I snapped this a couple of weeks ago at the locks on the Rideau Canal. I think it’s one of the cooler pictures I’ve taken, though I can’t claim it was totally on purpose.

After the ballgame in Toronto last Friday (and as of writing, the trade deadline has come and gone and Roy Halladay is still a Bluejay! Hooray! At least until the off season…), Shengrong and I spent the rest of the weekend in Niagara Falls. She’d always wanted to go ever since Dashan (possibly the best known Canadian in the world) took her on a “tour” of the falls in one of his TV programs. The falls are very well-known in China: westerners who go to China want to see the Great Wall, Chinese who come to Canada want to see Niagara Falls.

The falls themselves are as spectacular as you would expect. If you’ve never been there, there are two waterfalls, one much larger than the other. There’s a boat called the “Maid of the Mist” that’ll take you up close, which is a pretty intense experience, and made more so for us because it absolutely poured rain for the 30 minutes we were on the boat, and then the sun came out. They give you a stylish blue slicker to keep you from getting soaked by the spray, so we came out of the experience relatively dry.

The town of Niagara Falls is a little surreal. It’d pass as a fairly ordinary small town, except for the giant tourist area grafted on to the side nearest the waterfalls. There are plenty of hotels and restaurants, which is to be expected, but also a large number of “attractions” like the one pictured above that don’t really fit. Apparently, everyone is trying to offer an answer to the question of “we’ve seen the waterfall, what now?”, and answer it louder than his neighbour. I suspect there’s a positive feedback loop in action: each outlandish attraction pushes the next to be even crazier.

The waterfalls, at least, are beautiful. We mostly stayed away from the surrounding madness, but I couldn’t resist snapping the photo above of Frankenstein’s castle-and-burger-king, which is across the street from the toppled over Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum and just up the hill from the pro-wrestling themed “pile driver” amusement ride, and the wax museum where teenage girls busily snapped pictures of a wax statue of Heath Ledger as The Joker in the window.

I found myself trying to imagine what the Falls would have been like before the town. What must the first people to see it have thought, coming upon this roaring display of nature surrounded by the quiet woods? It would have been like finding the hand of god reaching down to the earth in the middle of the wilderness.

Roy “Doc” Halladay, the best pitcher the Toronto Bluejays ever had, is very probably going to be traded before the end of the week. I’d never seen him pitch except on TV, and, with a little bit of panic, realized that his Friday night start in Toronto might be my last chance. So I did what any die-hard Jays fan would do in my position: took the day off work and booked a flight. Shengrong said I was “feng feng dian dian de” for my impulsiveness, but gamely came along.

Halladay is incredible. Because he plays in Canada, and not say New York, he isn’t as widely known as he could be, and he seems to like it that way. Whenever he talks to the media he’s thoughtful and well-spoken, even a little shy. One the field, he’s incredibly intense. He rarely smiles or even looks up at the crowd. He glowers down at every batter like an ace pitcher should. Occasionally, steam comes out of his ears.

And what a pitcher he is: “dominant” is a word often used to describe him. He’s an incredible athlete: all of his pitches from the 94 mph fastball with deadly movement, to his pinpoint curveball, to his devastating 92 mph cut-fastball (Marino Rivera, the Yankee’s legendary closer, throws only cutters), to the sinker and the change-up, are “plus” pitches, meaning better than the average for the league. He has great command of all of them: he can throw any pitch for a strike on the corner of the plate when he wants to, and the hitters can never guess what might be coming next.

But there are many pitches with great “stuff”, as the pitch-arsenal is called. Great pitches alone don’t make a great pitcher, and his “stuff” is just the beginning of greatness of Roy Halladay. Some pitchers with wicked pitches try to strike everyone out. They spend five or six pitches per batter and are worn out after five or six innings. They’re happy when they manage to finish the seventh. Halladay can “pitch to contact”, he throws pitches that look appetizing enough for the batters to swing at, but they don’t connect solidly with the bat, and turn into easy outs. He saves the strikeout for when he really needs it, and thus saves his arm. He usually leads the league in innings pitched and throws more complete games in a season than most other teams. He once threw a 10-inning complete game and won it 1 to 0. Incredible.

And then there’s his work-ethic. Starting pitchers throw every 5th game, and Halladay is known to make the most of the time in between, both in terms of physical conditioning and in his analysis of the opposing hitters, learning their weaknesses, formulating a plan. I don’t know if Malcolm Gladwell mentioned Halladay in his book on how “genius” is often a product of a huge amount of work, but if he didn’t, he should have. When Halladay first arrived in the major leagues, he dazzled everyone by nearly throwing a no-hitter in his second big-league game. Then he ran intro difficulties and seemed to fizzle out. He was sent down all the way to A-ball and most people thought that was the last they’d hear of him; he’d be the baseball equivalent of a one-hit-wonder. But Doc worked is butt off in the minors, retooled the mechanics of how he throws the ball, and came back. He’s been to six all-star games, he’s thrown 44 complete games, he’s won the Cy Young award for best pitcher in the league.

But Roy Halladay, the arch-competitor, has never been to the post-season. He’s on a team that hasn’t made the playoffs since 1993, and that’s not good enough for the Doc. He’s current contract ends after 2010, and he’s said that, while he’d prefer to win in Toronto, time is running out for him (he’s 32) and he might look to other teams where he’d have a better shot. Right now, his trade value is as high as it has ever been, and so the Jays, fearing that he’d leave in 2010 and they’d get nothing back, have put him on the market. It’s unclear whether the Jays will get the kind of deal they want for him, but there’s a very real chance he could be going.

Whether he’s traded or not, I’m glad I got to see him on Friday. If it was his last game in Toronto, it was in some ways a fitting conclusion to his Bluejays tenure. He was brilliant, throwing 9 innings, giving up only 2 runs (1 earned) (giving up fewer than 4 earned runs in 9 innings is considered “good”), allowing only 4 hits, walking only 3, and striking out 10. The crowd, although not as big as it ought to have been for Doc’s final game, was certainly aware of what they might be about to lose. They gave him a standing ovation when he walked off the field after his warmup, they gave him a standing ovation after almost every inning, they stood and cheered whenever he got two strikes on a batter.

But for all of Doc’s superman effort, his team couldn’t get him the win. His opposing starter, Tampa Bay’s Matt Garza, kept right up with him, allowing only two runs to the Jays and baffling their hitters over nine innings. In the tenth inning, the Jay’s bullpen coughed up two more runs, and then the Jay’s hitters went quietly. As much as he tries to carry the team, Halladay couldn’t carry them enough to win the game.

At the Dragon Boat Festival this weekend there were three or four crocodiles like this fellow on display in cages. Each croc seemed oblivious to the attention of the passing crowds, content to lie in the shady grass in one corner or another of his cage. While I was snapping pictures I saw a man walk up to one of the cages to see what the fuss was about. He read the sign posted on the side, which said something along the lines of “Man-eating nile crocodile” and then peered in. The crocodile was lying against the wall nearest him, and he couldn’t really see it from the angle he was looking down into the cage. His eyes went wide when realization dawned that he was looking at an empty crocodile cage… uh oh!

Then he found the little fellow hiding in the shade and looked relieved.

The humble sign is not a new piece of technology, dating back to sometime just after the invention of writing in Mesopotamia, circa 3500 B.C. The sign is a clever concept: take an idea you want to communicate, write it down, and situate it prominently. When people see it, they’ll read the words and know what you wanted to tell them. Sounds good in theory, but do signs actually work?

After 5500 years of wondering, I’m glad we can finally put the question to rest.

‘

Mmmm, fresh homemade bread.

In lieu of something substantial, here’s a quick semi-illustrated smattering of my last twelve months’ activities.

What I look like these days
(Christmas 2008)

Favorite Blog Entries of 2008

• Why I Don’t Like Chainmail Underwear
• Chinese Food
• Noodling Again
• Really, what can you say to Ghandi?

Most Phallic Photograph
(Atlas rocket at the Museum of Science and Technology)

Best trip taken in 2008: China.

Favorite books read this year

• Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading
  I first became aware of Alberto Manguel when he gave his fantastic Massey Lectures in 2007. This book is a book about books, and a joy for any book-worm like me.

• Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
  I’ve been on a bit of a Hemingway kick of late. I think this is my favorite. John McCain’s favorite novel is “For Whom the Bell Tolls”, which is also pretty good.

• Ian M. Banks, The Aglebriast
  I like Science Fiction best when it makes my eyes go wide.

• Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
  I didn’t get this book at first, but about half way through something clicked and I couldn’t put it down. It’s a strange history a fictitious town called Macondo, where the whole of human history seems to play out.

• Neal Stephenson, Anathem (even if the end was a bit lame)
  This is a book that I thoroughly enjoyed but hesitate to recommend. It seemed to have been crafted precisely for me, and I know my tastes skew a little eccentric. It’s 900 pages long, has monasteries full of mathematicians, and the entire thing is one big game of hide and seek with the history of western philosophy.

Nerdiest Photo of 2008

Video Game Created: The Trials of Soscarides
(Windows and Mac; have you played it yet?)

Most Dramatic Ottawa Sunset

That’s all for 2008. Happy New Year!

On my flight to China in June I happened to see two pretty mountains from the window of the plane. I snapped some pictures, and figured I’d probably never know what I was looking at. After all, I was only moderately sure that we were over Russia at the time…

Well, tonight, after about an hour of playing with Google Earth, I managed to track them down. Both are volcanoes on the Kamchatka peninsula, which is the pointy bit of Russia that divides the Bering Sea from the Sea of Okhostka (if you ever played “Risk”, Kamchatka was where you massed your armies before invading Alaska). Here are my original photos:

Mount Kronotsky

Krasheninnikov Volcano

And here’s the NASA image that proved I was looking at the right thing:

North is at bottom right. You can see the tall peak, the triangular lake, the double crater, and the nearby ocean, which is basically what I had to go on. Here’s the link to see it on google maps, and here are the wikipedia entries. I’m quite pleased with myself for managing to turn this information up.

Judging by the photos I looked at while conducting my search, Kamchatka is a very beautiful bit of country.

It’s not exactly a secret that “Chinese food” as often experienced in North America (egg rolls, chicken balls, fried rice, fortune cookies, etc.) is not something a typical Chinese person would be familiar with. Finding out exactly where and how this particular deep-fried cuisine originated would probably make for a fun project, but it isn’t my project today. I’m going to talk about the food I ate while I was in China. Thanks to Shengrong’s cooking and the occasional trip to a more authentic Chinese restaurant (they exist), I didn’t find the food to be totally outlandish, but there were a few strange bumps in the culinary road.

In Beijing, we stayed on the campus of the China University of Geosciences, and ate a few of our meals at one of the University restaurants, “LocalFood.com”. One of my favorite things there were battered chicken wings heavily spiced with cumin. Shengrong ordered those on our first day since they’re more like the kind of food I’m used to. That was really the only meal in which I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to manage the food without any trouble, as I was really tired and jetlegged at the time. After that I ate everything happily, and when I got back to Canada I found my own cooking kind of boring for the first few days. Unsurprisingly, I got a lot better at handling chopsticks.

At the entrance of “Local Food” – it was pretty large and usually full of diners.

In a nice room of the restaurant where we ate lunch a few times, overlooking the university quad.

Naturally, we had to try Beijing Duck during our stay in Beijing. We ate it in “Quan ju de”, the most famous Beijing Duck restaurant, just off Tian’anmen Square. The duck is cooked with a crispy outside and then cut into small slices. You mix a few slices with leek, cucumber and a special sauce and roll them in thin pastries, using your chopsticks. It took me a while to get the hang of it, but I really liked the end result.

Some ducks waiting to be Beijing’d.

Shengrong ordering duck.

Other highlights from Beijing included a surprisingly good (and cheap) meal of chicken and black bean procured very late at night from a small student-frequented spot on campus, and dumplings at the great wall.

We had several nice meals in Wuhan, both at restaurants and as cooked by Shengrong’s mom. Shengrong and I cooked a few dishes on our last night there, using some spices we brought from home. I’m not sure how well they went over, but everyone in the family had the good grace to eat them and smile…

The Chinese answer to the question of “what shall we eat?” is often different from ours. For example: when we’d stop for ice cream, Shengrong would select a mung bean flavored popsicle. I wish I’d taken a picture – they were such a delightful shade of green. I tried one and was nonplussed. The American tourists whom Shengrong helped order snacks at the Beijing museum weren’t too keen on the mung bean flavor either. Can’t say I blame them.
Another cultural quirk that I wasn’t really expecting is that nobody in China drinks anything cold. And heaven forbid you should want a cool glass of water… the best you’re likely to do is a cup of hot tea minus the tea. Even the bottled water would be on a shelf and not in a cooler. As someone drinks a lot of water in a typical day, this took some getting used to.

The table at a place where we ate in Wuhan. There are a few differences between the Chinese restaurant experience and the one we have here. For starters, larger restaurants are usually better quality: the concept of a tiny restaurant with a limited menu and delicious food doesn’t really exist there. People tend to dine out in large groups (the bigger the crowd, the more dishes you can order, after all) and often eat in private rooms. Chinese place-settings are different from what a Westerner would expect: one receives chopsticks (naturally), a spoon, a small plate on which to put bones and other things you aren’t going to eat, and a small bowl, in which you put your rice and a few morsels from various dishes.

Three dishes from that meal: soft-shelled turtle, squid, pork.

Brother turtle, up close.

I put some thought into what the strangest thing I ate in China was. High on the list was having oatmeal for breakfast. That, in and of itself, is not unusual, but I’d never eaten oatmeal with chopsticks before, which lent the proceedings a kind of surreal air. I liked breakfast in China generally, and enjoyed the dumplings and the sticky rice with mushrooms and tofu and egg, which is a typical Wuhan breakfast dish.

But no, the strangest thing I ate in China was probably this:

It’s the ovaries of some kind of special frog, stuffed inside a papaya. Apparently considered a delicacy. I’m not sure how the chef who invented that got his inspiration… How was it? Kind of watery and not strongly flavored.

This isn’t really of anything we ate, but I put it in out of interest since it’s broadly food-related:

It’s a little hard to make out because I was far away, but those guys are dynamiting fish in Wuhan’s east lake. I’d never seen that before. The fish were flying out of the water like popcorn.

And lastly, Chinese Dairy Queen. The prices were ridiculously expensive. 26 yuan will get you a frosty, or 26 servings of rice at any other restaurant. Your choice.

More China in a bit, but today is Canada Day! We saw the RCMP musical ride at Parliament Hill.

This is about as Canadian as possible.

The camera actually got a better view than we did. I snapped most of these photos holding the camera at arm’s length over my head and hoping for the best. The crowds were huge.

This one was at the end of the performance when the crowds had thinned a little.

A couple of mounties actually lost their hats during the “charge” maneuver. Presumably that is frowned upon…

After the demonstration, a few of the calmer horses came to visit with the spectators. One expects an RCMP horse to be steady as anything, but we actually saw a few spook from the crowds and from the marching band that passed while they were waiting to begin their show.

Ever the optimist, I took some fireworks photos, even though such things are difficult to do well. We were right down by the river and you can see the reflections in the water.

Happy Canada Day.