If you asked a Spaniard about US (or South American, or Australian…) wines, you’d get pretty much the same reaction as if you’d asked an American about Spanish beers; they theoretically probably exist but why bother?

At my local grocer, though, Spain has been relegated to a district of Chile, apparently.

(click through for details)

It would be funnier if it wasn’t so creepy.

The I-10  in California changes character as it goes east from ocean.  It’s a typical southern California multi-lane concrete freeway in Los Angeles that becomes  something out of a Mad Max movie in the Inland Empire, especially around the Colton rail yards.  By the time it reaches Yuciapa, it’s settled down again into a lanky western interstate.

No doubt that this personality can be defined by factors like traffic density, the physical landscape, the number of exits, development alongside the highway (either preceding it or because of it), and the condition of the actual road.  But the people driving on the road play a big part, too, in defining its character.

Whatever the cause, it never ceases to amaze me that a highway can have a personality.  Generalizing a bit, highways  in the IE are insane.

I thought that New Jersey, where I grew up, was the last word in traffic until I moved to Boston.  Even driving in Manhattan, which has a peculiar but clearly understood set of  driving protocols, was better than Boston.  Boston’s got bad, nasty, aggressive drivers and crummy roads.  Nothing worse than Boston.

Then I moved to the Inland Empire.

Rather than try to convince you by anecdote, see this report on road rage by the Surface Transportation Policy Partnership.  It’s out of date by now, but they measured deaths attributable to aggressive driving and the IE was the top-ranked metro area in the country.

It wasn’t even close; measured in deaths per 100,000 people, the Inland Empire scored 13.4 while second-ranked Tampa was at 9.5.  New York City (including northern NJ) was 36th, with a score of 2.6, and Boston was 37th with 2.1.  That is, drivers in the Inland Empire are six times more aggressive than Boston drivers.

More on the Basque country:

There’s an old beautiful rustic church,the ermita de San Adrián, located on a hillside outside of the town of Elorrio (near Durango).  “Ermita” literally means “hermitage,” so strictly translated it’s “Hadrian’s hermitage” but I think “the chapel of San Adrián” better captures the feel of this single-roomed church. Perhaps there were hermits associated with these little chapels that are so common in the Basque country, but I sort of doubt it.  A cluster of farmhouses might share an ermita, and today people visit them only on the feast day of the saint associated with the chapel.

Characteristic of medieval Basque churches/chapels, San Adrian has a red-tiled loggia around the building.  Supposedly, this served as a meeting place for the local community in the past.  Here, for another example, is the tenth century (i.e., roughly contemporaneous in time) “Basque Romanesque” church of San Pelaio between Bakio and Bermeo on the coast:

I don’t know why the ermita in Elorrio is associated with Saint Hadrian (Adrián), or even which Adrián it honors.  After a thousand years, it’s a wonder the physical thing is still standing.

Interestingly, the San Adrián chapel preserves a covered bowling alley, above, with a sloped dirt floor:

The bowling ball was a large round piece of wood, not the small cannonball sized balls used in the Italian and French versions.  Bowling is common enough across northern Spain but is especially associated with Leon, where my family’s from.

The church was locked the day we visited but I was able to take photos through a knothole in the door.  I was surprised by how well they came out:

But San Adrian is most famous for its enigmatic old cemetery, the necropolis of Argiñeta, a graveyard bounded by a fence of vertical stone slabs with above-ground stone burial chambers.  The chambers are plain rectangular stone sarcophogi, some with decorated round steles (you can see some of them in the interior photos of the church, too.)

Inscriptions on some of the sarcophogi, which are made of sandstone quarried on the nearby Mount Oiz, date them to the 9th century.  According to tradition, the remains in the graveyard were collected here from ermitas in the surrounding area.  Twenty are supposed to be of Visigothic nobles who died while fleeing, wounded, from Muslim armies.

The other three (or five?) are said to be pre-Christian tombs, with round steles, seen above.  One tomb is a double, probably indicating a married couple.  I’m not sure it that’s one of the Visigothic Christian ones or the supposed pre-Christian ones.  The local area figures prominently in Basque pre-Christian religious mythology; the goddess Mari’s home is on nearby Mt. Amboto.

Coincidentally, I just returned from a similar short trip to the Basque country to visit my aunt in Bakio, a little seashore town outside of Bilbao.  She spends half the year there and I’ve been going there, on and off, my whole life (so far, as they add in Maine.)

For me, it was a trip back in time to visit people I hadn’t seen in years and, of course, a chance to eat crazy great food.  That little corner of the world has always seemed to me to have the best food anywhere and growing up it was always confusing to me that my friends in Bakio seemed to eat, to live, so much better than the rest of us.

What’s really startling, though, about the article, to me, is that the bar I grew up visiting, Itxas-Ondo, is so prominently described in Wildman’s article.  This is a little neighborhood bar, one of dozens in the town of Bakio alone.  It’s in a garage in the basement of the building where my aunt has an apartment, and where my parents used to own an apartment.  It’s her local and she can reliably be found there with her friends every night, during the summer season, from eight to ten or later at night.

I’ve spent a lot of time hanging out in Ixtas-Ondo and we have lots of family stories set there.  It’s really jarring to see it in the New York Times, especially since I just happened to return from there after an absence of seven years.  But I can highly recommend the pintxos and txakoli, especially the salty fish and pepper sandwiches up there next to the napkin holder by the old lady.  Those are especially good.

More on this later.

(Actually, I sorted that for you by cost, from lowest to highest.)

Notice how there are three geographical bands evident:

• East Asia (Japan, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and, anomalously, Vietnam) with the lowest fares, averaging $627 return from Los Angeles.
• Southeast Asia (Thailand, Phillipines, Cambodia, Singapore, Indonesia) average $781 from Los Angeles, with Phuket as an outlier.
• South Asia (India and Bangladesh) average $1035, plus Balikpapan in Indonesia which is new to me.

Within the bands, South Asia has the highest range from low to high; more than $300.  East and Southeast Asia are $100 and less.

But then I said to myself, “Self, what about the distance travelled to these places?”  So here’s a chart for you, based on Great Circle data, of the distance from LAX to each of those destinations, sorted from farthest to nearest:

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This isn’t exactly what I was expecting; the East Asian band is clear enough at the bottom, but somehow in terms of great circle distances, South and Southeast Asia aren’t so clearly distinguished.  Bombay and Bangkok are both farther from Los Angeles than Delhi, which is closer than Dhaka.  Now, you can argue that this is not exactly correct because there aren’t today flights from LAX that go beyond Hong Kong and Singapore; maybe Bangkok now?  So that to get to Delhi or elsewhere in South Asia you’re going to need to transfer (typically in Singapore or Tokyo if you’re going west; it’s about equidistant going in the other direction via Dubai or London) and that’s going to add to the duration.  And you, my pedantic reader, would be right.  Bless you.  Here’s a map of the routes, from The Great Circle Mapper:

Then — we’re in the home stretch, dear reader! — I put the two, price and distance, together to give us a cost per mile comparison which looks again very different:

These cost per mile bands reveal that although Narita is the cheapest in nominal terms from LAX, it’s actually only middling in cost per mile terms.  Ho Chi Minh City is hands-down the cheapest per mile and Dhaka is off the chart on the other end, almost double Saigon.  (Within the bands I’ve sorted by distance, longest to shortest.) India’s cost per mile varies widely, from ten to thirteen cents per mile.

Travel arbs, start your jet engines!

(Surprisingly, the alphabet was only invented once and all alphabets are genetically related to each other, branches from this one root.  Devanagari is linked to Latin letters via Brahmi and Aramaic.)

But in order to write Sanskrit correctly, you need some Latin letters not used in English.  This is a common-enough situation; think of accent marks, or the French and Portuguese cedilla — ç — or the Spanish enye — ñ — or even Motörhead’s heavy metal umlaut.  So, for example, “Devanagari” ought to be written “Devanāgarī” and “Pali” should be “Pāḷi.”  The complete set of diacritics for Pali is: ā, ī, ū, ṁ, ṇ, ñ, ṭ, ḍ, ṅ, ḷ .

There’s another, separate but related, issue about when to use these ‘extra’ letters and marks; for native English readers, the argument goes, these ‘extra’ letters and marks — called diacritics — are distracting and make the words harder to read.

Specialists typically prefer to preserve diacritics, because losing them changes the meaning of the word in its original language.  The question comes down to: “when do these foreign words become English words?”  There’s an active debate going on now on H-Buddhism, an academic Buddhist studies mailing list on this very topic.  Dictionaries are split on the issue, with some words preserving diacriticals and others losing them: for more on this, see the list of Buddhist Terms Found in English Print Dictionaries and Gerald Jackson’s series on fonts and diacritics in academic publishing.

The problem arises when you need to write diacritics in your friendly word processing application.  This immediately leads to a technical conversation about Unicode and Unicode fonts.  Which is when things start to get hairy.

The best starting point for Unicode issues is Alan Wood’s page,  It’s worth reading for the introduction, as an overview of the topic of digital transcription.  More specifically, for the topic at hand, the Tibetan & Himalayan Digital Library has a good survey of Unicode fonts for transliterating “Indo-Tibetan” languages.

(By Indo-Tibetan they mean Indian languages for Buddhist studies, including Sanskrit, Pali, Gandhari, and so on, plus Tibetan.  “Indo-Tibetan” isn’t a language family like Indo-European but the term point to the very close relationship between Tibet and India.  Buddhist Tibetan is a specialized language unreadable to a native Tibetan, optimized a thousand years ago to translate Buddhist Sanksrit into Tibetan.  Smart people have been dealing with these issues for a long time.)

They make the point that not all Unicode fonts contain the necessary characters, so simply choosing a Unicode font isn’t enough: “To properly display all the diacritic marks used in Indo-Tibetan studies, a Unicode font must contain the following character ranges:

• Basic Latin: U+0000 – U+007F (View Unicode Chart)
• Latin-1 Supplement: U+0080 – U+00FF (View Unicode Chart)
• Latin Extended-A: U+0100 – U+017F (View Unicode Chart)
• Latin Extended-B: U+0180 – U+024F (View Unicode Chart)
• Latin Extended Additional: U+1E00 – U+1EFF (View Unicode Chart)”

From Wikipedia’s “Pali transliteration on computers.”

The Tibetan Digital Library people also have a good chart of relevant diacritics.

(In the distant past, like five years ago, there were various gnarly work-arounds, including the now-deprecated Times Norman / Normyn font.  Nobumi Iyanaga has written a useful library of scripts to convert from Times Norman / Normyn to ‘good’ Unicode.)

So, what are the practical options for a good font  for transliterating Sanskrit and Pali today?  It seems to me that there are at least five good choices:

Times Ext Roman

The Tibetan Digital Library people really like Times Ext Roman.  But the only source for it is the Bahá’i Computer & Communication Association and it’s not clear to me what license its published under so I would be reluctant to recommend it even though I trust that it’s technically valid.

Gentium

If you can get past SIL’s Christian missionary agenda, they do outstanding linguistics work and their Gentium font is well regarded, seems complete for the purposes of transliterating Sanskrit and Pali, is widely accepted, is under active development and is licensed under a good, if idiosyncratic, open source license.  It’s a nice-looking typeface, in my opinion.

IndUni

John Smith has recently updated this font family.  It’s exactly designed for the topic under discussion, “the representation of Indian-language (and similar) material in Roman script using the Unicode character set.”  But he’s just one, albeit committed, guy and I don’t know what license he’s publishing these under, so I worry about its long-term supportability.  But worth mentioning; sort of in the same category to me as Times Ext Roman.

TransIndic Transliterator

There’s also a commercial product, TransIndic Transliterator in Unicode, from Linguists Software that seems like it does the job, although I don’t know much about it.  It costs $100 per typeface (they have Times, Palatino, Arial, etc.) or $250 for the whole thing.  Commercial license.  Paying for it has the advantage of having someone on the hook to help you with it, not a small thing.

Gandhari Unicode

This nice-looking typeface was originally designed to transcribe the newly discovered Buddhist manuscripts from Afghanistan.  (Gandhari is another Middle Indic prakrit like Pali.)  Gandhari Unicode is under active development, which is good, and seems widely accepted.  (Main page, download.)

The license status of Gandhari Unicode is a little bit troubling; it’s based on work licensed under the “Aladdin Free Public License” which isn’t, despite the name, a free public license.  The Free Software Foundation considers it a non-free license.  Other parts of Gandhari Unicode are GPL-derived but I don’t understand which takes precedence.  Note that the link in Andrew Glass’s documentation to the Aladdin license (at Wisconsin) is out of date.

[26 August 2009 update: According to reliable reports, there are issues with Gandhari Unicode's spacing, especially italics, when printed.]