Mountain View Arts & Wine Fair 2016

[tuftears]

"Wait, Tuftears, didn't you do one of these already?"

"Yes, but that was the Arts and *Crafts* fair. This is the Arts and *Wine* fair."

"So what's the difference?"

"Not a lot, this one's toward the end of the summer, but otherwise pretty much the same thing. A long stretch of booths allll the way from Central to El Camino Real."



First up was the hydrogen-powered Mirai from Toyota. They must have paid quite a bit to get preferential placement. I have a hard time seeing this take off though. Electrical vehicles, sure, you can charge them in your own garage. Hydrogen fueling stations seem pretty rare as yet. Not a bad looking car though.



Random musicians.



I apologize. It has been so long I have completely forgotten what this odd instrument is called.



The statue is back! This time he's got a guitar. The awesomeness intensifies!

Yes, I tipped. :) Gotta be hot wearing that much makeup and those clothes all day.



I saw this woman selling interesting hair ornaments so I figured maybe haikujaguar would be interested. They're basically metal spirals, meant to be woven into one's hair.



For lunch I had my usual lamb-and-beef gyro, so I didn't bother taking a picture of that. Instead, here, behold these crepes being made! She basically made the crepe in one pan while taking orders.



Then she flipped it over deftly into the second pan and got another crepe started in the first one. Here, you can see her folding the crepe over the ingredients.



Delicious! This is a mixed-berries-and-whipped-cream crepe.



This one booth had displays of various olive oils. I was interested but didn't want to commit to one of these big bottles... I asked; they had smaller $15 bottles. Probably a good thing I got a smaller size; I still haven't figured out what to do with the orange-flavored olive oil I've got now.



This other booth had... bacon-flavored caramels as one of the flavors. I tried some of their regular caramels. Pretty good, but I'm not much of a caramel person.



My old wallet is getting pretty worn out so I figured I'd pick up a new wallet.



This friendly-looking fellow was out on the sidewalk directly opposite one of the booths.

Phew. That's almost all the pictures I've got to catch up on.

Comments

[rowyn]

Eeeee spider!

I've seen those hair-twist ornaments frequently at renfaires. I have thick tapered one that I can put (most of) my pony tail in!

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Yeah, spider is "aiee" material if you aren't expecting it! :)

I could see that working well, re: ponytail holder. Faaancy ponytail.

[cjthomas.livejournal.com]

The instrument looks like a didgeridoo - a native Australian instrument - though it's possible it's something else and I'm misidentifying it.

I've never understood hydrogen cars. It diffuses through metal and has low density, so you get pretty bad losses trying to transport it by pipe, it leaks away over time in storage (at your fuel stations or in your car), and the weight of the tankage far outweighs the weight of the fuel.

For powering electric vehicles, aren't re-forming fuel cells running off of alcohol or hydrocarbons a better solution? What happened to those car projects? They were all the rage in the 1990s, we saw prototype buses with phosphoric acid fuel cells roll out, and then the news stories about them stopped.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

It could be a didgeridoo. It was definitely novel :)

Yeah, I don't get the hydrogen car thing, it seems like they'll be going uphill to try and establish it as the new in thing.

[cjthomas.livejournal.com]

I'm having enough trouble understanding electric cars at all. You get regenerative braking... and not much else. In return you have to deal with batteries, which are heavy and have lifetime problems despite decades of effort. Wouldn't it make more sense to use the electricity (or better yet, the heat that you'd otherwise be using to run those steam turbines to generate the electricity) to instead synthesize a chemical fuel?

If we're already planning to sequester CO2, strip apart water and react CO2 with hydrogen to turn it into methane, and transport that over our existing natural gas infrastructure and run cars using existing off-the-shelf natural gas conversion kits.

If we don't want to have to scrub our CO2, or if there wouldn't be enough industrial CO2 to run the automotive fuel cycle, we could turn air and water into ammonia instead (we already do this on a massive scale for fertilizer). Ammonia handles like propane (turns into a liquid under modest pressure), so once again we can use our existing distribution infrastructure, and like hydrogen it's lighter than air so it'll never pool anywhere.

If ammonia is too much of a pain to burn (the reason we don't use it in rockets), you can dimerize it to make hydrazine, which handles like water and burns a bit more easily.

These fuels are about as dangerous as gasoline - you wouldn't want to drink them or take a bath in them, but they're otherwise no worse than anything else we handle on a regular basis. They also give you energy storage densities many orders of magnitude better than any battery will, and unlike a stack of lithium batteries your gas tank won't lose half its capacity in a couple of years.

[/soapbox] =^.^=

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

For me, the attraction is that I don't drive a lot so I can plug a car in at night, drive it from/to work, and basically don't have to deal with fueling again for the expected lifetime of the car.