Ein²

[Extremes]

S&M Files, Episode 6: December 23, 1999
Extreme Sports

What a cute notion to fly a kite next to the crashing surf. But these were not ordinary kites. The kites themselves were little parachutes, and their masters were decked out in extreme kite wear. The huge contraptions seemed to take great joy in launching their captors high into the air and then dragging them across the beach. As I recall, sandpaper is made from sand.

Fortunately, Brighton does not have sand.

Brighton has pebbles.

Imagine sandpaper made out of pebbles. Imagine this very quickly passing over your face. Hence, the extreme wear.

Apparently, I was witnessing para-boarding, or sailing, or some such thing. Put yourself on a surfboard (tricky), fly an overgrown kite (trickier), and let it pull you across huge waves without falling off (trickiest). Here we have a sport that combines the best traits of frustration and humiliation with random Pavlovian reinforcement of pain. I was surprised I wasn't instantly hooked.

This is a buddy sport. You steady your kite. Your buddy jumps on you. You bound down the beach out of control with your buddy affixed to your ankle. He's not just holding you down but trying to affix a surfboard to your flying feet. Just when you think you have it, a huge wave crashes over you, buddy and surfboard. Do not let go. Repeat, do not let go of the kite, despite pebbles cramming deeper into your nasal cavity.

Eventually, our hero did get into the water. He sailed at the speed of sound, hit a sea turd, and did a salty face plant. Instantly he was yanked full out the water to do the face plant again.

Yank!
Splash!
Oof!
Yank!
PLOOSH!
Ugh!
Yank!

Do not let go. Remember the mantra.

When he was far, far out, I begin to wonder about the kite dunking itself. Maybe a 1/2 mile swim through raging surf attached to leaden kite is good exercise.

Extreme Hazards

Our intrepid surfer would have a much easier time if it were not for wild Brighton sea turds. Apparently the pipe from my little commode (and every one else's) leads directly to the sea. Yes, folks, raw sewage, toilet paper and all, from a major population center dumped directly into the sea. But it's ok, the pipe goes out beyond the swimming area so your chance of coming face to face with this morning's deposit are slim. Thanks to the tourism board, they process it in the summer into a more consistent paste to reduce chunkiness. Did I mention the popularity of curry?

Extremely Commercial Weather

"And now the Barbados Tourism Authority weather: London - Rain. South East - Windy and rain. Forecast - Dull, wet and windy."

It seems English weather is sponsored by Barbados Tourism. It's sort of the opposite of trying to sell fridges to the Inuit.

I wonder if they take plastic? I'd like to order some wicked sunshine for Brighton.

Extreme Behaviour

This morning greeted us with an exceptionally windy seaside day. My morning tour to the sea was interrupted as I watched a familiar face chase his hat down the block. I flapped my arms lightly against the gale in sympathy. He retrieved his hat, waved his hands in the air, let out a whooping yell, and marched up to plant himself but inches from my face. I could see quite clearly his two front teeth were mostly gold, which worked nicely with whole rasta-man gig he had going.

My small demonstration of solidarity was all he needed. He clapped his large black hand on my back and grinned even wider. We were brothers against the storm.

"Oh what a crazy world it is, mon, " he exclaimed loudly into my face. It was genuine Jamaican-rasta with a British accent. "Why can't we all a just be happy, my friend? Why just a last night night I was a singing and a laughing and a yelling MERRY CHRISTMAS! And you know what?"

I stared into his face. I didn't know what.

"Well, I tell you what," he continued with another thunderous pat on my back. "They came and tried to take me away. Oh, yes, they did. They wanted to puts a me in an institution just for being happy now. An institution!" Except he said INSTA-TOOOoo-SHUN .

I patted him on the backm and he was satisfied that I understood. I'm now an unofficial rasta-storm-brother. I get my secret handshake next week.

Extreme Conspiracy

I was greeted by an unusual sight when I finally continued down to the ocean. A large section of the beach was sectioned off with high fences and patrolled by plainclothed guards in bright yellow pants. (On the beach plain clothes include bright yellow pants.) Far beyond the fences on the beach were more men from the yellow pants unit scurrying around several large, carefully tarped objects. I had obviously stumbled across the covert yellow alien space craft retrieval unit.

I approached the guard. I knew it! He was a dead ringer for Mulder. Now where was that sexy Sculley?

He ran an unconvincing story about fireworks tonight. Celebrate the shortest day of the year he said. (He really did look like Mulder.) Even the English aren't silly enough to celebrate the lack of sun, are they?

That night we dashed out of the house into gale force winds in response to several terrific bangs. The crowds were gathered thick and sure enough... there were no fireworks. Instead, one of the large towers, now untarped, was on fire.

Instead of launching fireworks into the sky, it simply fell over slowly and burst into multicolored flames. <Fzzzz> <Crackle> <Crackle>

The yellow pants unit scurried like...well, not like ants...like British. They casually walked around the burning carcass, as if nothing was wrong, and lit up the ground displays. These were supposed to spin and sparkle like Chinese wheels. They flapped madly in the gale, letting off streams of glowing fireflies.

The second tower did a bit better. Instead of falling over and catching fire it stood firm and caught fire. <fzzz> <Crackle> <Crackle>

The yellow unit let the crowds watch the burning towers a while longer, thanked everyone, thanked the corporate sponsors, and bid us goodnight. As we walked home, I secretly admired the cunning of the yellow unit as the alien crafts burned in full public view.

[Housing, Heating, & Happiness]

S&M Files, Episode 3: December 2, 1999
English Life: Housing, Heating, and Happiness

Now that I've been in England more than one week, intending on being a permanent resident, I feel I have the right to make cryptic, cynical pronouncements about life in England. Enjoy this humorous and somewhat barbed rebuttal to Stephen's earlier comments.

We were fortunate that Stephen's cousin Julian offered to put us up for the first two weeks after our arrival here in Brighton. Of course, if one is to believe Stephen's account of Julian's apartment, perhaps the offer wasn't all that fortunate after all. :-P Myself, however, being made of far sterner stuff than Stephen, I found Julian's apartment to be perfectly fine for a cheap place to live. Now, you might not think that a £600/month place is a "cheap" place to live but, given the housing situation here in Brighton at the moment, and the fact that Julian has a 3-bedroom, 3-storey house, £600/month is almost reasonable. Cheap is what enables us (and Julian!) to save so splendidly on heating. After all, if the heating doesn't actually function, then you can't spend a fortune on electricity attempting to use it, right? Cheap is also what enables us to almost never have to vacuum. When the carpet throughout the house is the colour of dirty sand, you just don't easily notice the dirt on it. Ahhhh! The luxuries of the bachelor apartment!

For a cheap place, though, it has large windows everywhere, single-paned to be sure, but large windows nonetheless. The walls and ceiling even bear evidence of recent painting too. What more could a bachelor ask for? Cable, mobile phones, PlayStations, VCRs, stereo equipment, and sound editing equipment apparently. The sandy floor in the living room (or lounge, as the locals refer to it) is festooned with high-tech music equipment, two televisions, a PlayStation, and a digital equipment cordless telephone (DECT phone). This is very amusing when you consider that the actual inhabitants of this flat spend far less time here than we do. Maybe they've figured out how to use this stuff remotely?

I hope that the picture I paint of Julian's flat is neither too contemptuous nor unflattering. I rather like it except for the heating and the carpet. I had secret plans to sell all of Julian's stuff and just take over the place in order to solve our housing problem. I figure that any place that is not home to more than 20 species of bugs (unlike some other places in which I lived) is a fine place to stay. Any place where the roof doesn't leak into the walls is also a fine place to stay. Any place where turning on the microwave doesn't interfere with television reception because of 'noisy power' is a fine place to stay. If you manage to not have all these problems in one place then you've found a fantastic place to stay, even if it doesn't back onto a ravine!

For some reason, completely unfathomable to me, Stephen decided that finding a place of our own in which to live wasn't that high of a priority. After all, what can you do with your own personal place: open a bank account, have proof of address to get cell phones, have a place to forward your business calls to, have a place to put all of your stuff coming by container from Canada, have a place to sleep after your relatives boot you out on the street? Those don't sound all that important, right? Well, apparently they weren't to Stephen but luckily I convinced him that we absolutely needed to find our own place to stay as we could only stay with Julian for two weeks and then with Anna, a friend from Sussex University, for the month of December.

Finding a place to stay in Brighton lately necessitates a lot of visiting estate agencies. Apparently, since the last time I was in Brighton two years ago, lots of people in the London area hit upon the clever idea to move to Brighton because they could commute faster from here via train into London than they could navigate about London. The result of their cleverness is that the demand for housing in southeast England, especially Brighton, has skyrocketed, pushing prices for housing up and seriously impacting the amount of housing available. For us this meant that we could visit an estate agency in the afternoon, peruse their daily list of available properties, and discover that 2/3rds of them were already gone by the time we'd arrived at the agency. The turnover of rental properties is really high.

One of the first places we examined was a 1-bedroom apartment that had sea views from its windows. I think the 1-bedroom part of the apartment description was being overly generous. When the agent showed us the bedroom, I couldn't resist commenting that I'd seen walk-in closets that were larger. The "bedroom" was just wide enough to fit a single bed into and then be able to walk in the narrow aisle created between the bed and the wall to the window. The rest of the apartment was likewise small, even if it did feature an "electric shower." This device, not intended, I'm sure, for auto-erotic stimulation, heats up your shower water to the desired temperature using electricity, thus eliminating the need for a hot water tank which never has enough water anyway.

On another day, we were able to view two potential places. The first was a relatively modern apartment with two bedrooms, partially furnished. There wasn't anything much exciting about it except that it may have had cable and it cost £700/month! It was neat, cheerful and bright, but BORING and expensive. Definitely not EinMaterial.

The other place we were to scope out the agent was reluctant to show us. Apparently they'd had trouble renting out the place and it had stood empty since the end of August. The property in question was a converted mews. For those of us not in the know (like me!), a mews was a place where horses and carriages were stored and often featured a space for the grooms and horseboys to live above the horses and carriages. The original building was constructed in 1860 and featured "unusual decor". This sounded more like it. We were far more enthused than the hesitant agent. I loved it from the moment we stepped in, even if it did smell somewhat musty. Lots of brick. Lots of wood. Lots of windows. Lots of stairs. Every single room was on a different level than the others. There was a bedroom upstairs with two beds, a lounge at the front of the house, a small sitting room with french doors out to a sunken garden, a small, efficient modern kitchen, a bathroom with a nice deep tub, and the dining room.

It was the dining room that featured the odd decor. The two walls of the dining room had been papered from floor to ceiling in a gold wallpaper that had yellow flowers and vines crawling up it. It sounds rather odd but given the light in the house and how what little light there was reflected off the gold paper, it worked wonders to lighten up an otherwise quite dark area of the house, despite the number of windows. The house did have windows but they all face west and most of the house was down from street level. It was, however, a mere block from the sea. If we looked around the corner from the mews, we could see the sea. We could definitely hear the gulls.

I loved it. I had to have it, even if the place was furnished was already well furnished with antiques and rugs and wall hangings and we had a big whack of stuff arriving from Canada. The agents had recently reduced the price from £650/month to £600/month in an attempt to get the place rented out. We had to have it. We pestered the agents daily. We would have pestered them hourly if I had thought it would have helped. They provided us with a set of three two-page forms. One set for each of us and the third set for somebody who would act as a guarantor in case we decided to skip town. Having only just arrived from Canada, we of course didn't have any UK credit history which is what they wanted to check. We had to provide details of our jobs, our places where we lived, personal references, and get all this stuff from our guarantor, too. Again, Stephen's relatives came to our rescue, with Maggie providing the needed guarantor reference. Indeed, she turned out to be a Class A guarantor, just in case anybody else needs one in the future. Even with her all checked out pure as the driven snow, they still gave us grief. Stephen's personal reference turned out to be out of the country and they were going to hold us up just on that even though everything else had worked out. After several anxious days, we were finally given the keys after we gave them £1450 (or more than $3600 CDN)! That's almost enough to have a down payment on a house in Edmonton. This was only the deposit and the first month's rent and we only have the house until August. I guess we'll do the whole thing over or maybe consider buying. It's almost as cheap if we could come up with the 15% deposit. <sigh>

Well, at least we're housed now. Stephen can concentrate on his number one priority: making us rich so we can afford to shell out $1500/month in rent. (:

[Pedometer Panic]

I had a great walk yesterday from Brighton's West Pier to the Hove Lagoon and back. Actually, it was longer than I expected. About halfway back, I stopped to check my pedometer to see how I was doing for time but the pedometer was gone. I had last consulted it at the Hove Lagoon, two kilometers back. I doubled back, but I couldn't find it anywhere. I'm not surprised I lost my Sportline 360 pedometer, because I'd almost lost it several times earlier and I'd managed to knock it off my body onto the ground on several occasions too. I think the clip it's supplied with is a little lacking. Barring that, though, I rather liked the unit.

Pros:

• It could remember distances over the last seven days.
• You could use it for walking or jogging/running by programming in a stride length for each activity and then it would auto-detect what you were doing.
• It had a rough calorie counter based on your distance travelled and your weight.
• It also gave a rough estimate of number of steps per minute and timed your accumulated activity since the last reset of the counters.
• Very small and looked rather like a pager so was rather discrete looking.
• Cover protected the buttons neatly and kept moisture out of the buttons.
• No need to manually start/stop activities. It auto-detected movement and was reasonably (but not completely quiet) quiet and accurate.
• Really nice multi-line display.

Cons:

• The supplied clip doesn't work well on thin fabric. It's just plastic and doesn't have jaws. It's more of a slide on and pray it stays mechanism.
• There is no way to adjust the sensitivity. If it's not accurate where you placed it, you needed to try placing it somewhere else on your body -- trial and error.
• While it kept distance totals over 7 days, since I was counting steps more than distance, I would have liked to have seen the step total for each day. Granted, I could calculate it by taking the distance and dividing by my stride length, so this isn't a huge issue.
• The pedometer can work in either miles/pounds or in kilometers/kgs, but you can't switch on the fly between them. So if you leave it in km for yourself and then want to tell someone else the distance travelled, there's no way to get that. Changing units requires resetting the entire unit. Not that big of a deal.

So now I'm wondering what I should do. I did rather like it. Should I replace it and look for some way to attach a better clip to it? Or should I look for a different kind of device? I wouldn't mind something like a SportBrain but I'd like one that connected to *my* computer rather than requiring a yearly (or quarterly/monthly) telephone subscription to a service based in the US.

Another possibility is the Omron HJ-105. This sounds very similar to my former SportLine 360, but it has an actual spring clip with metal which might work better. This other Omron, the Omron HJ-112 (or see this description), sounds pretty good too. It apparently doesn't necessarily need to be attached to your pants but can go in a pocket or on a purse and it has a clip and a strap. I couldn't see any way for the two Omron units to use them in Metric though. I've dropped a note to their customer support team and their Canadian contact.

Any other suggestions, ideas or comments?

[Trees in the Toilet]

Last night I dreamt of toilets, toilets and toilets and it's all Eingang's fault.

Some time back, bemoaning the lack of trees in our neighborhood, we adopted a couple of stray Christmas trees and lured them back to the flat. (They were lost on the street and it was either that or take them to a shelter or, well, firewood.) Luckily they came with their own pots full of dirt.

These Christmas trees relate to toilets in a way you just don't want to know. Hang in there.

One of the trees blossomed under our loving care but the other sadly was losing its lust for life. We thought perhaps it had been affected by salty ocean spray. You see, when I found it, it was taking a not-so-thoughtful sojourn to the sea-side.

The Ein had a cunning plan. We would wash the tree. Not only would we wash the needles, but we'd, um, wash the dirt and rocks in the pot. And to make the poor distressed tree even happier, we'd kick his brother out of his nice pot where he was happily thriving and trade pots.

"You'll kill both trees and plug up our septic system," I pointed out. I had my doubts about the 'cunning' in the cunning plan.

"Maybe everything will be OK, " she beamed, "and we'll have lovely, lush trees!"

Maybe.

Well, we washed the tree, the pot, the roots. Despite our best intentions most of the dirt and crap seemed to disappear out of the tub. And now the toilet makes funny noises every time we flush.

You see, our toilet, being a late installation doesn't flush down. It flushes up. A little pump valiantly lifts all the water and stuff over the wall. Normally it goes "whirrr whirrr whirrrr" combined with a satisfying "grump grump grump" of stuff being pushed up and over.

Recently it started going "whirrr whirrr whirrr" with not so satisfying addition of more "whirrr whirrr whirrr" followed usually by "whirrr whirrr whirrr"

Flush!
Whirrr
Whirrr Whirrr
Whirrr
Whirrr
Whirrr Whirrr Whirrr
Whirrr
Whirrr
Whirrr Whirrr Whirrr Whirrr
Whirrr Whirr
Whirrr Whirrr Whirrr
Whirrr Whirr Whirrr Whirrr Whirrr Whirrr
Whirrr Whirr Whirrr Whirr
Whirrr Whirrr
Whirrr Whirrr Whirrr Whirr Whirr Whirr Whirr Whirr
(wheeeze)

"Perhaps we could suggest to the landlord that the pump isn't working so well anymore", Michelle suggested last night.

The last tenants who did this had the pump taken apart and it was found to be clogged with several hundred condoms! We're not quite certain how he explained this. "Condoms? I have no idea how all those condoms got there! What kind of guy would flush a condom?"

I have visions of the pump being opened up and us having to explain how it came to be covered in pine needles.

"Maybe it wouldn't be covered in pine needles," Michelle suggested optimistically, "Maybe it's covered in rocks!"

"Pine needles and rocks?, " we would say, "in our pump? No we haven't been flushing dirt and rocks down our toilet. Of course not. What kind of idiot puts dirt and rocks in the toilet. And we, of course, haven't been washing Christmas trees or anything like that in the toilet. That's just silly. They would go round and around when you flushed."

Of course, if they asked us if we were dumping rocks and needles down our bathtub we'd have to 'fess up and it would be the end for the adventuring S&M.

The dream? Oh, of course. After a conversation about this right before bed I proceeded to spend the night dreaming about an airplane flight where each window seat had its own toilet conveniently placed at about elbow height into the wall. The toilets were used as a kind of messaging and transportation system. You shoved an object into the back of the toilet next to your seat (at convenient elbow height) and it would be magically transported to one of the other toilets for retrieval. A very classy airline.

I was debugging Michelle's toilet and was having trouble getting the Hot Wheels car suitably in the back of the toilet. It was clogged with thick mud, rocks and shit. So to speak. As I was up to my elbow into the muck, trying to place my Hot Wheels car, it occurred to me this transportation system may not be too popular with the ladies. Just another crappy airline.

[Adventures Across the Atlantic]

S&M Files, Episode 2: November 27, 1999
Continued Price Shock

Hearing price shock from me is not surprising. What is surprising is how it continually sneaks up and waps me upside the head.

Mini Doughnuts: Remember those little doughnuts that float about the deep fryer on little conveyer belts and pop out fresh and hot at $2 bag or 3 / $5. Well, surprise! The Toonie-sized wonders are here for a reasonable pound note ($2.60). Oh wait, that's £1 for 3 donuts. Count them: 1-2-3. Ha! Ha! Three little donuts. For those that can't afford that kind of extravagance they can be purchased *singly* for a mere 35p (86¢).

Coke: Needing my fix, I hit the local Safeway and found cans of Coke on sale. Say, that's pretty reasonable: a pack for about $4.50. Safeway normally discounted a 12 pack to $4.00 back home. It wasn't until I tried to pick it up that I found out it was a 6-pack.

Long Distance Savings

5 ¢ a minute to Canada. With the help of the local Tandori and Bangers shop, we acquired a dubious looking card offering 5¢ a minute to Canada through some wierd invisible Internet routing. My first call home was a bit noisy and it clipped a bit if both people talked at once but soon, I believe, the volume of porn traffic on the net decreased. Lo and behold: Clear conversation!

Maybe it's not actually real. Maybe the conversations I have at this rate are not *true* conversations. It's like the Matrix movie. I only think it's a low-cost conversation. It's just an illusion or lesser reality. Or maybe I've been eating too much fish and chips.

Actually it turns out it's not real. Two calls on the card have almost wiped it out. Must call technical support, get my questions answered and offer proper design.

Found a cell package that gives me cheaper daytime calls than [missing text here. -ed]

Visiting The Brighton Pavillion

For those that havn't seen this pseudo-palace, it's sort of the Graceland of 19th century. Indian on the outside - Chinese on the inside. Well, not actually Chinese. The Prince received a gift of some Chinese wallpaper one morning and was so inspired he created a Chinese fantasy palace. The fantasy part is his; this is what Chinese looks like to a proper Englishman. Except the classical British architecture keeps seeping through. Think English stiff chairs on a backdrop of red dragons.

Actually the whole thing is pulled off rather well and certainly says more for good taste than some modern wonders that come to mind. (Atchoo WEM atchoo! <cough> pardon me)

Garbage Collection

We have a backyard. Really, we do. I can see it out the window. We've never been there. It is not for us. We are denied. The house just does not go to it. Apparently the fish and chips shop does.

We asked them where to take our garbage. "Oh," they said, "just put it on the street by the bin like everybody else." She pointed happily out the window to a wastebasket the size of a small chair. She suspected this was in fact legal because the waste did get taken away. "How often?" we asked. "Oh, I don't think there's a schedule. They just sort of come by." Apparently, this is true but they do just sort of come by three to four times a day, most commonly at about 2 AM when they take great care to crush the glass on the spot and scrape the pavement clean with large iron bars wielded by drunken stampeding elephants.

More Tourist Fun

The Pier: I normally picture piers as places to dock small boats rather than a place to house large, heavy amusement rides and a rollercoaster. Apparently, the Brighton Pier also contains amusement machines that are exceptionally gifted at removing 10p pieces from your pockets.

London

Visited the center of the financial universe but was barred entry. Apparently to leave the train station, one must feed one's ticket into a machine which determines if you are worthy of passing. I wasn't. I watched the throngs of worthy gifted people pass through but had to throw myself on the mercy of London security.

You know you're in England when the local Macs-like convenience store offers magazines, candy and fresh bread.

On the way back discovered an opportunity for a scenic tour of Sussex and area in the dead of night by boarding the right track and wrong train.

Well, apart from being terrified of choosing between rent and food, having a great time!

Cheers lads!

[Essaying England]

S&M Files, Episode 1: November 24, 1999
Introduction

England is well... England. The stereotypes are all true.

Little lanes
Wet weather
Tiny shops
Small cars
Outrageous prices
Little red chimneys
British countryside
All those silly Monty Pythoners everywhere. Two on the corner. One serving me at the store. Two figuring out how to hire a shopping cart. Help! I'm stuck in a skit.

It's like an overdone Hollywood set brought to life.

Flew in from bright sunshine and fluffy into a slow descent into wet and drizzling. Welcome to London, Stephen Dodd.

Our beautiful [temporary] home.

We have no heat. This is not a mistake. This is a feature.

Our three-storey flat is not heated. We stepped out yesterday to discover it was warmer outside. It's like walking into a room and discovering all the windows have been left open all day. But they're not. They're just single paned with no insulation. And no heating.

Well, that's no entirely true. When they fire up the deep fryers from the Fish and Chips shop downstairs, we get leftover Fish and Chip heat. Mmmmm. Fish and Chip on the brain all day, everyday. Tune into your 24 hour deep fried fish and chips channel.

Ok, the living room has two wall units that must be plugged in to work sporadically. You have to keep the living room door closed or the heaters just laugh at you. I wear thermal long underwear even in the living room.

The bathroom definitely does not have heating. It is very reminiscent of using an outhouse on a brisk Jasper morning. Actually the "bathroom" on the top floor is just that - no toilet even though there is a definite spot for one. In the middle of the night the bathtub almost looks tempting. (Note to Michelles and mums - note the *almost*. We are civilized. Yes, yes.)

It's a relatively large three bedroom flat complete with washer/dryer in the kitchen for a modest $2000 cdn (or less) a month. It could charitably be described as run down. The carpets are the color of dirty cement. Flipping a switch requires a pause while the lights consider. I'm just now realizing how immaculate our old "adventure" house was.

On the plus side, out the back between buildings, alleys and sorry looking brick gardens is - barely- a view of the sea! Out the front are double decker buses that look right into the living room as they go by. If I had a pole I could poke the bus as it goes by the window. Poke! Aiiieee!

Down the street are dozens of tiny shops including a Safeway with almost seven or eight aisles. We tried our Safeway Club Card. It didn't go no matter how many attempts the clerk made.

Downtown Brighton

Pretend you had a law that said all shops must be built on a back alley.

Now imagine careening down the alley, dodging cars, lorries and pedestrians, thinking all the time that you were about to exit onto a main street. But you don't. The alley's just lead to lanes. The lanes lead to more lanes. It's a good thing the curbs are low because the sidewalk is often needed as vehicle navigation. It's like being in a maze, minus the minotaur plus a car.

I'm glad I wasn't driving. I kept wanting to pull over to the right which would have been terrible inconvenient for my insurance record.

There are main streets. It takes two lights to cross them with a wee bit of tea break in the middle. The roads have "LOOK LEFT" AND "LOOK RIGHT" painted on them which is very handy as it seems even the locals can't quite figure out the traffic.

They love traffic circles here. Big ones, little ones. Odd ones. Whoosh. Imagine your local residential street corner with a traffic circle.

Land of Culture

Stopped at a convenience store for cell phone magazine. In one corner was the hardcore porn (can you say 144 pt "SHAG"), in the other family magazines with pictures of the Queen Mum. In between was this nebulous area of uncertain content. Blazing headlines and flesh prevailed. I had no idea if the inside would turn out to be Letters and Lovers of Better Gardening.

I would expect Pubs to be called the Crow amp; Dog or Iron Keep but the local pub bears "Spread Eagle."

Letting a House

We went to two estate agents. They both smiled and looked slightly amused when we explained we wanted to rent a flat.

One said, "oh, well it's really quite slow and what we do have is really quite expensive". You've got to be worried when a sales agent uses the word expensive.

This is Brighton. The major city south of London. 2 Bedroom flats for rent: Agent #1 - Two. Agent #2 - One.

Here it seems quite common to purchase a floor of a house with other people owning other bits and pieces. I can't quite figure out who then repairs the roof or fixed the foundation. I suspect the answer is "not".

We did find a listing for a nice detached house (an uncommon thing) for rent for only £3400 / month ($8500 cdn).

The market's going crazy. My relatives insist we should buy instead for the same price. I'm tempted.

Shopping Carts

Sometimes it's the little things.

The shopping carts have independent back wheels. This makes it very easy for parallel parking. Very difficult for turning to avoid little old ladies or navigating heavy groceries up a steep inclines - like where we live. Yikes!

The Phone Company

BT Telecom at great expense put out an elaborate booklet and CD-ROM with a free phone number to call for questions about signing up with them. So I call the phone company and get "bzzt...This service is temporarily unavailable. <click>" Somehow it just seem appropriate. :)

Having Fun

No don't get me wrong. I'm not bitter. It's all rather amusing. Quite crazy actually but that's alright; you have to be to live here. I'm starting on it now. :)

Tomorrow, I see the sea. From here you can hear the Gauls.

Miss you all.

Cheers!

[Student Standards]

Even though I'm working on a Ph.D. and have been for several years, I want my home to feel like a home, and not like the remnants of a free-for-all jumble sale. This is especially important when you consider that I spend almost all of my time working from home. Order, organization, cleanliness, and comfort are definitely my bywords and clash strongly with my recollections of days of living off of $3.25 (CDN) an hour in a shared apartment, sleeping on the floor, and eating instant noodles. That's the student experience. It's definitely over-rated! I don't miss those years at all.

If I'm going to live the student lifestyle, I'd rather do it more in a Gilmore Girls fashion, with designer desks, cozy carpets, and swoopy stereo equipment. I mean, how can you be expected to work or study without decent tunes and sound. Now that the first blush of youth, as we say, is gone from my cheeks, it's time to do some serious nesting. Let there be coffee tables, cushions, and CD racks. Amen!

[Doped Out Doper]

Yesterday, the sunlight called to us through the open window. Putting aside our duties for part of an early afternoon, we went promenading in St. Ann's Well Garden, a local planned garden spot, occupying a few city blocks. On our way back, we stopped to stroll through Brunswick Square. Brunswick Square is the slightly more upscale and definitely more beautiful residential square in our area. Unfortunately, the less savoury elements who inhabit the closer Norfolk Square have migrated the few blocks down the seafront to this beautiful Regency square. On this particular day, we had walked through almost to the seafront entrance when we passed a person lying passed out along the path. Passed out drunks are a relatively common fixture around this part of Brighton, even in early afternoon, so we did walk past initially, our eyes flickering over the sight as we continued our banal conversation on a bright day. Something wasn't quite right. The image passed again quickly through my mind and I doubled back to be sure. This wasn't a passed out drunk. A capped needle lay nestled in the crook of his neck and a small serum-sized bottle on top of the bench nearby. He was out completely, hardly moving. I couldn't tell by looking if he was breathing and his eyes were mere whites, rolled up into his head.

Caught without our cellular phones, I ran towards a man yabbering away on his and begged him to call 911. He instead pointed me to a telephone booth on the other side of the hedge. While I was on the telephone with emergency services, my conversational partner was dispatched to check on the poor man's breathing and try to rouse him. Within a short time, we were attended by an ambulance. The man had just returned to the mundane world, but he was confused and seemed concerned with the fact that another man had perhaps run off with his money. He denied to the ambulance crew that he took drugs, but the needle so carefully crooked capped next to his neck had been used. The bottle on the bench had been painkillers. He'd knocked himself out or been knocked out by his accomplice on a combination of painkillers and cooked smack. He stumbled away, refusing assistance from the ambulance crew, and headed in his shambling, confused way down the street. I, choked up with emotion, watched silently, wishing him well. Had I helped him? Perhaps not. But at least I hadn't blindly walked on by.

[Lock Those Libraries]

I visited the library at the University of Sussex yesterday for the first time in ages. I was unpleasantly surprised to discover that the library is now locked up tighter than a drum. In order to enter the library at all, you need to have a valid library card which is scanned by a card reader attached to the turnstyles. This just seems so... odd. I can understand preventing unauthorized people from removing items from the building, but why prevent anyone from entering and using the contents in a polite way? I've been to university libraries in several European countries, across three Canadian provinces, and in a few American states, and I've never seen a locked down library before. The war on terrorism has spread to libraries: our knowledge might be contaminated. Lock those libraries!

I went to the library yesterday expressly to find the supposedly available copy of Delany's Babel-17. After fumbling with my card at the turnstyle (no instructions were provided -- in fact, I just guessed that it wanted to scan my library barcode), I went on a exploratory mission to the deepest, darkest depths of the library, hunting for the elusive, improperly signed 'PZ' category which holds the library's limited science fiction collection. As I went down darkened row after darkened row (yes, dark!), lights magically came on before me. Actually, I thought this was an excellent new feature of the library. After all, many areas of the stacks are very lightly trafficked, if at all, so only turning lights on when someone is in them and moving is probably a win-win situation for the environment, for electricity costs, and for cooling costs in the summer. Now we have a library that keeps terrorists out and lights up the lives of permitted patrons. Will wonders never cease?

[Wheelie Bins for Waste]

Brighton + Garbage = It's a real mess.

My solution: wheelie bins for all. Yes, I secretly lust after a wheelie bin for my rubbish. Actually, I lust after a whole city full of wheelie bins, just like Nottingham. If everybody had a wheelie bin, then I could probably rely on mine not being stolen. I could also put out my garbage the night before collection and not leave the house the next morning to find that the seagulls managed to break into it and strew it all over the street, making a very large, unsanitary mess on my doorstep.

First, we get Wheelie Bins, then we take care of the poor recycling!