Blogger Meet-Up!

It's been a few days since I got back from a very enjoyable trip to visit the Dave Dude (also known as the webmaster general of this site) at his tony digs in Palo Alto, but posting has been light because 1) Dave is now in Kansas for work and 2) I took the red-eye back home to Ohio and had to finish moving into my new apartment. 

But how about some trip highlights? 

1) Dave showed me the lab where he works. I didn't get to see many cool pieces of equipment, because they were all packed up in Pelican cases to go to Kansas. But I had a great time kicking around campus while he had classes and meetings with advisors. I like the buildings that surround his lab: the Packard building, the Bill Gates building, etc. I haven't been on a real college campus (HUC is small) in a while and was delighted to find ample weirdness. For example, a big teepee set up with hand-painted signs urging students to join in the hunger strike that the teepee dwellers were staging. I couldn't quite see what the strike was for - I think something to do with bringing back certain campus groups that had lost funding.  

-I took the elevator up to the top of the Hoover Institute. Great view. Wanted to see if I could get a Thomas Sowell autograph or something, but it was 4 pm on a Friday, and I was shy. So I just looked at their big Herbie Hoover exhibit. 

2) In the evening we went to the San Francisco symphony. They played a Sibelius symphony - Michael Tilson Thomas provided a warning before they started: This is going to be weird, folks, and you probably won't like it. Okay. I didn't, really. The "bitter pill" was new composition by a guy named Mason Bates, who proclaimed his individuality and creativity by wearing a t-shirt onstage. Oh you rebel you. The music for the symphony wasn't all that weird, and Mason just provided some electronic twerps and squeaks on his keyboard and speaker system. I've heard worse. It was mostly just like listening to the soundtrack for a space movie. Then Yuja Wang played a Prokofiev piano concerto. This was a fine, but not memorable performance. I'll let Dave fill in more here, if he likes. I was under the influence of jetlag and a few glasses of champagne.

3) Saturday morning hike to see some big redwood trees was unfortunately cut somewhat short due to climate change. Driving up to the trail, it was a bright sunny day. We turned the corner to the trailhead and it was about 20 degrees colder and rainy. We trekked in for about twenty minutes, then decided against needless suffering, and went for a walk down in his sunny neighborhood instead (just a few miles away). 

4) Saturday evening jazz concert was phenomenal. I liked the venue, the War Memorial of San Francisco. Much cozier and more intimate than the symphony hall - also it has great murals. We heard Kenny Burrell and his band. This was my first live jazz performance ever. I loved both the experience and the actual band. I was much more awake than at the symphony. I guess I hadn't really been able to appreciate the unity and improvisation of jazz when I listened to it on CDs. It helped that Kenny had a remarkable pianist, Benny Green, and drummer, Clayton Cameron. Cameron performed a neat trick during one of his drum solos: the disappearing drum sticks. He seemed to just sort of toss them over his shoulder and magically produce a new one. Sort of a showmanship parlor trick, but still impressive. It was also interesting that he used the brush a lot during his solo. 

5) Sunday morning some of us woke up with our crankypants on. Maybe too much sauce at the excellent North Shore restaurant the night before? 

The remedy was a quiet, beautiful drive up to Half Moon Bay. In the afternoon we cooked up a bunch of delish produce from the local yuppie-style farmers market. We bought some extremely organic artichokes. We closed out the evening drinking IPA, enjoying Dave's big balcony and the sunny, very California sound of Pat Matheney on the stereo. 

In between all of that we ate a ridiculous quantity of blackberries, watched parts of Brideshead the original BBC production, and I helped Dave with the bottle of Lillet that I found in the fridge.