Life After Grad School

German television chef Alfred Biolek called the German election results “undecided like a cafeteria meal” - nothing for gourmets and foodies. He adds “if I had prepared something like that in the kitchen, I would walk outside, open a bottle of wine and take a deep breath”.

Interesting take on an unexpectedly close and unconclusive election, which may leave us longing for a decent meal for a few more weeks.

Original quote from Spiegel Online: “Das Wahlergebnis ist nichts für Feinschmecker oder Gourmets”, sagte Fernsehkoch und Moderator Alfred Biolek. Das Ergebnis sei “unentschlossen wie manches Kantinengericht”. Hätte er so etwas in der Küche zubereitet, “würde ich erst mal rausgehen, eine Flasche Wein aufmachen und durchatmen”.

Operation “Swimming in the Charles” became real when this blogger teamed up with the Charles River Swimming Club and started the process of organizing a swim race in the Charles River for summer July 2006. Should be an interesting and challenging endeavour. If anybody has answers to questions like “is it possible to rent buoys or should we buy them” or “what’s the best way to have swimmers enter and exit the river?”, please do share!

In other swimming news, a group of nude swimmers had to abandon a charity swim in Loch Ness due to strong winds and wave action. I can assure you that there’s little chance we’ll have those problems in the Charles, and not only because the river doesn’t get that choppy.

As a good daughter I’ve been planning my parents’ trip to Boston and environs and just experienced, once again, how cool Zipcar is. Not only does it serve well for those monthly grocery shopping trips, but it’s saving me $80 on a planned 3-day “leaf-peeping” trip to Vermont (I know, President Bartlett found that term humorous as well). Since for unknown reasons no cheap car rental is to be had in the Boston region (in CA you can get deals of less than $20 a day, in Boston the minimum is $40, and that will put you in a shoebox on wheels), I priced Zipcar instead and the result was amazing. All in all we’ll be paying $200 instead of approximately $280 and I can pick up the car a block away from my apartment instead of having to treck all the way to the airport (since local rentals are even more expensive). No paperwork to fill out, no business hours to plan our trip around, gas and insurance included.

Apparently I’m not the only one upset about Kepler’s closing. Check out the Save Kepler’s website for an outburst of support. If it feels strange to focus on saving a bookstore in the wake of hurricane Katrina, read Marc Morford’s column on Katrina and Burning Man in the S.F. Chronicle.

I have never been sympathetic to complaints about high gas prices and that hasn’t changed. In fact, for those who voted for the current administration, this is all I have to say: do you really think gas prices would be this high in the first place without a war in Iraq? Don’t complain to me. Granted, Katrina could not have been prevented, although the government has shown incredible incompetence in prevention and relief efforts, and there may be price gouging going on by gas station owners and oil companies (or should we call it a free market economy?). But the next time you complain, think of the people left in New Orleans who are in this situation and getting less help than victims of disasters in the third world because most of the National Guard is in Iraq, FEMA has been underfunded because all the money went to the war and according to George W. nobody could foresee that the levees would break. Right. Explain to me again how the war in Iraq assures homeland security?