Hello, I’ve moved to London and I’m living in an attic.
“Moved” is perhaps to strong a word, I suppose, since I’m only here for two months. And “attic” really doesn’t encompass how perfectly lovely my attic is. It’s huge and has high ceilings and large windows and french doors that open out onto the roof and has a little kitchen with a miniature oven and has a better desk than the one I have at home, and it’s centrally located and the rent is good. I’m renting it from an artist, and the entire house (which is a gorgeous Georgian townhouse) is decorated with her lovely work. She lives here with her husband, who is very elderly, and was also, incidentally, was a fairly well-known anti-apartheid activist in South Africa, and a publishing entrpreneur and athlete, and who, at age 89, had a pulse rate of 52, which is 20 points below the national average, or so his wikipedia page tells me. Also, according to this article, he may have basically invented the concept of having your bills withdrawn directly from your bank account for you? (And what have we all done with our lives lately?)
Really, all of this just confirms for me that Wikipedia is like a social network for people who are too busy doing things that are actually important to bother joining a social network.
What else, what else! Oh, I know. Today I visited three different cellular phone shops. Before I left the US, I very carefully got my phone unlocked and made sure that it would work with a UK sim card.On my adventures today, two separate phone-shilling idiots put a sim card into it, decided that it didn’t work, and tried to sell me a new phone. So, in the third shop, I didn’t even mention that I have a phone, and just bought a sim card, stuck it in my phone myself, and after three minutes of fiddling with the settings HEY PRESTO it works. Aaron and I like to make fun of each other for telling very boring stories that nonetheless have epic three-act setup/conflict/conclusion story arcs. This is exactly one of those stories. What shall we do with our boring boring stories? Let’s put them on the internet! Act 1: I made sure my phone would work. Act 2: Two idiots tell me my phone doesn’t work. Act 3: I buy a sim card, phone works.
Oh, what else? My flight was pleasantly uneventful, other than I actually didn’t sleep because it was a poorly timed overnight flight that left late afternoon instead of actually at night. HOWEVER! One of the wonderful things the universe likes to make happen for me is that in-flight entertainment systems very often have film and television choices that are VERY specifically skewed to my VERY specific interests. Once, on a flight to Toronto, for instance, I got to watch a documentary about Doris Day and an extremely delightful Rosalind Russell comedy from 1953, in which Russell plays a wealthy socialite whose father enlists her in the Women’s Army Corps to teach her a lesson. These are very much things that only I would watch. The last time I flew Air Canada, there was a documentary about dinosaurs, but it was not just any documentary about dinosaurs: it was called BONE WARS! and it was about the two founding fathers of American paleontology, Othniel Marsh and Edward Cope, who absolutely despised each other and basically made a giant mess out of dinosaur taxonomy purely through ham-fisted attempts to one-up each other. They would do things like have their assistants smash up any fossils they found in the field that they couldn’t immediately carry home so that the other guy wouldn’t find them. I am also very fond of this photograph, which appeared in the film:
Marsh is in the middle with the beard. Those fellows all around him? In their adventuring hats? They are all GRAD STUDENTS who actually paid to fund the expedition for which they then provided the labor. Ah, yes, the illustrious history of grad students paying people for the privilege of doing thankless work, its roots, they might be right here. At least these guys had the sense to wear funny hats and carry guns.
ANYHOW, I digress. The very-specifically-skewed-to-my-interests entertainment that Air New Zealand had for me on my flight to London was SEASON FIVE OF THE X-FILES (ie: The BEST season of the X-Files). This meant that as my plane descended at Heathrow, I was watching the most important moment in all of television history: Mulder and Scully slow-dancing to Cher’s recording of Walking in Memphis. AUSPICIOUS, I tell you!
*The classic three-act boring story that started it all is Aaron’s Ye Tale of Ye Meetinge, and it goes like this: Act 1: Aaron’s boss shows up and says, “We’re meeting today, right?” Act 2: Aaron is confused because he thought there was no meeting today. Act 3: A meeting occurs; it is fine.
