Happy Day Job

Today is my fifteenth anniversary as an engineer with Ford!

More Spore

I got the Spore creature creator. I got it for Zach, but heck, I think I will like this game too. So far all you can do is make creatures, but when the full game comes out in September, you'll put these things into the soup and watch them fight, evolve, eat, and live in amazing worlds, morphing from microscopic protozoa to space faring civilizations. What's not to like?

And it runs on the Mac. Well, as long as you have a blazing graphics card with more memory than an elephant.

Which I do.

A Hundred Percent And More

Today is as humid as the armpit of a silverback mountain gorilla after a turf fight. In the rain.

Tale Of A Tail

My favorite part of Miss Brown's A.M. Kindergarten class was Show & Tell. Even better than that project where you cover a piece of paper with colored crayons and then black crayon and scratch out a colorful design. Absent-minded as I was, I could always remember to bring in my Show & Tell paraphernalia.

I remember sitting on the floor of the classroom in the sun. My little classmates all crowded around in anticipation of what wonders they would be shown. I could hardly wait for my turn.

There was no problem choosing what to bring in. I always brought the same thing: my plastic dinosaurs. Ok, once I brought my plastic astronaut. But all the other times, it was multi-colored sauropods and therapods, all the way.

I opened my paper bag and removed the first dinosaur. This was a grey Allosaurus, a favorite of mine. This one had been through many imaginary battles and sunk its teeth into just about all of my other dinosaurs, especially the pterosaur whose wing had melted on the light bulb, making it look injured.

I went through the small plastic creatures one by one, naming each and telling a little about how they lived. Miss Brown seemed impressed that I knew all of the long complicated names.

At last I came to the final dinosaur, a thin yellow biped.

"....and this is "Ornithomimus"

"Wow. How did you know that?!?!", Miss Brown asked

"It's written on his tail, right here..."

I guess it is typical of little boys (and little girls too) to love dinosaurs. Like the cosmos, they have always filled me with wonder. Even today, I have an actual chunk of petrified Allosaurus bone sitting on my desk at home. I look at it often and try to imagine it alive some 150 million years ago, top of the food chain, walking around the humid late Jurassic looking for stegosaurs to bite into.

I also wonder how they know it was from an Allosaurus.

Oh, I know...It was probably labeled on the tail.

"She'd Better Have Clothes On!"

That was my mother's warning as I carefully unrolled my new blond decoration.

Yes, I had THE poster of my age. Proudly displayed on my bedroom door.

This poster is considered a classic now, one of the best selling of all time, even to this day.

I wonder why.

Big, Old, Deep, Far

"My own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." - J.B.S. Haldane

I used to like to lay on my back on the lawn after dark, just looking up at the stars. I loved the dizzy feeling I got when I did that. If I used a little imagination, I could make myself feel like I was floating in a field of pinhole lights that stretched on forever. It gave me butterflies. Before I had any idea what these lights were, I was awestruck by them.

I remember the first time I learned that those stars in the sky are actually suns, like our own sun but much further away. Some of them were huge, thousands of times larger than ours. I wondered if they had planets around them, and maybe life. I thought of all the diverse shapes life could take, even on our tiny blue planet, and imagined how many more kinds were possible...out there, in the cosmic black.

But how big was it, really? I learned that you could travel for millions or even billions of years at the speed of light and still not reach the end of all those stars.

Suddenly my reality got alot bigger and my importance in it got alot smaller.

I found out that some of the suns were slowly dying, while others were just being "born" from the gas and dust of previous stars. Our star is probably a "third generation" sun, which means that there were two suns in its place before it, each living its long sunny life and dying, returning it's elements to space, only to reform into another sun. Kind of like a super-colossal organ donation scheme. I wonder if life ever lived on a lonely planet orbiting our "grandfather" sun.

I also learned that all of the elements in our planet except hydrogen; all of our iron and carbon and gold and uranium and silicon and oxygen...all of it was made inside previous stars as they died. That was a very big thought.

Our universe, according to the best current estimates, is right about 13.73 billion years old, plus or minus 120 million years. Our sun dates back about 4.57 billion years, and the Earth and our other planets formed from it's "leftovers" about 4.54 billion years ago.

All of these things fill me up to the very top with wonder. It is, as Mr. Haldane implies, very difficult for the human mind to grasp numbers that big, distances that long, and time that far back. We are simple people, designed for prairies and savannahs and communal village life and rearing children, not prying secrets from millions of light years worth of cold space.

And yet, that is exactly what we do.

The very same problem-solving abilities that allowed our ancestors to develop spears and start fires now coaxes us to ponder such things as Quantum Mechanics, Super-Strings, Dark Matter, and 11-Dimensional Space-Time.

Take a look at the image at the top of this post. This is a composite of 342 separate images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope's "Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2". This is called the "Deep Field" image because it was taken with the camera aimed at one of the blackest and emptiest portions of our sky, and therefore reveals objects that are enormously far away. Just about every one of the 3,000 objects in this image is a galaxy, each containing hundreds of millions of suns. Some of these galaxies, red shifted and blazing, are riding on the ragged edge of the universe itself.

If an image like this didn't fill me with wonder, I think I would worry.

Some of the most brilliant minds ever to be born on this small planet of ours have worked to answer these, the biggest of questions. Aristotle. Newton. Kepler. Einstein. Schrödinger. Bohr. Hoyle. Penrose. Hubble. Tyson. Hawking. We have learned so much from them but still have so much more to learn. Every answer raises bigger questions. But that doesn't stop them from answering.

And it sure doesn't stop me from wondering.

Re-Hydrating Jake

Jake drank for about two minutes straight this morning, lapping up water like a sump pump. Not sure what is going on, perhaps he escaped last night, ran to a farm, and stumbled upon a salt lick?

Les Cheneaux

We will soon be kayaking the cool blue waters around Les Cheneaux (The Channel Islands) in Lake Huron. Les Cheneaux is a group of 36 small islands in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

My sister Mary, the kayaking guru of the family and all-around awesome chick, set up the trip and she'll be the one to watch. I expect fun, adventure, and the occasional near-drowning. I can't wait!

A Little Rest

As I traveled up the escalator at work, I saw a man on the steps of the adjacent "down" side. His eyes were closed as he stood, motionless.

Thank GOD. For years now I have thought I was the only person who sleeps on escalators.

Get Up 2 Get Down

They say a photographer's most underutilized piece of equipment is his legs. Fact is, even with all the options available for shooting at different angles and heights and perspectives, people still take the vast majority of pictures from where they are standing, right at eye level.

A famous photog once told his students to change the elevation of their cameras often because he'd "already seen what five-foot-eight looks like".

Walk all the way around your subject. See what it looks like from every position you can. Climb up. Crouch down. Climb into your subject's "world". Don't photograph children from your height. Get down on the floor with them, you'll be amazed at how the perspective changes. Shooting low tends to make your subject more prominent, while shooting from above tends to minimize it.

Look at how I photographed Wendy when I wanted to make her look big*, and when I wanted to make her look small. Notice the difference in my shooting angle?

I also like to tilt the camera to show disarray and confusion as in this shot. The tilted framing serves to remind the viewer of being off-balance. It's unsettling.

Use a wide angle lens close up to give your subject a distorted, bloated look. A telephoto lens on the other hand, is flattering and compresses and blurs the background.

So try it yourself. You will be astounded at how much more you can communicate with your pictures. It literally opens up a whole new dimension.


* Wendy really WAS huge, but I wanted to further accentuate that property. It helped me to achieve my "vision" for the shot.

I Know What You're Up To...

Veins & Tendons In Paradise

I don't ever use BBQ sauce from a bottle, but my lovely and pregnant wife had a craving for BBQ and I really needed to do something because she doesn't like chicken legs and that's all I had left. She has a problem with "veins and tendons" that she inherited from her aunt. So anything to help divert attention from the support structure of the food would be helpful.

I mixed up some sauce using various things I had around and made a hot (because I can't go making a mild BBQ sauce now can I?) sauce that was all mustardy and yummy with plenty of inherent "vein and tendon" hiding properties.

Heather approved. Mission accomplished. One more day in paradise. :)

Olives As A Means Of Transportation

A good friend of ours, Rob, was in town last night and took us all out to Sangria for dinner. We love Sangria, it's a great setting to catch up with friends and eat some great tapas and drink the best sangria in town. And the olives!! You can get lost in them and find yourself in Majorca in an instant.

We miss Rob and his family big time. Zach was disappointed that Rob's son Carl wasn't there. One of these days, when things calm down (if that ever happens), we'll have to take a trip to Pittsburgh to go visit them all.

Too bad they don't live on Majorca...we could just ride the olives there.

"I Poopy On Potty!"

Maddie hit a big milestone Monday...she pooped on the potty for the first time! Previous trips to the potty seat, peppered with fake grunts and groans, ended with no payoff. But this time was different. She did it! Yay for Maddie!

Of course, Daddy was right there with the camera. Watch out if you ever use our bathroom!

Cuteness, Rendered Clear And Smooth

This new 85mm lens rocks the freaking house.

Flexing

I brought a Flex Limited home last night. Quite a nice road car. Loads of room and it even had a refrigerator! I think this is the ultimate big-family party bus.

A Rose...

Let the white smoke roll from the chimney! We have decided on a middle name for Brooke.

Brooke Elizabeth Wild

She may only be 9 ounces right now, but it's never to early to get that all-important middle name decision out of the way.

Now that we've settled that, we move on to the next important activity: thinking up nicknames!

Balance Of Power

As you have no doubt heard by now, the balance of power is about to shift in our house. As it stands now, we are sitting on a precarious, razor-thin line of equilibrium with three on each side. The players are:

Boys: Me, Zach, Jake

Girls: HB, Maddie, Coco

As you can see, evenly matched.

But with yesterday's news, the girls will soon take control of the Wild Senate. Zach and Jake and I will be relegated to scrounging for votes to support man-related programs. Bathroom and closet territory will be lost. Television channels will be changed to girly shows with flowers and hats and never will a Dinosaur or Jedi Knight traipse across our screen again. Think about it: three measly Y chromosomes in the whole place. The X's have it.

You might take this to mean I am unhappy about the news that we are having a girl. You would be wrong.

I am overjoyed. I will love her as much as I ever could love anyone. I will carry her on my back and tickle her and teach her how to play guitar one day. I will help her with math homework and take ten thousand pictures of her. I will push her on the swing and kiss her boo boos. I will take her to the zoo and show her what a lion sounds like. I will teach her the right way to eat an ice cream cone. I will read to her about green eggs and ham and bunnies and princesses and frogs.

And I will kiss her on her little fuzzy head and tell her I love her every day. I will give her everything that is within my power to give her.

Except my remote control. I am a guy, and I need that. :)

A New Window To The World

I am getting a new lens today! This one is an 85mm scalpel-sharp prime lens from Canon. It makes loads of luscious, creamy vanilla-ice-cream background blur courtesy of a big f/1.8 aperture with 8 blades. This will be one great portrait lens.

It's not the 70-200 "L Monster" I have had on my wish list for a few years now, but it will tide me over until I get a spare $1,700 to blow on big glass.

Brooke

We have a little girl coming! And we can't wait to press "Play"!!!

Spore

There is a computer game coming called Spore. I am not sure exactly what it does, but you make your own creatures, and for that alone I know Zach will love it. Stay tuned.

The Creature From The Blue Lagoon

This is not the first thing you want to see when you come up from underwater while snorkeling. I thought perhaps I had a giant squid attached to my head or had inadvertantly sprouted a dorsal fin. Or maybe Heather's top came off.

Turned out they were just filming a television special at the beach.

Pipeline

It takes a bull-sized set of cajones to climb on a board and just paddle into one of Banzai Pipeline's world-famous left-breaking curls. That's one heck of a big dose of wave energy right there. And this is a small example. They regularly top 25 feet in height.

Pipeline is known for it's perfectly shaped tubes of water that come in like clockwork, as if made by a machine. It's bottom loaded with three seperate reefs and some very jagged lava spires under the surface though; Pipeline kills more surfers than any other wave.

Pipeline is known for breaking close to shore, just a couple hundred yards out. Consequently it has a wicked rip current, so you'd better know what you're doing. Tourists taking pictures at the shore, knee-deep, get sucked in to their deaths on a regular basis.

This is just one of many well-known surfing beaches on the North Shore of Oahu. Listing them sounds more like a Beach Boys song than a geography lesson: Pipeline, Sunset Beach, Waimea Bay, and Makaha off to the west. Epic wave breaks, all of them.

Once you graduate from Pipeline, you can try mighty Waimea. It starts breaking at 25 feet and if there is a winter storm in the Aleutians, will quickly surge to 50, 60, 70 feet or more.

At that point, cajones are no longer necessary, All you need is a good dose of insanity.

If you haven't seen Riding Giants, you really need to. It will amaze you and scare the bejeezus out of you, all at once.

Stiff

Life is inadvertantly funny sometimes.

Kuler

Adobe has a very cool online application for choosing harmonious color schemes. If you are anywhere near the time for decorating your house, check it out. You can get lost in color theory and you'll finally see how the best decorators come up with those color schemes.

And cooler still, you can upload a picture and it will extract color harmonies from it, in case you want to redecorate your whole house to match that photo you bought from me :)

Jay's Joan Jett CD

Ok Jay, you knew this was coming sooner or later, might as well be now. I here record the full shame of the "Tale Of The Joan Jett CD" for all to see. Consider this my apology. It's as close as you're gonna get.

Back near the misty beginnings of time, before cable TV and dinosaurs, Jay loaned me his Joan Jett CD. I can't exactly remember when, but sometime previous to the Russian revolution I think.

He then proceeded to make my life a living hell during the intervening time, badgering me for his shiny disc at every opportunity, until, at long last, I returned it to him on October 21st, 2005.

It wasn't that I didn't want to give it back. It was just very hard for me to locate. First it was packed in a box somewhere, then it was deep inside my old 400 disc CD changer, and not on the catalog - very difficult to locate. Finally one day when I had nothing else to do but prepare for my upcoming wedding, I went through the whole thing and found the disc.

It was another month before I located the jewel case, hidden at the bottom of a very large box in the darkest corner of the basement.

Once I had both pieces of the borrowed music reunited, I decided the best time to give it back would be at my rehearsal dinner at WAB. There would be merriment and celebration.

And more importantly, witnesses.

So ingrained in our collective cultures was this CD thing that I had the event photographed. You can see my witness, Brian, in the background, although he looks a little "out of it" and may not qualify as "reliable" in a court of law.

But the deed was done. Never again will I be burdened with such a longstanding debt. Until Jay loans me another CD, of course.

George

George was more than a comedian, of course, he was a socially conscious guy who was not shy about speaking out against the inequities and absurdities of our modern life. He particularly despised people who imposed their views or agendas on other people, and anything that threatened our innate human rights.

One of the best. I'll miss ya George.

Racing Forward

There is an interesting scientifically-based site online that shows you an estimation of what you would look like with various other racial feature sets.

Here is Afro-Cuban Dave. What do you think? I'm pretty handsome in any race, right? :)

Camp Invention

Zach starts Camp Invention tomorrow. They bring an old appliance and take it apart, then make something else out of the remains. This should be right up his alley. Here he is pictured with the "donor" appliance, a radio/CD player. If it only knew what was in store for it, the thing would scatter away, run outside, and hide under a transformer.

Hmm...I wonder what he'll make. If I had to guess I'd say some kind of death ray. Or perhaps a light saber. We'll find out friday.

Shiny Balls Of Air

Basking, Doglike In The Sun

Happy Birthday Lisa!!!

Gums of The Navaronne

I went to the dentist yesterday to get a filling replaced. Apparently the thing crapped out after the warranty expired. Isn't that always how it happens?

My dentist only uses white composite fillings, so I get charged extra by the insurance company, whose belief it is that I if the filling is in the back of my mouth and can't be seen, then terminator-shiny-metal is good enough for me.

My dentist office is a small purple building, with just about the most difficult approach and departure paths I've ever been subjected to. Entering the parking lot, which is in the rear, involves a wide swerve into oncoming traffic followed immediately by a super-sharp turn into an alley that is all brick walls on both sides. The receptionist has told me that dozens of people have hit the walls. I haven't, yet, but I can see lots of chipped evidence that she is not lying.

And getting out is even more fun. A completely blind right turn onto a busy street. You cannot see if a car is coming until at least three feet of your front fascia is committed out onto the road. It is amazing that I haven't been hit yet. And I pity any person walking on that sidewalk, because they would simply be invisible to me.

But I risk it, because my dentist is nice and seems to know what he is doing. And he pipes in rock music instead of Musak. And he has really groovy mobiles hanging up over the chairs that you can space out to while he works.

Yesterday he seemed a bit off his game though, and the drill was pretty painful, even after two shots of Novocain. Maybe he missed the nerve, or perhaps the cost of anesthetic is going up and he's cutting it with soda water.

But now I have a shiny new white filling, ready for bruscetta and tacos and Thai beef and gumbo. I hope it knows what's in store for it.

Grateful Dad

I leaned over the colorful bucket and looked inside. The water was bright red. Then I looked at the gleaming white shirt, knotted all over with rubber bands.

"Zach, these shirts have to be perfect...are you sure you know how to do this?"

"Dad. I've been doing this for TWO YEARS. I Think I know what I'm doing by now."

(And he did, they came out great).

Parts

Zach, sitting in the back of the car leafing through the massive B&H Photo catalog, filled with all kinds of photography and video devices:

"Dad, I wish this whole catalog was real, and I could have one of everything. Then I could take it all apart".

Out Cold

I went to Home Depot today with Dennis to help him pick out a new refrigerator. Actually, he had picked it out online already, using the following constraints:

1) It has to be chilly inside
2) It has to be 30 inches wide
3) It has to be cheap

Other than that, all options were wide open. Of course, they only had one model that made the cut, especially number 3.

I think it took about two hours, but things went a little fuzzy after about an hour, so I could be wrong. I do know that I had at least one birthday while I was waiting. I went over to the tool section and looked around until I had all the socket wrench prices memorized and I fully expected Dennis to be married to the sales girl and having two or three kids by the time I got back.

Apparently rebate forms are very time consuming. They had to keep getting new forms out too, as the old ones carbonized and turned to dust with all that passage of time.

This was a semi-emergency because the old McDowell refrigerator had died an untimely death and meat had to be thrown out. My suggestion to him to switch to an all-beef-jerky diet didn't go over well, so he needed a new fridge fast.

The desired model was not in stock, of course, so the sales girl threw out an estimated delivery date that Home Depot no-doubt has no intention whatsoever of meeting, and took his money and sent us on our way.

If he ever gets this thing it will be nice. It's big, featureless, rectangular, and white. Quite a stunning machine, actually. All it needs is a few realtor magnets and some crayon drawings and a picture of aunt Gillian, and the McDowell family will be back in the 20th century.

Average

Did you know that there really is a gold standard for beauty? Many studies have now confirmed that the way to get a truly, wonderfully beautiful face is to use a computer to average many ordinary faces. It doesn't matter which faces you use, just take a bunch of everyday faces of any race or country and average their features and you end up with a very good-looking face. The face above does not belong to a real person. It is a computer-generated average of about thirty ordinary female faces.

So, why does this work? The answer seems to be that averaging the faces produces symmetry, and symmetric faces are beautiful faces. You need good genes and good nutrition to grow a symmetrical face, and those traits (good genetics, ability to get good food) are desirable in a mate. And that's why we love symmetrical faces. I think you'll agree that the face above is very beautiful. And you didn't need to learn that, you just know it.

So, the next time someone tells you you're "average", you now have a great comeback.

P.S. Symmetry is not the only indicator of beauty. There are many more features that define physical beauty in human females, and these are mostly indicators of youth, such as clear eyes, shiny hair, lack of skin imperfections, and even blonde hair.

No wonder dating is so rough for girls. Guys get off easy, we pretty much just need a job :)

All That's Left

This is all that's left of Wendy. She met a man yesterday and finally left home for good.

That is, except for this one lonely chip.

But we soon discovered that Wendy's essence was actually in this very chip all the time. Her heart and soul and brain and personality, all in this one little chunk of poplar wood. This is the true Wendy.

So we can keep her forever. And we will.

Eye(s) Right

I have added a panel to the right that lists the latest post of each my friend's blogs. It's also sorted most recent post first. So now you can keep up to date on all the crazy stuff going on off-site.

Sorry if I outed anyone. If you'd rather remain secret, please let me know and I'll remove you from this short and very exclusive list.

And You Think I'm Nutty?

Love, In The Air

We're still lining up dates for Wendy for the weekend. In fact, one gentleman will be stopping by tonight to check her out. I'll let you know how it goes.

We also got a call from a woman who runs a day care. She said she immediately needs "a few" chips that she can superficially spread over the playground to pass a state inspection. Sounds like she really cares alot about the safety of the children at her daycare / child work camp. I made darn sure it was not Maddie's place.

Posture Out To Pasture

My 8-way adjustable chair here at work just broke in one more direction. I already sit bottomed out, like a low-rider, and now the recliner functionality is reduced to two choices: perfectly straight-up librarian mode, or fully reclined drive-by shooter mode. There is no in-between.

I'm looking for all lumbar support to fail me next.

Things Are Looking Up

The Tortilla Machine

Zach was at it again as he made a heaping pile of fresh tortillas for our Father's Day dinner.

His tortillas are nearly perfect now. He's fast approaching the skill level of a Mexican grandmother from Chiapas.

Useful, With Nice Ideas

Dennis has a post up on his blog called "Robot Love". I am really jealous because he has gotten a couple of robot comment posters too.

A guy named "powerball lottery numbers" said:

"Sorry if I commented your blog, but you have a nice idea."

And another fine commenter named "philippine lottery" commented that:

"I'm thankful with your blog it is very useful to me."

Now, I've gotten lots of comments before, but never has anyone called my blog "useful".

Banditios

It was a hot, dark night in the city of Nuevo Laredo, in northern Sonora Mexico, sometime in 1994. We had just left a good restaurant at about 11:30 PM, and were stuffed to the gills with carne asada, tacos, and Dos Equis. A very suspicious-looking man with a walkie-talkie eyed us as we left the parking lot headed for the border a few miles away. He started chatting to someone on the device.

Why did he have a walkie-talkie? Who was he talking to all of a sudden? Was it about us?

We drove down an empty boulevard, four of us. I sat in the back seat, driver's side. A different "guy named Dave" drove the car. Howard sat in the back with me and Bill was in the front passenger seat, half unconscious from the cervesa in his veins.

We were quiet. We had just worked a 12-hour day at the plant and had a three-hour dinner (which is almost considered fast-food in Mexico), so we were very tired.

I was the first to see the police car behind us. It was an old K-car, with two different-colored front fenders and a crooked set of lights on the roof. It fell in line behind us and just drove.

I asked the "other Dave" calmly if he knew how fast he was going. He said he was going 25 MPH. Nobody in the car had any idea what the speed limit was here, but since it was a boulevard, we couldn't possible be speeding, could we?

I did a quick check of the trajectory that Dave was driving. Pretty straight. He wasn't weaving or driving crazy in any way.

We were understandably a little nervous though, because generally speaking, you don't want to get into trouble with the police in Mexico, especially not in a border town. They roll with a very loose legal code, laced with quite a few gray areas. And typically a large part of their salaries come from money they get from giving Americans "tickets" in the field. Every now and then the Mexican Federales, or Federal Police, come in and shut down the police departments of border towns, disarming the entire force if they think they are colluding with the drug gangs.

And we were driving a brand-new Crown Vic with Texas plates.

So we glanced casually backwards occasionally as we drove towards the border crossing at 25 MPH. We were about a mile away.

The police car's lights came on.

I think I heard Howard break the tension first with a hearty "SON OF A BITCH!"

Ok, so try to picture what came next. You are on a very dark street, no lights. No people. Late at night. In a border town rife with drug gangs and corrupt police. To this day I don't even know if these really were police officers.

We pulled over. Two men popped out of the police car and walked toward us, sawed-off shotguns prominently displayed. They were wearing blue police shirts, and jeans. As they approached the car we could smell the distinct aroma of tequila, laced with a little pot smoke.

One of the men opened the driver's door and dragged poor Dave from the car without a word. I was waiting for the sounds of a beating to commence. Instead he dragged Dave across the pavement to the police car and shoved him in the back seat. Meanwhile, we sat and stared at each other wondering what was about to befall us. My stomach went all roller-coaster on me, but I retained my calm.

The other "officer" got into our car, which was still running, and closed the door and drove off with us inside to some unknown destination.

Howard feebly said something like "Officer, if we have broken the law, can we just pay the fine..." to the driver in broken Spanish but he was completely ignored.

This guy drove on for what seemed like an eternity, down gradually narrower and bumpier side streets, across sections of the city in which I would rather not be located even in broad daylight. The police car carrying the other Dave followed us. I thought about him, on his own in the squad car back there...he must need new underwear by now.

Eventually we came to a stop on a very secluded and dirty side street. I remember looking up and seeing walls topped with broken glass and overgrown with gnarly trees, made fearsome and surreal by the glow of the police car lights, which were the only source of illumination anywhere nearby.

We were told in "Spanglish" to get out of the car. We complied of course, because, what the hell else could we do?

They told us the driver, Dave, was drunk and speeding. When Dave protested that he was only going 25 MPH, we were told that the speed limit on that big boulevard was 25 kilometers per hour, not miles per hour. He said Dave needed to go to jail, and would be tested for alcohol.

Now, if you know anything about Mexican jails, you will have just shuddered a big fat shuddery shudder. An adventurous acquaintance of ours had recently gotten in a bar fight in the same city and was thrown in jail. He had been a little cocky, and resisted arrest. They pummeled him a bit, and tested him for alcohol with a used needle. he was then thrown in a cell with thirty other people, mostly drug gang members who couldn't come up with the proper "look-the-other-way" money for the police. As he crouched in a dark corner late at night, keeping his back to the wall, a guard walked in, strode over to the only other American in the cell, and just beat the hell out of him, for no apparent reason. Then he left. Needless to say, this guy wasn't going to make any more waves.

This story was fresh in our minds as we lived this nightmare.

At this point I had a very interesting thought that has intrigued me to this day. I think something in my brain clicked into survival mode, because I briefly entertained the notion that if we were all to run in separate directions, and someone were to trip Bill, at least some of us would survive. Bill was an incredibly ornery and annoying guy, not very much liked by anyone anyhow. Certainly he would take the fall for us in an honorable fashion. We would even drink to him in years to come, remembering his thoughtless sacrifice.

No, that wouldn't be nice to do, even to ornery Bill. Besides, that kind of thing only works in movies.

The next half hour or so is a little sketchy in my memory. I remember, not thinking, but knowing I was about to die. These men did not seem like your average everyday banditos. They seemed to have something against us, and the way they waived the shotguns in our faces with drunk twitching fingers on the trigger, shouting obscenities at us in Spanish, I couldn't really see how this could end well.

Well, whatever else they were, they were certainly banditos. They searched us, took everything of value we had, then went through our car and took computers and leather jackets and electronic planners and every last cent and peso we had.

Then for a while they seemed to be in disagreement as to what to do with us. They argued for a short time. Personally, I was rooting for the "Let's let them go" option, as opposed to "Let's shoot them in the head and leave them here".

You can guess the end of course, because I am writing this and not decomposing in a Mexican sewer. They let us go after a few terrifying more minutes of scaring the bejeezus out of us for fun.

We drove to the border quietly. We really didn't want to say much until we made it back to our hotel in Laredo. We knew that when the adrenalin wore off we would all count this night as one of the scariest of our lives, no matter what else happened to us henceforth.

We didn't even have the money to pay the border crossing fee. After explaining what had happened to us though, they graciously let us pass, for free.

After all of that trauma, the really crazy thing was we had to cross the border again the very next day for more work at the plant in Mexico.

We left early and ate in Texas.

Stan Winston, 1946-2008

This isn't really Stan of course, just one of his many creations.

Having A Ball At A Chain

Anyone who knows me knows I am no friend of chain restaurants. I love the unique and interesting places that are one-of-a-kind, run by an owner who cares and who wouldn't be in business if he (or she) didn't. All my favorite restaurants are "only-children". Sangria, Woodward Avenue Brewers, Ciao, Assaggi, The Blue Nile, Frontera Grill, Little Tree Sushi, New Yasmeen Bakery, and on and on to culinary infinity.

But having said that, there are three chains that I really like. I think they do it right.

The first is Baja Fresh. Even with Mexican town so close to me, I had never had fish tacos anywhere near as good and authentic as the ones I had in Mexico (no cheese, very little breading, cabbage, soft corn tortillas, super-fresh fish)...until I found Baja Fresh. They get it right. And the salsa, by far the best and truest I have had in a restaurant north of the Rio Grande.

The next is In-N-Out Burger. I should have known right away, any place mentioned in "The Big Lebowski" has got to be good. But since every store is owned by the family, they only have locations in California, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona. It's worth the drive, trust me.

But only if you are a carnivore who likes old fashioned burgers. There are no salads on the menu. No chicken anything. No kiddy meals. No fruit pies or pita wraps. They sell hamburgers, cheeseburgers, house-cut french fries, soda pop, and milkshakes. And that's it. And what they make, they make well. Big fat juicy burgers with enough sat fat to put you and anyone within ten feet of you into cardiac arrest. So next time you need a cheeseburger in paradise, head over to that "other" yellow and red burger joint.*

Finally, we have Macaroni Grill. I can't really speak to their menu as a whole, because I only get one thing there: the Chicken Florentine Salad. Full of spinach and smoked chicken and orzo and real Parmigiano Reggiano, and bathing in a lemon vinaigrette, it's the best salad I've ever had away from home. And the wine. They have a simple red Chianti-wanna-be that is incredible and they serve it by the tumbler on the honor system (not perhaps the best combo). This is my favorite place to go to refuel after a grueling photo shoot. Like all good chains, there are not enough of these around.

I am always on the lookout for more chains I like, and I give them a chance before I make up my mind, But it's a rare and treasured find when I run into one I really like.

I've had a couple people say I should try Chipotle Grill, so maybe I will be surprised.

Until then, at least I can get good fish tacos.


* Alisa: no offense meant towards your employer :) Hmm...it has just occured to me that I seem to be apologizing alot in my blog lately.