I'm an expat Californian who is obsessed with traveling to strange and exotic destinations in the former Communist Bloc. I also like tacos, beer, surfing, trapshooting, and the geopolitics of oil. I currently live in Arlington, Virginia and work in Washington, DC. Read more about me here, check out my photo album, or send me an e-mail.
While on our pool purchasing expedition to Woodbridge, I decided to stop at a Shell station and fill up the gas guzzling XTerra. I wasn’t exactly on empty, but I have this odd quirk in which I must fill up my gas tank if the needle shows that I only have a quarter of a tank left. Otherwise, I might end up stranded on some country road in the middle of nowhere, waiting for AAA to bring me a couple gallons of gasoline that would enable me to drive say, five miles or so. Not that I do a lot of driving through the middle of nowhere, as I most often use the SUV to pick up my drycleaning.
Anyways, I pull up next to a pump and start to fill up the XTerra with $55 worth of that wonderful product known as gasoline. The lady at the pump in front of me leaves, and I am now the only customer at the Shell station. Until, that is, two guys in a beat up Toyota pick up pull up right behind me and just sit there, as if they were waiting for me to leave so they could fill up their truck. I glance around at the five empty pumps and exchange a “WTF?” look with Jamie. A minute or so goes by (yep, still filling up, gotta big tank) and the driver of the Toyota finally pulls into the pump in front of me, as if he’s suddenly realized that there are, in fact, multiple gas pumps. The best part, though, was this dude’s parking job. Classic.
On Sunday, my roommate Jamie and I saw an ad on TV for a 16ft diameter inflatable pool that was on sale at Big Lots.
“Dude…”
So we hopped in my terrorist mobile (the nickname apparently given to my SUV by aforementioned roommate. Hippie.) and drove to the nearest Big Lots, which was 20 miles away in Woodbridge, VA. As I’ve discovered, there is really no reason to go to Woodbridge unless you are buying cheap Swedish furniture (IKEA), or giant inflatable pools.
Upon returning home with our pool in a box and assorted inflatable rafts, we began to set it up (but only after consuming Baja Fresh burritos for strength). The plan was to setup the pool before our other roommate, Laura, arrived home from her weekend trip to St. Louis. Easy enough, right?
The pool, deflated.
Tucker’s like, WTF are you doing to my yard?
Attempting to inflate the pool. This was, uh, harder than it looked, especially when I unknowingly started to deflate it. Also note that the pool came with a water filter. Hardcore.
We discovered one slight problem with our brilliant pool plan, and that is the slight slope of our backyard. The pool was supposed to rise as it was being filled, but since the water was all collecting on one side of the pool, that wasn’t happening. Gravity, or whatev. I decided that one end of our backyard looked much flatter than the other, and so we drained the water out of the pool and dragged it to the other side. That really didn’t help much, though, and the water continued to collect on one end. Dude, there’s a reason I transferred out of GW’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, ok?
We abandoned the pool project once the sun set, and when Laura finally came home that evening she was like, WTF?
The next day, I could not work on the pool as I had already planned a shopping trip with some friends (Yeah, I know, shopping? As Olga would say, “Who are you and what have you done with Lindsay?”). Jamie and Laura, however, googled some solution to level the ground, and went off to Home Depot to buy TWELVE bags of sand, a tarp, and a piece of wood. This is what the pool looked like when I got home later that day:
Laura says we need twelve more bags of sand. All I can think of is, uh, sunk costs fallacy?
The Communist Party in Russia (yes, it still exists) isn’t very happy about the latest Indiana Jones movie, “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”:
“Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” stars Harrison Ford as an archeologist in 1957 competing with an evil KGB agent, played by Cate Blanchett, to find a skull endowed with mystic powers.
“What galls is how together with America we defeated Hitler, and how we sympathized when Bin Laden hit them. But they go ahead and scare kids with Communists. These people have no shame,” said Viktor Perov, a Communist Party member in Russia’s second city of St Petersburg.
[...]
“Harrison Ford and Cate Blanchett (are) second-rate actors, serving as the running dogs of the CIA. We need to deprive these people of the right of entering the country,” said another party member, Andrei Gindos.
Though the ranks of the once all-powerful Communist Party have dwindled since Soviet times, its members see themselves as the defenders of the achievements of the old Soviet Union.
Other communists said the generation born after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union were being fed revisionist, Hollywood history. They advocated banning the Indiana Jones outright to prevent “ideological sabotage.”
“Our movie-goers are teenagers who are completely unaware of what happened in 1957,” St Peterburg Communist Party chief Sergei Malinkovich told Reuters.
“They will go to the cinema and will be sure that in 1957 we made trouble for the United States and almost started a nuclear war.”
“It’s rubbish … In 1957 the communists did not run with crystal skulls throughout the U.S. Why should we agree to that sort of lie and let the West trick our youth?”
Vladimir Mukhin, another member of the local Communist Party, said in comments posted on the Internet site that he would ask Russia’s Culture Ministry to ban the film for its “anti-Soviet propaganda.”
The Indiana Jones film is not the first Hollywood production to offend Russian sensibilities.
In 1998 the Russian parliament demanded the government explain why the Hollywood film “Armageddon” – which depicted a dilapidated Russian space station that blows apart because of a leaky pipe – was allowed onto Russian cinema screens.
A government official at the time said the film, starring Bruce Willis as the leader of a team of astronauts sent to deflect an asteroid on a collision course with Earth, “mocked the achievements of Soviet and Russian technology.”
Senator Barack Obama on Friday called for greater engagement with Cuba and Latin America, saying the long-standing policies of isolation have failed to advance the interests of the United States or help people who have suffered under oppressive governments.
[...]
“Don’t be confused about this. I will maintain the embargo,” Mr. Obama said. “It provides us with the leverage to present the regime with a clear choice: If you take significant steps toward democracy, beginning with the freeing of all political prisoners, we will take steps to begin normalizing relations.”
Yeah, because that policy has proved so successful for the past four decades.
It would be nice, for once, to see a politician with some guts declare that Americans (and not just Cuban Americans with family back in Cuba) should be allowed to travel to Cuba without the fear that they will have to pay a hefty fine upon returning to the United States. That this restriction on travel still exists is remarkable, considering Americans can travel freely to other communist nations such as China, Vietnam, and even North Korea (with the proper visa, of course). What, no political prisoners in those countries?
OK, so winter is over, but there’s always next year. An ad popped up on my Gmail for a company selling valenki, the traditional winter footwear adored by Red Army soldiers, peasants, and gulag inmates throughout Russia. These valenki, however, are suitable for “winter walking on 5th Ave all the way to Rodeo Dr” (why anyone would want to wear wool felt boots in Southern California is beyond me, although I couldn’t comprehend the ridiculous Ugg trend that conquered our great state, either). In addition to their supposed usefulness when it comes to walking from (l)east coast shopping destination to West coast shopping destination, they also broadcast your support for the now defunct Soviet Union via these stylin’ hammer and sickle symbols stitched onto the side.
Which ones should I get? Black? White? What will go best with business suits?
A warning to all the Italians who will be visiting the United States, you might end up like poor Domenico Salerno, a Roman lawyer who intended to visit his American girlfriend but instead spent 10 days in a Virginia jail thanks to a few Customs and Border Patrol officers on a power trip.
Research geographer Dr. Terry Slonecker said he was doing follow-up work on the clean up of World War I-era munitions and chemicals discovered in 1993 in the Spring Valley neighborhood near American University, when he detected the arsenic. However, it wasn’t in Spring Valley, but in Fort Reno Park.
Slonecker said he was using a satellite imaging system that could detect grass and other vegetation growing in arsenic contaminated soil. One image pinpointed a huge area in the park.
A soil sample report confirming the findings caused the National Park Service to close the park. The heaviest concentration of arsenic is believed to be in the southwest corner, near the tennis courts.
The levels of arsenic found in the soil exceed the Environmental Protection Agency’s safety threshold. Experts said that arsenic at a level of 43 parts per million requires a cleanup and that the preliminary tests at Fort Reno showed 100 to 1,100 parts per million.
Thankfully, I do not recall ingesting any of the soil during our games.
President Bush said yesterday that he gave up golfing in 2003 “in solidarity” with the families of soldiers who were dying in Iraq, concluding that it was “just not worth it anymore” to play the sport in a time of war.
“I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf,” Bush said in a White House interview with the Politico. “I feel I owe it to the families to be as — to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”
Bush said he decided to stop playing golf on Aug. 19, 2003, when a truck bomb in Baghdad killed U.N. special representative Sergio Vieira de Mello and more than a dozen others.
He said he received word of the attack while playing golf during a stay at the family ranch near Crawford, Tex. Press reports at the time indicate he took the call from Condoleezza Rice, then his national security adviser.
“They pulled me off the golf course, and I said it’s just not worth it anymore to do,” Bush said in yesterday’s interview.
The video opens with a then-candidate Medvedev promising a United Russia party congress that he would cooperate with former-President Vladimir Putin and, if elected, be true to Putin’s policies.
But the busty young woman in the video — clad in a tight T-shirt with a Medvedev portrait that does a fair bit of moving around, is devoted only to the new president.
“You came into politics together with Putin,” she sings breathlessly (and obviously dubbed) in Russian, while staring longingly at the new leader. “I didn’t want anyone else as much as I want you. … I need to be sexy and cool with you. I’ve got a crush on a bear.”
Medved, of course, is Russian for bear.
“I have dreams about you at night,” she purrs on as she walks through a New York City scene in which all the street names have been changed to Cyrillic. “I want to have your children.”
The rest of the footage consists largely of her posing in various stages of undress near pictures of the new president, with the name “Medved” appearing on her scanty, red and digitally altered panties.
The video is a humorous alteration of “I Got a Crush on Obama,” a popular Internet video posted in June and featuring a young woman singing of her love for the U.S. presidential hopeful.
[...]
Compared with Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s hard-drinking and often ailing first president, Putin, with his black belt in judo and moderate alcohol intake, looked like an impressive specimen. Numerous stories in the media touched on the theme of women having dreams — often erotic — about him.
So far, there are no reports of dreams linked to Medvedev, but a government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to talk to the press, said it was only “a question of time.”
So will the transfer of power earn Medvedev some of Putin’s macho image as well?
“Let’s wait a little bit. Let’s not rush the events,” the official said jokingly.
One Kremlin spokeswoman, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said the quality was not transferable.
“He is a young and attractive man, and it is normal to attract that kind of attention,” she said, after which she refused to answer any more questions.
Yevgenia Baturina, the editor of the women’s magazine Gloria, which is published by The Moscow Times’ parent company, Independent Media Sanoma Magazines, said she found the idea of Medvedev becoming a sex symbol “rather funny.”
“Women like strong men with the right expression in their eyes. Eyes that project force, intelligence, independence a certain ‘bounce,’ and sometimes even some obstinacy, are desirable,” she said. “But Medvedev looks at Putin like he is looking at a divinity, and this is almost feminine.”
“Even the animal ‘medved’ has nothing to do with Medvedev,” she added. “Despite his surname, he has nothing in common [with a bear]. He looks more like a hare or a squirrel.
“So far, his rating among the ladies is, unfortunately, not very high,” Baturina said.
One official with United Russia, the party headed by Putin, said the clip was a joke created by young people “who have their own way of looking at politics.”
“What I’m sure of is that this is not something done by the opposition,” he said. “They would never come up with such an idea. All they can do well is scream.”
As for the danger that Putin might become jealous were Medvedev to replace him in the dreams of Russian women, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he didn’t know the answer to the question.
“Medvedev is the head of the state, the president of the Russian Federation, and Putin is the head of the government. This is all I can say,” he said.
Last month, I toured the ConocoPhillips refinery located on the Delaware River in Trainer, Pennsylvania, which is just outside Philadelphia. The Trainer refinery has a processing capacity of 185,000 barrels a day, and processes light, low-sulfur crude oil from West Africa, Canada and the North Sea. I have previously toured an LNG terminal and a facility that produces gas turbines, but I’ve never been to a refinery before, so this was all very new to me. (The ultimate coup, I think would be a tour of an offshore rig in the Caspian Sea or or perhaps the Thunder Horse platform in the Gulf of Mexico.)
The refinery tour was organized by the DC chapter of Young Professionals in Energy (YPE), which, as you’ve probably gathered, is an organization of young professionals who work for the various energy trade associations (like yours truly), government agencies, corporations, and consulting firms that are headquartered in Washington. If you were to look at the membership list, the sheer amount of acronyms would make your head spin.
While the refinery was obviously the main attraction on this field trip, the 2.5 hour bus ride to Philly was eventful in and of itself. We were driving north on I-95, the main highway on the east coast, when our driver suddenly swerved into the left hand lane, which was under construction, and came to a stop in the grassy median that divides the highway. He then proceeded to yell “I gotta go!”, jump out of the bus, and run to the porta-potty on the median. We were all rather puzzled, and exchanged several “WTF?” looks. Our driver returned a few minutes later, announced “Now I gotta figure out how the eff to get outta here!” and started to back the bus out of the construction lane (which was sealed off with, you know, jersey barriers and cones and what not). Amazingly, he managed to get the bus out of the construction lane and back onto the freeway without killing all 25 of us.
We arrived at the refinery about an hour late due to several unscheduled stops like the one described above. ConocoPhillips provided us with a nice, warm lunch, so we dug in while the company representatives performed the standard safety briefing (as to be expected, it was much more thorough than the one we received at Chernobyl). The safety briefing was followed by a thorough overview of the refinery’s operations and the various structures we would be seeing on the tour as well as a Q&A with the refinery manager and other representatives from the various departments.
What we were really looking forward to, of course, was the tour of the facility. Bill, the Public Affairs director, led us on a tour of the refinery, while our bus driver miraculously managed to not run into anything and start a fire. I imagine if he had, we probably would not have been invited back. A few of the things we saw on the tour: gas flare (acts as a safety device), catalytic reformer, cracking unit, liquefied gas storage units, cooling towers, and the dock facilities where the tankers unload their crude. This post would probably make a lot more sense if there were photos, but for security reasons you obviously cannot go around posting photos of energy infrastructure.
Group photo
Overall, the tour was very enjoyable and I have a much greater appreciation for all the work required to refine crude into something my SUV can digest. Many thanks to Bill and the other ConocoPhillips employees for hosting the tour, as well as providing us all with souvenir mini mag lights to take home.
On a final note, our driver’s bizarre behavior continued on the trip back home. He almost hit a few cars, including a SEMI TRUCK, exited the freeway and entered a lane for a truck scale (WTF?), and took a “shortcut” through Laurel that added 20 minutes to our journey time. Well, at least we left the refinery unscathed.
