed potatoes and carrots. We eat in the kitchen.

I love crab

Ben loves crab

All this is washed down with lots of Californian Chardonnay and Cabernet.

Megan is a vegetarian but nobly accepted beef.

The next morning James kindly drives me to the airport on the KLR. Another joy of the apartment is that, although in the center of the city, it is only 20 minutes from SFO. You just honk down Oak until you hit 101 then freeway to the International Terminal. It is a great ride on a beautiful morning. Thanks James.

Here is a record of the trip to the airport.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTuAOkPTVes

Off I go on Ben’s Yamaha 650 to get my biometrics er done. It is another glorious day and I zap through the streets of San Francisco full of happiness and joy. The biometrics house is on Broadway right down by the Bay. It goes like this:

” Good morning sir, how are you doing today?”

“Well that’s just fine. If you would just like to take a seat and fill in this form, this fine lady here will call out your number real soon.”

“Nice talking to you sir, you have a nice day.”

I fill in my form and sit with the other sheepish applicants who represent a lot of nationalities. It continues with fingerprinting and photography.

A grinning Chinese American lady greets me.

“Hey Neil, how are doing? Yep it’s happy Friday, happy for me that is ‘cos I’ taking Monday off and that gives me 3 day weekend.”

She rolls my fingertips carefully over a sensor and my beautiful fingerprints come up on a big screen in front of me.

“Well, Neil, you can’t get away with anything ever again. Yep, they sure know who you are now.”

“Well, I’m gonna spend the weekend with my kids, they’re 6 and 10, you know. That’s you done, Neil. If you have a moment, could fill in this appraisal form on how we all done this morning during your visit. Thank you and have a good one.”

US officials are so sweet.

I am back on the street feeling groovy so head straight for a collection of old boats that can be walked around.

January in San Francisco

On an old square-rigged ship, the Balclutha, which was built on the Clyde in 1880, there are groups of schoolgirls being shouted at by instructors. They are harsh, in an attempt to render real the tough life that sailors underwent. I thought the poor little girls were going to burst into tears.

Mr and Mrs Sea-lion

A brief video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ss4ckj4bMs

So air travel is the miracle of our time. I left work at 12:00 on Thursday Okinawa. A friend drives me to the airport. I fly to Osaka,I fly to San Francisco, a cab blasts me to the apartment. I am now sitting in Central Coffee because I left the apartment key on my key ring now in the possession of the friend who drove me to the airport. It is 12:00 on Thursday in SF. I have gone door to door across the world and it is the same time. Haven’t actually gone through the door yet but that will come in due time. After 6,000 miles or so, the last meter beat me.

I am on a particularly crazy adventure. My Green Card runs out soon. To renew, I have to have my biometrics, fingerprints etc, er done. They give you an appointment that you cannot miss on pain of cancellation of application. So I fly to San Francisco and back for a 15 minute fingerprinting session. No complaints if I get the card extended.

What I feel like after I get off the plane.

It is a beautiful day and so I go for a stroll into the Golden Gate Park. The Park is only 10 mins from our front door and amongst many other attractions it contains the De Young Museum. This is a great place that has an excellent permanent exhibition including a lot of Chihuly but also hosts all the great traveling exhibitions. Right now it is Keith Haring.

Bad dog!

On my walk home I pay homage to the statue of Robert Burns that guards the entrance to the park. I make a little movie with the GoPro.http://youtu.be/AzLnJ3253uU

At last, I have faced the demon that has been mocking me. I have, to my mind, found all kind of excuses for not washing the sand out of poor,wee,crippled, Dileas. The process is simple. Buy  150 meters of hose, stretch it from the lonesome beach where Dileas lies abandoned, link hose to neighbor’s tap, pump water along the hose and then around the most intimate parts of poor, wee Dileas so that, enema like,the mass of sand that has so massively increased the mass of poor, wee, Dileas, is flushed out onto the beach.

My neighbor has been Okinawan. That is to say helpful, smiling, playful, hilarious. He runs one of the most successful restaurant around here but he would never let you know. Ah, dignity. He lets me use his tap.

I love a project

I spray water around her innards. She does not complain. I think she realizes that it is for her own good. Much sand is evacuated.

I now need to turn her over  so that the sand lying in the bottom of the boat becomes the sand on the top of the boat and so easily washed down to the exits that have been exquisitely carved.

Muscle

Many thanks to Tina and Darren for their muscle.

Space age fish trapped inside Dileas

So I think the boat is now free from sand.  I will stuff her with floatation stuff. Empty plastic bottles, huge chunks of styrafoam, party balloons, anything that will give her floatation. I will then take her to the sea, float her down to my house, totally boyant despite the huge gashes in her hull. From there I will bring her to dry land and arrange her burial rights.

You will probably have realized that I have got a GoPro. Check out this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDT7YcRenlU

Quelle histoire!

A quick trip to Tokyo. Symposium and reception and back to Haneda to stay in the glorious First Cabin hotel.

Late night soba

I have never been a fan of fancy hotels. I suppose if you are staying a week or so then a reasonable room with a desk is worth it but normally I arrive, I sleep, wake up,shower and leave. I then have the anguish of can I get to the airport on time? Will I take the wrong subway? Will I go to the wrong terminal?

I now use the First Cabin at Haneda airport whenever possible. It makes me feel youthful as there are strong undertones of school and camping. Your little cabin is like a super luxury tent where you struggle out of your clothes sitting down and stock your socks and shoes at the entrance of the tent. You have fast wifi and a huge TV, which I never watch. Before and after sleeping you go to communal sinkroom that reminds me of schooldays. This one however is superclean, not freezing cold and the soap does not have grit in it.

At the hotel – guess what it is for.

The best thing is the hotel is right beside the security check in. You get up, wash behind your ears, get dressed, choose from multiple airport restaurants for breakfast and sidle to your departure gate.

Bacon and eggs Tokyo style. The white and red stuff I took to be ketchup and mayo but turned out to be raspberry jam and cream.

No stress. It is also dirt cheap. Normal cabins are 5k yen and this morning I realize that there are first class cabins for 6K yen. These have an extra space beside the bed to stash your rucksack and hiking boots. I might splurge next time.

Here is pretty bad IPhone  video of the cabin experience.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVfJTzz12h0
They are are wonderful places but I feel they can only work in Japan. There is no lockable door to your cabin, just a slide up blind thing.  Therefore whilst you are in the sinkroom washing the back of your neck, it would be the easiest thing for thieves to break in and steal. Here you could leave the Crown Jewels in the cabin without worry, in Marseille the cabin would have been stolen before you even got there.

So back in Okinawa, I have to do something with poor wrecked Dileas. Having extracted her from the back passage with much difficulty she now lies stranded on the beach. Why she is still there is due to the fact that about a ton of sand was washed into the space between the inner and outer shells of the boat, making her impossible to move. I cannot leave her on the beach because I feel it is environmentally irresponsible and probably illegal.

Her bottom is broken

I have toyed with the idea of repairing her but I have finally accepted that such ideas are in vain. I have been in denial. This is apparently common after incidents of great emotional distress.

To get her to a place where I can truck her to a dump, I have to flush out the sand, as in her current condition she is impossible to move. How to do so is not obvious. I have purchased 150 meters of hose pipe down which water will pour and eventually flood the innards of Dileas and enema-like drive out the sand.

The wounded hussar

To make this work I have to strategically cut holes in the wreck.

So here are a movie.

This one shows some tragic cutting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4YzckFxq_Y

Tomorrow, yet another Japanese public holiday, I  administer the enema.