Category: Travel

Shopping Expedition

This weekend I went to a local Middle Eastern food market and got some stuff.

I also made a couple of videos about the experience.

Links to the things I was talking about: Fava Beans; The Lord Chancellor’s Nightmare Song [video] (from Iolanthe; with Mixed Pickles); and Peter Piper.

More links: hummus, tahini, baba ghanoush, imam bayeldi, paneer, dolma

Queen Mary in the Mists

Queen_mary

Perhaps there is some odd synchronicity with Tim J's haunting post, but this is a picture I was moved to take from my hotel hallway early Sunday morning as I was getting reach to leave the Long Beach National Square Dance Convention for the drive back to San Diego.

That drive should be only two hours, but with traffic it can be four five (and has been!), so I wanted to get an early start, and I happened to get up early enough that there was a lot of fog in the area.

The fog was so bad that when I got on the toll road to bypass a bunch of early traffic, I could not read the signs announcing the oncoming toll booths, making me wonder about traffic safety. Nevertheless I got home fine, despite all the fog.

The kind of fog you could hit an iceberg in. 

This post isn't about that, though. It's about the ship that you can see between the palm trees in the center of the picture (look for the black and red smokestacks; click to enlarge). 

The ship is the Queen Mary, which sailed as part of the Cunard-White Star Line in the mid-20th century before being retired and permanently anchored in Long Beach as a tourist spot.

I've never been aboard the Queen Mary. That'll have to wait for another trip (traffic and all, y'know). But I have encountered it in various ways.

For example, its gorgeous interiors were used as the setting of the outstanding and cinematically dazzling X-Files episode Triangle (one of the very best of the whole series).

Beyond the way the X-Files treated the ship, it's also reputed to be haunted, with various reports of ghostly happenings since it was permanently moored in Long Beach, with past guests supposedly making posthumous appearances, including soldiers who were housed on the vessel when it was used as a troop ship during World War II. (Bunks, apparently, were stacked in the central ballroom, with some bunks reaching almost to the ceiling.)

On that basis, it's also the location of the climax of Tim Powers' novel Expiration Date, which is one of my most favorite Tim Powers novels. It's simply marvellous–chocked full of audacious inventiveness, action, and humor. I love it!

It also mentions the billeting of troops that took place on the ship during World War II.

And the ship has a connection (believe it or not) to my square dancing life.

One of the past presidents of my square dance club was named Vic. He passed away a couple of years ago, when I was president of the club (before I was its caller), and I spent time with Vic during his final illness, trying to provide companionship and making whatever conversation he felt up to.

One of the things he talked about was the fact that he had been housed on the Queen Mary during World War II. He was one of the soldiers billeted in the ball room. 

Of course, I told him about Tim Powers' novel as part of passing the time.

And so, though I haven't yet been aboard the Queen Mary, it still has a special status for me. I look forward to going aboard and seeing it for myself.

This weekend, though, I couldn't resist snapping a picture of it through the morning mists.

Oh . . . and what's that ghostly ring of light around the ship in the picture? An electronic image artifact? A reflection in the hotel hall's window of the iPhone's circular camera, caused by holding it close enough to the window that the hall lights wouldn't get in the picture? A spectral manifestation of Koot Hoomie Parganas, Thomas Edison, Sherman Oaks, or (shudder) Loretta deLarava?

You decide.


Geneva & Rome, part 1

SDG here with a belated follow-up on my mystery photo post — and a bunch of photos.

First, as I acknowledged in the combox, the two mystery photos show me in Geneva and Rome, posing with large statuary representations of John Calvin (among others) and St. Peter — an echo of my faith journey from the Calvinist milieu of my upbringing to the Catholic faith I hold today.

But what else do Geneva and Rome have in common? After all, I wasn’t there as a Tiber-swimming pilgrim first and foremost. As I mentioned in the combox, the trip was movie related — and the specific connection was mentioned in earlier comments. In fact, Geneva and Rome are both important settings in … Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons, the movie version of which opens in May.

Earlier this month, I was one of a number of journalists from around the world that converged in Switzerland and Italy to view settings from the story and to interview the filmmakers, among other things. We also saw some excerpts from the as-yet-unfinished film.

In connection with the trip, I’ll be writing a piece for Christianity Today magazine on anti-Catholicism in Hollywood. I’ll also be reporting on all things Dan Brown in a number of Catholic venues, both print and radio.

In Geneva we visited CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (official site | Wikipedia), a particle physics laboratory that figures in Angels & Demons. (The bad guys steal about a gram of anti-matter from CERN in order to blow up the Vatican. (How plausible is this? Short answer: CERN does make anti-matter, in infinitessimal quantities — a few atoms at a time — which are almost instantly annihilated. They can’t store anti-matter for any length of time, and even if they could it would take something like 10 million years for them to make enough for a bomb. A gram of anti-matter would, however, cause a lot of damage if annihilated all at once. For more, see CERN’s highly entertaining and informative Angels & Demons FAQ.)

We got to go down into the Large Hadron Collider, or rather the ATLAS project, a ginormous detector that measures particle collisions in the LHC. How ginormous? There’s about as much metal in ATLAS as in the Eiffel Tower. This photo is only a tiny portion of what I could see from where I was standing, and what I could see was only a tiny portion of the whole.

The LHC is really big too: it occupies a big, circular, underground tunnel with a circumference of about 17 miles. (Why underground? Because above ground there’s all houses and roads and stuff and it’s hard to build a 17-mile circular tube somewhere where people can live close enough to work on it.)

We also got to talk to some of the scientists who work at CERN. (Favorite quote: “If Dan Brown got the Vatican as wrong as he got CERN, we [at CERN] have a lot less to complain about.”) To my surprise, I discovered that I knew two of them: An online friend from Arts & Faith named Jeff emailed me just before my flight from the US to let me know that he lives in Geneva and works at CERN, and when I got there I was approached by a Decent Films reader with whom I’d corresponded in the past, and who conducted our tour of ATLAS.

I also got a tour from Jeff of a lot of the CERN campus that wasn’t on the A&D tour, which included (or excluded, if you follow me) most of CERN except for the big exhibit dome and ATLAS. (Jeff tells me how lucky I am to have seen ATLAS — like many CERN folks on different projects, even he hasn’t seen it, and soon CERN will be closing ATLAS permanently to visitors without formal radiation training.)

Ironically, Jeff and I lived in the same state for a couple of years in the 1990s, Pennsylvania. How strange that we had to travel a quarter of the way around the globe for our paths to converge at such an unlikely location.

Anyway, I’ll post more pictures of Geneva later, and I’ll talk more about covering Angels & Demons in Rome. For now, I’ll just jump to posting some photos from my time in Rome. (You know what they say about pictures and words!)

Continue reading “Geneva & Rome, part 1”

Mystery photos: Where in the world is SDG?

Actually, where I am isn't a mystery — I'm back, and said so in a combox yesterday. So the question is, where have I been for the last week?

To answer that, let's play mystery photos! And to keep things fun, let's adjust the rules a little.

Below are two photos of me in two different locations, both taken with my iPhone by passing strangers. I should think the second location will more likely be recognized by JA.o readers than the first, but in any case, if you flat-out know the location in either photo, don't spoil it right away by identifying it in the combox. Just say "I know where photo B was taken" or "I know where you are in both shots." (Honor system! If you say you know, you get credit.)

If you don't know the location in one or both photos, feel free to offer whatever guesses or insights you may have (e.g., "The large figure(s) in photo [X] might be/is clearly…" or "The background in photo B suggests that…").

Two small hints. I already gave one (the second location will more likely be recognized by JA.o readers than the first). Here's another: Many JA.o readers will know specifics about my faith journey that resonate in an interesting way with the locations of the two photos, shown below in chronological order. (I said they were small hints!)

Next week, I'll post more about my trip.