Angels and Demons at CSU

We saw the movie:

Then we went to a lecture!

Did you know that parts of Angels and Demons were actually filmed in the Large Hadron Collider at the European particle physics laboratory CERN? ...And that there's no way Vittoria Vetra, played by Ayelet Zurer in the movie could have held antimatter in that small container. ...and yes, the antimatter really could have blown-up Rome!

Dr. Miguel Mostafa

Dr. Mostafa is a Professor at Colorado State University and an expert on ultra high energy cosmic rays! He was nice enough to tell us all about antimatter and stuff! There is a particle physics community in Fort Collins! 

So, what is antimatter? What does the Large Hadron Collider do? Why do particle physicists do what they do?

Dr. Mostafa explained it all! 

After the lecture, we met with some of the professors and made them feel welcome to the non-physicist community. We hope they take a break from their cosmic ray detectors and meson accelerators once in a while and do this again!

Surdos @ the backbone

We be drumming near this venue:

It's the Devil's Backbone Open Space near Loveland!

No more plastic buckets for us! Our order of caixas and surdos has arrived!

OK, a few djembe players were welcome.

Keith jamming on a surdo!

estamos felizes!

Colorado Rockies Memorial Day!

At Coors Field

A stadium named after a local brew

Baseball was played there

and there was a memorial

With some greenery near the dugout!

Denver lost 16 t0 6 to Los Angeles!

Cyclists on FoCo

In Beet Street! this weekend I saw this event:

"Bikers, non-bikers and families are invited to Old Town Square Fort Collins for the FREE Realities Pre-Ride Rally community event."

This ain't it!

It's important to know that "Bikers" refers to motorcycle riders.  If it's a bicycle that you are riding, then you belong in a cycling event.

BTW, the picture is one I recently took on a ride with the FoCo Newcomers Club. If you are new to Fort Collins, check them out.

Folks passin' through

This guy came to visit:

It's Tom from the Edgar Rice Band!

Remember that post last week of that old photo somebody sent? That somebody was the guitar player on the left in the old photo.  Tom was on his way from Seattle to his new home in Washington, D.C. with a truck full of stuff including saw horses, ladders, weed-wackers,  and oddly enough some works of art from Uganda. I haven't seen Tom since 1976 and we spent a good evening catching up. Among other things, Tom is the volunteer coordinator for a small school in Uganda! He thinks I would make an ideal math teacher in Uganda! 

I've been to East Africa but not central Africa; Hmmm... if I run out of roadside mysteries around here I bet I'll find all sorts of things in Uganda! 

(gimme some time to think about that!)

Beat barn! Bloco em FoCo!

Our drum order has not come in yet:

Here in the barn, we are working into a samba beat!

with djembes and plastic buckets!

Marcus will be back in June to help us out.

By then we should have something to show him!

This kid was grooving to our sound!

We are looking forward to having  Sunday practice in City Park and Wednesdays in the Beat Barn. Vamos ficar bêbado ! Beleza!

May means rain!

one would think:

May is half over and it's rained twice. But, if there is a flood, please climb to safety!

Larry's Bowling Ball Arsenal

This weekend our friend Larry came to visit:

He had finished part of a senior pro bowling tournament in Las Vegas.  I never owned a bowling ball, and I assumed that good bowlers owned their own ball and had a nice bag to carry it in.  It appears that professional bowlers have bowling ball bags that hold three balls at a time, and they may bring several bags to a tournament! Looks like Larry has at least 15 bowling balls in his trunk!

Larry the professional bowler standing next to his arsenal

Old Picture Archive #12

Someone sent me this the other day:

It's Tom, Bugman, Ray, Kathy, and Len!

It's a picture taken in Oak Park, Illinois maybe around 1975 of the Edgar Rice Burroughs Memorial String Band playing our 'hit' song: "I'm not a Lincoln, I'm a Ford!"  This band was well known to Peoria radio stations for unknown reasons as we never set foot in that town! We think they liked the name of the band, so our motto was "We should'a played Peoria". 

We used to practice in a house once owned by Mr. Burroughs in Oak Park where Tarzan was created!

Deathrow Dolls?

At the FoCo Girls Gone Derby!

It's the Deathrow Dolls (orange) against the Chanel Cartel (black)

Above it's "Lulu Ferrigno" making sure the team captain from the Chanel Cartel, "Coco She'll Nail Ya" won't get past the pack!

Wanna try out for the team? Come on down TODAY and see if the skates fit!

Can't skate? We'll teach you!

It's happening tonight at the Rollerland Skate Center!

Just wanna watch? Make sure you sit near this sign!

The Booty Zone is an area on the track floor where you have a good chance of getting hit by a roller girl.  On May 9th it's where I sat! Admittedly it's not that same as when I scored four front row center first balcony seats to the 2006 premiere production of R. Strauss's Salome starring Deborah Voigt at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, but at the opera, they didn't have a raffle for a $100 gift certificate to the local tattoo parlor! 

Note1: Derby is better than opera.

Note2: Only one derby girl crashed into me.

Note3:No! we didn't win the tattoo certificate!

It's the 2009 Collegiate Road Nationals!

I rode the old RAGBRAI road bike over to the races this morning...

The Division 1 Womens Race

There are so many cycling events in town! I just happened to catch this one today! This was just a small fraction of the much larger "Fort Collins Cycling Fest" (sponsored in part by CLIF bars) whose motto is: "Stay green, stay local, cycle often, and smile daily!"

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Whether you're on a 150-mile bike ride or making your way through a long day, CLIF bar is the energy bar for everyone!

Jazz Singers @ Harmony

Sometimes we forget we have free concerts practically in our back yard!

Tonight is was the FRCC Vocal Jazz Ensemble

The back up band was great. Here they are playing next to the circulation desk!

Note: We used to go to the Fort Collins Library, but NO MORE! From now on it's the Poudre River Public Library District!

Arthropod Diversity at the University!

At the C.P. Gillette Museum of Arthropod Biodiversity.
Few people know the location of this museum. It gets moved around a lot! Even the CSU Entomology department website says it's in the Plant Science Building. I found it in the 128 year-old Laurel Hall building, where the international student office is located.

There are millions of specimens here. I chose to look at the order Odonata, or dragonflies and damselflies.  I'm sure I'll be back and have a look at Diptera, lepidoptera, and hemiptera.

As a certified Bugman, I was welcome to view any part of the collection and borrow books, collection equipment and/or loose insect parts.  
FYI, We saw C.P.Gillette last year here.

CSU Junk

It's for sale:
Used furniture, computers, and old lab equipment. A bunch of coffee servers from food service.

Luckily I didn't see anything I wanted to buy, but there is an auction four times a year that might be interesting.

Samba Dancin'

A Drumcircle with movement:

Doing the Levada with Marcus Santos

It used to be we just sat around in a circle and beat some drums.  I'm glad I play a light-weight instrument (agogo and shaker).  This is the beginnings of Bloco Em FoCo, Fort Collin's mobile percussion ensemble. We saw a group in Eugene, Oregon called Samba Ja in March last year and they were fantastic.  It's danceable street music! Fort Collins will really dig this!!!