ships passing in the night, davis-style

So I come out to the Bay Area a day early, since I've got some time coming to me at my job, and I figure it'll be fun to take a little trip up northeast. One of our neos (new members of the frat), by the name of PETA (don't ask the provenance of the name) is living for the summer in Davis, that delightfully rural college community (UC Davis, natch) about twenty miles out of California's august capitol, Sacramento. I end up having to rent a car from an absurdly skeezy rental outfit, since Enterprise, which is about the only rental agency which will serve the highly-beset-upon under-twenty-five crowd, doesn't have anything except a tricked-out SUV. Since gas is about a quintillion bucks a gallon these days, I have to demur.

It's still a sweet drive, and I get a good deal on a hotel in Dixon, a town even smaller than Davis, if such a thing is credible. Nice place, though, a good ol' Sac exurb. (Said hotel is completely full, which speaks to its quality, as does the fact that it evidently provides free wireless internet service, by which means I type these words presently, without even advertising that extraordinary benefit.) Central Cali is about as western (in the sense of “western” in “spaghetti western” rather than "“western China”) as anyplace in the world: basically rural communities largely dominated by the farmland which provides such agricultural dominance to the Golden State.

But I don't end up getting in touch with PETA until around 9, by which time he tells me that he's got to be a-crashing, since he works construction and needs to wake up around 4:30 or some similarly ungodly hour. I have to admit that I'm imbibing a few in some dive in Sacramento with a couple folks about as sketchy as my car rental agency, and that there's pretty much no way I can get to his place in time to accomodate his sleep schedule. Alas... I will be only a ship passing in the night (actually, a green Toyota Camry passing in the night), hurtling down I-80 towards San Francisco. I did get a chance to grok his nabe, though; it's a nice-looking place. And with my visit to UC Davis, I've now hit up every one of the nine UC campuses except Santa Cruz (and, I guess, UC Merced, the one opening this year to make the total ten).

And temperature in inland California—the central valley—is about 95 Fahrenheit. Nearly anywhere else in the nation, that would be intolerable... oppressive. Here, though, it's exhilarating, because there's no humidity. At all. It's good heat. God bless California.

And now for something completely different: tonight, watching Family Guy on Adult Swim, Comedy Central gave a shout out to Lance Armstrong, ending it with “like he actually reads these”. Why don't you think he does, Comedy Central? Not all ships pass silently in the night. Some of them toot their foghorns. Maybe Lance is tooting for you.

of cel phones and crobars

Note to the world: if you're planning on getting drunk and leaving your cel phone sitting on a bar somewhere, try to make sure that bar is at your local watering hole so that there's some chance of getting it back. When you leave it at one of the biggest club franchises in the world, Crobar—with installations in London, Buenos Aires, Los Angeles, and most critically here, New York—there's basically no hope. By today, my friends are already getting crank calls from the miscreant. One such friend, nicknamed “Hooch”, gets a particular quantity, probably from a curious fellow wondering what's at the other end. I don't mind losing the phone; it was a piece of shit I wanted to replace anyway. But the numbers... all my phone numbers... irreplaceable.