Guinness is like a bowling ball, both in my stomach and my brain. Dude, I am wrecked.
Cigarettes Only
No time for a post, dear readers! The client visit was all day (it went great, thanks), and I only have an hour in the room to clean up, pack, do my work e-mail, and get ready for dinner and far too much drinking!
So I leave you with a little bit of Belfast art from my Sunday meanderings:
Shoot first, add captions later
I don’t have time to resequence and caption these pix, dear readers, but I’m sure you wanna see how today’s mini-coach trip up to The Giant’s Causeway went, so I’ve posted the pix.
In case you don’t wanna see the pix, I’m betting I can change your mind:
Keep in mind: these are natural formations.
Oh, and the backdrop is pretty nice, too:
I’ll get around to reorganizing and captioning during the weekend. Your job is to marvel.
What it is: 2/11/08
It’s the Belfast Special Edition of What it is!
What I’m reading: Exit Ghost
What I’m listening to: District Line
What I’m watching: On the flight over to Belfast, I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Big Lebowski (more on this later)
What I’m drinking: Guinness. Duh.
Where I’m going: Perhaps I’ll get up to the Giants Causeway today. I’ll definitely be going here on Tuesday.
What I’m happy about: Getting to explore a new place.
What I’m sad about: Being apart from my wife for a few days.
What I’m pondering: Why I didn’t stop to take a picture of the three epically drunk men I saw stumbling down the street on Sunday afternoon, each drinking from what appeared to be two-liter bottles of Strongbow cider.
New day
Made it into Belfast half an hour ahead of schedule, and cruised right out to my hotel. My driver told me that the story I heard about it is true; the Europa is the most bombed hotel in the world. Forty-seven different bombings, he said.
I napped (still can’t sleep on flights), and then meandered around town in the afternoon. I’ll post pix from that later. For now, click through this guy to see some of the gorgeous sunrise photos I took from the plane:
Standard Operating Procedures
I’m off to Belfast tonight for a client visit. Better go over my checklist!
E-check-in, print boarding pass, dig up passport: check
Pack suit, toiletries, walking-around clothes: check
Put together electronics kit, with chargers and international outlet adapter: check
Check battery in noise-canceling headphones, charge iPod and camera: check
Find some reading material downstairs in the library: check
Receive e-mail from my father with a joke about a plane crashing:
check
Pack extra Xanax for flight: check
This whole Mecca thing finally makes sense to me
This is my promised land. It’s so beautiful, I think I’m gonna cry.
(More here. And DISCS OF TRON!?!?! Oh. Mah. Gaw.)
Unrequired Reading: Feb. 8, 2008
I hope you had a good week, dear readers! Enjoy some links I didn’t have time to write about!
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Feb. 8, 2008”
Welcome to the Boomtown
This week’s issue of New York has a cover feature about the impending recession and how it’ll affect NYC:
See? The Boom Is Bust! Plus: The Upside of the Downside and The Everything Guide to Belt-Tightening.
But as I read the issue (it’s really become a great magazine under Adam Moss), I got the feeling that not everyone’s taking this premise seriously. It’s not that the ads were frighteningly inappropriate (not like a few weeks ago, when the cover feature on finding silence and peace in NYC was filled with ads for gyms that tend to, um, pump the megamix) (oh, and Quebec? Try to find a better tagline than “Providing emotions since 1534,” please); rather, it was a certain passage that betrayed New York’s status as a boomtown. That would be Adam Platt’s review of Dovetail, a new restaurant on the Upper West Side, which includes this gem:
As at other destination joints around town, there is a small private dining room downstairs, and if you have the inclination, you can wash your dinner down with a glass or two of ’98 La Tâche Burgundy ($1,840 per bottle) or, even better, a bottle of legendary ’95 Romanée-Conti ($3,700).
Remember, kiddos: the boom is bust! Better buy that $3,700 bottle of wine while you can still afford it!
You be Illy
Ernesto Illy, “evangelist of espresso,” has died at the age of 82. I’ve never been an espresso drinker, although we do have a machine at home (wedding present, naturally). Given his company’s level of QC, I’m thinking of trying it out! (not the pods, of course)
Largely under Ernesto Illy’s direction, the company built a laboratory equipped with sophisticated instruments like gas chromatographs, infrared emission pyrometers and flame ionization detectors. There, coffee beans are cut into slices eight microns thick for analysis in an electron microscope. Every step of the manufacturing process is monitored by computers. There are 114 quality-control checks between the time bags of raw beans arrive on the loading docks to the time roasted beans are shipped in sealed cans.
I love the floridity of this passage:
Disdaining standard-size cups of over-roasted coffee and any sort of added ingredient — particularly milk, which he viewed as a cover-up for badly roasted beans — Mr. Illy saw something sublime in espresso’s vibrant aroma, potent flavor and velvety, hazel-colored head of foam, known as crema in Italian.
I, at the moment, am drinking my afternoon French press of Jamaican Joe’s.