Buffalo Nichols. Long-lost brother?

As considered a few days ago, we’ve had to cancel our epic trip to South America and Antarctica next month. It was a tough decision, but countries and excursion operators are reacting quickly to the threat of The Omicron Variant (a good book or movie title, I must say) and making the things we wanted to do and see problematic. We might have ended up with an expensive and long boat ride, and we wanted a lot more than that for our time and money. We were able to retrieve all the funds paid so far for reservations, so that made the decision easier.

We may look at something a bit less ambitious, something within US borders, as a replacement for the January travel. Something tells me that there’s now ALWAYS going to be a next COVID variant, and the world will just have to get used to that. We’re pretty comfortable with the travel risk because we’re fully vaccinated, but the venues we want to visit have to be equally comfortable. And open.

Just another little gift from The Pandemic. Thanks, but no thanks.

Big news for science geeks. The first steps toward a warp drive have been taken. The Alcubierre drive, always one of my favorite most-likely-FTL candidates, looks possible.

And this article also gets the award for best incomprehensible title: “Worldline numerics applied to custom Casimir geometry generates unanticipated intersection with Alcubierre warp metric“.

This makes me absolutely ill. What in the world makes these people think that Christmas spirit and guns go together? And posting this just days after yet another tragic school shooting incident…it’s beyond the pale. Why oh why do the voters in Kentucky’s 4th Congressional district, in northern KY along the Ohio River, think this person is a good representative for them? This picture kind of sums up everything wrong in American politics.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against gun ownership. I’m against gun fetishism (see picture above) and proliferation (We have 1.2 guns per person in the US (!) – that includes children and infants – does your two year old have his/her AR-15 yet?).

Gun ownership should be taken seriously – gun owners should be vetted, trained, and licensed regularly, just like operators of other dangerous equipment (commercial vehicles, aircraft, autos). Anything capable of killing people en masse if/when misused. Folks like these are just playing to the crowd that thinks someone wants to take their weapons and that Everyman is Rambo.

The amount of poor judgement and poor taste shown by the parents of these kids is incalculable.

We don’t care for the daily sit around the pool, bake in the sun carnival atmosphere at the resort, but the night-time views are pretty nice. Photo with iPhone 12, no editing.

It’s been an interesting day, in the Chinese Curse sense of the term. Countries are shutting down, travel rules are changing daily, and our SA/Antarctica trip is in limbo. All because of the Omicron variant.

I’m actually not too worried about this mutation, because viruses tend to mutate toward greater infectiousness and lesser mortality. Viruses need a host to live, and they mutate in that direction. Omicron is probably more infectious and less dangerous.

But that doesn’t stop governments from over-reacting and making travel impractical. That may happen with our SA destinations for January – we’ve already seen a bit of that, and it will only take a little more rules/regulations/constraints to make our trip impractical.

We’re evaluating day by day right now. Could be no issue, or could be that we’ll get the entire month of January back for something other than a cruise.

Thanks to D. Bowie for the post’s title. Great song.

Sometimes you get lucky and an event lives up to or exceeds expectations. That happened last night when we tried a new restaurant within walking distance of our resort, The Wine Bar. I had hoped for a good wine list and some decent food, and wow! What we found was a wonderful Mexican and Italian-centric wine list and superb food. Probably in our Top 10 meals ever.

We worked our way through 4-5 small plate servings (shared) of the parent restaurant’s menu (Romeo y Julieta, a great Italian restaurant here at the end of the continent) and two fabulous wines. The star of the meal was the Casa Madero 2016 Grand Reserve Malbec paired with an artichoke gnocchi. I’m not normally a big Malbec fan, but this was a superb wine. Smooth, creamy, fruitful and a bit dry. A solid 99 rating. Casa Madero, the oldest winery in the Americas, comes through again.

Every dish we tried was great. The gnocchi, some risotto with asparagus, a fritto misto and even a small portion of lasagna. With fresh made onsite bread to soak up all the sauces of each dish.

Our second wine wasn’t quite as good as the first – a tough act to follow – but it was still a 90+. A Syrah from Casta de Vinos in the Guadaloupe Valley, one of our favorite wine regions.

All-in-all, it was a memorable evening and meal. But today I think a healthy day is in order. One can only take so much fun.