MUGA Day #46: Stanford Class of '62 50th Reunion in Napa

Our Stanford Class of '62 had our 50th Reunion this past fall, but some of us did not participate.  So Kathy Ray Darling hosted at her Napa home a mini-reunion for us.  It began with Kenji and Lefty dropping me off on their way to the San Francisco Airport.  However, Kenji had a glass of Sterling Sauvignon Blanc, as Lefty had to drive.  Our group:

My freshman roomate, Jim, with, to his left, our next door neighbor in our dormitory, Bill, then Kathy, with Sue at the bottom.  Bill and Sue met at Stanford, with Jim and I as grooms for their wedding in Santa Rosa.  Sue/Bill went on to Cameroon for their Peace Corps assignment.  Jim was sent to the Ivory Coast for his Peace Corps experience.  Below, Jim and Kathy:

Here are Kathy and Jim 54 years ago when Jim and I were sophomores.

This photo, I think, was taken at Berkeley.  Jim transferred to Cal-Berkley in his sophomore year, but returned to Stanford after a year there.  He now teaches at Berkeley and is regularly nominated for teacher of the year.

Cathy (with Coco) prepared a great lunch of a St. Michael's Alley type tossed salad and pesto salmon, with four bottles of wine, two red and two white.  The 2003 Souverain Zinfandel was the featured bottle.  Lunch ended at 3PM, so we cancelled our scheduled dinner and all went to sleep very early.  I got ten hours, and feel great today.

Cathy will drive by French Laundry and Bouchon for  photo opportunities (as no one in my golf group wanted to eat there), then to Sterling for some wine tasting, and finally on to Equus in Santa Rosa for lunch with Nancy and David Kyle, who are then taking me to their Sea Ranch home.

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MUGA Day #45: Napa

I'm now a month and a half into My Ultimate Global Adventure with nearly a week left.  What have I learned?

1.  Well, because of USA Today, I now know that Joyce Kilmer of TREES fame (I think that I shall never see, A poem lovely as a tree), was a man.  I'm not much into poems, and was never forced to memorize this poem, nor knew anything about the poet.  Well, to learn that TREES was written exactly a century ago by a GUY named Joyce, was noteworthy.  To further read that he, with a fifth child on the way, volunteered to fight in World War I, and was killed three months before the Armistice at the age of 31, that was a sad revelation.

2.  Travel magazines provided in hotel rooms and airline lounges also are worthy of mention:

    a.  Global Traveler, is a particularly slick publication that measures up to the standards of My Ultimate Global Adventure.  The May 2013 issue reports that:

        1)  Japan's bullet train (Shinkansen) will this fall operate retro-style first class trains in Kyushu featuring regional craftworks and traditional designs.  Poland, Portugal and Sweden will soon become members of the high-speed rail club, joining France, Germany and Spain in Europe.  California hopes to build a 520-mile high speed rail link between Los Angeles and San Francisco...BY 2033.

        2)  Global Traveler's Hall of Fame Nominees for 2013 include Asiana Airlines for Onboard Service and Flight Attendees (as I indicated earlier in MUGA), and United Mileage Plus as the Best Frequent-Flyer Program.  I am flying Star Alliance.

        3)  There is a special feature on San Francisco (Bay Bridge art), and I'm spending nearly two weeks in this city by the Bay or nearby.  Also highlighted are Barcelona, New Delhi, Helsinki, Silk Road, Perth and a whole range of cuisine.

    b.  The April 2013 issue of Business Traveler focused on Seoul, American barbeques, the State of New York, Ireland golf, and the future of aircraft design.  I was particularly surprised to learn that United Airlines now has baggage delivery service in 36 cities, including Honolulu, where checked baggage delivered to your home within 40 miles of the arrival airport would cost only $50 for three suitcases ($30 for one and $40 for two).  The service could soon expand to 190 cities.

    c.  Premier Traveler wrote on their 2012 awards, and looked at Toronto, Sydney and Napa.  If you want a room at the latest rage, Andaz (a Hyatt) in Napa, they're generally booked, but if you get in, be prepared to spend $450/night.  Nice to have friends in Napa.

    d.  There are many, many business travel magazines!  I lost count.

3.  China is an environmental mess.  While I was in that country, Time magazine had an article on "The Poisoned Rice Bowl."  You've read about all this in this blog:  16,000 dead pigs in the river from which Shanghai purifies for drinking, H7H9 avian flu and air pollution so terrible that one million Chinese die prematurely every year.  On my final day in Beijing I began to cough, and it took me two weeks to get most of the particulates out of my lungs, I hope.

TOMORROW I CONTINUE MY WINE-TASTING SERIES.

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MUGA Day #44: Rancho Solano GC and Umi Sushi

Kenji's Golf Safari played twice at the Rancho Solano Golf Course and shared eight meals at Umi Sushi, a close walk from the Hampton Inn, where we also had a wide range of drinks awaiting dinner:

We are sitting this side of left.  Rancho Solano is an excellent course:

Wally, Leroy and Andy with Rainier plums, which we ate.  I just had to take this shot.  What do you think it is?

Hint:  not my golf ball.  The highlight of our trip was Kayla and Umi Sushi...here with Lefty and Kenji:

The bottom photo is Kenji's quail egg and tobiko sushi.  I should add the dinner we had last night at Texas Roadhouse, the place with peanut shells all over the place and great steaks:

To finalize, Leroy Perry  (he is the one with his hand under his chin in white) won the low gross and David Block (extreme left) and Kenji Sumida (go above to his sushi and Kayla) occupied the embarrassing bottom.  The fact that no one died and we all finished all five straight days of golf were miracles of moment.  Tomorrow, my Stanford 50th Year belated Mini-Class Reunion at Kathy Ray's.  THE ULTIMATE WINE SUMMARY ALSO CONTINUES TOMORROW.

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MUGA Day #42: Napa--The Ultimate Wine Glasses

I'm still on Kenji's Golf Safari, so the least I can do is to show a photo of Kenji contemplating two bottles of Kirin:

We keep coming back to Umi Sushi because all drinks are two for one and the food is tolerable.  For those who don't know Kenji Sumida, he is the leader of our safari, a former Air Force General, and was at one time president of the East West Center.  Well enough for that.

Today, I feature wine glasses.  Sadly, our wine adventure on the course used paper cups.  You can do better.  While you can find more expensive glasses, Riedel wine glasses tend to be used by the best restaurants around the world.  This Austrian company has been around for three centuries.  How can you tell if you have a Riedel?  Slowly twirl the glass and watch the bottom of the base toward the edge.  The make of the glass will be indicated.

There are three primary kinds of Riedel glasses.  The everyday ware, or Vinum ($20-$30/glass), the swirl  type (left) with no stem ($12-15 each), and the Sommeliers collection, which goes for a hundred dollars each ($50-$125, depending on type), more or less.  The ultimate Cabernet/Bourdeaux glass can hold 30 ounces (remember, a full 750 ml bottle contains around 26 ounces), and you can today get one for $105 at Amazon.com.  How can you tell Vinum from Sommeliers?  The latter is larger, the glass is thinner and the harmonics when you cling glasses go on forever.

When you splurge on an expensive restaurant, if you order one serving or a not so expensive bottle of wine, you will invariably be provided Vinum glasses.  Only when you indulge in a "more expensive" wine will you generally be honored with the $100 ultimate.  

These are the basic shapes for various wines:

Mind you, there are critics of Riedel.  Here is a blog on "The greatest trick Riedel ever played was convincing the wine world..."

It gets worse, for these expensive crystals can have a lead oxide concentration exceeding 40%, and most medical reports indicate that you should be careful, for this metal can leach into your wine.  Riedel glasses most certainly are NOT lead free.  Most definitely, don't regularly store your wine in Riedel glasses.  

In a way, it is ironic that lead-free glasses are much cheaper.  What are the symptoms?  diminished intelligence, impaired behavioral development (particularly children and pregnant women, not from drinking wine, but from paint and other lead sources), impaired hearing and inhibited growth. See a doctor if you have been drinking too much wine from Riedel glasses, and think you are a victim, for there are chelation treatment options to remove lead from your body.

I recommend using titanium glasses.  Schott Zwiesel, for example, sells a mix of titanium and zirconium instead of lead, and not only is it cheaper and safer, it is more resistant to cracking and scratching.  Amazon.com sells these Titan glasses for $10 each.  I've dropped this glass and it bounced on the floor, although, I wouldn't try this on purpose, as I've also cracked one.  You can bang it on the counter very carefully with some confidence.  Ravenscroft lead free wine glasses also sell for $10 as another option.

It gets cheaper and safer with Govino polymer shatterproof and recyclable glasses, where a set of four will set you back $12.95.  

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MUGA Day #41: The Ultimate Wine Summary--Part 1

The final ten days of My Ultimate Global Adventure will weave through Napa, Sonoma, Russian River and similar points north of Vacaville and south of Mendocino at various wine tastings. This all started yesterday at the Vacaville Fiesta in celebration of Cinco de Mayo, and here is some of the wildlife:

 

For $15 you could have 10 wines or five bottles of beer. We had both, repeated, with dinner at Los Reyes. Here, Kenji, the leader of the safari, pondering which bottle to drink:

 

The food was was also fine:

The seven, plus me, taking this photo:

Thus far, our safari has featured margarita, martini and red wine days...while on the course.  Then, as above, to work out the winnings/losses, we have a greater variety of imbibibles.  Upcoming, single malt scotch tomorrow and the best of vodka on Tuesday.

But, to initiate the Ultimate Wine Summary.  Let me start with wine bottles (click on this link for a spotlight on the the ultimate wine region in the USA--where I will be visiting during this ten day period):

From the top:
  Split or 187.5 ml or quarter bottle / half bottle or 375 ml /
  bottle or 750 ml / Magnum or 1.5 liters / Jeroboam or 4 bottles/
  Double Magnum or 4 bottles (yes, same) / Rehoboam or 6 bottles

Bottom half:
  Methusalem or 8 bottles / Imperial or 8 bottles (yes, again, same) /
  Salamanazar or 12 bottles / Balthazar or 16 bottles /
  Nebuchadnezzar or 20 bottles
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MUGA Day #40: Dow Jones Industrial Average

Our golf safari continues, as our economy booms.  Yesterday the Dow Jones Industrials cracked the 15,000 barrier for the first time and ended at an all time high of 14,974.

The Average has increased this year by 14%.

Remember, we recently fell off the fiscal cliff and are supposed to be suffering from sequestration.  Can you think back when Barack Obama came into office a little more than four years ago and the world was on the verge of a frightening depression?

That low in 2009 was 6469, so we have jumped by 231% since that day in March.  What in the world is happening?  I don't know, but let's see what happens on Monday.

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MUFA Day#39: TOP UNIVERSITIES IN THE WORLD: Best of Asia

This is Day #39 with the next few days "just" golfing and eating on Kenji's Golf Safari.  For the next couple of days, then, I will insert items of interest that occupied my attention during My Ultimate Golf Adventure.

Education has been my whole life.  Whether it was as a student, professor or observer, I've had some crusades involving aspects of education.  I began my chapter on this subject in SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Humanity with a gripe that teachers were not sufficiently paid, our STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) program was lacking and students were doing terribly compared to other developed countries.  However, when I completed this chapter, I wondered, if our educational system was so crummy, why is our nation so supreme.  

I then completely re-wrote my education chapter and totally adjusted the presentation.  You, of course, need to read the details about how I think we could be so much better as a society with really early education beginning at the age of two, and that our schools need to cover the full rainbow spectrum of education by focusing a lot more on the SEVEN R'S...but the overriding factor was that the USA is doing fine in education, and the reason is because of our superior higher education system.  To quote from the link in the previous sentence:

So is the U.S. in trouble? Is the strongest economy ever a generation or two away from mediocrity? Nope. There is one area where we still lead in education: higher education. The total expenditure per student in the U.S. is $18,570, compared to Denmark in second place with $11,600 and Britain in third with $8970.

We have 17 of the 20 best universities in the world. As a nation, we have, apparently, decided to focus on the few who will lead and produce. Even at this stage, there will be more followers than chiefs. But this system is working, and could well be the answer to our success.

We are not today as dominating as a few years ago, but still doing fine in higher education, and in world dominance.  The following ranks our institutions compared to the rest of the world.

The Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings (THEWRR), presented by Thomson Reuters, lists the following top ten universities:

1.  Harvard
2.  MIT
3.  Cambridge
4.  Oxford
5.  California at Berkeley
6.  Stanford
7.  Princeton
8.  UCLA
9.  Tokyo
10.  Yale

Twenty eight out the top fifty are from the United States, and 43 of the best 100.  You could surmise that the UK would look good, as Times Higher Education is a British magazine.  Thomson Reuters also has deep UK roots, although their  headquarters are now in New York City.

There are two other influential rankings:  the QS World University Rankings (also UK) and the Academic Ranking of World Universities (Shanghai Jiaotong University).  Shanghai was the first to publish a ranking, in 2003, and they list 500 universities.  The top three for QS are MIT, Cambridge and Harvard, while Shanghai has it Harvard, Stanford and MIT.

The top ten from Asia according to THEWRR are:

1.  Tokyo
2.  National University of Singapore
3.  Hong Kong
4.  Peking
5.  Pohang University of Science and Technology (South Korea)
6.  Tsinghua
7.  Kyoto
8.  Seoul National University
9.  Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
10.  Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

Of this Asian top 100, Japan had 22, Taiwan 17, China 15 and South Korea 14.  The rise of South Korea and Taiwan is a bit surprising.  The list extends to the Middle East, with Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel) at #15, Middle East Technical University (Turkey) at #22, Sharif University of Technology (Iran) at #42 and King Abdulaziz University at #49 (Saudi Arabia).  The disappointment is India, with none in the top 10 and only 3 in the best 100.  Hiroshima University, where I provided a talk on this trip, is #67 in Asia.  In Thailand, I did not expect King Mongkut's University of Technology (#55) and Mahidol University (#61) to be rated higher than Chulalongkorn University (#82).

Should we be worried that our once overwhelming superiority in higher education is being challenged? Yes, of course, but consider that those three rankings above come from the United Kingdom and China.  I suspect if "Americans" controlled a review system, we'd look better.  In any case, the world is catching up.  However, you don't need to lose too much sleep over our poor K-12 performance.  We set those low budget priorities a long time ago and well survived.  The USA will remain the dominant world power for the next century, if not well into the next millennium.

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MUGA Day #38: Vacaville

Vacaville?  Well, we are not quite in Napa, which is 26 miles away, but in Solano County's Hampton Inn and Suites.  Like the Four Points hotel being part of Starwood (or the Sheraton chain), Hampton belongs to the Hilton family.  We are 35 miles southwest of Sacramento and 45 miles northeast of San Francisco.  Vacaville was founded in 1851 and now has a population of more than 92,000.  

There are 5 Japanese restaurants, although one is called Keanu's Island Kine Food, which serves Japanese, Filipino and Hawaiian food.  Located in this less than sprawling metropolis are the Vacaville Premium Outlets (120 stores--that's their ad to the left).  

Kenji, Lefty and David all made it to the Four Points by 7AM, where we had breakfast, drove to Trader Joes to pick up some supplies and found our way to the Hampton Inn in Vacaville.  Free breakfast, quick internet, free bottles of water with trail mix, an evening cocktail corner where no one bothers you and large rooms.  Kenji, Lefty and I walked down to Umi Sushi for a decent lunch:

The restaurant featured $2 mugs of Sapporo Beer, and I had an oyako donburi.  Dave came later.  At the end of the day we had a beer and bottle of Two Buck and 49 cents Chuck Shiraz with potato chips. The other three I think went back to Umi Sushi for dinner, while I stayed back and slept

Some of you might remember that semi-famous Nut Tree off U.S. 40, which became Interstate 80.   That's in Vacaville.  Surely, you had a personalized giant frosted honey cookie and rode their rocking horses.  Hey, in 1983 they catered a luncheon hosted by California Governor George Deukmejian for Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, and were an early pioneer in what is today called California cuisine.  Actually, Nut Tree closed for a decade between 1996 and 2006, said to be mostly caused by a family feud, and is now a shopping plaza.  Their train powered by a green biodiesel engine runs on biofuel.

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MUGA Day #37: My Day in San Francisco

Forty eight hours ago, my only full day in Denver, the temperature rose to 81 F.  Today, up to 12 inches of snow and a high of 32 F.   See that one white spot at 32?  That's Denver:

At the other extreme, temperatures here and in the Napa area are expected to hit all time highs, with Santa Rosa expected to go up to 91 F, when its all-time high for May 1 is 83F.  I've never heard of an 8 F degree record breaking difference for anywhere ever.  The Napa region also has four wildfires largely out of control and winds exceeding 30 MPH are expected today.  Worse, tomorrow, three digit temperatures could be reached in certain areas of the valley.  Kenji's Golf Safari begins with arrival at the San Francisco Airport tomorrow.  We will be in smoke and heat for a week, unless it rains early next week, which is expected.

What I never envisioned in My Ultimate Global Adventure was an exciting room.  I happen to  be on the second floor in the extreme corner near the freeway from SFO to the City, and cars are whizzing past.  A slight deviation and they're into my room.  The exit is also right in my view, and if a driver gets a heart attack, the vehicle could slam into me:

I've told this story before, but as first-time visitors are half the readers every day, let me explain why this a second home for me.  I went to school down the road at Stanford, a decade later spent a summer working on a Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program at the NASA Ames Research Center, and in the 70's did research at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for Edward Teller a couple of times on laser fusion.  I recommended to NASA forty years ago a direct technique to not only detect extrasolar planets, but also thusly determine the atmospheric composition.  Virtually all of those planets thus far found (a number now nearing 1000--until 1992 the total was zero) used indirect wobbling of the close-by star, not a seeing of the planet itself.

While at Livermore in 1979, I was asked to become a staff member of the U.S. Senate, where one satisfying victory was helping Carl Sagan (who wrote the book, Contact) gain initial funding for the SETI program.   Read about our encounter with Senator William Proxmire.  I had met Sagan while at Ames when we saw the first Mars photo being beamed in from Viking (that's him standing next to a model of this spacecraft).  Ironically, Jill Tarter, chair of the SETI Institute (which is located just off the Stanford Campus), is in Hawaii this weekend for a series of events.  She is the model for Jodie Foster's role in the 1997 film, CONTACT.  This is what I did for NASA forty years ago.

I took BART into Frisco and meet Sharon and David Block for lunch at Tadich Grill:

Not exactly an adventurous day, but we then walked up and down Market Street.  I took this photo:

We then went to the Ferry Building Marketplace and had some champagne and white wine. I followed by scouring the foodstands for the ideal cheese, foie gras, bread and wine, and could not find anything worthy.  However, just as I was about to catch the elevator down to the Bart Embarcadero Station, I saw a Subway, bought a 6-inch Italian, then a large bottle of Corona beer, plus American potato chips, and had my international dinner in my room at the Four Points Sheraton.  Tomorrow, the first day of Kenji's Golf Safari in Napa.

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