Nothing About The Bakken (Except Fracking Mentioned In Passing) -- October 21, 2018

Food

The new appetite for San Antonio. Our first Texas home was San Antonio. This is the full-page, front-page story in this week's section,"Off Duty," in The Wall Street Journal. Highlights:

• San Antonio: 1.5 million people
• Tex: north of the downtown
• Mex: south of downtown
• Tex-Mex: downtown
• the writer visited more than 600 trattorias, bistros, steakhouses, sushi bars and craft-driven cafes
• UNESCO: designated San Antonio as a world-wide Creative City of Gastronomy
• Native American, Spanish, Czech, Polish, and more
• Cured: one of the best restaurants in the Pearl; foodie scene north of San Antonio
• Southerleigh Fine Food & Brewery
• Botika: Chinese- and Japanese-influenced food of Peru (our younger daughter's favorite cuisine)
• Esquire Tavern: no kitchen until 2011; now, seven years later, curing their own charcuterie, making short-rib empanadas; downstairs, a cocktail speakeasy called Downstairs
• Battalion: an Italian restaurant 
• still one of the country's best cities for tacos
• best tacos: Carnitas Lonja, opened last year (2017)
• Mixtli, opened in 2013 -- one seating per night; seats 12; yup, a hole in the wall -- literally
• Five other sites to visit in San Antonio while waiting for your next Mex-Tex-Japanese-Chinese-Polish-Peruvian dinner:
• McNay Ar Museum: we used this as our library when we lived in in San Antonio; biking distance; not quite walking distance
• Mission San José: still holds Catholic Mass
• San Antonio Museum of Art: superb; one of our favorites; did not visit it often enough; downtown
• Brackenridge Park: when we lived in San Antonio, biking distance; not quite walking distance

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Memo to MsB: The Medieval Ages Are So Yesterday

Tone deaf: someone didn't hear the bone saws; listening to Apple music? Link to WSJ: behind the scenes it is being reported that MbS "feels betrayed by the West. He said he would look elsewhere and he will never forget how people turned against him before evidence was produced."

• winner: Putin?
• losers: US defense firms

Advice to Steve Mnuchin: watch your back, and stay on the yacht. From the linked WSJ article --

The Khashoggi affair is the latest in a series of missteps that tarnished the crown prince’s reputation, including getting into a prolonged war in Yemen, imprisoning dozens of perceived dissidents and failing to carry off a planned initial public offering of Saudi Arabia’s state oil company.

He developed “a complete intolerance for dissenting voices,” said Dennis Horak, the recently retired Canadian ambassador to Saudi Arabia, who himself was barred from the kingdom in August, after the Canadian government criticized Saudi Arabia on Twitter for jailing activists.

In recent months, Prince Mohammed had begun appearing less in public. He has spent many nights on his yacht on the Red Sea, say people briefed on the matter, thinking it safer than his palaces.

When your country harbored the bin Laden terrorists that flew planes into the WTC, and whisked likely co-conspirators out of the country immediately thereafter, would one think there would be so much backlash to a single murder?

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Fracking and the Big Bang

From National Geographic.

In 1998 scientists discovered that the universe is not only expanding but that its expansion is accelerating.

This totally unexpected behavior has been called the "most profound problem" in physics, because our current understanding of gravity says that attractions between mass in the universe should be causing the expansion to slow down.

The graphic:

The amount of antimatter in the universe? Perhaps one part in a trillion. Is there an anti-universe in which matter accounts for perhaps one part in a trillion? Where did all that antimatter go? Some suggest that immediately after the Big Bang, anti-matter and matter annihilated 99% of particles, leaving 1% imbalance, that led to us today.

But perhaps:

And, from there, of course, it's an easy step to see multi-verses.