Here’s a picture of a carved scrofa semilanuta (half-wolly sow, or, pig with a mohawk), symbol of Milano — the name may actually come from seMILANuta. One guy at my talk had a mohawk, the city scrofa rep.
Taking off near dawn, lovely views of Europe. Wayne Thiebaud has done a series of paintings of the Sacremento River delta like this. Oddly enough there was an earthquake in Milan the evening after I left. Synchronicity: I was standing in the Piazza de Jorge Luis Borges the afternoon before I left, and when I went to pick up my car at SFO, the couple in front of me were named Borges.
And here we are back in the Bay Area, these are fractal river channels in the mudflats near Sweet Home San Ho. I always kick myself a little on air flights for not looking down at the land more. It’s so amazing.
The GG Bridge of course.
We went for Thanksgiving dinner at my friend Jon Pearce’s; here's a view of some of the assembled guests, including dear Sylvia on the right. Note son Rudy (CEO of Monkeybrains) and his friend Penny on the lower right.
And here’s Jon and his little family: Ben, Ronna, and Laura left to right, a shot similar to the Meet the Beatles album cover except it’s out of focus. Jon was my office-mate at SJSU; we've been getting together for nearly twenty years.
Jon and me, sober as judges, but looking drunk, a kind of temporal inertia. Back in Kentucky and Virginia, Thanksgiving was always a day for Wild Turkey. My father liked to drink on Thanksgiving, too — I used to have a big pang of missing him on Thanksgiving, but now it's been so long since he died (ten years), it's more like I'm missing the memory of missing him. Time piles up such an endlessly thick blanket of forgetful snow.
After dinner Jon asked me to read part of the first chapter of Mathematicians in Love out loud, which I enjoyed doing. It’s good to be home.