More about Life

As many of you know, Professor Gray and I live with two creatures of the genus Felis catus. The functions of these creatures are to act as a crude alarm clock, to cover everything in the house with a thin layer of hair and for scientific observation.

Cath and I both have very different disciplines. I am in charge of noting the negative characteristics of the subjects: such as, the frequency and irritation of pitch of their whining; their tendency to believe they are ankle bracelets; and their inability to learn practical lessons from many of their escapades. Professor Gray is in charge of exaggerating their learning and cognitive skills.

Even before our chubby little subjects went on their diets, the overriding concern in their lives was food. Whilst this is true of many animals who, in the wild, don't know where their next meal is coming from, for animals that have never known the wild, rarely go out and are fed pretty damn regularly, this should not be a worry. Yet, Borneo (the male subject) spends his entire waking life whining that he doesn't have food in his bowl. Obviously he does have food in his bowl quite frequently, but it's only ever there for a few seconds before he wolfs it down. This brief period does at least afford the briefest gap in his whining. Borneo has an eating problem.

One of other joys in a cat's life is the stalking, wrestling and torturing of such prey as twine, thread and lengths of string. This of course is also related to food. In the wild, these bits of string would be mice, birds and adorable, little baby rabbits with big eyes and a delightful curiosity. But even cats know that the nutritional value of a bit of string is somewhat below wood shavings and hair (although Borneo does eat a lot of the latter). However the process is so closely linked with the getting of food, even for a cat that has never caught anything bigger than a moth in is life, that once the string has been caught, very often Borneo will drag it down to the kitchen and drop it in his bowl. Because all he knows about food is that this is where it appears.

Professor Gray has hypothesised that this shows rudimentary understanding of currency. Which I guess could be true. But it's more likely he's either treating this as a gift (more able cats often give their owners gifts of disembowelled mice or the badly-chewed heads of adorable, little baby rabbits with big eyes and a delightful curiosity); or that he is using some rudimentary logic along the lines of:

things caught = food;
food lives in bowl;
therefore anything put in the bowl will become food.
(Reductio ad felinus)

It's possible that some dropping of caught string in the bowl has been seemingly rewarded with real food, which may have reinforced this behaviour.

However with true scientific rigour, we do need to prove or disprove the currency theory. Therefore I am creating a whole system of different-length strings that equate to different amounts of food, along with an exchange rate (linked to stock market prices) between the string and other currencies (little squashy balls, catnip mice and shoe laces). So the cat will be paid unemployment benefit of three balls a week and an obesity allowance of one catnip mouse, plus whatever string he's able to hunt, as long as it's under the string-hunting quota of 15 pieces of string a week. Once he's got the hang of this, we'll starting introducing hunting levies and taxation, plus we may have to investigate possible unemployment benefit fraud as hunting could be considered an occupation. Once he has mastered these complications, it's time to make him CEO (or perhaps Main Executive Operating Worker) of his own corporation and see how long it lasts. Although the problem I foresee is that his first role as CEO will almost certainly be to reward himself a huge food bonus.

Who said cats were stupid? Oh, yeah, I did.

Labels: Cats, Science, Wildlife

Due to time travel, I woke up at 6:20 am. I sat on the balcony over the sea and listened to the roar of the city. Like many big cities, Seattle has a background roar of traffic and... well, just traffic really. I observed a pair of seagulls clamour around the tin roof just below our balcony. One had an odd tendency to stand on one leg. In fact, for the first 15 minutes I thought he only had one leg. Every now and again one or the other would fly off or disappear under next door's balcony. They didn't even know or care that I existed.

Ships came in and out the harbour. I watched the steady progress of a huge container ship laden down with containers bearing the name Hyundai.

At shortly before nine we grabbed some coffee from the conference breakfast area, and I attended one of the sessions available to anybody (only Cath had paid up, I was a conference husband for the next few days; Free to play golf and have tea with other conference husbands, of which there seemed to be none).

During the late morning, I wandered through the maze of Pike Place Market and then topped up my caffeine level at a branch of Seattle's Best Coffee. It's pretty good, but I'm not sure it's the best.

After that, I wandered around some more; joined Greenpeas; bought an ironic hat and some bubblegum cigarettes; and visited the bubblegum wall. I don't normally do so many bubblegum related things in one day, but when in Rome... The latter is a wall outside an improv theatre which has lots of bubblegum squashed into it. It's a local attraction and somewhat artistic and somewhat gross at the same time. Back at Pike Place Market, I finally got to see some fish being thrown. It's apparently one of the things that you must see and there are often tourists hanging about the same corner waiting for a new fish to emerge.

For dinner we had Vietnamese and were happy to see that some places do serve more normal American portions. Nouvelle cuisine isn't very American, being French and hard to spell. And small in size.

In a random drugstore, we found another of those American products that make you shake your head in wonder. This month it was Identigene – home DNA test kit. "for mother, child and alleged father." It's not really a home testing kit. It's a kit for taking the necessary swabs and an envelope to send them to the lab. It does not include the $119+ for the actual test.

Down one of the narrow alleys between buildings, we caught sight of a scampering. And sure enough, as large as life and twice as smart, was a rat. We pretty much saw a rat every day after that. Seattle is all about coffee, rain, rats, fish, tattoos and totem poles. Not necessarily in that order. Somehow grunge got dropped off the list.

On the way back, we had to wait for a huge long train heading from the harbour area out of town. It was loaded with Hyundai containers. I guess they'd finished unloading the boat I'd seen that morning.

Luxury hotel it may be, but either the walls are really thin or the people next door were really loud.

Labels: Anthropology, Drink, Food, Science, Transport, Travel, US, Wildlife

Airlines still have not taken on board my idea of having a separate section for families with children, or making the children travel in the hold with pets. After all, smoking is banned and second-hand smoke doesn't shorten your life like having to deal with screaming kids does.

At the front of our section was a kid with a misshapen head who screamed even before the plane even took off. You can imagine how he was when the plane left the ground and the pressure swelled the air in his odd little ears to painful levels.

The choice of food on flights these days seems always to be "chicken or pasta." Which is an annoying choice. I mean, "how is the chicken prepared?" and "what's in the pasta?" Perhaps there really is no choice, just chicken pasta? It's like asking "4x4 or Hyundai?" or "White or electrical appliance?" Crazy. Anyway they ran out of chicken two people before me, so there was no need to choose.

Cath always avoids all this by playing the "lactose intolerant" card. I must admit "lactose intolerance" always makes me think of some old geezer sitting in a bar saying, "Ah, these lactoses, coming here and flooding our cornflakes! Why can't they go back to cowland?" Idiot! Everyone knows it's Cowtania.

After food, the crew announced the availability of "doody-free" items, implying both the chicken and the pasta contained "doody."

After this, there were the compulsory entertainment system problems. In my experience of long-haul flying, there is always one entertainment system problem per flight. This time it was an entire entertainment system failure. You never want to hear the word "failure" announced over the aircraft PA system, but that was exactly what happened. You just hoped and prayed they reset the right box or that the entertainment system wasn't directly linked to the flight control system. Liberal use of the word "failure" over an aircraft PA system is exactly the sort of thing to make your underpants entirely not "doody-free."

Labels: Anthropology, Food, Science, Transport, Travel

"Anywhere I go, a fly girl will please me," NWA

Having checked in online, we didn't have to queue up at the check-in desk at the airport. However, as we had bags to check, we had to perform a queue up at the baggage-drop desk. The baggage-drop desk is a check-in desk relabelled "baggage-drop desk" at which you queue in exactly the same manner as you did when it was a check-in desk.

We were checked in, sorry: our baggage was dropped by Mevrouw Room (or Mrs Cream, which is clearly a name from some novel). After this we went through the security check, which is still called the same thing, but is now a much longer process.

Since shoes have been thrown at the last US president and belts have killed several actors and rock stars in hotel rooms, both are now considered deadly weapons and must be x-rayed. I am dreading the day terrorists hijack a plane by strangling the pilot with a pair of underpants. In fact in the 1974 sexploitation classic Deadly Weapons, I'm pretty sure Chesty Morgan kills a man with her enormous boobs. If the FAA in the US ever see this movie, I expect that boobs over a certain size will have to be kept in a resealable plastic bra.



After the regular security comes the extra travelling-to-the-US security, which employs the same travelling-to-Israel security techniques of X-raying things a second time and asking a lot of questions. They don't really listen to the answers, I've notices, but, I guess, to your nervousness in answering.

NWA is currently undergoing an identity crisis and can't decide whether it's called NWA or Delta. I think it should call itself something even more hip-hop like NWA vs Delta Posse featuring The KLM Crew.

The plane was from NWA, but the safety rigmarole (video) was from Delta. I hadn't seen Delta's safety rigmarole before; it's cute. In it a chirpy actress with an LA smile perkily tells you all the ways to avoid death. Or at least things to help you feel you can avoid it. It doesn’t help fill you with confidence when your ticket says, Destination: SEA. I preferred my first ever long-haul ticket that proudly proclaimed, Destination: SIN.

Labels: Anthropology, Europe, Movies, Science, Transport, Travel, US

Church of the day: St. Peter's Vietnamese Catholic Church.

Not many people realise St. Peter (or San Pi Ta) was Vietnamese. In fact only a handful are even aware there were Vietnamese Jews in Israel in and around 0 AD/BC. What we do all know is that AD/BC was the rock band that Peter fronted. It's not mentioned much, but when Jesus said, "Peter, you are my rock," he actually screamed it out from the front row of the Jerusalem Amphitheatre (now the Cellcom Arena).

First port of call for today was a pleasant, well-run nursing home currently housing one of Catherine's relatives. It's usually hard not to be depressed around nursing homes, but this place does almost everything to make itself seem like a hotel. Except that most of the staff dress like nurses. Mind you, many people would pay very good money to stay in a hotel where the staff dress like nurses.

Lunch was ambushed at Spring Creek Barbeque. Here there were several options for getting your food. You could shuffle along the canteen-style line to pick out what you wanted; or you could stand at a desk and request it for take-away from the smiley lady. There was also an extra stand selling "cobblers." Cobblers are a kind of filled dumpling. If you're British, never has "carry-out" food been so "Carry On."

In-restaurant music was provided by a CD of Christian rock. For those of you who don't know Christian rock, this was a highly typical example. It was bland, country-tinged AOR (Adult-Orientated Rock) with choruses of the sort that go, "Jesus is alive!" with a portion of the gusto that other bands use when celebrating women who "shake." No matter what your views on religion, it's safe to assume Jesus deserves better than Christian rock. Most bands are very pale imitations indeed of the legendary AD/BC.

The middle of the day was devoted to golf, the gentleman of sports. The only sport that comes with its own special buggy (except, of course, buggy racing) and where you have the chance to see bobcats (except, perhaps, bobcat buggy chasing). I was very pleased with how it all turned out. My previous experience with golf had been limited to knocking balls about as a way to get out of more physical sports at school and a couple of practice rounds over the years. But I still remembered how to swing that stick and thwack that ball in roughly the right direction and for a reasonable percentage of the distance required. Not quite Tiger Woods, but perhaps Pussycat Bracken.

-


If TV ads are to be taken as showing what Americans think they need, then the answer is: cars and medication. In fact the number of car ads is down since the auto industry rolled over the side of a cliff and burst into flames. Of the medications, very popular seem to be Viagra and "Cialis," which I only know about from my email box.

The best thing about the ads for medication (including Viagra, Cialis and the like) is that so much time goes towards (a) making sure you check with your doctor first; (b) warning you about possible side effects; and (c) making sure if anything unusual occurs, you go to your doctor. More time is spent warning you about the product than is spent trying to sell it.

America has come a long way and I never thought I'd hear the words "erectile dysfunction" in the middle of the day on a US TV station. Not that I really wanted to. The "erectile dysfunction" ads show a lot of men older than 30 sitting on sofas with women and talking. And thus by implication, not having sex. In fact, had the announcer not said the words "erectile dysfunction" you wouldn't have guessed he was hoping for sex, except for the fact he was a man alone with a woman. There is nothing suggestive of the situation except a mild sadness in the couple's eyes. In Italy, no doubt they have a cartoon penis to advertise these products who starts of flaccid and out of breath. In the US, this would cause heart attacks and riots on the street. My campaign for Viagra would be hosted by former cartoon dog, Droopy. He would be perfect for the role. There's almost certainly a cartoon where he drank growth serum.

Dinner was had at Chedders a chain of restaurants that are pleasantly decorated but frequented by noisy people. The food is the usual sweet, salty fare. Even the carrots were sweetened, which is a crime against humanity. Or at least against veganity, which I'm sure is nearly as bad. They had music in the background and, guess what, Chedders plays pop. (You have to be British and over 30 to appreciate that joke.)

In the evening we visited Cath's spirited Aunt Vora, who lives in one of those neighbourhoods with faux-wooden bungalows on each plot.

I was told not to walk on the grass because of things called chiggers. Chiggers are local-grown little critters that live in the grass but prefer skin. They cause itching and rashes and things like that. Nobody seemed to have a good word for them. There ought to be a joke about the sort of music they play, perhaps only suitable for Brits over 30, but I can't think of what it would be.

On the subject of music, I'll leave you with a tune that was following us around on the radio waves this trip. It's something like New Wave Electro English Beat Queen Gary Numan Pink Floyd. Ladies I give you Late of the Pier with Bathroom Gurgle: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYuwGGqd0y4

PS Of course, right at the end should come the set-up for both the jokes in this entry: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4TmQxLjELI Glorious!

Labels: Food, Music, Religion, Science, Sport, Travel, TV, UK, US

Coping with long-haul flights is different for each person. Catherine can often manage to sleep on planes, especially in her ear-plugs, eye-mask and mind-shield. I can rarely it. Even with less than four hours sleep under my lids I still was not able to drop off on the plane. Two large coffees didn't help matters. But then being stuck on a plane is a good chance to catch up on the three W's: watching, writing and reading.

Out of curiosity, and the fact I've watched all the others, I took in Quarter of Sausages (also know as The Bond Conspiracy). In it, Jason Bond moods and broods through a succession of killings frequently juxtaposed with similarly dramatic performances (operas, fiestas and other fights). Bonds are a lot more psychological these days and villains no longer want to take over and/or destroy the world. In Question of Sportsnight, the secret organisation (excitingly more spectre-like than Spectre ever was) wants to get in on the lucrative game of utilities management. Anyone who didn't already think that water providers were more evil than al Qaida of Saudiarabia can feel a Quantum of Smugness.

In all, Quest for Seweragerights is enjoyable and somehow gritty yet over the top at the same time. Three Roger Moores out of 5.

Sitting in a plane, you can't help but get a glance of other people's screens. These, half-glimpsed images (always from the same small subset of films) often get merged in the mind and you wonder how you missed the subplots in the film you saw about the street kids in India and escaped cartoon zoo animals. Personally, I think this would have made a much better film (worthy of 4 or even 5 Roger Moores) and would be called Quantum of Slumdog Madagascar.

The second film I watched was Suspect X, a Japanese cop drama starring your favourites: Masaharu Fukuyama, Matsuyuki Yasuko and Tsutsumi Shinichi. A repressed yet somewhat tense story where emotions are kept in except for the odd crime of passion or vent. In the end, love wins over science although this being a Japanese film not in a happy singing-dancing way but in an "everyone's doomed to a life of depression" sort of way. Two Masaharu Fukuyamas out of 5.

Sometime during the films, the cabin crew offered "doody free" items. Implying everything else they offered so far had been filled with faeces.

Labels: Anthropology, Drink, Language, Movies, Science, Transport, Travel, US

It has not been unknown for me to help KLM out with training their support staff to deal with angry customers, so it actually felt weird to call them several times in one day as a genuinely irritated customer. I was sorely temped to get really angry just to see if they'd learnt everything. But in the end I was too nice to get anything more than miffed.

I was calling because my names appeared to have been stuck together and wanted to check that this was okay. The girl said that because the US authorities were such sticklers for accuracy (even though highly organised terrorists are far more likely to get things like that right than the average Joa) it was best to get it changed.
• Plus side: they could easily have this done for me.
• Minus side: a change like this (adding a space as far as I was aware) takes several hours.
• Extra Minus side: we could not check in online until it was done.

So we waited. Some time shortly before 4pm, a new e-ticket was issued.
• Plus side: a change had been made
• Minus side: It was even odder than before, with the Mr put in an odd place.
• Plus side: the (or another) girl confirmed this would be okay,
• Minus side: we now could not check in.

Although our ticket said "this is an e-ticket," and the My Tickets area listed it as an e-ticket, when we tried to check in online it gave us an error message, "This ain't no e-ticket, motherf***er." Or something to that effect. The (or another) girl tried to help, but clearly something had got messed up during the change. Computer records are annoyingly like vinyl, very easily damaged. The airline support fall-back was soon the only option – check in at the airport.

So with only 4½ hours sleep under our lids, we arrived at the airport at 7:30, dreading being given the worst seats on the plane. (The worst seats are usually those right at the back where they do not recline but the ones in front of you recline fully. Although once on an internal flight in China I and a colleague were allocated seats that didn't exist as they had been taken out to make the exit.) As things turned out, we had fine seats and check-in was relatively smooth except I couldn't be checked in onto our connecting flight; we had to do that once we arrived at our stopover.

As we waited in the long line for stuffy security staff to ask about our stuff, we watched the silent TV screens. It's intriguing to see what they show to people in airports. Most airports show you rolling news channels, but sometimes Schiphol likes to be different. Today they were showing curling.

Curling is possibly the world's worst sport. Yet somehow strangely compelling – like an incomprehensible foreign ritual. But as a sport it is, as I believe president Obama would put it, retarded.

Before you complain:

"Retarded, adj: Physics. Designating parameters of an electromagnetic field which allow for the finite speed of wave propagation, so that the potential due to a distant source is expressed in terms of the state of the source at some time in the past" (New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary).

If you don't know, curling is a kind of bowls meets lavatory cleaning on ice. One person bowls a large, solid blob along an ice strip towards a painted target. After this two enthusiastic moppers take over and clean the path (in front of) of the ball with brushes. As Newton's 4th law of Subthermal Dynamics states:

"The cleanliness of the ice is in direct proportion to the maximum speed attainable by an object travelling along that ice." (Old Longer Cambridge English Dictionary)

My main problem with it is that in other sports, the ball is what you use to play; in curling, the sweepers speed along preparing the way for the ball. They are the ball's bitches. The skill involved is the skill of being able to sweep really fast whilst skating. I agree not an easy skill, but at the same time not a useful, elegant, empowering, practical, cool, or indeed desirable skill. Participation has the result of making yourself less important than a large, solid blob of who-knows-what. It's a hard sport to play and keep any form of self respect.

Labels: Anthropology, Netherlands, Science, Sport, Transport, Travel, TV

We landed in Portland International Airport, which is one of the best organised airports I've seen in the US. It helps that it's not so big. The thing I am still not used to is the American system whereby all of the shops are before you go through security. Therefore after you have checked in, you still mingle with thieves, drug smugglers and terrorists for a long time before you get on the flight. But I guess I'm used to security-conscious Europe rather than the commercially-minded US.

One thing I did touch upon was the problem we were having with NWA, the Network With Additional Costs. When we came to check in online, we were allocated seats. Two people who booked tickets together paid for in the same payment were allocated seats at two different ends of the plane. Why would any company do that? There is a 100% chance we would want to sit together in those situations. The reason is, NWA wanted to grab more money from us. It allowed us to change these seats, but most of the available seats were only available at a 50 dollar upgrade charge. So basically, they stick you in unacceptable seats and charge you to sit somewhere reasonable. We picked the last two free seats together that weren't charged for (right up near the back of the plane) because we didn't want to give these crooks any more money. We should have remembered their 1988 hit, "F**k tha Passengas."

On top of that the site wouldn't let us fully check in after we selected seats because we'd booked via KLM. It suggested trying then booking airline's site. We tried KLM's website told us "why not check in online at nwa.com." Believe me, baby, we tried.

I am currently trying to complain but because of the fact we booked through KLM, they can't seem to find details. Criminal AND badly organised. Sounds like a bad combination.

We had a lot of time before the flight. I ate a huge mushroom burger while Cath napped. For some reason Americans think there is nothing better than putting a pickled gherkin in a bun otherwise filled with good things. They must either like them or think that it is good to do some penance with something that is otherwise enjoyable. Maybe they think it will help them get into heaven. Not with gherkin-breath, you won't.

Going through security, it was shown that my ticket had a random "S" on it. This random letter is added to the card based on criteria unknown and means extra security check required. It meant that I had to go through the "puffer." This is a glass box the size of a small elevator that blows air at you in order to dislodge particles. It then sniffs the air for whatever they are looking for: pesticides, drugs or explosives. Then a chatty woman swabbed my new bag and put the swabs into a machine. It was my new laptop bag and she swabbed pockets I hadn't even known were there. If the machine was calibrated for "new bag smell" alarms would have gone off all over the building. But whatever they were looking for, I didn't have any. They funny thing is, this extra security took me outside of the normal queue and I was all done before Catherine with her standard security was through. Evidently potential terrorists get fast-tracked onto the plane. The Americans have never really understood security. But I guess it protects the airport itself more.

We still had plenty of time and so nabbed some coffee and used the airport's power to laptoptify. Portland is a fun, small airport and huge jumbo planes have to line up with tiny little things that are barely bigger than the cockpit of the former.

Our flight was full and our seats at the back were not bad in that they had a little more room as there were only three of them instead of the four earlier on in the plane as it was starting to taper in there. And we weren't right at the back where the seats don't go back. However the flight was popular with people with children who I still insist should have a class of their own.

The safety instructions were given via a video with what seemed to be real aircrew carefully picked to be completely across the board racially. There was a Dutch translation after every explanation, but it was done quickly and only covered some of the topics. For example none of the first class apparatus was explained suggesting the cost-conscious Dutch don't travel first class.

Soon after take off we were offered a last glimpse of the magnificent Mount St. Helens, sitting there, biding its time.

It was a long ten-hour flight which Cath cleverly slept through. She part-fasted whilst I ate everything that came my way and completely failed to sleep whatsoever. My method was actually the more successful at getting back on the new time zone but only because I have the more flexible body clock that sorts itself out pretty quickly at the expense of being a zombie for the first few days back. I even managed to do a short improv gig the afternoon I arrived. I have no idea how it went, but I certainly wasn't in my head, which is a good thing.

It was nice to visit new places in the US. San Francisco and Portland I could definitely do again. In fact I suspect I could live in both places, and not many cities in the US make me feel like that.

Labels: Drink, Food, Impro, Music, Science, Transport, Travel, US

The latest scientific wisdom is that the way to beat jetlag is through fasting. Apparently if you don't eat for 14 hours before you land, you reset your internal clock the moment you eat, your body deciding this must be breakfast. All well and good for flights landing around breakfast time. If you land in the evening, what do you do then? Perhaps I should do some research rather than rely on second-hand hearsay. I remain unconvinced as to the scientific fact of this and will continue to eat and carry my magic time sticks with me.

We awoke at seven, grabbed a quick breakfast, packed and hopped on the shuttle-bus for the airport. It was all very easy, although our German driver was a tad grumpy that we were not ready when he turned up a couple of minutes early. We took a tiny little Alaskan Airline plane to Portland. 18 rows of seats it had. I was rather disappointed there were no Inuit on the flight. Maybe they were in Frost Class. (I know it's a bad joke but I woke up at 7, so what do you expect.)

I liked Alaska Airlines. They had a big picture of an Eskimo on the tail fin and served Starbucks coffee. However, even this managed to taste like mud as all airline coffee does. I think it is something to do with altitude.

Up in the air, we had some awesome views. A great snow-capped mountain drifted past some 45 minutes in. This was almost certainly Mount Shasta. Sometime later appeared a giant crater filled with water called Crater Lake. This was Oregon and more mountains followed many with snowy peaks, without which mountains don't really seem like mountains. Around that area there seemed many paths (they must have been roads/tracks from this height) but otherwise the area seemed very unspoilt woodland.

Labels: Drink, Food, Science, Transport, Travel, US

We broke our fast but were unable to get to the waffle maker again because of a throng of children and their parents. However, today there was a little Spanish lady who made omelettes how you like them. I like them warm, full of mushrooms and made by Spanish ladies.


After this we checked out and drove to the La Brea Tar Pits. The tar pits are several patches of tarry water that are filled with animal bones and surrounded by school children. Over thousands of years many creatures have found themselves trapped in the sticky pools, sunk to their deaths and been preserved as bones. For the last 100 years or so, humans have peering into the pools and recreating the creatures from their bones. There are thousands of wolves, sabre-tooths (which are no longer called sabre-tooth tigers because they ain't tigers) and American mastodons, which are like mammoths, which are like hairy elephants. (You didn't know America had elephants, did you.) Many of the creatures whose bones were found in the pits are now extinct. This could be due to the fact they kept falling in the pits, but that doesn't seem to be the most popular theory. Only one human skeleton has been found which is surprising considering how many kids there are running and screaming all around.


If you have trouble imagining how these creatures could get trapped in the tar, models of mammoths illustrate. On one side of the largest pit, a female sinks as her mate and child look on helplessly. On the other side, a happy little mammoth strides merrily off the edge unwittingly into the black goo. The human kids all run around merrily in what is essentially a place of death.




In the cheap museum, you can see many reconstructed skeletons, some life-like models and some awkward animated ones for kids still young enough to like that sort of thing. There are some facts, but possibly the best bit is the quiet arboretum in the middle (which is forbidden to groups of children). It has plants and a pool containing big koi and an abundance of turtles. The turtles swim about lazily or sun themselves. They were all relaxed except for one little one, who enjoyed aggravating the others by swimming in front of them and waggling its paws in their faces. A teenage brat turtle. Awesome.





On the way back to the hotel to pick up our luggage, we drove up Rodeo Drive, famed shopping haunt for stars. The street was mostly full of tourists looking for stars, just like we were. We arrived at the airport with plenty of time to spare. The trouble with LA is at one time the roads are fast moving and you can fly anywhere, but a few minutes later, it all grinds to a halt. There wasn't a great deal of choice at the airport, so we had to eat at Chili's a chain that is a kind of prefab Texas. I had fajitas that were adequate if you ignored fact that everything had been sweetened.

Labels: Food, History, Science, Transport, Travel, US, Wildlife

What I have not reflected much on is that this was in many ways a Day of Horror. (den, den, derrrr.)

It all started with Catherine singing in the shower. Outside the door, it had an eerie, echoy quality just like the soundtrack of many a horror movie. Upon hearing the sound, my original idea had been to turn the camera on in movie mode and make (probably) the first ever Dogme95 horror movie. With the eerie music playing as we approach the door, then the door bursts open onto the mandatory shower scene and the most realistic screaming ever. I changed my mind when I realised that the resulting film would be less like psycho and end up being more like a Point-of-view porn snuff movie as a naked girl kicks to death the cameraman.

In the end, I settled for merely recording the eerie singing on my phone. This is where it got really spooky, as when I later played back the recording, I could hear nothing whatsoever of the singing. (den, den, derrrr.)

The underlying feeling of horror continued. It reached another peak with the swarm of flies at the tower. And later during our walk after our pancake, we reached a point where we could no longer hear the screaming kids. It was peaceful. That was until the dogs started. They were some way off, but it sounded like they were coming closer. Or was it the thing they were barking at that was getting closer? Neither, it seemed. We were spared. We were not left to be discovered as a pile of limbs in a symmetrical pattern not seen since the same day 50 years ago.

After that we thought we were safe, however when I looked back at the pictures I took the night before, I saw that we had in fact been visited by some terrible, terrible phantom.

Labels: Science, Travel, TV

Just to show that the whole mice thing isn't new, here's something I wrote early 2001 shortly after arriving in the Netherlands. The only people I know in the Netherlands who don't complain about mice, have cats. So you have to make your choice.

Mouse Hunt.

Labels: Netherlands, Science

The countryside, and much of the townscape, has a magical feel to it at the monement. After a couple of days of snow the place has taken on the character of a Christmas Card. It only lacks a chirpy little Robin to come and stand around in the foreground and eye up a sprig of holly.

Suddenly cycling becomes more akin to snowboarding. At first it's quite pleasurable as you scatter the fresh layer layer of snow without any real hinderence. That is until it starts getting icy. The previously cycled grooves become glass-like and piles of previously-parted snow become solid, impenetrable mountains. Then it's better to take the gritted roads (if they have been by then) or the tram.

Just as it does in England when it happens, the snow all but brings the country to a halt. It takes about a day for the gemeente (council) to find where they left the grit and snowploughs the last time there was snow.

The trains goes into underdrive. The train system in the Netherlands compared to the UK is pretty reliable. Compared to some other places it is not. But when something goes wrong, it becomes a shambles. It takes a long time to not only identify it and make other arrangements, but even longer to tell the long-suffering passengers what to expect and what they can do. And don't bother asking any of the ground staff. They aren't told either and it's not their job to deal with it.

On Thursday for instance, it took the best part of an hour of saying there are severe delays and a reduced service before we were finally told to abandon all hope all ye who seek Leiden on this line. If I'd have been told to head to another station when I arrived, I'd have only been 30 minutes late for work. Not an hour and a half.

The "severe delays and reduced service" were so severe and reduced that the following day there were still no trains running. I know this because I checked the web site before I left. Thgey may not tell their ground staff anything, but the web site is sacred.

Labels: Netherlands, Science, Transport