American in Spain

Have you ever noticed how, on a commercial airline flight, the pilot always – without fail – informs the passengers of the speed and direction of the wind at the destination? I can understand telling us about the local time, temperature, and general weather (e.g. foggy, sunny, raining) at the destination. That’s useful information about how much clothing to don before exiting the aircraft.
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The more I watch the media coverage of the GOP presidential primaries, the more I’m struck by just how different Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney are, physically. Newt’s got a pretty spherical noggin, and Romney’s is more oblong. My photoshop nerves are itching again, so I thought I’d try a face swap, like I did with Prince William and his bride. I searched around the internet for two high resolution photographs in which they are looking more or less in the same direction and are lit from similarly positioned light sources. Ideally for this, you’d have them both in the same photograph, but they don’t pose together that much. The result of my half hour of work is pretty mediocre, but I figure I’ll share it anyway.
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Recently I noticed a minor bump on my left hand, in the center of the palm. It itched a little, but I thought little of it. But then it kept growing, almost until it looked like a little human nose. I made a doctor’s appointment and went in to see my physician. She nodded and asked, “I don’t suppose you spend a lot of time on the internet spewing sarcasm on social networking sites, do you?” Startled by her insight, I relied, “Well, maybe a little, yeah.” “And do you use puns and wordplay excessively,” she continued, “sometimes with an awkward narrative for the sole purpose of a not-that-funny punchline?” “Yep, that’s me,” I admitted. She said, “I thought so. You’ve got a textbook case of Facepalm. I’m afraid it’s going to get worse before it gets better.”
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Yesterday morning I had a video conference with Bangkok, as international men of mystery like myself do on Friday mornings. It was actually with my friend Jacob, who is there for a month on business and had his workday cancelled because of the heavy flooding Thailand is currently experiencing, so he was bored in his hotel suite and sent me an iMessage. When I initiated a FaceTime call with him, I realized as soon a I pressed the button to call him that there was no way it would work.
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Earlier this week, my wife told me that, to celebrate a successful business meeting she was going to have with a client, she wanted to have pork chops and fried eggs for lunch. Then she said, “And save the big egg for me. Don’t use it for any other recipes.” I raised an eyebrow, “The big egg?” She smiled and said, “You’ll know it when you see it.”
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When I was sitting on the beach yesterday, I noticed something off in the distance out of the corner of my eye. In a split second, my unconscious pattern recognition neurons decided I’d seen a flock of birds. After several seconds of gazing at the phenomenon a kilometer down the beach, I’d determined that they were too big to be birds, and the flying was too orderly. They must be kites, my brain suggested, but…but…how?? They were flying in perfect formation, up, down, swooping, soaring, diving… What they really reminded me of was Boids, the artificial intelligence algorithm – one of my favorites! – that demonstrates how lifelike natural flocking behavior can be mimicked with very, very few lines of code.
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Just over a year ago, in May of 2010, we bought Roomba. We had two recommendations from friends, so we splurged the 300€ and bought a robot to vacuum our floors. Initially it seemed pricy, but it’s some of the best 300€ we’ve ever spent. As my wife said to me soon after we bought it…

I think I like the Roomba. It doesn’t clean as well as I do, but it cleans about as well as you do.

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Like most of my best wordplay, it had escaped my mouth before I realized the cleverness of it. I was talking with my daughter this morning, and I said, “You’re so messy! You’re like [Argentine soccer player, Barcelona phenom, and possibly the best living soccer player] Leo Messi!” I stopped for a minute, realized the significance of what I’d said, and went into the next room with a “Look how clever I am!” look on my face to tell my wife, but she stopped me and said that she’d heard what I’d said and already – probably before I did – noticed the humor/coincidence of it. Did any of my bilingual readers pick up on it?
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In general, I am very much against knickknacks, a.k.a. crap you have to clean the dust off every once in a while. So perhaps you can imagine my dismay when my daughter and mother-in-law bring home one of those horribly gaudy asian waving cat things. Apparently it had caught my daughter’s toddler eye (and why wouldn’t it?) in the local chinos shop, and her grandmother had bought it for her. “Mimi mimi mimi”, they said to each other mimicking the not-entirely-unlike-the-Nazi-salute gesture. I facepalmed and sighed.
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In my local cured meat and cheese shop, they have this bottle of water that is very intriguing. It’s meant to be a souvenir of Colindres, the town where I live, showing the Virgen del Carmen, the statue of this version of the Virgin Mary (more or less a goddess of fishermen) that they parade around town once a year. In the photo, she’s seen in front of the town church. What’s cool about the bottle is the exceedingly clever 3D visual effect it presents. Watch the video first, and then I’ll explain it.
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