San Diego

I flew in yesterday after a lovely flight in an Embraer, which has become one of my favourite kinds of jets. They feature roomy seats with a headrest high enough for my head, and every seat includes an individual television set. I watched Bruce Willis in *Surrogates*, which was a movie that I believe confused its own PR people. I also got a look at a couple of episodes of *Better off Ted*, which Milena had recommended to me. It’s a sitcom about a team of people who invent things for a living. I particularly love the commercial they include, which is based on the theme of each episode. For example, they explain how the company is one big family, which is why they keep everyone together on evenings, weekends, and holidays.

Just say no to $100 worth of sea salt
Those of you who have followed my adventures for a while, and, I suppose, anyone who has met me or seen me in a store, will recall that I am a sucker. This is especially true while traveling, when I get into the frame of mind of going with what’s going, and end up wondering if a bottle of wine with three snakes in it will really clear customs, or if they would prefer to display it prominently in their glass case of absurdly ridiculous, in fact bordering on criminal, foreign purchases. Today, however, you will be proud to learn that while stopping by the Fashion Street Shopping Mall, I not only experienced an entire demo of how my hands could benefit from exfoliation using salt from the dead sea, but I also managed to thank everyone and get out without buying an unreasonable quantity of these viscous liquids, by which I mean more than I could possibly carry in my luggage. I even held my ground when they offered to ship it to me. Thank God the woman wasn’t somebody’s Chinese grandmother, or I’d’ve been toast.

San Diego Zoo
World famous for its decent treatment of animals, the zoo here is huge. It takes 45 minutes just to ride around it in a bus, which I did today while getting glimpses of a wide variety of earth’s endangered and critically endangered species. Then, once you have your bearings, you can get off and walk around to look at everybody in more detail. I saw, for instance, lions and tigers and bears. There was a herd of what the man beside me described to his child as “the Pumbas,” which were surprisingly cute. I also found myself at one point in a hummingbird garden, where I was soon nose-to-beak with one of the little flying jewels, and I stopped by a couple of gorgeous parrots wearing, respectively, red and blue, with tails down to here. One of the main attractions for me, however, was the flora, which is sufficiently diverse that the zoo is also classified as a horticultural gardens.

Outdoor Whirlpooling
Say what you like about the cold weather (two degrees above freezing last night), strong winds (up to 75 mph yesterday), and rain (I believe the adjective is “torrential”), you still can’t beat eating some fresh papaya for breakfast, then going and sitting in the outdoor hot tub until you begin to wonder how seriously they meant the signs that say there are limits on how long a person ought to soak in there. I stayed long enough today that a buzzard begin circling the back yard of the hotel, although after a while I must have sufficiently waved a languid foot or something, because he gave up on me. A couple of hummingbirds also zipped by, busy in what passes for a conversation among their kind.

P.S. I noticed the next morning that the buzzard was back, so I’m guessing it was nothing personal. The hotel is apparently just part of his regular rounds.

Addictions While Traveling
I’m not sure what it is about being alone on the road, but it tends to bring out the obsessive and repetitive aspects of my nature. Perhaps that’s enough said, but I’ll go on. For this trip, I started by leaving home in the middle of an addiction to the TV series JPod. One of my brilliant graduate students recommended it to me a while ago, and sure enough, I started to watch all the episodes in rapid succession. Since they weren’t available here on my not very good wireless connection, I switched to all of the first season of Better Off Ted. Now that I’ve seen them two or three times each, I logged in (again on the suggestion of one of our genius grad students) to www.hunch.com, and I find myself answering dozens of random questions in the hopes that the system will tell me about new things I can get addicted to. Is this any way to live? I think of the line from the standup comedian Marc Maron: “I feel sorry for anyone who has never been addicted to something. Imagine wanting something really bad, then getting it, again and again.”

Four Brothers (Spoiler Alert)
I watched the other night a Mark Wahlberg movie that is essentially The Return to the Shire, except it is set in Detroit. Four brothers revenge the murder of their saintly adoptive mother, succeeding through a combination of direct action and shrewd knowledge of the people in the neighbourhood. I particularly liked the red herring where three of the brothers begin to suspect the fourth, since he received a large insurance claim when his business is going broke, and they subsequently watch him handing money to an underworld character. It turns out that of course he had paid for his mother’s insurance—he paid all her bills. The insurance is for the next generation of kids she’d adopted, and the money to the underworld figure is a bribe—you can’t do business in their neighborhood without paying off the corrupt people in the system. In the end, they defeat the villain, or Saruman, by giving money to all his henchmen instead of bribing him; the successful brother had made his early successes in union organizing.