The Ravings of Demented Rabbits

Champagne Supernova

And another week passes. It's Easter weekend here, which is a really big holiday, meaning we get a four day weekend, and I believe real schools get like 2 weeks off. I may or may not be going off to Leeds Castle later, depending on if people actually decide to call me or not. We shall see. In any case, I get to relax until Monday, which I really need to do, considering that even on a slow week, things are pretty busy.

Last Saturday, which I apparently decided not to relate when I posted, a fairly decent group of us went on a "pub walk" around the city, which involved such highlights as:

Katie, the map carrier from yesterday, getting lost trying to find us all at the Starbucks by Embankment station, and somehow finding herself "on a bridge," which considering Embankment, is not a good thing. In some fairness to her map skills, she did have helpful suggestions from the rest of us the day before, such as "follow the big road!"

Rather more theaters than pubs, or so it seemed. There were something like five pubs and three theaters on the thing, plus some random other buildings, including a shop specializing in antique scientific instruments, which from the window displays looked awesome. The pubs were all pretty nice, being rather historic and 19th century and the like.

The first pub, which was actually a wine bar, was talked about in the tour guide as having "intimately vaulted ceilings" which in reality translates to "small, dark, cavelike atmosphere where you expect to be assaulted by bats at any instance."

Speaking of pubs, been doing a fair amount of that this week. Saturday, then at least once more, and then Friday night, wherein other Mike - Mike my roommate and 8 others being in Paris, and those of us left behind having gotten together as the "jealous of Paris" group - bought me a thing that billed itself as a rum and coke, but was actually more akin to a rum and pepsi, since the Manor doesn't HAVE coke. Ah well. Also had a little bit of Guiness, which I will happily leave to the beer drinkers. Too, the Manor was doing karaoke, which was fairly entertaining, since Margolyn not only knew all the songs, but was singing along at the table, using a Smirinoff Black Ice bottle as a mic. SBI, incidentally, isn't bad, and I need to remember it. In any event, I recognized almost none of the songs, except when they played Elvis of all things, a bizzare disco version of a song I forget the title of, and Oasis' Champagne Supernova right as I left.

Hit the British Museum again on Tuesday, for an hour with my Roman Britain class to tour the Roman Britain section of the museum, and then for an hour on my own time, wherein I simply wandered around and toured the place superficially. I can't really do justice to the place without my pictures (of which I have 130 for the trip, which means you all will have good times when I get around to uploading them), but anywhere where there are random Roman mosaic floors hanging in the stairways along with a totem pole and a big damn Buddha statue simply because that was the only place to put them must by definition be cool. In fact, my trip here has been made worthwhile simply because of the British Museum.

Just to skip around a bunch, Monday night we went off as a class to see a play called The Skin of Our Teeth, by Thornton Wilder. Bizzare, bizzare play. Supposedly written about the Second World War, it involves ice ages, floods, plagues, and people in dinosaur and mammoth suits. It was good, but obviously influenced by a good deal of hallucinogin usage. This Tuesday, we'll all go see Journey's End, which is a World War I from the trenches play, with about all you'd expect from that sort of thing.

Not a lot of exploration for the week, but a bunch of class. Roman Britain and Literacy in the Ancient Near East are both really fun, because Professor Garfinkle is very very good at what he does. Which, incidentally, is why I'm ransacking his mind for a great big reading list on various things. This should be good. London Theater is sort of ok, which is about what I expected of it. It's pretty good when we're talking about a play we've already seen, like Skin of Our Teeth, but not so good when we're preparing for the play we've not yet seen, like Journey's End. This translates out to about half of each class being fun, half sort of boring. Ah well.

As it is now 11:30 and no call, I shall assume that I'm not going anywhere today, which means that today and tomorrow are likely to be days of relaxation, which is good. Monday, of course, Stephanie's over from Belgium, so that ought to be fun and entertaining and such.

On a totally other note, the tube allows one to do an awful lot of reading, which means that inside of a week, much to the amazement of various people, I've gone through Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, and Shadow Puppets. Thusly, ponderances on them follow.

Sort of like how Ender's Game was the flashiest, coolest book in the original series, Ender's Shadow is the flashiest, coolest book in this series. That doesn't make the other two bad in any way, but it's certainly a different sort of book. It's not QUITE good enough to be on par with Ender's Game, but that bar is pretty high. The other two books are more along the lines of your average technothriller Larry Bondesque geopolitical novel, which has basically been done to death, but is nevertheless pretty cool simply because knowing what happens on Earth while Ender's off being spaceboy is nifty.

If I have a gripe, it's about the sort of not quite palatable characterizations of the Chinese, which seem a little too oldschool Great and Glorious Middle Kingdom and not enough Marxist-Maoist Worker's Paradise for my taste. Too, while I think Card's done a good job portraying his Christian characters as not all good and moral and righteous, Bean's leap to morality, and his relationship with Petra in particular, didn't quite set right with me. Ah well. In any case, the books are damn good, and you should be reading them.

Actually, along that line, Cryptonomicon was damn good, too, though I spent vast portions of it going "I have no idea why I think this book is so good. Why am I reading it?" Fortunately, I listened to instinct, read it, and muchly enjoyed it. I expect much agreement from Whir on this. If you haven't read it, do so.

Also, Ring of Fire was pretty good. 1632 and its attendant universe can never quite be Island in the Sea of Time, but that's ok. For what it's worth, I still enjoy time travel stories of that sort. Maybe a little odd and ahistorical for a historian, but oh well.

And Colleen McCullough needs to come out with something new so I can read it. I'm having urges to go read The First Man in Rome again.

And damn you, Conquests patch 1.22 for being 24 megs, meaning excruciating downloads on dialup. Damn you. A thank you to Whir, however, for the other stuff.

However, and this ought to make Gris happy, I should be able to play Epic 40 while I'm here. Because anything that promises to be a rehash of Epic 15, I'm totally up for.

And on another gaming note, the Surface Tension level in Half Life is pretty damn hard. Tanks that take 4 RPGs to kill and kill you in one shot are teh suck.

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Edit:

Oh yeah. Tuesday, I think, or maybe Wednesday, Mike and I went to the Indian place down the street. It rocked. Very nice atmosphere, very good food. I had chicken curry - there are about three basic meats you can get, of which lamb and chicken are two of them, and I forget the third. Added to that, there are ten or fifteen different ways you can get it, from the curry to the garlic stuff Mike had, to sweet and sour, hot and sour, and a bunch of others. I'll definitely be going back.

Posted by Dwip at April 10, 2004 4:54 AM