I'd just finished carving my first Halloween pumpkin in years, and I was really excited to light it up. But I had no tea lights, so I used the big red candle that the former occupant of my apartment had left behind. The Pumpkin was sitting on the side table behind me (hat off), I was absorbed by my work, and the candle burned all the way down, spilling its guts in a mighty flow of molten wax. Also setting fire to the inside of the pumpkin, which in turn set off the fire alarm. At 6:00 in the morning (I was finishing an all-nighter of plasmid genomics analyses, if that means anything to anyone), waking up my poor landlords downstairs (oops).
But hey, no regrets, the result is just too cool ;-)
Well, it was really bad on Sunday night as we drove up from Boston, MA, to Kittery Point, ME, but since then it has cleared up really well and we've had wonderfully sunny weather! Of course we've been indoors most of the time for Hard Science Sessions, but the sun was out in full force during both coffee breaks, and it gave us a beautiful sunset over the bay and our margaritas/martinis in the evening.
Hmm, in six hours a new day starts, and in the afternoon I'll be giving a three-hour talk to a captive audience. I guess I should go to sleep right about now. Hey, I'm still under the spell of discovering that there's a wifi connection available here! Which no one else has discovered yet, apparently, considering the number of people who have asked me if I could email stuff for them through my iPhone!
I want to say "It's not you, it's me" but yeah, it is you. Your greed for air traffic, your hubris of hosting UN summits. You wanted Air Force One on your tarmac? You've got it. You're the Big Hub of the North, the drama queen of the East Coast.
And you're out of my life.
Hey, I liked having the little flight before the big one each way. Boston - New York - Brussels worked pretty well --- when Obama's security wasn't putting the freeze on the whole airport for ages. And Brussels - Amsterdam - Boston was a super concept --- apart from the timing from hell.
Speaking of which, that's two more things that I won't be doing again: booking flights by telephone and flying KLM. The first because telephones interfere (severely) with my brain functions (freely choosing a departure at 6:20 AM, me???), and the second because KLM people suck at following up on cancelled / rescheduled flights. Or was that just because of the KLM - NorthWest co-operation? Do you really think I care?
It's too bad about KLM, because Schiphol isn't half bad as airports go, and I had a good walk in downtown Amsterdam and along the canals (killing a fraction of my, wait for it, *6 hours* of layover). It's darned pretty in the morning sun, though the scents of warm pastry and weed fumes mingling in the narrow winding streets make for a rather heady mix. And the accent of people, the accent! I tried practicing my Dutch on a coffee-shop waitress (and here I rush to specify that this was a shop that served coffee, as opposed to the more immediately horticultural type of establishment they also have there), but even with my throat getting sore from a budding cold, I couldn't manage the cheese-grating rasp of the locals, nor was my nose clogged up enough yet to approximate their nasal intonations.
No big regrets then.
No, from now on, when I fly to Europe from Boston, I'll be going through London. It's just shorter that way (seriously, New York, look at a map and tell me it makes sense to fly via you from Boston on the way to Europe). Also, it satisfies my chief requirement: being able to go through immigration services in Boston, where fewer foreigners disembark and staff people are friendly and laid-back.
So that's it, New York; it's over between you and me. I doubt you'll notice, but my life will be better for it.
Next on my agenda: sign up for a British Airways frequent flyer account.
I believe I was introduced (in book form) to the much-missed comedic genius of Douglas Adams, author of the "Hitch-hiker's
Guide To The Galaxy" (HHGTTG for short, a trilogy in five parts) and good friend of
Richard Dawkins, some 12 or 13 years ago while on an archaeological dig in Wales, where I was training to not become an archaeologist.
Unbeknownst to me, I had already met Douglas Adams (in televised form) and his HHGTTG on one of the episodes of the Christmas lectures Dawkins gave for the Royal Society in 1990 (which have now been semi-immortalized on DVD). Dawkins had invited Adams to read an excerpt from Part 2, "The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe", to illustrate a point about evolution and the domestication of animals -- I think. At the time, as I recall, all of us in the family watching the lectures on TV were so charmed by Dawkins himself (or, for some, by his shirts) that we rather failed to remember Adams' contribution. Though I have to say that as lasting impressions go, the prize probably goes to the model of Mount Improbable and the poor nautilus that got stranded on a minor peak of the evolutionary landscape.
Some time after discovering the wonder that was, is and always shall be the HHGTTG, I found myself wandering the streets of a Welsh town that was probably not Cardiff, in company of several other disreputable prospective archaeologists, one of whom is now... a rising star on the green blogosphere, I kid you not (I'm personally more of a fan of his travel writing, and I have great hopes for his sci-fi / fantasy, but there you go). Anyway, said gentleman probably doesn't remember the epsiode, but I believe he was the one who first ducked into the second hand bookshop where I found a tattered old copy of "Last Chance To See" by Douglas Adams and biologist Mark Carwardine.
The book, which I originally picked up just because Douglas Adams was on it, was a write-up of a documentary the pair had done with the BBC to highlight the plight of endangered species. It turned out to be hilarious as well as touching and informative, and I read it many times -- to the point that by the time I was in college training to be a biologist, the poor thing was literally falling apart at the seams. Then I lent it out to a fellow student and never saw it again (at this point you may picture, if you will, a little tear of regret plopping sadly onto the keyboard).
Flash forward to last June when I heard that Stephen Fry, whom I adore for many many reasons and who I'm told was also a good friend of Adams', had gone off and done an updated version of "Last Chance To See", a sort of "where are they now?" with the original Mark Carwardine (accept no substitutes). Well, if anyone was going to do justice to Adams' role, so to speak, Stephen Fry would have to be the one. I'm putting the DVD on my Christmas list.
And so it happens that this morning (all terms being relative) I stumble onto a YouTube video of poor Carwardine's uh, encounter with Sirocco the frisky kakapo parrot. I can only imagine how Adams would have written it up but I'm sure he'd have been laughing like a whale. Watch it below and enjoy Stephen Fry's humorous narration!
I just spent a few days in the capital of Europe (yes, dear Frenchie friends, that's what I just said -- so take your Strasbourg and shove it), hobnobbing with Royalty over lingerie (sort of, but not) and now I'm off to Paris for the weekend.
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