Blogosphere

I posted a comment on Time's Global Health blog last week...starting my imminent takeover of the malaria blogosphere! Har har har. Really I'm just a minion for Bill Brieger's malariamatters.org blog, which he's doing a fabulous job on.

Moonshiner

I got some tacos at Chipotle today, and they were playing Uncle Tupelo's "Moonshiner" as I ordered. I suppose the very expensive muzak service Chipotle employs has decided that this song calls up Western misery and images of gringos fleeing to Zihuatanejo to live out their days away from the prying eyes of Texas lawmen, and that people eat at Chipotle because they feel a kinship with those dudes running south of the border. But "Moonshiner" is about an Appalachian whiskey-still operator who can't quit the bar scene. Oh well. It's one of my favorite songs so I was at once happy to hear it, and cringing that Chipotle has coopted it.

You can tell the place is run by McDonald's, by the way, because of the way your stomach revolts against the food in the middle of the afternoon. It tastes good while you're eating, and then bam! The payback.

London/Geneva

I went to London for work last week and got to see Kara in the process - she came up on her R&R from South Sudan! It was great and we ate lots of bad (as in good) English food, like cheeseburgers and steak and ale pie and pizza. We had coffee every morning at this really super little cafe around the corner from my hotel in Brentford.

We also met up with my college friend Josh, who's doing research for his PhD in the British Library. We went to the Tate Modern and went down the Holler slides:

and then saw the "Sliding Doors" exhibit:

On Saturday we went to another ex-power-station-made-into-art-space, the Wapping Project, which had huge fashion photographs in it. I was a little bored with the 'fashion photos and models in old brick industrial space' concept, and the cafe service was terrible. That said, the candles on the huge pumps and machinery still in the building made the early evening quite pleasant, as did the comedy of five english majors speculating on how the plant made electricity.

We set out for some dinner through Brick Lane (Indian restaurants galore) and Spitalfields, which has a Sunday market and a really good restaurant I'd been to the past summer, St. John. After some street BBQ we got a few beers at a bar, where I explained the sociology of Baltimore's heroin addicts to Josh's friend Ian. Honestly, most of it I just made up. Sorry Ian.

Sunday Kara and I had yet more coffee and went on a hunt for a scarf that took us up to Russell Square, where we perused books at Judd's, and where I accosted a man with a nice scarf, much to his shock and horror, to find out where he'd gotten it. Then back to Covent Garden, where I found said scarf right where he had told me, and then up to King's Cross to confirm Kara's hotel, down to Oxford Circus to grab food and an earful of live blues, and then home on the tube to pack my stuff up.

In Geneva I met with a bunch of people and all went quite well. I even have a friend to go skiing with next time I'm there and there's snow!

Mes excuses!

Sorry for not posting - I've been away on vay-cay to Puerto Rico (awesome) and work trip to London and Geneva (also awesome!). As soon as I figure out how to offload the pics from my new Blackberry (incredibly useful while traveling; bane of my existence when at home) I will post you some nice things. In the meantime, here's Nick's last post. Phantom Tollbooth author addresses love and math. Awwww.....

"A romance in lower mathematics"

Ran across this cute 1960s animated short of a children’s book by Norton Juster (of Phantom Tollbooth fame and also a western Mass resident): “The Dot & the Line: a romance in lower mathematics”.

Seeing that it’s about love and math, how could I resist?

[nick@anize]