Sleep Spent

I visited the London Transport Museum today, which is just what it sounds like: an examination of ways Londoners have gotten around their city from 1820 to today. I really liked the exhibits, although I was at first afraid that everything would be geared too much toward children. Certainly there were a lot of kids about, but the exhibits themselves did a good job of being both fun (with tons of “press this button to make the [noun] [verb]” bits) and at the same time interesting (did you know that the recently extended Jubilee line is now the only tube line that touches all the other lines? Neither did I).

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I had a bloody great time, let me tell you! That is one beautiful country. You’ll see what I mean just as soon as I can sort through the photos. There aren’t nearly as many as there were from Greece/Italy, so it should be done in a few days. No, really. :-)

Michelle and I rode a sleeper train back to London last night from Edinburgh. Thus, I haven’t showered or eaten since yesterday.

So now for breakfast, a shower, and class....

I’m in Scotland this weekend; in Edinburgh at the moment, but I’m taking a bus tour with Michelle Mac over the weekend. Getting here was uneventful; we’ll be taking a sleeper train back Sunday evening. Probably no updates til then.

Hope everyone is doing well! Talk at you later.

I just read this interesting article and thought I’d open it up to those of you back home.

I’m in England now, with a bit of time left. Many of you will be registering for classes soon. Do you know what books you need? Can I get any of them for cheaper here? I’d be perfectly willing to tote a few textbooks back with me.

Believe it or not, last night I went to see a performance of Romeo and Juliet by an Icelandic circus troupe.

You didn’t misread that.

It was the most unusual adaptation of Shakespeare I’ve ever seen (not that I’m any sort of expert on these things), and it was really, really good. There were parts I didn’t like (the MC was grating, and I had issues with Mercutio), but on the whole the performance was outstanding.

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How many times have you needed help with your potatoes, only to be left helpless? I myself cannot count the number of times; it is more of an ongoing drought of potato help.

So it was with great joy that I discovered that there really WAS help out there for me and my potato woes. Someone cares!

PotatoHelp.com (or PotatoeHelp.com if you’re Dan Quayle) has all the right responses to your potato queries.

PotatoHelp.com, my potatoes thank you.

I’ve experienced run-on sentences before, but not usually in newspapers. Much less, the New York Times. Less still as the first “sentence” of a story! Observe:

What on earth was he thinking, Siegfried & Roy’s 7-year-old white Siberian tiger, Montecore, sequestered now ‘’in its usual quarters,’’ as one report phrased it, at the Mirage hotel in Las Vegas, his future as an entertainer, indeed as a tiger, in serious question.

Somebody has a ways to go before they’ll be writing front page copy.

If you’re so inclined, you can read the rest of the story here.

It appears I was a bit too optimistic when I predicted pictures would be up in the “next few days.” Sorting through these, naming them and then providing interesting and relevant comments is a daunting task.

In the mean time, I should let you know what I’ve been up to. Several essays are due soon. I’m going to write one of them on the history of the London Underground, one of my favorite topics of late. I bought and read Down the Tube: The Battle for London’s Underground, which investigated the Treasury’s Public-Private Partnership plan to modernize the Tube. It was fascinating reading, chock full of interesting anecdotes about the construction and maintenence of the Tube.

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I put it off yesterday, but I finally went and grabbed Transatlanticism today. It is AWESOME, but that wasn’t ever seriously in doubt. I think my favorite songs are “Title and Registration” (mp3) and the title track.

I just love getting a new album, learning the nuances of it. And learning the lyrics. And then learning to love every last sigh and idiosyncratic warble. It makes life worth living. I am so looking forward to seeing Death Cab again! I’ll be the one that knows all the lyrics this time. :-)

I also managed to pick up Peter Gabriel’s Up for £8. That’s about $12.50; not a great used price, but not terrible. I’m glad to be able to examine the liner notes now. A song off Up is the Song of the Week, but only because I wrote that down before I got Transatlanticism.

I have to get to sleep. I’ve got class at 8:30 tomorrow. Night!

I’ve been hosting “Mad World” by Gary Jules (from the “Donnie Darko” soundtrack) for awhile now on the Song of the Week page. It’s an awesome song, and a great movie.

Every once in awhile, I indulge in some manual log parsing, and over a thousand hits to mp3s tends to be pretty obvious. Especially when 85% of them are direct links to a particular song. In this case, the song is “Mad World,” and the hits are coming almost exclusively from Sweden.

I have no idea why.

Thank God Hurricane Electric is fast and gives us a 25GB/mo bandwidth cap!