GLOBADOM

But I don’t got that right now. Must work harder.

Here’s a question for you: can you sensibly judge musical taste?

I say no, but after thinking, I’ll go with yes, provided that the Facebook question Mr. Barefoot references is rephrased as “do you think most people would say you have good taste in music?”

Because then you could just poll that person’s friends and create a sorta-scientific meta-analysis of the collective assessment of mutual musical taste.

If you do it right, we won’t all be above average.

A vacation, of course, being that thing from which I am just returned. Well, sorta. I have a few more days off to get over soul lag. Photos will probably pop up in the Flickr stream soon. For now, some notes.

I think three weeks (more or less) was exactly the right amount of time to be on vacation. The basic problem with going from Vancouver to a small cycladic island is that it takes, more or less, 3 days to get there, and 3 days to get back. You can fudge this number a few ways, but there are essentially no direct flights that go YVR to ATH, and the ferry trip from Piraeus (the port of Athens) and Syros takes four hours by the slow ferry, maybe half that by the fast ferry, and I’ve never investigated the option of taking the 30-minutes-or-so flight, which is not daily). With one air connection and one boat connection to cover, your 18-odd hours of travel time will probably feature some layovers.

Syros itself was lovely. I don’t know how much of this will translate for others, though: The Lovely One and I had the incredible advantage of staying at her parents’ recently-built house, which is described by the locals as way out of town. In fact, it is about 15 minutes from the centre of the downtown core. The house is very close to being the most distant dwelling on the island from the main city, and is pretty rural. Our neighbours were the house across the street and 200 metres from the road, the other house 100 metres down the road, and the goats in the field below us. there were maybe two or three more dwellings within sight of the house. That was it. In the right place on our balcony, we could see the Milky Way at night.

The only catch was the Harrowing Road of Death between the house and the town of Ermoupolis, the big town. It was a near-parody of a mountain road: switchbacks, narrow, blind corners, extreme examples of contour-following on hillsides, roadway literally carved from the slope in some cases, with shoulders that alternated between the vertical cliff face and the vertical cliff drop. A few guardrails were thrown in at apparently-randomly-chosen corners, though I couldn’t figure out what distinguished the selected corners from the entirely scary places that didn’t have guardrails.

A Greek island in August is a near thing to paradise. We got lucky in this trip with excellent weather, just a tad milder than the seasonal norms, and mitigated always by the still-very-real local practice of siesta. How real? Most of the things you will want to see or do are going to be closed between mid-day and 1900h. Just go to the beach, or better yet, take advantage of the time to work on a nap, since it’s hot, and you’re going to be up until 0200h, since you started dinner at 2300h, and it takes two hours to eat.

The nearest thing to paradise would probably be the same island in spring or fall. The locals claim the water (there’s maybe 15 major beaches, and as many again minor or hard-to-reach ones) is un-swimmable for about two weeks around New Years. I suspect anyone who has taken a dip in the ocean near Vancouver wouldn’t blink twice at Mediterranean swimming at any time of the year.

We took two day-trips to other islands while we were there. The first was to Paros, where we overpaid heroically to rent the last scooter on the island (mid-August, revolving around the national holiday for the Feast of the Assumption on August 15th, is the high season for Greeks to go on vacation, and they go to the cycladic islands), and had an okay time. This was my second trip to Paros (we visited on our honeymoon seven years ago), and both of us felt we had pretty much done the island. The highlights for new visitors probably come down to seeing Lefkes, and maybe going to our favourite pottery shop, Studio Yria. Two notes on studio Yria: the Lefkes shop is now closed, and be sure that if you ask the way, you’re being directed to the pottery studio near Kostos, not the bed and breakfast on the other side of the island (a mistake that led us on a pleasant diversion in 2000).

Naxos was different. Bigger, greener, more trees, new to both of us, more stuff of archaeological and historic interest (everything from the Naxos portal to an endless array of 6th-to-10th c. Byzantine churches, most still in use today). We liked it, and will probably return the next time.

On both our island trips and at “home” on Syros, we were complete suckers for the brown signs that in Greece direct you to a historic or archaeological site. the guidance is often vague (and seems no better in Greek than English; most road signs were bilingual), and we repeatedly found ourselves following the brown signs then then not finding our destination. On a few occassions, it became apparent that the brown signs led to a location which was very long hike from the last road. Greek footpaths are routinely little more than goat paths. None of this mattered, since the journeys really were as interesting as the destinations: at one point we followed the signs to the end of the road, walked through a semi-abandoned rural village, and never saw our theoretical goal. But on the way back I found an untended apricot tree, picked as many partly-dried apricots as I could, and ate about six or seven before TLO’s wise counsel intervened. Good times!

We rented a small car (Kia Picanto with a 1000cc motor) on Syros, and scooters on our island trips. TLO and I continue to debate the merits of the car. On one hand, it was a very nice car, peppy, air-conditioned, and with plenty of room for a bag or two. On the other hand, parking was so bad in Ermopoulis that by the end of our stay we found ourselves avoiding trips downtown, which was a shame. Parking would not have been an issue for a scooter, and we continue to debate whether the Harrowing Road of Death would have been less scary on the scooter (because I could drive further from the edge of the cliff) or more scary (because, well, it’s a scooter). On the gripping hand, I accepted the gift of a bicycle from one family friend, and returning to the house on a scooter might have been rather interesting.

Amusingly, the cars (including rentals) in Greece are almost universally manuals, while the two scooters we rented both featured CVT automatics (as is typical). Greek driving was characterized by a bit of loonyness, surprisingly little horn-honking, and an awareness of the very tight margins involved. You have to be aware that your car and the oncoming car will frequently just fit through the roadway, or maybe require taking turns through the narrow bit, and if there’s a foot on either side of your car, it may soon be filled by a scooter or motorcycle. Our road travel was largely uneventful.

Ferry travel in Greece ranges from amusing to annoying. I’d suggest that if you take the Blue Star Ithaki (the main near-Cyclades car ferry from Piraeus), especially during the high season, that you seriously consider the few extra Euros for reserved seats, which are comfy and will save you the stress of finding what you can. TLO and I had relatively little trouble sitting on either leg of our trip to Syros, but it was a near thing. The boats we took to Naxos and Paros were a mixed bag: the Flyingcat 3 to Paros was a hot-rod turbine-powered catamaran, capable of 60 knots, making trips half as long as on the slow ferries. Internally, it was all reserved seats but not very inspiring. I loved the bilingual house magazine, Pelagos, for its surreal musician interviews.

Our other two boats were Nel Lines’ Panagia Thessalene (looks like a slow ferry, but was nearly as fast as the Flyingcat; reserved seats, and generally a nice boat), and the Panagia somethingelse, which was a very slow ferry indeed, and arrived late to boot.

For air travel, we used Quebec-based Air Transat to get as far as Amsterdam (Schipol) and for the return, and Olympic Airways to get to Athens and back. Olympic was its usual comic self: in 20 years they have updated their planes, and have acceptably comfortable cabins, but there was always a slight sense that the logistics were about to go horribly wrong. I can’t recommend them as a carrier of choice, but it’s clearly not an avoid-at-all-costs situation. the new Athens airport, freshly built for the last Olympics, manages to be nearly as dreary and shabby-looking as the old airport, which itself was a very dreary and shabby-looking place.

Schipol, by contrast, is one of the nicer international airports on the planet, although buying food may bankrupt you (did our two sandwiches and medium pop really just cost $20?). On the other hand, the branch location of the Rijksmuseum located inside the security zone is an oasis, and admission is free. An art lover could make a case for a brief layover in Schipol just to check out the current exhibit (though if you were really that serious, surely one would make it a day, and carry on to the full museum in town?)

Air Transat was the most confusing. The food was reasonable, the service was courteous and competent, the seats were leather, and I absolutely cannot recommend them to anyone over 5’6″. I am that height, and my knees nearly touched the seat in front of me. Seat pitch must be one of the shortest in the industry, and I don’t know how tall people would even physically fit into the space provided. Even so, I managed to get several hours of sleep on both of their flights.

But on the other hand, I can’t complain about the experience of air travel. The security checks are tedious (though the staffers at all the posts we went through seem to have their act together these days; people passed through the checks fairly quickly, and the Athenian security guard who gave me a hand-pat was courteous and had a gentle touch :).

As for the actual experience of being in a bunch of Airbuses for so many hours, well of course it’s tedious and unpleasant. To make the economics work (and please point me to an airline with a really nice ROI; there’s a few cheap-jet carriers making a steady living, and that’s about it), Transat puts 351 coach seats in an A330. A non-tedious, pleasant option is also available, in the form of 12 club-class seats up front (more room, nice food, be wary of the last row of seats in Club, which don’t fully recline), and it is priced accordingly, which is to say I gladly accepted the option of being crammed in the Ambulatory Cargo hold in exchange for being able to afford my vacation. It’s ten hours of mild discomfort in exchange for several hundred dollars.

So in conclusion, I highly recommend my vacation, and if you ever have the opportunity of taking it, I recommend the experience.

A few days in, and Syros is still paradise. Instead of getting all the cuisines of the world, you get one cuisine, and the world’s best watermelon. Instead of a thousand options at night, you get maybe a dozen, but I personally recommend the one where you listen to the crickets and the goat-bells from your balcony, and those are the only two sounds you can hear. Then lie back on the balcony, and look up at the brightest, starriest sky you’ll see this side of a very serious camping trip.

The road of harrowing near-death experiences is still harrowing, but I’m beginning to enjoy driving it. The Lovely One says it’s so scary that if she had seen the road beforehand, she would have told her dad not to build the house where he did. The drive takes about fifteen minutes from our place to downtown Ermoupoli, by the way.

We have been to two beaches in three days. The swimming and sunning are first-rate. My obsessive desire for a bicycle is annoying my bride and baffling my uncle. I have found an ad for one candidate, a cheap-looking Puch 5-speed that, if inexpensive, will work. But cottered cranks! Possibly steel rims! And the only bike shop in town doesn’t even have clipless pedals for sale (fortunately, I bought a set in Athens. Better would have been remembering to bring my own set, as I had planned…).

We went to the movies Wednesday night with our young cousin, Vasya. She is very fluent, speaking with only a slight accent (the phonemes in Greek and English seem to be so similar that there is little trouble in pronouncing the language, and that goes either way, for native English speakers trying to speak Greek, and vice versa) and few stumbles. It was an outdoor theatre, showing Ocean’s 13, and I had the obligatory Canadian-goes-to-Europe, has-beer-in-an-unusual-location experience there. It helped the film along nicely.

This trip has filled me with two emotions: a deep desire, once again, to get my affairs in order so I can move here for a long-term stay, and a fair bit of shame that I spent so little time working on my Greek language skills before the trip. TLO worked very hard for several months before we left, and the effort has paid great dividends, to the point that I am completely dependent on her for negotiating ordinary transactions. It’s not that most people here can’t get by with a little English, and are generally fluent if they work in any remotely touristy enterprise, but having someone with native language skills helps so much that I simply rely on her in almost every case. My skills are at the point where I get excited when I read a kitchenware catalog and figure out that “anoxidoto” (“ανοξείδωτο”) means “stainless.” Which opens me, of course, to the question of why I am reading a kitchenware catalog, but let’s leave that to the realm of the unexamined.

Best. Vacation. Ever.

So I’m in Greece. The trip here was relatively unpleasant. We traveled through YVR, Schipol in Amsterdam, and after a 1-day layover, on to Athens.

Athens International is notable because they completely replaced the airport shortly before the Olympics: new location, completely new facility. It’s a sadder, cheaper-looking affair than either of the other two, older airports we went through.

We’re staying on the island of Syros, in my in-laws’ newly-constructed place. It’s shockingly beautiful. We look out over the sea from our hilltop vantage, with goats roaming the lower pasture and the hillsides. The food is superb, the weather is nearly perfect (it rained for 15 minutes today, which will probably make the front page of tomorrow’s paper), and in every way you could imagine, the place and the times are ridiculously perfect.

The civilized culture of siesta is one I can really get into!

With a dressed weight of about 30 pounds, almost all of my luggage fits into a single bag, which, had I needed to, I could probably force through as carry-on. The biggest impediment to that is my need to carry things like 350 mL of contact lens fluid, which, thanks to the forces of evil, is not permitted in the passenger cabin.

I devolved into a rule of fives for this trip. five sets of socks, five shirts, five pants. More or less. I think I have six or seven pants if you count things like bicycle shorts.

Inexplicably, I’m bringing four sets of footwear, including two pairs of brown leather shoes, but no runners. And I just realized I’ve forgotten my bike pedals. Darn.

Minor Tweaks: the IKEA DIALOGUES.

Wherein some blogger repeatedly holds conversations with Ikea’s web chat-bot, Anna.

Hint: start at the bottom of the page, with “A conversation with IKEA’s online assistant, Anna” and scroll up through the dialogues.

Nobody filmed ’em better than Frankenheimer.

Regarding car chases, the French Connection, as dramatic as it looked, is not an especially sophisticated chase, technically speaking (though the dramatic element of chasing the “L” with a car is affective and effective). The chase relies on undercranking to speed up the action, and quick cuts to avoid spoiling some fairly modest illusions.

Wikipedia does say that it was filmed without permits or road closures, and thus some of the driving is in the middle of real traffic, which is probably why it could never happen today.

For convincing car chase/race sequences, Frankenheimer’s two great car movies stand out. In Grand Prix, he basically invented the modern rigs for attaching cars to cameras, and in an interview with Speedvision (now Speed Channel) before his death (I think Bruce Dern was the host), he talked about how they were occasionally filming from helicopters flying 15 feet above the cars, something which wouldn’t be possible today.

In Grand Prix, the action is virtually at full speed, and the effect is astounding. See a documentary here.

Also, it’s fun for annoying cinephiles. Cite it as both your favourite Toshiro Mifune movie, and your favourite Yves Montand movie, and watch steam come out of their ears!

Then came Ronin in 1998, which effectively reprises the same filming techniques (sans the helicopters) but with road cars on normal roads. Despite the three decades separating the two films, I think the cars-at-speed scenes of either are only equalled by the other.

Ronin features a pair of car chases, each quite amazing in its own right. The commentary by Frankenheimer on the DVD is pure entertainment, with the director revealing that there was a stunt driver inside the car that gets blown up, among other technical tidbits.

Both movies have essentially slight plots outisde of their action sequences. As with Grand Prix, you can have fun citing this as your favourite Robert DeNiro/Jean Reno/Stellen Skarsgard movie! Or cite either as your favourite Frankenheimer movie, so they can start sputtering “Manchurian Candidate!“

A short review.

I thought the funny thing about the cartoon stand-ups is that while they looked pretty naff in person, they look really good in photos! Something about the flattening effect of photography.

As for the rest, it was…a good try. The fact that the signature Krusty-Os and Buzz Cola were an instant sell-out (along with the pink donuts, and the Radioactive Man comics) diluted the effect a fair bit. But the bizarro slogans (“rich in bunly goodness!”) and the Kwik-E-Mart uniforms were great.

Of the products I saw, the Buzz Cola was a brilliant reproduction of the original, but looks a little cheap when translated into the real world. The Krusty-Os packaging was a work of genius, and I still regret not buying a box. Both were way more convincing than the Squishee cups.

Why? They played it straight. The Buzz Cola can is what it is: a can of Buzz Cola. There’s a subtle “Simpsons Movie” logo tucked above the bar code on the back side of the can.

The Krusty-Os are even better, with their lovely styling and various slogans and ad copy (“the best you can expect from a TV clown.”) It is as if magic hands have plunged into the Simpsonverse and pulled back a consumer product for our delectation.

The Squishee cup is less perfect. I have two versions of the cup, one cardboard and one plastic. Two different Squishee logos, and neither cup can help itself: they both add 7-11 and Slurpee logos to the cups as well, and break Kayfabe (thanks, Colby!) by putting large “Simpsons Movie” logos on the back sides of the cup. The plastic one goes one worse, by actually having a Simpsons character on the cup as well. At the risk of sounding like an idiot [that’s a no-risk proposition! -ed], I’m pretty sure when Bart goes to the Kwik-E-Mart to buy a Squishee, his family members are not emblazoned on the cups.

In short, I have a feeling that had Disney’s Imagineers been on the job, I would have been fully convinced that I was in the Kwik-E-Mart. As it was, I felt like 7-11’s Imagineers did the job, with all that entails.

Don’t get me wrong: I think they went farther than anyone had any right to expect out of a rebadged 7-11. Maybe my expectations were too high.

I know, you’re sick of reading about a telephone that isn’t even available in Canada. Or you have no idea what I’m talking about.

After enjoying a long and pointless conversation with a good friend who is intimately involved with the mobile telephony business (he’s an iPhone skeptic; at one point he sent me a photo of his business partner picking his nose; I think he was doing this to illustrate the camera in his Blackberry Curve…), I finally found the One True Quote regarding der iPhone:

My old phone, one based on Windows Mobile 5.0, had almost every feature the iPhone has – point by point. The differences between the products (like the differences between their desktop cousins) have to do with how functionality is exposed to the user. In this matter, you’ll find that Apple’s product is almost infuriatingly superior.

Hey you kids in school: UI matters.

For some reason, I’m thinking about health care a lot these days (No, I’m fine, thank you for asking: except for needing to lose a few pounds to get to race weight, I’ve never been better).

I was over hanging around Darren Barefoot’s comment on the new film Sicko. This is roughly what I said there:

Nobody wants to say it so much, but as bad as the health care system in the US is (for a minority of its citizens, it should be said, as opposed to the well-covered ones), no country’s medical care system (at least the parts where the US differs substantially from the rest of the world) makes much of a difference.

What separates the developed world life expectancies from undeveloped-world life expectancies is mostly stuff like child immunization, clean drinking water, and effective treatments for diarrhea (ORT, which is pathetically cheap and incredibly effective).

What separates Cuba (and other nations, mostly in the “developing” category) from the US is probably the availability of enough, but not too much food (and not a lot of meat). Thus the average Cuban is on a calorie-restricted but not starvation diet.

The average American or Canadian or European diet? Not so much. Or rather, too much.

Meanwhile, the health care spending makes people healthier in relatively marginal ways: the rare young cancer patient benefits if we can extend their life by 30+ years, but they are rare. We can give you knee surgery and hip replacements, but those don’t make you live longer, they just make you able to play golf at age 60.

Unfortunately, all these marginal treatments are really pricey. As has been noted in the field, the last six months of a patient’s life are often the most expensive, medically speaking. This is because, well, we can’t always be sure they’re going to die, but without medical intervention we’re pretty sure they will.

Then they do, and all we have to show for our dramatic medical intervention is a lot of public health expenses.

Regarding the issue of the value of marginal spending on health care, see this slightly leftish discussion and this rather libertarian discussion. Both lean heavily on a government-supported RAND study that took a sample group of 7700 uninsured Americans, and gave them one of five types of insurance, ranging from free care, to HMO-style care, to a group that had a 95% co-pay with a capped maximum annual out-of-pocket cost (in essence, the subject would have been sheltered from catastrophic medical costs, but would have to pay virtually all of their routine doctor-visit costs).

There was almost no difference in their health outcomes. The free-care group showed a bit better control of hypertension, and had better vision (I suspect this means they kept their eyewear prescriptions up to date). Marginal value of health care and all that.

A serious examination of modern health care systems needs to be clear-eyed about what they can and cannot do for the money.