Sealion II

I just got my first spam comment. (You can't look at it, it's been deleted; it was boring anyway. The website associated with it was rather enlivening, though.) The spambots have found me worthy of attention...I wonder if soon I will have to put up the little gizmo that makes you write out the letters before posting.

I do not collect animal statuettes, either. Or pictures, or tchotchkes, or pillows with animals embroidered on them, or plush animal dolls. At least, not intentionally. I have acquired a few by accretion.

But if I did, I would collect...SEALIONS!

Wait, was that too easy?

The system of thought bequeathed to us by our forefathers is unlikely to be ideal, but it is likely to be functional.

How to make your feelings about a politician known:

Damn John Jay! Damn every one that won't damn John Jay!! Damn every one that won't put lights in his windows and sit up all night damning John Jay!!!

via Volokh.com

Christmas is, of course, the celebration of the birth of Christ, which is an event worthy of celebration if any is. It is also a pagan solstice festival co-opted by the early Church. In either case it celebrates the coming of the Sun/Son and the triumph of life over death.

So, even though Jesus was born in the spring, I like having the festival of his birth at midwinter--because of the symbolism, and because it gives us something to look forward to as the days get shorter and colder!

We did relax a little on Friday, though, and jaunted through Oxford, where the HLP had one had a course of study as he made his way through law school. (We did not, alas, reach Cambridge, but I have determined to do so on another occasion, in honor of Isaac Newton, who is a personal hero.)

Here, at any rate, is a picture of the Bodleian library, which figures so largely in Gaudy Night, possibly the finest mystery I have ever read. Hooray for Lord Peter Wimsey!



And that was that. I came home again, having jaunted through Germany (no pictures, that was business and I saw a hotel and a biology building and nothing more), England, Scotland, France, and England again in the space of ten days. I came home worn out. It was a great vacation.

FIN

Almost there!


I am obsessed with mass transit, because I have never owned a car. Well, maybe not "obsessed", but I am more interested in it than most Americans would be, I think. At any rate, here's your picture of the Paris Metro. Unlike Ezra Pound, I was not moved to poetry, but I will quote his:
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in a crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.



The Cathedral of Notre Dame. I did not like it nearly so well as Westminster; it was too big vertically, not big enough horizontally, and too dark.

This is horribly dismissive of what is rightfully considered a beautiful building, but, uh, them's the breaks?

'

This is probably my favorite picture of the whole trip. Because....RHINOCEROS!


A view of the Musee d'Orsay. We saw pretty much the whole thing, including some very striking van Goghs which were, apart from the rhinoceros, the high point of this one.


The Louvre. This places is huge. I mean, really, really huge. I walked at a decent clip for three hours and saw maybe a third of it. It's the only museum I've ever seen that could rightly be called a multi-day affair. Of course, we did not have multiple days, but we did what we could. Including a visit to this woman


whom you will have seen before, and the Mona Lisa, which looks startlingly like the Mona Lisa, except smaller and with lots of people around it. Gene Wolfe advances an interesting theory that the Venus de Milo is a 19th century forgery, but regardless of when it was made it's a knockout.



This is a fountain depicting Michael the Archangel defeating "that old dragon" (Rev. 12:7-8) near where we ate lunch/dinner, which was very good and at which we spurned a complimentary glass of wine apiece, to the probable bemusement of our waiter.

Overall, I did not like Paris as well as London, but that is at least partly because it was quite hot while we were there and I was overdressed. We also didn't get to relax much there (not that we did much relaxing in London either, as the HLP was running the show and that is not his style.)

musical covers, that is, I would get Tom Waits to cover "Hide and Seek" by Imogen Heap.

And David Bowie to do something of Joanna Newsom's. "Bridges and Balloons", maybe.

You?

So, after our late-night amusements at the football match (or, in the American, soccer game) we arose bright and early the next morning to make our trip to the City of Lights. Day trip to Paris!

We were a bit short on sleep, so the trip was a little surreal right from the get-go. In our previous train trips we had discovered that the so-called canard is a fact--Americans really are super-loud and obnoxious. The Scots and English people on our train to Glasgow outnumbered us five to one or thereabouts, but we made much more noise just by conversing at our normal American level than everyone else did put together.

The train ride to Paris proved, however, that there is a nation whose citizens are louder and more obnoxious than the Americans. That nation is Australia.

The train journey to Paris was enlivened (maybe not improved, but definitely enlivened) by the advent of an aggressively cheerful and gregarious Australian miner who sat down across from the HLP and me and proceeded to regale us with stories about his wonderfulness. And mining accidents, and things like that. It was very early and the details were never very clear.

It was something of a relief to get off the train, all things considered. After a brief rendezvous with a station agent there in Paris we had our Metro tickets and our maps in hand and were ready to begin.

I figure it will only take me two years to finish the trip at this rate.

But hey, at this point it's bringing back all the lovely memories. So that's something.

On Wednesday we went first to the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey. And this is the proof of it:


That's me and King Richard I, Coeur de Lion (he was a Norman, after all, so he gets the snazzy French. Not that "Lionheart" is unimpressive.) Unlike Lord Nelson he is willing to turn his back on Parliament, but Parliament was less troublesome to absolute monarchs back in his day. At least until he left his little brother in charge while he went on a crusade.

Westminster Abbey is the most beautiful building I have ever seen.



That is all.

Then we went to see Wicked, which was a blast. I liked it a lot, but we don't have any pictures. What we do have pictures of is...Champions League football! Arsenal v. Sevilla, and I was there! This was a crowning felicity of my sporting life, and worth every penny. Here are the lads in action:



The ones in black are Sevilla, the red and white are Arsenal. Arsenal carried the day 3-0, and a good time was had by all.

I got up very early this morning and went out to vote. I wanted to make sure I got it done, and I've got to give a group meeting this afternoon. So, at 6:53, I got in the line to enter the polling booth and do my civic duty.

Yes, there was a line. At 6:53 in the morning.

I am, apparently, not the only person extra-motivated today. There were about thirty people in line in front of me, and the line behind me quickly grew to something like 100, where it held pretty steady--that was about the number in line when I left at 7:45.

I'm reading online reports of similar things in other states. Looks like turnout will be unusually high. It could wind up being a barn-burner, folks.

No pictures for this part, really. It's too bad, but sometimes your vacation goes undocumented visually.

After our visit to Glasgow Castle we went and got a tour of a haunted house, which was wasted money cuz the ghosts failed to make a timely appearance, and then we got on the train and went to Glasgow to stay with Mads, the woman who was making the whole thing possible (we were staying with her employer in London because he's the nicest guy in Creation and the only man to ever out-generous the HLP in my presence). So the HLP had a suitcase full of things she had requested from America as her present for having been so nice to us. Plus, we got to see her pad and Glasgow.

We ended up seeing a lot more of the first than the second, which was too bad; after our train ride (and an exceedingly unfortunate interval in which my ATM card was devoured by an intransigent Scots ATM (they call them something else in Great Britain, but darned if I can remember what it is)) we went to dinner at an Indian restaurant and had haggis curry, which isn't any better than it sounds, and then went back to Mads' flat and watched part of 28 Days on the television, then sacked out.

And since the windows were all closed (with shutters, mind you) and Mads didn't have to get up and go to work and we had had about two hours of sleep the night before and we were all kinda jet-lagged anyway, we didn't even wake up until 11:30 AM, and we didn't get out of the house until something like one o'clock, which meant that we had just enough time to eat lunch and get on the train. So that's what we did.

One note will suffice for lunch--please, be aware of what you're getting into with the Scots soft drinks. Their ginger ale is not a polite ginger-inflected beverage like Canada Dry; it is like ginger amphibious commandos assaulting your taste buds, by which I mean you would get a similar experience by dousing your tongue with concentrated essence of ginger, by which I mean, BEWARE!

They also drink Iron-Bru, which is like Frescolita, if you've ever had that, and if you haven't lived in Venezuela you probably haven't. It's sorta like creme soda; if you could make liquid carbonated caramels it would taste a lot like it.

So that was Glasgow. And by the time we got back to London, it was late, so we just went out and observed the restaurants and had a fairly forgettable meal at a pizza restaurant (don't go to London for the pizza).

But Wednesday...a lot happened on Wednesday.

I was telling you about this a few months ago...thought I'd try again.

So. Edinburgh! We got there in the end, and this is what we saw:





These pictures pretty much entirely fail to do it justice, especially since we got some exquisite views from Edinburgh Castle which were underdocumented (and would have been hard to capture without a snazzy panoramic camera anyway). Edinburgh is one of those cities that's exquisite when you can actually see it (much like San Francisco)--its setting is actually quite similar to San Francisco's, since it's built on the Firth of Forth. Of all the cities we went to this is the one that I think about most.



This rather uncanny-looking building is a World War I memorial; I'm not sure you can tell from the picture, but it was more reminiscent of an attenuated pagoda than any Western building I've seen. It's almost the first thing you see leaving the train station, and in the early morning half-light it was very impressive (and not easy to get a good photograph of, in the dim light).

Is that all the family members' experiences are so much the same, and yet, so different.

My sister Lady Grey (maybe you wonder, why all the cute psuedonyms? Well, cuz it's fun...and why put the name all over the Internets for it to be fished out by horrible spambots and other ill-inclined persons and demipersons?) has a post up about a conversation among my sisters with a family story I have never heard before. And, y'know, there have got to be more where that came from. Especially because I have all kinds of memories that seem to have escaped everyone else...like the family vacation interlude in which my sisters barged into the hotel room shouting "Beer and skittles! Beer and skittles!" and promptly set to drinking root beer and pounding Skittles like there was no tomorrow, to drown their sorrows. I never figured out what the sorrows were, but it was quite an amusing interlude. And, as best I can tell, no-one but me remembers it now.

But I bequeath it to you, Internets, and now it will never die so long as Google maintains its Cache.

SPQR stands for "Senatus Populus Que Romanus", "Senate and Populace of Rome". It was put on the standards of the Roman legions, and some classically inclined person made it a cement graffito in the sidewalk over by the UCSF Parnassus campus, which I thought was rather clever.

I was going to write a review for The Dark Knight, but it kinda got away from me--it's a page and a half long, and I'm only about a fifth of the way through the things I want to discuss. So maybe I'll do it in parts.

Suffice it to say, as reviews go, that it made a big impression on me. I'm not sure I've ever come out of the theater more pleased with a movie. It's very, very dark--no gore to speak of (except for Harvey Dent's "after" picture, which is pretty hair-raising), which is why it got a PG-13, I suppose. Heath Ledger is amazing; I am not in favor of his getting an Oscar nod for "Best Supporting Actor" because he's not a supporting actor. He should get Best Actor.

So, I could wax rhapsodic, and maybe I will later, but in the meantime, if you like Batman, or crime dramas, or scary movies that make you think about important stuff, you should go see The Dark Knight. Right away.

10 out of 10 stars.

Now with extra sisters!

So, we all dove on the other side, except I didn't dive. No mask, no snorkel, glasses...um. Not a winner. So I stayed by the float and bobbed a bit while the other fellows went down and fetched up one abalone apiece. They're pretty impressively big (the legal sized ones--they have to be at least 7 inches long to be taken) and they grow kelp and barnacles and limpets and things all over their shells. Kinda like sloths, but, y'know, underwater. After a while the bobbing with the float made me a little motion-sick, so I headed back to shore and paddled in the tide pools for a bit--and discovered a beautiful abalone shell in six inches of water. o-o It was just big enough to be legal to keep, too (if it had been alive when I found it). So I promptly claimed it as my booty, and it is now drying on my windowsill at home in preparation for a life as an ornament on a bookshelf. It's gorgeous--not even chipped. (My insistence on including the shell in our day's "take" occasioned a few laughs, but hey. I take my successes where I can find them.)

The lads didn't have as much success as they would like and we were hoping to find a place with a bit less kelp, so we pulled up stakes and drove a couple of miles down the coast to another spot we had seen and put out again. This went rather more smoothly, but either there weren't enough rocks or there was too much kelp, and we didn't have any luck at all. After a few hours (much longer than we had thought, actually) we got out and drove back. It's a nice drive, really, but we were stressed cuz we thought the dive shop would close at 6 and we would have to come back early in the morning to return the items. Fortunately, it closes at 8, so we made it in plenty of time. I got a really weird sunburn from the wetsuit--my right shoulder is all red, and the rest of my arm is its normal tone(s), so it's kinda a reverse farmer tan.

So, a day of adventure; and now I have an abalone shell, and a story, which I have just told you.

THE END

So, on Saturday I took a break from science and what-not and went with some friends to do some abalone diving. In case you are wondering, what on earth is an abalone, let's start with that:

wikipedia is our friend

The pictures there aren't really very good, but it will give you some idea. They are sea snails with non-whorled shells-something like half a clamshell atop a good-size marine snail. The shells are very handsome indeed once the rather hideous-looking creature inside of them has been removed. I was really more excited about getting a shell than catching an abalone, which, as events turned out, was all to the good.

We went so as to be in position to abalonicate at low tide--1 PM or thereabouts--and got into the water at about 11. The organizer generously loaned me a wetsuit and booties, but even so buying the fishing license, the abalone license (a separate deal), renting the mask and snorkel, the fines, the weight belt, and the float (an inner tube covered in a mesh net for us to store things in while out on the water) set me back a pretty penny. So. Expensive.

And also fairly dangerous, as weekend activities go. Not like, say, scuba diving, or hang gliding, or motocross; but still. After clambering about a bit on the rocks in our first chosen locale we decided to strike out into the deep--but my fins were missing an attachment piece and so I wasn't wearing them. Between that and the fact that it's been rather too long since I went swimming the organizer (wearing fins and managing the float) outpaced me pretty quickly, and I was making no headway against the waves. If I had had more confidence in the snorkel and mask I would probably have come through all right, but I was still close enough to the rocks that I was afraid of a cross current swamping my snorkel (I have no idea if that would really be at all likely, but I was totally unwilling to find out) so I endeavored to turn back.

Let's just say that swimming toward large rocks while in the grip of four or five foot waves is a risky enterprise, since one goes from being "too far!" to "much, much too close!" to the rocks in a matter of seconds, and since you have your back to the waves it's never clear when exactly this is going to happen. I got back, glommed onto the first available rock, was pulled off by the retreating tide, and went forward again (not really voluntarily), managing to get past the first rock and giving myself something to brace against. At that point I was pretty much out of danger, but it took me two or three more waves to work my way to a truly secure position.

After spending twenty minutes or so to collect myself I went back around the big group of rocks which we were using as our "home base" in search of my fellows, and eventually we found each other again.

AND NOW, A DIGRESSION: We were on a point with a lot of tide pools and all kinds of kool tide-pool animals. I saw several crabs and hermit crabs, many starfish, many mussels, many anemones, a few tide-pool type fish...this was one of my favorite things about the expedition.

Anyway. Having reunited, we dove on the other side of "home base", which featured a much easier approach but a lot more kelp (good, cuz the abalone eat it, bad, cuz it's nasty nasty stuff to swim in and worse to dive in--very entangling). I discovered that at some point in my mad scramble my mask and snorkel had been lost and were now, presumably, in the custody of one Davey Jones. I didn't much care. I was alive.

It did, however, prevent me from diving (together with the fact that I was wearing glasses...yep, abalone diving while wearing glasses. (!) The glasses were never in any real danger of being lost--the wetsuit kept them clapped close to my head.)

PART TWO: IN WHICH NOTHING EXCITING HAPPENS to follow