The Beach again - Wednesday

The Beach again - Wednesday
It's supposed to be our rest day, but I decided to rest on the beach.
All of this walking around has made me feel good but restless. L is
taking it easy.
It's a weekday and knowing the system made the trip a little faster.
On the subway, a woman sung with a portable karaoke machine. We've
also seen bands with accordions on the subway. They work for seemingly
meager tips. It's a captive audience but not an especially receptive
one. I'm thinking of doing some standup comedy on the metro: "What is
up with those toilets? Insert punchline here ... Please come back and
remember my metro A line material is completely different from my B
line stuff."
The beach was beautiful and less crowded and maybe a little cooler
than Sunday. There was a lot of wind surfers today.
On the way back, I picked up a discarded paper, Metro. On the front, a
picture that took up half the page showed a collision on the
Washington metro. I couldn't understand most of the caption, but I did
pick up "Takoma
e Fort Totten," two DC metro stops, so it's not Washington, Italy. Why
would they care here? I saw the same thing ten years ago in Prague,
with a big picture of a Conrail train overturned in the Midwest on the
front page. Maybe a good disaster picture works anywhere. I don't know
if it's specia because it's an American disaster. In Prague, a person
commented that he could never live in America, with all of the
hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, forest fires. I guess all of the
coverage convinced him America was all disaster, all the time, like
General Motors or the NC Global Transpark* (cheap shots but they
work).

I thought this was too much detail, but L said to put it in. It
reflects on the differences in our food strategies. We had no sandwich
fixins when I left, so I thought maybe I'd get a couple of
cheeseburgers at the Termini station, much less than lunch bought from
a beach vendor. But on my way, I saw a sandwich vending machine. It
reported a temperature of 4° C (about 40 real degrees). So I grabbed a
salmon sandwich and put it in my backpack. An hour or two, I ate it on
the beach. They even cut the crusts off for me. Italian crust can be
quite crusty. To some readers, this was obviously stupid. Vending
machine + fish + time = gastronomic disaster. At T+10 hours, no
disaster yet. All I can say is my life's creed: It seemed like a good
idea at the time.
Footnotes:
*A multimillion dollar boondoggle/ state attempt to build an airport
in the middle of rural eastern North Carolina to capture air cargo
business. Unfortunately most shippers don't ship much to rural eastern
North Carolina, and they don't need a hub there. You can't build a new
Research Triangle Park just by throwing a lot of government money at a
project. My attempts to build the Global Danpark with government
grants have so far failed, even though it's shovel ready.
The Danpark would consist of several McDonalds close to my house to
culinarily revive North Northeast Durham. There would a main McDonalds
and several backups. And Chilis, Krispy Kreme, and Chik-fil-A. That's
just the beginning. For irony, a really large gym would be in the
middle of the complex. Bowflexes will sculpt the neighborhood with
only 20 minutes 3 times a week. Government spending likes irony. We
could call it the gym to nowhere.

-D