Sunday, May 3, 2015

Idle Chatter -- Nothing About The Bakken -- May 3, 2015

Wow, it looks like a great day for relaxing. I will talk about the Bakken -- always do but some non-Bakken stuff first. If you came here for the Bakken, skip this post.

We had an incredible evening last night. Our daughter / son-in-law were moving into their new home, so we took our youngest granddaughter out and about so she would not "be in their way." We started out with frozen yogurt down the street, and then, on a lark, drove up to see what was happening on Main Street, Grapevine.

It turns out: Gallery Nights, open house at the town's six art studios (the entire downtown is about six blocks long) to include:
The studios all had special events as well as free wine, beer, lemonade, and incredibly good food. We didn't get to all the studios but it would have been hard to beat the art gallery at the information center and the Great American West Gallery.

This is at the Great American West Gallery:


Sophia was the only non-adult in this gallery.

My wife was aghast when I took Sophia into the vault where $80,000 paintings were hung. She was so afraid Sophia was going to touch them; she didn't. The gallery was a bank many decades ago; this is the original vault door, cleaned up, of course:


At this gallery we feasted on: quail in cream sauce, venison and pork tamales (wife's favorite), bacon-wrapped jalapenos stuffed with chicken. The tamales were incredible; someone said they were a bit hot (as in spicy); obviously not a native Texan -- not spicy enough!

Finally, this picture does not do Sophia justice -- she was having the time of her life but she looks a bit subdued in this photo -- perhaps just a bit too much wine:


No, she only had lemonade.

We finally got home about 10:00 p.m.

For a little big town, Grapevine, Texas, is quite incredible. They hold events year-round and one never knows what to expect.

There are several wineries in the area, including the third oldest in Texas right on Main Street. We visited Messina Hof for the first time last night. It is now on the top of our list for wine and cheese platter. 

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Book Review

There is a very, very interesting book review in this weekend's edition of the WSJ: On The Move, Oliver Sachs, 2015, 397 pages.
This is a very striking book by a very striking man. It is honest, lucid, passionate, humorous, humane and human (also slightly Martian).
The Oliver Sacks you thought you knew may surprise you with his back story: He is not the cuddly avuncular figure you imagined, the wise neurologist whose life’s work is to probe the mind’s more puzzling precincts—or not entirely that.
The front cover of “On the Move” shows a photograph of Dr. Sacks in his 20s, sitting handsomely astride a powerful and gleaming BMW motorcycle. His hair is close cropped, his tongue protrudes slightly through his lips as if tasting the air, and he gazes with curious eyes into the distance, ready to take off. He is wearing a tight leather jacket over a white T-shirt, revealing broad shoulders and a narrow, tapering waist. A thick muscular thigh forces his jeans taut over his leg. He looks like an adventuring biker bodybuilder, with a distinct suggestion of gayness about him. And that is exactly what he turns out to be.
Later:
A few years later the author moves to America to pursue his medical career, living initially in California. He still rides his motorbike for hundreds of miles at a time, hangs out with a gang of Hells Angels, frequents Muscle Beach in Los Angeles, and begins using drugs regularly.
He is sufficiently dedicated to power-lifting that he breaks the California record for the squat (recall the massive thighs).
And again, later:
He seeks escape in drugs, developing a serious four-year addiction to amphetamines: “The doses I took got larger and larger, pushing my heart rate and my blood pressure to lethal heights. There was an insatiability in this state; one could never get enough.” Not until he moves to New York, in 1961, and begins psychoanalysis does his addiction stop. (He has been in analysis for 50 years.)
In New York, the Oliver Sacks we know today begins to take shape: the clinical neurologist, the accomplished writer, the keen observer of everything around him. “On the Move” turns from sex, drugs and motorbikes to no-sex, swimming, book writing, cultivating friendships and becoming a distinguished figure (something gained, something lost).
And finally,
Meanwhile, he has to get himself through Oxford, where, despite some academic difficulties, he wins a prestigious prize in physiology after writing the exam completely drunk. He treats himself to a luxury with the prize money, buying all 12 volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary. “I was to read the entire dictionary through when I went on to medical school, and I still like to take a volume off the shelf, now and then, for bedtime reading.”
For those who may not know Sachs, this may help:
Thus we have “Migraine,” “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” “A Leg to Stand On,” “Uncle Tungsten” and other well-known works. His groundbreaking work with the drug L-dopa on patients suffering the aftereffects of encephalitis lethargica, which became the book “Awakenings,” is what really put him on the map and elevated him to cult status when the film with Robert De Niro and Robin Williams came out.
Something tells me Hunter S Thompson and Oliver Sachs might have enjoyed an occasional trip together to the Sturgis rally. 
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