Los Angeles

After a busy week in Berkeley, I finally have time to put up pictures from the road trip down to LA that Zack, Sally, and I took to visit Dan over Veterans' Day weekend. It was a good and very relaxing trip, that entailed a lot of sleeping, eating, and drinking, and since it was LA, driving around everywhere. We had a fun walk around Huntington Gardens and a good Mozart and Strauss concert by the LA Philharmonic at Walt Disney Hall in downtown LA. I'm amazed at how skillfully Los Angeles-area neighborhoods have been designed so that you have no sense of the immense suburban expanse that sprawls out in all directions. I think I'd still go crazy, though.

The above are both pictures from the beach at Santa Monica. I was amused by the row of very compact, multistory houses in pastel colors, which are squeezed between a very wide public beach and Highway 1 (in front of the cliff face). Not a place I'd want to live, but I imagine those houses are pretty expensive.

I also met Peter Carter (a friend from high school who I hadn't seen in five years) while I was down there. Peter's studying urban planning at UCLA. He had e-mailed me out of the blue a few days before I was set to drive down there, and said that he had enjoyed the gorilla costume pictures. He tells me that there are all kind of subversive, postmodern ironies about being dressed up as a gorilla, about all of which I was completely unaware. We had dinner at a Tibetan-Nepalese restaurant right before going to see Borat.

I hope this picture doesn't need any explanation. (Those of you who live in Japan may not be aware of the movie Borat, since I doubt it will be released in your country. I offer the following brief explanation: 「ボラット」という映画はイギリス人のコメディアンによって作られました。カザフスタン国有放送局からアメリカの社会を研究するために派遣されたジャーナリストの振りをして、アメリカを回って、アメリカ人の反応を見るために性的な冗談を言ったり、恥ずかしいことをしたり、自分が騙されているのに気づいていないアメリカ人を差別なこと言わせたりします。この映画は最近アメリカで出てすごく人気ができたけど、日本で人気になるか微妙だと思います。僕の友達は、この人の格好をして、映画館に行って映画を見ました。)

As always, I spent a lot of time at Cal Tech on this trip. Near Dan's office are a series of framed physics bets by famous Cal Tech astrophysicist Kip Thorne with various other famous physicists (and physics students) from the past twenty years. The above bet is with Stephen Hawking.