Double double and a chocolate shake
A few highlights from San Francisco and Berkeley:
*Tilden Regional Park has a road which is closed in the spring for migrating newts, and a parking lot with a beached concrete whale.
*The UC Berkeley geoscience and map library has a beautiful collection of relief maps. They're those plastic sheet maps with bulges and grooves corresponding to mountains and canyons, of the sort you might have seen in your elementary school science classroom. There's also a wooden relief map of Mt. Shasta, in which stacked layers of plywood have been whittled away to show topography, with each layer representing a different elevation range, such that the underlying layers are broad and the ones at the top are narrow; basically, it looks as though it were made of very small Legos.
*The Earthquake Trail at Point Reyes, where the labels claim that the sole area casualty of the 1906 earthquake was a cow which fell in a crevasse; it closed around her, leaving only her tail sticking out.
*If Diane Arbus had decided to make a screwball comedy, it would have looked a lot like the 2003 remake of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
*I watch too many horror films. I guess it's not surprising that one should be nervous in a huge, empty sorority house. People live in bedrooms. That's what they're there for. When you see a house full of empty bedrooms, your mind therefore fills in invisible occupants, and soon the house feels haunted. When you see a staircase out of the corner of your eye, it's only natural to get the feeling that something's going to be coming down it, because that's what staircases are for...and if there are no other living human occupants in the house, then whatever's going to be coming down those stairs must be something weird and unpleasant instead. Even so, if I can't sit in an empty sorority house without hearing someone mutter, "It's me, Billy," and if I get spooked by signs on foggy moutains which read "Gillespie Youth Camp" or "Morgan Horse Farm," it means I watch too much horror. (Extra credit to anyone who got even one of those references.)
*Oh, and the title of this entry refers to In & Out Burger, obviously. First thing I did after leaving the airport was find the In & Out.
*Tilden Regional Park has a road which is closed in the spring for migrating newts, and a parking lot with a beached concrete whale.
*The UC Berkeley geoscience and map library has a beautiful collection of relief maps. They're those plastic sheet maps with bulges and grooves corresponding to mountains and canyons, of the sort you might have seen in your elementary school science classroom. There's also a wooden relief map of Mt. Shasta, in which stacked layers of plywood have been whittled away to show topography, with each layer representing a different elevation range, such that the underlying layers are broad and the ones at the top are narrow; basically, it looks as though it were made of very small Legos.
*The Earthquake Trail at Point Reyes, where the labels claim that the sole area casualty of the 1906 earthquake was a cow which fell in a crevasse; it closed around her, leaving only her tail sticking out.
*If Diane Arbus had decided to make a screwball comedy, it would have looked a lot like the 2003 remake of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
*I watch too many horror films. I guess it's not surprising that one should be nervous in a huge, empty sorority house. People live in bedrooms. That's what they're there for. When you see a house full of empty bedrooms, your mind therefore fills in invisible occupants, and soon the house feels haunted. When you see a staircase out of the corner of your eye, it's only natural to get the feeling that something's going to be coming down it, because that's what staircases are for...and if there are no other living human occupants in the house, then whatever's going to be coming down those stairs must be something weird and unpleasant instead. Even so, if I can't sit in an empty sorority house without hearing someone mutter, "It's me, Billy," and if I get spooked by signs on foggy moutains which read "Gillespie Youth Camp" or "Morgan Horse Farm," it means I watch too much horror. (Extra credit to anyone who got even one of those references.)
*Oh, and the title of this entry refers to In & Out Burger, obviously. First thing I did after leaving the airport was find the In & Out.