Looks like someone is baking a mega-batch of garlic bread for dinner...


 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The World's 3rd Largest, Almost Invisible, Statue

Image
As my flight was approaching the international airport in Bali, I noticed a giant statue on the horizon that was about 15 kilometers away, but appeared as though it must have been hundreds of feet tall.  I decided that I would visit it while I was on Bali. My last day on Bali, I decided to hire a taxi to take me to the Gurita Vishnu Kencana Statue, which depicts Vishnu riding on Garuda.  Including the pedestal, it is 122 meters tall (30 meters taller than the Statue of Liberty) and the winged Garuda's wingspan is 64 meters.  And the statue is so massive it can be viewed from up to 20 kilometers away. It is the tallest statue in Indonesia and the tallest statue of a Hindu deity. When the taxi I hired arrived at the park entrance about a kilometer from the statue, we found that the site was closed indefinitely.  I couldn't take a picture, because you couldn't see the statue at all through the trees and it was obscured further by the terrain.  My intrepid driver at...
Read more

Erik's Book Club: November Selections

Image
I experienced another wonderful month of reading, six books in all.  Five of them were quite magnificent. The Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi was probably my favorite.  It's a novel that was a finalist for the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction. It's a philosophical novel of family, religious faith, identity, and science and one women's struggle to understand them all as they apply to her tragic life. It would take a 1000-word review to do the book justice;  I would simply say that I highly recommend it and it's a book worth seeking out. Very different, but as good as Gyasi's novel is: When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut, a finalist for the 2021 Booker Prize. It sounds peculiar: it's a hybrid history/novel retelling the story of crucial discoveries in quantum physics. It's a book that disorients the reader in that, for the first half, it is extremely difficult to determine where fact ends and fiction begins. Ultimately it is a caution...
Read more

Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here

Image
If you are familiar with Dante, you will recognize this as the saying inscribed on the Gate of Hell that the condemned pass through on their way to eternal damnation.  But, I bet you didn't know this is also the saying inscribed above the entrance to the Customs Office at Soekarno-Hatto Airport in Jakarta--the place where my three suitcases have been held for 15 MONTHS now. Though I haven't provided you any details of my visit to the Customs Office today, I think both the headline and the first paragraph qualify as textbook examples of foreshadowing and you don't need to have ESP to have figured out how our expedition turned out.  I was accompanied by Tasya (she is picture here dressed in camo, though her battlefield attire was of no use) and Gigih, the poor souls in HR, who have inherited this mess from the previous souls in HR, who no longer work at SU.  They escaped before they had to pass through the Customs Office Gates. I will not bore you with details of the three ...
Read more