Thanks for the love K-Face

Rogue Turtle

Rogue Turtle is alive and well!  I replaced his front tire tube today and am ready to ride again!  Too bad it will snow soon =[

Only in Asia!!!

My friend Nicholas is a Singaporean exchange student who is a very witty english major.  He decided to introduce me to what he considered to be the ridiculous antics that his home country sometimes performed.  The tourism board of Singapore decided that the country needed a national symbol, so they invented the Merlion.  Its half lion, half fish, and its all hilarious.  Oh but wait, it gets better, they built a giant merlion at a place called Sentosa, in the day it is perfectly normal,
but at night it shoots lasers from its eyes!

I almost wet myself

Revelry

There are drunk and cheering people everywhere.  Horns are honking, and more horns in response, as people yell and dance in the streets.  There is a very sincere joy in the people I walk by as they smile as though they just had their first kiss, a kind of giddy unrestrainable smile.  I cannot help but be happy for their happiness, and get caught up in their joy =]

If he is as good as they believe, I will be very content with his presidency.  I am a little bit uneasy that the democrats just took over both houses in addition to the presidency though... At least we'll finally get some liberal judges who realize that the constitution is not an opportunity to legislate lifestyle.

Middlesex Fells Reservation picture journal

On Thursday I decided to accomplish what I set out to do on Tuesday, that is, make a trip to the Middlesex Fells Reservation.  Fells apparently means rocky place, and the whole reservation was jagged in an endearing way that gave character for something so close to the city.  After riding the T for an hour and then following people's directions I found a way into the reservation, although it was not actually an entrance.  Here is the first thing I saw, there is no path and I ended up ignoring paths the majority of the way:

Immediately there was this wonderful little waterfall, I was so excited and my morale skyrocketed!
This bridge was at the top of the ridge, and that creek makes the previous waterfall, this is one of my favorite pictures
There were no mountains, and there were no rolling hills, but there were rugged hills.  Here is the summit of the first one I climbed, I ended up going over about 10.
Here is a zoom in on the prudential center from a different hill
The stones created a natural staircase
Big rocks were everywhere
I felt like I was in a Shaman's grove
This was the highest point that I found in the 2 and a half hours of daylight I had to explore the reservation.  After I took this picture I descended all the way to the ground as I was approaching a body of water.
Spot Pond!  Its not much of a pond really, its actually bigger than BU's campus, I looked on the map.
A Divine Path
This path was really narrow
This is Wright Pond taken from a mini-cliff that made me want to jump in, except that I was cold.  The next photo was taken from the opposite shore of this little cliff
Here is Wright from the other side, and you can see the cliff of the last photo
All of the water in the reservation was crystal clear
Two swans in love, I wonder what that is like?
They came right up to my feet, I was surprised to learn that swans can be almost a meter long, it really caught me off guard
Here they are eating some plants on the beach
Wow, I wish my backyard was like that.  This is what the hills were like in the reservation
Sunset while riding the Orange Line home

HAHAHAHA

Fully deployed military unit on the Charles River 10 feet from jogging pedestrians + intrusive food seeking geese = hilarity

The Stata Center, Frank Gehry, and Modern Architecture

I am going to start off with my bias:  I don't like modern architecture.  I will then move to my second bias:  I find Frank Gehry to have an ego the size of a whale and I believe egoism more than artistic vision plays into his creations.

In nature, things have patterns, and many animals also demonstrate symmetry.  It is quite beautiful.  I love architecture from so many different places, the asian, the arab, the european, the mesoamerican and incan, I can appreciate pretty much anything that is well built.  The Stata Center at MIT is not even well built, heck, MIT sued Frank Gehry for all of the problems they are having with the building!  The whole point of the building is that there are no patterns, it defies all algorithms, and in that it defies nature.  I hate to tell Frank Gehry this but, we are a part of nature and nature is a part of our souls.  This is supposed to be one of the great works of Modern architecture and it is a total piece of crap!  I went and saw it for myself in person, and the first thing I noticed is that it is huge, much bigger then the pictures make it look.  It is a HUGE piece of crap!

Nature is fighting the Modern World and the Modern World is winning.  I found this on the sidewalk that I took the first picture from and it pretty much summed up how I felt about this work.