Rocknrace

Today I woke up at around 8:30. Last Sunday, it was a different story. Up at 5:30, out of the house by 7. I was off to the Rock 'n Race. The goal of the Rock 'n Race was to raise money for and awareness of colon cancer. I must admit, though, it was the prospect of seeing Paul Simon at the post-walk concert that drew me in. That, and the 5K walk. I needed the exercise. In fact, my joke was that while everyone else was walking to fight colon cancer, I was walking to fight heart disease.

As the beginnning of the race approached, I joined the mob at the starting line. Looking around, everybody else had their number pinned to their shirt, like I did. But many people had placards pinned on their backs. "I am participating in memory of..." "Mom"..."Uncle Joe"..."Grandpa" Wow. That really got to me. Eventually I looked around and saw that some of the placards said, "I am participating in support of..." That made me feel somewhat better. Of course, eventually I noticed someone whose placard ended "...myself." Wow, and I was just out for a walk.

Then Katie Couric fired the starting airhorn and we were off. Shuffling very, very slowly. Was the whole walk going to be this slow? No, it turned out, it was just as we were passing by Katie Couric, and everybody strained to get a look, or a picture or an autograph. Once past her, the pack spread out to a reasonable pace, it was time for a nice walk around DC. We walked to Union Station, then swung back and walked up and down the mall. Beautiful day, nice and invigorating.

Then it was back to plop down on the mall for the entertainment portion. I munched on the breakfast provided for me. (Hey, between that and the t-shirt, I hope they saved some money out of my registration fee to fight colon cancer.) I listened to the Max Weinberg Seven and profiles of people who had survived colon cancer...and those who had lost loved ones to the disease. Again, pretty moving. And I should mention, it's worth reading up about colon cancer. Something like 90% of all cases are cureable if caught early enough, so if you're at risk, it's really worth it to get checked out. Please.

After that, by 11, it was time for the main attraction...Paul Simon. This summer I went through my entire CD collection and listened to all of the CDs. I realized how great Paul Simon was. Wow; the guy put out wonderful music from his work with Garfunkel in the '60s until 1990's The Rhythm of the Saints. (I wasn't familiar with the Capeman, and I don't have his new album yet.) And here was a chance to see a living legend for far less than a concert ticket. And get a free t-shirt! And fight colon cancer! How could I pass this up?

Anyway, it was a really nice experience. For an hour-long concert, he played quite a number of songs from Graceland...4, I believe -- Boy in the Bubble, Graceland, Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes and You Can Call Me Al. He also did Bridge over Troubled Water, a very different version of Kodachrome, The Boxer and three songs from the new album. His encore was Late in the Evening.

As I shuffled off to the Metro to get back home in time for the Redskins game, I was pretty darn happy with what I had gotten accomplished by noon that day. Today, I'll have to settle for writing this as my accomplishment.

England Pictures

I've uploaded pictures from my recent England trip here.

George Hits Japan

And now for the final entry in the George Trilogy, as our hero arrives in Tokyo...

I can't remember the last time I was doing something peaceful like getting off an airplane that I got shoved so many times. Then the cab ride from the airport to the hotel was damn expensive and the parts of the city that we drove through didn't look like a place worth driving through. But things get worse...

The meter on the taxi is ticking away, the city is just a mass of concrete with no style at all, and we finally get cleaned out of cash when we get dropped off, and the ride cost us 25000 yen. 25000 yen is roughly equivalent to 250 dollars. The hotel looked ok from the outside, but it had all the signs of being a low budget place to stay. There was no driveway to the main lobby, no doorman, and no bell boy to tote the luggage upstairs for us. All of these things were standards on my previous trips for this company. At check in we learned that the front desk staff doesn't speak good English, and you guessed it, we don't speak good Japanese. We get checked in after a while and head upstairs. The room looks like a jail cell. Very small box of a room with a crapper that spit at me when I went to use it. When I got into bed I found that the pillow must be stuffed with beans, and then the whole thing smelled of cigarette smoke. Needless to say we moved to a better hotel the next day. This one had all the features that I expect to have on business trips.

Saturday, without checking out the weather we joined a bus tour to Mt. Fuji. Along the road it started to rain pretty hard. No problem, it will probably blow over. No such luck, we get there in a serious rain. No problem, I've been wet before. Boy did I get wet, and although I was standing on it, I never actually saw it. The clouds were so low you could see about 20 feet in front of you. The next stop was lunch. They took us to one of the traditional places where you sit on a mat on the floor and cram you legs under the table. It was ok, but being far from decent plumbing I wasn't going to take any risks and didn't eat much of it. After that we went to The Valley of Big Hell. This is where an ancient volcano had collapsed upon itself and now it smokes and bubbles up hat springs of water high in sulfur. Just in time to hike around here the rain started to come down like crazy and we got soaked through and through. The thing to do here is hike up a
bit to this shack that boils eggs in the hot spring water and eat one. Supposedly it gives you seven extra years to live. They looked pretty bad but tasted like normal eggs. The trip back to Tokyo was on the bullet train. I was a bit disappointed with its speed because it didn't feel like it was going fast, but it shortened a 3 hour drive into 36 minutes. Not too bad. We had to walk back to the hotel from the subway station that evening. You guessed it, raining even harder now. Joining the rain were high winds and lightning. We looked like we had been through hell when we got to the hotel.

Sunday I found out why the weather just got worse as the day went on. Typhoon #17 approached Tokyo on Saturday and passed by just to the east on Sunday. Sunday was boring as a result of the weather. I did the next best thing and hung out in the bar.

George and the Singapore Sling

The second of three installments from my friend George...

A great thing happened the same day I sent my last report. It was my last
night in Singapore and I still had not been to the Long Bar in Raffles Hotel
for my Singapore Sling. Now, for all of you who don't know the importance
of Raffles (I was one before heading on this trip), The Long Bar at this
hotel is where the Singapore Sling was invented. Being here for so many
days and not having one was eating at my conscience. So after work off we
went. A pretty good drink too. Didn't taste too fruity, and packed a
decent punch. A few went down and the guy I'm travelling with got a bit
tipsy. Next thing I notice is this bar menu telling me that the kitchen is
about to close and lo and behold they have hamburgers for $13 and it costs
an additional $1 for cheese and an additional $1 for bacon. Hell with it
all, I want two with both cheese and bacon. The tasted good and were a good
size so I didn't mind spending that much.

Anyway, we had to leave the hotel at 4 AM to get to the airport for our
flight to Tokyo so I got loaded on Singapore Slings and stayed up all night.
Singapore is a nice place, and I finally felt satisfied with my stay there.
I would go back if anyone comes up with a reason.

George in Kuala Lumpur

Well, I've run out of England stories. For your vicarious traveling pleasure, however, George has agreed to let me post his Tales of the Mysterious East. Today: Kuala Lumpur.

Greetings from the other side of the world. Everything is going along mostly on schedule down here. We have made it past Kuala Lumpur and are pretty much finished with Singapore now.

We only had one day free in KL and pretty much got lost walking around the city. We walked over to the Petronas Twin Tower (tallest building in the world), and then proceeded to get lost in interesting parts of the city. Not necessarily parts we wanted to see, but definitely educational. I don't think I had ever seen so many chickens running around in a city before. Malaysia appeared to be a country desperately trying to not be third world, but at the same time definitely is third world.

Singapore though is completely modern. Heavily influenced by the Chinese, and somewhat enjoyable. For a place as small as it is, there seems to be a lot to do. Just don't go to the beach expecting to see Singaporean babes in bikinis. For some reason they wear more clothes to the beach then they do to go shopping. It's been fun though.

The food is killing me though. I'd had enough of oriental foods before I got off the plane in KL. By the time I reached KL I had endured two days of nothing but curried chicken or Chinese food of some sort. Last night we attempted to eat hamburgers, but even these were Japanese style with some kind of onion/tomato/gross stuff all over it. When this trip is done I might not eat Oriental for a few years.

Who Won the Debate?

I watched the presidential debate last night. I admit, I thought Gore won, and Bush looked out of his depth. But then, I went in with that expectation. So I turned to the commentariant to tell me what the "consensus opinion" was. In Slate, Jacob Weisberg explained that "Bush got his clock cleaned." So I was right. And in Salon, Andrew Sullivan concludes, "It was a knockout." For Bush. Hmm. So maybe this debate just did confirm whatever expectation people went in with.

Here's what confirmed mine. After Bush suggested getting the Russians to mediate in Yugoslavia, the following exchange ensued.

GORE: ...But I think we need to be very careful in the present
situation before we invite the Russians to play the lead role in
mediating.

BUSH: Well, obviously we wouldn't use the Russians if they didn't
agree with our answer, Mr. Vice President.

GORE: Well, they don't.

The "Well, they don't," just had this air of, "Is it too much to ask you to pay attention?" It cracked me up.

The Two Noble Kinsmen

I wondered if I could walk to the hotel and back to the Globe in time for that evening's performance of The Two Noble Kinsmen. It pretty soon became apparent that I couldn't. Well, no problems -- I'd just catch a taxi on the way back from the hotel. Unfortunately, I didn't see one near the hotel. So I walked towards the Globe and tried to hail the various cabs I saw on the way there. No luck -- they were all occupied. Eventually, I made it to the footpath along the Thames...and realized I wasn't going to catch a cab there. Oh, well, I hoped they'd still let me in. I eventually got there about 15 minutes late, and stood in line behind people buying last-minute tickets. I eventually picked mine up and slipped in the back. Looking at the play now, I think I showed up towards the end of Act I.

The Two Noble Kinsmen, unlike The Antipodes, was actually written by Shakespeare. Well, sort of. OK, co-written. Sigh. It's "by John Fletcher and William Shakespeare." But still. It counts.

Anyway, it's the story of these two cousins...nobles, in fact. They're thrown in jail for something or another (look, I got there late). I think 'cuase they lost a war. They don't seem to be too annoyed by this fact until they cast eyes upon Emilia, King Theseus' sister-in-law. They both fall for her, for no particuarly good reason. They scheme to get out of jail (free?) and fight each other over Emilia. Is it a tragedy? A comedy? I dunno, but it was another fun play. At the end, the artistic director thanked us for filling the house for one of Shakespeare's less known plays as the cast threw red roses.

After that it was off to bed, for the next morning I had to take the Tube to Heathrow. The ride was nice enough. There were a couple of Americans sitting across from me that were comparing the size of "the gap" (as in "mind the gap") at the various stations we passed. It was kind of amusing until they started saying things like, "Wow, that's really uneven. Can't these Brits do anything right?" Sigh. I like my country, just not all of the people from there.

At the airport, somehow I got selected for the extra hassle treatment. You know, extra X-ray of the baggage, rifling through my carry-ons, stuff like that. The actual hassling of me didn't take long. The problem is that there's only one person to hassle all of us, and the people in front of me just seemed to need more hassling. Like the guy who seemed to have his entire life wrapped up in his carry-on luggage. Oh, well. After the security guy made a joke about confiscating my sunglasses, I was through and back on my way to the USA.

Tate Modern

The Tate Modern was my next stop. Truthfully, I could have spent the whole weekend there...4 1/2 hours seemed very rushed. Going in, I had very little familiarity with modern art. Coming out...well, I guess I now have some familiarity with it.

The Tate Modern opened earlier this year in what was formerly a "redundant" power plant on the South Bank of the Thames (right next to the Globe). It's a huge building. It has three main floors of exhibitions. The third floor alone took me two hours to view, and I didn't linger for all of it. One of the nice features is a digital voice player you can rent for a pound. When you see a number underneath the description of a work of art, you can punch in that number and hear a curator or an artist speak about the work. That's a good improvement on the self-guided tour with the tape player.

One of the photographers whose work I liked the most was Andreas Gursky. In particular, I liked Rhein II, which you'll have to picture as an oversized landscape rather than a...er, image in a browser. He also does some pictures with interesting special effects.

Some of the works I saw fell into the old "Is it art?" category. For example, one picture (Lucio Fontana's "Spacial Concept 'Waiting'") was just a blank canvas which had been slashed. I think the artist was trying to make some sort of point about getting beyond the traditional two-dimensional canvas. OK. Interesting-looking, actually. But now that you've made the point... Also in that category, I'd put Yves Klein's "IKB79". "IKB" stands for "International Klein Blue," a color he "invented" and patented. And I must admit it's a pretty neat color. I'd love a shirt in that color. But do I really want to see a canvas painted completely in that color? More than once?

I particularly liked their Dali paintings, such as Autumnal Cannibalism and Metamorphosis of Narcissus. There's something about the surrealist pictures that really strikes a cord with me. Some of his other work, however, I just found odd, such as Lobster Telephone. According to the Tate Modern, Dali found both lobsters and telephones to be erotic, so he liked the juxtaposition. I think that tells more about Dali than anyone else. And more about Dali than we need to know.

Speaking of Surrealists, I was interested to see a painting by Rene Magritte. Not because I have a particular interest in Magritte's work. In fact, not because I knew anything about Magritte. I just knew the Paul Simon song "Rene and Georgette Magritte with their Dog after the War". So that's who Rene Magritte is. Incidentally, there's a pretty interesting interview with Paul Simon where he describes how he came to write that song. "It doesn't actually make sense, but why should a song about Magritte make sense?"

Duchamp's "Urinal" was interesting. Some of the story is told here; basically, Duchamp bought a urinal, signed it, and entered it into an exhibition that was open to any artist who would pay 6 bucks. The urinal mysteriously disappeared before the exhibition. Once again the question is, "What is art?" "Is it art if an artist says so?" Good questions, but too much navel-gazing can become tiresome.

I think that's one of the things that makes Gilbert and George (warning: naughty language at their site) so enjoyable.

"We want our art to speak across the barriers of knowledge directly to People about their Life and not about their knowledge of art. The 20th century has been cursed with an art that cannot be understood. The decadent artists stand for themselves and their chosen few, laughing at and dismissing the normal outsider. We say that puzzling, obscure and form-obsessed art is decadent and a cruel denial of the Life of People."

OK, still pretentious, but "speak...directly to people about their life and not about their knowledge of art" is a worthy goal.

Which is one of the fun things about Andy Warhol. You don't stare at his pictures and say, "What the heck is that?" It's Elvis! Two of them! Or Marilyn Monroe. And, yes, it's more complicated than that, but at least you don't have to worry that you're missing everything because you don't know about his strange relationship with lobsters. For the Andy Warhol room, the digital voice player had David Bowie's "Andy Warhol" which I cranked up to maximum volume while walking around the room to the disconcerted looks of other patrons.

On the other hand, sometimes things may speak too directly to us. Sam Taylor Wood's "Brontosaurus" features a film of a naked guy flailing around while classical music plays. She explained that she had a friend dance naked to techno music while she filmed him. When she played around with things, she said she found that the slowed-down images without the original sound looked alien to her. I don't know; the first thing I thought was, "Hmm. Naked guy dancing. Probably to techno music, but it's been slowed down."

Anyway, I look forward to future visits to art museums a little closer to home, now that I have some exposure to twentieth century art. After touring two floors of galleries and taking the voice player's recommended "architecture tour", I visited the gift shop and hurried back to my hotel to drop off the day's purchases.

QB4I

I got up last Saturday morning with my eye on the London Eye. I wandered down to the edge of the Thames half an hour before it was due to open and spotted the queue for tickets. I fortified myself with breakfast from a street vendor -- a bagel with salmon & cream cheese and a Coke that appeared to be from Slovakia. (What's going on there?) Then I got in the queue and 45 minutes later, I emerged with a ticket for noon. It was 10:00, and I was to queue again for "boarding" at 11:30. Hmm, not enough time to do sightseeing, so I wandered around, bought souveniers and wrote postcards.

At 11:30, I queued up again. This was a relatively disorganised queue. I got in it at the end (of course), but then the London Eyesters invented a new end, started queueing people there, and moved us behind it. At one point, the queue crossed a public path in such a way that it really wasn't clear who was queued and who was walking through. After 45 minutes of queueing, we found ourselves on the Eye.

The London Eye is the world's largest Ferris Wheel. It's huge. The previous record-holder was 85 meters high. This is 135 meters high. Wow. You can get some nice views of London that way. I suppose you could orient yourself in London via one of those double-decker bus tours -- but that's too slow, and you don't get a great sense of relative position. You could do so via boat, but then you don't see inland (including the big waste-o'-pounds Millenium Dome).

Oh, but the views! Quite spectacular. I hope my pictures turned out well. The glass was a bit reflective, and one of my disposable cameras had a flash (not to mention the reflection from the sunglight). I could see all the sights of London, and I bought a pamplet that had all of them labelled. I now have a much better sense of where the major landmarks are in relation to one another and the Thames, and where I've been in London.

After the 30 minute ride, I stepped off the Eye (while still moving -- American insurance companies would never go for that one). The whole experience was crowded, and it was very touristy...but I heartily recommend it to anyone who goes to London. Just get your tickets ahead of time. With that, it was time for lunch and the Tate Modern...

Wrestlemania

"Based on how Rulon and Karelin wrestled today, I have to think that Rulon has a serious chance (sorry I keep changing my opinion on that). Rulon is unquestionably in better condition than anybody out there. If the match goes into over-time, I think Rulon might pull off an upset. Of course I am a Karelin fan and I would be really sad to see him lose, but he should retire before he meets Rulon."

My pal Scott Contini knows his wrestling. He made the above comment before the "Miracle on the Mat".

The Antipodes

After I had checked in to my London hotel, shaved and showered, it was time to find dinner. I looked in a restaurant guide from the hotel to find something interesting and appropriately located. I settled on Livebait -- "Fresh Fish with a Difference." After I sat down, they placed a bowl of prawns on the table to stare at me. Fortified by that, Bushmills and a selection of their excellent bread, I placed my order. They had a Friday fish 'n' chips special, but that didn't seem to have enough of a...difference (even fancy fish 'n' chips). So I ordered the pre-theatre "set price" menu. (I was going to the theatre, after all.) The first course was sardines with sweet potato and rouille on mixed leaves. The main course was grilled marlin on crushed new potatoes with tapenade and pesto. Excellent, excellent. I followed that up with the mango creme brulee and then sped my way on to the theater.

I left Livebait and walked down to the Globe. When I first got tickets for The Antipodes at "Shakespeare's Globe," I assumed that I really just wasn't familiar enough with the Bard's work to have heard of this particular play. (Hey, "Hamlet" sold out.) Eventually, I discovered that it was, in fact, not written by Shakespeare. Well, a play written by Ben Jonson would be OK, too right? No, wait, this was written by Richard Brome, Jonson's manservant. Hmm. Well, I had ordered the ticket already. Apparently I wasn't the only one to suffer the confusion. As I was waiting to collect my ticket, I heard someone behind me say, "I just assumed that I had never heard of it," followed by, "Darn it."

After collecting my ticket, I head...where else?...for the gift shop. I noticed with some amusement that the T-shirt declaring me as a "groundling" cost twice as much as the ticket to be a groundling. The groundlings stand right in front of the stage. In Shakespeare's time, admission was 1 penny and the groundlings had a reputation for rude and uncouth behavior. I quickly took my place at the edge of the stage and rested my elbows on it.

Looking around, the first thing I noticed was how many young women there were around me. Wow. Why didn't somebody clue me in to this when I was 16? The show began with some announcements (e.g., no photography). We were told that there was a celebrity among us. (Presumably he got to sit down.) Richard Fauldes, England's first gold medalist of the 2000 Olympics was in attendance. This was deemed appropriate, since in the context of this play, "the antipodes" were the lands on the opposite end of the globe.

The Antipodes is a comedy about a country lord who comes to London seeking a cure for his daughter-in-law's madness. It turns out the whole family is pretty much bonkers, with the lord's son lost in dreams of faraway places, and the lord himself gripped by jealousy over his young wife's supposed infidelity. The cure involves the doctor and the lord being visited putting on a play (also called "The Antipodes"). They fool the son into thinking he's been transported to the anti-London, where everything's backwards (Bizarro London?). Since it's a comedy, everything works out in the end, and it is pretty funny in the process.

After the show, the artistic director came out to thank us for attending the last show of "The Antipodes." The actors threw white roses out to the audience. (I caught one, which died a quick death in my hotel room.) He thanked everybody involved, and talked about how great it was to have the house filled for such an obscure play. (I wonder if he realized how many people bought their tickets and said, "Well it's Shakespeare, right?"

I then walked out and admired the views of the London skyline (in particular, St. Paul's Cathedral) across the Thames. A man next to me turned to his companion and said, "It looks just like something you'd see in Washington DC." Glad I made the trip. I walked along the Thames and into the city to the Internet cafe at Charing Cross.

You say it's your birthday...

I don't know what I'm doing for my birthday next year. But if anyone shows up with this on their head, I'm running like hell.

Quotes

"America is the first society in the world that has tried to organise itself on the assumption that human beings do not need to sleep. There are 24-hour news channels, 24-hour wedding chapels, and, of course, 24-hour lap-dancing emporiums."
--The Economist, 9 Sep 2000, p. 34

"We believe the Spice Girls are split on the euro."
-ibid, p. 68

"Ignoring enemies is the best way to fight."
--Jenny Holzer, Truisms (at the Tate Modern)

"First of all, there's no way to make anyone listen to anything. The sooner you embrace that, the less frustrating your life will be."
--Carolyn Hax

Jerky Boys

"To the consternation of Sampson and his team, the Slim Jim loyalists turn out to be a pretty stoical crew. "They didn't seem too bothered by it," Sampson says. "Maybe one or two would ask, 'What's mechanically separated chicken?' 'What do you think it is,' the moderator was instructed to reply. People tended to draw pictures of a chicken carcass flying at a jet engine," Sampson says wearily."

Dungeon fave Ruth Shalit has an article at Salon on the marketing of beef jerky. Funny stuff.

Viewer Mail

Martin writes,

"The second time I went to Fado, I was with my Irish friend Nolene who hadn't been there before. I recommended a particular salad but said I hadn't enjoyed the black pudding served with it, and she said she never eats that because she doesn't like the idea of eating blood. A moment later she realized the blood part was news to me and laughed for about an hour."

You Can't Go Back to Belgium

Greetings from London, land of 24-hour internet cafes...

So Wednesday night I decided to head for the Belgian Monk, Cheltenham's Belgian restaurant. Ever since my trip in May to Belgium, I had been hankering to try Belgian food again (especially the fries). So I sat down, ordered Grimbergen Triple -- 9% alcohol by volume. Then I ordered mussels and fries. When they arrived, well, the fries were comparable to Wendy's fries. The mussels were OK, but nothing special. Sigh.

I decided to give Belgium one more chance, so for dessert I ordered waffles a la mode. They were as good as I remembered them, but frankly after 3 Grimbergen Triples, I probably would have raved about a Frosty.

One thing I noticed in the restaurant is that those darn scooters are everywhere now.

The next evening it was off with a colleague for Indian food. I ended up with the Prawns Madras, some Kulcha Nan, and a Kingfisher. The Prawns Madras may have been too spicy, as I regretted them a bit this morning.

Temperature Rising

My colleague was going to leave at 6 AM to drive to Heathrow. He was my ride, but I found out that for 11 pounds I could take the coach to London. Not the bus, the coach. Buses are local; coaches are cross-country. Got that? Anyway, given that, I could sleep late, have breakfast at the Lypiatt House, and then arrive at London Victoria instead of Heathrow...all in all, it seemed worth it. So I took the 12:30 coach.

Everything seemed to go well until we were departing the stop at Heathrow. A minute or so later, the coach driver announced, "As soon as we left, my temperature started to rise, so we have to head back." So the coach had mechanical difficulties. Or the coach driver did; the phrasing was somewhat ambiguous. Eventually it was clarified that the coach, in fact, had the trouble. After a delay of 30-45 minutes, things were put better, and we were on our way again.

After arriving in London Victoria, I took the Tube to Lambeth North, which I had determined was the closest station to my hotel (another thing the morning in Cheltenham allowed me to do was to buy a map). It's across the street from the Imperial War Museum, which I have visited before, did not plan to visit again, but will probably be tempted into visiting tomorrow.

I would have just gotten a guest house or something when I got here, but I wanted to be able to give emergency contact information in advance. So I looked for a hotel that met my criteria: reservable online, in Southwark and a reasonable price (which turned out to be near $100). And after all that trouble, when I went to check in, my reservation wasn't there. Oops. They got me a room anyway, but it made me wonder what all the trouble I went through was for. Then I realized that the fact I had gotten a room by reserving last week meant that a room was probably going to be there for me, even if my reservation wasn't.

One interesting feature of the room is that I need to put my room key in a slot in order to get electricity in the room. I guess it conserves energy, and I guess I don't mind, but...weird. Then it was off to dinner and the Globe, but I'll write about that another time, as it's late & time to take a taxi back to Southwark.

Department of Corections

OK, looking at the menu this morning, it was "black pudding", not "blood pudding." That make the confusion more understandable. On the other hand, I try to avoid foods that share their names with D&D monsters.

Yesterday was a nice day of work; it's fun to realize that there are people over here working on similar things to what I'm working on, and it's good to interact with them. Afterwards, it was off to the Belmont Restaurant for dinner. I was somewhat concerned to discover that Her Majesty's Government was picking up the check -- would this constitute "recourse to public funds"? Could I be deported for this? Evenutally, I decided that it constituted "recourse to public foods" and I was OK on that account.

Today was more meetings. I did get to see an old Cray. If you look carefully at the picture I linked to (sorry, I couldn't find a better one), you'll see that it doubles as a couch. It was pretty neat seeing the one in the Air & Space museum last year (the one pictured). It was really neat this morning taking a break, drinking a Dr. Pepper and reading the paper while sitting on one. Let's see...I also picked up some "digestive biscuits" (cookies) for a friend of mine...not much else to report. I'm over here to work (until I get to London), and while that's cool, I don't have much time left over for tourism right now.

"What's in the Blood Pudding?"

Greetings from the land of cold rooms and warm beer, where I have once again somehow managed to sneak away and garner Internet access.

Was it worth it to fly over here just so I wouldn't have to watch the Redskins game?

After checking into the Lypiatt House yesterday, I wandered around, got my bearings and headed into a pub. Ah, England. I ordered fish and chips (avoiding the "American-style hot dog"...authenticity in pubs is sometimes hard to come by these days) and a nice, warm beer. Ah, that was nice. A couple of months ago, I ordered a Bass ale at the Santa Fe Cafe in College Park and was served it ice cold. There and then I vowed to come over here and drink English beer at the proper temperature. (OK, so it's not much of a vow.)

I went back to my room with the intentions of freshening up. Sadly, after watching a few minutes of the Pakistan-UK field hockey match on the BBC, I was overcome with a deep need for sleep. Now, I know that the recommended means of overcoming jetlag is to stay up until the next night, but I was proud of myself for keeping it down to a 2-hour nap. Of course, having terrible nightmares will do that to you, too.

So I headed out again. I made it to the Cheltenham museum half an hour before it closed. That was about 10 minutes too much. They had a lot of artwork I wasn't interested in, and some fairly random exhibits of pottery. The one really cool room was devoted to Edward Wilson, an artist and zoologist from Cheltenham who went with Scott on his Antarctic Expeditions, and died with him after reaching the South Pole. They had some of his watercolors of penguins, and a bunch of his gear. It was pretty neat.

Last night I went out to dinner with a colleague and his wife. For some reason, the age distribution of people at my work is a bit skewed towards the baby boomer era. I mean, I like those people, but well...see my previous thoughts on age and socialization. Anyway, I got to go out with the one co-worker (slightly) younger than me, which was cool. We went to a nice Greek restaurant and had a good time.

This morning was a fine breakfast in the English tradition. I restrained myself from sampling everything offered to me, and restricted myself to the orange juice, toast, and scrambled eggs with salmon. Mmm. Aforementioned colleague's wife ordered the blood pudding, since she had never had it before. After getting it and not liking the looks of it, she wondered aloud what was in it. "Uh, blood," responded the vegetarian at the table. Ah, England.

Fuel Shortage

My colleague showed up, and it was off to Europcar to pick up our rental. The lady behind the counter asked him if he could drive a manual because they were low on automatics. He said, "No, I'd kill someone." She said the recent fuel shortage had caused them to be short on automatics, and she'd be happy to give him a larger manual for the same price as an automatic. He said, "No, I'd kill someone." She said they didn't have any automatics yet, but we should go over to the main rental counter.

We waited to take a bus to the main rental counter. We waited quite a while; Europcar certainly isn't causing the fuel shortage by running too many buses. We made it over there, where he was asked -- surprise, surprise -- whether he couldn't drive a manual. At this point, I was almost expecting them to offer free driving lessons to get him to take a manual. The guy behind the counter went into a long discourse about how the fuel shortage was causing them to be short of automatics. Frankly, I wasn't too convinced...the connection seemed a bit tenuous. It was almost as suspicious as if he had blamed lingering effects from the Y2K bug. He said that they hadn't been able to communicate to everyone to stop taking reservations in the past week because of the fuel shortage, which left them with no automatics. My colleague pointed out that the reservation had been made over a month ago, at which point the guy wandered off.

He came back a few minutes later with the paperwork for...an automatic. How did that happen? Are the rules that they can try to make it sound like you should go away, but they can't actually tell you to go away? If you see through it, you win the prize? Anyway, it's not only an automatic, it's a really cool car. Not one of those wimpy European cars, either -- this felt british A Rover Seventy-Five. Quite elegant, and quite the car for tooling down the M4 (and other roads) to Cheltenham. The only trouble we had with the left side of the road was when we got here, pulled into a driveway and almost hit some people who were on the wrong side of it (we recognized them from back home).

Checked into the Lypiatt House and wandered around town. More about that later (I don't know when), though, as the cybercafe is closing.

Hey, I'm in London. Cool

I just got off the plane in Heathrow and am waiting for my colleague to arrive on a flight an hour later so that we can hop in the rental car and head to Cheltenham. I doubt I'll have Internet access for most of the trip, but right outside customs there was this place renting access, so I thought, what the heck.

So what's changed in the 5+ years since I've been over here? Well, I have no idea; I just got here. The one thing I will note is that the stamp on my passport used to say "Leave to Enter for Six Months Employment Prohibited." That's now expanded to "Leave to Enter for Six Months: Employment and Recourse to Public Funds Prohibited." Glad they covered that loophole.

The thing I love about the British is how self-centered their world view is (unlike we cosmopolitan Americans, of course). To them, the British Open is just "the Open". And when they stamp your passport, it just says "Heathrow" -- of course the country is the UK!

I like getting my passport stamped; it makes me feel like a world traveler (which, I guess, technically I am). I'm always vaguely annoyed that the Canadians fail to do so. Looking back, I now have 2 Heathrow stamps, 2 Manchester stamps, 1 Gatwick and 1 Leeds/Bradford. As for those other countries, I have both an entry and departure one from Cyprus, one from Belgium, one from Finland, and oh, yeah, one from the USA. For what it's worth, all the other countries carefully stamp my arrival in the arrival section, and the British just stamp the arrival stamp wherever they feel like it -- arrival section, departure section, the middle of the page. Hmm.

Stick a Fork in Him

"Yes, in principle, Bush could win. The stock market could crash. Gore could be caught shagging an intern. Bush could electrify the country with the greatest performance in the history of presidential debates. But barring such a grossly unlikely event, there is no reason to think Bush will recover. "

Slate has an article entitled "Why Bush Is Toast". It's a pretty good explanation of why Al Gore is going to win this November's election. It makes a point I've been making for a couple of months now -- namely that peace and prosperity determine the outcome of elections, and that favors Gore. It also makes some points that I hadn't thought of -- some I find more plausible than others.

It does omit another reason I don't think Bush will win. He's a jerk. He comes across as a twit. I don't know what the percentage is of guys who join fraternities in college -- maybe 20%? Bush is the perfect frat house president -- which means he'll have a good chance of rubbing the other 80% the wrong way. I remember seeing a poll during the primaries that showed that the more people got to know Dubya, the less they liked him. No wonder he wanted to avoid the debates...

I hope he wasn't in the car

"The story also erroneously said that Amir Abbas Hoveyda was in the paint-splattered car. Hoveyda...was executed in 1979."

--A Washington Post correction

Dead or Alive

I've been somewhat of a Winston Churchill fan ever since high school. My friend Ben was writing a term paper about the Winter War for AP Modern European History. He left a copy of The Gathering Storm over at my house. I started reading it and was fascinated by Churchill's description of the events leading up to World War II. I read the other volumes of his history, his biography, and other things that I could pick up related to him.

People associate Churchill most with his role as the leader of England through most of WWII. But he played a part in many other important events of the 20th century -- he was in charge of the British Navy for part of WWI, and he was involved in Irish independence, the formation of Israel -- he even coined the term "Iron Curtain".

But one of the most interesting episodes in Churchill's life took place in the twilight of the 19th Century. Back then, British military officers got a winter vacation -- so they could go fox-hunting or whatever. Churchill, an ambitious young man from a famous but not wealthy family, had other plans. He headed off for the Boer War as a correspondent. He didn't stay an observer for long. When the train he was on was ambushed by Boers, he took the lead in defending the train. Despite his efforts, which allowed many on the train to escape, he was captured and held prisoner Churchill: Wanted Dead or Alive is his granddaughter's re-telling of these events, in addition to his escape and his eventual flight to freedom.

I read this book on my way back from California. It's certainly an interesting tale. If it had happened to anyone else, I think it would make a great movie. And here it is, with Churchill, an larger-than-life figure for so many other reasons. But some of the things that would make this a great movie make it a less-than-ideal book. It's a nice, simple story. So what does Celia Sandys fill up 215 pages with? Much of it with the story of her researching this book. I'm sure it was interesting for her to meet with the descendants of the people who helped Churchill escape, but the digressions take much out of what should be a fast-paced read. So it was fun for a Churchill fan to skim through, but others should probably just read the relevant section of a good Churchill biography.

Football Season

Well, the NFL season is off to an auspicious start. Yesterday I watched my beloved Redskins hold on for 20-17 win over the Panthers.

This is the first year I've ordered the NFL Direct Ticket. We had a pretty nice setup. The big TV was on the Redskins game (but of course), the medium size TV was on the Lions game (for Steve) and the small TV on the Ravens game ('cause that and the 'Skins game were all we could get on the antenna). We pulled up the sofa and chairs real close and enjoyed football nirvana.

It's strange. I'm in a good mood today, and part of the reason is that the Redskins won. (Yee hah! 16-0! Undefeated!) Another reason, of course is that Michigan won on Saturday (No. 3...national championship, here we come!) Sometimes I feel like giving your allegiance to a sports team is this bizarre exercise is losing control. (Despite what I may want to believe, my rooting doesn't control the fate of the team.) Why should I cede the ability to decide if I'm happy to a bunch of guys wearing funny uniforms?

But a lot of things in life that determine our happiness are way out of our ability to control. And maybe fan-dom is a pure way of expressing that. You give your heart to someone who literally doesn't know you exist, sit back, and hope for the best. Ah, football. Can't wait 'til next week.

Great Books

On my recent trip to California, I read The New Lifetime Reading Plan by Clifton Fadiman and John S. Major. I think the title is somewhat misleading -- it sounds as if the goal of the book is to get you to plow through these classics, from #1 (The Epic of Gilgamesh) to #133 (Things Fall Apart). While I suppose you could use the book this way, I see this book put to better use as a list of suggestions for books you might consider reading. As in, "Hey, The Federalist Papers -- that would be pretty interesting."

And the commentary itself is the most valuable. I had the good fortune to read a number of these books in three semesters of "Great Books" at the University of Michigan. I had wonderful professors who guided me through the works. This book, with a handful of pages devoted to each work, is no substitute for that. Still, the suggestion can be very helpful for someone approaching, say, Nietzsche:

"Suggestion: Use the edition called The Portable Nietzsche, if available. The translations are intelligent, the notes and other apparatus helpful. You might read the whole of Zarathustra, uneven as that strange work is; the selections from Beyond Good and Evil; Toward a Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, and perhaps The Antichrist."

I don't know how many of these books I'll read -- they said the list is aimed at those "who have not met more than ten percent" of the authors (I'm in the twenties, I think). But I probably will want this book on my bookshelf for when I feel like picking up a classic and am looking for some guidance. Now where can I get a copy of Gilgamesh?

Santa Barbara Pictures

My camera gave out pretty quickly into the trip, but I did get some pictures worth sharing. I'm trying an experiment with Yahoo! Photos; it was much easier to upload them there than to create my own pages.

Start Here.

"So far he hasn't yet paid me $55.95..."

I almost didn't link to this, because a) things could just get too self-referential and b) well, if this weblog is going to have a theme, I'm not sure it should be that theme, but Jeanene has weighed in on last Wednesday's Viewer Mail.

From Russia With Love

I got back last night from Berkeley. Nice conference; more about that later. The hotel was OK; some people were complaining, though. Dan Bernstein told this Russian hotel story that made us grateful for the one we had. Dan's a nice guy, although he does have some interesting hobbies.

Rump Session

I just got back from this conference's rump session. I'm not sure how widespread the "rump session" is in the scientific and technical world, but it consists of all the presentations too trivial, too bad, too new, or just too silly to make it into the regular program of the conference.

In my mind, it has two very important innovations which should give it an edge over the rest of the conference: very short talks and alcohol. The two achieved a very nice synergy in the first talk tonight, "AES Update," a 4-minute talk. The speaker started by giving a history of the AES process (don't ask). Someone shouted out, "We're all cryptographers; we know what AES is." Finally, he was heckled into sticking to the "update" part.

At its best, rump session talks consist of someone madly dashing through a quick, but interesting result -- like breaking a cryptosystem presented at one of yesterday's regular talks. Madly dashing through a boring result also works...the comic effect is still enjoyable. Unfortunately, there was too much plodding through really, really boring stuff. People reading from their slides in a monotone and not being cut off by the moderator when their time is up. Even 5 minutes of that can be deadly.

So I've come up with an idea I think can improve these rump sessions. I think they should be modeled after one of modern entertainment's greatest triumphs -- the Gong Show. Get a panel of noted cryptographers -- and Jaye P. Morgan -- give them gongs, stand back, and watch the fun begin. This would have a number of advantages. One, anything exceptionally boring would be cut off by the dreaded gong. Two, speakers would have even more incentive to entertain the audience for fear of getting cut off. Three, those particularly interesting talks -- the ones that leave the audience wanting more -- could continue on as long as they kept the judges amused. But most importantly, we could all go home earlier.

Viewer Mail

Martin writes

"Enjoyable as ever, but I'd like to ask that if I'm mentioned again in the near future, I be refered to as 'the guy who wrote in to say he'd pay that much for a daily [Lewinsky]'."

Details, Details

"A photo caption in one edition Aug. 21 incorrectly identified former baseball star Henry Aaron as Ghanaian President Jerry Rawlings."

From a Washington Post correction today.

I Miss The Ocean

During my departure from California in the Great Retreat of '93, I left a number of things behind...restaurants, bookstores... But I realize, being back here, that the thing I miss most is the Pacific. I used to sit on the 10th floor of Evans Hall at Berkeley, in the Math Commons, and watch the sun set over the San Francisco Bay. A lot of things weren't going well for me at that point in my life, but that was one thing I had going for me. I'll have to try that again when I'm up there later this week, and see what emotions result...

Because of the weird geography of this place (Santa Barbara), the nearest bit of the Pacific is actually east of here. So nuts to the idea of the traditional Pacific sunset. Still, last night I wandered down to the beach and dipped my toes in the Pacific Ocean. Don't think I've done that since '93...the only times I've been back to California ('97 and January of this year), I didn't make it to the water. Anyway, it felt good.

Tonight I tried rounding the corner of land UCSB is on in order to see the sunset. There were two glitches. First, the sun was almost down by the time I made it into position. Second, there was still a spit of land sticking out to the west blocking my view. Still, it was a nice picture. Tomorrow I'll have to break out the camera.

Personal Space

Greetings from sunny Santa Barbara, California, where I am until Thursday for a conference. Despite United's recent woes, today wasn't all that bad in terms of what the airline provided. They didn't cancel either of my flights! OK, sure, they delayed the second one without telling us what's going on. (Uh, there are people getting off our plane which is supposed to leave in 10 minutes, and it's going to be on time? Right.) But only 30-45 minutes, and I wasn't in a hurry.

The main annoyances today came, not surprisingly, from my fellow passengers. On the leg from BWI to Denver, I was seated next to a large (not fat, just up-sized) gentleman, who for some reason chose the middle seat while letting his wife have the window. Awfully gallant, fellow, but have a little consideration for the fact that you're spilling into a large portion of my seat. I eventually stuck my newspaper between myself and the armrest just so he'd stop bumping me. It cut the size of the seat down even more, but it seemed worth it.

But the worst part was the kids sitting behind me. Kicking the seat, banging on the trays, even once in a while reaching around to grab me. I heard the parents talking to them, and there seemed to be only token efforts at control. Look, I accept that in this country you can name your kids whatever you want, but if you name them "Madison" and "Sidney," they're probably going to turn out like that. Sigh.

The next leg was the opposite: two seats to stretch out in. Luxury.

Footnote about BWI. I watched Goldfinger last night. They referred to it as "Friendship" airport. A much better name; pity they changed it. I'm sure at the time, "BWI" seemed more modern. But now, "Friendship" seems nice and retro, and retro is, of course, now modern.

Gamera is Really Neat

Best quote out of context I've seen in a news article lately:

"AOL spokesman Rich D'Amato said the company is still looking into how Gamera escaped."

--from an article in yesterday's Washington Post.

Runner-up:

"Following his death, Ware re-joined the organization."

--from an AP obituary of one of Mensa's co-founders.

Gold Diggers

Last night I went to a co-workers house for an attempt to win a bunch of bucks from goldpocket.com. Well, mostly to watch an attempt.

The idea behind goldpocket.com is that you're asked three trivia questions at a time. You compete against one of the thousands of other players. Winners advance; losers go into some sort of lame consolation round. (Ties are broken by a lightning round, where speed counts.) The final winner gets $100K with a chance to win...one million dollars. I have no idea how they hope to turn a profit.

The idea behind last night's gathering is that if we got several people playing in the same place, they could help each other out while still having several people playing. So, after much furious networking, 4 systems were set up. There were about 8 of us, so I and others merely observed.

The first sign of trouble came in the first round, when two of the computers sitting right next to each other were paired off. The odds of that seem pretty slim, but we can't figure out any explanation. One was connected via a modem, so it's not like they were matching up IP addresses. Anyway, that knocked 1 out, and the questions were so easy that others were forced into lightning rounds and knocked out pretty quickly. The last remaining one lost in about round 6. (Out of 13 or more.)

We watched the rest of the questions. Then things degenerated into a discussion of how to network Windows 98 machines, and I hit the road.

A Day at the Races

I went to Laurel Racetrack yesterday with Mensa. I'm sure that sounds like we figured we could beat the system, or makes people wonder what smart people are doing throwing their money away on the ponies. But, really, it was just a social event.

I had never been to the track before, so it was an interesting experience for me. I had to ask a lot of questions before starting to get how the whole betting thing works. It's neat; the final odds are not determined by a handicapper, but by what bets get placed on which horses. So if lots of people bet on a longshot, the odds come down. It take a little getting used to, but it's really a "free market" type of system, and those things are pretty darn efficient most of the time.

I decided I was willing to lose $20 (we figured to stay for less than 10 races, so that would allow at least a $2 bet in each race). I announced this fact, to everyone's great amusement. My strategy was simple -- pick the horses with the most interesting names (e.g., Party Guy, so I could yell "Party! Party!" during the race). The strategy worked for my first two bets -- but I kept letting things ride and lost $10 on the third bet. On my fourth bet, I wanted to bet the favorite but at 1-5 odds (or 2-5; it kept fluctuating), it hardly seemed worth it. So I went for the exacta. Voila, now I had another $10 to bet. But I lost that bet, and the next one. We decided to leave early, and I was only down $10. So on the last race, I put 2 $5 bets on the longshots, one to show and one to win. The 40-1 longshot I had to win was leading pretty late into the race, which was exciting, but he ended up fading to 7th. Such is the way of longshots. The other horse ended up 9th. Anyway, all in all it was pretty fun, and a fairly slow way to lose money.

Hail To The Redskins

While I was in the midst of figuring out yesterday where to watch the second Redskins pre-season game, Ben called me up and said he had his parents' tickets. Did I want to go? Of course!

Ben's parents have season tickets, and from time to time they find a reason not to go. Especially to pre-season games. As a life-long Redskins fan, it's a joy to see the team under any circumstances. And it was nice to see Smith, Sanders and the other new additions out on the field.

I must admit we ducked out partway through the fourth quarter. I love the team, but the fans can sometimes get tiresome. Here I'm thinking of the woman next to me who kept putting her elbow into my seat space, the guy behind me who was telling his buddy about his vasectomy, and the drunken yahoos a few rows back who kept yelling out obscenities that had nothing to do with the game. C'mon guys, at least keep 'em relevant.

Oh, and if you want to hear about on the field action, take a look at the article Redskins' running game roughs up Patriots. Go team!

It's Always Nice to Be Appreciated

Especially by Bryan J. Busch.

Campin' Pictures

Enjoy these pictures from my recent camping trip (mentioned in an earlier episode).

Teddy

Sorry, nothing funny today. I'm tired. Teddy has been through a series of health crises over the past month or so. The first two, which struck at right around the same time were scrapes on his head and pain when walking. The pain when walking was probably due to a slipped disc in his neck. That was treated fairly easily through anti-inflammatory drugs and switching from attaching his leash to a collar to attaching it to a harness. The scrapes were more of a pain...they involved a long routine of antibiotics, some sort of cream, and special shampoo. Also, there was a brief ringworm scare, which caused me to keep everyone away from Teddy for fear he was contagious. Finally, last week, I was told that Teddy was A-OK and could resume his normal life.

Then, Monday night, when people were over for D&D, Teddy started running around in a most disturbing way. He would tilt to the right. Sometimes only a little bit, but sometimes he'd pull a Dick Cheney and run into things he'd be so far over to the right. I called the vet's after-hours number and was told it was probably just an ear infection.

Not so. When I took Teddy in the next day, the vet noticed one of the pupils was dilated. Blood tests ruled out an infection, so the most likely choices remain that he suffered a minor stroke or that he has a tumor (or some other degenerative condition). I'm convincing myself it's a stroke, 'cause with a stroke, he gradually gets better. And he has been. This morning, his eyes were closer to looking the same. And he's been walking in straight lines, although I haven't gotten him excited (which causes the condition to worsen).

Sigh. Anyway, we're seeing the vet again next Tuesday, at which point we get to decide if it's off to the doggie neurologist. Keep him in your thoughts.

"He's Become More Powerful Than We Could Ever Imagine"

Martin made that remark after passing along the sad news that British Actor Sir Alec Guinness Dies at 86. We discussed whether this meant that our generational icons were beginning to pass on. I argued that Alec Guiness belonged more to our parents' generation. He pointed out that "Lawrence of Arabia" and "Bridge on the River Kwai" made him a good actor to our parents, but Obi-Wan was a legend. Good point, but as long as we have Han Solo, I'll still feel young.

I'm posting this via NewsBlogger, a new site letting me post news articles in Blogger. It's powered by Moreover, which has a pretty darn good selection of headlines. As something of a news fan, I may start using this to generate more weblog posts.

Unfortunately, Newsblogger is no more; the link doesn't work. Moreover is also no more -- I changed the home page link to point to the Wayback Machine version of it, but the Alec Guiness article can't be reached. 25 Mar 2005

Pseudoprime.com

Well, I went and registered pseudoprime.com at register.com today. (It'll take a few days for the link to become active.) I've been going back and forth between the idea of using jgrantham.com for my web pages, too, or keeping it for my e-mail only. But I'm content enough with my current e-mail setup that I don't want to change it around -- so I'm going to eventually put the web pages on pseudoprime.com. That'll set me up to ditch clark.net eventually.

This was partially inspired by a re-design of my web site. I've used cascading style sheets and a sidebar to give a common feel to many of the pages. I've also cleaned up the home page considerably.

Why pseudoprime.com? My dissertation title was Frobenius Pseudoprimes, and it's the subject on which I've done most of my research.

Campin'

Ben, Mickey, George and I went camping last weekend at Cunningham Falls State Park. It was a lot of fun. We went hiking, played D&D, drank beer, and ate a bunch of unhealthy food.

It was interesting watching all of the families with kids at the campground. Apparently a lot of parents see it as a good idea to bring their kids' bikes and let their kids ride around the camp site loop. Around and around and around. There was one girl who rode her pink bike around the loop, wore her pink helmet, and would ding her bell every time she got to the top of the loop. Another boy had some seriously squeaky brakes. So for a while it was, "Ding ding. (Pause.) Squeaksqueaksqueaksqueaksqueak. (Pause.) Ding ding." Repeat.

I never went camping with my folks growing up, so I don't really have a set of expectations for what it's like to be a kid camping. But somehow I'd hope that it would be more exciting than riding a bike around and around in circles. I mean, c'mon, that's what I did at home.

Douglas Coupland's Miss Wyoming, p. 247

"She tried joining Mensa but was turned off by the bunch of balding men who wanted to discuss nudism, and women who refused to stop punning or laughing at their own spoonerisms."

The Incomprehensible X-Men

I saw the X-Men movie on Monday. Wolverine kicks ass. 'Nuff said.

The movie inspired me to want to start reading comics again. And where better to start than with the X-Men comic book? But which one? I remember enough from my comic book reading days to know that Marvel produces a number of different versions of its most popular titles. So where could I see some of the complex battle of wills I had fun with in the movie? I eventually found a web site giving a guide to the X-Titles. Well, it was clear I'd need to be careful to pick the right title to avoid things such as a time-traveling X-Man from the future -- I was looking for basic, vanilla X-Men.

Further searching turned up the X-Axis, where some Scottish guy publishes weekly reviews of the various issues. Pretty entertaining, even for someone who doesn't read them. But it just confirmed one thing. There are no basic, vanilla X-Men anymore! It's all alternative universe this and space alien that. It's all fiendishly complicated to maintain continuity for some 45-year old guy who lives with his parents and will have a complete fit if something doesn't fit with one little piece of his 20-year collection of X-Men comics. ("But Aquaman, you cannot marry a woman without gills, you're from two different worlds.") I don't know, maybe I'm deluding myself into thinking there's somewhere I can go to get interesting superhero comic books without having to become an obsessive reader to understand what the h-e-double-hockeysticks is going on. But it apparently doesn't involve the X-Men.

Tennis Ball Madness

My friend Dave was in town last weekend. Dave is a big baseball fan. When we're at conferences together, we try to take in a game. We went to Fenway at the Fermat conference in '95, we caught the Ottawa Lynx at CNTA '96, and we tried to catch a minor league game in Winnipeg in '99, but it was rained out. So when he came for a visit, it was natural we'd go see a Bowie Baysox. It was a pretty cool game. The Baysox ended up winning in the bottom of the 10th. Cool.

And there were even fireworks after the game. In some ways, they were even better than the fireworks on the Mall on the 4th. They were closer, so we could hear them being fired, and there was a greater variety.

But that wasn't the best part. The best part was...Tennis Ball Madness! For $1, you could buy a tennis ball and throw it on the field after the game. The object was ostensibly to get the balls into some hula hoops which would win various prizes...a dozen bagels, $10 off a lube job... But really, the cool thing was we got to chuck stuff on the field and not get arrested.

Harry Potter and the Goblin of Fire

With 734 pages, it's filled with a story of magic, a fictional world, and so many other things that will make you never want to put this book down. READ HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLIN OF FIRE TODAY!

This review at Amazon.com says it all about J. K. Rowling's new Harry Potter book. Er...what do you mean it's Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Oh, yeah, that book.

Anyhoo, I just stayed up late last night to finish it. It was an enjoyable read, although I feel that the ending was a little muddled, but I think I could say that of most of her books.

One thing I've noticed as a recurring theme through the books is people being wrongly accused of things they didn't do. There are lots of examples from earlier books -- Hagrid, Buckbeak, Harry, Snape, etc. -- so I won't spoil anything about this book by giving examples here. I don't even think this book does so more than the others -- it's just something I noticed more this time.

Maybe that's because it's something I've been thinking about myself recently. I'm a very judgemental person. I tend to try to form opinions rather quickly. A silly example follows.

After the TV show Friends came out, Martin called me up and asked me what I thought about it. I started going off on a rant about how it was clearly a slickly packaged attempt to market a certain image of Generation X. Martin said, "You know, with anyone else, I would have just asked, 'How about that great new show, Friends?'"

You know, I was right about the show. But it's also pretty funny (most of the time), a fact I had overlooked in my initial recoil to the way the show was "targeted". It's since become one of my favorite shows. So I do give things (and people) second chances. But I sort of wonder how much I may have overlooked due to unfavorable first impressions. So I'm trying to do better. So if somebody seems like a jerk at first, maybe I give them a chance to prove me wrong. Or prove that they really are a jerk. Which would have me hanging around with jerks more often. Hmm, is it worth it?

Emo

When I was a kid, I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realized that the Lord, in his wisdom, didn't work that way. So I just stole one and asked him to forgive me.

The other day a woman came up to me and said, "Didn't I see you on television?"
I said, "I don't know. You can't see out the other way."

I went to see Emo Philips a couple of weeks ago. We sat at a table right near the stage. I was sitting in a chair up against the stage, so close I rested my elbow on stage. So I got to be in one of these:

• "What's your name?"
  
• "Jon."
  
• "What do you do?"
  
• "I'm a mathematician."
  

Emo then told a joke about Stephen Hawking. What I should have said is, "Dude, he's a physicist." Unfortunately, all I could think of to say was, "He's a physicist." At least I was clever enough to realize that wasn't funny enough to say. But while everyone else is sitting there enjoying the joke, I was just sitting there thinking, "I can't believe he's telling a physicist joke. I'm a mathematician." I mean, really.

You Say You Want a Revolution

I went to see The Patriot with George last weekend.

You know that old cliche, "If you only see one movie this year..."? Well, for George it isn't a cliche. He sees one movie a year. Last year it was The Phantom Menace, a few years ago it was Braveheart, and a couple of years before that it was Multiplicity (he had to kill time while getting his truck fixed, and that was what was playing). Anyway, since George does Revolutionary War re-enactment, and since he really enjoyed Braveheart, this seemed like an appropriate choice.

We had settled in for the (long series of) trailers, when one came on for the movie Pearl Harbor. It opened with some kids playing ball, then all of a sudden Japanese planes started streaking across the sky. Scenes from the attack on Pearl Harbor ran while FDR's "Date Which Will LIve in Infamy" speech played. At the end, "Memorial Day 2001" flashed onto the screen. George turned to me and said, "I was afraid I was going to get screwed up."

Back to this year's movie. I found it somewhat enjoyable, although towards the end, it got to be too much, "You Klingon bastard, you killed my son." And this Salon article raises some disturbing questions about certain of the movie's historical inaccuracies. And really, I would have so much preferred a historically accurate movie. George pointed out that the exploding shells in the movie were also anachronistic.

But, still, it was nice going into the 4th to be reminded that Independence Day is not just about fireworks. It honors a sacrifices made in the birth of this nation, too. And I'm sure "Pearl Harbor" will be a good reminder of other sacrifices.

The Big Schtick

When I was in high school, some friends of mine and I started writing a chain story. We would pass it around Mr. Snyder's AP Modern European History class, and each of us would write a paragraph or so before passing it along.

Some time during college, somebody typed it up. I recently pulled it off disk, where it had been compressed with the ZOO archiver and formatted in WordPerfect 4.2. I eventually uncompressed it, converted it to HTML, and fixed some typos.

Ladies and gentleman, I present The Big Schtick. Warning: it is long and weird.

I have recently tried to get some of the same authors to work on a web-based chain story. So far, it's off to a slow start (I blame Paul), but I hope it will pick up.

We All Want to Change the World

I was driving to work yesterday listening to a Beatles album when "Revolution" came on. This ranks right up there with "The One I Love" in the misunderstood songs of all time.

A few years back, when Nike decided to use the song in an add campaign, much wailing and gnashing of teeth ensued. I remember in particular an op-ed in the Washington Post bemoaning how a song the author associated with protesting the status quo had turned into a tool of commercialism.

Hint: just because a song has a word in (or as) its title, doesn't mean it's a song in favor of that word. The Beatles could be "conservative," after a fashion. Ever listen to "Taxman"? More to the point, ever listen to these lyrics?

You say you'll change the constitution
Well you know
We all want to change your head
You tell me it's the institution
Well you know
You better free your mind instead

I remember being in high school and writing a paper on Brave New World and A Clockwork Orange. I needed to incorporate literary criticism into my paper, so I went to the library and found some big honkin' books full of criticism. Wow -- this was exciting. And there was criticism of everything -- even Beatles songs.

One in particular that stuck out was a screed on "Revolution" writted for some socialist worker's magazine. This guy got it -- mostly. He railed against the Beatles as tools of capitalist oppression. Out there, yes, but at least he had a clue (about music). Of course, like a good Red, he wasn't above distorting things to make a point. He took the lyrics

You ask me for a contribution
Well you know
We're doing what we can
But when you want money for people with minds that hate
All I can tell you is brother you have to wait

and blasted the Beatles for equating "contribution" with "money". In fact, I think that's explicitly not true. They equate "contribution" with "doing what we can." The person they're talking to, by contrast, just wants "money for people with minds that hate." Ah, well.

Anyway, I think this illustrates one of the great lessons of life.

Pay attention!

Redesign!

I re-designed my weblog today to use cascading style sheets. How does it look?

Let me know if you have any problems with it.

The Pragmatist

Last weekend, I went to see a collection of photographs by Glen E. Friedman. He took a number of photographs of skateboarding, hardcore, and rap scenes, and the amazing thing (as mentioned several places in the exhibit), is that he started taking these pictures early -- before these scenes hit the mainstream radar. OK, interesting enough.

But one thing that interested me was the political message underneath the photographs. Friedman seems to feel that each group of people was comprised of idealists; indeed his latest book is entitled "The Idealist". Flipping through a copy of that book, I was treated to an idolization of the idealist over the pragmatist. There, as other places in the exhibit, Ronald Reagan was specifically mentioned as the enemy of the idealist.

Later that evening, I went hope and watched CNN's Cold War documentary on the '80s and "Star Wars" (SDI). One of the things that struck me was how passionately Reagan believed in a missle defense system, and how he risked various arms control agreements that he was interested in, just for the sake of preserving SDI. In fact, the agreements were only signed after the Soviets realized that SDI would never be built as conceived.

So maybe Reagan wasn't a pragmatist (is that what people call idealists they don't agree with?). And I doubt everybody Friedman photographed was really an idealist; in the preface to one of his books, someone noted that the idealism of the skateboarders sounds more like "adolescent dickishness" in retrospect.

But what of this dichotomy between idealism and pragmatism in general? Is it real or is it false? To me, idealism and pragmatism are two balancing forces that need to exist in harmony. If you're an unrelenting pacifist, you may see your entire town slaughtered because you refused to compromise. If you believe that your example will achieve the cause of pacifism, that's one thing. But if you're trying to prevent violence from occuring, well, you lost. Similarly, the pure pragmatist is willing to do anything to achieve...what goals?

In my view, we have a responsibility to be idealists when we choose our goals -- world peace, freedom, etc. But then we have to be pragmatists when trying to figure out how to realize them.

I Can't Dance, But I Can Type

During my recent excursion at Mensa happy hour, the conversation turned to the subject of dance. Swing dancing, contra dancing -- it seemed like everyone sitting near me did some form of dancing. Not me. I am very...uncoordinated? Klutzy? Arhythmic? My last attempt to go out and dance was a very traumatic experience -- for both my dance partner and myself. I just couldn't seem to learn the steps.

So part of what I need to learn to do is accept that I can't dance; there are many other wonderful aspects to my personality. And hopefully the subject of dancing won't come up every time I hang out with Mensans.

And yet, and yet...do I need to accept myself as who I am, or do I need to improve myself? Or both? Always forward I say, so I have strapped on my in-line skates (Rollerblades^TM, for those less trademark-averse) and vowed to do battle against my inherent tendency to fall down.

Skating is easy. It must be. I went to a free skating clinic recently and after minimal instruction, everybody was skating smoothly around the parking lot. Except me (OK, and somebody else, but we'll ignore her since she complicates my point). I sucked. I don't like sucking; I like being really good at things.

So here's my plan: stop sucking. Then transfer my newly found coordination skills to other things that I've hitherto avoided due to my klutziness. Skiing? Roller disco? The possibilities are endless.

Can I pull this off? I don't know. It's been a while since I tried to add a new skill like this. But I remember in 10th grade when I took typing class. I sucked. Partway through the first quarter of it, I was failing the class. So I bought a typing book (the typing teacher was useless), and practiced, practiced, practiced. I brought my grade up to a C for the quarter, a B for the next quarter, and I got an A on the final exam, for a semester grade of "B". Only non-A I got during my Senior High years. But boy was I proud of it. And I spend all day using the typing skills on the computer keyboard (except for the ones involving "correction tape").

So I can type. But I can't dance. Yet. Give me a year. Or two.

Mensa and Transportation

I got my "Offer of Membership" from Mensa today. On the enclosed envelope, do they really need to say "First-Class Postage Required Post Office will not deliver without proper postage." Hel-lo. I qualify for Mensa, remember? I think I could have figured that out on my own. It annoys me when the power company does this; it's just ridiculous that Mensa does.

The letter accompanying the offer encourages me to "contact your local group and begin participating in some of the activities in your area." Actually, I already have. Friday night, I went to Mensa Happy Hour at Zorba's. Following that, the Singles SIG went for dessert and Xando, and afterwards three of us went over to someone's apartment building to chat. At around 12:45, I announced that I had to leave to attempt to catch the last Metro train back home. As I was riding the escalator down into the Dupont Circle station, I heard the announcement that the last Red Line train for Glenmont was now on the platform. Ouch. Too late. I hailed a cab, and as I was riding, wondered how much he was going to charge me. After all, in DC, they have that silly zone system. I didn't know what they did for DC to Maryland trips. Oh, well, I figured, I'd pay whatever it was and next time be more careful, if it was ridiculous. But he checked the trip counter, looked on a chart, and the total came to $20 with a (generous) tip. Not bad.

The next evening I went to a birthday party of a Mensan I had met the previous evening. The party was in Northern Virginia, and I had a choice between driving and Metro. Plus for Metro: I wouldn't have to watch my alcohol intake as closely. Plus for Driving: I wouldn't have to try to catch the last train again. Plus for Metro: The invitation said I had to get a visitor permit, or my car would get towed. Plus for Driving: I'd have to catch a Metrobus. Advantage: Driving.

And when I got there, the advantage seemed to tip even more in favor of Driving, as the birthday girl informed me that since her apartment building was out of permits, they had canceled towing for the night. And, since I stayed until 2, I would have had to take an even more expensive cab ride home. But when I left the building, my car was not where I had parked it. The same thing had happened to a fellow party-goer. Oh, crap. As we walked back into the building, we heard the maintenance guy telling someone on the phone, "I canceled towing for the evening!" He turned out to be very nice; he gave us a ride to the impound lot, and signed to have the apartment building charged for the towing fee until the "misunderstanding" was cleared up. And I made my way home eventually, although not before getting lost and touring parts of DC and PG County I hadn't planned to see (ever).

So despite my problems getting home both nights, I had a good time. As with any group, some people annoyed me, but I found some interesting people to talk to. So I'm accepting the offer of membership. I just hope I don't forget to put a stamp on my reply.

Teevee

Raspberry-flavored wine. It sounds like something Prince would sing about drinking right before he got his freak on.

The latest of one of many pieces at teevee.org that have amused me is Philip Michaels' piece Red, Red Whine. I haven't seen the commercial; let me know if you have.

Trivia

I went out last night with friends to play NTN trivia. On the way home, I thought about coming back and writing about NTN, but I ended up in a traffic jam. (At 11 PM! What's up with that?) When I got home, I was too tired to write about it. Martin wasn't.

Sadly, Themestream is no more, so that link no longer works. -- 24 Mar 2005

Uncle Petros

On my plane ride back from Belgium, I read Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture. For those of you not mathematical, Goldbach's Conjecture is that ever even number greater than 2 can be written as the sum of two primes. So, for example, 28=23+5. 100=3+97.

Those of you who know me know that I am a number theorist, so it's hard for me to read this book as anything other than a story about number theory. But I'll try. The narrator's Uncle Petros devotes his life to trying to prove Goldbach's Conjecture. Goldbach's Conjecture is one of the oldest unsolved problems in number theory (since though it has been confirmed for every number tried, it has never been proven true of all numbers). Though it isn't a central question in mathematics, its proof would undoubtedly be a work requiring many interesting advances; in fact, many interesting advances have already resulted from proof attempts.

There I go, making it about the number theory. The point is, Goldbach's Conjecture is a hard problem. Anyone who solved it would likely be known throughout the ages. And that's part of what attracts Uncle Petros -- the chance for "immortality". But the flip side is that anyone who attacks the problem -- no matter how brilliant -- is unlikely to solve it. So Uncle Petros tries, and fails, and is perceived never to solve anything because he can't prove the one thing he is trying to prove. That, says the narrator's father, is Uncle Petro's problem -- his failure to set "attainable goals".

So in a very simple sense, the book is a cautionary tale...set your sights too high, and you're doomed to failure. I have actually seen this happen far too often in mathematics, and it's one reason I'm a little glad to be out of the academic world. "Oh, he only got a partial result." "Oh, his theorems are just generalizations of others' work." "Oh, he has a tenure-track position, but it's not at Princeton." Sometimes mathematicians act as if anything less than transcendant genius is to be derided.

But it's really not that. After all, if nobody ever tries to prove Goldbach's Conjecture, nobody ever will. Clearly Uncle Petros is unbalanced -- having one impossible goal and being tormented by failing to meet it. So maybe what is need is both unattainable goals and accepting an inability to meet them. Reach for the stars, but be happy with the moon.

D&D Update

In the latest installment, we go deep into the earth to rescue some lost miners.

US 4, South Africa 0

Ben, George and I went to RFK yesterday to watch the US play South Africa in soccer. When George went to get the tickets, he asked for the cheapest 3 seats together you could get. Even though there were $18 tickets, they sold him $25 tickets...which turned out to be great seats. Best seats I've ever had to a soccer game. 10 rows from the pitch, on about the 45-yard-line (if you'll excuse the American football reference). So the extra $7 was definitely worth it.

I figured with the US playing South Africa, the American fans would be the loudest. That's not always the case; when we went to see the US play Jamaica a couple of years ago, the Jamaicans out-cheered the Americans even if they didn't number them. I figure that most Americans aren't interested in coming to a soccer game. But if you're a Jamaican or South African living within driving distance of DC, you're going to show up when your team comes to play. Since there aren't as many South Africans as Jamaicans, US fans did dominate, but there still were a fair number of South Africans. One woman came by waving her South African flag and hit Ben and me with it. I was indignant until a guy dressed in red, white and blue came by with a drum and hit me in the head with that. Yeah, I guess Americans can be even more obnoxious. There were some South Africans sitting behind us yelling all the time in Zulu or some South African language. They'd switch into English every once in a while for obscenities. Or maybe they were swearing in both languages.

The game itself was a lot of fun to watch. I love watching soccer games in person, and it was a nice day to do so. The constant action is hypnotic, and a contrast to most American sports. Most of the game was spent with the US on offense, though both teams had a number of chances to score. The US just had more, and took advantage of them. Cobi Jones was amazing, scoring 2 goals and assisting on the other 2. So we came out of it a winner, and hopefully we'll win the (essentially meaningless) US Cup. I'm really excited about the World Cup qualifying, though. I read that the US may play Cuba at RFK in September; that's definitely a match I want to be there for.

Look here for a summary of the game.

Kevin Smith Chat

"The UPN pitch meeting was classic. We didn't have to pitch. They said, 'Look, we don't care what the show's about. Just bring it here. We need programs.'

We could've 'xeroxed' our asses for a half hour and they would've let it run for at least two seasons. ABC wouldn't let us 'xerox' our asses, so I regret going with that particular network."

If only the 'Clerks' TV show last night had been as funny as this Kevin Smith interview on cnn.com.