Hello Everyone!
I recently found the most incredible item ever found at a bookshop, and I thought it was worth sharing with y’all.
I give you the 2026 Shakespearean Insults Desk Calendar! Now, for each day for the rest of the year, I will add a new insult to my repertoire to demean others with all of Shakespeare’s wit and swagger (a word that he seemingly invented). Here’s an insult that you can use to start your week off with a bang:
“What, you egg! Young fry of treachery” - Macbeth
Now with that said, let’s find out What’s Up With Will…
Spring 2026 Finals Week this time around was surprisingly unclimactic. As you might remember, I had already finished the final paper for Gender Studies last week, and by Tuesday, I had finished my final paper for Methods. This was probably in large part due to the project being scaffolded over the entire semester. I only had to write one analytical section and the conclusion, and then Bob’s your uncle.
My final paper turned out to be a qualitative study on the practical strategies wine bartenders use to broaden customers' wine knowledge and confidence in their taste preferences, based on interviews with two wine bartenders in the San Francisco Bay Area. However, as in my gender studies paper, I also used auto-ethnography and observational field notes as secondary research methods. If you are curious, I am happy to share more about my project!
All that is left school-wise is to grade the final/late assignments of my students for my public speaking class. So technically speaking, I am not done with the semester yet, but I am going to count it as such. One Year of my master’s degree down, one to go!
Rylee was off to Alabama for Hannah’s bridal shower with my mom and grandmother, so I fully expected to spend this weekend alone. My dad, who was also excluded from the bridal shower, called me up a few weeks ago with an idea. He asked, “What if I fly to San Francisco, and then we have ourselves a Sideways-themed weekend?” I immediately responded, “Let’s do it!”
Sideways is a 2004 road trip comedy-drama about two men taking a last hurrah trip to Southern California wine country before one is set to get married. The movie was critically and commercially successful, winning a total of 123 awards, including an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and 2 Golden Globes for Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy and Best Screenplay, and grossing over $109 Million globally. It also spawned what Economists refer to as the Sideways Effect, being credited for surging Pinot Noir market while depressing Merlot sales.
Over the course of the 2-hour and 7-minute film, we see several locations throughout the Santa Ynez Valley, including wineries, restaurants, and other tourist stops. For this trip, we were going to try to stop at several of them.
I picked up my dad on Thursday, and we started our 5-hour drive. What started as an offhand comment about Gilroy, CA, being the “Garlic Capital of the World”, turned into a side quest of searching up each small town we passed. We learned about Salinas, the “Salad Bowl of the World”, Paso Robles, “California’s Wild West of Wine” as it’s known in the wine industry, and Pismo Beach, the “Clam Capital of the World”. If we didn’t already have a plan this weekend, we could have easily gone up and down Route 101, tasting all that California has to offer. Maybe another time, though.
Side note: Who knew there were so many unofficial food capitals in California?
We pulled late at night to our hotel, and our first stop on our Sideways Weekend, the Sideways Inn. This was the same hotel that the main characters stayed in, so it felt only right, thematically speaking, that our nights should be spent here too. After a long day on the road, we immediately fell asleep for a jammed-packed weekend.
The next morning, we started off our trip by going to Ostrichland USA!
Ostrichland USA started in the early 1990s by a South African owner who farmed ostriches in his home country before deciding to continue selling ostrich eggs, feathers, and breeding pairs in America. The 32-acre farm is now home to over 150 ostriches and emus, and is mentioned in Sideways during one of the main characters’ clothes-less run back to Sideways Inn, remarking, “At one point, I had to cut through an ostrich farm. Those f---ers are mean!”
Nowadays, Ostrichland allows you to get up close and personal with these large birds, even giving you the opportunity to feed them. I can concur that these guys are fiesty. They attacked my food bowl like they had a bone to pick with it. Although cool to be face-to-face with an ostrich, I was in constant fear of being pecked. I also got to see baby ostriches, though, and they were much more adorable and a lot less scary.
Then, we drove into Solvang, CA, where we would spend the majority of our day. The next stop was the Book Loft bookstore and the Hans Christian Andersen Museum. Not only can you learn about the acclaimed fairytale writer, but you can also buy some of his books!
Hans Christian Andersen is famous for his fairy tales, beginning with his 1835 collection Fairy Tales Told for Children, which included stories such as The Princess and the Pea, The Little Mermaid, and The Snow Queen. Throughout his life, Andersen wrote more than 150 fairy tales, poems, novels, plays, travel books, and biographies. His works were translated into many languages and inspired countless books, movies, and plays around the world, including the Disney movies The Little Mermaid and Frozen. Compared with these upbeat adaptations, his did not always end happily. Instead, Andersen used his writing to teach lessons about hope, kindness, perseverance, and the importance of inner character over social status.
We then headed over to our first wine tasting of the trip, Alma Rosa Tasting Room.
As you might have been able to infer from the Sideways Effect mentioned earlier, this wine region of California is known for its Pinot Noirs. While not one of the wineries featured in Sideways, Alma Rosa is owned by Richard Sanford, the same owner as another winery featured, Sanford Winery. Sanford started growing Pinot in the area in the 1970’s, back when people thought of that area as too cold for quality grape growing. Over time, though, his wines followed a narrative arc similar to that of The Ugly Duckling (another Hans Christian Andersen fairytale), gaining national and international reputation through years of persistence and refinement. Ultimately, he was pivotal in the creation of the Santa Rita Hills American Viticultural Area (AVA).
At Alma Rosa, we tried an entirely Pinot Noir flight to grasp the sheer variety of this AVA. Our first wine was light and fruity, being grown in the Santa Rita Hills valley floor, but as we tried tasting across vineyards located at progressively higher elevations, the wines became bolder and more tannic. By the final of our 5 wines, I felt like I was drinking a Cabernet. The one thing across the board was the grapes’ signature p-funk (or Pinot Funk), which is a term used by sommeliers to describe the more natural and savory notes of a Pinot Noir.
Now that we were wined-up, we decided to learn more about this funky town of Solvang.
Originally the handcrafted home of Viggo Brandt-Erichsen and Martha Mott, the Elverhøj Museum is dedicated to Solvang’s history, art, and Danish heritage. In addition to showcasing what a Danish home would have looked like in the 18th century, it highlighted the history of Solvang itself.
Solvang was founded in 1911 by three Danish immigrants who sought to create a Danish-American colony of farms, homes, businesses, and a folk school, and chose 9,000 acres in the Santa Ynez Valley as the spot to do it. It stayed as a small agricultural settlement until the 1940s, when the town decided to emphasize Danish-style architecture to attract tourists after a Saturday Evening Post article brought the town national attention. In fact, before this article, Solvang looked like many other smaller Western towns. Windmills, half-timbered facades, and other Danish-inspired elements popped up overnight. For instance, the characteristic pitched roofs were used in Denmark to prevent a roof cave-in from snow. It has only snowed a handful of times in Solvang within the past century.
Finally, for dinner, we stopped at the Hitching Post 2, home to the “World’s Best BBQ Steaks”. In Sideways, this restaurant acted as a watering hole for the main characters and where we meet the main character’s love interest. Legend has it that the writer of the novel Sideways, Rex Pickett, would often stop at this restaurant’s bar on his trips from Southern California, and the staff was doubtful about his plan to write about this wine region. That was until location scouts started at its door.
The Hitching Post 2 was celebrating its 40th anniversary while we were there, so we welcomed ourselves to a wonderful three-course meal: a house salad, top sirloin with fries, and a cup of cookies and cream ice cream. And of course, I had to pair it with the Hitching Post’s in-house limited release Pinot Noir to celebrate 40 years.
The next day, we were off to the town next door to Solvang, Los Olivos. While Solvang went all in on Danish architecture, Los Olivos has a much more laid-back charm to it. Which I think was also reflected in our more laid-back day.
Fun Fact: Los Olivos is Spanish for the olive trees. I know what you might be thinking, but olive in Spanish is not "olivo”. It’s aceituna.
As we were walking around the town, waiting for places to open, we stumbled upon Pumacasú Antiques and Jewelry. We were greeted by an eccentric man who proclaimed himself as the “Corkscrew Guru.” Upon seeing my dad’s Georgia Tech hoodie, he started to geek out with us about the history of wine corkscrews, particularly the invention of the Thomason Corkscrew, a left and right-threaded device that could extract a cork in one continuous motion. In an NYT article, it has been dubbed the “best corkscrew that’s ever been designed”. I left feeling a bit inadequate, knowing that none of my corkscrews came even close to the level of sophistication of the Thomason.
We also stopped at the Los Olivos Wine Merchant and Cafe, and its
We also stopped at the Los Olivos Wine Merchant and Cafe, where the main characters go on a double date, and the arguably more famous alleyway right next to the Los Olivos Wine Merchant and Cafe, where the main character single-handedly tanks the value of Merlot with his line, “I am not drinking any f—ing Merlot!” (It should be noted that at no point on this trip did we drink Merlot. That would be blasphemous.) I had an absolutely bomb Santa Barbara pizza! It was covered with cheese, roasted garlic oil, pistachios, fried rosemary, burrata, and arugula. I have never had pistachios or rosemary on pizza, but sign me up for the future!
Our final stop on our Sideways Trip was Fess Parker Winery, founded by the actor Fess Parker after his television career portraying Frontier Legends like Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. Over time, Fess Parker has also become somewhat legendary in the region and has played an important role in mentoring winemakers in the area. Yet despite its significance, the real reason we were going here was that this winery was the site where the main character receives a phone call that his book was rejected and decides to drink from a spit bucket.
We entered with one goal, and one goal only: to recreate that scene. However, when we sat down, they did not immediately give us a spit bucket. I guess a lot of other people have the same idea, so they now wait until someone actually needs one. Unfortunately, I had to make a sacrificial offering of Grenache Blanc to the Wine Gods to get the photo I wanted. I want it on the record that I did not drink from the spit bucket, though.
With that masterpiece of a picture secured, we spent the rest of the time enjoying a wide range of wines, including Pinot Noir from its vineyards in the Santa Rita Hills AVA, and a Riesling, Viognier, and Syrah on property in the Santa Ynez Valley AVA, whose climate is better suited for those varieties.
While trying to find breakfast to fuel our Sideways adventure, we stumbled upon a feud between two Danish pancake places in the area: Paula’s Pancakes and Ellen’s Danish Pancake House.
Ellen’s began in 1947 in Solvang by Danish immigrants Ellen and Carlo Hansen, but in 1986, LA transplants Paula and Charles Greenwald bought the building that housed Ellen’s and gave them a two-day notice to get out. Soon after, they opened Paula’s in that same spot. Ellen’s had to move to the neighboring town of Buellton. This eviction notice was the start of a long-running pancake rivalry.
We wanted to test ourselves which pancakes reigned supreme. First was Paula’s, which had softer, fluffier pancakes, topped with cinnamon apple topping and thick whipped cream. At Ellen’s, the pancakes had a slightly crispier texture and were loaded with whipped cream and apple sauce. At the end of the day, I am going to have to side with the OG Ellen’s. Big win for the underdog!
To lock in for studies, I generally listen to some form of lofi / binaural beats /study music. This finals week, I’ve stumbled into the genre of “No AI” study music, where they are specifically pointing out that it is real people and not a machine making our music. I’m here for the vibes, but it’s kind of dystopian when you think about it.
