See Dick run from radioactive death

So there’s a new radiation warning symbol. (See also here; previous link is non-specific.) It’s this thing:



Why do we need a new radiation warning symbol?

The trefoil symbol has no inherent meaning and only those people that have been educated in its meaning have knowledge that it represents the presence of ionizing radiation. The new symbol is the completion of a multi-year effort by the IAEA to develop a universal radiation warning symbol that anyone anywhere will understand the message of “Danger- Stay Away”.

And this brings up an interesting point about symbols — they have no intrinsic meaning in and of themselves. Even the skull and crossbones doesn’t really mean anything; we assume that it is a good representation of death and destruction, but anyone who’s done poison education can tell you that some kids will see it and think, “Oooh, pirates!” (To be fair, I know some adults who will think the same thing, too.) Hence, Mr. Yuk comes into existence (deeply messed-up video also available). It’s debatable whether Mr. Yuk works better than the skull and crossbones, but he was designed by committee, so you tell me.

It’s worth taking a peek at this discussion of the development of the biohazard warning symbol. The creators wanted something memorable, yet totally meaningless in and of itself, so as to be able to educate people in its meaning later. Educated, the biohazard symbol manages to convey the idea that “something nearby will fuck you and/or your offspring up in a disturbingly organic manner,” and that’s probably a good thing. But would it carry the same message to someone who had never seen it before? I doubt it.

The trefoil has been around since 1946. Some of the design considerations were pretty interesting:

The first signs printed at Berkeley had a magenta (Martin Senour Roman Violet No. 2225) symbol on a blue background. In an earlier letter written in 1948, Garden explained why this particular shade of magenta color was selected: “it was distinctive and did not conflict with any color code that we were familiar with. Another factor in its favor was its cost. . . The high cost will deter others from using this color promiscuously.” Explaining the blue background, he said, “The use of a blue background was selected because there is very little blue color used in most of the areas where radioactive work would be carried out.”

Garden did not like yellow as a background: “the very fact that . . . the high visibility yellow stands out most prominently has led to extensive use of this color and it is very common.” To compensate for the lower visibility of the blue, Garden even toyed with the idea of including diagonal white stripes across the sign.

Despite Garden’s view to the contrary, most workers felt that a blue background was a poor choice. Blue was not supposed to be used on warning signs, and it faded, especially outdoors. The use of yellow was standardized at Oak Ridge National Lab in early 1948. At that time, Bill Ray and George Warlick, both working for K.Z. Morgan, were given the task of coming up with a more suitable warning sign, a blue background being too unacceptable. Ray traveled to Berkeley and picked up a set of their signs. Back in Oak Ridge, Ray and Warlick had their graphics people cut out the magenta symbols and staple them on cards of different colors. Outdoors, and at a distance of 20 feet, a committee selected the magenta on yellow as the best combination.

Maybe it’s just me, but there’s something funny about physicists arguing about color choices.

Note that in both cases, the guys designing the symbols were not trying to make something that would be intuitively obvious to someone who had never seen it before — they were counting on the ability to education potential warnees about the dangers posted, either from radiation or biological activity. With education you can do more or less whatever you want (consider the European hazard symbols, some of which aren’t terribly helpful unless you know what’s going on). A vastly different problem occurs when you’re trying to warn naive people away from stuff, and that’s where the new symbol comes into play.

The intention is to put this symbol on equipment (sources, generating devices, etc) such that it only becomes obvious when the equipment is disassembled — it’s not a general purpose warning (and, indeed, it would fail miserably at that task since it seems to imply not just that there’s danger, but that there’s danger and that you should leave, now). The goal would be to prevent a repeat of something like the Goiania accident, where naive individuals inadvertently contaminated themselves with Cs-137. (Incidentally, the IAEA’s report into Goiania should be mandatory reading to anyone who wants to talk seriously about radiological terrorism, but that’s another post for another day.) What’s interesting about the new symbol is that I don’t have that visceral reaction to seeing it that I think the IAEA thinks I should — although I understand its message perfectly and know exactly what it means. That said, they’ve apparently tested the snot out of it, and are apparently happy with the message it communicates, and they’re smarter than I am, so I defer to their expert judgment.

No discussion about naive warnings in this journal would be complete without me bringing up what has become quite possibly my favorite long-term problem: Marking the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant so that humans from the future stay the hell out:

* This place is a message… and part of a system of messages… pay attention to it!
* Sending this message was impotant to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
* This place is not a place of honor…no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here.
* What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
* The danger is in a particular location… it increases toward a center… the center of danger is here… of a particular size and shape, and below us.
* The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
* The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
* The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
* The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.

The excerpts capture the spirit well, but if you’re truly interested in the topic and have some time to kill, the full 351 page report from Sandia is worth a read too. I find the whole thing to be deeply fascinating: How do you communicate with your own species across time? How to you ensure understanding? How do you ensure survival? The fact that we’re even thinking about it makes me proud as a human.

I check back on this every year or so, to see if there are new developments or changes to the plan as written. The last new thing I saw was the implementation plan for the permanent markers, which sets up a bunch of timetables and discusses where they’re at in terms of preparing to mark the site. I hope they finish it, and that I live long enough to see what they’ve done.

20/20 Hindsight: Memories of Paris

I keep meaning to finish telling stories about Europe 2006 here, and I keep putting it off — probably because the last entry took so long, and because I’ve been kinda busy since then. So I’m going to change things up a bit here, and not be wedded to the concept of chronological storytelling, and instead talk about some stuff that I’ve been thinking about recently.

Lately, it’s been Paris on my mind.

(Narrative and 20 some-odd pictures and a movie follows…)

The reason? This:

Around a dozen Japanese tourists a year need psychological treatment after visiting Paris as the reality of unfriendly locals and scruffy streets clashes with their expectations, a newspaper reported on Sunday. …

“Fragile travelers can lose their bearings. When the idea they have of the country meets the reality of what they discover it can provoke a crisis,” psychologist Herve Benhamou told the paper.

The phenomenon, which the newspaper dubbed “Paris Syndrome”, was first detailed in the psychiatric journal Nervure in 2004.

Colby Cosh once said that London was a psychological second home to everyone who thinks in English, and while that is unquestionably true, it works the same way if we’re talking about Paris and thinking in French. I spent 17 years of my life learning French, became extremely fluent in it, and still am to a functional degree. Through all those years, steeping in French culture and the language, it was impossible to not concoct some mental image of what Paris is like. Even approaching the subject with an open mind, how can you not have expectations?

What’s really funny is that I don’t really remember the conclusion of the train ride that took us out of Arles and into Paris. I remember boarding the TGV in Arles and being mildly impressed with the duplex configuration (top and bottom). I remember whipping through the various towns on the way to Paris, passing something like four nuclear power plants in the process, and staring out the window. K., as we discovered, gets disturbingly ill on high-speed rail, so I also remember fretting about that. I do not remember the view from outside the train as we pulled into the Gare de Lyon, but I do remember navigating through the station to the Metro, buying our tickets for the subway and boarding Ligne 14 towards Saint-Lazare. I remember closing my eyes for a moment and feeling like I was in Montreal again… and then I realized that I wasn’t in Montreal, I was in Montreal’s bigger, older, more glamorous sister.

Ligne 8 took us from Madeleine to Ecole Militaire, where we ascended from the Metro into the afternoon light in Paris. It was at this point that we met our first (and only) dickhead in France, the guy who runs this place. The lobby itself is very nice, and I have no doubt that the vastly-more-expensive rooms are nice, too. Ours, however, was not: Peeling wallpaper. Threadbare carpet. A toilet with exposed innards (no, really). Not air conditioned. This wasn’t a deal-breaker, and wouldn’t be normally, but we were hot and tired and wanted some way to sleep at night. So we decided that it wasn’t an acceptable option. While K. scoured the neighborhood for other choices, I got into a protracted argument with the aforementioned dickhead. I explained that we found the room unsatisfactory, that there were several problems with it, and we were not interested in staying. Dickhead suggested that perhaps I was letting my wife drive the decision-making, and that if I didn’t really have problems, maybe I should stand up to her. Then he told me I was paying for the room one way or the other.

What I wanted to say was, “Go fuck yourself.” What I said was that I thought we had a disagreement and there wouldn’t be a useful way to resolve this, short of “we’ll take our money and be on our way.” I really wanted to swear at him in French, I really did — it was the first language I learned how to swear in, and, almost without fail, if I get really really angry, I end up muttering at myself in French. But the problem is that while I can do a couple of French dialects, what I really speak, and what I really know, is Quebecois French, and swearing in Quebecois French is very strange, and I don’t encourage it if you want to be taken seriously outside of Quebec. (Briefly, “c’est toute fucké” is perfectly OK with your mom; “mon hostie de Christ en ciboire” is strong enough that you might provoke a riot under some circumstances.) So I couldn’t exactly say, for instance, “va t’en faire bapteme” or something along those lines, because it wouldn’t work; he wouldn’t get it. So I set K. upon him, and in the end we escaped with a $100 bottle of Evian water — our “free” gift upon registration, and one night’s worth of lodging poorer, but only after threatening to call the cops.

Thank gods for the Hotel Prince around the corner on Avenue Bousquet. The proprietess took us in, gave us a nice room, and told us that the guy we’d dealt with was a notorious jerk. That made me feel better. (I managed to confuse her frequently by switching between French and English randomly throughout our dealings over the next few days.)

Before actually going to Paris, the thing that most influenced the way I think about Paris was Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain. The “Amelie effect” loomed large in my mind, and I was a little disappointed, arriving in the middle of the afternoon, that I was greeted with a relatively flat, boring light that well-matched the heat of the day. Silly photographer! You should know afternoon light is never very nice. Paris did not disappoint me, in the end.



Eiffel Tower. Paris, France. 3 July 2006.


K. and I kissing underneath the Eiffel Tower. Paris, France. 3 July 2006.
(Note also the Vigipirate guys standing in the upper left.)


Eiffel Tower. Paris, France. 3 July 2006.

We ate our first Paris meal in the Champs de Mars, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. You’ve seen it a thousand times in pictures; you could probably draw a representative sketch of it if you had to. In person, it is truly unlike anything you’ve ever seen. I remember seeing the Tokyo Tower for the first time; it didn’t seem to be very impressive despite looming from the fog. The Eiffel Tower is different. Who knows why; it just is. We ate Chinese take-out in the Champs, unable to tear our eyes off of this giant metal thing.

The lineups were long but I was determined to be up in the tower for sunset, to see Paris by night for the first time from its finest vantage point. Paris did not disappoint me:



Looking east from the Eiffel Tower at dusk. Paris, France. 3 July 2006.


Arc de Triomphe, shortly after being lit. Paris, France. 3 July 2006.

All I could think of was U2’s “City of Blinding Lights.” Look, I know it’s about New York but who cares? (Later, I would be dismayed to see the song used in precisely this context in The Devil Wears Prada, but I was in Paris before I saw the movie, so I claim inspirational rights.) The history and the sense of place was almost overwhelming, far more so than in Venice. I had loved Venice, had hated the idea of leaving Venice; this was something completely different. It wasn’t some tourist destination whose glory days were behind it — this was the living, beating heart of a culture and a country, one of the world’s great cities of history and of the present. How can you not fall in love with a place like that? At the top of the Eiffel Tower, watching the sun set on the city that looms so large in the minds of so many, how can you not love that on some level?

Some things in Paris can be familiar even if you’ve never seen them before:



Rue Cler. Paris, France. 4 July 2006.


Galeries Lafayette. Paris, France. 4 July 2006.


Napoleon’s Tomb. Paris, France. 4 July 2006.

We blasted through Versailles and the Louvre in the space of a single day. Up early, out of the hotel, a quick stop at the neighborhood bakery for croissants and quiche, then the RER C line to Versailles and a six-hour romp through the palace grounds. Back into town, a shower, a snack, and a late evening at the Louvre. It’s open late on Wednesdays. I remember being overwhelmed by the sheer size of both places — at the opulence of the palace, of the historical significance of the museum. (Sofia doesn’t really do Versailles justice in Marie Antoinette, though it is interesting to be in many of the same rooms.) K. and I were both pretty thoroughly museumed out by the time we made it to the Louvre, so we headed straight for the Italian wing.

Watching tourists in the Louvre can be quite funny. They all want to see La Gioconda, so they race like crazy past four other Leonardo paintings, all of them less famous than the mysterious woman. We had a Leonardo exhibit in Victoria a few years back and they brought a replica of La Gioconda to town, and I have to say that the real one is a little underwhelming. It’s tough to admire the painting; it was in temporary quarters when we were there, and behind its bulletproof glass and its layers of security personnel, and surrounded by people, it’s tough to give it the reflection that you think it deserves. Creepily, her eyes do follow you around the room, but that’s about the end of it for me. I much preferred The Virgin and Child with St. Anne if I had to pick a Leonardo painting.

Still, some fun things exist in the Louvre, including the non-Gummi Venus di Milo, and an homage to ancient Greek baseball:



Hercules Killing the Hydra. Louvre, Paris. 5 July 2006.

And there are some truly infuriating things, too:



Grrrr! Louvre, Paris. 5 July 2006.

That night, we walked through the Tuileries towards Place de la Concorde and the Champs-Elysses. We’d planned to stroll up the Champs and find dinner, but we were distracted by some strange happenings:



Paris Civil Protection units on Place de la Concorde. 5 July 2006.

Oh, yes, that’s right — it was Match Night. France was playing Portugal in the World Cup, and, if they won, they’d be heading to the finals. We found a small bar/cafe a few blocks up from the Champs and ate dinner while France held its breath.



Pandemonium ensues. The Champs-Elysses explodes with people celebrating.



Champs-Elysses, Paris, France. 5 July 2006.

The mood was ebullient. I can’t think of any other way to describe it. We walked down to the Seine and back towards the Pont de l’Alma, the bridge leading back to l’Avenue Bousquet and our beds. I was grabbed by ecstatic strangers and hugged; I had nonsensical shouting episodes with random football fans overcome by joy at this semi-final win. About six blocks from the Champs, I was approached by a young man in a leather jacket.

“Il y’a du monde sur le Champs?”
“Il y’a tout le monde sur le Champs!”
“Awesome.”



This is what I remember about Paris: A city that more than lived up to my expectations. A city that was suddenly simple to be in. A city like no other, and yet like all others; a place I’d never been before that was already familiar to me by the time I arrived. (London was like this, too.) A place to fall in love, and to fall in love with. It was, quite possibly, the highlight of the trip for me.

Weeks later, I was in Dublin, riding the bus from the airport into the center of town. K. and I were sharing the top deck of the bus with a pair of American girls from Washington, DC, who were talking about future destinations. They were idly trashing Paris and France, despite never having been there. One said she didn’t really understand why she’d ever want to go to Paris, given that it was so expensive and people were so rude — why, she could just go to New York if she wanted to put up with that, and New York had better shopping besides. I could have slugged her — both for the unfounded slur and the horribly incorrect perception. And then I relaxed. Paris has been slighted many times before, by people better than her, and if she can convince other idiots that it’s an expensive, rude place to be, so much the better.

Now, to be fair, I’m absolutely certain I had a much easier time of it in Paris, and in France generally, because I speak fluent French. I suspect that my opinion of the place would have been much different had I only spoken English; that’s the conventional wisdom, anyway. And yet, at the same time, I run into Anglophones all the time who went to Paris without speaking a word of French (my mom, for one), and who went on to have perfectly great times without any rude encounters, which makes me think that it’s an attitudinal thing. As it stands, I got one rude encounter with a guy who was basically a jerk to everyone, and that was it for obnoxious French stereotypes.

Lately, I’ve been dreaming of Paris more and more. When I drift off at night, more often than not, I’m dreaming of somewhere different — the Big Island, Turkey, Wales, Italy, Japan. But I keep coming back to Paris, wanting to revisit the warm glow the city left in my mind. It takes a special place to do that.

The War for Terra

There has got to be something wrong with me.

For the past year or so, I’ve been finding that I’ve been paying a lot more attention to stories about climate change — and then trying to act on the ideas in them. I bought a much more fuel efficient car, for instance. I don’t drive nearly as much as I used to. I turn down the heat (not that this matters much, since I have electric heating, and electricity in BC is essentially carbon-neutral). Elizabeth Kolbert’s magnificent reporting for the New Yorker has been a powerful tool for influencing me, but I think the real credit belongs to Terri Schiavo.

L’affaire Schiavo demonstrated many things, among them the depths of depravity some politicians will sink, but the one that really stuck in my craw was the absolute certainty of people who have no idea what they’re talking about. It was galling — truly, madly, infuriatingly galling — to watch non-physicians, non-neurologists, and people who’d never once cared for a PVS patient (or anyone else that was comatose, for that matter) explain how Terri was clearly not brain dead, and how she could wake up under some circumstances. I think this exchange captures it quite nicely; I’m not going to re-hash it again, because it will just make me very very sad.

You saw a lot of this with the Schiavo case, but you see it everywhere else science comes into conflict with articles of faith: Parents who think thiomersal (or the MMR vaccine, or anything else) gave their kids autism will never, ever listen to the evidence that said it doesn’t cause problems; anti-vaccination activists will kick and scream and cry bloody murder before they ever admit that maybe vaccines are useful. Creationists will shout to the heavens that something created the universe and that evolutionary biology is bunk, despite not knowing the first thing about evolutionary biology. It goes on and on and on, and every single time, I end up siding with the people who have the data to support their position, and not just random accusations of conspiracies. Laypeople (a polite word, really, for “idiots”) arguing with experts over expert subject matter makes me want to tear my hair out; we’ve reached a point where the fact that you know a lot about something no longer grants you special status in discussions about that thing; you are now subject to argument from people whose knowledge may range from zero to near-parity, and you are expected to take them all seriously. (See my comment in the above-linked Schiavo journalism story about Buzz Aldrin arguing with moon-landing skeptics.)

Which brings us to climate change.

For many years, I was in deep denial about climate change. I didn’t think it was real, didn’t find the evidence persuasive. I argued that it was too early to suggest that human behavior was causing all these weird things. I pointed at solar output variation, at the fear of global cooling as recently as 30 years ago (the causes of and cures for which were essentially the same as today’s proposed causes and solutions), at the dramatic effects Earth itself has on its own atmosphere. Part of this was a reaction to the hippies that dominated the environmental movement in the later 1980s and early 1990s, but part of it was my own healthy skepticism of certainty — or so I told myself.

And then, one day, about a year and a half ago, I found myself staring at a joint position statement from the national academies and societies of the G8 that explicitly endorsed the idea that anthropogenic climate change was occurring, and that we needed to do something about it. I started to argue in my head, and then I stopped. “Wait a minute. I am arguing with the Royal Society of Canada, among others. These are supposed to be the best and brightest scientific minds of our era. They know more about this subject than I do. Who the hell am I to argue with them?” Just as I would be annoyed with a climatologist who decided he knew what the best management strategy is for STEMI patients, I was getting annoyed with myself for arguing in opposition to people who, quite simply, know more than I do. There is, in other words, such a thing as expert opinion. It has spoken, and who am I to argue with it? I don’t have standing to argue.

With that realization I turned 180 degrees and started worrying about it. And today I took another small step: I bought myself and my 5.1L/100km Acura a TerraPass, I bought enough credits to cover all the flying I’ve done in the last twelve months, and I’ve vowed that I’m going to make sure I buy credits to offset the future air travel I do. (I’d buy one for the house but virtually all of the heating is electric and, as I said, electricity in BC is almost entirely hydro-generated, so it’s not making the climate problem worse.) I’m not fooling myself: This by itself is not going to save the planet.

But it’s a step in the right direction.

And for me, personally, it’s a kind of penance.

Okay, what the heck happened?

I was gone for ten days. I went from this:



Science World, Vancouver, BC. 10 January, 2007.

To this:



Kahalu’u-Keauhou, HI. 18 January, 2007.

And back again. And on my return, I discover:

  • there are giant potholes in virtually every street in Victoria, including some large enough to swallow a tire on my Acura,
  • that the Chinese smacked a satellite in sun-synchronous orbit,
  • that Stephane Dion said something excruciatingly dumb,
  • that it is, in fact, still cold here,
  • that work is still, in fact, fucked up,
  • that I’m looking hard for reasons why I don’t just chuck it all, move to Kona, and become a SCUBA instructor.

And then I realize the answer to the last question is probably something along the lines of, “Because you’re not legally entitled to work in the United States, doofus.” (Spare the comments about illegal immigrants, ok?) And the answers to the others.. well, they’re not really questions, so they don’t need answers. Still, it’s hard to shake the feeling that I want to be back on the beach, where everything seemed simpler and less irritating.

You people!

From the “Some People Will Complain About Absolutely Everything” file… CBC: BC school yoga classes slammed:

A school program to fight childhood obesity that includes yoga is drawing complaints from some Christian parents in the Quesnel area in B.C.’s Cariboo region.

They say yoga is a religion, and shouldn’t be taught in public schools.

Chelsea Brears, who has two children in the school system, said her son was asked to do different poses and “to put his hands together.”

Brears, a Christian, said she doesn’t want her children exposed to another religion during class time.

“It’s not fair to take prayer out, and yet they’re allowing yoga, which is religion, in our schools.”

Local rancher Audrey Cummings doesn’t believe Christian children should be doing yoga at all.

“There’s God and there’s the devil, and the devil’s not a gentleman. If you give him any kind of an opening, he will take that.”

The two women have complained to the education minister and the Quesnel school board.

But school board chair Caroline Neilsen said the yoga is being taught as a stretching exercise, not as a spiritual practice.

Neilsen also noted that children who don’t want to practise yoga can do different exercises or leave the classroom.

In other news: Hey! There’s 4 cm of snow on the ground!

This is crap.

Life sucks. Work is a mess and won’t get better any time soon; if the administrative crap hasn’t been enough, I’ve had a couple of tough cases lately, and they’ve been bugging more than they should. I’ve gained a bunch of weight, nothing is really interesting anymore, and it’s tough to find reasons to stay motivated in my chosen profession.

The weather here’s been miserable. It rained today, for the 8,152nd consecutive day, and it was rock-you-like-a-hurricane windy for what was probably the 436th consecutive day. And then there’s this:


Tonight... Rain showers or wet flurries and small hail changing to flurries near midnight. Snowfall amount 2 cm. Windy. Low zero.
Wednesday... Flurries ending late in the morning then cloudy with 40 percent chance of flurries. Amount 2 cm. High plus 4.
Wednesday night... Clearing near midnight. Becoming windy in the evening. Low minus 5.
Thursday... Sunny. High minus 1.

But wait! There’s more!


4:12 PM PST Tuesday 9 January 2007
Wind warning for
Greater Victoria continued

West to northwest winds of 60 to 90 km/h easing later this evening.

This is a warning that damaging winds are imminent or occurring in these regions. Monitor weather conditions..Listen for updated statements.

An intense cold front crossing the south coast is producing strong west to northwest winds of 60 to 90 km/h over much of the south coast early this evening. The strong winds will gradually ease this later evening as the front moves well east of the region.

In the wake of the front flurries are being reported in many coastal. Locations and snowfall warnings remain in effect for northern Vancouver Island the central coast where an additional 5 to 10 cm is expected tonight. Flurries will extend across the Fraser Valley overnight where 5 to 10 cm is expected by Wednesday morning.

I’m sorry for saying, but: FUCK. THIS. SHIT. I’ve had enough of it. If anybody needs me, I’ll be over here. Since I gotta wait for things to suck less, I might as well wait on a nice beach.

Random Europe photo #1

Below the cut because it was screwing up my formatting…



Banks of the Rhone. Arles, France.

I really promise I’ll get around to (a) finished the Europe stories and (b) putting pictures from Europe and Japan on-line Real Soon Now. Of course, I’ve been promising that for a couple of years now, so…

Oooh! I wanna play too!

Meme time! “List the towns or cities where you spent at least a night away from home during 2006. Mark with a star if you had multiple non-consecutive stays.” This ought to be interesting.

* Coquitlam, BC
* Vancouver, BC
Phoenix, AZ
Seattle, WA
Edmonton, AB
* Calgary, AB
Toronto, ON
* London, United Kingdom
Istanbul, Turkey
Vienna, Austria
Salzburg, more or less, Austria (not by choice)
Venice, Italy
Rome, Italy
Riomaggiore, Italy
Arles, France
Paris, France
Swansea, Wales
Dublin, Ireland

A good year for travel, overall. Better than 2004. Way better than 2005 (aka “the year of living dangerously”). It’s funny because I went through Google Earth last night and marked every place on the planet I’ve been to. I’m a fairly well-traveled guy, but the exercise made me sort of depressed. “Maaaan! I’ve got all kinds of ground to cover!” Round-the-world ticket, here I come! (Thanks, FlyerTalk punks, for putting that idea in my head. Jerks.)

Great Marcellus Wallace moments in travel

The luau is the image most people have when they think about a great Hawaiian party. Me, not so much — I’ve done the luau thing, and I think I’d rather go find some local people, drink some beer, eat some poke, and party hearty in their backyard (while dodging the coconuts falling from above — true story). That having been said, there’s something weirdly fun about settling down for a night of more or less unrestricted heavy drinking while eating food that includes a pig that spent most of the day underground. And the luau is more or less a mandatory experience for anyone visiting Hawaii for the first time.

So I went looking into a couple of different options for luau on the Kona coast, and there are sever–yikes! $82.90?! Jesus.

A conspiracy theorist might argue there is collusion.
An economist may argue that there simply isn’t enough competition.
A politician may think that this needs to be regulated.
An entrepreneur may see an opportunity (“Uncle Donny’s Diz-Count Luau and Oil Change”).

Morbo’s good friend Dr. Hazmat, meanwhile, will probably shut up and pay. Then party hearty. I better get damn good and drunk.

What YEAR is this? (Part 45)

I feel very torn about the existence of this Web site. On the one hand, it’s frustrating because I can’t find anything on it — what useful information is present is basically buried in there, somewhere. On the other hand, it’s kind of charming, in that retro throwback-to-1994-’cause-we-just-got-a-bunch-of-clip-art way. I mean, holy frick: You got endless images. Blink tags. Clashing colors. Scroll bars until tomorrow. Links to just about everything in the world. Twelve years ago we would have swooned over how much graphical content was on this thing; six years ago it would have seemed kind of dated. Now it might just be so awful it’s cool again.

I can never tell. Maybe I should send the link to the cool kids and see what they think. (“Dr. Hazmat sez: “Check out this hilariously 1994-esque Web site I found while doing frivolous research on the Web!” Indeed. Heh. Posted by: Xeni.”)