Gulch

Mental Vacations

 Once in a while, it's good to unfocus your mind, push your chair back, and take five minutes to go on a mental holiday.  Here's a couple quick links that recently helped me get away from it all for a few minutes:

• My all-time favorite beer commercial from Estrella Damm.  It comes with all the unrealistic expectations of any beer-driven marketing.  But still...Formentera.  Estrella Damm is the main beer in Catalonia and I used to think that it was inferior to my favorite Spanish beer of Cruzcampo.  Of course, that was because I once spent four months living next to a Cruzcampo brewery and could smell the sweet, sweet beer fumes everyday.  So, I guess the take home message is that the true way to market beer to me is via my nose.  Build a brewery near me and I'll be a customer for life.  The band in the commercial, Billie the Vision and the Dancers, has their music available for download by donation - the song is called Summer Cat. 

Downward Drifters

Some quick videos I recently took at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California. The music is from the theme to the movie 2046 by Shigeru Umebayashi.

In Which Travelocity Asks Me to Blether About One of My Favorite Places

The Internet café’s air conditioning was on full blast, making me wish that I was wearing more than shorts, sandals, and a t-shirt. Jen and I were in Tulum, Mexico on our honeymoon and had stopped in to check email. Buried amongst various messages from friends, family, and Nigerian businessmen was an email whose subject line read: Travelocity Podcast Interview. I clicked on it.

A few weeks later and back at home, I pulled on my Gore-tex raincoat and walked up the street and into the local CBC radio station.

“Uh,” I said, “I’m hear to record an interview.” They knew what I was talking about and showed me to a recording studio. A technician arranged for the international phone call from the interviewer to be routed to my mic.

And so, this week, I made my podcast debut on Travelocity’s Window Seat blog. Specifically, I answered some questions about the Mayan Riviera and talked about some of the places we recommend on our Gulch Guides for their Podcast Episode 4: Paradise. You can also scroll down for the specific section on the Mayan Riviera to hear the segment which features me. I’m also really happy to report that technology exists to edit out all of my “uh’s” and “ums.” Well, most of them at any rate.

Thanks again to Travelocity and the people at LA Podsquad for the opportunity. Here are some specific sections of this website that were relevant to the podcast:

• Gulch Guides to the Mayan Rivera
• Specific recommendation for Playa del Carmen
• Specific recommendations for Tulum
• Stories and writings about our travels in Mexico

In Which the Mainstream Press Seeks Expertise From, Well, Me

The award-wining, hard-hitting, truth-seeking Helena Independent Record (the newspaper for the capital of Montana and thus for the capital of western civilization) was obviously in need of expert knowledge last week. With pressures rising and deadlines looming overheard, the IR staff must have turned to the one place where they knew they’d be able to find the answers to the questions that trouble them so: this website.

While you would have thought that the press would have interviewed me years ago for my investigative research into Banana Slugs or alternative lifestyles, they instead cited me for something even more interesting: beer reviews. As you can see, on the bottom of this page, they used my review of the Blackfoot River Brewery in helping them determine the Drink of the Week.

Cheers to Blackfoot River Brewing for making a great stout that is, indeed, the best beverage from October 6th, 2005 to October 13th, 2005 - if not longer. And cheers to the IR for recognizing it. Please don’t hesitate to call if you need further field research on beer or clarification on my many other scientific findings, such as slugs are squishy and people in Europe use knives.

The Two Types of Cities

I have often said there are two types of cities: those with craigslist and those without. Thus, I was quite happy when I stumbled across craigslist: victoria, BC which seems to have gone live sometime within the last month. Hopefully with increased usage, it will become the local compendium of stuff and things and things with stuff that it is in other cities. It looks like they have done a lot of expanding and there's even a montana version now.