That Province . . . Took ADVANTAGE OF ME: The Halifax Report, Day 5, pt 1

Thursday was the last day of the conference, and it was really only a half day with the most appalling excuse for 'science' packed into it.

Truth be told, I spent most of the first morning session catching up on my e-mail. As I mentioned in my first report, the Lord Nelson's lone flaw was the lack of free wireless in the rooms; fortunately part of our conference schwag packet was a login and password for the Dalhousie wireless network. However, I'd been mostly too lazy to carry the New Hotness to campus most days.

Anyway, caught up during the first session so that I was able to devote full attention to the second. It had some hoity-toity title like "The Phenomenological Post-Kantian Repercussions of How Totally Awesome it Is to Be Human," which was not confidence inspiring. Fortunately, the chair, who was also the first speaker said, "I have no idea what's up with that title . . . but all the papers in this session kinda sorta deal with humans. Let's rock and roll." (I paraphrase.) Most were good, even one by a member of the legion of our sworn codon-model enemies. (Diabolically good, because convincingly presented and completely devoid of any of the criticisms we've been leveling, which amount to: "Yes, and? What the hell difference does this actually make to anything we're looking for?"

But there was a truly appalling paper in this session. Worse, it was a truly appalling NIH-funded paper. It had ridiculously hand-waving hypotheses, a good 20 years out of sync with current literature and thinking, that were not even being tested by the data collected. True crap and very disappointing to see it anywhere, let alone at an otherwise high-quality meeting. It was especially unfortunate that this was in the last session and left me with a bad taste in my mouth. A bad taste that could only be removed . . . by shopping.

Most of our walkabouts were at night, and most nonhospitality businesses were closed at that time. This had absolutely zero effect on my drooling over things in windows. Specifically, there was a small hosiery/lingerie shop that had a to-die-for grey scarf with a skull-and-crossbones motif. Had to have it. Also had to have some superfly skull laces for my Doc Martens as it turns out. Who knew?

While I was merrily shopping, J drew the unenviable task of not only shopping with me, but simultaneously trying to sort out why the hell we couldn't check in for our flight online. We had discovered this unfortunate fact just as we discovered that the Lord Nelson really is not very smart about these Intarwebs things. (Even in their business center [which comprises 2 PCs], they required that you call down to the desk for a 45-minute key to log in. Blegh!)

As we wandered away from the hosiery store and further down Spring Garden, J scored (a) a live person at United (SPIT!) Airlines and (b) a fabulous shirt befitting Puffy D (you probably don't want to ask). Still further down the street, there was a shoe store that, at first glance, I thought was called Ka/Ks. (It was, actually, Kas Footwear, which is weird enough, and if you know why, I either pity you or scorn you as one of our legion of sworn codon-model enemies.) Some Campers totally wanted me there, but I remained strong.

Continuing on, we decided that it was probably a good idea to fortify ourselves with at least a bit of lunch. We shared a tasty enough bagel sandwich and I recaffeinated. Always a good idea.

We soldiered on past the Commonwealth's most baked library. As we were heading down the diagonal path toward the store next to Mary Jane's Smoke Shop (not a smoke-shop, a hippy clothing/jewelry/fabric/tchotchke store; ah, thank you, google, it was called The Black Market ), J took my elbow, and stepped us off to the side of the path, muttering "Rickshaw." I was just on the verge of laughingly saying, "I'd have sworn you just said 'rickshaw'," when a man pulling a rickshaw passed us by. Though slackjawed, I was able to repeat, "Rickshaw?" And being Canadian, he politely offered us a ride. We did not, however, take him up on this.

I got a cute wrap skirt and a red belly-dancing top at the Black Market. Why a belly-dancing top, other than to make all who have seen me scream, "MY EYES! MY BRAIN! HOW COULD A SUPPOSEDLY BENEVOLENT GOD ALLOW THIS TO HAPPEN?" Well, (a) because it was $9, (b) because if I ever do get off my butt early enough, I want to take the Middle Eastern Belly Dancing class at OTSFM, and (c) because Puffy D was watching out for the interests of the ZK.

From the Black Market, we continued on along and down, passing the Press Gang 15 or 20 times as we made our way northeast. The most notable stop we made along the way was at Peep Show Girly Boutique (I have to tell you I loathe that article, which I'm glad I didn't see before we went in). Rather than being . . . well, anything at all like what that article purports it to be, was eerily like stepping back into the shopping fugue I experienced in New Orleans last fall. The staff were over-the-top friendly (even for Canadians), but were far from attempting the hard sell. Rather they kept urging us to have fun and look at things.

There were easily 7 different bags that I really, truly, needed to have. And dresses. And skirts. And kneesocks. And jewelry. And shoes. And then there was this completely awesome shirt that had a guy with giant mutton chops and the caption "I like boys in punk rock bands," (tragically, it did not fit). How I had the willpower to leave there with nothing more than a bright blue shaving kit decorated with the Warhol skull (I'll use it as a toiletry bag, which I honestly needed) I will never know. Probably inciting J to purchase items as gifts helped.

We'd sort of had a vague intention of going down to the maritime museum (and there just HAPPENED to be a store down there we wanted to pop into), so we headed waterfront-ward. At the store that just happened to be there, I picked up some neat little hexagonal hoop earrings and a necklace with an interesting brass pendant. We tried hard to get a luscious silk blouse for Wire Monkey Mother, but sadly, the sizers in this store were working on the "teeny, rackless" Asian sizing model and there was no room at the inn for The Girls. Pity, because that charcoal blouse was smokin'.

The outbreak of capitalism rather derailed our plans on the cultural front. By the time we got to the Maritime Museum, we realized that we'd only have 45 minutes or so to wander around. Now that might be enough to time to taken an exhibit called, simply, Pirates, but once you add in the exclamation mark, you're in for the whole day. We decided instead to walk up toward the Citadel.

There was a last gasp of running-dog-ism at a jewelry store (and I'm glad there was, as we found a great pendant for and I got a bit giftie for a friend) and then a real trek. You must remember that J and I are not used to topography at this point. It wasn't especially hot that day, but the sun was bright and the grade impressive.

We were puffing more than a little bit by the time we reached the level of the Clock Tower. WE rested a bit there on the pretense of reading the text, then made the big push up to Citadel Hill itself. We were destined to be completely culture free (there's also a charge to get into the Citadel proper, and the guards wear the fluffy hats of ultimate seriousness regarding their duty. But it was well worth the climb, as the view of the city and the harbor is absolutely breathtaking from that height.

We headed back to the Lord Nelson along a road just north of the gardens, which was not our usual route. That's how we discovered that the Highland Games were going to start without us. Curses! Back at the hotel, we cleaned up quickly and went to catch a cab for the Hydrostone Market, where we had dinner reservations at Rogi Orazio.

Our cab driver was a very chatty lebanese guy, and we bonded over pizza (he told us where to get the best pizza in Halifax and had a good handle on the fact that this was a local rendition of pizza, and a good one, rather than being any kind of attempt to imitate Pizza) and garlic. The restaurant just happened to be right next door to LK Yarns and we just happened to arrive with about 10 minutes to spare for yarn shopping. I yarn shopped, obtaining some lovely mohair in a lustrous navy color for something out of the Sublime Very Gorgeous Kid Mohair book, and another odd skein in a colorway I just couldn't resist.

Although it had felt hot during the day, by the time we sat down to dinner, it was breezy and lovely, so we sat outside. Have I mentioned that Halifax builds these boardwalks on to the fronts of their streets so that outdoor seating doesn't completely bugger up pedestrian traffic? Well they do. So as we sat enjoying champagne, a large number of extremely cute dogs walked by for the petting. We also realized while sitting there munching on awesome red pepper bruschetta and spicy, cornmeal crusted calamari (no, I'd have never thought of combining cornmeal with calamari, either, but it was fabulous) that I was staring at a wine supply store, and J was staring a brewery. Oh, and there was a massage therapist on the upper floor of the yarn shop's building. In a lesser city, this would have looked desperate.

I knew nothing about the Hydrostone Market, and J only knew that it was historic in some way, so we asked our server about it. As so many things are, the market is tied into the Halifax Explosion. The neighborhood was built on the Garden City plan as temporary housing after the explosion under the supervision of Thomas Adams. Our server thought that all the stone for the neighborhood actually came from Boston, but I can't seem to find confirmation of that, just indications that Boston and Massachusetts in general were of great help around the time, and Halifax still sends them their giant Christmas tree every year.


After appetizers, J had a soup and I had a salad, both quite luscious. For my entree, I had a fabulous mediterranean pasta dish with chicken, shrimp, bacon, sun-dried tomatoes, and olives, and J had something spicy (as a final safe indulgence in a context that would not kill his lovely wife). We had another very good bottle of wine and I could barely make a dent in my dessert, which was some kind of will-sappingly-scrumptious brownie concoction.

And then, suddenly, it was very nearly 8:30, and we needed to get back to the Lord Nelson, but quick, for our date with the pirate (who had actually called during dinner to confirm that the hike was a go for that evening). The hike and the pirate deserver their own entry, and this one's long enough, but I just have share our opening conversation with said pirate. He gathered folks up and handed out tickets, then said we'd wait a few more minutes, both to let it get a bit darker and to accommodate any stragglers. In the meantime, he said in an unmistakably Newfoundland accent, "I've got to get a coffee. I am useless on the tour without a coffee. Does anyone want one?"

Provincial Hipsters: The Halifax Report Day 4

So Wednesday was J's turn in the barrel. Although he'd been passionate about the possibility of another Tim Horton's breakfast sandwich in the afterglow of the donair, we skipped morning food and went straight to sessions, which turned out to be a poor decision, as fortification was definitely needed.

The earlier set of sessions was on primate populations genetics. It was not as exciting as I had hoped, although that speaks more to the fact that, by now, my standards were pretty high: If this had been at ASHG, with the exception of the one truly pointless, wrong, and terrible paper in this session (boy was the rage building for those horrible 15 minutes), I would have wept for joy. The final paper in this session was the exception to the rule of mediocrity. Rather than being about primates, per se, it was a very elegant experimental design to identify the sources of human food-borne infections. Furthermore, it actually had implications for public policy. Imagine, as Vince Noir would say, that!

Fortified with coffee and danish (Have I mentioned that the danish and other pastry things were, like, not just edible but actually good? All hail the SMBE organizers!), we headed for the very first time into the Ondaatje Auditorium for the all-math, all-the-time session (hiding under the guise of the Methods in Population Genetics session and fooling no one). This was pretty much the return to Texarkana for J and myself. We made it through the whole thing, but we were whimpering "Math hammer, don't hurt us!" by the end.

Oh! I've just remembered something that I think began on Tuesday. You see, Halifax is smoke free indoors, and that includes Dalhousie, of course. So, you have the usual ashtrays down by the street and the usual folks pushing the limits of the 15-feet-from-the-door rules. On Tuesday, when we were in the Methods in Comparative Genomics Session (and I was still in my suit and feeling cranky), I suddenly realized that my lungs were seizing up like mad. Before I'd even registered that I was having trouble breathing, I was in a state where it was an extremely bad idea to try to walk, particularly up the treacherous stairs of the theater in which the session was held. I realized the source of my trouble was the woman sitting in front of me: She was wearing this hideous multicolored sweater and she smelled like she'd been smoking inside a telephone booth for the last 25 years. For the rest of the conference, she was everywhere, wearing that same sweater and smelling and aggravating my asthma from incredible distances. Anyway, she was at the math!fest, so my brain AND my lungs were going all French on me.

We headed back to the hotel for lunch and decided that we'd neglected the Victory Arms Pub for far too long. You're probably thinking that this was just around the corner from the Lord Nelson, but you'd be tragically wrong in this instance: It's actually in the Lord Nelson. Neener. I had these sinfully good quesadillas, and I think J had a shepherd's pie. It was all so delicious and comforting that I didn't even care that I was being forced to watch tennis the whole while.

But we had to shake off the food coma, because it was show time for J. The session was a very good one, although it's probably inevitable that there will be some "does not, does too-ism" on the subject of selection on synonymous sites, how much difference it makes in the grand scheme of things, and other issues. Time ran a bit short on J, but he got to explain thoroughly the all-important multicolored quadrant slide.

The paper right after his was a very good one, and it was delivered by our aforementioned Gaius Baltar. He joined us along with the young woman from the previous day at the bar in the student union after the session. M (said young woman) showed us her presentation, which was quite good and, best of all, has some interesting jumping-off points for future research, should one desire to spend the rest of one's life buried in the Y chromosome.

After she departed for the banquet, J revealed to me Baltar's deep secret: He'd been working with the data from our paper and had managed to replicate the results. That might sound like no big deal, but given that it took us, 5 years of jumping through hoops to get that published, it was pretty freaking exciting for us. We had a fine time trying to decide how much Castle Dementedness we could comfortably reveal to Baltar in trying to communicate how pleased we were to hear about his results. This dance, of course, was enhanced greatly by the pitcher of beer we were consuming.

J and I learned our lesson about attending conference social events a few years back, so we were definitely skipping the banquet. In fact, we were dead set (so to speak) on doing the Haunted Hike that evening. Accordingly, we decided to have a drink and a snack before heading to the Burns statue. And, really, there was only so long that we could avoid a restaurant called Deco (we sat right under the Charnay poster), which was not just around the corner from the Lord Nelson. Goodness, it must have been at least a block and a half from there!

We had some dangerously cracklicious drinks and shared the mussels (a fabulous Thai-esque take on them, completely different from those at Tizi Melloul, but just as good) and the crab cakes. I still don't know how I had the willpower to walk out of there without the better part of their furnishings.

We dutifully arrived at the Burns statue around 8:15. There were various people waiting around, enjoying the goods from the Dairy Queen on the corner. These included an extremely cute greyhound (a rescued racer) named Samson, who must have been a very good dog indeed, because every single person there with ice cream shared some with him. He was a total sweetie pie, and I had to laugh when his person revealed that when she first adopted him, he used to shoulder check her when they were walking. She couldn't figure out why he was doing this until she looked into his racing history and realized that this is why he'd been a big winner.

We waited until about 8:45, but sadly, the square remained pirateless. We walked back over to Your Father's Moustache and checked the poster, which assured us that we had not been high in reading the specs. J put in a call and left a message. We then walked across to the gate to the gardens and asked the attendant if he knew anything about the Haunted Hike. He said that he knew the pirate well and, unfortunately, said pirate had been quite sick recently. Saddened by the lack of pirates and ghosts, we traveled water-ward again.

We made our stop in at Cows to obtain gifts for our loved ones and began to wander in search of a place to sit and have a drink. Our main requirement for said place was, basically, dark. In walking down the street we thought would contain the Economy Shoe Shop , we found that it did not, in fact, contain it. It did, however, contain The Argyle, which met our undemanding criterion. I had a G&T and noted that the Blue Jays have finally caught up with the hideous and tragic uniform trends of the 1980s.
Go Jays!

After glancing at a food menu and finding nothing especially promising (and not even a hint of oysters), we moved on, once again, in search of the ESS. Naturally, we wound up at The Press Gang. But we decided not to let it be the boss of us just yet. We turned back and really, really did try to find the Shoe Shop. But first we stumbled across Seven, a wine bar that was most definitely dark.

We had a very nice chat with the bartender, who turned out to have worked in seafood brokering for much of her life. She knew and spoke highly of DiCola's, my preferred seafood procurement facility. I had a New Zealand pinot noir that I can't really recommend, although it was drinkable enough to raise it well above the level of the best pinot noir to come out of MIchigan. J had some kind of vodka that might or might not have been blue.

There were some food items on Seven's menu that looked highly intriguing, but the kitchen was sadly closed. This was the first and most gentle chastisement we received for slutting around on the Press Gang. The worst was yet to come. In a final attempt to wind up at the ESS, we got lured into a basement bar called The Seahorse Tavern.
We really should have known better when we were charged a cover, but we pressed on. I was having trouble making up my mind on a drink and finally settled on a Black Russian. Oh, tragic, tragic mistake. The infant bartender dutifully mixed kahlua and vodka and then FILLED UP THE REST OF THE ROCKS GLASS WITH PEPSI AND ADDED A LIME WEDGE.

Thank the evil spirits that I hadn't ordered a White Russian. J was comparatively safe with his tequila, and we sequestered ourselves in the nook with the large round table that bore incredible and eerie resemblance to the book with the large round table at The Pub. Once ensconced in the nook, we had a chance to appreciate how very dire this place was. There was incredibly dire hip hop being "created" by very, very white Canadians with equipment far more expensive and sophisticated than their skill level merited. The space is absolutely fantastic (the pictures on their web page don't do it justice) and it was utterly wasted on . . . whatever it was trying to be.

We finished up our drinks but quick and dragged back into the Press Gang with our tails between our legs. S, the bartender, laughed at our travails. The owner of the PG's property also owns the ESS and The Seahorse. Apparently at the Seahorse, they deliberately mix drinks wrong so that people will stop ordering things that are more complicated than beer or wine. Aiyeeee! Someone might have mentioned that, you know!

To comfort ourselves, we asked S if he would allow us to experiment with making a sazerac on our own. Initially dubious, he eventually poured us two shots of rye, a shot of absinthe, and provided us with lemon, sugar and the bottle of bitters. We eventually managed to mix something that was a pretty passable rendition of the sazerac and patted ourselves on the back for it. Having done so (and J having consumed the balance of the absinthe), it became a good idea to have some more food in our stomachs (you may have noticed that we'd neglected to have any dinner). And so we were forced to have another half dozen oysters, prompting S to tell us that he had 12 steps he'd like to introduce us to.

We managed (narrowly) to make it back to the Lord Nelson without indulging in donair. And so we retired, the last half-day of the conference and our departure looming large.

Flowering provincial love: The Halifax Report, Day 3

I've been a dork about writing this up, mostly because I'm pretty busy at the moment. However, Halifax was such a great trip that I don't want it to get away from me. And so onward. Here, fishy fishy.


Tuesday was mostly about my poster, which means that it was rather fraught. I'd been in denial about it to the point that I had no idea when my session was, other than "Tuesday." So when Og awoke on Tuesday, sie dutifully climbed into pantyhose, makeup, and a suit. Og then rampaged quietly and internally as sie realized that the poster session was many, many cups of coffee away at 7:30 (?!??!!) PM and there was no reason in the world to be in stupid grown-up clothes.

So there was some crankiness during the morning sessions that not even a tasty Tim Horton's breakfast sandwich and surprisingly drinkable coffee could banish entirely. (Seriously, I made up for a lifetime of never having had Tim Horton's in the space of 4 days.) Crankiness was furthered by the fact that there seemed to be more presentations of interest with overlapping time slots. It's still not a bad problem to have (ASHG, for example, has precious little worth seeing, and they seem to scheduled everything one might reasonably want to see in the same 15-minute window at the far ends of the earth from one another), but we did have to make the tough decisions and the pantyhose weren't helping.

They were so egregiously not helping that I was seriously entertaining the idea of wearing my newly acquired (courtesy of the superawesome Dalhousie University Bookstore) jammie pants, which proclaim me to be both female and a goddess. However, we instead opted to dash back to the hotel so I could change into compromise clothes. We also obtained panini as big as our heads at a cafe, once again, around the corner from the Lord Nelson.

I have my suspicions that there there is some serious applied wormhole research going on at Dalhousie. This is based on: (1) the existence of an impossible number of amenities within spitting distance of that hotel and (2) the fact that no matter what street we walked down, we passed the Press Gang. When I have time to explore further, I fully expect to learn that Cheyenne Mountain is simply the coverstory location for the Stargate Project, which is really located beneath the Citadel.

Back to the campus after lunch, we headed into the bookstore building to hang the dread poster. I think it was around then that we realized just how marked for residency we really had been by Halifax. I'm not at all sure how we had missed the signs for the Annual Zombie Walk up until then. I am forced to conclude that we had, at this point, cleared some initial vetting and the Halifax Relocation SWAT team got the go-ahead to create this complicated back story for our benefit.

Poster hung, we headed to the afternoon sessions, which were sadly rather trying. Codon models are, apparently, a hot topic at the moment. Paradoxically, that makes it a particularly bad time to be someone who has been living and breathing codon models for, like, a decade. Because it's frustrating as hell to sit through presentations purporting to have done novel research when in fact that research has been pretty well-sounded out over the last, like, decade. But again, there were still some interesting papers, so it wasn't a total loss. In fact, it wasn't even really much of a loss at all. The whole day was just colored by crankiness.

We had the early evening to ourselves, and once I'd wrangled Og back into the grown-up clothes, we headed to Luxx for dinner. Luxx is, you guessed it, right around the corner from the Lord Nelson. (By now, I am sure that my gentle reader is picturing the Lord Nelson as existing on some kind of polyhedral island with nothing but corners. I'm telling you: WORMHOLES.) Luxx had a beautiful room and a nice outdoor patio overlooking Spring Garden Road, but we opted to sit inside.

The service was slightly odd. In part, this was because our server was a total newbie, but there were other strange elements, including the fact that when J ordered a kir royale, they'd only make it for him if I ordered one, too, so that the split champagne didn't go flat. Twist my arm, why don't you? We had more than decent Oysters Rockefeller to share (not a patch on Frank's, you understand, or any that I've had in the Big Easy, but tasty).

For my entree, I had pecan-crusted haddock filet in a fantastic red curry sauce. The fish was fabulously fresh and well prepared. Sadly the rice pilaf accompany was dry and rather pathetic. J had the gnocchi with shrimp, and we had the "erm?" moment again when he realized that the very saucy shrimp still had the tails on. There wasn't much on the dessert menu to tempt, and we thought we might seek out ice cream or something else on the waterfront later that evening, so we bid adieu to Luxx and headed to the dread poster session.

"Whyfore dread?" you might ask.

Under the best of circumstances, doing a poster is pretty bad: You stand there, hoping that you're successfully faking professionalism, people come by and try not to make eye contact with you as you strive to make eye contact with them in the hopes of gauging whether they'd like to just quietly take in the poster on their own or if they'd like a walk through. It's awful and uncomfortable for all concerned. Under the circumstances observed in the first poster session, that metaphorical discomfort would also be manifest in literal discomfort born of too many people in not enough space.

And then there was the fact that I hated my poster for the very good reason that is was the least visually interesting piece of crap ever. For a variety of reasons that I won't belabor, my poster was not at all what I wanted it to be. Even if it had been, the project was just something much better suited to a talk than a poster. When you mix in the fact that I have no art brain, well, you have a crappy poster.

In this case, happily, it was a crappy poster that inexplicably received quite a lot of attention. After the first 15 minutes or so, during which I radiated waves of hate at the dorks across from me who were offering people Turkish Freaking Delight.

This was the Halifax synchronicity going somewhat horribly wrong, as J and I had had a rather extended conversation about how repulsive Turkish Delight is earlier in the trip. But this does not take one iota of the bloom off the rose that is Halfiax. It's like when your TiVo is first trying to learn your tastes in order to make suggestions.

To borrow liberally from Patton Oswalt, it goes like this: Your TiVo observes that you have recorded a Western, and your TiVo wants nothing more than to make you happy. Unfortunately, your TiVo's lateral leap is in entirely the wrong direction. It has inferred from this recording that you, in fact, love horses, and you wake up one morning to find your "Suggestions" folder filled with reruns of My Little Pony and "Mustardfart Station" (© Patton Oswalt). (I'm leaving aside, for the moment, the fact that my freakishly intelligent TiVo immediately started recording things that happened to star people from Twin Peaks, just after I had finished watching the series for the first time.) Anyway, Halfax overheard us talking about Turkish Delight and it damned well produced some Turkish Delight.

Just as my poster neighbor (a very pleasant woman from Dublin who endeared herself to me early on by measuring the evening in chunks of time until pub time) and I started to commiserate about how we hate doing posters, we both started to get busy . . . ahem . . . many people began showing up at our respective posters. One of my first visitors was a fellow anthropologist who'd stopped by in anthropologist solidarity. Being someone swamped in immune genes, most of which scream with the evolutionary signature of diversification and selection, she was appreciative of attempts to identify genes (or subgenic regions) of interest with an independent variable.

Another early arrival was a woman who was actually looking for J. She's a Penn State grad student, and her opening line to J was: "I have read your paper so many times. I sleep with it under my pillow." It's good to know that the professor's 5up3r 533kr1t identity as Man!Ho is well guarded. In all seriousness, she's smart and doing good work that builds directly on J's previous research. We'd chosen poorly in the morning and missed her paper, but fortunately we would have a chance for an encore during which her secret identity as Number 6 would be revealed only when we had discovered a completely different ally in the unlikely shape of Gaius Baltar. Other drop ins included the author of the chimp paper, and a physics misfit. Almost before I knew it it, it was 40 minutes after the time we'd said we'd be bugging out of there.

But bug out of there we ultimately did, and once again into the comfy clothing before heading, inevitably, to the Press Gang. We had a different bartender on this occasion, and we decided that the presence of actual absinthe (well, the closest one can get in these degenerate times) was too tempting. We asked him if he'd give a sazerac a go and he was game enough not only to try it, but to give us a half shot of the absinthe itself to sample.

The sazerac was not a rousing success the first time out, although it's possible that the clarity of our explanation was not all it might have been. I declared the absinthe "not nearly as disgusting as I thought it would be," whereas J actively liked it. The reason for this only became clear the next night: Absinthe is, in fact, blue.

In addition to the sazerac and another drink or two, we also shared a half dozen oysters on the half shell. These were absolutely required from the moment that we realized that he was grating fresh horseradish on to them. I've already mentioned that we can stop the oyster thing any time we want to right? Right then. Normally I'm not much for adulterating my oysters, but I'm a sucker for fresh horseradish. These also game with a garlic laden balsamic that is just a fantastic idea with the horseradish and the oh-so-delicious oysters.

I don't put much stock in the nonsense about oysters being aphrodisiac. However, I suspect that they might have been implicated in the sudden literal hunger that overtook us as we left the Press Gang and wandered back Wormholeward. When that appetite met with our strong intellectual curiosity regarding what the hell a donair was and why there were 4 late-night places on the 4 corners of a single intersection, like some kind of weathervane of spiced meat, purporting to be various ranks of donair royalty. (Again, much would become clear on the next night when we realized that we were on the same street as "Mary Jane's Smoke Shoppe." [Although why people congregate at the Halifax Public Library to get decriminally baked remains a mystery.])

As J prefers to go straight to the top, we went to the King of Donair. I was not, at the time, open to experimenting with unknown spiced meats, but I was suddenly seized with a desire for a slice of pepperoni pizza the size of Smart Car. J waxed rhapsodic about the donair all the way back to the Lord Nelson. Thus endeth the second day.

Shameless Provincial Flirting: The Halifax Report, days 1 & 2

According to google maps, it's 2,608 km from the Lord Nelson Hotelin Halifax to Telecommuniculturey HQ, estimated driving time, 1 day, 2 hours. It's saying something about my deep and inevitable love for Halifax that I even want to talk about Halifax given that I am now entering into hour 15 (update: now in hour 18 [final travel time: 23 hours for a 2.5-hour flight]) of my time in Canuckian airports and it appears that by the time I arrive home, assuming no further shenanigans (and I'm not assuming that by any stretch of the imagination), I could have driven from point A to point B.

So, J and I were maritime bound for the SMBE Annual Meeting. After my traditional nuit blanche on Saturday, cursing NCBI, dbSNP, and all its evil works, we met up at scenic O'Hare International, scored the "Economy Plus" rock star seats (without paying the upgrade costs), and were on our way. The good luck associated with the lack of flight-related drama continued as we completely failed to die in a flaming auto crash, despite the fact that the driver was doing 120 kph in a torrential downpour.

After some small confusion about our rooms, we were assigned two that were exactly what we wanted, up in a sort of semi-private corner of the 9th floor. I was blown away by the view from my window of the Public Gardens until I saw the view from J's room, which happened to be the rooftop beer garden of Your Father's Moustache (something weird is going on with that website at the moment, but I'm hoping it's temporary). We tried to be good little nerdlingers and see if it was still possible to check in for the conference, but we'd just missed the end of the opening night festivities. (In all earnestness, a shame. I'd have liked to see the opening lecture, "Continents, consumption and consumers: genetic signatures of human migration.")

Due diligence done, we headed moustache-ward. Along the way, we saw and saluted a pirate in front of Robbie Burns, as one does. In the hall leading up to YFM, we saw a flyer for the Haunted Hike of Halifax and said, more or less simultaneously, "We have to do that." Also, being scientists, we intuited that the flyer's indication that the tour departed nightly from in front of the Burns statue explained the presence of pirates. You see, we were still smart at that point, our brains having not yet been eaten. Atop the 'stache, we enjoyed some absofreakinglutely kick ass fish and chips, fine fine beer, and equally fine desserts. (I had a chocolate truffle cheesecake that was, as advertised, actually truffle-y, not just chocolatey. And then this killer brownie thing.) We called it a relatively early night in the interests of Og no face planting in the dessert and/or falling off the roof.

Monday morning dawned a bit overcast, but by the time we emerged from Smitty's, our bellies full of much-needed diner breakfast, complete with crack-laden breakfast potatoes, the sun was shining and it had warmed up considerably enough that I knew I'd need to make a lunch-time run to a drugstore for knee-highs (Og packed at about 8:30 AM and left the house not long after; I suppose sie would like a pat on the head for remembering hose at all, but The Other was not in the mood to reward behavior that involved wearing full-on pantyhose underneath pants.) In the morning, we registered and picked up our superior swag bags (which actually contained pens, something that seems never to have occurred to ASHG, which also routinely saddles us with bags perhaps appropriate to carrying codpieces, but not much else). We sat in on a session about the genetics of domestication, which had a great paper on dogs and another on barley (with important implications for beer).

After the first round of morning sessions, we enjoyed the goodies provided during the coffee break (and, hello, coffee, juice and decent pastries reliably available during the coffee break? sweeeeeeet). From there, we headed to another session on tools for annotating and working with high-throughput data sets. The tools actually seem worthwhile and as if they work, which is, of course, more than we can say for NCBI on both counts. By lunchtime, we were trying to adjust to such competence and practicality in the field, and we were ready to run my, by now quite urgent, hosiery errand after having quite good food (albeit food of dubious Mexicanity) at a Mexican restaurant in the building next door to YFM.

The second of the afternoon sessions were for the graduate student award competition, and most of them were quite good: solid, important research and well presented. I admit that I was looking forward to taking the short cut to this paper about chimps having more fast-evolving genes than humans, as I've only had the chance to do a cursory read so far. The presentation was good, but I still have some concerns about the data included. The conservative approach is almost always the right one, but in this case, it's most likely to cut out genes that are genuinely evolving rapidly in humans. Still, nice papers overall.

Monday night was one of our scheduled fancy schmancy dinner nights. Our destination was Onyx, also directly across from the Lord Nelson (you could totally live at the Lord Nelson, were it not for the tragic lack of free wireless or other internet in the rooms). We had been attracted by the great rating, but worried that we were not nearly hipsters enough for this place. As you can see, the website is . . . well . . . just completely silly. Fortunately, the restaurant is not. We were both struck with an immediate need to fondle the accoutrement, from the textured silk napkins (which you could actually buy, I assume, on the hotel bathrobe principle: Everyone was taking them anyway) to the leather table runners to the real cork binders for the wine list. It was also soothingly dark and not loud (despite being on the busiest street in Halifax) (two nonnegotiable requirements for Og and J) with funky but not unpleasant music. Our server did warn us that on Fridays and Saturdays, it was strictly animal noises and whipping, so we'd come on a good night. We sucked down a caipirinha (me) and a fancy mojito-y thing (BSD) like juice as we perused the menu.

They had a prix fixe menu that, unfortunately, seemed to exclude some of the must-have appetizers. The server laughed in her friendly Canuckian way and assured us that we could have any appetizer we wanted, there was just a small extra charge for a few of the others. Rock star. We started with oysters on the half shell to share (we do not have a problem and we can stop any time we want to). I then had escargot served in mushroom caps with the most interesting sauce: kind of a mexican crema and a very light green sauce that was not quite salsa verde, but had a pleasant kick. It's not that I object to escargot as a vehicle for butter and massive amounts of garlic, but this was an interesting, very tasty, and new to me preparation. I definitely needed selections from the varied and delicious bread basket to sop up the sauces, too. J had the duck, which was sublime: It was a lesson to every dry, stringy duck slathered in nasty, jam-like plum sauce on what they should be: Perfectly done meat, not greasy in the least, with just a hint of delicately sweet sauce, all wrapped in light, flaky pastry.

For the main course, I had the seafood cannelloni. The shells were an excellent cross between a silky flour tortilla and freshly made pasta. The chipotle in the dough was smoky overall, but there was also a nice, sharp fresh chile flavor that lightened up the creamy sauce and the cheese accompanying the seafood. As for the seafood itself, it was fresh, well-prepared, and had distinct textures and flavors—no mishmash of puréed seafood and ricotta here. J had the cornish hen, which was a beautiful fusion of curry and molé. Accompanying the main courses, we scored the last bottle of the Diemersfontein 2005 Pinotage from South Africa. The cork was giving our server some gyp, which she was altogether too embarrassed about (it happens to the best of us). For dessert, we had the chocolate hazelnut mousse pyramid (me) and the creme brulée trio (J). Mine was the only thing less than great (a little on the pasty side), although it was still quite good. Judging from the inhalation of the plate as a whole, I take it that the professor had no such complaints with his dessert with which he also had a local ice wine that he enjoyed very much.

After dinner, we decided to change out of our finery and walk off some of the dinner on the water front. Based on the helpfully provided maps in our swag bags, we intuited that if we walked away from the conference, we'd be heading for water. On the way, we passed by at least three stores that I needed to check out. At the waterfront, we consulted a directory and headed for the most sticky-outy of the businesses, most of which are clustered at the north end (we and the Lord Nelson were at the south end). Along our walk, we met a very sweet rottweiler doggie and his owner, witnessed other, possibly inebriated, people trying to run up to the top of this "wave" statue," and decided that we needed to come back to visit Cow's at some point during the week. We made it already to the end by the casino before heading back south in search of a place to sit and have a drink. Most of the waterfront was rolling up its sidewalks by then (Monday night, after 10 PM), and so we headed back in the vague direction of our hotel. We came across a place called the "Golden Triangle" (not much of a web presence, it seems). We sat in the bar area, but three steps up from that was a proper restaurant, and another three up from that, an area with live music. On the able suggestion of the bar tender, I had a Propeller Bitter and, later, I did a good deed by taking the freshly pulled pint of guinness left by my neighbor whose cab had finally arrived.

Shortly after we'd come in, two guys came in, one from Wales and one from Manchester. Although they'd clearly been drinking beforehand, they got in under their own power and, for about 5 minutes, seemed fine. They ordered a couple of guinnesses as well, and then in record time, the Welsh guy was singing at the top of his lungs and pounding the bar, much to the embarrassment of his pal. Nothing more eventful than that happened, but we were somewhat baffled how he'd gone from able to walk under his own power to that hammered that quickly.

Anyway, we settled up our tab and really were virtuously heading back to our hotel when the exterior of a particular bar caught our eye. We then noticed that it was called the Press Gang, which we found amusing. We were peering inside and making mental notes for later when a man nearby said, "Don't be shy, go on in!" Not wishing to be impolite Americans, we did. As we sat down, the bartender said, "Just so you know, we're closed." We apologized and started to get up. He looked scandalized and said, "Oh, no, I can give youse a drink! Sit on down." How very Canadian. I had an IPA at his suggestion and didn't regret it (although IPAs are not usually among my favorite beers). J spelunked around their scotch list and astutely noted that they had real (well, as real as one can get nowadays, which is realer than the pernod one gets in the states) absinthe. The sazerac light bulb went on over our heads and we asked the bartender if he'd ever heard of one. He said no, but dutifully wrote down the recipe we tried to provide.

On that note, we did finally make our way back to the Lord Nelson, obtained some tasty carbonated caffeinated beverages from the vending machines, and so to bed.