Ars Gratia Artis

Welcome, artistic reader, as I regale you with the delights of our visit to the Cantor gallery at Stanford University. Incredibly, this world-class art collection is walking distance from our house, which gives you yet another insight into just how spoilt we are here in Palo Alto.

Disappointingly, this place isn't named after Georg Cantor, or even that most famous of parlour tricks, Cantor's diagonalization theorem. It's named after the guy who started the Cantor Fitzgerald investment bank, but hey, we all have our crosses to bear; apparently that nice Bill Gates is to blame for Windows.

Inside, you're treated to a relatively small but impressively high quality art collection:

In fact, Cantor-the-banker was one of the world's foremost collectors of the work of Rodin, so here you're treated to something like 90 Rodin pieces (and there are others elsewhere on the campus), as well as a fascinating insight into how Rodin worked and was viewed at the time. Again, I'll emphasise that this is about a mile from our house. You don't get that in Ash Vale!

Upstairs it got even more interesting, with a room of American contemporary art consisting of originals by Pollock and Rothko, no less. I once made a special trip to Tate Modern to see a new hanging of the Rothkos there, and Helen got me a Pollock print beautifully framed just this Christmas, so to see more originals was pretty special. In fact this might be the first time I've seen an original Pollock, thinking about it, and what was surprising was the texture of the thing, which really gave you an impression of the energy that went into creating it. Awesome to see.

Last weekend we also made a trip over to the other side of the Peninsula, to Pescadero State Beach, where all manner of hazards await:

I'm more used to the American crayfish invading our European waterways, or those grey squirrels out-competing the cute British reds, so I'm surprised to see quite this hostility towards our New Zealand friends.

If the 1 million snails per square yard don't kill you, there's a chance the tsunamis will:

Now, there's a lot made of earthquakes around here, so much so that I've felt the need to study them a bit. The sign is of course nonsense, because the San Andreas fault involves two plates sliding past each other in opposite directions; this doesn't cause huge disruptions in the sea floor, thus no major tsunami danger. Now, the Cascadia subduction zone? That's going to cause a massive tsunami some day, so Seattle, if Mount Rainer doesn't blow itself to bits and obliterate you first, I'd be working out how to get to high ground if I was you. You're welcome.

The beach itself, as with many here, is this beautiful sandy thing. The temperature here is much cooler than on our side of the peninsula, but of course that didn't stop us getting royally sunburnt. No warning signs about that, dear reader, no warning signs about that!