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