Adventures of a Discoverer

All the Boeing 737 airplanes you see around the world (including the latest version, the infamous MAX) come from just one location: the massive Boeing plant in Renton, at the southern tip of Lake Washington. It's a huge complex where you can see 737s in various stages of assembly and where there is a small airport from which the brand new airplanes take off. What most people don't know, however, is that squeezed between the plant and the airstrip there is a small (and very narrow) public park: the Cedar River Trail Park . It's a lovely little park on the east margin of the Cedar river that among other recreation facilities has a small boat launch, from which I launched my kayak today. It was a wonderful day for paddling on the lake and the waters were calm and transparent. The cool thing about paddling here is that you can get really close to some brand spanking new 737 MAXes: in fact, I could even see some Boeing employees working overtime on one of them this Saturday morn...

Yesterday I could do something quite fun: watch a live concert of... That One Guy . I watched him once before, but this time around his show was even better at the environment of the Tractor Tavern, so I decided that it was worth of blogging about it. The Tractor Tavern is a small-ish concert venue in Ballard (a really cool neighborhood in Seattle) that feels very intimate but has great sound and light effects. On the other hand, "That One Guy", as the name implies, is a one man band that uses a special electronic instrument that he crafted himself to make some very otherworldly and esoteric kind of music. He combines that with videos that he displays in the big screens behind him (and some of the videos actually interact with the live performance of the music) plus some more effects and even some magic tricks to make quite a show. To summarize: I think it's the closest I'll ever come to know how it feels to have LSD without actually having LSD. It was an amazing nigh...

The fast food chain formerly known as "Kentucky Fried Chicken" and now known simply as "KFC" from time to time releases a new dish that's patently absurd, in order to get free press and free advertisement for its restaurants. Just recently, it did just that by creating the... "chizza". The name comes from the fact that it is a "pizza" but instead of being made with pizza dough, it's made with... fried chicken. Basically, they get a somewhat flat and somewhat round piece of fried chicken (a big chunk of white meat, like a nugget), cover it with marinara sauce, put some cheese on top and then some pepperoni slices, to make it look like a "pizza". To finalize, they cut it in four slices. Yesterday I tried it out myself. It's not too bad... their fried chicken is good (nothing particularly good, but good enough) and the toppings are nice. It feels a little bit like a confusing mix of flavors, but it's not bad. I wouldn't...