Tag Archives: Photography

by - 0 comments

Boston Harbor – sort of

I’ve developed this weird trend lately where I show up new to a place I’ve never been before, but somehow end up with a schedule that allows me only a few hours to initially see places before I’m on my way again.  It happened recently in Milwaukee and Detroit, and now Boston.  I’m not complaining mind you, because all it means is I have to go back.  Oh darn.

In any case, the family only had a few hours before a wedding west of Boston.  So we went down to Boston Harbor and walked around a pier or two and then toured Harpoon Brewery.  Incidentally, as much as I worship beer, this was my first brewery tour ever.  I’ll probably write about that later.  Maybe.

But whatever, here’s some random shots of Boston Fish Pier, right down the road from Harpoon.

dsc00549

Boston Fish Pier is still very much operating.  All the boats there are small craft, as in not the massive trawlers that are literally raping the oceans.  You can tell from the material condition of everything that they’re owners not necessarily swimming in gold.  It all felt very classic, except that the pier itself had been renovated from it’s original creation in the early 20th Century.

 

DSC00553.JPG

 

DSC00552.JPG

The Exchange Conference Center – Located at the head of the pier.  If you’ve heard me whine about the awfulness of modern architecture, here is an example of a new building I’d consider a great job of creating something that’s not a faceless glass enclosed wonder.

 

DSC00551.JPG

I have discovered the fattest seagulls I’ve ever seen in all my global travels are located in Massachusetts.

 

DSC00554.JPG

A lightweight anchor casually discarded on the pier.  If you look you can see why.

 

 

by - 1 Comment

All Hail Nautilus Kitty

About a year and a half ago it was Dead of Winter. Outside I think it was about 15 degrees with eight inches of snow on the way. I get home and there’s this cat on my doorstep, hanging out, and meowing. I love my dogs, my brothers both have cats, but I don’t know anything about cats. Cats baffle me because I’m so used to dealing with dogs.

My neighbor is a kind retired doctor. So he and I figure out the cat’s without valid identification, kitty’s papers were apparently expired. So we get the idea we should at least feed the cat. Somewhere in my memory I had heard that if you feed a stray cat it becomes your cat. Seeing as how I didn’t want a cat, I worried feeding the cat was a bad idea. Nevertheless the cat seemed hungry and thin. So my neighbor gave him a little canned tuna and I gave him a little of my dog’s kibble. If you’re a cat owner, and are horrified by these meal choices, I once again reaffirm I have no idea if these are valid cat nutritional options or not.

Anyways, after the cat’s done eating, he and I begin to wonder what to do to prevent kitty from freezing to death or dying in the forthcoming snowfall. Kitty’s running around like a crazy person, and eventually sets up shop underneath my still warm car frame. My neighbor eventually lost interest. So I’m outside freezing and alone with this cat under my car. And I get it into my head that unless I get this cat indoors, it’s going to die overnight and it’ll be all my fault. But I don’t know nothing about cats. And I can’t keep a cat in my place because my dogs will kill it or the cat would kill them.

So I spend an hour calling cat shelters or whatever. Nobody wants to pick up their phone. Or they are of the mentality of, we’ll take the cat from you, and then kill it. Holy shit! [slams phone receiver] For the uninitiated, slamming your phone is the most popular smartphone app of 1987. In the meantime, kitty is either underneath my car or on my doorstop meowing constantly. Finally the local city animal control calls me back. This kind young woman is all helpful, but offers a weird solution. She’ll take the cat, but nobody ever claims cats, so you should just leave the cat alone otherwise it’ll never get home, if it has a home. Oh, uh, …

Remember, I’ve got it in my head at this point that this cat is going to literally die unless I save it. So I tell the woman thanks and I keep dialing. Finally I get a hold of a shelter that will take the cat, not kill it, and get somebody to adopt it if nobody claims it. They are a half hour away. It’s getting dark, my escapade with the cat is now two hours old, I’m freezing, my dogs are hungry, but with this news from the shelter my heart soars. The cat will live.

Anybody ever try and get a cat to go somewhere it doesn’t want to go? I hadn’t. Kitty would not let me pick him up. Kitty had to be bribed with more dog kibble. Then I could pick up kitty. But kitty kept trying to scramble out of my hands and I was worried kitty would claw my eyes. I could get kitty in hand, get close to my car, and chuck kitty in the backseat. But kitty was so quick, he would always manage to jump out of the car before I could shut the door. Cat was literally a blur of fur the dude was so fast.

Eventually after an hour of this I could no longer feel my frozen hands. It’s pitch black now. And kitty jumps out of the car for the twelfth freaking time, and runs off. Cat’s gone. So I walk around for a half hour trying to find the cat. I never did. After three and a half hours I went inside, defeated, certain kitty was not going to last the night. I had failed kitty, it was on me. I think it snowed ten inches overnight.

Yet a week later, I see kitty gleefully chasing another cat around the neighborhood. I stopped where I was in my tracks, and just started laughing like a lunatic. Darn cat’s alive! It was a true six year old Christmas morning moment. It made my month. I hereby dubbed kitty at that moment Nautilus Kitty, for his ability to survive arctic weather on his own.

I don’t know if Nautilus Kitty is a stray, or is owned by a neighbor. Nobody has ever claimed Nautilus Kitty as far as I can tell. I see him about once a week or so, in all weather. I don’t feed him, I don’t try and save him, because I know he’ll be alright. Occasionally I see Nautilus Kitty conning a neighbor for food. Even my doctor neighbor feeds him every once and a while, I’m not sure if he remembers meeting Nautilus Kitty originally or not?

But Nautilus Kitty never begs me for food or says hi. I guess he’s still angry at my failed kidnapping attempt. I’ve tried to take Nautilus Kitty’s picture for years, but he’s too quick, and runs when I approach him. So this shot is the best I could do recently. So you play Where’s Waldo and find Nautilus Kitty’s blur in this photo. For the uninitiated, Where’s Waldo is the most popular smartphone app of 1993.

Nautilus Kitty.jpg

All Hail Nautilus Kitty! Who cannot be slain by weather, or dogs, or other cats, or dragons, or whatever. Turns out the animal control woman was right after all. Nautilus Kitty endured.

by - 0 comments

Detroit – because work said so

Someday somebody way smarter than me is going to write a book where Detroit is a metaphor for all of America. You can trace the tale from the earliest French settlers, to British rule, frontier America, transition from an agrarian to industrialized economy, full blown dominance (Detroit probably single handedly out produced Nazi Germany), followed by collapse & depopulation, followed, by what?

Well, one would hope rebirth. Rather than continued slow decline. Since 1950 Detroit has lost almost 2/3 of its people. A similar trend stalks Cleveland, Milwaukee, and countless other Midwestern cities. Literally, Detroit used to be the center of the world alongside New York and London. Will it ever return to its former glory? Is it even possible? I’m not sure. So much of what drove this greatness no longer exists. What America is and does is so very different than in 1950.

Maybe I’ll try and write about it later on. But for now I’ll let the photos speak for themselves. Or at least to also offer that Detroit has some of the worst traffic I’ve ever experienced, which says a lot considering the parking lots I’ve driven in (Tokyo, Washington, New York, LA, etc). And also Detroit’s suburbs have some of the best Lebanese food on the planet, truly legit awesome stuff.

Work sent me to Detroit for all of three days. I only ended up snaking a few hours to drive around. Sadly I didn’t get to do anything reasonably fun. So I guess that means I’ll have to go on back on my own dime.

Woodward & Guardian

One Woodward Avenue (left) and the Guardian Building – One Woodward was completed in 1962, note its applicable stale awfulness.  Guardian Building dates to 1929 and is apparently beautiful inside.   Also note the weirdo sky bridge which linked the two since the 1970s.  In 2012, Rock Ventures LLC bought One Woodward.  Rock Ventures owns Quicken Loans, a bunch of sports teams and casinos, and about a 100 other companies.  I suppose it’s an example of the types of companies that Detroit has to attract in order to rebuild.

 

Ambassador Bridge.JPG

Ambassador Bridge & Downtown Detroit – The busiest border crossing in North America, the bridge carries 1/4 of all trade between America and Canada.  The separate Detroit River Tunnel carries rail traffic.  In a bit of weirdness the bridge is actually privately owned by a guy who appears to behave like an evil monopoly man cartoon caricature.  A second bridge is scheduled for completion by 2020.

 

Windsor.JPG

Detroit River & Windsor, Canada

 

GM Building.JPG

GM Renaissance Center – appropriately enchained behind a fence for GM’s cheating death off the backs of the taxpayer

 

Packard Plant.JPG

Ruins of the Packard Automotive Plant – Completed in 1911, it built cars until 1958.  By 1966 Packard had evaporated as a car company.

 

The next three shots are of ruined houses just a few blocks away from the Packard Plant.  Once upon a time, an American farm worker could move to Detroit and get an entry job at the Packard Plant.  Thirty years later he could retire as a supervisor with a decent pension, and go buy himself one of these beautiful houses to live out his days as a grandfather.  Now it’s all gone, the Plant, the house, and this very concept of employment as part of the American Dream.  I wonder if they could have ever imagined how bad it would get?  Understanding why this all came about, and where to go from here, is central to Detroit’s future.  And perhaps America’s as well.

 

House

 

House1

 

House 3.jpg

by - 0 comments

get more pegs

My very first boss, who is probably still the best even after all these years, had one of these maps on his office wall.  I’ve never forgotten about it.  But for whatever reason it’s taken me forever to bother with this.  And even then it was no deliberate plan.  It’s like I just woke up one day recently and decided it was going to happen.  So I did.

DSC00544.JPG

The pegs are hard to see in this shot, but they’re multicolored to define length of stay, purpose of trip, etc, etc.   For those of you who unfortunately read this degenerate blog on a regular basis, you might recognize some of the pegs from previous travel themed posts.

I just added another peg last week, from a recent work trip.  I might get around to posting about it shortly.  I also probably need to get around to planning another trip, just for fun, without the insanity of work telling me where to go.

Either way.

Get more pegs.

by - 2 Comments

Jacques assists my brain decompression, his way

I’ve been horrendously busy lately with no sign of it letting up. So I’ve had to take a step back in planning what I’m going to cook. For quite a good long while, I’ve been on this kick to try ever harder recipes or techniques. I guess just to prove that I could do it. Or also that hanging out in the kitchen for hours with the dogs, cooking, drinking beer, and/or listening to music is my way to decompress from stupid reality.

I don’t have time for that now, but a man’s still got to eat. So lately I’ve transitioned back to some of the early cookbooks I bought, in particular Jacques Pépin’s The Short-Cut Cook and Fast Food My Way. You go buy your stuff, spend less than 30 minutes, and you’re done. This has certainly helped my schedule, but it’s also been a delightful return to basics. Something other than a massive list of ingredients with perhaps needless complexity.

It’s been kind of a return to roots, in the sense that if you’re only involved with a half-dozen items and a half-hour, you’d better get it right. You can’t hide anything if you screw it up. In many ways, this simplicity is better. In this hour long interview with Anthony Bourdain (you should watch the whole thing), go to the ten minute mark to hear Jacques lay this philosophy out, “…take away, take away…”

It’s also given me a chance to mess with things that have been on my mind for years, but just never got around to doing. In this week’s case, it was playing around with chicken livers and sardines, both from Short Cut Cook:

– Chicken livers persillade

Most folks hate these things because they’ve got a weird texture and look terrible when you break them out of the package. So I think I was well north of 20 years age when I first had them in Asia. Since then, I’ve never turned them away and tried them all over the place. But I haven’t ever worked with them in the kitchen. So Jacques steps in, and essentially offers you the opportunity to serve them with some toast and call it a day. Overall kitchen time is less than ten minutes.

Things did not go well at first. As I was trying to get the liver tub open and I ended up spilling liver blood/juice/whatever over a good portion of my counter and floor. My youngest was more than happy to help me clean up, so I had to scramble to contain her happy doggy tongue with one hand while I wiped it all off the floor with the other. Then you’ve got to clean the livers by trimming off all the connecting veins and all those lovely weird black parts that you’d rather pretend don’t actually exist. I’m not sure if this is typical, but I ended up discarding about half the biomass in trimming them down to the cook ready parts. After that, I was a bit demoralized, and wondering what I’d gotten myself into.

Yet all you have to do is roast some baguette slices for ten minutes and sauté the livers. The livers themselves take one minute per side, really high heat, and that’s it. Take your liver, take your bread, eat, and it’s well worth it. It’s probably not for everybody, but it worked for me all right.

 

chicken livers

finished product, they were liver-rific!

did ya get it?  I did a thing there?

[cricket, cricket, cricket]

 

– Sardines in tomato sauce

I don’t know whether this is accurate or not, but I always had the impression that folks tend to turn away sardines or anchovies because they don’t like the little small fishy, and the overall oiliness, fish odor & taste is too much for people. So you don’t really see these two dudes make much of an appearance in typical American cuisine (whatever that is). I’ve always loved them though. So when I came upon Jacques’ instruction to buy a whole freaking 16 ounces of sardines, I was sold. So because I’m a lunatic, I went and bought four tins, just to be safe. All he has you do is throw them on some greens with vinegar, parsley, salt & pepper, and some fresh tomato. So if you don’t care for sardines, this is repulsive because you’re eating them right out of the box as is. But for me this was a win. I took five minutes to make.

I love Jacques’ mentality on food. I guess he’s technically considered a celebrity chef, but in my mind he’s one of the originals alongside Julia Child who is not really a celebrity chef. I mean, sure, Jacques has made a boatload of gold throughout the years, but he’s always carried himself with the same humble simplicity that Child also had. There’s a reason those two were friends. It’s always a breath of fresh air from the current modern machine manufactured chef crowd. Jacques still cooks for public television, folks.

So thanks Jacques, for helping me get through this crazy busy time of my life. While also still eating well. And learning something new every day.

pepin and child.jpg

yep

by - 0 comments

Milwaukee – for just a few hours

I’ve pretty much gotten to the stage where I’m beyond planning anything for travel not dictated by those who employ me.  This is just about the exact opposite from a decade ago where I had a tour book, ledger, and a timeline.

I wish I could say this was part of some kind of mystical theoretical journey where I’ve cast off the toolbox shackles of a younger age, but truly it’s just because I don’t have enough energy to care.  It’s the mentality of, eh, it’s just for fun, whatever.  Show up, and see what happens.  I like this, it takes less effort.

For those of you unfortunate enough to be a regular reader of this degenerate blog, I now end up traveling to Chicago regularly now.  But I usually fly into Milwaukee for this is cheaper to the bottom line.

A hint perhaps, for those of you looking to head to Chicago.  If you fly into Milwaukee both in terms of flight cost and rental car, you’ll save at least $100.  And your trade is about $8 in interstate tolls and an extra hour’s drive.  You decide if this is worth the tradeoff.

Anyways, I usually have zero time, and so turn south from Mitchell Airport bound for Chicago.  This last week though I had a few hours since I got there very early in the morning.  So instead I turned north and decided to spend a few hours in Milwaukee.

With zero upfront planning I ended up in downtown, parked, and just walked around for a few hours.  This was a good idea.  However, it didn’t help that I felt terrible that entire day, but there was nothing I could do about that.  So I decided to carry on.

First I walked around like a lunatic until I could find breakfast, I ended up at a local Greek diner:

Mykonos Gyro & Cafe

1014 North Van Buren Street

 

This was a wise, fortunate, rendezvous.  They do two things I’ve never seen before, they put gyro meat in an omelet, and you get tzatziki in a squeeze bottle.  Both of these are wise decisions.  But be warned, for about $8 you’ll get enough food that you feel compelled to walk it off for hours.  So in other words, this was a huge win.

Then it was few blocks east down to the Lake.

 

Lake Michigan

Lake Michigan from the bluffs of Juneau Park.  As is typical for Eastern or Mid-Western cities, those damn highways are in the way of water views.  If you didn’t know, this was a deliberate decision of city designers in the early car era.  Highways, or parkways, were put along the water to give casual driver’s a good view.  This is the lunacy of getting fully dressed up and going on a drive in the 1930’s, because that was considered recreation.  My Granddad used to chuckle about that, you would go on a drive for fun.  So back then, having the road along the water was an advantage, now they just kill our view.

 

Soloman Juneau

Soloman Juneau.  First mayor of Milwaukee, and it seems an all around decent guy.  An explorer, trader, and trailblazer of the American West who seems to possess a rarity in that he has little or no blood on his hands.

 

Bad Day

At the base of Juneau’s statue.  At first I was like, “is this some type of weird local offering to Juneau’s ghost?”  But in reality, I came to the conclusion that this was somebody’s really, really bad day.

 

Then it was  a short walk to the East Side of downtown, separated from the West Side by the Milwaukee River.

Milwaukee Federal Building

Milwaukee Federal Courthouse.  Once a regular federal office building, is now a place where dreams are destroyed.  A classic piece of late 19th, early 20th century city building architecture.  I hate new office building designs, all glass, all stale awfulness.  At least back then they built things they looked like they actually cared.

 

The Pfister

The Pfister, one of the oldest hotels in Milwaukee.  A broader American hotel icon, and recent setting in Space Cop.  An interesting note is the property on the right-side street corner is for sale.  Their pitch in the window is it hasn’t been available for purchase since, “The Dow was at 500 points.”  I don’t know what year that was, but that’s a pretty awesome sales pitch.

 

Milwaukee River

Milwaukee River.  It wasn’t as cold as it looks, but it usually is, apparently.

 

Milwaukee Public Market

Milwaukee Public Market, in the historic Third Ward.  An awesome place.

 

At this point, that I felt horrible, and that stole the rest of the journey out of me.  So I briefly had lunch at this place, another win:

The Wicked Hop

345 North Broadway

 

And then I had to basically get out of there, drive south, and find a way to get to bed early.  It helped because I felt better in the morning for work.  But it’s only left me wanting to go back to Milwaukee again soon, and get more in depth, to a city that has a lot of offer, but who’s surface I’ve just barely scratched.

by - 0 comments

virtual, what?

So this photo of Facebook’s Overlord got quite a bit of undeserved attention as, or so folks said, an example of the Giant Octopus getting its claws into everybody’s souls.  I think people got unnerved that they all had headsets on, and then Zuckerberg’s got this creepy smile on his face like he’s ready to drive humanity using a giant joystick.

oculus-1200x799

I mean, I guess.  It’s certainly not a good look for Facebook.  And I think I’d be genuinely uncomfortable in a room alone with Zuckerberg unless I was armed.  But I’m just not sure what the problem is?  Dude’s just showing off his fancy new product, of course they’re all supposed to wear it.

What is this virtual reality thing anyways?  I’m having a hard time understanding how this is supposedly the new thing.  Are people supposed to design buildings, drive cars, or shoot people in video games or what?  I can’t get around the concept that regardless of what you put on somebody’s skull, what they see and hear, that unless you put them in a giant custom built warehouse you run into the problem that people have to actually walk, move, etc, the touch and smell part.

So I think this’ll become a niche thing, expensive and little used.  So rich 10 year old Jimmy and his friends will play Mass Effect in a warehouse at his birthday party.  Ford will allow you to drive their new car on the track built like you’re driving around Mars.  And so on.

Will virtual reality go mainstream?  I just don’t see it.  And in any case, virtual reality is already here in its own way.  When you’re in the airport waiting area and 98% of folks are buried in their smartphones, that’s virtual reality to me.  They’ve all checked out.

In the same line of thinking, here’s another shot, as an example of one that a teacher of mine tried to sell as an example of fear of progress.

giant gear.jpg

This is not the original shot my teacher used, I couldn’t find that one.  Don’t ask me why I remember this lesson and yet can’t remember the date England separated the head of their king.  The same basic concept, a human standing next to a big gear, as an example of the smallness of humanity compared to our own massive creations.  That we’d devalued the human form into just a gear, a cog of the machine.  At the time I’m like, uh, maybe, I guess.  But we need big gears don’t we?  Ships use them to sail around and stuff.  Our #2 pencils (remember those) rode a ship from China to get here.  So what’s the big deal?

Put another way, it’s progress.  In 1963 you couldn’t talk with your friends while you waited at the airport.  Now you can.  That’s kind of cool.  Yet folks can get freaked out by progress, I mean, I’m certainly one of them.  So virtual reality’s going to rub some people the wrong way.  It’s going to be a bit controversial, just you wait.  You pick a topic, it’ll be there in its own way.

Let it.  It might be weird and little used, but it’s still progress.

by - 0 comments

Happy New Year

Today the sun came out for the second day in a row, which is pretty cool considering it spent the previous 11 days hiding behind thick clouds and rain.  The temperature also dropped about 30 degrees, so for the first time this winter it actually feels like winter.

Does this mean we’ll soon see this again out back for my youngest to frolic around in?

snow

Perhaps.  Who knows what 2016 will hold for us.

But I know one thing is solved already, giant squids!  Did you know they saw one just rolling around Japan three days ago?

And in today’s ultra-second-reaction-zone you’re like, oh, that’s neat.  And you unthinkingly move on to the next article.  But then you’re like, wait, what?  Giant squid!

giant squid

Yep.

Except nobody seems to care, eh, where was the clickbait mania over this dude.  He’s so awesome.

Hey remember all the days where every 8 months you’d see a new search for the giant squid adventure documentary on National Geographic or Discovery?  Finding the giant squid was the nature equivalent of discovering Sasquatch, at least before he sold out to a meat processing ad company.

Seriously, here’s a documentary from 1994 entitled Sea Monsters: Search for the Giant Squid.

Now nobody cares.  Well I care!  We love you giant squid.  Happy New Year giant dude.  What does 2016 hold for you?  What does 2016 hold for any of us?

Will Santa put a giant sloth under my bed, just to open the year for wackiness?  Who knows?  But I’m anxious to find out what this year holds for us all.  Let’s go, friends!

giant sloth

“I have been provided with a prepositioned list of all your naughtiness.”

“Oh.  Uh, …, want to pound some beers creepy giant sloth?”

…

“Yes.”

by - 0 comments

what is that?

Do you ever go through your camera’s memory, and you’re like, “what the hell is that shot?”  This doesn’t happen to me often, mostly because I don’t take many pictures.  But it sure happened here.  I had to conduct detailed forensic analysis to find out where they flowers came from.

And by detailed, I mean beer assisted.

flower1

It’s at my Parents place.  I can tell by the sliver of brick on the right, which is the side of their house, and the touch of concrete on the left which is their walkway.  It took me forever to figure this out due to:

a) beer

b) the Where’s Waldo of the brick hiding in the lower right of the shot beneath the shadows laid by the plant

For those of you who are a bit young, Where’s Waldo is the most popular smartphone app of 1982.

flower2

I’m going to have to show these to Mi Ma in a few days and ask her what these are.

by - 1 Comment

Chicago – again & again & again & a t-rex

All your carefully laid life plans are worthless.  The universe is driving, you’re just in the backseat.  Sometimes you’re screaming, other times you’re back there giggling.  It’s all good.  As long as somebody decent like Santa Claus is driving, and not some type of coked-out-Aztec-death-god, you’re probably doing okay.

Last year I got it in my head to travel to Chicago for the first time in some sort of joyful ride to stave of mental insanity.  It was a highly successful journey.  And I wondered when I’d be back in Chicago.  I figured many, many years.

No, one year.  For work decided my new travel location would shift from Texas to Chicago.  So whereas a trip to Chicago was so very, very unique, now I’ll be there all the time.

This is of course a very good thing, I hope.  Hopefully work doesn’t detonate my view of the cooler things in life I experienced there.  But I did try and start things off on the right foot.

I got to Chicago a day early, before work, to avoid any difficulties in getting there on time for the first day.  So I took that early day and went back downtown.  I visited some of the restaurants I went to the last time, because I’m a big loser and wasn’t willing to risk a new place just yet.

But the one difference was I went to the Field Museum.  They have a ton of stuff there, most of it great, and I might write about some of the exhibits later.  They also have a t-rex.  They named it Sue after the lady who found it.

Sue

It’s the largest, best preserved t-rex bone pile on the planet.  The Field Museum paid nearly $8M to take it off the hands of the dude who’s land Sue found it on.  When you read about the legal drama that unfolded to bring this skeleton to Chicago, it’s enough to make you yearn for the scene in Jurassic Park where the lawyer gets eaten whilst he was seated upon the can.

This was the only photo I took at Field, but the shot doesn’t do it justice.  It’s a huge creature, but yet at the time I still remarked to my lunatic brain, “Wow, I thought it’d be bigger.”  I truly did.  So this of course does further confirm that I’m an idiot, as this is a seven-ton monster.

An interesting note is that’s not Sue’s actual skull.  The real skull is on the second floor in a glass box.  It’s simply too heavy to put on the actual skeleton without running a pole to the chin, which was probably a wise aesthetic choice.  They figure Sue was about 28 years old when he or she checked out to Dino Valhalla in a dry stream bed, bound for history.

It would have been quite the view if you could actually see one of these dino dudes for real.  So I have this idea, to bring the dinosaurs to life.  We’d probably need to clone them or something.  So I figure we can get their DNA from some Dominican amber.  We grab the dino DNA from the blood inside the mosquito inside the amber.  Then we get some geneticists to do their thing.  And when I have their results, I use their complex data to build a big robot dinosaur.  What am I supposed to do, breed a live one?  Do you have any idea how high that food bill would be?  Sue would eat, like, four or five cows a day, probably?  And think of how much beer Sue would drink, and I’d have to buy it, because I can’t say no to a seven ton monster.  Who’s got the cash for all that?  Not me.