Melyssa-with-a-Y

He was so funny in Ferris Bueller's Day Off and The Wonder Years. But now he's just g one off the deep end! Stein's new movie, " Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed ," [I won't link to it!] is about the persecution of people who believe in Intelligent Design , and the difference between ID and science. Only the movie never really explains what ID is, or for that matter, what science really is! "The definition of what science is and what should be taught as science in a world in which Asia and Europe are itching to clean our economic clocks by seeing us throw away our considerable lead in synthetic biology, genomics, agriculture and the biomedical, oceanographic, geological and energy sciences escapes Stein and his producers. ... The failure to say what science is constitutes a huge failing in this cinematic cant." Arthur Caplan, Ph.D., Bioethicist at UPenn This movie is so bad, Scientific American has produced a whole series of articles about it! J...

ok, so people will have to sit on the sofa... it's still so neat to have done it all myself! (the food is potluck, so I only had to make the matzah ball soup.) :)

I have a whole list of things I am planning to blog about, including "bitter-gate" or whatever you want to call it, but when I found Tim Robbins' speech at the National Association of Broadcasters , I thought I should share it. It goes from a sarcastic history of broadcasting to total sap and utopian wishes for the future, but it's an interesting take on the role broadcasters have had in making our society more divisive, instead of less, and what they could do about it. This is a nation divided and reeling from betrayal and economic hardships. And you, the broadcasters of this great nation have a tremendous power, and a tremendous potential to effect change. You have the power to turn this country away from cynicism. You have the power to turn this nation away from the hatred and the divisive dialogue that has rendered such a corrosive affect on our body politic. You can lift us up into a more enlightened age. [...] The road we are on is leading us to a corruption of...

Maui is a be-yooo-tee-ful place, even when it rains. The locals kept telling us it a) hadn't rained since January, and b) "doesn't rain like this" (thunderstorms). We must have brought the weather with us. Ah well. It was worth the trip anyway. :) I highly recommend the DK/Eyewitness Travel "Top 10" books. Of course, I love all of the Eyewitness travel books, but the little ones are easier to carry around. It gave us great information about Lahaina when we drove around there on Friday, and I used it to find the Ioa Valley State Park on Saturday afternoon, good places to eat and shop, and other interesting tidbits. Top 10 things I did in Maui this week: 1. Ascended Haleakala on a bright Saturday morning 2. Visited Iao Valley State Park 3. Drove (well, rode) around the West Maui Mountains, through Lahaina and Kapalua 4. Ate at Mama's Fish House 5. Ate at Hali'imaile General Store (a very Austin-y restaurant with excellent pork ribs) 6. Walked 2.5 mil...

Iao Valley , location of the bloodiest battle to unite the islands under Kamehameha, in 1790. The weather in here was grey and misty; the weather at the beach was bright and sunny.

I jumped out of bed at 6:30am and was on the road to Haleakala (hah-lee-Ah-kah-lah) by 7:15... iced coffee in hand. :) It turned out to be a gorgeous sunny morning. The summit is over 10,000 feet up! I took a bunch of pics, which I'll upload when I get home. I had planned to do one of the short hikes at the top, but it was windy and freeeeeeezing up there! Driving back down, I passed a lot of people going up... I'm glad I got there early. There were a lot of people doing the bike ride down, too.

Today we drove (we: Tommy, Deb and I) all the way around the northwest part of Maui. Lahaina is mostly a tourist trap... jewelry stores, art galleries (Peter Max!) and cheesy souvenir shops. We stopped for lunch at Cheeseburger In Paradise, and visited the Wo Hing Temple, to get a little Chinese History. With a little exploration, we found the giant Buddha at the Jodo Mission. (pics will be uploaded tomorrow...) Then we continued our trek up along the coastline. We stopped at an overlook point around Kahana, and spied some whales in the water! The road around the top of the island is narrow and windy, a lot like the road to Hana - and similar to Rte 101 along Big Sur in CA! I was glad Tommy was driving. :)

this is a pina colada poured over strawberry puree. yum!

I posted my first day of pictures on Flickr. This is my fave, it's a pic from the beach at Makena, in the southern part of the island.

at the Maui Ocean Center

No wireless in the hotel! Shocking! ;) But seriously. Departed Phoenix @ 11am yesterday, but we had to stop at LAX to refuel (or leave a dozen people off the plane...) so we ended up arriving 2 hours late! Ah well, the price you pay to get to paradise. I drove the roundabout way to Kihei, just to check out the scenery. Gorgeous! No pictures yet, be patient. ;) Checked into the hotel at 630pm and was in bed by 7- by that time, I'd been up for 18 hours! Of course, I woke up @ 430am and couldn't go back to sleep. Went for a walk along the beach at 630, and was not alone- dozens of people out walking, and everyone says "good morning!" Having my first cup of strong Maui coffee, and then I'm off in search of an Internet connection.

Paulie brought me a white rose today, that he'd gotten down on main campus. Attached to it was a tag outlining the White Rose Society , a project of UT's Hillel group. The card talks about the 10,000 people who died every day at Auschwitz. There's a conference next week about human rights, and specifically about the genocide in Darfur**. Being the sap that I am, I got emotional. I am absolutely conscious of the fact that, in Europe ~70 years ago, I would have been put on a rail car and shipped off to the gas chambers like everybody else - I would have been one of those 10,000. I studied World War II and the Holocaust in-depth in college, and visited Terezin when I was in the Czech Republic with mom in 1994. There are whole towns in Poland that simply don't exist any more because all of the people were wiped out by the Nazis. That to me is one of the most powerful parts of the Holocaust Museum in DC - you walk down a hallway, and the names of these towns are etched in ...

I don't usually take food pics, but this is the quintessential N'awlins dining experience. We'll see how I do not getting the powdered sugar on my black clothes....

at the Bienville Hotel

You can't see the small band sitting in the middle of the street behind that black SUV, playing typical New Orleans brass band music. It was a perfect way to be introduced to the city.

or, University Blvd in Urbana is not the same as University Blvd in Champaign ! ARGH! It's a good thing my co-worker brought the directions also, because I looked up how to get to the hotel address, but it was on the wrong side of town! After driving around for 20 minutes *knowing* I wasn't quite in the right place, Luke figured out that my directions were different from his, and we finally made it to the hotel. Part 2 of "I was soooo tired": When the nice lady at AVIS returned my drivers license, I managed to slide it into the wrong pocket in my wallet. So when the nice lady at the front desk asked for my ID, it wasn't there! Oh no! I lost my DL! Panic! Call AVIS, they don't have it. Go through my pockets, my purse, everywhere I can think of... not there. Go back out to the car ( nb: it's 22 degrees with wind chill here ) and look, it's not there. Go back to the airport, just in case the AVIS lady didn't see it (using a more direct route)... and,...

I don't think I've ever written about Israel on the blog before: how much it pains me when I read about Israeli soldiers and civilians dying, how connected I feel to a place I've only visited once (20+ years ago), and how important it is that Israel continues to be a strong force for democracy in the Middle East. On the 60th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel, much is being written on these topics. After Rosh Hashanah last year, I signed up for "10 minutes of Torah," a daily email from the Union of Reform Judaism. Sometimes the emails are a quick read (the definition of a Hebrew word, in today's context) and some of them are gripping. This week's emails have been the latter. Wednesday's post, by Rabbi Robert Orkand, was entitled "Why Israel Matters to Me." While I didn't grow up in the 50's and 60's, my attitude toward Israel (3rd paragraph, below) is identical. In those days before email and relatively easy air t...

A QP meal at McD's in the Houston airport: $3.59. Club salad with grilled chicken and lo-fat balsamic dressing: $5.95, and fruit & yogurt snack: $2.19. Knowing that you chose the healthier option, even when faced with french fries: priceless. :)

Translation: Pisco is a potent drink! Saturday night was the March Supper Club. We decided on South American cuisine. We had pupusas, seafood stew, a shredded beef dish (the Venezuelan version of ropa vieja), and dulce de leche crepes (a little bit of poetic license for the crepes, but they were TASTY!) for dessert. My two contributions were Pastel de Choclo , which I had once in Santiago, Chile, and Pisco sours to drink. There are MANY versions of the Pastel recipe. (I skipped the olives. blech.) Technically, you're supposed to cook it in four small clay pots, but it worked fine in a large pan -- and I needed nine servings anyway. I also sliced the hardboiled eggs and laid them down as a layer, rather than shoving egg-halves into the beef mixture. I've been cooking up a storm recently, now that I think about it. Rebeka and Paul came over on Thursday for healthy dinner night, and we had spicy crusted grilled salmon (a WW recipe that I haven't used in years) with steamed ...