Steamy

The Maker Faire more than earned its gratuitous "e" on Saturday. It was a great day down the peninsula and we saw everything from a robot dustbuster to a different color robot dustbuster. And a lot of other wild and wacky contraptions. There was a Diet Coke and Mentos fountain display by these guys, and little cupcake-mobiles that kept sneaking up on me.

But the biggest new thing for me: steampunks. I had seen them around San Francisco but since half the people here are dressed up like pirates or punks or pagans all the time I thought they were all just one-off personas. Not so - Steampunks are a whole subculture that recalls the days when everything was steam-powered and technology was fantasy. They're like Victorian punks. I will admit to being somewhat fascinated by them and I took every opportunity I had at the Maker Faire to stare shamelessly at them.

Here's a couple of Steampunks from behind (let's ease into this, shall we?). Notice the corset over the clothes and the black and white striped stockings. This is classic Steampunk. (Another term is "retro-futurism" which sort of hurts my brain to think about.)
Next we have a Steampunk mobile which is not powered by steam but is just kind of a glorified bicycle carriage. Observe:

And then there's a whole thing about wearing gas masks and goggles and lots of leather. Creepy! And yet I can't look away.

Go ahead and make me

Today we go to the Maker Faire to celebrate Nelson's birthday. It looks like it will either be really cool, or perhaps more targeted at children than one would want it to be given that we are a group of about 12 30ish year olds attending today.

In other news from the breakfast table, Eric and I were reading about a drunk driver with a blood alcohol level of .16. I have no idea what that actually means, you know? How drunk is that? I'm curious to learn.

"Looks like you can rent a breathalizer for about 20 bucks," Eric reported.

"Oh wait, that's a breathalizer costume. Never mind." He updated a moment later.

Turns out to get a really accurate reading it looks like you have to spend some real cash. That's unlikely. For more thoughts on the merits of breathalizers, here's another opinion.

Bullet: dodged

For anyone who doesn't already think I work for some sort of cult, I received this email last week:

"Next Friday, May 29th marks our first quarter gateway on the 100 day stretch and we will be having a special 2 hour team meeting that will begin at 6:30am sharp (for SF locals) at the steps in Aquatic Park. Bathing suits are recommended. You’ll also need a pen."

I resided for a moment in incredulity. Then forwarded this to Eric.

"Is this the first time you'll need to get a bikini wax for work?" Eric asked.

So as it turned out, this trip to Seattle was a blessing in disguise. I slept in this morning rather than joining my colleagues getting hypothermic in the Bay.

In a weird way I do sort of feel like I missed out on something. But then I remember that it was something bad that I missed out on, and then I am glad.

Aloha Seattle

Guess what.* I'm back in Seattle.

I flew out this morning for what really should, this time, be a two-day trip. On the plane I sat in the aisle seat next to a couple in their mid-forties that appeared to be connecting back from a vacation in Hawaii.

They were quite dear. If I had to guess I would say they were Peruvian; both were short and round with dark brown skin and black hair. I could see that her feet didn't touch the floor, and I don't think his did either.

She was wearing a flowery bathing suit cover up and may very well have had a bathing suit under it; I didn't check.

They held hands in that sweet post-vacation way, like they were extra in love with each other in this happy transitional time on the way back to normal life. She was wearing a lei and I kept getting whiffs of flowers mixed incongruously with the smell of canned air and jet fuel.

She spent part of the flight watching The Office and when she laughed should would swing her feet like a child.

I was totally enchanted with them.

The plane finally landed, taxied, and came to a final stop at the gate. The seatbelt sign was turned off. Because we were at the back of the plane, I didn't move to stand up since it was clearly going to be a few more minutes before there was anywhere to go.

"Can I get out?" she asked me in a thick accent.

"There's nowhere to go," I snarled at her.

"But I want to stand up," she said to me.

"Fine." I said shortly and squeezed out into the aisle which was already crammed with people. She squeezed out into it as well, followed by her lover. We stood there squashed together uncomfortably for at least four minutes before the aisle finally cleared.

She collected a Hawaiian wood sculpture from the overhead bin along with another beachy sarong and shuffled on her short legs down the aisle in front of me.

Aloha, lady.



*Yes, chicken butt.

The things they didn't carry

When I read "Into Thin Air," Jon Krakauer's journalistic ascent of Everest, I remember being very struck by his description of base camp: it was basically one large garbage dump and toilet. Apparently it is quite disgusting.

Mount Shasta also lacks toilets. But rather than encourage people to leave their business wherever they please, the thoughtful and practical people running Mount Shasta have implemented a human waste pack-out system which is exactly what it sounds like.

When we got our summit passes at the ranger station the nice ranger also handed us a few human waste pack-out kits to take with us. They consist of: a paper lunch sack with about a cup of kitty litter in it, a larger plastic bag and a large piece of thick paper with instructions printed on one side and a huge bullseye printed on the other.

I am not joking.

The instructions suggest that you find a comfortable spot, take out the paper and make sure to weigh down the corners with rocks or snow to avoid the wind playing a nasty trick on you, and then - ready, aim, fire!

Once you've hit your target you take the paper by the four corners to deposit the contents into the brown lunch sack which in turn is placed into the plastic bag. I would think you would want to seal that really really carefully before packing it up into your bag. Double bagging does not seem overly cautious.

For better or worse, we packed these handy kits in and then back out without having to use them, so I can't report on how well they work or don't. I can tell you that the three young men camping next to us spent a lot of time talking about them and were, I would say, kind of eager and excited to use them. I think they may have picked up some more fresh ones on their way out of town to continue their target practice at home.

Up

Over the weekend I fulfilled a dream. Ever since I saw Mt Shasta for the first time almost ten years ago, I've wanted to climb it. Yesterday morning at 7:30am, I stood on top of it.

Mount Shasta, both the mountain and the town of the same name, sit about five hours north of San Francisco close to the California-Oregon border. We arrived at the town of Mount Shasta late afternoon Saturday after renting crampons and ice axes at the Berkeley REI in the morning and attempting to drive through Lassen Volcanic National Park on the way there only to discover that that road is still closed for the winter. So we had to drive around. Note to self: call ahead next time.

Sunday midday, after a big breakfast, we parked the car at the Bunny Flat trailhead, elevation 6,950 ft, and started up to Helen Lake at 10,600 ft where we would be camping. The six hour hike up was wonderful but trying. The sun was hot and very intense reflecting off the snow, which was melty enough to make climbing in it slow and a lot of work. You can see Helen Lake up above you on the mountain about two hours before you get there and it looks a lot closer than it is.

I was thrilled when we finally arrived at Helen Lake and the small tent city that had assembled there. We had learned at the ranger station that there were over 170 permits out for Saturday night and a girl we talked with on our way up and her way down confirmed the story saying she had counted 80 tents. Happily, there were many fewer tents and people on Sunday night and we got a good spot right at the edge of the ridge.

After a dinner of trail mix, raw almonds and granola, we tucked in for the night at 7:30pm. This was when I discovered that my sleeping bag is not warm enough for camping on snowpack in a tent that is mostly made of screen instead of tent. As it turned out, though, it didn't really matter since I wasn't going to be spending all that much time in it. We woke up a little after 1am and by 1:30am we were ready: crampons strapped onto our boots, ice axes in gloved hands, pockets lined with Clif bars and a few emergency Snickers bars just in case. Off we went up the mountain.

There's something about climbing a wall of snow in the dark at 2am that is just kind of magical. There was no moon and it was very dark. All the climbers were wearing headlamps to light their way and looking across the face of the mountain you could see little pods of bobbing lights where people were climbing.

At dawn, we came over the first ridge and were rewarded with some spectacular views of the sunrise as the sun came up on the far side of the mountain. We were surprised for a moment to see another large mountain looming on the horizon until we realized that it was actually Shasta's shadow cast by the rising sun on the landscape below.

Three false summits and more than two hours later, we were both in tears as we finally arrived at the true summit. It was extraordinary. The climb had been more exhausting - both physically and mentally - than I had expected and I was thrilled and relieved to have finally made it to the top. Amazing. We paused a moment there to enjoy the view from 14,162 feet and savor the sweetness of finally realizing a long-held and hard-earned goal.

Coming down is supposed to be the fun part because you glissade, which is basically a fancy word for sliding down the mountain on your butt. If I ever doubted the value of sleds, I don't anymore.

We were back at the car about 24 hours after we had parked it. We calculated that of those 24 hours, we'd spent 16 of them climbing (12 hours on the ascent, 4 hours on the descent). Neither of us was in any shape to be operating a moving vehicle so we took turns driving home and at one point stopped at a rest stop and napped in the grass for a little while until the bugs got to be too much. Then we got in the car and drove the rest of the way home.


Climbing a wall of snow in the dark
Climbing a wall of snow at dawn
Shasta's shadow at dawn
Happy, and cold, at the top

Against all the odds

I'm not sure what came over me on Tuesday when I was shopping for clothing for the rest of the week. Maybe I was delirious, or simply feeling audacious. I did something that I normally have the presence of mind and superior judgment not to do: I bought a white blouse.

I know, I know. Foolish. We all know that I am not adult enough to be left in charge of caring for a white blouse.

In fact, I own very few white items at all. We have two white tablecloths that we use for our eating table* and one of them is totally stained and shabby: this we call the kids tablecloth for obvious reasons. The other tablecloth is the one we use when anyone other than the two of us is present. Also for obvious reasons.

So, despite better judgment, I'm wearing it today. I'll let you know how it goes. Smart money is on at least one stain before lunch.

*It's like a kitchen table that's not in the kitchen and not in the dining room. Is it just a table?

Seriously.

It seemed downright unforgivable to spend a week in Seattle and not go to Serious Pie at least once.* Last night was the night!

I went with one of my client-friends who lives in Seattle but had never been there. After last night's experience I figured it would be good for me to have dinner with another person.

Just the smell walking in the door made me happy. She and I agreed to share two pizzas (they're personal size) and we get the two that I have had there several times now: roasted chanterelles and truffle cheese on one and buffalo mozzarella and roasted tomatoes on the other.

After the first few bites she put down her pizza and glared at me.

"You know," she said, "when you come back next time and I've put on 30 pounds, that's on your conscience."


*If I were to go at the same rate as when Eric and I were here back in March I would have to go 10 times, which is a lot of driving from Redmond.

I'm still here

My three hour cruise to Seattle has turned into a week here.

At first I was sort of excited because there is a great new piece of work that we are doing here and I thought it would be really valuable to be in person for a few days to get it started.

Then, when at 8pm last night I found myself eating a salad alone in a desolate food court at the Bellevue mall, about to go back to my cold dark hotel room to work for several more hours, I realized I was profoundly unhappy with this turn of events.

Perhaps the most unexpected moment of the day, however, happened on my drive from the office to the mall where I would buy clothes for the next three days. I was tooling along minding my own business in the middle lane on the highway when a car a little ahead of me in the right lane suddenly drove itself into the sidewall. It then ricocheted off into the car behind it in the right lane, pushing both of them into my lane directly in front of me. Luckily there was no one in the left lane next to me and I was able to swerve out of the way and go around them.

"Holy sh*t!" I thought to myself. Did that really just happen??

I tried to watch how the rest unfolded in my rear view mirror but I went around a curve soon thereafter and couldn't really see anymore.

In other news, on my way out the front door of the hotel this morning the heel of my shoe failed to sufficiently grip the concrete and I took a huge and very dramatic spill, causing concerned onlookers from up to 50 feet away to gasp and come running to assist me.

I'm fine.

If by warm, you mean cool, then yes.

I don't want to be a whiner.

Sometimes hotels just have bad days, I think. And that's understandable. But it can also be frustrating when you're tired. I'm just saying.

I have an example. Last night, I arrived at the Sheraton in Bellevue where I have stayed often and it is generally a very inoffensive place.

It was raining when I arrived, and since I have not yet internalized that bringing an umbrella with me when I travel to Seattle is generally not going to be a wasted effort, I was soaking wet when I got in line at the front desk to check in. There was only one person working the desk and she was helping two Indian fellows ahead of me who had been locked out of their room. The plot soon thickened, however, when they said the room was not actually in either of their names, but in the name of a gentleman who had come and already gone. This took a while to resolve. All the while, a restless line is forming behind me and a young woman in a pretty white blouse with a nametag that just says "Training" is standing behind the other woman looking uncomfortable.

When I finally made it up to my room I did the first thing I always do upon entering a hotel room: turn off the AC, which for some reason is always on even in the dead of winter. It was not warm outside but the AC was blasting away per usual and, unsettlingly, continued to blast even as I set the thermostat to 80 degrees.

I turned the whole system off. No good - an aggressive fan continued to push cold air into the room. Apparently nothing but cold air was on the menu for the evening.

I phoned the front desk and they sent up a technician who did some stuff but as soon as he left it started again. I turned it off. It stopped for a while then: more cold air. As someone who hates being cold, this is like someone playing a mean prank on me.

No fair.

I debated calling again and decided that instead it was just time to go to sleep.

The end.

Packing it in

What a weekend! We really crammed a whole lot of fun stuff into the past two days, let me tell you. I am almost exhausted just thinking about it.

There was the improv show, and the nice Basque snack afterwards where I shamelessly tasted three wines before choosing one I liked. My excuse is that I was getting warmed up for wine country the next day where after a most unfortunate and time consuming mis-navigation on my part we discovered a whole bunch of new wineries we hadn't been to before. It was delightful and really, really hot. For lunch, we had cheese. Lots. Mmmm.

Wine country can really wreck you if you aren't used to drinking constantly all day so we didn't make it back out that evening - instead we crowded around my laptop to watch Changeling. Let's just say I wouldn't recommend it. Or The Wrestler. Or Frost/Nixon. I will now resume control of the Netflix queue.

Sunday brought many, many more adventures. The people who planned Bay to Breakers were considerate enough to send it a half block past our place, so we wandered over there to watch a handful of elite African runners, followed by a slightly slower handful of elite white runners, followed shortly thereafter by 85,000 drunks in costume. It is one of my favorite San Francisco events though I had never spectated before, I had only participated. I thoroughly enjoyed watching the madness and cheering. Eric loudly did one of my favorite race cheers that I encountered the first time I "ran" Bay to Breakers years ago. "You're all winners. You're all winning." It goes over great. Trust me.

Eric's biggest takeaway: if we spectate next year we need a megaphone.

After watching over an hour of this, we needed to go back to bed for a while to recover. Not too much later we perked up in time to go watch the Blackhawks vs Red Wings game at our local Sunday sports bar Jillian's, followed quite incongruously with a trip to the SFMOMA to see the Kentridge exhibit. (Highly recommend. It goes until May 31.) Followed by...the Giants game at AT&T Park. In case you don't know Gail, I should probably confirm what you might suspect which is that the hockey/baseball double header is an unlikely Sunday gameplan. But she seemed to be enjoying herself so we didn't ask too many questions. The only thing we didn't get to do that she had seemed legitimately interested in doing was go learn to shoot a gun. Next time, Mom, OK?

We closed the weekend out with a feast of Thai food and calling for a 5:45am cab for my mother and me, she headed home and I to Seattle. I am On The Road.

See you next time, Gail!

Welcome Gail

My mother Gail is visiting us from Chicago this weekend. She flew in yesterday afternoon and flies out Monday morning after we've had a lot of fun. That's the plan.

To make her feel especially welcome, I wanted to make sure we had some food in the house that she liked. You know, food = love.

Gail is gluten-free so the other evening Eric stopped by the Whole Foods to get some gluten free items which, not intuitively, are stored at the opposite end of the store from the other baked goods, back by the meat. Not sure if this is some sort of advanced psychology merchandising or if they found that late at night the regular baked goods were bullying the gluten-free items and making them feel bad about themselves.

We ended up getting Ezekiel Bread and gluten free muffin mix which I made into pumpkin muffins last night.

Combine that with fresh coffee with half & half et voila!: Gail is welcomed.

Fresh

I thought I was being a real garden badass by cutting greens from my very own garden yesterday morning and bringing them to work for lunch.

I had a meeting during lunch where I got as far as taking the tupperware out of my bag, putting it on the desk, and opening the top. But I never actually dressed or began to eat the pointy leafy greens.

Halfway through the meeting, my colleague Nicky casually reached over and plucked a little green spider off the rim of the tupperware where it was doing a little spider dance.

Salad remained untouched and was still chilling on my desk at around 3pm when an inchworm wandered out onto the rim of the tupperware and inched his way around and around the container while I talked to a client on the phone.

Once I got off the phone, I raided the snack closet and ate some granola for lunch instead.

But the salad is still in the fridge. It's so hard to throw away something you grow yourself! Maybe I'll wash it several times and eat it today. Or maybe tomorrow.

A tale of two memberships

Membership #1
About two weeks ago I got Eric and I a dual membership to the SFMOMA, which is about a block and a half from our place. It's a great deal for a great museum and you get to feel good about being a patron of the arts. Or something like that.

Saturday the SFMOMA opened up a new rooftop garden gallery for a member preview, with the opening to the public on Sunday. It was a beautiful day so Eric and I decided to try out our new membership and check it out.

We hadn't yet gotten the member welcome packet in the mail but I had gotten an email confirming the membership was effective from date of purchase so we strolled up to the membership desk and asked for our member tickets to the rooftop garden. The young lady working the desk looked in the system and couldn't find us.

"How long ago did you sign up?" she inquired.

"A little over a week ago," I told her.

"Oh. Yeah. You're not in the system yet."

"How long does it take for the membership order to get into the system?" I wondered aloud.

"About five to six weeks," she answered with a straight face. "Did you bring the printout of your membership order? I can't confirm you're actually a member without it."

"Obviously I didn't bring it," I snapped. "Five weeks for an online order to get from one system to another? What year is this?"

Cold stare.

Resolution did not involve clawing her eyes out but it did involve me imagining doing that while I showed her the confirmation receipt email on my blackberry. And off we went to enjoy what turned out to be kind of an underwhelming sculpture patio.


Membership #2
We've been to the symphony several times recently and have found it sufficiently delightful that it seemed membership for next season was a grand idea. When we learned that the student membership is 50% off the regular price, it became an imperative.

The box office is only open from 10am-6pm during the week so one day last week after a doctor's appointment nearby, I stopped into the Symphony Box Office to get us signed up with a subscription.

I started by confirming that I could purchase two student subscriptions*. Off to a good start. I thought I was all prepared with what I wanted but the lady behind the window threw me a curve ball: student discount only applies to certain programs. She started reading me different options and I was immediately confused because I need to see things written down. So I asked her to show me the different options on paper, which caused her to take a deep breath and roll her eyes; this was only the first of many times she would do that during our unfortunate and lengthy interaction. For some reason I was incredibly challenged as I tried to explain what I wanted to her: dates, programs, performers, series, all swirled together in a soupy mess. She was exhausted by me.

"Where are you a student?" she looked at me dubiously.

"Um, Stanford," I said sort of sheepishly, knowing that I was tarnishing Stanford's reputation as I said this.

She sighed again and rolled her eyes. It took at least another 15 minutes before I got out of there with two student symphony subscriptions in hand. At least she didn't suggest I might also qualify for a discount for the disabled.


*I get a courtesy ID from Stanford through Eric which gives me access to Stanford facilities as well as student discounts when people don't look closely enough to see it isn't really a student ID but just a courtesy ID.

Yeah it's that easy

I taught a yoga class last night at a studio I haven't taught at before. I was really excited to try out a new venue with new students, and it is between home and work so it could be an easy commute if I wanted to teach there every now and then.

I'd never been there before so I got there a bit early, chatted with the owner, got a tour of the space and got all set up. It was still about 10 minutes before class was supposed to begin, so I set about chilling and waiting for time to pass.

At 6pm, no one was there.

A woman stuck her head into the studio and asked if the class was going to happen. I said I thought so but wasn't at all convinced of it myself. I stepped out into the check-in area where the two staff women had been sitting and they were gone. The place was completely deserted.

Odd, no? I would think that if you were advertising a yoga class you might spend, oh I don't know, at a minimum, the ten minutes before the scheduled start time actually sitting at a desk where people interested in taking the class could give you their money.

I ended up teaching the class to two students - a regular and the woman who wandered in off the street. For a while it didn't feel like it was going so well, but I tried to adjust real-time and at the end both women seemed pleased with the experience they had had.

Just lounging around

In anticipation of the coming apocalypse, and because it is fun, I try to do a little bit of vacation every day and a whole lot of it on the weekend. It is less about going physically away or doing specific things and more about a state of mind. I think it also helps when you have the right conditions, as we did this past weekend, namely really crisp clean air and plenty of sunshine. When you have those things, then just sitting on the velvet couch with the windows open after getting thoroughly worked over at yoga will send you right to vacation land, which is conveniently located near nap land.

There were two other events this weekend that served to transport one from the here and now to another time and place, namely a nine-year local area college reunion for my class and going to see Star Trek. They were, in very different ways, both quite effective at taking me on a journey.

The class of 2000 San Francisco Bay Area reunion was Saturday evening at a barbershop lounge* started by a classmate two years ago and was a great venue to learn that I am apparently the only person from my class who hasn't founded or been elected board president of a non-profit. It was, suffice it to say, an impressive parade of do-goodery. It also turned out that four of the eight rowers in my freshman boat on the crew team were there, along with three of the freshman men's eight. I don't know what that means other than that we like free food. Probably nothing.

Star Trek, on Sunday evening, was great fun and took me somewhere very far away. Other than the very beginning which made me cry (it was a pretty horrible scene but I don't expect that that's a good enough excuse for crying at Star Trek) I thought it was some good old-fashioned escapist entertainment with clear good guys and bad guys and lots of unadulterated heroism. It came along with a healthy dose of "daddy issues" of course because it was directed by JJ Abrams, but still managed to be a good time. The experience was further enhanced by seeing it at the Kabuki which is a theatre where the balcony has reserved seating and sells food and drinks. No, I'm not noticing a pattern here.

And now, the week begins, with a heap of work to tackle. I am already looking forward to a little bit of vacation this evening, perhaps at the Clementina Lounge.


*This "barber lounge" concept is a new generation of barber shops based on market research that showed that men would spend more time and money at a barber shop if it were actually just a bar with booze and a comprehensive selection of men's magazines where it turned out you could also get your hair cut.

Deepish agriculture

Last night we went to hear Michael Pollan speak. The title of his talk, which is part of the Seminars About Long-term Thinking (SALT) series with the Long Now Foundation, was "Deep Agriculture."

I really like how Michael Pollan thinks and talks about agriculture and the entire US food system. He approaches this massive and gnarly mess in a positive and solution-focused way: in spite of the overwhelming nature of the problem, which he does not skirt, you somehow leave feeling like we can actually fix this rather than feeling beaten down.

Food, he pointed out, is the shadow problem which is driving some of the largest problems we are grappling with as a society right now: climate change, the skyrocketing cost of health care, and elusive energy independence. The industrialization of agriculture over the past 50 years was single-mindedly pursued in the service of ending hunger (and making certain parties extremely wealthy, but bear with me a moment): I think we can say that the system has over-performed on that count. It is time to rethink what we are optimizing for, and then line up appropraite technologies and subsidies, regulation and other policy incentives and disincentives to create a system that better serves the health and well-being of the American public.

What's exciting is that we finally have a president who "gets it" and sees the path to fixing this. What's troubling is that he has said privately that he doesn't yet see the movement. He's listening for it. Michelle's planted an organic garden at the White House. But he needs the American public to demand it in a way they are not yet doing today.

The demand is clearly building, however. Michael Pollan doesn't know about my rooftop garden and my fantasies of small-scale farming life, but he did say that not a day goes by that he doesn't have some young professional - programmer, analyst, etc - share with him that they are cashing out and buying a farm. This makes me feel so much less original in my instinct to do just that and makes me wonder if what we are talking about is a real movement here.

In fact, the biggest obstacle he cited in getting from where we are today to a healthier, more resilient, more sustainable food system is that we don't have enough farmers. Today, one million farmers feed over 300 million people. He estimates that we will see something closer to 20 million farmers in the US by 2050.

How do we get there? Michael Pollan says: "we need to make farming cool."

Take a good look at my face

Eric and I went to a friend’s wedding in Santa Cruz on Saturday. It was a small wedding at their house in the mountains and a disproportionate share of the group were Iowans. The ceremony was untraditional and three hours long, but had some nice moments.

As we got into the evening, the dance party, courtesy of someone’s laptop, started to get going on the deck under an awning onto which they were projecting the laptop screen and showing the youtube videos along with the songs. People would shout out requests at the end of each song, and then someone would search it and bring up the video. This was all going swimmingly (assuming you like random German techno music) until someone shouts out “Smokey Robinson Tracks of my Tears” (yes, I suspect this was one of the parents who were also very much part of the dance party).

It was searched and clicked on; everyone is dancing. The video is not of Smokey himself but instead is showing pictures of happy cows- the Iowans are loving it. Then the screen goes white and shows the words “now for some real cows…” The next image on the screen is of a CAFO cow that looks, um, kind of messed up. There’s a collective confused noise from the dancers.

Next image: CAFO cow with half its face missing, covered in pus and blood and slime. The whole crowd goes “uuuggghhhH!!!” and someone dives towards the laptop to stop this delightful PETA video from ruining the wedding reception.

I laughed so hard I cried. It might have been my favorite moment from the whole wedding.