At Home In The Wasteland Travel Blog

I am heading off to Ukraine and Poland today. My flight is less than ideal (Dulles to New York JFK, 4 hour layover, JFK to Warsaw, Warsaw to Kiev) but whatever, that’s what happens when you try and save a few hundred bucks. We will be in Kiev from July 1-5, with a tour of [...]

Facebook in 40 years – will we still have Facebook profiles when we’re 65? MySpace for the proletariat, Facebook for the bourgeoise? If I have both, does that make me an equal opportunity class enemy? Are there really no Republicans left in California? Foreign Nationals Hired For 2 California GOP Posts (this really is a [...]

I didn’t really take many photos at Coachella due to my laziness, so a majority of these I stole from Kat. And yes, I realize this happened like two months ago. This one photo pretty much sums up the entire weekend Jack’s Mannequin Some beautiful desert scenery Kat, Danielle, Laila Willie Nelson Not really concert-related, [...]

I read a lot of news and blogs, most of it about Russia or energy. Here’s what you should read, too: World’s most expensive cities? Two of my favorite, of course. Moscow takes the #1 spot while London comes in second. Berlin hotel recreates East Germany Honecker portraits on the wall? Yeah, count me in! [...]

Yesterday marked the 66th anniversary of Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi Germany invasion of the Soviet Union and beginning of Velikaya Otechestvennaya Voyna, The Great Patriotic War. In the end, an estimated 26 million Soviets were killed on the Eastern Front of World War II. As a sophomore in college, I wrote a paper on Stalin’s [...]

June 21 is International Surfing Day. You’re supposed to skip work, go surfing, and help clean up your local beach. Unfortunately I was unable to participate in this unofficial holiday as I am three hours from the nearest beach and my surfboards are back home in SoCal. Luckily, the good people of WaveWatch have installed [...]

This past Sunday marked the 35th anniversary of the Watergate burglaries that subsequently led to the downfall of President Richard Nixon. I wasn’t alive in 1972 (and thank god for that, because life without cell phones, e-mail, google, and wikipedia must have been downright boring!) but the Watergate burglaries hold a special place in this [...]

do they really need a police officer there to open the deodorant case for customers (yes, the deodorant and bodywash, etc are kept behind a locked case) and to search through the packets of developed film? Surely, in this neighborhood, there are better uses for an armed officer of the law?

Pity the poor office workers who slave away in the buildings surrounding Union Station. Come lunchtime, they are faced with a depressing choice of food options. Do they brave the hellish atmosphere of the Union Station food court, a seething pit of rowdy out of town school groups and tourists who think nothing of forking [...]

Here’s an interesting, and somewhat timely, AP article on the “thriving” wildlife population in the radiation soaked area surrounding the former Chernobyl nuclear (uh, “nucular”?) plant: Two decades after an explosion and fire at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant sent clouds of radioactive particles drifting over the fields near her home, Maria Urupa says the [...]