The Southwest, part 2

This leg of the trip was highlighted by the Grand Canyon, although Williams AZ was an awesome morning, and although Santa Fe started weird and slow, we had a great evening there as well.

On with the photos!

Early morning reflection.

As mentioned previously, Williams was our first exposure to old Route 66, so we kinda went camera and shop crazy. The town is really small, but we must have spent an hour just walking around...









I was really tempted. I figure that just goes on the 'to make' list.




Off in the car again. The Grand Canyon is about an hour north of Williams (vs. about 1.5 hours outside of Flagstaff). Although Flagstaff is nice, Williams seems to be the better bet on places to stay within striking distance of the Canyon.


Just sleeping. He wasn't there on our way back.


Now at the GC, there was tonnes of snow, and very little tourists. It really did seem to be the perfect time to visit.




The snow really helps with the depth definition.





We really got some great shots of the Canyon just walking around... if you find yourself near the South Rim of the Canyon, drive.walk.bike up the steep entrance to El Tovar hotel (Einstein once stayed there!), as suggested to us by a friendly lady as we were U-turning onto a one way street near the community centre there. Once there, access to the GC is unfenced, direct and spacious, and the contours in this particular spot are great as well.



Not the best shot. In Williams one could hop on the Grand Canyon Railway and 2.5 undoubtedly scenic hours later would be dropped off steps from the advertised. It really is a full day trip, there and back, and thought it better to leave that for a second visit.


There were no bikes on the road, but signs were everywhere and ready for the spring.


After spending about an 1. 5 hours just walking, talking and taking pictures, we decided to at least try to take a helicopter ride over the giant hole.

Adam dove into the airport, and found that just down the street Papillon offered 30 minute flights for $150 each. Since I've never been in a helicopter (and Adam only once before), we thought this would be the perfect opportunity. Also, it was taking off in like 5 minutes.


We sat with a couple of others, and window access was full. There was unfortunately no "Danger Zone" played over the headsets, although Adam commented that it did sound like it was about to come on at one point. We just sang it a cappella in the car afterward. No, seriously, we were jacked.




We got lucky with the low hanging clouds, and with the weather in general. These small pictures don't really do the size of the Canyon justice, but you could figure that.

I could bore you with about 50 more of these, but I figure I'd have to sedate you with booze first. In saying that, plans can be arranged.
.





Once landed, Adam was told to take off.

It was a great experience. There is some video archived as well, but I'll save that for another time...

The Grand Canyon was pretty awesome, and a one night Las Vegas / one night Grand Canyon getaway would be very much be worth it (and relatively cheap), especially if you've never been. It is something that you need to experience with someone else, and sharing that gaping hole with Adam was unique, and something very special to me.

So, back on the road now, and looking to head to Santa Fe before it gets too late.


The round trip from Williams to the Grand Canyon to Santa Fe is about 530 miles.

For lunch, we stopped at Charly's in the lovely Weatherford Hotel, Flagstaff, AZ.




err... different hotel.


Flagstaff, where they will tow your dog.


Cholla Power Plant. Absolutely disgusting, and can be seen for approximately 50 miles around. Located on the man-made Cholla Lake, which slightly bubbles as it cools the refuse from the power generator.


View Larger Map
I figure that big black spot over the power plant is the smoke. Apparently none of the power generated here stays in Arizona; it gets sold to California and Oregon. Apparently there are some carbon capture studies being done now at Cholla, but this thing is just plain disgusting.

Well, on to better things. Apparently we're approaching Knife City!



.. and Goodwater. The town with no services.


Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Goodwater, Arizona. You just missed out on owning this no service town. The 600 acre property sold recently for just under $800,000. The headquarters improvements consists of a mobile home, concrete bunkhouse, a large hay/livestock barn, and several out buildings. Telephone and electricity are available to the headquarters site.



Apparently updated just a few days ago, isitconstitutional.com








A rest stop just inside the New Mexico borders. I liked the bench, and didn't like the facilities.

I really can't add to the perfection of this picture.


SO, arrived in Santa Fe; it must have been somewhere around 10 pm. The place looked dead, except for a handful of pockets around the Plaza. Maybe it was just too cold? Above, Adam is about to sample his first chiles rellenos of the trip at the Inn of the Governors' Del Charro Saloon, where the house margarita is cheap, sweet, and plentiful.






Empty Plaza at night; too cold?


I'm sure Santa Fe is a great town with some great culture, but to me, it turned out to be the only disappointing town visited on the trip. Maybe I hyped it too much in my head. Being there for basically 15 hours overnight, it didn't really strike a chord (more pictures are coming from the next day...), but probably didn't get its fair shake either. It would be interesting to go back there in warmer climates, but honestly, it does feel a bit too much like a tourist town for Americans to visit the southwest. We're Canadians. It just never really was going to work out. I think Adam described it as Disneyland's southwest outpost, and I agree.

However, it's not just about the sights, the architecture, or the towns. It's also about the people you meet, and the stories you share. The picture above is us with our favourite Santa Fe bartender, Aaron. Although we had our pick from a few (if you ever go to Evangelo's make sure the bartender is in a good mood(!); that may have stemmed from us being the only ones in the bar), I think what sold us most with Aaron was his easy pours, local Catamount and ex-wife gossip, at 3am.

See part 1 here.

meh.. just four great articles you should read...

They are all great reads, long and short, right in my wheelhouse, and after contemplating taking the credit, I must admit I stole them from Kari's google reader feeder.

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Photographer Loves Math, Graphs Her Images




http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/01/pl_arts_found/ for more pics.

Most of us can’t tell our secant from our cotangent. But the forms are everywhere, and Nikki Graziano wants to help us see them. See more of her Found Functions series at Nikkigraziano.com.

These look ok, but I really like the concept.

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Garry Kasparov writes of artificial intelligence and chess. This is a really transparent article by Garry; his bitterness, his emotion, as well as his intellect really come through. You could almost feel the struggle within from paragraph to paragraph. If you haven't seen the movie, "Game over: Kasparov and the Machine", you should.

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At the outset, this article looks "meh, pedestrian", but keep reading.

In Western films, the gunslinger that draws first always gets shot. This seems like a standard Hollywood trope but it diverted the attention of no less a scientist that Niels Bohr, one of history's greatest physicists. Taking time off from solving the structure of the atom, Bohr suggested that it takes more time to initiate a movement than to react to the same movement. Perversely, the second gunslinger wins because they're responding to their opponent's draw.

...

Bohr's idea, it seems, was correct in theory, but wrong in practice. That didn't stop Bohr himself from testing his hypothesis in experimental duels against fellow physicist George Gamow using toy pistols. According to anecdotal reports, Bohr always reacted and he won every duel, but Welchman has the final word on the matter:

"Our data make it unlikely that these victories can be ascribed to the benefits associated with reaction. Rather, they suggest that Bohr was a crack shot, in addition to being a brilliant physicist."

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And finally, sing me Polish techno.

New York is practically a non-stop music festival, so it makes sense that the city doesn’t host many big-tent events. In ungenerous moments, New Yorkers may even think that nothing passes them by because everyone plays here. Not so—some musicians just don’t care for touring. But a well-curated festival can bring out those artists, and the seven-year-old Polish electronic-music festival Unsound, which comes to New York Feb. 4-14 (starting in and around Lincoln Center), is at least that. Vladislav Delay will offer his gorgeous electric fog, Radian will play its arid version of minimalist rock, and countless others, some rarely seen, will upend machines in search of the perfect beat. There will also be panel discussions with pioneers such as the seventy-six-year-old Morton Subotnick, one of the first musicians to work with modular synthesizers. You’ll have to admit that the Poles got this one right. Eleven days is a lot of synergy, and it seems unlikely that you will be standing in mud at any point.

From the New Yorker.

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Now, the point of this post? So I could play you all this:

Rabindranath Tagore

"Depth of friendship does not depend on length of acquaintance."

I agree with the quote; at least my experiences really show that. There is a undoubtedly a stronger connection with certain people; regardless of time. There is more to "taming" than time. There is also that distance aspect.

I thought this quote worked well in with "The Little Prince" post below. I stole the Tagore quote from my friend Sandra's facebook status, and although I didn't know anything about Rabindranath Tagore then, I know at least a little now.


(The guy on the right)

Wikipedia says: As a poet, novelist, musician, and playwright, he reshaped Bengali literature and music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As author of Gitanjali and its "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse",^[1] being the first non-European to win the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature^[2], Tagore was perhaps the most important literary figure of Bengali literature and a mesmerising representative of the Indian culture whose influence and popularity internationally perhaps could only be compared to that of Gandhi whom Tagore named 'Mahatma' out of his deep admiration for him.

Tagore denounced the British Raj and supported independence. His efforts endure in his vast canon and in the institution he founded, Visva-Bharati University. Tagore modernised Bengali art by spurning rigid classical forms. His novels, stories, songs, dance-dramas, and essays spoke to political and personal topics.

Ok, so what does that mean? Well, let's look at his stories...

The four years from 1891 to 1895 are known as Tagore’s "Sadhana" period (named for one of Tagore’s magazines). This period was among Tagore's most fecund, yielding more than half the stories contained in the three-volume Galpaguchchha, which itself is a collection of eighty-four stories. Such stories usually showcase Tagore’s reflections upon his surroundings, on modern and fashionable ideas, and on interesting mind puzzles (which Tagore was fond of testing his intellect with). Tagore typically associated his earliest stories (such as those of the "Sadhana" period) with an exuberance of vitality and spontaneity; these characteristics were intimately connected with Tagore’s life in the common villages of, among others, Patisar, Shajadpur, and Shilaida while managing the Tagore family’s vast landholdings.

Download the Sadhana period audiobook here, and buy the book here.

Also, while looking for a picture of him, I stumbled upon someone else who had stumbled upon this:

JULY 14, 1930 ON THE NATURE OF REALITY

[Excepted from - "Einstein and Tagore Plumb the truth : Scientist and Poet Exchange Thoughts on the possibility of its Existence without relation to Humanity" by Dmitri Marianoff, published in NewYork Times, August 10, 1930]


TAGORE: You have been busy, hunting down with mathematics, the two ancient entities, time and space, while I have been lecturing in this country on the eternal world of man, the universe of reality.
EINSTEIN: Do you believe in the divine isolated from the world?
TAGORE: Not isolated. The infinite personality of man comprehends the universe. There cannot be anything that cannot be subsumed by the human personality, and this proves that the truth of the universe is human truth.
EINSTEIN: There are two different conceptions about the nature of the universe – the world as a unity dependent on humanity, and the world as reality independent of the human factor.

Smell the quantum physics? Shit yes(!), this does go on...

Science is concerned with that which is not confined to individuals; it is the impersonal human world of truths. Guess who said that.

EINSTEIN: Truth, then, or beauty, is not independent of man?
TAGORE: No, I do not say so.
EINSTEIN: If there were no human beings any more, the Apollo Belvedere no longer would be beautiful?
TAGORE: No!
EINSTEIN: I agree with this conception of beauty, but not with regard to truth.
TAGORE: Why not? Truth is realized through men.
EINSTEIN: I cannot prove my conception is right, but that is my religion.

Einstein kinda found that he ended up proving himself wrong... he just never really believed it and never was able to picture it. ... "Himself one of the founders of quantum theory, disliked this loss of determinism in measurement (this dislike is the source of his famous quote, "God does not play dice with the universe.")." (wiki)

ok.. go read it yourself.. I'll stop quoting here... it really is great.


--


ok, maybe one more snippet to tie things back up neatly to The Little Prince.

TAGORE: Once I asked an English musician to analyze for me some classical music, and explain to me what elements make for the beauty of the piece.
EINSTEIN: The difficulty is that the really good music, whether of the East or of the West, cannot be analyzed.
TAGORE: Yes, and what deeply affects the hearer is beyond himself.
EINSTEIN: The same uncertainty will always be there about everything fundamental in our experience, in our reaction to art, whether in Europe or in Asia. Even the red flower I see before me on your table may not be the same to you and me.



It really all ties in with perception and how and why it's formed; what jumps out at you, and what you jump out to.

The Little Prince

Inspired by a great post from Angela, I wanted to look up The Little Prince. I've never read it, and actually, never even heard of it before. So, impatiently, yet somewhat fittingly - I was thinking of going out tonight to see if I could get a hard copy of the book somewhere but I'm a hothead who's starting to learn to trust his intuition more- I decided that reading it on the net would be a good warm up, to see if I liked it. Sorta like music I guess...

As discussed with Adam on the road trip (and previously elsewhere), there is certainly something to the randomness of songs on the satellite radio, or the ability to hold an album in you hands, vs. the mp3 internet download thing. As a kid, I remember buying albums based on one or two songs and I'm sure others did too. I don't do that anymore, but it did seem to make a lot of those albums classics as one had really invested in them; you damn well were going to listen to them, and moreover be influenced to like them because of the investment.

There's almost a stop and interrupt effect here, isn't there? Remember this: How to make good experiences even more pleasurable (and bad ones even worse) from here? As in, putting in that extra time, pausing, thinking, and listening, really made some of the records just jump out, and others really sound crappier than the crap they were, if possible.

On satellite radio, the randomness of the songs, as well as their short lived existence (i.e. no chance for a repeat) make them special. With a record, you pay an even greater price than time and randomness, but you also now own it. Because of these investment, I think we agreed one really does appreciate it more, both in regards to the satellite and album listenings, as compared to the mp3 variety. Or, at least the opportunity to.

Sorry, that was all a bit more jumbled than it had to be - I hope you get the jist.

And now here's finally the connection to The Little Prince. This is just as the fox and the little prince's appreciation (taming) comes with investment, and the risk of losing to randomness and time.

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The fox gazed at the little prince, for a long time.

"Please-- tame me!" he said.

"I want to, very much," the little prince replied. "But I have not much time. I have friends to discover, and a great many things to understand."

"One only understands the things that one tames," said the fox. "Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any more. If you want a friend, tame me..."

"What must I do, to tame you?" asked the little prince.

"You must be very patient," replied the fox. "First you will sit down at a little distance from me-- like that-- in the grass. I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings. But you will sit a little closer to me, every day..."

The next day the little prince came back.

"It would have been better to come back at the same hour," said the fox. "If, for example, you come at four o'clock in the afternoon, then at three o'clock I shall begin to be happy. I shall feel happier and happier as the hour advances. At four o'clock, I shall already be worrying and jumping about. I shall show you how happy I am! But if you come at just any time, I shall never know at what hour my heart is to be ready to greet you... One must observe the proper rites..."

"What is a rite?" asked the little prince.

"Those also are actions too often neglected," said the fox. "They are what make one day different from other days, one hour from other hours. There is a rite, for example, among my hunters. Every Thursday they dance with the village girls. So Thursday is a wonderful day for me! I can take a walk as far as the vineyards. But if the hunters danced at just any time, every day would be like every other day, and I should never have any vacation at all."

So the little prince tamed the fox. And when the hour of his departure drew near--

"Ah," said the fox, "I shall cry."

"It is your own fault," said the little prince. "I never wished you any sort of harm; but you wanted me to tame you..."

"Yes, that is so," said the fox.

"But now you are going to cry!" said the little prince.

"Yes, that is so," said the fox.

"Then it has done you no good at all!"

"It has done me good," said the fox, "because of the color of the wheat fields." And then he added:

"Go and look again at the roses. You will understand now that yours is unique in all the world. Then come back to say goodbye to me, and I will make you a present of a secret."

The little prince went away, to look again at the roses.

"You are not at all like my rose," he said. "As yet you are nothing. No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one. You are like my fox when I first knew him. He was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world."

And the roses were very much embarrassed.

"You are beautiful, but you are empty," he went on. "One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you-- the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or ever sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose.

And he went back to meet the fox.

"Goodbye," he said.

"Goodbye," said the fox. "And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."

"What is essential is invisible to the eye," the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.

"It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important."

"It is the time I have wasted for my rose--" said the little prince, so that he would be sure to remember.

"Men have forgotten this truth," said the fox. "But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose..."

"I am responsible for my rose," the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.

---

This is something really, really gorgeous. There is just so much in that short piece of text. This kind of book demands more time. The quote above (I can't integrate it into verse like Angela has...) was taken from here, and is only half of chapter 21. The children's book has 27 chapters, and such wonderful lessons.

What a great gift (to have been given and to give).

If you really want to read it online (hey, I did my first time), here's a cleaner, easier to read version than the one above.

Here's a little on the author's motivation and history. Actually, let's keep this simple and provide a link to Wikipedia. There are some interesting parallels within the author's life and the child's book... ;)

Ummm...

Why doesn't everyone use one of these?



When you’re in a hurry to wash a few items, this washing machine easily solves the problem of having to wait around for your electric or gas washing machine to complete a full load of laundry or feel bad about only washing a few items at a time.

Made of plastic with no mechanical parts, the hand powered washing machine comes assembled. Just attach the handle and go! It can last a lifetime and requires no maintenance.

This small washing machine uses less water and powder detergent per load of laundry. The washing cycle is also extremely fast (from 10 seconds to 2 minutes) saving you an extraordinary amount of time.

If you work in the yard or outside frequently and don’t like to put your really dirty clothes in the wash with your other clothes, this washing machine allows you to easily separate them and get them thoroughly clean without staining other clothes.

http://www.cleanairgardening.com/portable-washing-machine.html

Am I missing something? Faster, cheaper, better for the environment... Maybe the clothes don't come out as clean? I find that hard to believe; just spin it a bit longer, no?

Am I insane, or does this just make too much sense?! Why blow a whole weekend day when you can intermittently do what you need to do at home, when you want to do it? I dunno... I'm gonna try it and report back in a bit..

Binding books

http://www.themillions.com/2010/02/deckle-edge-in-the-age-of-mechanical-reproduction.html

The deckle edge dates back to a time when you used to need a knife to read a book... The printing happened on large sheets of paper which were then folded into rectangles the size of the finished pages and bound. The reader then sliced open the folds.

This volume’s pages are uncut: a first obstacle opposing your impatience (or another reason to hesitate?!). Armed with a good paper knife, you prepare to penetrate its secrets. With a determined slash you cut your way between the title page and the beginning of the first chapter.

I've never seen one of these books and really wasn't sure if they existed. This article, in addition to being timely, also reminded me of the library scene in The Great Gatsby.

From here: Gatsby's library is an inside view of the background of his intellect. At one of Gatsby's great parties, Nick enters Gatsby's library and converses with some other guests. One man in particular is infinitely impressed with the fact that all of the books in Gatsby's library are real. The pages in the books are not even cut; they are in the same condition as when he bought them. Those books have never been opened or read. Fitzgerald shows that Gatsby has all this knowledge at his disposal, yet does not use it, remaining in his ignorant state of complacency. Fitzgerald uses Gatsby's complacency to reflect the same sense of self-satisfaction shared by the generation of the times.

Need to memorize something?

Here's some software that'll help you.

If it's a long passage (speech, poems, verse, etc...), try this: http://www.memorizenow.com/

If it's rote stuff where flash cards would be handy (State capitals, 2-letter scrabble words, days of the week, etc...), the best program out there seems to be Anki. The software seems to be originally designed for vocab, but the flash card design, a form of Hermann Ebbinghaus' effective coding techniques, and sharing and uploading with networks (or phones!) makes this a simple and accessible program for long term retention.

My new favourite blog

Barking up the wrong tree blog just asks really cool questions and then presents evidence toward an answer. Simple as that. Also, the answers usually have some research paper backing, so there's at least some credibility to them, theoretically.

For example:

How important is physical attractiveness to a happy marriage?

Physical appearance plays a crucial role in shaping new relationships, but does it continue to affect established relationships, such as marriage? In the current study, the authors examined how observer ratings of each spouse's facial attractiveness and the difference between those ratings were associated with (a) observations of social support behavior and (b) reports of marital satisfaction. In contrast to the robust and almost universally positive effects of levels of attractiveness on new relationships, the only association between levels of attractiveness and the outcomes of these marriages was that attractive husbands were less satisfied. Further, in contrast to the importance of matched attractiveness to new relationships, similarity in attractiveness was unrelated to spouses' satisfaction and behavior. Instead, the relative difference between partners' levels of attractiveness appeared to be most important in predicting marital behavior, such that both spouses behaved more positively in relationships in which wives were more attractive than their husbands, but they behaved more negatively in relationships in which husbands were more attractive than their wives. These results highlight the importance of dyadic examinations of the effects of spouses' qualities on their marriages. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved)

Source: Beyond initial attraction: Physical attractiveness in newlywed marriage. By McNulty, James K.; Neff, Lisa A.; Karney, Benjamin R. Journal of Family Psychology. Vol 22(1), Feb 2008, 135-143.

Here are other good recent ones:

Yes, even Grandma had premarital sex:

Does feeling like a victim make you selfish?

Can living like you're young prevent aging?

How to make good experiences even more pleasurable (and bad ones even worse)? Hint? Interruption... just stop for a second and think. Refocusing on the task at hand really does the trick!

A silly trick I use all the time to remember the moment forever in and out of the moment. Thoughts, feelings, things left unsaid.

The Southwest, part 1

Playing with the idea for a year or so, Adam and I finally took the plunge and flew out to Vegas... only to drive to New Orleans, and back again.

Scheduled to take place over roughly 10 days, we stayed two nights in Las Vegas to kick off the festivities.


Milan booked us into the Mandalay there, conveniently right next to the airport..


Vegas is great, but these days, how much more than two nights does one need. In fact, if Milan wasn't there we'd surely be on the road after one night.



The building above look familiar? Libeskind strikes again.


I call this: Milan, looking sketchy on a cell phone. What a great dude.

We were then off on our first leg: Las Vegas, NV to Williams, AZ.

Approximately 216 miles, or 348 kms. A relatively easy early drive.

Speaking of sketchy, our Hyundai Sonata did not have plates for the duration of the trip. We had a 30 day temporary permit lacquered on our front windshield, and a Budget dude telling us "yeah, that's how it's supposed to be." While we were nervous this could cause some issues in Texas, it turned out that this isn't that far out of the norm down there...


First stop, El Pollo Loco.

Adam sent me this tidbit: Apparently Pollo Loco started in Mexico, and still has ambitions to conquer KFC. But I think this is the best part of its Wikipedia entry: The chain's most recent marketing efforts, featuring a Mexican playing a character named El Caliente (Spanish for 'The Hot One') (played by Matt Cedeño), have drawn fire from Chicano advocacy groups who claim that the ads depict a stereotypical view of Latinos. Generally, however, El Caliente is seen as less offensive than previous Latino mascots, such as the Frito Bandito.

The meal was judged unanimously delicious. Honestly, it wasn't that bad at all.

For reference, it is here:

View Larger Map
It, ummm, obviously hadn't been built yet at the time of this photo, but when you see an A&W and a KFC, you'll know you're about to have a better meal than both of those.

For more pointless information about El Pollo Loco, please visit, as I just have, www.elpolloloco.com.


Now, only about 40 miles outside Las Vegas was the Hoover dam!

Or, more specifically in this photo, the bridge above, The Hoover Dam Bypass, for those with too many dams in their lives.

An aerial shot of the project should help make this somewhat sensical:



On the other side of the dam we entered Arizona.








Take a look down...

Btw, doesn't the picture with Adam look so much better than the picture of the bridge and dam alone? Now, obvious the additional subject matter helps - hell, those shots from a $20/hour Hotel 6 bed in Amarillo look phenomenal - but, a photo with a person in it adds context and greater expression. I love taking photos of people. Front or back, side, alone, together. Body language, instant freezing of a thought expressed through every ounce of your body with an unlimited time period to read into it. Ugh... I get shivers.

Or, chalk it up to different exposures, angles, and colours. Your call ;)



The actual dam, not being done justice by the shot, and overshadowed by the bypass.






Back on the road...




It wasn't too late as we entered Williams, AZ. With a population of around 3,000 and about an hour from the Grand Canyon, this seemed like the ideal stop as it would be our first feel of old Route 66.

But before that, dinner and sleep, and explore tomorrow.

Hmmm... I'm sure I recognize her from somewhere...*

*The line I wish I thought of here? Before dinner, we decided to hit up the local wax museum where Adam decided to pose with his ex-wife. (Thanks Tyler!)


We get all the way down to Williams AZ and decide to eat at a place called "Pancho McGillicuddy's".

There will be more...

Jowi Taylor speaks tonight

MASS LBP is pleased to announce MASS Talk no. 8 with Jowi Taylor

During his decade-long tenure at CBC Radio, Jowi Taylor was host, writer and co-producer of such notable series as Global-Village, The Wire (winner of a 2006 Peabody Award, and AWESOME), The Nerve (currently re-running Sunday nights on Radio Two, and right up my alley) and Invisible Cities.

Jowi's independent project Six String Nation explores history, geography, identity and the shifting parameters of Canadian culture through the lens not just of music but of one very special guitar.

Please join host MASS LBP and Jowi Taylor in a discussion about what his work has revealed about the nature of Canadian identity.

Direct link to free tickets: http://masstalk8.eventbrite.com/




I've seen Jowi speak before when he released his Six String Nation book, and even shared the pleasure and privilege of a road trip down to NYC with him and his loving woman Sarah. I can guarantee you a special Monday evening here. Print your free ticket from the link above as space is limited, and see you there.