My Work Here is Done

lexington visit Yep. All done. Sitting in great cafe with a cup of camomile, listening to one of my favourite Mingus albums on the cafe’s overhead speakers, feeling that it all went well. (The latter – Mingus in a great cafe late at night? – is not really the Kentucky I remember.) I seem to have gone three for three. Class, seminar, colloquium. No disasters, besides skimping on the sleep a bit here and there and writing some of the material at the last minute. Good.

So I gave the seminar at noon, talking about much the same material I did in my Santa Barbara talk I mentioned before here. We then went to lunch at a Korean place nearby that was rather good. I ordered the bi bim bap (as I often do at Korean places) and to my disappointment, it did not come in the super high temperature near-molten […] Click to continue reading this post

A Return

I’m in Lexington, Kentucky, for a couple of days to give three presentations at the University of Kentucky (or “UK” as everyone refers to it here – I hope that explains the previous post). I should be preparing two of them instead of blogging, but… you know how it is. Here’s how I got here:

lexington visit On Wednesday afternoon, after a class on magnetostatics, and an attendance of a lunchtime event where four of our faculty (Biology, Geology, Cosmology (our very own Elena Pierpaoli!), Biology) presented their research, I dashed for a plane. Some hours later, at 10:45pm local time, I touched down in Chicago, and 15 minutes later was on the highway in the company (and car) of Nick Halmagyi.

Our mission? To hang out for a few hours in an excellent bar or two of his acquaintance and catch up on what’s been going on with each other, workwise and otherwise. The Charleston was indeed excellent, and (after chortling a bit about the memory of my annoyance at being charged $29 for a serving of a single malt scotch in a bar in Aspen during the Summer) proceeded to order the same here (he the Macallan, me the Talisker). At about 1:00am, the music stops and a guy with a face full of character sits down at the upright piano, is introduced to a scattering of applause, and proceeds to play some Chopin. Everybody shuts up and turns to listen. Appropriately, the piano sounds like all upright pianos in all bars all around the world sound (the tuning is just a bit wobbly), and the guy is good – really good. He stops playing the piece, and there’s some more scattered applause; someone (jokingly?) offers his a dollar as he walks away which he waves away enthusiastically; the music comes back up, and everybody turns back to their conversations. Nick and I continue to chat about various aspects of life, and order a couple more whiskeys.

At 1:25am or so we wander over to another bar. Nick seems a bit surprised by my suggestion to do this (‘cos I’m supposed to be going to sleep), but I’m just enjoying walking for a bit in the cold, wearing a cozy hat and coat that normally get no use these days, and there’s something nice about a proper bar hop in a neighbourhood with good bars and in the company of someone who appreciates it. This bar has an […] Click to continue reading this post