the pod bay door

.: Instead of being on the ground in Edmonton, I am in Prior Lake, Minnesota. Explanation: The flight this morning from Baltimore to Minneapolis was delayed almost two hours, apparently because a nail was discovered in one of the tires in the landing gear. We were placed on a different jet, a Boeing 757, which remained parked at the gate for 90 minutes after all the passengers had boarded. The late departure resulted in me missing my connecting flight to Edmonton, leaving me here for another 10 hours. I cannot articulate here how angry I was as this developed. This is the third time in the last four round trips I have taken where I have missed a connecting flight.

I am at my cousin Janet’s house in Prior Lake, a suburb of Mpls. I called her from the airport to tell her what had happened, and that I was essentially stranded at the airport. Janet drove to the Mpls airport and took me back to her house, where she and her husband Steve are celebrating Father’s Day with their two sons, two daughters-in-law, three grandchildren, and Steve’s father and stepmother. We just finished eating burgers and salad, and it is nice to relax and visit with everyone here. Considering the alternative, which was to hang out at the airport for ten hours, this is a much better way to spend the afternoon, which is with family, as Janet said. I owe my cousin Big Time for this – thanks, Janet, for saving the day.

.: I am sitting in a MARC Train railcar at the moment, on the way from Baltimore to Washington DC. When I arrive in DC I will spend the day walking around the area known as The Mall, which includes The Smithsonian, Capital Bldg, White House, Library of Congress, etc. My friend Meghan, from U Minnesota, will meet me at Union Station and hang out with me.

Later on, I’ll grab another train and go to Alexandria VA to visit with Alexia for a couple hours before returning to Baltimore.

Yesterday I went to Johns Hopkins with Mary (at whose home I am staying in Baltimore), and then we drove to Annapolis, where we walked around the US Naval Academy grounds, and had dinner at a restaurant where we dined on an outside table overlooking some Chesapeake Bay marinas while the sun set. In all, a glorious day. Pictures will follow soon.

.: I’m off to Baltimore MD this morning, to attend the Special Libraries Association Conference. Afterwards I’ll be staying with my friend, Mary, and plan to rent a car to drive to Washington DC and perhaps Annapolis, and who knows where else.

.: Hardy Drew and The Nancy Boys played its first gig with the current lineup on Sunday, 28 May 2006, at The Fox in Edmonton. We had a lot of fun, I loosened up as the gig progressed through the selection of fourteen tunes, twelve originals by David Leigh, the drummer and lead singer, and two covers: a lounge version of Whip It, and a noisy interpretation of Surrender. My thanks to Niki West and Angela Pond for taking a number of photos, which have been uploaded to Flickr. This one may be my personal favorite – can the guy still rock out? The bass player, James Wakefield, and I go way back, to 1990-91, when we were members of The Flicks, a seven-member so-called alternative band, and it felt very comfortable to be working with him again. David, James and I had good chemistry on stage, but we were plagued with poor on-stage sound, which we dealt with as best we could.

After a 15-year absence playing this kind of music, I wasn’t sure what to expect, and I was also hung up on personal age issues. In other words, I was concerned about being on stage playing music ostensibly of interest to people less than half my age. In the end, it didn’t matter, and I’ve shelved the imagined ageist issue for good. It was fun to play electric music again, especially with good musicians like David and James. The band gets together tomorrow for another rehearsal, the last one before I go to Baltimore on Saturday. I’m looking forward to learning new tunes and working with David and James on future musical collaborations.

.: Steve sent a link to images from Harrisand, The World Championships of Sand Sculptures, held annually at Harrison Hot Springs, British Columbia. Check the photos of these amazing sand sculptures, the work is outstanding. I wonder how they do it.

.: In a previous post, I raved about the brilliant ABC show, Sons & Daughters, easily the funniest network sitcom I’d seen since Seinfeld, and partially improvised to boot. ABC, in classic fashion, showed great faith in the show by cancelling it after 10 episodes, proving yet again, that network television executives cannot recognize talent and creativity when it is staring them right in their collective faces. Scheduling the show opposite American Idyll didn’t help the cause either. I haven’t felt this passionate about a television show being yanked before its time since ABC tanked the equally brilliant My So-Called Life.

A petition to bring the show back to ABC is online and I’d encourage you to sign it.

Fred Goss, the co-creator, Executive Producer, Writer & Director of the show, is on MySpace and YouTube, and posted two short videos that are worth watching. Fred writes, “This is the presentation I used to sell a pilot to NBC last year. It also led to the sale of Sons & Daughters at ABC. I shot this for under 5000.00 dollars and obviously it was worth every penny.” If you haven’t seen Sons & Daughters, the video has very much the same feel as the show, improvisation, actors playing off one another.

Of the following video, Fred writes, “These are a compilation of additional scenes to the weekends presentation. If you haven’t already watched weekends, I recommend that you watch that before watching this.”

As for Sons & Daughters, read this post, a great summary of why the show is so good. Missed the show? Check the links at the bottom of the aforementioned post, which will take to you videos of all the shows, available on YouTube until ABC yanks them. Brilliant stuff, funny, edgy, and worth the time to watch.

.: The band I am in, Hardy Drew and the Nancy Boys, played its first gig last night with its current lineup, with me on guitar. We played 14 songs, including 12 originals by David Leigh, the drummer and lead singer. Overall, it went well. Pictures will be posted soon. Many friends and colleagues were in attendance, and my thanks to each of them for taking the time to support my musical escapades.

.: This kind of stuff hurts my brain but absolutely fascinates me. From Penn State Live:

Penn State researchers look beyond birth of universe
Monday, May 22, 2006

University Park, Pa. — According to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, the Big Bang represents The Beginning, the grand event at which not only matter but space-time itself was born. While classical theories offer no clues about existence before that moment, a research team at Penn State has used quantum gravitational calculations to find threads that lead to an earlier time.

“General relativity can be used to describe the universe back to a point at which matter becomes so dense that its equations don’t hold up,” said Abhay Ashtekar, holder of the Eberly family chair in physics and director of the Institute for Gravitational Physics and Geometry at Penn State. “Beyond that point, we needed to apply quantum tools that were not available to Einstein.”

By combining quantum physics with general relativity, Ashtekar and two of his post-doctoral researchers, Tomasz Pawlowski and Parmpreet Singh, were able to develop a model that traces through the Big Bang to a shrinking universe that exhibits physics similar to ours.

In research reported in the current issue of Physical Review Letters, the team shows that, before the Big Bang, there was a contracting universe with space-time geometry that otherwise is similar to that of our current expanding universe. As gravitational forces pulled this previous universe inward, it reached a point at which the quantum properties of space-time cause gravity to become repulsive, rather than attractive.

The full press release is here.

.: Rehearsals for the Sunday night gig are going well, we should be able to crank out about 14-15 tunes, even if a couple of them are, like, 60 seconds long!