Stayed in hotel in Romulus, Thursday night.  Not a great hotel, but it was a place to sleep.  Fell out of bed at "Oh-Dark-Thirty," for flight to Houston at some ridiculous time of the morning.  So, back in Texas for 90 minutes.  I can faithfully report that a modern airport in Texas looks just like a modern airport anywhere else.  Only thing of note, is that I noticed far fewer people of obviously-Hispanic ancestory than I expected.  In some cases, Spanish was clearly the preferred language.  Probably, I just don't know what "Hispanic" looks like.

Boarded another plane, flew to Vancouver.  (Yes, we flew south to Houston in order to get to Vancouver.)  Spent long time in "cattle-pen", weaving our way to the Customs agents.  Not as long as I would have expected to spend in line at DTW.  Noticed something like a dozen international flights landed within 10 minutes of ours.  Had it been DTW, we'd still be standing in line.

All cars are small, here.  All trucks are domestic, all cars are foreign (Japanese, with a smattering of BMWs).

Many people (like one-in-three) are clearly of Asian ancestory.  Not surprising, as I understand that many people who left Hong Kong to avoid becoming part of the PRC moved to Vancouver.

There are sushi places everywhere.

Nicole noticed that, for a port city, there are amazingly few gulls flying around.

Spider Robinson's characters frequently praised Ricard's Red.  I finally found it at The Keg.  It's not bad at all.  It's a "two of these is not too many" beer.  Good character, enough flavor to notice it, but it doesn't overwhelm a meal or nuke your ability to taste anything else.

Houses, like in London, are set behind privacy hedges and fences.  For some reason, they remind me of Hawai'i, but I can't grasp why.

Arrived in early afternoon.  Went to Vancouver Art Gallery.  Saw the exhibition on cartoons.  Some interesting stuff (e.g. Krazy Kat, Shaun Tan's The Arrival), but mostly not.  Exhibit moved from early American newspaper cartoons to more-recent American stuff that isn't published in newspapers, to manga, and finally to anime.  Surprised by the complete absence of Neil Gaiman's Sandman, or anything by Alan Moore.  But then, the examples of manga and anime weren't anything I'd heard of, so they must be off-the-beaten track.  I'm guessing licensing issues prevented use of any of that stuff.  Clearly, they saved that money for the animation portion of the show, where we saw stuff from Pixar (Toy Story), Nick Park (The Wrong Trousers), and Dreamworks Animation (Over the Hedge).

Out the hotel window, 14th floor, 6:30 AM:

Nicole & I leave for Alaska, soon.

We've been unable to locate our camera.

A once-in-a-lifetime trip, without a camera, would be bad.

After we exhausted even the ridiculous, like calling Anne to learn if we'd left the camera at their house, and searching the basement, Nicole told me to go pick another camera (Happy Birthday to Me!).  I selected the Canon Powershot S5, largely on the strength of that review, and the fact that I'd like to (at some point in the future) try attaching my camera to a spotting scope (birders call this practice "digiscoping").  This camera is not an SLR.  But it's the next-best-thing, and Canon makes an adapter that allows it to accept additional lenses -- and also to be connected to an adapter for a spotting scope.

Just finished listening to The Odyssey.  I understand that it's a translation of an oral, pre-writing, work.  That's why it's so repetitive.  But, if I hear "child of Morning, rosy-fingered Dawn" or "Tell me, and tell me true," one more time I may flail, foam, and thrash about the room.

I had read an abbreviated version.  But I wanted to read the real thing.  Plus, I thought it'd be interesting to hear it.  After all, that's how it was supposed to be presented.  But it drove me up the wall.  The pacing is, by the standards of a video age, excruciatingly slow.  The first quarter, maybe third, of the work doesn't even follow Odysseus.  It's all about his son Telemachus, and how badly his home is treated by Queen Penelope's suitors, and his travels to Sparta seeking word of his father.  Even after Odysseus enters, almost all of his story before his actual return to Ithaca is told in flashback.  Every narrative is interrupted by digression -- even the digressions.  No action takes place without extensive dialog.  Mid-fight, someone will stop spearing to exclaim about the wickedness of his opponent, the number & type of sacrifices he'll offer, which Gods will be receiving those sacrifices, the various offenses committed by the villain and the punishments merited by each, the male-ancestors of all combatants, and then the opponent will respond in kind.

I did learn the answer to a question that's bugged me since I first read the Odyssey.  Odysseus returns in disguise.  Penelope, inspired by the Gods, holds a contest to decide which suitor she'll wed.  Odysseus left his massive bow at home when he went to Troy.  Anyone who can string it, which no one but he has ever accomplished, and shoot an arrow through 12 iron axe-heads, as he used to do to exhibit his skill, will win.  Of course, they can't string it.  He can.  Does.  Wastes an arrow shooting it through the 12 axe-heads, then begins slaughtering suitors.  My question: Odysseus went to Troy -- the largest, most-important fight of the Age, involving Continental-scale armies in a time when a dozen-man sheep-stealing raid merited a ballad, and he left without a bow that can throw an arrow through a dozen axe-heads?!?  That's like the US Army deciding to engage in urban combat, but leaving all the snipers State-side.  Turns out, the bow was a gift from a dear friend of his youth.  He considered it an heirloom of his house more than a weapon, and feared losing it.  Which probably says as much about the difference between then & now anything else in the book.

I'm going to have to buy a bunch more timber and stakes.  India dug out, again, a week-or-so-ago.  This time, she broke through a buried 2x6.  The wood's been in the ground long enough to rot.  We've not had time to do anything about it.  We've been letting India out for only brief periods.  As often as she's escaped, she's never do so immediately after being let into the yard.  Last night, she disappeared through the existing hole within 10 minutes.  She didn't return until 7 this morning.  She's currently taking a post-bath nap.

Oh -- interesting website: sensibleunits.com.

Wow.

Yesterday, I watched Men's 10M Air Pistol, Men's Judo, Women's Judo and, this morning, I watched the US Men's Soccer Team tie the Netherlands.  That last, I think I watched live.

Argh!  They let the Dutch score in Injury Time!  On a free kick!  Cause somebody decided to kick the ball away, instead of just let it ricochet off his legs!  Arghhhhh!

Finished Legacy of Ashes.  Ended up feeling kind of sorry for the CIA. Still think, always assuming the book's content is not too biased, the Agency's history is one screw-up after another.  At the end of the Cold War, they had no clear target and a President with no use for them.  The Agency exists to serve the needs of the President.  Without a clear target, a mandate from the President, and facing a Congress eager for a "peace dividend," many in the Agency left for more-lucrative pastures.  That left the CIA staffed with people too burned-out to look for other work, and recent graduates with no experience of the world outside Yale, yet alone North America, and burdened by myriad regulations.  One anecdote is of a recruit, who would have been only the 2nd fluent Farsi-speaker in the entire Agency, who was not hired because he couldn't pass the English-language test.  It wasn't that he could speak & write English -- it was that his English wasn't up to Ivy League standards.

Origin of Species is something I've wanted to read for a long time.  It's not easy.  Darwin was clearly, obviously, unmistakably writing about something he knew.  The degree of logic, the layer upon layer of reason, example, expected dissent and counter-argument is overwhelming.  The man understood that he was presenting an idea that wasn't self-evident, and went to great lengths to show that it was correct.  Even to the extent of starting from really simple things -- like the fact that individual organisms compete to survive.  Who, other than a genius trying to demonstrate an obscure truth by constructing a framework of observations, would bother to establish that fact with multiple examples and still more citations?  But those same densely-layered arguments are almost impossible to follow, especially in an audio format.  There are also problems of anachronism.  Not surprisingly, in Darwin's day "species" didn't have a rigorously-defined meaning, so Darwin uses it (and the term "variety") in ways that seem incorrect to modern ears.  I may have to abandon it.

Listened, again, to Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys.  Still, in my opinion, possibly the best fiction audiobook ever.  Lenny Henry's reading is outstanding.

Next up . . . Homer's Odyssey and Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food.