majrodgers

Sarasota, FL, March 2, 2011
It came as a surprise recently when I heard from a few of my readers telling me that I had gone silent.  So I checked and saw that my most recent posting was on January 20, over a month ago.  So it seems that if you start up something of a repetitive, continual nature, viz., a blog, then it generates an amount of expectation/anticipation in the community, or at least in part of it. It could be that I am drawing a false conclusion because of the small sample, but anyway the comments I received have spurred me to take up my virtual pen and compose another posting.  Here goes.
Over the last couple of weeks there has been a distinct improvement in the weather in Sarasota; not that the weather before was anything to complain about, but these days temperatures have increased to the 80s or so in the afternoon, every day is sunny, there are birds singing in the trees that were not there before, and the lime tree in my yard has flowers on it. From this I deduce that it must be spring! Meanwhile in the north of the US, if the temperatures have risen above the freezing point of water, the inhabitants there feel blessed. Bottom line is I am congratulating myself on having chosen to spend the winter in Florida, along with the many thousands of other lucky folk who have done the same clever thing.
However the end is in sight; I have resolved to depart hence on 19 March, less than three weeks from today. I will retrace my steps up I 75 to Bowling Green where I shall remain at my house and visit Emily for some days. Then I shall drive to Chicago to stay with Jane and Sam for a few more days and on March 30 I have a ticket for an American Airlines flight from Chicago O’Hare to New York City, where I shall stay for one night, and take the American Airlines morning flight to London Heathrow.  Since this flight arrives in the late evening, London time, I shall stay for one night near Heathrow and on April 1 I have a British Air flight from Heathrow to Rome. After a night in Rome I shall rent a car and drive to Castiglione della Pescaia, and begin a re-visitation of the wonderful Maremma and re-acquaintance with my Tuscan friends, and others.
The sane persons among you might ask why I am taking 3 days to make a trip that could be accomplished during the passage of one night; my response to them is that “this is my thing”.  I have been doing this extended itinerary for several years now.  It started because I hate spending the night in an airplane and being shaken out of sleep at about 2 AM my time; it simply ruins my day and the next one.  With the extended trip you do the transatlantic part during the daytime and the nights are spent in comfortable hotel beds; it also helps along the time change.  To add to this, a couple of weeks ago I saw a Nova show on PBS that was an account of why Air France 447 might have crashed into the south Atlantic last year en route from Rio to Paris.  One thing that the presenters surmised was that they entered a huge thunderstorm that their on-board radar had failed to warn them about.  In the storm their pitot heads froze up, generating an inability to monitor the airspeed, with the result that their on-board computer crashed. The plane was an Airbus 330, in which the computer controls everything. To lose the computer means that the pilots have to control the plane manually and in the dark and in the midst of serious buffeting by unremitting turbulence, and being out of touch of controllers in Brazil and Senegal, their training, which was for a totally computer-controlled machine, was suspected to have been inadequate to recover the plane from a stall.
The point was made that in the dark of night the pilots cannot see a storm ahead and so are unable to make course corrections to avoid it.  During daylight hours this would not have happened because such huge storms are clearly visible and avoidance procedures can be put in place.  Well, this spooked me and it confirmed me in my decision to avoid overnight transatlantic flights.
I have arranged to rent an apartment in CDP for 2 1/2 months, leaving in the middle of June. It’s a different place from the one I rented last year, this one is not in the medieval city but in one of the more “modern” streets just below the castle. From the street level to arrive at the front door I need to climb 35 steps. This is only 10 steps more than I had to climb last year, but this time I don’t have to climb a mountain first in order to arrive at the door. Having arrived at the top of the 35 steps, the effort becomes very worthwhile, because the apartment has a terrace that overlooks the Tyrrhenian Sea. And the terrace is huge, big enough for major cookouts and parties! Here I have included a photo taken on a moody day last November.
Meanwhile in Sarasota my walking routines continue unabated; several kilometers on the streets around sunrise and several more kilometers at the water’s edge most evenings around sundown.
I have already proclaimed to you that I enjoy watching pelicans going about their daily toil, now to this I must add another enjoyment; that is the herons. There are many of these imperious birds wading at the edge of the inland waterway here, some blue-gray some white. Sometimes my walking trail takes me within just a few feet of the wading creature, but they don’t seem to care about my proximity, I suppose that they are used to human passers-by. They appear to treat me with deserved disdain.
Since my last posting, the whole Arab world has been turning upside down.  I was especially impressed with Egypt which accomplished a regime change through persistent demonstrations by many persons. Thanks to a reasonable military there was hardly any bloodshed; quite Gandhiesque.  Compare this with the regime change in Iraq which was achieved by the overwhelming might of the US military and accompanied by oceans of blood; can this be labeled Bushesque?  Thinking about GWB and Iraq makes me wonder how can this man rationalize the banning of research on stem cells obtained from unwanted fetuses, with the potential for great human benefit, while at the same time sending very-much-wanted young men and women to slaughter and to be slaughtered.  Seems to me that if you are pro-life at the fetal stage, you ought to be pro-life at all stages thereafter; am I being ingenuous here?
And then there is Libya, where another despot is crazily spilling his people’s blood in a frantic attempt to remain the guy in charge. I suppose that being a despot has some perks but the huge disadvantage is when it comes to retirement.  After a few decades of despotism, after the killing, imprisonment and torture of his countrymen, he imagines that a modicum of resentment has built up in the land, which leaves an impression that all will not be forgotten and forgiven were he to simply step down and retire to one of the palatial dwellings that he has had built out of the people’s hide, or by skimming the cream from the billions of dollars in Western aid that has poured into the coffers.  Not him; he remembers the bard’s quote “uneasy is the head that wears the crown”, so he does all he can to keep his own head.  Perhaps revolutions are necessary, but it seems to me that revolutions that remove despots put in place other despots, and if there is anyone out there who does not believe that, I point them to the Russian revolution which begat Stalin, and the Iranian which begat Khomeini and his pals.  The US revolution, though bloody, did lead to a democracy, at least for white males.
On a pleasanter note, a few evenings ago I drove to Siesta Key, the southernmost of the islands that spread themselves in the Gulf of Mexico near Sarasota. Like all the other keys (Bird, Lido, Longboat and St Armand’s) Siesta is densely populated by homes, some of which are mansion-like and some bigger, and many of them give onto the water. To get to Siesta you have to drive south on Hwy. 41 for a couple of miles or so, which takes you through the commercial heart of the town. Perhaps “heart” is not the best expression to use in this context, since it implies a compact, rounded object, which this commercial district is definitely not; rather it is a ribbon of stores and businesses on both sides of the street that goes on and on; commercial sinew could be a closer description. At some point you make a right turn onto Siesta Drive and head west towards the coast, eventually crossing a bridge to the Key itself. The bridge is somewhat interesting because it’s a drawbridge, and it just so happened that as I was driving towards it, the traffic lights turned red and the drawbridge began to rise. We were held there for perhaps 20 minutes while one section of the bridge rose to the vertical position, a little sailboat went through, and then the bridge descended, the lights went green and normal life resumed. I was about the 20th vehicle in the line on our side of the bridge and in my rear-view mirror I could see a string of vehicles behind me. Coming in the other direction once the bridge was open there was also a long continuous line of traffic that had experienced the hold up.  Siesta Key is quite large and populous and the drawbridge is the only connection between it and the mainland and so it is very busy. It is interesting that such an ancient structure continues to be the only link between two parts of the city, and that the lives of hundreds of motorists can be put on hold for the convenience of one sailor-definitely a thought to conjure with.
Once over the bridge and on the key itself it is still quite a drive to the beach because the beach is well towards the south end of the key, a long one, which narrows to the south. Considering that it was nominally winter, the beach was quite busy, although as it was approaching 6 in the evening, nobody was actually in beachwear; there were several couples and several groups and some loners like myself.  Some were sitting, some standing, some walking up and down; I suppose all, like me, were there to see the sun go down. A few had brought beach chairs and coolers and were having drinks to celebrate the passing of another day, or the start of another evening. As expected by all, the sun dipped its derrière into the Gulf at about 6:30 without a care for any of its loyal worshipers.
For the first time ever, I have dictated this blog post to my laptop and not typed it. I must say that the transcription works very well. I am using a software package from Dragon.  In the beginning I had to teach it to recognize my voice by reading a passage selected from a list of alternatives that it provides.  I am not certain which one I selected the one but it could have been an excerpt from a Dave Barry posting somewhere. Anyway, this is to train the software in your voice and method of expression. Having done this it is trivial to simply put on a headset, plug it into the laptop, open the so-called Dragon pad and start speaking; it is remarkable (for me) to watch the words typing on the screen, as if by magic. Of course, you have to remember to speak clearly with good enunciation (no problem for me), or it prints out garbage, and sometimes the garbage is more interesting than the real stuff. When you want to punctuate you say “comma”, “period”, “question mark”, “tab” and so on, and the software dutifully places the desired symbol in the appropriate place. You are able to interact with the transcription as you go along, or do it after finishing, as you wish. But the thing I like about it is that I don’t have to type it out; I can sit in an easy chair and just talk into the headset.  It makes document preparation and emails very straightforward. Once all my pearls of wisdom are in the Dragon pad, on paper as it were, I just go through and have a peek to see if it is publishable.  If so, I can simply copy and paste it into the WordPress blog, as I am doing now:)

Another clean one from the Weiss stable:

Fear not, bloggees!  This is not a scene from a chamber of horrors, it is your Florida correspondent undergoing (i.e. suffering through) photodynamic therapy (PDT) .  Yes, the guy who squandered taxpayers dollars by the millions pretending to “study” PDT is now on the receiving end of it, and it is not pretty.  I took this photo of myself with my trusty blackberry during my exposure to the BLU (trade mark) light.

Why am I doing this?  Like many people of advanced years with my skin coloration and little or no hair to protect from solar energy, I have developed actinic keratoses on my scalp and upper ears.  These little devils are not dangerous if you have them treated.  For several years now I have been visiting a dermatologist every 6 months or so to have these precancerous lesions removed, and the guy in Bowling Green used to spray the affected areas with liquid nitrogen.  He would do this until I screamed in agony and then do it some more.  Well, I wanted to get the treatment in November when I was there after my Italy sojourn, but he was too busy to see me in the narrow time window I was offering, so Erika, of Erika and Alex, put me in touch with her dermo, one David Bracciano, here in Sarasota.  I went over there last December and he did the usual liquid nitrogen torture, but at the end of it he asked whether I was interested in having this PDT treatment.  An of course, being a renowned PDT scientist, I jumped at the offer.  In this he (or rather his assistant) rubs a preparation of levulinic acid onto your scalp and upper ears.  You then sit around for about 2 hours to generate some porphyrins, I suppose, after which you are invited to sit under this carapace which has the blue light tubes in it, as you see in the photo. And then they turn it on and a new torture begins and goes on for 16 bloody minutes!!!

They warn you up front that it might sting a little-a giant piece of understatement.  It stings a lot and burns like hell-pure agony.  Water-boarding has nothing on this and after a few seconds I was prepared to sign any confession to make it stop!  They should take it to Guantanamo where it will work wonders, I am sure.  Anyway, I endured it, thinking of all those singlet oxygen molecules running around my scalp, doing lots of photo-oxidation in all  the right places.  I have to stay out of the sun and wear a hat and sunblock for a couple of days to obviate unwanted photosensitization.  And there you have it, and the insurance picks up the bill, what a wonderful life it is.

To the next installment…

The first thing I do in a morning (unless the rain is fierce) is to go street-walking, an activity that wakes me up and shakes off the cobwebs.  Sarasota has many fine streets to offer to the walker, some are more challenging than others. Since street.walking is an exercise, I walk briskly, not to break records or become an entry in the Guinness book of records , but just to induce some heavy breathing and get the heart pumping at a higher rate.  Typically I walk at a 16 minutes per mile (10 minutes per km) rate for 3 or 4 miles (if you want km, you do the math).  The only deviation from this rate is when my route takes me over the bridge, when, on the uphill sections, I go as fast as I can; that brings on lots of heavy breathing!  At this point I interpose a sunset photo of the bridge taken from a vacant lot across the street from my domicile.

The bridge connects the Sarasota mainland to Bird Key and beyond that to other keys. The official name of the bridge is the John Ringling Causeway and the Ringling name is to be found all over the city.  The family were big circus owners and John, the major player, made Sarasota the winter home of the circus.  He funded many institutional projects in the early days of the city (for more see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ringling).  The Ringling estate and the museum are worth an extended visit.

So, since my walking is not for record-breaking purposes, I do not have to focus on my performance and I can use the opportunity to observe things around me.  Of course, I am not the only exerciser on the street and, especially on weekends, the routes become busy with walkers, runners, bikers, strollers and their dogs, so I have the chance to have a little human interaction.  And not only human, one of my favorite sites are the pelicans who glide seemingly lazily over the water until they spot fish below.  Then with a few flaps of their enormous wings they get more height and at the right moment plummet vertically into the water, beak first with wings outstretched and a couple of seconds later come to the surface with their catch in their capacious beaks.  They gulp down the fish then start up the procedure again, continuing, I suppose until they are gorged.

The weather here has been all that I could have hoped; typical days have been bright, cloudless and sunny with daytime high  temperatures in the high 60s/low 70s.  It is pleasant to see the semi-tropical plants blooming in January, the bougainvillea and the hibiscus, for example.

The bougainvillea in the picture are a deep red color (not well reproduced in the photo), but the purple variety are also much in evidence.  Perhaps I said this in an earlier posting but there are lime, grapefruit and avocado trees on, or near to, my house and every morning as I return from my exercise, I go looking around for windfalls, and sometimes I am lucky.

Of course, there have been days that have been distinctly unfriendly with high winds, lashing rain and cool temperatures, but on these occasions it is easy to cheer oneself up by looking at the TV news programs showing mountains of snow, ice storms, freezing rain and the like in the frozen northern US.  It might be not so nice here, but there it is surely hellish.

The iciness continued across Europe over the Christmas period, causing football games to be postponed, even in England.  In addition I received emailed photos from friends in CDP showing it snowing there-a very rare event.  All in all, I am very pleased to be where I am, able to walk around lightly dressed, admiring the blooms of January.

The Bloody Statue!

An alternative to walking across the bridge to Bird Key is to walk the other direction to the downtown area and around the marina.  This route takes you past the Bloody Statue of which I have written earlier.  I felt compelled to take a photo of the eyesore and I insert it here for your pleasure.  You can see the immensity of it by comparing it with Jane’s Mini Cooper parked nearby and the normal-sized persons next to it.  The one redeeming feature is that the planners have placed it in a place with trees around, so that one day it may be completely obscured.

The central part of Sarasota, the downtown, is a composite of tightly-spaced buildings having a variety of uses.  There are high-rise offices and swanky palatial apartment houses/condominiums, interspersed among which are low-rise stores, restaurants, bars, art galleries, theaters and the like.  The downtown is heterogeneous, but quite pleasant; it is easy to walk around and just about 10 minutes walk from Golden Gate Point where I am living.  What I am showing here is a photograph of a glass-walled high-rise bank tower reflecting the sunset.  Maybe you have figured it out by now,but you can get a bigger version of the photos by clicking on them.

Like any American city, once you leave the central zone of Sarasota, going north or south you soon find yourself in less-than-elegant areas devoted to low-level commerce, auto repair shops, pawn shops, money lenders and the like.  These are not so beautiful but they provide essential services at prices that we can afford.  For example, if you take your BMW to the BMW dealership for an oil change and lube job and wait for it to be done, you will be ushered  into a waiting room by a clean person, who will point out comfortable couches and chairs with a self-service area for snacks, coffee, sodas, spring water and the like.  Your car is spirited away from your sight and is eventually returned to you all washed and polished.  You are never confronted with a person in oily overalls; the bill for the job will be $73.  On the other hand if you take the same car to Tires Plus in the blue collar zone you will find yourself waiting in the ante-room to the service area, which serves as tire showroom and reception.  Oily overall-ed guys are all around, you can see your vehicle up on the lift in the service area ; there are a couple of cheap chairs, a pot of hot coffee, and some  magazines to help you while away the time until your car comes back without washing or waxing, this bill is $30.

Well, it is cocktail hour, so more on this must wait…

Sometimes Dick Weiss sends me something clean!

Thanks Dick.

Right click image and select “open in new window”

The Winter Solstice, 2010

For crazies such as I am, tonight has to be a special one; it is the Winter Solstice, it is a full moon, and there is a total lunar eclipse.  Of course, a total lunar eclipse requires a full moon, but the coincidence of all three is a rare event; it is about 400 years since the last triple conjunction occurred.  Unfortunately for me, on the eastern seaboard of the United States, the eclipse is a middle of the night affair and I am not sure that I will be able to stay awake long enough.  Just now, about midnight, I went outside to look at the moon and perhaps there was a suspicion of a darkening as she was entering the Earth’s penumbra, but nothing certain.  And to make it difficult, the moon was at the zenith and to look at it gave one a severe pain in the neck.  Perhaps if I keep writing I shall have the opportunity of seeing more of this once in a half-millennium phenomenon.

The other news is that I am now residing in Sarasota, Florida and I have been here for about three weeks.  I did the famous three-day drive from Ohio on the days after the Thanksgiving holiday; it was long and uneventful and perhaps surpassingly boring.  The only billboards that I found interesting or provocative were in Georgia and Florida-aka the Bible Belt.  These told us that at 18 days (I think) after conception the baby heart is beating.  The unstated implication was that to perform an abortion on such a fetus was akin, nay the same as, a murderous act.  Well, who knows, but what is surely apparent to anyone who thinks about it, an 18 day fetus has no chance of surviving outside the womb and thus a beating heart is only a beating heart and it is merely a precursor to the development of a child.  Just another example of  how some of our fellow men know so much better than the rest of us and gladly pay money (collected from us, no doubt) to shove their mores down our throats.

So now I am living in Sarasota, a small town on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, just south of Tampa.  Sarasota is a rich town; the automobiles on the streets are Mercedes, BMW, Audi, Lexus, Infinity, and so on-very few jalopies. It is clean and well-cared for and I love it.  The one thing that irks me is The Statue-as I think of it.  Down by the waterfront at the marina there is some greensward, on which the city fathers, I presume, arrange for various pieces of art to be placed. All well and good, and there have been some interesting giant pieces displayed there, but for a couple of years now The Statue has been in a prominent position in that vicinity.  Maybe some of you are advanced in years enough to remember a photograph in a 1945 magazine (perhaps Life).  This iconic picture showed a sailor kissing a young lady in the VE/VJ celebrations in Times Square, New York.  Well, some crazy sculptor has created a super-life-sized statue of the two of them, perhaps 15 feet high, in their seminal clinch.  And there it sits in all its ridiculousness in this prominent place on the Sarasota waterfront; not at all to my taste.  Nobody and nothing is perfect, so they say.

Yet again I find myself at a place where a great body of water encounters land; Sarasota is on the mainland but just offshore are islands that they call Keys, and between the Keys and Sarasota is the inland waterway, and beyond the Keys is the Gulf proper.  About five minutes drive from where I live is the beach at Lido Key, a beach that is not sandy but is made of crushed seashells-white and quite spectacular; it is a good place to go for an exercise walk in the early morning.  The funny thing is that as you walk to the west you come across a patch of beach where there are hundreds of sea birds of different kinds, all standing in close proximity.  I have not yet figured out why they stand there and nowhere else on the beach, but I intend to find out.

It is now 1:15 AM EST and I have been out into the night and note that the eastern edge of the moon is decidedly perturbed, so the eclipse is in progress. But, dear friends, the night is overtaking me and I must forgo my visitations with the moon and indeed with you, so until the next time-adieu!

Now I am somewhat more confident about the mechanics of this, here is my latest “letter from”, I am still experimenting.

Now read on:

Walking the streets of Chicago at 5:30 in the morning is not as eerie as I thought it would be; certainly it is dark, as the sun will not be up for a another hour or so, but there is traffic on Lakeshore Drive and a few well-bundled persons on the streets, insulated coffee cups in hand, scurrying to an early starting job.  The western shore of Lake Michigan is about 1 mile from Jane and Sam’s house (to be called J&S henceforth) where I have alighted as my first stop in the US after Spring, Summer and Fall in CDP.  The path from J&S to the Lake goes east on Berwyn Avenue and under the elevated suburban railroad that takes you downtown, and I imagine that most of these early voyagers are heading for the Berwyn station to catch a train to somewhere in or around the city center.  The trains run all night.  And they say that New York is the city that never sleeps!

Beneath the station itself and just to the left of the flight of stairs that takes you up to the platforms is a little hole-in-the-wall shop run by a Pakistani couple.  They open at 4  AM to provide coffee, snacks, newspapers, candy and other sustenance to the commuters.  After the station, Berwyn continues east until it meets Sheridan where it seems to terminate. But not so, a few paces north on Sheridan, Berwyn starts up again and takes you under Lakeshore Drive into Lincoln Park.  The park is situated between Lakeshore and the lake itself and runs for miles to the north and the south along the lake shore. Like any park it has lots of trees and greensward and it is threaded through with trails for walking, running, strolling and biking.  However, unlike many city parks , it has the magnificent Lake Michigan as its eastern margin.  So I am once again at a place where the land meets a huge mass of water, of major appeal to me.

When you enter the park you have covered about 1 mile from J&S  and turning south you can go on for many more miles along,  or proximate to, the water’s edge, where you have an uninterrupted view across the water to the horizon, just over which is the western shore of the state of Michigan.  This morning, as yesterday, the sky is cloudless, and approaching the lake the planet Venus is bright in the dark sky which is graying close to the horizon, heralding the imminent sun. Over to the west planes are already rising from O’Hare, like larks  from meadows, and heading out to the lake where they would bank to attain their planned trajectories

Continuing the walking for another mile or so along the trail I meet other walkers, or are overtaken by runners, all people who, like me, want to exercise but prefer to get it out of the way at the beginning of the day.  But so early?  My excuse is that I am just in from Italy, a seven hour time difference, so crawling out of bed at 5 AM in Chicago is equivalent to not getting up until noon in Europe.  It seems that early rising fits in well with the schedule at J&S.  Both Jane and Sam are dedicated distance runners and they prefer to do their training spins prior to going to work, hence the early hour.

So after another mile I turn around and retrace my steps to J&S.  By now, over my right shoulder the sky is becoming grey-blue and overhead the wispy cirrus are painted orange, or light pink.  Then, moments later, an almost imperceptible filament of red light seemingly peers, somewhat hesitatingly, over the horizon, and, having assured itself that all is well, the filament assumes the shape of a rosy segment, then a semicircle and finally a brilliant red disk emerges out of the water: the sun has risen and a new day has begun in Chicago.

Back at Berwyn station I call in at the shop to buy a New York Times, a newspaper that I have not held in my hands since last March.  Somehow it seems too heavy, and I recall a story told to me by Warren Garrison, my post doc mentor at the Lawrence-Berkeley laboratory some 45 years ago.  He was from The mid-west where the daily newspapers were thick and heavy, thick enough so that when carried across your chest under your coat, it would help to alleviate the frigidity caused by the biting winds off the lake.  Anyway Warren’s story was that once he went on a trip to England and selected a newspaper off a pile at a news-stand.  On walking away he was called back by the vendor who complained that he had paid for one paper but had taken three.  Warren had unthinkingly picked up enough until he felt to have got the weight and thickness of a typical American daily!

And so CDP is behind me.  I left with some sadness because I had grown to love the picturesque place, a few of the Castiglione people and some people from far-off Grosseto.  I experienced much friendliness and kindness.  I think that it was good to begin my sojourn there in the early Spring before the influx of the tourists.  At that time it was just me and the locals and we were able to easily recognize one another.  Of course, Posto Pubblico helped, because there, Valentina introduced me to her friends that came to visit, mainly business owners down the hill who still had time to socialize before the inundation began.  I called her Queen Bee because all the visitors were men, young and old, there were never ladies in this procession.  Her reply to my question of why only men was “Their wives all hate me!”  Anyway I greatly enjoyed the new life I found there; the new friends insisted that I go back after the winter, and I probably shall; who knows?

So I send greetings to all my old friends around the world and a special one to my new ones:

Irina, Laura M, Giancarlo and Maurizio,

Laura Budget and Rita.

Claudio and Antonella.

Azzurra at the Farmacia

Elena at MPS

Lisa and Yusuf, and Mario the dad.

Valentina, Chiara, Marzia and Lita in the Borgo.

David the crazy Yacht Man.

That seemed to work.

Mike has decided to be a blogger and here I am experimenting with creating a post containing words and pictures.