Vacation Slide Show! Chicago 2012

What would a vacation be without snapshots with which to annoy friends and family?

Well, we don't want to leave you hanging, so here's some snapshots from Jamie and Ryan Go A'Touristing in Chicago: 2012.

For our Google Album (public for now, but not forever) click here.

The lobby of the beautiful Palmer House Hotel

Jamie and I headed to Grant Park

at Buckingham Fountain.  A tourist on a Segway took this one.  Very nice man.

Signal Watch Goes Loco: Taco Time

You know, when we said we were going out of town a lot of people asked us "where are you going to eat?" or made suggestions for where we should go. In fact, nobody seemed to care what touristy stuff we were going to do, all anybody talked about was restaurants.  Chicago is a vast tapestry of food options, and I appreciate all the suggestions, but could not possibly have considered travelling to even a quarter of what was suggested due to geography and other factors.  


Do not worry:  We had our day of nice meals where we had a terrific breakfast and a stellar dinner, but, seriously, I'm not made out of money, and unless all we were going to do in this center of culture and history was pat ourselves on the back for eating poached mushrooms or whatever the hell, our money was going elsewhere during this trip.

Don't worry, we ate in a couple tourist dumps and paid plenty. But I also ate lunch one day from the refrigerated section at CVS. And yet, somehow, still managed to have a swell time.

But, if you're looking for a food adventure, the great thing about America is that you need never go far. On the way back from the airport, Jamie said "just go get Taco Bell", and indeed, we did.

I took the opportunity to get myself the Doritos Loco Taco.

There it is in all it's glory.  It looks and smells pretty much like a Taco Bell crunchy taco.  The shell is lightly dusted with the Doritos cheese, notorious for finding its way onto one's fingers and then their white linen pants leaving orange fingerprints.  Fortunately, Taco Bell lovingly wraps each taco in a specialized cardboard taco protector so one need never muss their fingers, nor stain their favorite seersucker suit.

Here I am moments from tasting the taco.  I'm pretty excited.  Jamie really was discouraging this whole enterprise and probably would have supported me just chucking the damn thing in the trash.

Here I am enjoying my first, savory bite and trying to comprehend the wild palette of flavors hitting my tongue.

That's not a thumbs up of awesomeness.  That's a thumbs-up of "I'm not going to barf".  The truth is, the taco isn't all that bad.  It basically tastes like everything else at Taco Bell, only there's a mild zing of that Doritos cheese flavor somewhere in there.

To be honest, it's nether good nor bad.  Your mileage will vary depending on whether you like Taco Bell crunchy tacos to begin with, and if you like the flavor of Doritos.  My guess is that the demographic for Doritos and Taco Bell is a near total-eclipse on the Venn Diagram.  Whether it's worth the extra money for you to taste the weird faux-cheesiness of Doritos (something I'm usually only into when beer is involved) is up to you.

Apparently Taco Bell has already sold more of these than there are people in the US, so I guess the matter of whether this was a good idea will settle itself.

More Monkey Countdown

Countdown to Info on MonkeyBrain Comics

Still in Chicago: Aquarium, Planetarium, Art, Comics, Improv and Gene!

Having a lovely time.

Yesterday was Texas Summer Hot, which was pretty rough.  We got through the Aquarium (which was pretty great) and made it through about 1/3rd of the Planetarium (well, we did maybe 1/2 the stuff adults are supposed to do) before we threw in the towel.

You know, I don't have kids, but I have mixed feelings for those of you who do.  Man, they just go nuts, don't they?  I mean, who can blame the little monsters when confronted with the amazing universe of our aquatic friends, but they certainly do go batshit given the slightest stimulus.  And for some reason the Aquarium was the hot ticket item for family fun, which seemed odd when the Planetarium was (a) awesome and (b) totally kid friendly.  Also, you think fish are really gonna hold your kid's attention after you've been playing Pixar movies and buying them iPads for the past 8 years?  Good luck with that.

Hey! It's Me in the University of Texas Library Newsletter! Talking Comics!

A while back I was hanging out in the office of the Communications Officer for the UT Library.  I like to go in there both because Travis is hilarious and also because he often let's me take promo items like pens and whatnot.  Anyway, I was hanging out and Travis asked if I'd be interested in participating in their usual feature for the official newsletter for the UT Library where they ask a librarian to talk about some books they like.

Well, I'm not a librarian, but it's not like I can't read, and lord knows I'm not going to not give my opinion if asked.  "Can you walk about comics?" asked Travis.


"How many thousand words?" I asked.


Apparently they keep asking librarians this question, and they tend to get a lot of the same sorts of columns.  The Hail mary desperation play: ask the guy with the Superman poster what he thinks folks could be reading.


So, this quarter it's yours truly on Page 10 of the UT Library Newsletter.  "Ryan Steans Recommends".


I tried to mix it up a bit by mentioning different kinds of comics: biography, memoir, sci-fi, superhero...  We'll see how I did.

And, yes, Longhorns, that's me in the stacks of the PCL where I work everyday.

Hey. How's it Going?

I'm in Chicago.  We're staying right off Millennium and Grant Park in a beautiful hotel.  I feel very, very lucky.

The hotel was built in the 19th Century and is next to the El, so you can hear the rumble of the trains very lightly every few minutes.  Also - the El is amazing.  Texas: get with it on public transit.

We're taking it easy as we go.  Today we walked around the park and Buckingham Fountain, and then walked to the Field Museum (home of Sue the T-Rex) where we spent several hours and saw maybe half of the place.  We walked back, rested, then went for dinner.   Feeling jolly, we walked over to Millennium Park where we saw The Bean, some fireworks and a live broadcast of the Chicago Ballet which, apparently on Wednesdays in the summer they show on a huge screen in the park.  For free.  The place was packed.  Wrap your head around that, Austin-which-likes-to-pat-itself-on-the-back.

Oh, and the stage and area where this was shown, designed by architect Frank Gehry.  Just because.

Tomorrow:  The Aquarium and Planetarium.

I appreciate the food suggestions, but we're somewhat limited by the fact that Chicago is absolutely enormous as a city, and we're mostly trying to walk.  Based on our location, we can walk many directions and have many options, and so far, so good.

You won't see us doing 20 things in a day because that's not really the plan and we're not trying to rush.  The goal of this vacation was to take a vacation, so we're in the Windy City to take it easy.

Plus, give Jamie a break.  Girlfriend is on dialysis.

Anyway, that's trip report 1, I suppose.

A Reminder: I am in Chicago

As of this evening I am in Chicago.

This is a pre-written post, so it's possible my plane exploded or I got lost and took a wrong turn at Albuquerque.

Anyway, low-post week is more than likely.  You guys have a great <indeterminate period until I post again> and we'll chat soon.

An Open Letter to NBC as The Olympics Draw Nigh

Dear NBC,

This evening I tuned into some pre-Olympics coverage.  Coverage of time trials as young Americans in Omaha, Nebraska who had been working their whole lives (or some short period of time between adolescence and now) to become world class athletes competed against their countrymen in very silly activities like seeing who can swim fastest for400 meters, but changing directions something like 8 times to do so (just imagine if we asked 400 meter runners to keep changing directions.  I'd watch that.)

I can almost sense the impending failure just from the official NBC logo.

As we do every four four years, I saw Andrea Kremer hopping about in a golf shirt (a sports-casting garment reserved just for the Olympics.  Why is that?), trying to interview hairless, genetic freak men with excellent musculature.  I can see why anyone for whom that's a thing would be as excited as Ms. Kremer.

I also noticed the color commentators relishing the opportunity afforded them for a few weeks every quadrennium to seem something like relevant, instead of finding themselves filling time on CNBC at 3:00 on a Saturday in February.  They seemed very interested in odd minutia about very specific individuals, talked about how the nation's hopes were pinned on this seventeen year old girl who is supposed to swim faster in a switchback fashion than other people, and then had very little nice to say about her once she was in the water and not breaking laws of space and time.

If I may:  Planning a meeting or a conference or even a party takes an incredible amount of work.  I get this.  I do stuff like that often.

You work and work and work to get to the event, you struggle through it, and then its over and all you want to do is celebrate.  The last thing you want to do is show up again on Monday and consider what maybe you could have done better.  I also get that when only do something once in a while, say, every two to four years, its hard to remember what worked and what didn't and get better at doing what you're doing.

So I am going to help you out.  You can skip the notes you misplaced after 2008.  I got you.

A Round-Up of New and Old Items

I wound up posting a lot over the weekend.  Partially because we mostly stayed home this weekend in an effort to save a few bucks before we hit the road.

Movies:
Superman Vs. The Elite - DC Animation's latest offering.  The conversation spun way off from just talking about the film itself and got into some other contextual history and perspectives on heroism.
Desperate (1947) - we tried to get back on the noir wagon with this 1947 movie featuring a young, burly Raymond Burr.  We turned on the movie within 15 minutes and just clung on for dear life for the 1:15 running time.
Rebel Without a Cause (1955) - We caught the original teen picture for the first time in 20 years.  It holds up just swell.
Jimmy Stewart Double Bill:  Anatomy of a Murder and Harvey - Stewart in two terrific movies at opposite ends of the spectrum for audiences.

Ephemera:
The Dug provided us with a picture of himself and Jamie meeting Donald Duck circa 1981.

Comics:
We also read a lot of comics this weekend.  Axe Cop Volume 3, Captain America's latest Volume 1, Fantastic Four's latest Volume 1, The Shadow #3,  Adventure Time #5 and Memorial #6.

All good stuff.