informage

Hmmm, long time no post. Shannon has been doing a great job of blogging her journal of our travels. Me, I'll try and catch up soon, but lots to do since I got back...

Anyway I'm maybe just gonna throw up some random links as I go along for a while...

globalcommunity.org gives me some nice warm and fuzzies. Make sure you click on the gopher, "all this stuff, the animals, the water, the sky, the ground, the bugs, the fish, the tacos, they're all conected".

Whereas Marshall Brain just makes me wonder.

In a desperate attempt to redress my lack of recent blogging, and following the old maxim that a picture speaks a thousand words, I present a couple of hundred thou' on the summer's English country weddings:

Wedding pics

I have somewhat of a backlog to clear, right from Simon and Su-yen's glorious sunny scottish wedding, through a whistlestop Boston tour, the much anticipated (and not a little dreaded) Minneapolist meet the parents visit through to one more wedding on a dramatic foggy clifftop in San Francisco.

That'll have to wait though: right now I'm overwhelmed by my initial impressions of Tokyo. We've been here less than 24 hours and already I've seen so much. It's just so darn japanese! General impressions include the overwhelming politeness and respectfulness of people here: bikes are just left unlocked on the street and although english is poorly spoken if spoken at all, every person we've met has strived hard to communicate effectively. The juxtaposition of the imperial elegance of the old japan aesthetic and the brash modernism of new japan is everywhere. The quaint noodle restaurant we ate at last night with it's fine examples of japanese art was only given away by the posters of bikini-clad models that accompanied the prints.

Other bits:

On the train in from the airport upon leaving the tunnel it felt like half the carriage got their funky flip phones out and starting SMSing.

The woman at the airport who sold me our train tickets was a character from Hello Kitty, clad in pink with her alluring knowing smile.

The train announcements sounded like english played backwards (wow - what an observation!)

The housing started rustic and truly japanese looking and gave way to more modern concrete as we entered the city, but each dwelling had a specific eastern look.

Today walking around the lake which was rendered almost invisible by fecund Lotus plants, several old men stopped spellbound to observe a single sparrow foraging in the undergrowth.

At traffic lights car switch off their engines and lights whilst waiting.

A sign: "Wine. The best friend of life"

Our month-long tour of Britain is complete. The recurring theme was that although it's usually inaccurate for American's to see this country through the rose-tinted slant of film's like Four Weddings and Notting Hill, Shannon and I have been blessed with a dream-like view of the isles. From Christian and Chloe's magical wedding in Suffolk, through the surprisingly aesthetic view of the midlands, to a nautical view of London from a canal narrow-boat leading up to Simon and Su-yen's scottish castle wedding.

According to this 'What Pixies song are you?' stupid quiz page, I'm 'Where is my mind?'. Well, the write-up (see below) is fairly convincing. I'm guessing that Wil Wheaton did the same test and came up with the same result.

So, speaking of Pixies, Jack Mottram describes a superb decision-making process in those situations when you should have an opinion but can't really be bothered to work through the pros and cons. The process is very simple: just ask "Who's a lovely little Pixie?". In fact its so simple I know I've made most of the important decisions of my life this way already, but Jack's manage to extrapolate this into a formal - STAY with me here - process.

Well done my man and thanks for explaining why I find myself agreeing with pretty much everything Shannon says!

(Oh, and on the hot issue that spurred Jack's creativity, a bimbling project to sort out exactly how blogs work under the hood, I have to say I don't care very much either. And I probably should, being a techy programmer sort, but I don't. And the Trotts are lovely little pixies and I like their software very much so I probably agree with them).

...'cos life's exciting over here in blighty:

Taken in Chipping Campden in the Cotswolds on the occasion of a wonderful picnic with my mother and stepfather and Shannon. The occasion was only marred by turning up in the car park of Dover's Hill to find that an elderly couple had just returned to their car to find the window smashed and their digital camera gone. Some of the aura of idyllic English rural life was shattered with their windows, but I do keep telling Shannon that it's not all like 'Four Weddings and a Funeral' here. Unlike Christian and Chloe's simply fabulous wedding we attended the previous weekend, and I mean fabulous literally here - it was almost too dreamily perfect to believe, as attested to by the picture below of us, or perhaps better by the picture Shannon used when she blogged about our time here.

Oh, and whilst I'm blogging backwards in time let me tell you that the Swiss Alps in summer are stunning.. Prior to the aforementioned wedding a small group of us went with Christian to his home country to celebrate and consummate his transition to manhood (enterrer la vie de garçon). I'm afraid I can say no more on what the consummation entailed, but I can tell you that the backdrop was picture-book; having only seen the alps cloaked in winter white this lush green wonderland was breathtaking.

So to be fair, withdrawing the sentiment with which I started this entry, the trip so far has been a surprising array of visual wonder to remind me that splendour lives on near my point of origin too.

I'm off on Tuesday. For a while. To quite a few places.

(London, Switzerland, Coventry, Berwick-upon-Tweed, Boston, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpar).

I love her hair just the way she likes it.

I had a dream a week or so ago that I was cycling around London, and awoke disappointed that I don't even have a bike here. Independently, Shannon decided to find a cheap bike in Cash Converters round the corner last week, so I went down to check it out and serendipitously they had a matching pair of Peugots. Neither is in great condition, but they were cheap and are rideable. Today I had to drop off a car I've been borrowing - I get my new styling(ish) Honda tomorrow - and so I decided to take the bike and ride home. From Obz to Sea Point is probably about five or six kilometres, so not that far but an evil hill to finish. I made it in about 40 minutes, which given how out of shape I am was pretty pleasing. So there's all sorts of tweaks to be made to my bike, but I'm happy to be riding again.

In today's Observer, Terry Jones once again writes a pithy, almost funny, yet deeply dark account of the state of the nation's leadership.

Continuing with the absurd, Wil Wheaton's outrage at Bush's description over the weekend of Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf - the notorious Iraqi information minister - as "my man" is well-justified. This beggars belief, Bush is a drooling marionette puppeteered by some of the most violently right-wing men in the western world. If you doubt the latter, please follow Terry's advice and read www.newamericancentury.org.

It's really not funny how many works of "fiction" I've encountered lately which ring truer and truer. Neal Stephenson's "Interface" where a stroke victim is manipulated by sinister forces into becoming the perfect populist American president, or "Starship Troopers", Paul Verhoeven's parody space opera depicted a semi-fascist state encouraging genocide against an alien race, or the novel I'm reading right now "Gibbon's Decline and Fall" by Sheri S Tepper - one of my favourite SF writers.

Speaking of Monty Python: I am growing rapidly enchanted with the joys of the Python programming language, named after Terry et al's not unsuccessful comedy troupe. I recommend it to anyone wanted to learn programming, it is straight-forward yet powerful, qualities that few other programming languages bring together.