Impermanence

Happy New Year!

Odetta 1930-2008

"Rosa Parks was her No. 1 fan, and Martin Luther King Jr. called her the queen of American folk music. Odetta's stage presence was regal enough: planted onstage like an oak tree no one would dare cut down, wearing a guitar high on her chest, she could envelop Carnegie Hall with her powerful contralto as other vocalists might fill a phone booth. This was not some pruny European monarch but a stout, imperious queen of African-American music. She used that amazing instrument to bear witness to the pain and perseverance of her ancestors. Some folks sing songs. Odetta testified." (full Time article)

"Odetta sang at coffeehouses and at Carnegie Hall, and she became one of the most widely known and influential folk music artists of the 1950s and '60s. She was a formative influence on dozens of artists, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Janis Joplin. Her voice was an accompaniment to the black-and-white images of the freedom marchers who walked the roads of Alabama and Mississippi and the boulevards of Washington in quest of an end to racial discrimination."(IHT obit)

Here is her searing live rendition of House of the Rising Sun
on A Prairie Home Companion (12/8/07):
Special thanks to Doc Bogz for this priceless rare gem.

Moroccan Treats

more food!

Straight from Al Bled, courtesy of Ahmed:
chebbakia, cornes de gazelles, palmiers,
and some fantastic foliated pancakes "mssm'n"

Fresh Fun With Grains

The Rise of the Breads

30 minutes later... Fresh, Warm and Delicious

We made a spectacular bread last night. Using the spent grains from brewing and some whole wheat flour and local honey. YUM!

The beer we brewed this weekend is happily fermenting. It's a "Home for the Holidays Ale" with a little ginger and allspice, masterfully formulated by our zymurgy sensei Wendell.

The Skies Are Smiling

Click on the image for the full effect

"At sunset, [the] western sky showed off stunning colors and dramatic clouds reflected in Brisbane Water on the Central Coast of New South Wales, Australia. It also featured the remarkable conjunction of the crescent Moon, Venus, and Jupiter forming a twilight smiley face."



From the Great NASA Astronomy Pix of the Day Site.

Rockville December Sky

Shop Till You Drop

Doing our part to keep the economy a'rollin' and getting ready for some turkey madness!

Spanakopita!

It is time for me to give many thanks when I get back from band practice and there's some fresh warm homemade spanakopita waiting in the kitchen for me.
YUM!

"Obama, Yey, Yey, Yey"

"Your victory has demonstrated that no person... should not dare to dream of wanting to change the world for a better place"
- Nelson Mandela

Kenya has declared a national holiday of celebration.

I went to 4 different stores today to try to buy extra commemorative copies of the Washington Post and the New York Times. All stores were completely sold-out.

Here's a sweet sweet track from Extra Golden, a Kenya/US band collaborative. I've been blasting this song all day! It was written to thank some Illinois Senator help them clear their final tourist visa hurdles so they could come perform and record in the US in 2006.

Lyons Classic Pinball, Colorado

Seeing four pinball machines at Oskar Blues was already a treat. Well, just around the corner was this little piece of heaven called Lyons Classic Pinball.

I walked around in a gleeful daze.
36 games of pinball.
3 rooms chock full.
In the last few years, I have hopelessly watched as pinball has been quietly disappearing from establishments all over.
So this chance find was momentous.

We ended up chatting up the knowledgeable and hospitable owner for a while even though he politely passed over my offer to effusively hug him in gratitude for having such a place. There is no doubt this is a labor of love. I wish him all the best and I can't wait for our next trip out to friendly Colorado.

A quiet moment of prayer and giving thanks

"The Audacity of Hops"

One of my favorite bars is now The Oskar Blues Restaurant and Brewery in Lyons, Colorado. They call themselves "The Little Brewery That Cans." These fun folks were the first microbrewery to can their beers since 2002. Besides being very practical to take along outdoors, cans are actually better for beer than bottles since they block out all harmful sunlight. Cans are also easier and more efficient to recycle and to ship that bottles. And you can crush them on your forehead if you choose to do so.

Their colorful brewpub is a treasure of a place, full of character and liveliness. When we visited there was a top notch Honky-Tonk band downstairs tearing it up with upright bass, pedal steel guitar and harmonica. The food was outstanding. I had the superb Blackened Redfish Washday on a bed of rice and beans.

But most importantly they had a full arcade room, with not 1, 2, 3 but FOUR pinball machines. When I profusely thanked the hostess for the uncanny perfectness of the place she told me all their pinball machines were actually supplied from a shop right next door....

Modular Star

While most of us were at work, someone stayed home sick and made this impressive origami out of 30 different pieces. It took more than 3 hours apparently!

Permanent Vacation

I'm back from vacation and still trying to catch up with everything.
My glasses however are still enjoying the Basque beaches of Southern France.

A complicit sneaky wave allowed them to escape and off they were,
never to be found again. I guess I cannot really blame them, Cap Breton does offers some of the best surfing in Europe.
I can't very well, but see for yourself.

Mac Pro Delight

It's christmas in August for me at work. To supplement my dual 20' PC, I just received a 30' loaded! Mac Pro. It is a beast. Processing is blazingly fast and it's just so smuv and slick.

Zina hits 200,000

My trusty 1992 Acura Integra GS-R just hit 200K and she's still doing great. 300K here we come.

The Dale's Way

Beth and her dad hiked the Dale's Way in England for a week.
Pints of bitter, rolling hills, rustic farms, charging bulls, B&Bs, friendly publicans, ancient stone bridges, big blisters, rain, and then more rain, hearty ales, all spell good times.

Dead Trees, Grand Sable Dunes, Michigan

We're on a pretty pix rampage.
Here's the National Geographic Picture of the Day


Photograph by Phil Schermeister, 1991

"Long-deceased trees cling stubbornly to the steep flanks of Grand Sable Dunes in Michigan's Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. The precipitous dunes, left behind by ancient glaciers, rise some 300 feet (90 meters) above Lake Superior and spread over 5 square miles (13 square kilometers)."

(Photo shot on assignment for, but not published in, "Big Lost Country," March/April 1991, National Geographic Traveler magazine)

Milky Way

NASA's astropix of the day

I have not seen the milky way in too long.

"Sometimes, after your eyes adapt to the dark, a spectacular sky appears. Such was the case earlier this month over Ontario, Canada, when part of a spectacular sky also became visible in a reflection off a lake.

To start, the brightest objects visible are bright stars and the planet Jupiter, seen as the brightest spot on the upper left. A distant town appears as a diffuse glow over the horizon. More faint still, the disk of the Milky Way Galaxy becomes apparent as a dramatic diffuse band across the sky that seems to crash into the horizon far in the distance. In the foreground, a picturesque landscape includes trees, a lake, and a stone wall. Finally, on this serene night in July when the lake water was unusually calm, reflections appear. Visible in the lake are not only reflections of several bright stars, but part of the Milky Way band itself.

Careful inspection of the image will reveal, however, that bright stars leave small trails in the lake reflections that do not appear in the sky above. The reason for this is because the above image is actually a digital composite of time-consecutive exposures from the same camera. In the first set of exposures, sky images were co-added with slight rotations to keep the stars in one place."

Volcanic Lightning

Thanks to my bud Ed for letting me steal this amazing picture from his desktop. This is the eruption of Chaiten Volcano in Southern Chile in early May.


"Lightning can happen as a result of a volcanic eruption. As the hot ash rises through the cooler atmosphere, transfer of charge occurs. This excess of electrons within the cloud makes it act like a capacitor, and should the conditions be correct, huge electrical discharges may be observed as bolts of lightning during volcanic eruptions."


More pix and long article here.

Thorn in The Moon

Our lead singer Nita contributed vocals
and piano to a track by Matt Vucic.

simply gorgeous.

A Nation of Whiners in Mental Recession

Egg on Your Face

My cell phone has been pretty unreliable for the last few weeks. Since i'm still holding out for a possible new fancy gizmo, I just bought a used phone for $20 on craigslist to tie me over a few more weeks. Here's a random picture that was still on it:

Bethesda Trolley Bike Trail

Yesterday we stumbled upon a brand new-to-us bike trail going from the White Flint Metro area to the very heart of old downtown Bethesda.

Some section are on roads through residential neighborhoods and the worst part was on the sidewalk along Old Georgetown past the NIH. But the rest was pristine trail pavement going through leafy areas. There are also 2 nice overpasses over I-270 and I-495. I gleefully waved to the stop and go traffic below as we zoomed past, all downhill.

There are still more development planned on this pretty new trail: additional trail markers, map kiosks, wayside reststops, etc. yet it's already a very convenient trail and for the time being, one of DC's best kept secrets.


Here are the original pdfs with
the full map and interesting historical info.

Metro Spirit Iritis Write-Up

We're written up in the Augusta Metro Spirit ahead of our show at the Red Lion pub this saturday.

"A giant eye stares out at the audience, with squiggly serpent-like shapes fleeing its center. The tapestry hanging on the stage behind the band forces the audience to pay attention, making people feel less like they are sitting in a bar and more like they are chilling in a basement listening to a groovy record. Once the psychedelic rock band Iritis starts playing, the eye draws you in even more, making everything flow seamlessly together in a magical harmony."

full article here.

Minor correction: our album is not completed yet. We have not even really started it. Look for it later this year.

Bamberg Bike Trip Route

In the planning stages of a little summer trip... The region around Bamberg in Germany is reputed to possibly be the very best bike and beer tasting area in the world.

Now Dance!

This is one of the quintessential classic french fables. It just came up in conversation with a friend and i found this excellent English translation.

Here it is, followed by the french original:

The Cricket and the Ant
by Jean de La Fontaine
translation by Don Webb

The cricket had sung her song
all summer long
but found her victuals too few
when the north wind blew.
Nowhere could she espy
a single morsel of worm or fly.

Her neighbor, the ant, might,
she thought, help her in her plight,
and she begged her for a little grain
till summer would come back again.

“By next August I’ll repay both
Interest and principal; animal’s oath.”

Now, the ant may have a fault or two
But lending is not something she will do.
She asked what the cricket did in summer.

“By night and day, to any comer
I sang whenever I had the chance.”

“You sang, did you? That’s nice. Now dance.”


La Cigale et la Fourmi
by Jean de La Fontaine
Fables, livre I (1668)

La cigale ayant chanté
Tout l'été,
Se trouva fort dépourvue
Quand la bise fut venue :
Pas un seul petit morceau
De mouche ou de vermisseau.
Elle alla crier famine
Chez la fourmi sa voisine,
La priant de lui prêter
Quelque grain pour subsister
Jusqu’à la saison nouvelle.
« Je vous paierai, lui dit-elle,
Avant l’août, foi d’animal,
Intérêt et principal. »
La fourmi n’est pas prêteuse :
C’est là son moindre défaut.
« Que faisiez-vous au temps chaud ?
Dit-elle à cette emprunteuse.
— Nuit et jour à tout venant
Je chantais, ne vous déplaise.
— Vous chantiez ? J’en suis fort aise :
Eh bien ! Dansez maintenant. »

Rock Star Get-Up

Our show at the Grog went very well.
Thanks to all our fans who came out to support us and a big thanks to D from the band Bliss who lent us his sweet Marshall amp stack when one of our amps was misbehaving.

This was our second gig with our new singer Nita and we're all getting a better hang of this whole performing thing.

We need some improvement in terms of our stage presence and showmanship. Some of us may suffer from a rock style dysfunction. So here's an idea for a new stage get-up for our lead guitarist:

Cell Phone Recycling

I'm wrapping up a cell phone recycling initiative at work.
It was a great success, we were able to collect 42 phones!
That's the magic number.

After some research, I opted to go through the non-profit Eco-cell which partners with the National Zoo for three great reasons:
- For each phone they'll contribute up to $15 to the Friends of the National Zoo which provides support to wildlife conservation programs at the Zoo and around the world.
- All phones, batteries and accessories are refurbished if possible, otherwise they are recycled under strict EPA guidelines. This complete No Landfill approach prevents the leaching of toxic chemicals and heavy metals such as arsenic, cadmium and lead into the environment.
- Cellphone recycling also helps protect the lowland gorillas of Congo who are threatened by the mining of columnite-tantalite (coltan) used in cell phones.

This last point is how I actually got started on all this.
A friend's father asked me for help with mapping some areas of Congo as he was looking to acquire mining rights for coltan. Unfortunately when i researched it a bit, i found out how in Congo it is mined in the middle of endangered gorilla and elephant habitat. These animals are often killed by rebel bands of natives mining this ore. The UN reported that for the past five years, the eastern lowland gorilla population in Congo has declined by 90%.



After we met for this mapping and GIS work, I'm not sure how far he pursued his efforts but at least i have him to thank for indirectly bringing to my attention the adverse consequences of cell phones.

And why stop now, next up I'm kicking off a battery recycling initiative at work too.

Tinned Gold

The last time i came back from Morocco in 2003,
i painstakingly lugged home a whole case of sardines,
a most precious loot to be carefully aged and rationned,
my sunny childhood memories deliciously evoked one can at a time.

To my great delight, more and more great sardine brands
have been showing up at my local grocery stores.
I might soon even venture beyond my Moroccan bias
and try some of the European, Asian and American offerings.

An added bonus is that sardines are packed with B12, vitamin D,
omega-3 fatty acids and calcium. They are also low on the food chain
and fast-growing, which makes them among the safest fish from overfishing.

Iritis at the Grog and Tankard

So Decadent

At a beer tasting held in a church complex,
the ladies looove Ska Brewing's Decadent Imperial IPA,
hand carried from Durango, Colorado just for this tasting.

It's a hard job to taste all these but someone has to do it.

Having a lively discussion about the merits of triple decoction, flux capacitor yields and stuff.

If it don't fit....

In the continuing saga of my recent car issues...
I have learned a few important lessons this weekend:

- when you start hearing a flapping sound on the highway, it's a good idea to slow down presto to check it out.
- a spare tire and wheel that actually fit the car would be preferable.
- on an interstate you get a good feel for a 107 heat index, despite the nice breeze from Mack trucks zooming by a few feet from your person.
- and finally, unproperly maintained old cars mean lotsa problems such
as a thrawted trip to hike in the mountains.

Red Lion Pub Flyer

greetings y'all

my apologies for being out of touch for so long.
I was waiting to get some nice videos to post
but it's taking much longer than anticipated.

In the meantime below is a new poster i just
made for our next upcoming big show.
cheers

Crazy Clouds

As we emerged from the basement after a great Iritis band practice session, the sky above us was otherwordly.

Pizza Pizza!

The 32-inch pizza slices from Pizza Mart are not only a true DC institution, they taste like heaven at 2 in the morning.... or after a 4-1 rout by our DC Capitals over the Carolina Hurricanes to grab the first spot in the division. OV! MVP!!!

Long gone are the raucous evenings when the monster slice would only set you back $2.25. These days there are food riots in Egypt and Haiti. The cost of flour and rice has sometimes tripled from China to Mozambique. So $4.50 is not bad at all for a slice that's almost a foot and half long and weighs in close to 1 pound. It also packs 1,117 calories.

mmm..... there's only one Pizza Mart.

Black and Tan Craze

The marketing wizzes at Anheuser-Busch are giving away a free beer toy!!
I'm a sucker so i signed up of course.
It must be part of their aggressive push in the market since
they took over distribution rights for the European InBev brands (Bass, Stella Artois, Beck’s and Hoegaarden)


Local beer writer Greg Kitsock wrote in his recent discussion
of Black and Tans in the Post:
"It works, but you must pour slowly, because the creamy
stout foam tends to gum up the holes."

So my ol' trusty versatile Guinness spoon might have an edge here.
Plus the MBAs at A-B probably figured it was a great way to gather
information on beer drinkers and force them to buy glassware that will actually fit the brolly. 'sure looks like it is sized only for the new sexy Bass glasses. ....of course i want a couple of those too.


Now I'll just need to get my hands on one of these Brütül LagerHead Turtles to conduct a full comparison test...

Cheers!

A St Patty's Breakfast

Say!
I like Green Eggs and Spam!
I do! I like them, how lucky-I-am!
And I would eat them in a boat surely
And I would eat them with a goat curry.

A Thirst Quenching Encounter With a Pundit Icon

Stephen Colbert, born 1964

"Stephen Colbert, the mock pundit for the Comedy Central show The Colbert Report recently contacted the National Portrait Gallery hoping to donate this portrait of himself from his show. While this triple portrait is not one that would typically be accessioned into the Portrait Gallery’s permanent collection, NPG agreed to go along with the joke and hang the portrait for a limited time.

In episodes of The Colbert Report that aired on January 10, 14, and 15, 2008, Colbert tries to convince the Smithsonian that he should be considered a national treasure. He attempts to donate his portrait to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, but the museum’s director suggests that perhaps Colbert should speak to the National Portrait Gallery. Finally, after much "discussion," the director of the National Portrait Gallery finds an appropriate place to hang Colbert’s portrait, in between the bathrooms and above the water fountain.

This portrait will only be here through April 1, so refresh yourself at the drinking fountain while contemplating this portrait of Colbert while you can."

Falu

'Had the chance to see and meet the lovely, talented and radiant Falu and her crew this past week at their show at the National Geographic.

I've loved her singing and her music after discovering her on myspace a few months ago. But they were even better live!

The rhythm section was rock solid and more forward than on the CD and that was a very very good thing. I was in awe at the masterful musicianship. Absolute control, and supreme tightness. What a show.

They have a perfect blend of "Indie Hindi Rock". Much like we're trying to achieve with Iritis and Middle Eastern music. Except we have a long way to go.....

Here's a glimpse of Falu live!

Beer Can-dle

With Dremo gone we hit up some of the other ol' haunts. I hadn't been to Galaxy Hut in years, the initial manifestation of the essence of Bardo. I bumped into one of the bartenders from Dremo while there.
Tap selection was as great ever. Pictured here is Stoudt's Fat Dog Oatmeal Stout and Rogue's Charlie 1981, a pretty potent American Strong Ale.
Gotta love the aluminium can candles they had all over the place.