Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

adventures / family / Friday / maps / photo / Switzerland — Comments Off
20
Jun 25

On the rail again

Up early this morning for a small Italian breakfast, then a short walk to an Italian train station — most of Italy’s transit workers are on strike, we found out two or three days ago and got lucky with a backup plan. Our route looked like this.

We arrived in Interlaken, as planned, in what is almost the center of Switzerland. Definitely it is one of the tourist centers. And who could blame the tourists for coming to places with views like this?

And that’s just on the way there.

After a quick bus ride we arrived at our hotel — a small little place run by a kind, small man and his family, with Swiss efficiency. There are maybe 16 rooms. This is the balcony view we’ll enjoy (but not slow down enough to see often) for the next few days. That view is not bad.

Click to embiggen.

If you just look down at the water, it is awfully inviting in the middle of this heat wave.

We took a ride back into Interlaken for dinner. And by “we,” I mean my lovely bride and her parents. This is an in-laws trip, which I don’t think I’ve mentioned. Here they all are after dinner.

A few years back, 2019 in fact, we decided we should take a trip, and this year we were able to do it. And now here we are, in beautiful Switzerland.

Tomorrow, we go up a mountain.

adventures / history / Italy / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
19
Jun 25

It is dangerously hot

It is very hot. It was 91 degrees throughout the afternoon. We were outside. Conceding the sweat. Seeking out water where we could. (We could not find enough of either.) Trying to hide in the shade. Have you figured it out yet? Where we are? Here’s one last hint. This is the Basilica di Santa Maria delle Grazie.

So, if you haven’t guessed, we are in Milan, Italy. (But only until tomorrow.)

We took a Tesla Uber to get there. The basilica, of course, not Milan. No way I’d stay in that car long enough for a real trip. What a stupid car on the inside. Just a blank interior and a giant distracting screen with a UI that looks like it came from a cheap Canadian dystopian sci-fi show.

Both the car and this church are places I hadn’t ever thought of experiencing — some things you just don’t ever contemplate. For the former, I was grateful we only went a short distance and not over water or that the driver didn’t use the self-drive murder mode in our short trip. For the latter, it just didn’t seem a place I’d ever get the chance to see. Never something I’d considered trying. Not a goal. It was not unobtainable, just never on the radar.

Sort of like pedestrians, to the famous Teslers sensors.

Outside the Basilica di Santa Maria delle Grazie, we were given tickets. Inside, we had to display our passports. Then we went through an air filtration system — or so they said. And then, in another room, there it was, The Last Supper.

Leonardo da Vinci painted it from 1495–1498, in the refectory of the Convent, using a tempera fresco technique as both an experiment and an expediency to logistics. It is a fast-drying style, permanent in the sense that it doesn’t allow for alterations, but temporary as it relates to time. (Two early copies of The Last Supper are known to exist, thought to have been done by Leonardo’s assistants. The copies have survived with a lot of their original detail. One is in Switzerland, the other in Belgium.)

Today’s venerable works were once just things on walls. The room has been used as a stable, a hospital (during WWI) and a dining hall. At one point, in 1652, they cut a door in that wall, and through da Vinci’s representation of Jesus’ feet, to create a direct path to the kitchen. Late in the 16th century, the painting was considered all but ruined. The first restoration was attempted in 1726. However that went, a few decades later a curtain was installed, meant to protect the painting. Instead, it trapped moisture, and whenever the curtain was pulled, it scratched the flaking paint. Because of the way da Vinci painted it, much of what we see today is not original.

So the filtration process is amusing. But there you are. You walk through that one glass door from the filtration room and suddenly you’re confronted with the work of a master.

There’s also a display for the visually impaired.

The mural has gone through a series of more successful restorations over the years. A man named Luigi Cavenaghi was an innovator of his time. He worked on it from 1903 to 1908. At the time, apparently, addressing external factors (like the room, or the building) was a revolutionary idea.

One of Cavenaghi’s students, the self described failed painter Mauro Pellicioli, updated the restorations after World War II. He, again, updates the methods used for work on the famed wall. (During the war it was covered in sandbags as a precaution.) Pellicioli would become one of Italy’s most important restorers. Some of the most famous works you can see have experienced his work.

Later, Pelliciloli’s student, Pinin Brambilla Barcilon was tasked with the most recent restoration. It was the 1980s by then, and the art of restoration had become a science. She removed older glazes, and did much of the work that we see today.

On the wall, opposite is a painting by Milan native Giovanni Donato da Montorfano, descendant from a family of painters. His depiction of the Crucifixion (1495) is his best known work.

This fresco is believed to have some figured painted by da Vinci, as well.

We left Renaissance Milan, taking a bus from the Basilica di Santa Maria delle Grazie (which was constructed between 1465 and 1482). Here’s our parting view.

In retrospect, we could have taken those scooters.

We went over to La Scala, but the famed 18th century opera house wasn’t accepting tours. Odd, considering the many, many, tourists milling about. So we sat in the shade of the piaza until it was time for our tour of the Duomo di Milano.

The Milan Cathedral is beautiful, if you like the gothic renaissance style.

They started work here in 1386, and just finished the work in 1965. It supposedly seats 40,000. I wouldn’t know. The tour turned out to be a bust. We started on the roof, which was unimpressive. We came from the back left, across the front and down on the right side. When we got inside the cathedral told the tour, “Non oggi.” Not today. It seems there was an event scheduled for the afternoon, and our tour company can’t or didn’t check the cathedral’s event calendar.

What you can see from the back of one of the large parts of the church hinted that we missed a lot.

Someone else who was on the tour said he’d been on it before. He said we saw nothing compared to what we should have been able to see.

We’ll be getting a refund.

Took a cab back to the hotel. Cooled down in a restaurant that was conveniently located across the street. Settled in early, hoping that, this, day two, would be the end of the jet lag. Tomorrow, we are traveling by train.

adventures / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off
18
Jun 25

Where am I? Who am I? What day is it?

OK. We’ve traveled, by plane. And we arrived at our hotel, where we will stay for two nights. And this is the first night or the second night, depending on where you are in the world. And I have no idea what is going on, so scrambled are my brains and biorhythms. That’s your next hint. So this is the Wednesday post, which could also be on Tuesday, depending on where you are. That’s a hint. And here’s the final hint, a quick shot from a hop-on/hop-off bus tour we took to see the area, and ward off jet lag. And, as it turns out, to get a little breeze on the skin. It is unexpectedly warm here, despite forecasts. Anyway, that last hint.

That photo hint probably is only a little help. If you stare it closely it might help you eliminate several possibilities, but probably won’t give you a precise location. I’ll offer you that tomorrow; if I’m awake for it.

adventures / movies / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
17
Jun 25

Big ol’ jet airliner

Yep, that’s me. I’m sitting over a wing. The better to ensure there are no monsters out there. You might be asking yourself how I got here — by car. You might be asking yourself why I am referring to “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” which turns 62 years old this fall — it is still terrifying, but for different reasons. But the questions you should be asking: Where are you going? And: “What did you watch along the way?”

I’ll give you a day or two to figure out the answer to the first question. And I’ll give you a very small and indirect hint with the answers to the second question.

First, I watched “Captain America: Brave New World.”

It could have been better, but they were working from a thin comic book concept here. Anthony Mackie deserves better. And how Harrison Ford got involved will remain a mystery. Indeed, it is the copy book of MCU movies.

So, in other words, a good airplane movie. Passed the time. Filed it away. Pleased I didn’t spend time that could have been better spent doing or watching anything else.

Which brings us to our second film of the flight. And, again, Honest Trailer nails it.

There are pumpkins in North Africa, expressions some 1700 years before the technology that prompted them was invented and a newspaper in ancient Rome, where no history is observed.

Look, there are several reasons one makes a movie. Fan service, the box office, high art, or marketing overreach. Others are misguided movie execs, to right a wrong or wrong a right. One of those reasons is “to give Ridley Scott something to do,” and this film is that.

Anyway, the plane has safely landed. And if you’re plotting runtime to try to determine where I am, or otherwise trying to glean some information from the photo above, let me tell you I also watched the first episode of 1923 to complete the flight. We have arrived at our lodgings. Now we fight off the temptation to sleep — didn’t do that on the plane, as usual — so that we may laughingly ward off jet lag.

Tomorrow: more hints.

cycling / memories / Monday / photo — Comments Off
16
Jun 25

Gummosis is actually the term for it, yes

I set two alarms, 18 minutes apart. There’s no reason for this. At one point I made an alarm in my phone for the top of the hour and at another moment I had cause to make one for 18 minutes after the hour.

If you had to log an explicative for your alarms, they would be as banal as they are amusing. On this, we can all agree.

So I set an alarm in my phone, doing the math, figuring, “That’s a good solid 8 hours of sleep. That’ll help fix me right up.” And then I stayed awake for the next two-plus hours.

But when the alarm went off, I’d been woken twice. Once by the light, because I did not configure the doors for optimal photonic blockage, and once when my lovely bride began her industrious day. And so it was that I was surprised when the top-of-the-hour alarm finally went off. And doubly so when that next one sounded, 18 minutes later. That was a delightfully long 18 minutes.

And so the morning things. And then the afternoon things. We watched the FedEx man sprint across the yard to hurl a small box on the porch. It was our version of those insurance commercials, when homeowners become their parents. What if he slips and falls?

Simple, we bury the body. Of course you have to do something with the truck. That’s a bigger hole to dig. But, you’d of course pull other people’s deliveries out first. Maybe there’s a shovel — or an excavator, or a front-end loader — in there.

Happily, he did not slip. I fetched the box, one the cats will not enjoy, for it has their medicine in it. It is designed to reduce the thing that cats do that you have to clean up. (I don’t want to be too descriptive, because you are perhaps reading this over a snack.) We administer it twice a week, it’s a gel that is rubbed on the foreleg, which they lick off and, despite it’s pleasant-to-cats odor, it is the worst thing that has ever happened to them, ever. Just ask.

So I opened the small box and put away its contents when they weren’t around. The shipping box is now in the recycling stash, ready for tomorrow morning’s run.

I checked the mail. DirecTV wants me back. We haven’t had DirecTV in several years, never at this house and it wasn’t in my name. But they want me back. I do miss the DVR function and the UX they offered. Well, not the last one we had. They’d just rolled out a new guide system and we dropped them before I had time to adjust to it. Still, in these, our modern times of convenience, after navigating apps for six minutes before waiting to find out if the Internet connection is going to work (pretty solid here, actually) I do miss good old fashioned TV.

Several years ago we had a grad student stop by our house for something, this was a woman in her mid-20s, easily. She walked through the living room, did a double take at the TV and said, “Oh, you have one of those.”

Earlier this year I read a study that argued that people that watch streaming things still think of it as TV. And I was gratified by that, until I remembered I saw an interview with an NBC bigwig from last year who said the same thing, and there’s no way they were both correct, right?

Anyway, we’ve lately been streaming West Wing. Just sort of waiting out time until the next big bike race, which we will also stream on our own delayed schedule.

I can’t remember if that race is taking place on the app that showing you a preview as you scrub through the slower parts of the program, or not. The inconsistency of thoughtful little features like that is just one more argument against a la carte streaming.

Which is funny. People argued for a la carte cable. Cable wouldn’t or couldn’t comply, so there’s another industry taking a 3-iron in the teeth. We, meanwhile, have six dozen apps and, bizarrely, a Samsung TV package we don’t acknowledge.

When I was young, I knew two things about peaches. The first was about that sticky bit of gooey ooze that comes out of the fruit on the tree. Hands should not be sticky, and that impression influenced a lot of my young thoughts about peaches. The second thing I knew was that peaches and chocolate cake make for an excellent pairing. And if you didn’t know that, you’ll need to do a little research. Bake yourself a Betty Crocker cake and crack open a can of peaches and become the person you were meant to be. This will also influence your thoughts about peaches.

Now, we have a peach tree and I have learned several things. I know the three-pronged test for determining ripeness (color, squeeze, and smell). I know this tree will be all-encompassing come August. And I know to recruit peach recipients early, which we have been doing.

So I checked on the peaches. They’re coming along. Another banner crop, I’m sure.

They are a small fruit, but they are delicious. And they are plentiful. And that’s how I have learned so much about this particular stone fruit the last two seasons. We still have some from last year. We might still have some from last year. So long as you stay away from the gummosis.

I set out for a haircut today. I have tried this once before, last week, which isn’t unusual. It often takes several attempts. Mostly because everyone needs haircuts, everyone seems to go to the same cheap place I go to, and they all go at the same time I want to. And the only worse than sitting in the big chair is sitting in the waiting area.

The last time I went I just told the woman that cut my hair: I don’t like to be here. She was cool with it. Of course, she was deep into her shift and on her feet that whole time and probably felt the same way. She was very nice. Gave me a good cut. Did not, however, remove all of the silver hair.

It was a different person this time, of course, because more than 15 minutes have elapsed. And she picked up on my pleasant style of chatty silence quickly. She asked if they’d thinned this part the last time. I, a guy, said Maybe? It gets poofy and I probably complained about that, and it didn’t seem to get so poofy. So maybe. She said it felt like her colleague had thinned it.

I wanted to ask why it all grows at different speeds out of my head. Why are some parts of my scalp more exceptional than others? Just look at this discrepancy. I could not help but look as she held it up, appraising the problem, arriving at the solution and sharing my shame with all of the world, or at least the old man behind me and the fidgety little kid to my left.

Anyway, haircut done. The various layers are trimmed and shaped and “My! What thick hair you have!”

I don’t mind that part. I like that part. Everything else, not so much a fan.

Our neighbor invited us for a group ride this evening. The three of us went out with another who was, apparently, on her second road ride — today, she figured out her shifting. She’s training for her first triathlon, a sprint, in August, and tonight we took her on a 17-mile lollipop.

She’s a runner and a swimmer. Her parents did tris. Now our neighbor and the Yankee, both Ironmen, are giving her tips and advice. She’ll be just fine. Best of all, we found another person to ride nearby. This is going to turn into a full-on group ride before long.

Just when I got out of the echelon, they pulled me right back in. Only kidding, I haven’t done a proper group ride since 2019. I’m OK with that. You’re never last when you ride solo.