I had a pretty good blog entry to post a couple of hours ago, and I forgot it totally. This is because I was wrestling a virtual machine to the ground because it had gone somewhere HTTP requests could not follow. I'd have posted about that nonsense, too, except the VM hosts The Daily Parker, you see.
I am therefore reduced to a link round-up, though this time I will embed, rather than link to, two of the things that people have sent me in the past day and a half:
- I had an excellent dinner tonight.
- Science writer Michael Hanlon thinks innovation peaked in 1973. I disagree, but I haven't got a rebuttal yet.
- People in L.A. suspect that arsonists burned down one of the most anti-urban development projects ever thrust upon Americans.
- My flight Sunday got delayed in part because of de-icing. Patrick Smith explains why this happens.
- Chicago steak houses are suffering because the price of wholesale beef has shot up in recent days. I feel for them, I really do, but I also want to have a Morton's steak before year's end. Anyone want to join me?
- Talking Points Memo has a timeline of the New Republic's self-immolation. I still mourn.
- I got some personal news today that will make Daily Parker headlines when it's officially announced next week.
- I'm staying up until 3am CET (8pm Chicago time) because I don't want to fall asleep at Euchre tomorrow. Just remember: the left bower is trump, you idiot.
- A propos of nothing, I'm posting one of the best speeches by one of the worst characters in all Shakespeare:
There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
You have been patient, and have earned your reward. Here are your two videos, hat tip to reader MG:
And this, but you have to skip ahead to 37m 53s to get the point:
Business travel sometimes presents contradictions. Here are mine today:
- Good news: I got assigned to do a technical diligence in Paris.
- Bad news: We'll be at the airport for two days, with only one opportunity to see the city.
- Good news: Hey, it's an all-expense-paid trip to Europe.
- Bad news: In coach, which is really grim on an overnight flight such as one from Chicago to Paris.
- Good news: There's a 9am flight to London and the Eurostar to get me to Paris the next morning.
- Bad news: I have to get up at 6:30am on a Sunday.
- Good news: There's no traffic on the Kennedy at this hour on Sunday morning, so I got from my house to the airport and through security in only 30 minutes.
- Bad news: It's still Sunday, and I'm missing two full days for travel.
On balance, it's worth the trip. But yes, I'm going to be grumpy about some aspects of it.
Updates as the situation warrants.
Well, we made it to Heathrow only an hour late, and scrambled to get our initial findings out to our director in the 45 minutes we had available in the lounge...until our flight to Chicago was also delayed an hour and fifteen minutes. Really I just want to get on the plane and sleep. But then I also want to get home with enough time to nap before an event I've been looking forward to. So, here's hoping the published delay right now is the real delay, and I still have a couple of hours to unpack and change.
Also, I was off just a bit in my surmise how the credit card transit tickets worked. It's not that Norway has less transit theft than other countries (though I suspect this is true anyway), it's that you have to swipe your credit card to get out of gates when you arrive. Still, we left the hotel at 5:20 and got to the airport by 6. That's pretty impressive.
The Nag's Head, Angel:
Coincidentally, this pub has the same name as my go-to pub when I lived in Hoboken, N.J., 15 years ago.
Waiting at Heathrow for the flight home has only one consolation: the lounge and its open bar. Still, I've just spent four days doing essentially all of my favorite things to do in London, so it's a little melancholic being back at the airport.
I also didn't take a lot of photos. Once I'm back in Chicago and can tell what time of day it is (tomorrow, most likely), I'll extract them from my phone.
Regular blog postings should resume in the morning.
And still in London. Postings should resume tomorrow.
This is only my 7th time at O'Hare in the past month, but since two of those times were yesterday and the day before, it feels like I just never left. Today, though, I'm going to the Ancestral Homeland. That makes it all better.
Well, almost. I mean, it's still O'Hare. And Heathrow isn't exactly the jewel in the British crown, either. And so far this week I've flown the equivalent of a trans-Atlantic trip already.
No matter. Boarding in 20 minutes; dinner in London tonight. Mustn't grumble.
Over the next 10 days I have four long flights, one round-trip to Los Angeles and one to London. Even though I'll have to work a bit on all four of them, I'm also getting ready to have some quality reading time. (In fact, there will be at least one afternoon in London spent reading and drinking beer, as usual.)
To start, I've added two challenging books to my Kindle: Cervantes' Don Quijote (in the original Spanish) and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (in the original Middle English). I've never read either; both will push me linguistically. (And now that I'm thinking about it, I'm also adding a Spanish-English dictionary...)
Also, I've sent these articles to the device:
The L.A. trip was expected, as it's a follow-up to the trip I took last week, but it's still weirdly timed. And poor Parker will be boarded forever. Of course, when I take the recycling out to the alley, clearly I've been gone forever when I return, so that's not exactly a neutral benchmark.
Yesterday morning I griped about how dark October mornings seem. Today it's raining. This causes a minor additional problem as Parker has a vet appointment in a little more than an hour, and I'm pretty much committed to walking him up there. So I guess we'll both get wet. What can you do? The weather these days.
Actually, all of this is just getting into the spirit of London ahead of my visit in two weeks. The English call this "having a moan." I still need some practice, clearly; a good English moaner would have been able to extend that last paragraph out for half an hour....
There are so many things in life we know intellectually but forget in reality before getting an unhappy reminder. The ever-later sunrises in October, for example, just suck, but we forget.
Since the end of daylight saving time moved from early October to early November in 1986 and 2007, October mornings are just grim, especially when it's overcast and gloomy, like today. The sun rises in Chicago before 7am until October 12th, but even at 6:45 (like today) many people still wake up before dawn.
My second-favorite city in the world has it worse, though. London sees the sun come up around the same time as Chicago in the middle of September, but today the sun came up there well after 7a. The day before the UK goes back to GMT at the end of October, London's sunrise is a depressing 7:43a on the 25th, but it gets worse for them. Boxing Day (December 26th) doesn't see the sun until 8:07a.
Chicago's latest sunrise this year is 7:24a on November 1st. Because Chicago isn't as far north as London, our midwinter sun comes up a few minutes earlier, at 7:19a on January 4th.
So much for quantifying misery. It's all cyclical. October mornings can just be depressing, though.