Head of the Charles

The Head of the Charles Regatta was held this past weekend in Boston/Cambridge. If you were watching the ALCS game on Saturday night, you might have seen some footage of a few races going by.
This is the largest regatta in the world. Granted, The Boat Race between Oxford and Cambridge is more prestigious and has more total spectators; (estimates range from 10 - 120 million TV viewers) each draws nearly a quarter of a million spectators to the banks of the rivers. But whereas Boat Race only has 36 competitors, the Charles features approximately 1,700 boats and 9,000 participants.

I rowed in the Club 8+ with Potomac BC; we also raced a Masters 8+ and a Champ 4+. Unfortunately, the Champ 4+ broke a rudder cable early in the race and had to withdraw. The Masters did very well against some tough competition. The "87 Gold" boat that passed them ended up getting disqualified because one of their rowers was found to be in his 20s, younger than the 30 year-old Masters limit. Blatantly ignoring the rules is one thing, but what makes it worse is that bow seat in that boat was none other than Mike Teti, the US national team Men's Head Coach.
NC State's rowing club also brought 2 boats, a men's Club 4+ and a Lightweight 4+. Both rowed very well, the club 4+ missing the top 50% mark by just 7 seconds.

Blog Revived

For those of you who checked my blog while I was traveling through Sweden, you noticed that not much happened after my trip to Riga. But hopefully this will be the beginning of more regular posts.
For the most part, my posts won't be as exciting as Donny's (in Bangladesh), Kristina's (Chile), Greg's (Cambridge), or Saket's (Stanford) but hopefully I'll at least be able to keep you up to date on the interesting things that do happen around here.

For those that aren't aware, my life currently consists of rowing at Potomac Boat Club and working at the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

(The respective logos of the USPTO and PBC. I'm not sure why the eagle is golden, though it seems to be a common feature/flaw of US seals. I suppose it does look better than a real bald eagle.)




I've also been auditing the German 101 course that my mother teaches at Catholic University, though I can't attend lectures. It is certainly interesting to see the dynamics of learning a new language after spending the past 3 years on Arabic, and Spanish before that. German is, first of all, considered a less difficult language than Arabic, and this is made even simpler because of my knowledge of both English and Swedish. I'd like to become fluent in German, but I also need to make sure I don't forget all of my Arabic.

I hope to rotate my posts in this forum between stories and updates on my life, so that my friends across the world and around the country can keep up to date; I also hope to post interesting updates about my experiences with the US Patent system from the inside.

And finally a note on the new title of my Blog. (Copyright 2007, Benjamin Gaddy.) Perhaps it'll be the title of my memoir. A reference (tribute) to James Joyce, and a fascinating book which I read in the 12th grade AP English, one of the few I finished. I'll explain the rest in my next post!