My Winter Holiday Plans

With the ISK becoming so devalued against the USD I decided to take a holiday to Iceland when I am done with my thesis. This trip is a present to myself for finishing my Masters degree after 8 years of part-time work on it. Plus, visiting Iceland is one of the items on the list of Things To Do With My Life.

So, I went online and checked out the flight details and was amazed at some of the prices I saw. I got a round-trip, non-stop flight on Icelandair from JFK to Reykjavík for $473. (That figure includes all taxes, airport fees, security fees, and fuel surcharges. WoW!)

I arrive on the morning of 31 Dec 08 and leave in the afternoon of 08 Jan 09. I plan to use Reykjavík as a home-base for seeing the country but I might spend a few days at a rural farm-house accommodation, to see just how much cold weather I can stand.

I know a couple guys from Reykjavík through an on-line forum of which I am a member so I am in touch with them to get tips on places to stay. As far as things to do, I plan to go to the Blue Lagoon, take a walk/hike on a glacier, explore all of Reykjavík, and check out the local music scene.

But, first things first, I need to find a place to stay in Reykjavík for New Year’s Eve. (And buy a bunch of ISK’s while the currency is still depressed about 60% from its previous levels.)

Ways To Kill Time On The Intarweb

So,

Of late my buddy Mark and I have been exchanging our favorite time- killing sites on the web. You know, one of those sites that is fascinating due to the depths of its esoteric details on a subject or due to humor and/or topical dislocation from any relevant context. The other day Mark sent me the following link which falls into the latter category.

Unintentional Hilarity From Mr. Rogers Neighborhood

I won’t go into too much detail and ruin for yourself the fun of exploring the list, but below are my two favorite snippets from the list. They make me laugh in a profound, and perhaps profoundly disturbing, way.

(Why does a 38-year-old man find the idea of alien “bread people” to be laugh-out-loud funny? Oh, and when my two youngest nieces get a little older I am definitely going to teach them King Friday’s version of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star”.)

- – - – -

“Lady Elaine Fairchilde: Don’t look now, but we are being invaded from outer space.
Chef Brockett: What makes you think that?
Lady Elaine Fairchilde: The flying bread. Dangerous, dangerous people, those bread people. But very clever.”

“King Friday XIII: I feel like reciting the royal version of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.
Lady Aberlin: Oh, please do if you will, Uncle.
King Friday XIII: Certainly, yes. ‘Scintillate, Scintillate diminutive stellar orb. How inexplicable to me seems this stupendous problem of your existance. Elevated at such at an imeasurable distance, in an apparently perpendicular direction from this terrestrial planet which we occupy. Resembling in thy dazzeling and unapproachable efulgance, a gem of purist carbon, set solitaire in a university of space.’”

Inching Along the Edge of the World

I love reading the travel articles in the New York Times and just today I came across this piece by Will Self from which I cribbed the title for my post. I did not know he had been authoring a series of articles about walking round out-of-the-way regions of the British landscape (even when these British landscapes exist in some other country). I have only read one of his books, Great Apes, but have read many of his short-form pieces. They are wordy, abstruse, lacking in obvious humor, and a thoroughly enjoyable read.

In this series of articles he comes across as a man who truly loves the land he treads upon. He provides descriptions of soil, earth, rock, sky: geologic details of texture and surface meaningful only to someone who wants to get a true sense of a place from the ground up. And he takes delightfully spare black-and-white photos usually devoid of any people. Again, it seems it is terra firma, the land, at which he marvels.

Check out some of his pieces at the link above.

The Buck Stopped Here, Again

Following up on this posting from last Saturday, Mr. Buck decided to pay a daylight visit today. I was in the sun-room again, messing around on the computer. Out of the corner of my eye, I see what looks like a large deer move through the back yard. I get up to investigate and see “my” buck scratching his antlers on a pine tree in the back yard.

I grabbed my camera and headed outside. I spent 15-20 minutes trying to take pictures in the fading light with (very) limited success. Out of 44 pics taken with my little point-and-shoot camera, only three of them were even close to being usable/useful. So, here they are. This is my six-point buck from last Saturday night. Isn’t he beautiful?

Buck At Dusk 01

Buck At Dusk 03

Lipstick on a Pig

Hmm, what was Sarah Palin’s claim about being in touch with “real Americans”, the ones who are the “Joe Six-Packs” of the world? How many of these “real Americans” can afford to, and would want to, buy clothes from Neiman-Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, Barneys, or Macys? Well, it would seem that at least one of those “real Americans” likes to shop at those high-end clothing stores: That would be Sarah Palin herself.

Politico has an interesting piece on the $150,000 spent by the Republican National Committee on clothes and other accessories for Sarah Palin since she was selected to be the Republican vice presidential candidate. That selection occurred a little over two months ago which gives them a pretty substantial burn-rate for their $150,000 expenditure.

I am totally down with a candidate’s, and their backing political party’s, desire to make a good impression. But the incongruity is startling when the RNC promotes Sarah Palin as an everyday “real American” while buying her clothes from some of the finest boutique stores in the country. (Granted, Macy’s is not high-end boutique like Barney’s or Saks, but it sure as Hell ain’t Lands End or J. Crew.)

How do everyday “real Americans” afford to shop like that at boutique clothiers? They don’t! That type of shopping is the domain of the wealthy and is most often associated in the mass media with the Liberal elites in NYC or Hollywood. [Oh, Yes! I did go there. I threw out the L-word.]

So, just how dumb do they think we are? Do they really think we won’t recognize the dissonance between how Sarah Palin is portrayed as an everyday “real American” citizen-politician but in reality is just as much a superficial, self-absorbed ideological huckster as every other politician who uses the public’s money for their own gain? Come on, this revelation makes her no different from all the other politicians in this country who present themselves in one way to their public and act the opposite way when out of the glare of the TV lights.

So, stop pretending that she is Simple Sarah.