Archive for the Category ◊ Random fun ◊

10 Sep 2009 Exploring Caledonia: Part I

A Week in Caledonia

I began writing this shortly before we left Britain, but then life caught up, and in the chaos of returning to the US, it got set aside. As I write these words now, it has been nearly a month and a half since we landed in the US and a month since we returned to Albuquerque.  Life has been…  Very good, but very busy since the return.  But the memories of Britain and Europe are still strong, and part of our hearts still live there, I think.

So now I flip back through my notes and the feel and scents of Scotland return to me.  I will do my best to transcribe some of them, but there’s a great deal to say, so this may take more than one post and some time to get out.  (Not aided, I know, by my incurable verbosity.)  Think of it as a slow-motion discovery for each of you — you’ll never know when another bit of it will pop up.  But I’ll do my best to at least finish up Scotland before, oh, say, Christmas…

One of the final tour targets for the great Rati-Lane British Isles tours was Scotland. We’d been hoping to hit all of the major regions/countries of the British Isles (England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland), but we still missed Ireland.  Ah well — good reason to return at some point.  ;-)

We had to decide on something, and we had really needed a work-free vacation, so we packed our bags and headed North.  A lot happens in a week of intense vacationing, so there’s quite a bit to report.  We’ll start with:

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09 May 2009 Only in Britain…
 |  Category: Places and Sights, Random fun  | One Comment

… would the wiring instructions at a construction site come with etiquette:

Instructions to wiring crew at Tube rennovation works, drawn on a wall in Leicester Square tube station.

Instructions to wiring crew at Tube rennovation works, drawn on a wall in the King's Cross/St Pancras Tube station.

18 Mar 2009 Spring comes to London!
 |  Category: Places and Sights, Random fun, Vistas  | One Comment

It isn’t all snow and wet and dark here in London.  Spring is on the way!  Last weekend1, Susan and I went to the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew to enjoy the first flowers and a bit of blue sky.

Early spring flowers at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew

Early spring flowers at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew

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11 Feb 2009 The joys of globalization
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Susan and I were making travel arrangements to Paris last night. (We’re heading there in a week and a half or so to meet a friend who’s there on business.)

While reserving a hotel room, I ran across the following bit as a piece of a larger legal disclaimer:

This Web site is offered to you, the customer, by Travelscape, Inc. trading as ‘Eurostar Planet’, a Nevada Corporation c/o 3150 139th Avenue SE Bellevue, WA 98005 (“Eurostar Planet”).

So this is a Nevada company, run out of Washington, pretending to be French, selling hotel rooms to people in the United Kingdom, using a U.S. credit card, billed to an address in London.

Ah, the wonders of the global economy…

16 Jan 2009 Holy blog overhaul, Batman!
 |  Category: Random fun  | Leave a Comment

So, Dreamhost (our ISP) nudged us to upgrade our Wordpress to 2.7, and lo-and-behold it included some major enhancements, including threaded comments!  This made our little heart go pitter-pat.  But, of course, the theme we were using didn’t support threaded commenting.  So we tracked down one that did that we didn’t hate.

New features in the current layout:

1. Threaded comments!  (Duh.)  Now you can reply to specific comment and it will display as such.  This is probably more useful for us than for you.

2. The picture in the middle of the header changes, and it’s once of ours.  Some of the ones we picked look better than others, so we’ll probably play with it.

3. We can now automatically email you when we answer your comments!  One thing I’ve always felt made blogs like WordPress impersonal in comparison to social sites like LiveJournal is that people have to go back to the site to see if anyone happened to answer their comment.  I believe Terran and I, as admins, are the only people who can use the feature, but now when you comment, we can reply and send you an email notification.

Hope our (very small) devoted readership likes the change :).

04 Jan 2009 A cup ‘o kindness
 |  Category: Meditations, People, Random fun  | One Comment

New Year’s Eve for us was a whirlwind of chaos and impressions, but many of those impressions are good ones and we will have memories to treasure for years.

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29 Dec 2008 Randomly…
 |  Category: Random fun  | 4 Comments

Ok, this is completely non-travel-related.  But it’s so strange that I had to relate it…

So I started to ask Google “Why doesn’t firefox spellchecker handle contractions correctly in gmail?” (which is one of my current tech annoyances).  But when I got as far as “why doesn’t”, the Google auto-completer helpfully recommended the following:

  1. why doesn’t he call (233 Million hits)
  2. why doesn’t glue stick to the inside of the bottle (114k)
  3. why doesn’t he like me (53.7M)
  4. why doesn’t he love me (33M)
  5. why doesn’t god heal amputees (21k)

I shit you not.

Now this tells us a couple of interesting things:

First, the top three causal interrogatives that concern the web population as a whole are (a) courtship ritual uncertainties, (b) kinetic curing properties of (likely polyvinyl acetate-based) adhesives, and (c) the theological problem of evil.

Second, the courtship rituals cluster overwhelmingly outweighs the other two.  By like 3 orders of magnitude.  Sex trumps chemistry and god every time, I guess.

Third, the courtship rituals are entirely about the behavior of the male of the species.  There are no “why doesn’t she love me?” queries.  I won’t touch that.

Finally, the most pressing query about evil concerns the (undoubted) suffering of amputees.  While clearly a pressing theological issue, one does wonder about other concerns such as war, famine, plague, crime, poverty, etc.

The web is a far stranger place…

Anyway, as a pathetic attempt to make this post at least marginally travel-related, I’ll note that fruit cocktail tastes exactly the same in Spain as it does in the US.  Ah, fond memories of preschool snack time…

29 Oct 2008 Game review hall of shame
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All the games in Terran’s review below were the games we thought WERE cool.  We played a few that didn’t work so well too.  Most notably, a tile matching party game based on pairing up romantic couples in a nightclub.  The instructions were very funny.  The actual gameplay sort of killed the fun, which makes it a good contrast for Accused.  I don’t remember the name now.

We also played Pinch the Poachers, a collaborative children-and-adults game about saving the cute animals from the evil poachers.  The game itself was rather nice, and I think it would be fun to play with your six or seven-year-old.  The company itself had a big agenda about using collaborative gameplay to shape young minds to be nice rather than competitive that we found to be a bit too much.

26 Oct 2008 Spiel trip report (preliminary)
 |  Category: Random fun  | 2 Comments

Hi all!

This weekend we’ve been at the Spiel gaming convention in Essen, Germany.  There’s a lot to say, but I’m writing this from our hotel in Essen and I don’t want to take the time for a full report just yet.  But a few quick notes to you gamer geeks out there on the games we’ve seen, ranked in decreasing order of coolness: more…