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I am Forrest Gump

by Brian on September 28, 2012 in Travel, United States, Utah

The Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Salt Lake City, UT

Sometimes it’s hard not to feel a bit like Forrest Gump. No, not because I’m slow-witted (although that is often true, too) or a prodigious runner (which is decidedly never true) but because occasionally it feels like I’m unknowingly dropped in the middle of history’s great events.

Watching the famed Mormon Tabernacle Choir practice isn’t exactly like giving John Lennon the starting lines to Imagine or being hosted by Richard Nixon at the Watergate hotel, but it felt a little out of body just the same – like I was witnessing something extraordinary that I had no right to be a part of.

Cathedral of the Madeleine

by Brian on September 26, 2012 in Travel, United States, Utah

We can’t leave the topic of beautiful Salt Lake City buildings without showing you the Cathedral of the Madeleine. Its amazing Spanish Gothic interior and colorful Byzantine murals are simply breathtaking.

Disenfranchisement in the Age of the Internet

by Brian on September 24, 2012 in Travel

Many moons ago, driven by crushing career boredom, I taught myself basic computer and database programming. Even with my limited skills, I’m 100% confident I could build a database that would collect a person’s name and address, match those data against a voter registration database and allow absentee internet voting while prohibiting people from voting more than once. Such a database might take a couple of afternoons to build.

Instead of that simple process, or any other simple process, we’re confronted with the following when trying to make sure we can vote from the road:

Drink Utah

by Brian on September 21, 2012 in Food & Drink, Travel, United States, Utah

Wasatch Brewery, Park City, Utah

It’s hard not to be a little disappointed. From all we had heard about Utah’s liquor laws we thought going there would be like visiting some bizarre alternate universe where drinks could be served but not seen. So great was the hype about Utah’s toughest in the nation alcohol restrictions that we contemplated smuggling our own stash over the border like modern day Al Capones.

But our laziness bested our ambition, and we failed to stock our cupboards before arriving. At least, we figured, we’d accumulate stories about harried adventures navigating Prohibition-style liquor laws. What we found instead was all too ordinary, if only because most of the rest of the country is no less bonkers when it comes to booze.