Away from New Zealand

I'm in Los Angeles right now. This blog ain't called "A Massachusetts Yankee in California," so I won't be posting until I return to Christchurch on Sunday.

Labour Day

It's Labour Day in New Zealand. I'm currently in Wellington chilling with Matt, my DJ friend, and his wife, Hiona. The weather in Wellington is terrible, as it usually is when I visit. I've been hanging out at their apartment watching movies and napping. On Friday, we went to see the play Hiona produced, Nga Tangata Toa, and Matt spin records at a local club.

Ghost Walk

Last night, Margee and I went on the Ghost Walk at the Arts Centre. It's housed in the old campus of the University of Canterbury. We toured the gothic study halls as our guide regaled us with stories of the university's past. Unfortunately, the history of Christchurch and New Zealand is completely unsordid. We were given battery-powered lanterns to carry as we wandered around the buildings. The actor leading the tour spoke too haughtily and choppily. He included the story of the two girls who killed their mother and whose story is the basis of Heavenly Creatures. I don't think they were connected to the university. There were some nice touches. An accomplice would move a doll to different locations for us to encounter. We'd see the accomplice's face peering from empty rooms. The tour ended weirdly with the guide faking a nosebleed and leaving us alone in the basement. Then nothing happened.

I haven't been in a Halloween mood this fall because, like duh, it's spring here. The days are getting longer and I'm thinking of the beach. Next Wednesday from 6-9 pm PST, the radio show The Roadhouse on KEXP is having its annual Halloween special. You can listen the show over the web and I highly recommend it. The music's scary enough to play in the background as the trick-or-treaters visit. The selection's range from old gospel dirges to modern rock, like Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and The White Stripes. There's nothing freakier than Tom Waits singing What's He Building?

And the final bit on Halloween in this update. On Wednesday, we had another movie night in the math department. We watched On the Beach and Donnie Darko. I've wanted to see Donnie Darko since my last year in LA. I'd occasionally hang out with a group of people trying to break into the movie industry for whom Donnie Darko was the best movie ever made. Actually, they were fairly movie illiterate, if I recall correctly. Complete non sequitur. Why is The Shawshank Redemption number 2 on IMDBs best 250 movies of all time? I guess I'm out of touch or The Wisdom of the Crowds is completely and utterly wrong.

Astrolabe Chardonnay 2005

This week's wine comes from Astrolabe Wines. Again, it was a wine promoted by my wine store and was on sale. It was very good. It has no wood flavors and tasted of strawberries. The berry flavor implies that it was sweet, but it wasn’t. I don't know what foods I'd pair it with. I wouldn't want it for desert, and it probably doesn't go well with fish.

The Pretentious and the Crass

Last Saturday was a study in contrasts. During the day, I toured the SCAPE 2006 installations around Christchurch and at night I went to the stock car races at the Woodford Glen Speedway.

The highfalutin magazines I read, The New Yorker and Wallpaper, claim that the only interesting art show in New Zealand is the SCAPE biennial held in Christchurch. I was excited to see it happen while I was here. I emailed about volunteering but never passed the stage where they asked for my resume. The short of the story was that the art was terrible. For example, we have the first two photos. We see that the artist left the storage shed from his grandmother's house in the middle of downtown Christchurch. Ok. We can go inside and see what the artist has made. Instead of something interesting, like compost pasted to walls and ceiling or gaudy, neon-pink paint or a wax sculpture of Jimmy Hoffa, we get the parallel mirror effect. This was cool when I was 8 and saw it at the AB Jamboree. To generalize from this and other exhibits, 50% of modern art is crap. The artists are more involved with the lifestyle rather than honing their skills. One gets people attaching mirrors to walls when there is no skill. 25% is virtuosic but boring. I find the last 25% enthralling. The Mass MOCA in North Adams, MA always has outstanding exhibits. You never know which group most of the art in the exhibit belongs to and that 's half the fun.

A few grad students and I went to the speedway that night. The Australian grad student went to the races weekly while growing up. I once went to Thunder Road in Barre, VT while I was an undergrad. It's fun. The cars are loud and there are accidents. The street stocks are the craziest. The evening ended with a 30-car demolition derby using cars from the Undy 500. The motor sports club would install 5-way restraints into your undy car if you wanted to participate. First prize was 50 12-packs of beer. Woodford Glen has a dirt track that they watered down and made slick. The Volvo in the pack did very well. Movie crashes are more dramatic than what we witnessed. We're watching On the Beach tonight in the math department because it has an auto race, and stunningly, the Aussie grad student has never heard of it.

The low brow won on this Saturday. Let's see if the high brow can recuperate.

Start of Social Polo

I believe that my first game of summer league is tonight. Today the weather is dark and cloudy with a chance of rain and the people in the league like to cancel. There was a game last Tuesday, but I was away in Palmerston North for the Allan Wilson Centre meeting. We don't have formal teams. We split the players for pick-up games.

I never wrote about the climatic game for fifth place in winter league. We lost 9-3 to Bottoms Up. Oh well. My season's stats were two goals, numerous assists, a crappy save percentage, and one swim. I want to practice shooting because the Boston team needs another scorer. I posted a photo of the Uni's A-grade team in our more natural environment. From left to right, it's James, Mark, Shaun, Sam, Ross, me, and Nick.

The Beginning of the End

I realize that on this blog I rarely talk about my work. It's all about travel and adventures. I've been tying together lots of open ends from my job in the University of Washington Statistics Department. I've written a book chapter for Gene Essentiality: Protocols and Bioinformatics. I submitted a paper about the chapter to a bioinformatics conference in Hong Kong. The paper was rejected which bummed me out. I finished analyzing the bird data in R Bleiweis. (1998) Fossil gap analysis supports early Tertiary origin of trophically diverse avian orders. Geology, 26: 323—326. I am so happy that the last one is done because I spent a lot of time trying to draw conclusions that weren't supported by the data. I wrote a grant for funding next year from the Werner-Gren Institute. Surprisingly, I haven't heard back from them. I'm cleaning up my gene essentiality paper and working on new branching process theory.

But alas, this is the end of my academic career. It hasn't been working out and it's time to move on. Like last fall was the most important time for the work that I'd do in New Zealand, right now is the most important of prepping for a job in the US. In addition to preparation, I'll be traveling. I can't leave any stone unturned. Next week I'll be back in Los Angeles for a friend's 40th birthday. Ray is visiting in late November. Margee is talking about celebrating New Year's in Sydney. My last paycheck is March 8th. This trip is not over by a long shot.

Vino Pino

This week's wine is Vino Pino, a pinot noir made especially for my wine shop, Vino Fino. It was bottled in 2003 somewhere in central Otago. It was very good with chocolate overtones. I think that it will be hard to find it in the US.

Two weeks ago, I went to the International Winemakers Roadshow held at the Grand Chancellor Hotel in the Central City. I was really good but I drank irresponsibly and haven't wanted a drink since. The best two vintners were Seresin Estate and Te Mata Estate. I guess that I won't be subscribing to the magazine Modern Drunkard anytime soon.

I'm trying a new editor for this entry, WriteToMyBlog. Usually I use Word and copy and paste into Blogger. This program hides the HTML tags from me, which I don't like. Call me old school or a writer of too many LaTeX documents. WriteToMyBlog adds an extra space after hyperlinks. I think that I will go back to my copy and paste method. I need to see what the final post will look like before I publish it.

Rafting the Rangitata

On Saturday, Margee and I rafted the Rangitata River with the company Rangitata Rafts. The recreation centre at the university organized the trip. The river had a couple of class V drops. We sat in front because we had experience from doing a trip on the Concord River. The first photo is of the Concord. Maybe, we lied a little about how well we could paddle. The trip went by without incident and was almost sedate. Only one person in our boat swam while we were surfing a wave and I was able to pull her back in.

Riding on the bus back to Christchurch, I thought a lot about a rafting trip I did 20 years ago. One of the three readers of this blog went with me. I hadn't thought about that trip in ages and I was surprised how much I remembered. Our final river back then was the New River Gorge that also had two class V rapids. The rapids on the Rangitata weren't as scary. On the New, I remember hitting a wave on one class V rapid that sent our raft completely vertical. Also, I almost fell out on the other class V rapid.
On another river back then, the Youghiogheny River, the rafting companies would send out scores of boats and none had a guide. It was absolute carnage through the rapids, as many rafts would flip. The guides would stand on the shore and throw ropes to the swimmers. People are much more concerned about safety these days.