Halfway down the Danube

Cairene guest-blogging 2: Don't Eat at Rick's, the first part.

Wow, this retreat has been less like a spa, and more like a fighting withdrawal from the very concept of relaxation itself! (With added hot migraine action.) Anyway, I have a backlog of guest posts to fill, so here is Luke S., filling us in on Egypt's cuisine:

When I arrived in Cairo, I was treated to a long nosebleed from my host, the American University of Cairo, about how at many places it wasn't safe to eat. A few of them were the same as the US -- street vendors -- as there are no health codes in Egypt, but the storefront places are also a deadly threat.

So, in my first two weeks here, I wandered over to the 26th of July Street, the main drag on posh Zemalik Island, where I live. It's Fifth Avenue gone neon and Bladerunner, with lots of tacky shops offering just about everything. In the early, highly paranoid days of my arrival in Egypt, there were two places I went to get safe food: La Bodega and Maison Thomas.

The former looks like it was cast out of Europe in the 1930's, despite its name. With lots of dark mahogany, brass, and green leather, it's a brasserie and one of the nicest bars in Cairo-despite its lack of European, even Lebanese wines. It serves European food, for the most part -- pastas, steaks, filets, etc. anything one might think of as Egyptian food is called "Lebanese" or "Oriental" something that would give Edward Said a fit of epilepsy.

The waiters, dressed in swallow-tailed coats speak in unaccented French or English, and understand my recently acquired Egyptian Colloquial. The clientele is largely Western -- men in suits and ties, women in close-cut cocktail dresses -- speaking mostly English, but some scattered French, and dashes of German. It's a bubble, and a comforting one early on, with an excellent view of the Nile, too boot.

Now, one thing that the AUC and all guide books can agree on is the conservative dress of even modern Egyptian culture. For men, this means no shorts and few short sleeves. For Western women, leave your hotpants at home [dammit. CY] -- the natives increasingly favor the 'raincoat brigade' look that was first thought up in the seventies over all Al-Azhar. In our first days, we got lectures about eye contact, posture, and public displays of affection. It's a society that's a product of Nasser's Arab Socialist Revolution, to be sure -- the Chancellor of the AUC is a woman -- but it is also one of Muslim Modernization along the lines that Mohammed Abdu would have approved of; social conventions are very conservative.

One night, I got all trussed up to go to La Bodega for a nice dinner with my mom -- she copes with my arrival in the Middle East by tagging along for a week -- arrive, order, and eat. About thirty minutes into dinner, a very loud group of about a dozen kids shows up -- twenty-somethings, maybe -- who are dressed like they were cast for MTV's Spring Break in Cancun, but with even less clothing and more makeup on the girls. They sit at the table next to mine, chatting in high speed Arabic. they order not one, not two, but four bottles of Johnny Walker Black and two bottles of Pepsi.

The girls, made up in a way that would make Tammy Fae or Katherine Harris jealous, periodically adjust their blue contacts in the smoky-tinted mirror while ignoring their Treos, ringing to the tune of "My Humps." Everyone -- guys wearing lots of rings and gold chains, shirts open to their sternum -- takes a glass, pours in about three shots of whisky into a glass, and top it off with just a little bit of Pepsi. They each drink three of these in the span of forty-five minutes, laughing and chatting, and settling in for a break before they return to clubbing for the rest of the night, which ends here, as in Spain, in the early morning.

What I couldn't figure out, while watching all this, was who these people were. Unlike the Balkans, which produced the sponsorozhde in Serbia, as these girls aren't gun molls of victorious gangsters. Egypt doesn't have moneyed oligarchs like Russia or the Gilded Age United States. They lacked the requisite bodyguards to be the children of members of Egypt's Shura Council -- the Upper House of Parliament. But they were twenty-somethings with a lot of money for Egyptians, and a lot of free time, to go drinking and clubbing on a week night, especially in the pricey La Bodega, to be drinking imported -- and extremely expensive -- whisky in large amounts.

The wardrobe bears some on that of the Sponsor Girls that Doug described earlier, with very conspicuous consumption in every way possible, but entirely in imitation of the 'America' that MTV sends via satellite to the Middle East. But it also reflects the state of the Egyptian economy; education is universal at the college level, and though college graduates continue to have the promise of a job on graduation, they're increasingly being paid below the standard of living.

These people were loud, bawdy, and a general pain in the ass -- like college students anywhere -- but it's the only group of young Cairenes out of the town that I've seen. Ever. This, combined with the amusing articles in The Egyptian Gazette suggest that young Cairenes are having a public/private space problem, but these people are something else entirely. So, I promise to figure out who these sort of people are, and report back accordingly.

More to come from Luke shortly.

Random thoughts from an undisclosed location

Hi, back for a bit. Who knew this retreat involved so many Xeroxes? Anyway, some thoughts.

1. The press corps and the Prisoner's Dilemma

I am not the only person to have watched American news organizations over the last decade and wondered, "WTF? No, really, WTF?" Because I am crass, my first guess at an explanation was, "Money." Because I am extremely crass, my second guess was, "P&B, you know how they live."

But, since I do know how some of them live, I understood that these explanations were, at best, incomplete.

My third guess has to do with the game theory of asymmetrical information access. And, unfortunately, it's not something I know enough about to think further on. Suggestions?

2. Milman Parry.

Parry is an unrecognized keystone figure in the intellectual history of the twentieth century. And that's an interesting list in itself; I would be interested to learn what other figures HDTD's readers would add.

3. Incremental hedonic progress and the invention of mayonnaise.

The ingredients in mayonnaise have been known since before history began. But put together as a commonly used sauce? Not until the early modern era, and good luck trying to track the history down.

How many other small improvements to the human condition have been made whose provenance has been lost, and whose existence we take for granted? Enough little things can add up to a big thing. Mmm, mayonnaise.

Sanity returns to Wisconsin; cats become more insane

Following up on my previous post, we now have this news: Retired Farmer Agrees To Cancel Hitler Memorial, leaving many skinheads bereft of vacation plans in America's Dairyland.

The cats, of course, have taken up the slack.

But never fear! It can't happen here. It can't happen here. It can't happen here.

(Yes, that was a cheap shot. But I've been saving that photo for two freaking years, dammit.)

Alan's First Eucatastrophe

So, last week, we were reading one of the "Akiko" comic book collections.

If you have kids under ten or so, give Akiko a look. Akiko is a fourth grade girl (though she gets to fifth, then sixth grade in the course of the series) who is whisked off to another galaxy, where she has adventures with a collection of odd characters. There's Mr. Beeba, a timid academic; Spuckler Boach, a Han Solo-like space cowboy; Gax, Spuckler's dilapidated robot; and Poog, a mysterious floating purple blob thing. The whole thing has been compared to "The Wizard of Oz meets Star Wars', and that's probably fair. There are books as well as comics.

Anyway. We'd reached the point in Volume Three where the evil Loza Throck has captured Akiko and her companions and thrown them into... The Hole.

This was a mildly scary sequence. Maybe more than mildly. Goes like this:

-- Villain puts Akiko and her friends in a cage on a chain. The cage descends into... The Hole.

-- Some discussion. It's dark in The Hole, but Spuckler pulls a torch out of Gax the robot. (Spuckler is always pulling things out of Gax; sometimes they work, sometimes not.)

-- Vents in the side of The Hole open. Out pours... red hot lava!

-- Spuckler manages to cut some of the bars of the cage. Akiko climbs out onto the top of the cage, so she can climb the chain.

-- The villain releases the chain. Bastard!

-- We see Akiko flinching backwards as the chain falls onto the top of the cage. The others climb up... but there's no escape now. They're trapped! The red hot lava is rising, and in moments it will come over the top of the cage and engulf them. Close-up of Akiko's frightened face...

[pause]

"Okay, should we stop now?"

"Daddy, turn the page."

"You sure?"

"Daddy, turn the page."

Next page... the cage suddenly tilts... and lifts! It's rising out of the lava! But how?

Spuckler Boach hangs upside down over the edge of the cage and looks inside. There, pressed against the roof of the cage, is Poog. The floating purple blob alien has never been seen to float anything but himself. But now... though we can see that the strain on him is terrific...

"It's Poog! It's Poog, goldurn it!" yells Boach. "He's liftin' us outta here!"

Alan turned to me, beaming, smiling. Then he just laughed. Pointed at the page and laughed for joy.

And that's all.

Have a good one

I'm leaving this blog. If you like, you can check my new home.

Cairene guest-blogging!

My first guest-blogger while on retreat is from Luke Schleusener! Luke is yet another member of the soc.history.what-if Usenet mafia, who crashed in my Brooklyn book-lined crypt apartment when he took the Foreign Service exam. He's got a dry wit and a warped sense of humor, so he should fit right in. Also, he swims.

Here's my first contribution for your readers' interest.

Flight time from the US to Cairo is about fourteen hours--theoretically, it's thirteen hours and fifty-five minutes. In actuality, it's somewhere closer to fourteen and a half hours, due to inevitable delays.

This only mattered because the nice folks from the State Department behind me remarked that they were "screwed" with coach rather than getting promoted to Business Class, as the cut off is the fourteen hour mark.

Coach on Lufthansa international isn't bad--it isn't great, either. The food is about as good as any college cafeteria, which is much better than United, but still, not great. However, the booze is free, which, for any American college student, well. That's a boon, especially when you're six-two and crammed into a totally full flight. If there's one thing I could wish for my compatriots, it would be, I suppose, travel manners. The Americans on my flight were by and large loud, boorish, and stupid. The row ahead of me seemed to have come direct from tallgating a Jets' game.

Frankfurt Airport is a wonderful confection of steel and glass. The inter-terminal train is reminiscent of Denver, but is in much better condition, with broader doors and nicer seats. But Frankfurt also allows smoking indoors--there's a particular underground walkway where all the smokers seem to congregate, hoping to pass along cancer to the maximum number of people.

The preflight lounge looked as if it had escaped "Catch Me If You Can" with plastic bucket seats and metal tables in a weird sixties chic. The Lufthansa attendants were bright, multilingual, and responsive--and their little yellow neck-scarves looked like they'd escaped the sixties, too.

The flight to Cairo offered more space, more booze--in the form of not one, but two reasonable shots cognac, and some Bailey's Irish Cream. Given that the composition of the flight was largely Arab and South Asian, Lufthansa reworked its in-flight meal to cater specifically to this demographic, with curries that were remarkably tasty, despite their in-flight microwave process. All this made my arrival in Cairo all the more tolerable.

Cairo International Airport is a pretty standard Third World Airport. Customs were amusingly lax, if intent on keeping up appearances. I had to wait behind a yellow line while the customs officer gossiped with his partner behind him, a woman in a pink hijab and a robin's egg blue raincoat with coke bottle glasses. I passed through promptly, only to be double and treble checked by Egyptian soldiers dressed in storm-trooper black, with submachine guns slung over their shoulders, and their seersucker counterparts, who had shoulderboards and lots of red piping. Serious bells and whistles, these folks are awful glad to carry your luggage.

Getting from Cairo International, which is out in Helopolis, to the city proper, is a test of nerves. There might be traffic signs, there might be lanes pained on the blacktop, and a soldier might occassionally gesticulate at traffic. Cars ignore all of these "suggestions" to do generally whatever they want. Two lanes can become four and cars swerve through them with seemingly no intent. The first time through, this all looks wreckless [sic. I'm leaving that in. -- CY] and tends to be nerve-wracking. But it's better to be in a car than to be a pedestrian--maybe.

The American University of Cairo's student residence is on Zemalik, the posh island that was home to the Khedive's summer palace. The southern three-fourths of the island are a mixture of Central Park and Chicago's Museum Mile, with a few historical curios mixed in. The northern third, where the student residence is, is populated by embassies, upscale private schools, and residences for expats.

The student residence is a fancy building in tan marble, with our own devoted security service with a metal detector, and a concierge straight out of a French Pension. The Mens' and Women's wings are segregated, and mixing is strictly forbidden on the residential floors, as is any sort of Public Display of Affection. These are approximately the rules of Christ College, Cambridge, C. 1950. Not that I mind.

Food here is dirt cheap, comparatively speaking. On the island, the 26th of July, named for the day Nassar's Army seized the Suez, is the Fifth Avenue by way of /Bladerunner/ with the massive overpass of the bridge bracketing a mixture of neon lights with the higher-tone lounges, bars, and restuarants further inland.

By and large, the nicer restaurants are done in a way to immitate pre-war France, with bistros and brasseries with green leather and lots of brass lighting leading the way. Finding a place
that serves alcohol here isn't hard, and a good meal is cheap--fourteen dollars for an appitizer, main course, and two glasses of Lebanese wine.

Yesterday was Jumma, which meant that the American University held no classes so that the Muslims could attend services. This meant that the cafeteria at the residence was shuttered, so I went down to Costa Coffee, about a block away, for brunch. It sits at an three-way intersection; inside, it operates as a Starbucks-cum-Pret a Manger. The high unemployment rate in Egypt meant that the place was packed with young Cairenes who served the (mostly) Western clientele hand and foot, while Arab pop plays in the background. Outside, more observant Muslims unrolled their prayer mats for the second time that day.

If I were Tom Friedman, I'd wield my Mustache of Understanding to talk about "the flattening" that this represents. Instead, I'm going to simply say that Cairo is a densely populated Third-World city, looking a lot like Southern Europe--say Spain under Franco--with its various needs intersecting from time to time.

More to come.

Hysteresis, downtime, guest-blogging

Okay, I need a short break. I feel as sharp as a not very sharp thing. One of those. You know. Things. Not sharp.

So I will be going on a super-glamorous retreat for a few days! a happy place, where I can sip wolfberry tea, realign my chi, and rub suntan oil on well-read dancing girls.

(Well, no. I will be staying at home, eating butterscotch pudding, and watching Justice League Unlimited torrents in my boxer shorts.)

In the meantime, I have some guest blog posts lined up: we will be finishing esteemed commenter Noel Maurer's trip in the Philippines; we will be starting young master Luke's series on life in Cairo; and we even have some wartime stories from Noel's father, Leon.

Sounds good? Like you have a choice. Ah, well. Trust me.

Skip and hop!

Fedex apparently is using advanced technology that hasn't made it to the news yet. Or have you heard about the instant teleportation device they have in Sacramento? I want that for home use. Just imagine, hopping to Germany to get some good bread two minutes before lunch. Cravings for Ben&Jerry could be satisfied instantaneously. No more month-long waits for the move to arrive. Grandparents would be just a skip and a hop away. Bali, so close! Oh... It would be like living next door to everybody!

I mean, see for yourself:

Information and services provided to Fedex users.

Package Progress

06/13/2006 19:36 NEWARK , NJ
06/13/2006 16:23 NEWARK , NJ
06/13/2006 08:43 SAN JOSE , CA
06/12/2006 23:24 OAKLAND , CA
06/12/2006 20:41 SACRAMENTO , CA
06/12/2006 17:56 SACRAMENTO , CA
06/12/2006 17:56 MEMPHIS , TN
06/12/2006 17:56 SACRAMENTO , CA
06/12/2006 17:03 SACRAMENTO , CA

Tracking results provided by Fedex

Just saying.

The Last Rain?

It rained last week.

Nothing special. Just rain. The sky clouded up, it got very windy, then it rained. For maybe ten minutes. Enough to water the flowers, not enough to clean the car.

But there's a good chance that might have been the last rain.

See, Armenia has these long hot summers. Long hot dry summers. Long hot dry summers with very little rain. Or none at all.

We look at the weather forecast most mornings. For a week now, the five day forecast has been the same. "Chance of precipitation: 0%... 0%... 0%".

That's expected to continue until sometime in September.

I've lived in some odd places for weather. The Marianas Islands. Upstate Maine. London. But this is a first. That modest shower may have been the last rain for a hundred days or so. This is probably no big deal for our readers in Arizona or the Galapagos Islands, but it's new and a bit freaky for me.

August temperatures here regularly go over 40 Celsius (104 Fahrenheit), BTW. So, watch for a post in a few weeks: "But At Least It's /Dry/ Heat."

Too much sympathy for the devil in Wisconsin

"They said he was a racist. It's a lie. He advocated for, he was in favor of these people. He respected other races." (WARNING: NSFGermany.)

That's going to be one disturbing rummage sale when he kicks off.

Worthwhile Canadian initiative

So I saw this game at Snooky's: "Ten-man Trinidad and Tobago shocks Sweden".

Let's see. A blonde guy fell down and whimpered like a little boy who skinned his knee, somehow causing a black guy to leave the field permanently, at which point the blonde guy popped up and skipped away -- excelsior! -- returning to the game less than half a glass of water later. Despite this, the blonde guys were unable to do a damn thing against a goal that was open almost to goatse proportions.

No one scored any points at all. I suppose the absence of a rout is shocking, if you cared about the narrative in the first place.

UPDATE: A counterpoint from Noel -- yes, from Noel -- is below the fold.

So there we are, in Snooky’s, watching the game. I’m in a bright red polo shirt with the T&T flag emblazoned across the front; Amma is there, also cheering on her mother country -- but wearing, completely by accident, a gold shirt, blue pants, and a blue-and-gold hairpin. It would have been mildly embarrassing if anybody else on that side of Prospect Park had cared in the slightest. (The Mexican-American fellow in the bar was waiting for the Yankees-Oakland game; the Panamanian-American dude with the pencil mustache was marginally more interested in the game, but seemed really dedicated to his Guinness.) Carlos, appropriately, is wearing black.

Amma, like Kads, is a female Trinidadian novice to the world of soccer.

The first half is stupendously boring, save for the pre-game show on Univisión, which features some fellows playing the steel drums, scantily-clad surgically-enhanced cheerleaders in the studio (apparently to make up for the World Cup’s mysterious lack of cheerleaders on the field), and a female correspondent reporting from Germany in a very fetching cowboy hat. Unfortunately, the pre-game show didn’t last, and the play began. Ball up-the-field, ball down-the-field, whatever. To quote the bartender, "This is like hockey on valium."

Anyway, we’re watching on and off, talking more about the weather, cars, Afghanistan, and Johnny Damon. "First he was Jesus, then he was Brutus, but he still throws like Mary Magdalene," says the bartender.

At which point there’s that bullshit foul, the Swede doing his overacting routine, and Amma yelling, "That was nothin’, what he carryin’ on about, boy!" Carlos is reacting as you’d expect, and I’m thinking, "This is a sport? They should just let the players punch each other. Just like in that Spinrad story. Hell, MLS team staffing is already straight outta that story."

And please nobody write in telling me that the foul was actually a foul -- I don’t care about the rules, Martin; it should not have been a foul. As the bartender so pithily put it, "Bunch of p--sies." He wasn’t hurt, no way nobody was gonna get hurt, WTF? I may change my mind if it can be explained to me why allowing smash-ups like that one to happen would make the game even less eventful.

By now you’re wondering, "And this is a counterpoint to Carlos?" It is -- because once Avery John was kicked out, the game became an incredibly exciting nail-biter. One misstep, one screw-up, and it’s over. Done. The goalie -- the arquero; this was Univisión -- is there trying to cover an incredibly large space; the Swedes are there attacking and attacking and attacking, Hislop makes those two awesone saves, deflecting that shot from the drama-queen with the stupid tail and diving to stop Ibraimovic’s shot. "The whole world is tilted towards Trinidad’s feet!" yelled the announcer. I have no idea what that meant, but it sounded right. I bit my nails down to the knuckles. I bit Amma’s nails down to the wrists. Since you knew that a tie was as good as a win for T&T, since England had already beaten Paraguay, it mattered.

The Univisión guys had it right when they said, "For Sweden, a tie with the taste of defeat."

I couldn’t help but note that the Swedes cut out the stupid drama once every second started to matter.

Anyway, I enjoyed the game. Carlos couldn’t believe that I barely glanced over when Thomas hit a two-run homer off Mussina in the second. He shouldn’t worry. Baseball is still a far superior game to soccer, as is football and basketball. (I used to think hockey, too, but the impossibility of getting non-hockey fans to enjoy a hockey game has taught me otherwise.) But soccer can have its points.

So how to improve the game? Easy. Take all 22 players from both teams before a game. Shoot one of ‘em. Play. Then you’ll have something well worth watching.

Your last stop for World Cup coverage

The Guardian accidentally ran something insightful on the American disdain for soccer this past April, in a supposedly humorous guest column by the American impresario David Eggers. Since it's by Dave Eggers and in the Guardian, it is not actually funny. But, as my co-blogger says, even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then:

The second and greatest, by far, obstacle to the popularity of the World Cup, and of professional soccer in general, is the element of diving. Americans may generally be arrogant, but there is one stance I stand behind, and that is the intense loathing of penalty-fakers.

As much as I hate to say it, Eggers is right.

There are few examples of American sports where diving is part of the game, much less accepted as such. Things are too complicated and dangerous in American football to do much faking. Baseball? It's not possible, really - you can't fake getting hit by a baseball, and it's impossible to fake catching one. The only one of the big three sports that has a dive factor is basketball, where players can and do occasionally exaggerate a foul against them, but get this: the biggest diver in the NBA is not an American at all. He's Argentinian! (Manu Ginobili, a phony to end all phonies, but otherwise a very good player.)

But diving in soccer is a problem. It is essentially a combination of acting, lying, begging and cheating, an unappealing mix. The theatricality of diving is distasteful, as is the slow-motion way the chicanery unfolds. [...] It's disgusting, all of it, particularly because, just as all of this fakery takes a good deal of time and melodrama to put over, the next step is so fast that special cameras are needed to capture it. Once the referees have decided either to issue a penalty or not to our Fakey McChumpland, he will jump up, suddenly and spectacular uninjured - excelsior! - and will kick the ball over to his team-mate and move on.

The American attitude towards football is, you play with pain, you play through your pain, and you don't leave the field unless you are so damaged you can't play. This fake Fabio-writhing-in-the-dirt-for-a-minor-tactical-advantage business... gah. Gah gah gah. It feels morally disgusting to watch, the way a PETA activist might feel at a bullfight. Jeez Louise, suck it up, Goldilocks.

(An aside: many non-Americans complain about American football's arcane infraction code, its armored uniforms, and its stop-and-start game play. They don't realize that the gridiron evolved that way for a reason: to prevent the regular maiming and violent death of its players. I won't link to the Taylor-Theisman hit, or what happened to Tim Krumrie. Strong men and women have vomited at the footage. Krumrie, at least, was able to play again, with a foot-long metal bar inserted in his leg. He's from Wisconsin.)

Which brings me to Eggers' other point. In other countries, soccer is an expression of national pride, a celebration of young manhood.

In the U.S., it's a form of day care.

There really isn't much more to say.

Summer!

It's summer. Not officially yet - I think Yerevanians declare summer when the temps hit 40 degrees. But the sun is shining all the time, and over the weekend, our cherries just sucked up all the heat and turned into this:

Yummy!

The mulberries are just as I remembered them from my childhood in Istanbul: mainly sweet.

We are looking forward to masses of walnuts in the fall:

Since our landlord doesn't approve of pesticides (and we don't either), this year the apricots yielded to some sort of horrible disease:

(Mama? Wonach sieht das denn aus?)

I'm sure there are gentle alternatives that can be applied but those will have to wait until next year (until my mom has educated me on the subject). However, at least the apricots are still there. Our figs have just disappeared and that one baffles me. There were quite a few of them and then, there weren't. Not a trace of them left. What the hey? Have they been abducted by aliens? Birds? Ants? It seems odd.

Hoopoe!

I saw a hoopoe yesterday. Doug is upset. He doesn't begrudge me seeing it but he really, really hates that he didn't see it.

A Weekend Out

So we finally got out of town for the weekend.

We drove north from Yerevan to Vanadzor, then up almost to the Georgian border, where we stayed at this hotel. Stayed there Saturday night, then swung back down through Dilijan and past Lake Sevan.

We'll blog more about this anon. A few random observations are below the fold.

-- It's June, which is the end of the brief rainy season and the beginning of the long, dry, furnace-like summer. So everything is blooming. Claudia calculated that there are more than ten billion daisies in Armenia right now. I think that might be low.

-- Every dinky flyspeck of a country claims that it has "tremendous variety". But here in Armenia, it might be true. In one weekend, we saw steppe (no kidding... real Eurasian steppe; you could practically see the Mongol hordes thundering over it), prairie, oak forests, snow-covered mountains, lush meadows, deep gorges carved through volcanic rock by a white mountain river... I'm assured that there's also semidesert and, up north, something close to a temperate rain forest.

We also saw a depressing amount of environmental damage, mostly from deforestation. But that deserves a post of its own. (Probably on some day when I'm in a crappy mood anyway.)

-- We drove past the Molokan villages. And we saw some Molokans on the road. But we didn't stop.

If you know what Molokans are, then you know this is sort of like driving to Keystone, South Dakota, and then not bothering to look at Mount Rushmore. If you don't... oh, hell, we can't get through a couple of years in Armenia without doing a post on the Molokans. So, watch this space.

-- We can see why everyone heads to the mountains in the summer. By the shore of Lake Sevan today, it was 21 Celsius (68 F). One hour later, we were in Yerevan, and it was 32 Celsius (90 F). By August you'll want to add 6 or 8 degrees to those figures.

-- A minor but telling incident: the hotel sits by a loud mountain river, all brown water foaming white over rocks. After looking at it for a while, it occurred to us that we didn't know where the water went. That is, would it flow eventually into the Black Sea, or the Caspian? The watersheds in the Caucasus get really tangly, so the answer was not intuitively obvious.

So we asked one of the hotel staff. "It flows to Georgia," she said.

"Yes, but... after that... where does it go?"

She summoned a colleague. They discussed it for a moment in rapid fire Armenian, then turned to us.

"It goes to Georgia."

"Yes, that's right. To Georgia."

"Um... okay. Thank you."

And there you have it. The river goes to Georgia, just a few miles further north.

And then, I suppose, it just stops.

-- We try to avoid comparing our children online. (If only because they may come back, years later, and develop a complex from reading that Sibling X toilet-trained a month before Sibling Y.)

But one thing became very clear on this trip: Alan is only mildly interested in chasing chickens, but David can't get enough of it. Sadly, we didn't get pictures, but he was quite the cursorial predator.

What this may foreshadow, I entirely refuse to speculate.

Shazam!

Looks like lightning zapped my USB adapter last night in Brooklyn. Hopefully that's the only damage. (Update: replaced the adapter, re-installed the driver, everything seems to work.)

The best fiction I've read on the Napoleonic wars since Patrick O'Brian has talking dragons in it. (And again, it's been praised by writers I wouldn't trust to recommend shoelaces.) Step up, people!

(C&D, all three books are in the latest box to Yerevan. Y'all should be getting a box every two, three weeks now until August.)

Latest reading: Mark Kemp's personal history of Southern rock, Dixie Lullaby, Norman Douglas's South Wind, and Huntford's biography of the polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen, who was unaccountably not from Wisconsin.