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I told Mike that I wanted to leave at six AM.  We packed our bags, got into the car, looked at the clock and the clock showed six.  Yeah, bitches.  Driving to Cross Lanes, WV was slower and faster than I thought as Eastern PA received quite a bit of snow but central PA had enough time to clear it allowing us to do 9 MPH above the speed limit as I tend to like.  My biggest fear were deer, not because of limited visibility or difficulty breaking but because by the time we approached West Virginia I went from driving a car covered in salt to driving a salt lick with a gas motor.

Test Dirt: Please do not wash

Mike and I stopped for lunch at a very depressing Hardee’s with some of the fattest pigeons I’ve seen and service staff dropping awesome lines like “He can see the kids again once he shows he can stop drinking for two days”.  Pigeon obesity seems to be defined by simply walking away when someone attempts to kick you rather than flying.

Once we picked up Chris, I had a novel experience: I sat in the back seat and didn’t drive.  I tried such things as lying down, browsing the web on my laptop in a moving vehicle, and my personal favorite, riding with my leg out the window which was invigorating but very chilling:

Look at them gams.

I also got to take pictures of traffic control devices and other novel road phenomenon like “MacCorkle Drive”, and what looked like very angry red light:

ANGRY TRAFFIC LIGHT

We originally sighted these in WV, but they continued in other places.

I had built quite a nice fort out of people’s bags when we approached Cincinnati which was a traffic clusterf#ck that I later learned was unrelated to the snow.  The roads were icy and hills required a bit of weaving to get up and I think stopping distances were measured in light-years.  At one point, Mike approached an intersection slowly but going from 5 MPH to 0 proved difficult as the ABS went nuts.  The car began to fishtail and Mike applied the e-brake, which was exactly the right thing to do but, as we were going 3 MPH, a more effective breaking method would have been to get out of the car, walk in front of it, and push in the other direction.  Me screaming “NOOOOOOOOO” the whole time probably didn’t help and I’ve come to the conclusion that just as we have drivers’ ed, I need to take passengers’ ed.   This course would probably ask you not to do other awesome things I do as a passenger like suddenly touch the driver’s neck and rest my hand on the shifter when I fall asleep.

The rest of the drive to Chicago was uneventful but we noticed that you could make out where you were in Chicago by determining what store was excessively prevalent whether it be barbershops, hair salons, butcher shops, laundromats, or Starbucks.

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I very much enjoy spending time in Chicago with Peter Jerde aka Pants.  He keeps my bullshit detector sharp with about a 50/50 chance of finding an error with something I say or firming its accuracy.  We both keep notes on such items, I via notepad, he via iPhone, and then we regroup at his apartment and attempt to ascertain fact.  Here was my topic list of the form “claim” – “fact status”:

  • An order of magnitude is a factor of 10 – Yip, although an order of magnitude call follow any fixed ratio, in common parlance, it’s a factor of 10.
  • Software patents are protected as alternate implementations of hardware patents – Not any more, once, patents in software were sanctioned as protecting hardware patents (if someone builds something in software that you’ve done in hardware, it’s an infringement) but now direct software patents are possible.
  • Carbon Dioxide gas is shipped liquified – Sometimes, for medical uses, it’s often shipped at low pressure but the standard 350 PSI cylinders are liquid.  Phase diagram.
  • Information stored on the surface of a black hole is done thermally – I blew this one despite giving a reasonable explanation of Hawking radiation and the Holographic Principle.  The information stored on the surface of black hole is temporary and creates deformations in gravity that changes how virtual particles behave near the event horizon which would make the particle properties of something falling into a black hole detectable.

I also did a really crappy job of defining what is meant in physics by “information”.  Four out of four for the truth being between the two positions.

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I wanted to meet Peter Jerde in Chicago for lunch, which turned into a late lunch, which turned into dinner.  Upon entering the greater Chicago area I encountered something I’d largely missed so far on my trek across vast open landscapes and barely tamed wilds: traffic.  It was novel at first, the idea of having a car immediately in front of me that was moving at a speed of less than 10 miles per hour seemed neat.  Maybe I could get out of my car and greet them, see how their driving was going, but as the slowness entered the second hour of moving 7 MPH or less I became…unaffected.  While being passed by a windblown Arby’s bag was disheartening, having driven about 10,000 miles, the context of traffic was a temporary inconvenience that moved my average speed for the entire trip down on the order of a tenth of a mile per hour, I’ll live.

Pants and I met at a Wendy’s where we were both hoodwinked by a savvy salesperson.  We were both asked “medium or large” a false choice as small was also an option but a question to which everyone I heard picked one of these two.  Tricky.  We ate, he showed me his Prius modifications and I shortly thereafter left for Fort Wayne, a 2.5 hour drive.  I was cruising along thinking I’d get to Banks’ house shortly before midnight, the time I’d told him I’d arrive when he shot me a text asking me where I was.  Oh.  Crap.  Prior to 2006, Indiana didn’t observe DST, making it effectively in the Central Time Zone when the rest of the country was under DST.  In 2006, Indiana started observing DST again, a fact I forgot, making me an hour late.  I floored it.  I screamed across towns and Rt. 30 shaving minutes off of my route… until I hit a speed  trap about 3 minutes from Banks’ house, erasing any semblance of a benefit from my speeding.  The ticket was for $181, but again context, a mere 1.5 cents a mile.

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Kyle and I rolled into my driveway at around 8 AM each of us having slept for a few fitful hours.  We calculated the total cost which, even after food, was around $200 per person.  I still felt a bit drowsy and decided to take a nap and leave for work around noon.  I woke up at 3 AM the next day.  I guess I was a bit more tired than I thought.

Next trip, I bring ear plugs and a face mask, even if it has ponies on it.

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My departure from Chicago was like my departure from my host: icy.  Peter made the outrageous claim that seasons I & II of Star Trek: The Next Generation where the best.  I recognize I’m sometimes viewed as an iconoclast for my love of DS9 but claiming that the repurposed tripe that was the detritus of Star Trek: Phase II represented the pinnacle of writing in Trekdom is heresy bordering on treason.   Were I not so tired, that claim could have sent me into a paroxysmal rage that would have taken out a 1/3 of Team Interobang’s SAs.

I had a chance to calm down later and Kyle and I proceeded to FermiLab… which was closed.  I’d registered for a presentation there but was waitlisted by a school group.  We drove about the complex a bit including driving down some sort of access road where pi-shaped power supports stretched to infinity.

I pulled that from Flickr but the area around was blanketed in snow.  The site’s pristine status as a well maintained but forgotten site was reinforced by 1960s industrial design coupled with a emptiness that I’ve only seen in the works of De Chirico.

I regret not being a bit more ballsy in exploring the site as I’m sure they get their fare share of curious nerds.  This was the place that discovered the bottom Omega baryon on a continuously diminishing budget and is a testament to America’s dedication to being on the frontier of discovery0, and they have the bison to prove it.

We drove homeward and due to the vicissitudes of Garmin’s pathfinding our path jumped from I-94 to Rt 30; the way I’d gone out and back to Chicago on my previous visit.  Kyle found its barrenness as enchanting as I did but this time we had the additional dampener of uniform snow.  Stopping in Fort Wayne to take up someone on an offer of pizza provided a change of company and temperament that was refreshing.  The combination of brick oven pizza and Caesar salad purged me of Chicago’s taste in more than a figurative sense.  I used our temporary host’s bathroom and was able to clog it with droppings no larger than Vienna sausages.   I asked for a plunger and received the quizzical response I often get from people whose bowel functions make clogged toilets more of a theoretical concern than a fact of reality.  I’ve gotten quite good at the art of the silent plunge and the issue was quickly put down the drain… or toilet trap.

The final stretch back included a stop over at which Kyle first lived.  I’m glad we were fully stopped as he was hit by waves of mental calibration as his internal image of his old house was reconciled with reality.  I was lucky; my old home was replaced by the fruit section of a Superfresh before I encountered such cognitive dissonance.  The rest of the turnpike welcomed us home in the manner it often does: with just enough hill to trigger a gear change using cruise control but not enough to complete the upshift.  I missed you, Pennsylvania.

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Feasterville has always been to me the Noah’s Ark of fast-food.  Covering more ground has showed me that my region of PA is losing the strip mall arms race as Columbus held both a Little Caesar’s and a Donato’s Pizza, serving as a Land of the Lost of dead chains.

The Bounty

The Bounty

Additionally, I test drove a Steak ‘n’ Shake, which succumbs to the burger counterlogic of proclaiming “100% ground <cut of choice>”.  Good hamburgers come from a combination of meats in much the same way that a good salad includes many vegetables.  “100% pure romaine lettuce” may be nice to some but not I.  Their milkshakes were also questionable, with much larger ice crystals than one should allow:

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This was done with the remarkable macro function of the Canon G9.  Anyway, I was comforted that I hadn’t traveled too far from home when I saw this reminder of tawdry spell-hacking:

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Ah, a baby hanging station.  That’s something that reminds me of home.  As we continued on something that didn’t remind me of home was this:

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Before leaving Chris and Stephen’s I played the gift gnome and hit a jar of baconnaise in their fridge.  The snow effectively ended as we exited Ohio but the damage was done:

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I’ve found that the larger the above image gets the harder it is to directly make out the word “stop”.  I’m actually posting this a week after this was taken and my windows are still much like this.  I buy fuel in New Jersey and never go to car washes so it may be some time until the stars align and I remove the salt.  That’s probably dangerous, but I have principles to maintain.

Indiana at night was as magical as I remember it but this may be partly due to hypnogogic hallucinations.  Kyle was smitten by the landscaping and shortly after stopping near Purdue for some wine for our hosts he asked if we could take pictures of the wind turbines at night and I replied with the tact of the angry parent of an 8-year old who’d been awoken at 6 AM on a Saturday.

Kyle: can we try to get a picture of the wind turbines?
Me: No.  It’s too dark.
Kyle: But they’re illuminated at the top.
Me: The reds’ll saturate and you won’t make out anything.
Kyle: Can we try?  I’m willing to pull over.
Me: I’m not, road vibrations can induce lens shake and wind and such *snore*

I probably should have given it a sporting try as a 30 second exposure can help one cheat out a lot of stuff when coupled with the pixel-peeping power of RAW.

Our last stop before Chicago was again to get fuel at a gas station in Indiana.  I have a special place in my heart for truck-stop hot dogs as the fact that they’re on rocket hot rollers for literally hours made them my default snack on cross-country runs.  Much like the last peanut in a container, the last hot dog is slathered in the juices of its forgotten peers and like wines that develop flavors based on their barrels the hot dog can pick up kielbasa, hot sausage, and beef frank notes based on its former co-rollers.  I got the hot dog, but saw no rolls so asked the counter agent who replied with incredulity at the notion that I’d slander her noble gas station with claims of insufficient hot dog rolls.  After two attendants performed a visual inspection of the hot dog setup to confirm that they were indeed sans buns one of the associates disappeared for a period in excess of 10 minutes before returning with rolls.  I think he walked into the store room, opened the exterior door, ran to the next gas station and stole their hot dog buns.  What did I get for my wait?  I was only charged the medium hot dog price of 89 cents instead of the full 1.19!  While waiting, I did get to check out their keen hat display.

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Actually driving into Chicago proved difficult.  The GPS recommended route was not open so we had to switch back through the Alcelor-Mittal plant to the south of Chicago.  The powerful juxtaposition of old industrial shanty town next to a the precision flare-offs off a cracking made the scene look like satan playing the organ.  The low clouds and snow obscured the fractal detritus that belies the age of industry and the whole scene was out of something by Charles Sheeler.

Classic Landscape by Charles Sheeler

Classic Landscape by Charles Sheeler

For those of you who play TF2, it was very much similar to many of the more industrial maps like cp_well or cp_freight.  We eventually made it to our hosts’ house and set to the task of consuming 4 dozen cookies (spoiler: we ate them all by the time we left).  Pants and I reviewed his discomfort with the notion of an infinite universe and its implications and I drifted to sleep in existential terror.  Just like I like to.

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We departed Banks splendid hospitality Saturday morning and again took Rt. 30 west.  I started the day with a positive portent where I thought myself tricky by grabbing literally a handful of ice to recharge my car cup.  Ice is cold.  We arrived at the zoo at 9:30 and we were quickly met by TheChief/Jim German.

The Cast

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Jim German/TheChief

His children already knew all of us by game name (which was creepy) and also accosted Tardbagel for not going to enough Steelers’ games.  The rest of of the party arrived including the following:

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Peter Jerde/Pants

My first meeting was odd as I was used to seeing him in pictures with more beard.  He was also usually sitting so his 6’3″ness was more…vertical than I anticipated.  He has a perpetual sparkle in his eye requiring “gee golly, mister” to be prepended to all statements of incredulity.

_MG_3309-20090613-Zoo

Clinton Haymen/Jazzysax

I made at least 2000 references during the weekend to Clinton being short.  At a mighty 5’4″ he’s apparently tall in his family although I was perpetually afraid of backing up suddenly and crushing him.  He has an asymmetrical face which makes him look like he’s been pulled from a Picasso painting or was hit with a 2×4 during his formative years.

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Mike Weber/VirginBride

He has cuffed jeans.  I also correctly guessed he had granite countertops.  I don’t know why, I just saw him as having granite countertops.  I was partly expecting him to meet us at his door in a velvet bathrobe and direct us to his leopard print couch.  He took public transit home so I had no opportunity to verify this image.  After meeting him, I’m glad I had no such occasion.

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Will Gattis/FlamedDemon

I have better portraits of Will elsewhere in the Flickr feed but thought this summed up much his time at the zoo.  He’s a chronic texter on his iPhone in the way I’m a chronic searcher on my iPhone.  The faux-hawk with red highlights was excessive in my opinion but I’m told this is a method among his people to court someone during the Illinois mating season.

/OnaZ”]IMG_1146-20090613-ZooDespite having the “Douchebag” appogiatora added to his forum account, the fact that he apologized for being in the way of a 5 year-old charging through a display dispelled that.  He’s training to be a piano tuner which I think is getting to him as per his shock of gray hair.  During the day after getting bored at one point he yelled for us to “change the map”.  Oh, topical humor.

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Lea Dekker/littlekitty

This isn’t the most representative picture of Lea I have but the others made her either look fat or like she was about to eat someone so I thought this was a nice compromise.  Lea’s education has proven… lacking in some areas which I documented throughout the weekend.

List of Things to Which Lea Claimed Ignorance

  • Beaver as synonym for vagina
  • Cornbread
  • John Stewart and Stephen Colbert
  • Exit Only as a statement of opposition to anal sex
  • What a “b-boy” is
  • Mr. T
  • Porn on DVD
  • Understatement
  • Chuck Norris (added 30 Jun 09)
  • Religion of the Pope (added 30 Jun 09)

This is not mocking her ignorances merely that it was an interesting collection.  Most people would fake knowledge, Lea refuses to, which I think is to be valued.  The last note “understatement” requires a bit of explanation.

Peter: Bluthium thinks we harsh on hackers too much.
Me: I think that’s a spot of an understatement.  We exterminate them with extreme prejudice.
Lea: Well, what’s wrong with “harsh”?
Me: I don’t think “harshing” is strong enough.  That’s like saying the Nazi’s “harshed” on the Jews, Roma, and gays.
Lea: But they did.

The Meerkats

The best portion of the zoo trip was the meerkat pen where Peter and I proved extremely popular with the lil’ bastards.

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Turns out they really liked my camera/monopod combination, to the point where spent about 30 minutes staring at them staring at us.  We were eventually yelled at by a park docent for scaring them despite doing nothing besides standing and staring at them staring at us for about 30 minutes.

We took a constitutional on the false promise of coffee.  The bathroom had a profoundly powerful (I say diesel powered) hand dryer which may have served as inspiration for the pyro’s compression blast.

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Will approved.

The search for coffee involved an 8-block walk to get sufficient caffeine to have the energy to walk 8 blocks back.  Caribou coffee appeared to be more descriminatory than Starbucks or my more familiar kitchen coffee pot as none of carried sufficient Apple products to sit inside.  I could have walked back to my car to grab my iPod and iPhone thinking that’d be effectively a MacBook Air but decided against it.

We had dinner at a restaurant that found a way to hid an entire tossed salad into the hamburger.  The ribs blew and I left a measly 28% tip.  Tard and I returned to Pants’ appartment where Tard fell asleep.  I learned a vital lesson: Pants can hold his liquor like a f*ing champ.  Peter and Audrey make their own soda to avoid the 10% Chicago “pop tax” and over the evening he downed two 1-liter bottles of grapefruit soda.  Except instead of using water as his base he used vodka.  The only indication that there was a trace of blood in his alcohol level was when I challenged his sobriety and he said “my sleech doesn’t splur”.   I met Ivan, his 16 lb cat who sports a crappy Russian accent in which he largely says “I am sooo fat”.  I really wish I had a recording.

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This weekend was dedicated to the craziest thing doable these days short of drinking from a microwaved Nalgene bottle: Meeting people in a strange town that you met on the Internet.  Team Interrobang is a little shy of 16 months old and we decided to have a meetup at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo with the plan that Friday evening would be spent staying over at Banks’ (Chad Bedwell).  I picked up Tardbagel (Jeremy Churchill) on or about 2:30 at the 5 1/2 hour to Ft Wayne began.

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Tard, stunned with joy.

I’ve never considered PA particularly exciting driving-wise except for some stretches over the Appalachians and around Pittsburg.  I learned a new type of boring driving through Ohio.  If you want to recreate the experience we had, I strongly recommend you stare at the following images in fullscreen while making snarky comments about people and feeding dollars into a papershredder to simulate the burning of gas.

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Boring #1

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Boring #2

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Boring #3

I wanted to get a quality shot in Ohio of us at an intersection showing both roads going into infinity but I didn’t want to agitate the case of deep vein thrombosis that was building up after sitting on my duff for roughly 10 hours.

The roads weren’t just boring, but an epic, periodic kind of boredom.  Even in the spartan areas of PA houses exist in clusters of 3-7 even in the boonies but Ohio went house with small backyard surrounded by hundreds of hectares of nothing followed by another house surrounded by hundreds of hectares of nothing.

There was a brief moment of farce when we asked the GPS for the nearest fuel and we were directed to a “Sunoco” that was actually an abandoned rail station surrounded by sorghum fields.  On the way we passed a sign for “Jim’s Custom Meats” which depicted a pig giving the “a-okay” sign.  This was preceded by a 30 mile stretch where the GPS was convinced Rt 30 was 50 yards to our right.  The half hour of “off route!  Take next right to route 30.  Make left on route 30. Off route!”  is slightly above “da da da” as things I hate to hear when driving.

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The highlight of the drive in was by far Tard’s slurpee in Ft. Wayne.   This is quickly followed by a close second by the collection of anti-abortion billboards of which my favorite is always “abortion stops a beating heart”.  One had a blank billboard below it on which I wanted to write “except in cases where the fetus has yet to develope to the point where it has cardiac cells or has some congenital developmental defect, but I doubt it would have lasted long.

We met Banks in Ft. Wayne after almost having to pull a General Lee to hit the McDonalds’ parking lot and he took us to “Flanagans” the stereotypical Scotch-Irish cultural island that every city of at least 100K people must have where I ordered the “Flan-jitas” which I pronounced as such with a hard j.  The server attempted to correct me that it was “fÉ™-hÄ“’tÉ™”.  I think a bit of her died inside when I showed her the butchering on the menu.  The Flan-jitas were expensive and I should have gone with the Flan-burger with some Flan-diments.

Back at Banks’ I wind-mill slammed my 70-200 lens into the pavement but that was balanced out by the splendor of seeing the Jimmy Johnson room which contained a lifesized cutout wearing a straw hat and the bumper of his car after a victorious race of some sort.  This abutted his fallout shelter/exercise room which contained enough soup for him and his family to walk to southern Ohio in case of zombie invasion.

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Banks gazing lustfully at Jimmy Stewart

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Just in case

IMG_1100-20090612-Friday at Banks Banks also has a dog, Tootsie Roll, which he rescued.  At some point after doing so, she ate a bag of Tootsie rolls without dying although after 5 years she acted like she was still on a sugar rush from that incident.  In addition to the “Oh, shit” stock Banks basement had a carpetted bathroom.  The room in which I stayed had a shelf of books which I was told were signed, which is interesting as the shelf has a paperback copy of the Iliad.  Even if Homer has been dead for two millenia and may not have existed, I have no doubt Banks could get his signature.

This was the end of day 1.  All photos available below:[flickr album=72157619668029842 num=5 size=Thumbnail]

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  1. The middle seat of a minivan is usually roomier than the front seat if the vehicle was built before 2005.
  2. Ask anyone going on a long trip if the have bowel problems first, if so give them diapers and ban them from approaching soda machines.
  3. Never insult the driver, even if he can’t hear you yell at him to avoid the car in the next lane because he has earbuds in.
  4. Hardee’s makes a great burger, and if it’s your first time, a wonderful solid Draino.
  5. If they have a big collection of cards, they’re probably fat, if they have good points, they’re probably pale, if they refuse to identify themselves, they’re probably that dick from the forums.
  6. Never have the last waffle made before the batter is changed at a motel breakfast bar.
  7. Red Lobster is just nice enough that poor people dress up to go there, like I did as a kid going to the Ground Round.
  8. Love handles block A/C vents.
  9. Driving at 85 but stopping every hour to pee or get gas averages out to above 65.
  10. Chicago has 80 cent tolls.  Yep, you heard me, 80 cent tolls.  I’ve never left a city with more dimes.
  11. Two people who are both light sleepers and snore should not share a room.
  12. Never insult the tournament organizer’s girlfriend.
  13. Never hit on the tournament organizer’s girlfriend.
  14. Never hit the tournament organizer’s girlfriend.
  15. Chicago apparently puts it fountains in bathrooms (broken urinal) while Philly puts them in park squares.
  16. The driver should not be allowed to participate in the time honored game of holding your breath through a tunnel if the tunnel is more than a mile long…. or there’s traffic.

Pictures coming soon.