Redwood City #1

So, what have I learned in my first day in Redwood City, CA?

• Oracle HQ is full of buildings that look like hard drives. Or artists’ impressions thereof.
• Oracle HQ is full of lakes. No wonder lions drowned here, when it used to be a safari theme park.
• Duck shit is green.
• I have visual evidence of Larry‘s Yacht:
  [INSERT PHOTO]
  Parking your yacht outside your corporate HQ tells you something, I’m just not quite sure what yet.
• Sofitel here trades agressively on its francicité. Not something I’d noticed with any Accor Group hotel in Australia. The francicité is un petit peu overdone. From the pamphlet for SoBoutique (You’ve Slept In Our Bed, Now Buy The Bedspread):
  

  Make your home look Magnifique!
  THE ART DE VIVRE: Pure moments of Plaisir
  THE ART DE RECEVOIR: The Taste of Bon Goût

  From what I can gather, the translations to English in the brochure are deliberately poor, for that extra soupçon of Gallic je ne sais quoi. Alors, moi, je sais quoi est-ce que c’est. C’est de blague des emmerdeurs pretentieux, câlisse!

• The roads are brobdignanian and verdant and void of pedestrians, the way that always alienated me from SoCal.
• I got lost on the brobdignanian and verdant roads, trying to get from hotel A lobby to hotel B lobby, which makes me even less well disposed to them. They disorient me: they’re not meant for people on foot.
• Rumi’s Restaurant, where I ate last night, was advertised to me as Persian-Italian fusion. Given who and where Rumi was, I’d have thought Greek–Persian (or at least Turkish–Persian) would be more apposite; as it turned out, I was hard put to find any Persian in there at all.
• I’d been led to believe the History Channel was All Hitler All The Time. That would have been hugely preferable to the National Enquirer mess of parapsychology and conspiracy theories that was actually broadcast into my hotel that night. A show on the Freemasons’ influence on the Great Seal of the US actually kept gravely saying “Conspiracy theorists believe…”—and not as a disparagement. One more reason not to bother getting cable…

OK, time to get some work done: start of my morning workshop session.