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London, Part 6.

Friday, February 25th, 2011

More museums! Can’t get enough! But first, a couple of random photos.

Pret A Manger (or Pret, as it’s often referred to) is from England, and I found this window cling very pleasing for two reasons. One, I like alliteration, and two, I happen to know (don’t ask me how or why) that the tool used to stir porridge, the one you see in the bowl there, is called a spurtle.

I mentioned earlier when I was talking about the play Warhorse how creepy I thought it was to have war stories for children. Apparently Warhorse wasn’t enough, oh no! Let’s have a whole freakin’ exhibition of traumatic tales for tots! Nightmares for everyone!

Did everyone read the book The Witches by Roald Dahl? If it’s been a while, let me refresh some points for you. The witches don’t blend into normal society. They have long claws, so they have to wear gloves. They are bald, so they have to wear wigs. They have blue spit, which makes their teeth have a bluish tinge. And finally, they have no toes and their feet end in blunt stumps, making wearing modern pointy shoes extremely painful for them. I used to love that book and read it over and over, and to this day every time I see super-pointy shoes, I think about how uncomfortable those must be for witches to wear. Imagine my glee when I saw these shoes in a shop in Greenwich, in the land that the book The Witches takes place in.

This proves it! The story is true! Witch shoes!

This is a poster from the subway for a drug exhibition. I didn’t go, but I loved the words chosen for the poster.

Now, the V&A Museum. The Victoria and Albert Museum of Art and Design is my most favorite museum in the whole wide world. If I lived in London, I would be there once a month. You simply can’t see everything, even after many visits. It’s a beautiful building in itself:

Which still has shrapnel scars all over from the bombings of WWII.

And inside is rooms and rooms and rooms of every kind of design you can imagine – architecture, garments, jewelry, housewares, armor, etc. Check it out.

You want a room full of Greek stuff? You got it.

How about Early Christian? Not a problem.

Medieval, perhaps? We have a room for that.

How about a long hallway completely filled with every kind of ironwork? Okeedoke.

Seriously, it’s intense. Here’s a picture of a giant super-snazzy Baroque wall of a house. You can’t appreciate it in the picture, But the red parts of the wall is transparent red glass over mirror shards, giving it that extra tackiness. Sparkly!

I decided to focus on the Japanese items on this visit (last time I focused on the art glass section). It was really dark in the Japanese wing, but I still tried to get some decent shots.

The Japanese traditional clothing did not have pockets, so the Japanese originally used little hanging boxes called inro, like little wooden purses. The toggle bead holding the cords of the inro together was called a netsuke. The inro and the netsuke were often exquisitely carved small sculptures made from ivory or hardwoods, accented by metals.

Often natural elements are used in the pieces, like wee beasties or plants. Here is a tiny curled-up rat netsuke.

And here is a snail on a leaf netsuke.

But my favorite, without a doubt, was this one.

A badger wrapped in a lotus leaf?! With a little rain hat? How effin’ cute is that? I totally squee-ed.

Interestingly enough, the thing that blew my mind the most in the museum wasn’t anything I expected. I was walking up to the fourth floor when I passed this enormous wall drawing. It had to be 10 feet by 14 feet. It was huge.

It was an isometric drawing of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Here’s the deal, though: Every single detail is in there. Drawn with pen. Probably a pen with a nib that you have to dunk in an inkwell. It might be one of the most humbling things I’ve ever seen. Since it’s so tall, I could only take pictures of the lower half, but you get the idea.

Woooooow. Here’s the info card next to the drawing.

I might have stood in front of that drawing for fifteen minutes. If you go to the V&A, make sure you check this out. It’s at the top of the stairs to the fourth floor as you enter the architectural section.

(And here’s a nice photo Cricket took of the Millennium Bridge with St. Paul’s Cathedral in the background.)

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London, Part 5.

Thursday, February 24th, 2011

So Cricket and I were on the subway, and while he was reading the paper, I caught a glimpse of this article. I bolded the important part, the part that made me make a snorting noise in the middle of a crowded subway.

Mass murderer Jeremy Bamber today lost the first stage of his latest bid to overturn a conviction for the killing of five of his relatives. Bamber, who has always protested his innocence, has served nearly 25 years for the 1985 killing of his family in Essex. He has twice lost appeals against his conviction and remains one of 38 killers who have been given a whole-life tariff. The bodies of Bamber’s parents, Neville and June, his sister Sheila Caffell, and her six-year-old twin sons were found at White House Farm in Tolleshunt D’Arcy. All had suffered multiple gunshot wounds. A total of 25 shots had been fired, mostly at close range. At first, suspicion fell on Mrs. Caffell, who suffered from mental illness and was found holding the murder weapon. Then, attention turned to Bamber after a blood-stained silencer was found in a cupboard in the farmhouse.

Here’s what it sounded like to me: “At first, we thought it was Miss Scarlett with the lead pipe in the conservatory, but it turned out to be Colonel Mustard with the candlestick in the lounge.” I love England. They’re so…British-y.

MUSEUMS. We went to a lot of them. Let’s take the Natural History Museum first. If the museum was empty it would still be amazing, because whoever built it included natural history elements into the actual building all over, in both the interior and exterior.

It’s like going to atheist church. At one end of the giant hall, a dinosaur skeleton (see picture above). At the other end, a sculpture of Charles Darwin. I felt like there should be a choir singing hymns about evolution and survival of the fittest.

Once again, England kicks our American butts because their museums are free and you can take pictures. Here is a coelacanth (pronounced see-lah-canth) or, as I like to call it, the “Seriously, That Is Way Too Many Fins, No One Needs That Many Fins”.

Here’s the interesting story. This is an OLD breed of fish. Like, they thought it went extinct 65 million years ago. Then – poof! – someone fishing found one off the coast of Africa in the 1930s, and they’re back! This particular specimen is from 1964, so it has lost its deep-blue color. Also, and I found this adorable, it has little mushrooms growing on it.

They also have a phenomenal amount of dead stuffed things. My favorite last time I visited was the pangolins. My favorite this time was still the pangolins.

I will never get to see a pangolin in the wild, so this was thrilling for me. Plus, one of the pangolins on the tree looks like a zombie with his little stubby pangolin arms outstretched in front of him. Evil zombie pangolin.

Aside from more dead things than you can shake a stick at, they have a stellar mineral wing. I do enjoy a good mineral. Here’s a pic of the mineral wing.

Rows and rows and rows of neatly labeled rocks. I was so happy. I learned the difference between a pebble and a cobble. Here’s a cobble full of pebbles.

And did you know pumice is just frothy lava? It’s like lava meringue.

I want these agates. I want them real bad. Especially the one on the right.

The Natural History Museum has a terrific insect area, but I didn’t have time to visit it. However, I did get to enjoy its entrance. It has that great big ole beetle over the door, but I love how the many-eyed spider looks like he’s welcoming you in. “Oh hello!” he says. “Come on in! I made crumpets.”

Museums have specialty exhibits, and those you have to pay for. The Natural History Museum has an exhibit on right now called “Sexual Nature”, about the sex lives of animals. Really.

I couldn’t take pictures in there because it was dark in an attempt to be romantic (really, they had Barry White playing in the background), but I don’t know, seeing taxidermied animals posed in states of copulation doesn’t get my motor going. I did get a shot of how foxes have sex, which was totally different than I expected. They just back up into each other, ending up looking like a dog with two heads. Very interesting.

Also, around the exhibits and informative plaques were TVs playing Isabella Rossellini’s “Green Porno”. If you’ve never seen this, clear an afternoon, take some magic mushrooms, and hunker down for some of the weirdest television programming you’ve ever experienced. Here’s one just for a taste.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BckqviVaWl0

Cricket’s favorite Green Porno episode was the salmon. I was partial to the duck one. You really must see them all.

To finish off my Natural History experience, here is a giant slice of a very old sequoia (with Cricket standing next to it for scale):

And here is a life-size accurate sculpture of a gulper eel. I made a painting on a gulper eel, but it’s different when you see one up close and personal. I didn’t realize their mouths were tetrahedronal. I was very excited. People around me were concerned.

And here is a poster outside the museum with a very startled-looking drawing of a lemur.

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London, Part 4.

Thursday, February 24th, 2011

Did I mention that we went to theater? ‘Cause we did. We saw four pieces of theater and some stand-up comedy. Let me run through the theatrical stuff real quick-like for you.

1. Warhorse. It’s going into previews at Lincoln Center right now. It was fabulous, one of the best shows I’ve seen in a long time. I highly recommend it. That being said, it is also a total cry-fest. Ooooh, you’re gonna cry, possibly forever. It’s based on a children’s war story. What the hell, England? War stories for kids? You read that material to them at bedtime? “And then the grenade exploded, and Michael was blown to smithereens right in front of his childhood friend Alan. Alan then had the metallic taste of Michael’s blood in his mouth. Nighty-night kids!” Anyway, the roles of the horses are played by giant, horse-size puppets run by three people each. You can see the puppeteers, but after a while you don’t even notice them there. The horses breathe, and their ears wiggle back and forth, and they snort and slap away flies with their tail, it’s just amazing. It’s going to be one of the best pieces of theater you’ll see in ages. Here are some pictures I found online.

Quick recap: Phenomenal theater, you will cry until your face puffs up and people think you got punched in the face in a brawl over syrup.

2. The Woman in Black. This is spooooooooky bit of theater. Since you’re never going to see it, I can give you the plot summary. Woman A has baby out of wedlock. Her sister, Woman B, offers to take the child and raise it as her own. Woman B is a lady of means who lives in a big house surrounded by spoooooky marshes covered by spoooooky mist. Woman A is distraught but has no other options, so she agrees. Woman B says Woman A can visit the boy, but must not reveal her true relationship to the child. When the boy is six, Woman A, while waiting by the window of the big house for the boy to return from an outing, sees the pony and cart that the child and a caretaker are riding in. She then sees the cart, pony, child and caretaker fall into the marsh and get sucked under. Woman A is completely emotionally destroyed, develops a wasting disease and dies. Her ghost now haunts the big house her sister lived in. If you see her (woman dressed all in black, skeletal face), that means your child will die shortly after. Everyone in the nearby village avoids the house because – hey, shocker! – they don’t want to bump into her and have their kids die in unpleasant ways. But a young lawyer goes up there to close out the estate and organize the finances and creeeeeepy things happen.

Anyone who knows me knows I do not like child-based terror. This show had all the things that make the skin on my back get icy and leave the room. Rocking chair with no one in it? Check. Music box that no one opened but is playing anyway? Check. Flashlight zipping around a room filled with children’s toys and clothes? Check. M. Night Shyamalan-style build-ups of silence and suspense following by loud screaming that caused me to crap my pants? Check.

Quick recap: Spoooooooky.

3) The Children’s Hour. It was meh. It had lots of famous people in it (Carol Kane, Ellen Burstyn, Kiera Knightley and Elizabeth Moss), but some of the people are just not very good stage actors. Combined with a script that is not exactly riveting (Are they lesbians? Aren’t they? Who cares?), it made for a very tepid experience. And at no point did Carol Kane say, “LIAH! LIAH!!”, which was a disappointment. But the good thing is that you can drink beer outside. Here is Cricket drinking beer outside the theater.

Quick recap: Meh.

4) The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Okay, I admit, this is a wholly American show, but I love the hell out of it and I wanted to see how the Brits handled such New-York-y material (answer: really freakin’ well). Since it was the first night of previews, Cricket and I had front-row seats, which was exciting. I was reminded how great a show it was and if it ever comes back to this area, I highly recommend you go see it. I have rarely laughed so hard.

5) And the stand-up comedy. It turned out to be terrific, but I won’t lie – Cricket asked me to pick some stand-up, and I picked this one solely based on the fact that it was being held at a place called The Slug and Lettuce.

If you go to London, go to this show. It’s called Soho Ho, it’s held at The Slug and Lettuce on Saturday nights, and you get a discount to go to an disco down the street called The Loop with a real light-up floor a la Saturday Night Fever in the basement. We did not go to The Loop because we were coming down with Travel Plague, alas, but had we been healthy, we would have.

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London, Part 3.

Monday, February 21st, 2011

We went to so many museums. One of the Museums we saw was the Tate Modern. I tend not to like modern art, but everyone everywhere said we had to check it out, so we did. The building was amazing (it’s a former power plant, and it is HUGE), but I still don’t like modern art. I can even pinpoint when I stopped caring for modern art. I was in college and since I went to an art school, there was art all over the place. My senior year the college acquired a whole lot of outdoor art. Some of it was clearly identifiable (like bronze sculptures), but some was not (like a shopping cart which had glass bottles filled with pink liquid in them). One day I was walking on the campus and I saw a giant pile of garbage. I immediately circled around it looking for an identifying plaque with the artist’s name, until it occurred to me there wasn’t a plaque because this was a giant pile of garbage. Just regular old garbage, the kind that goes in a dumpster. And it was like a ray of light came out of the heavens and I saw the light and had an epiphany. The epiphany was,

“I don’t have to play this BS game. If something looks like a pile of garbage, whether fancy people call it art or not, it’s still a pile of garbage. Art should require skill and talent. Most modern art requires a PR person to hype it. I’m done with this.”

And since then I won’t go to the Guggenheim or the Whitney or any of those museums. But I made the exception for the Tate Modern for two reasons: One, I was walking right past it, and Two, all the museums in London are free, so no money lost there. Cricket was ecstatic because it had free wifi, so he didn’t mind at all. They have a famous exhibit there right now, the porcelain sunflower seeds. An artist commissioned 100 million hand-painted sunflower seeds and poured them out all over the floor. It looks like this.

And there are signs like this.

And don’t think I wasn’t tempted. They made a little barrier around the sunflower seeds just a leetle too far for me to reach the seeds to take one, and there was a guard posted in the corner makin’ sure the peasants weren’t pilfering the seeds. Shortly after that (when Cricket was done checking his email), we left.

We also went to Greenwich, the home of Greenwich Mean Time. Here’s clarification for those of you that don’t know: There is longitude and latitude. There is a definite latitude line – the equator – to base location and time off of. But there is no definite longitude line. So people invented one, the 0′ line, and it runs right through Greenwich, England. It has been the home of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) since 1884. It is a completely man-made thing, but the 0′ point has to be somewhere, so it might as well be in Greenwich.

They have a lovely museum there with lots of cool clocks and astronomer’s equipment. They talk a lot about how difficult it was for sailors to figure out where they were, how they used the position of the sun at certain times of day or the stars at night. My favorite tidbit of information was one of the harebrained ideas for always knowing Greenwich Mean Time. Some scientist claimed he had the “Powder of Sympathy”, and his plan was to scratch a dog with a knife that had been rubbed with the powder. The dog would travel on the ship going to foreign destinations. Then, every day at noon in Greenwich, the scientist would plunge the knife into the Powder of Sympathy, and the dog, feeling corresponding pain, would yelp, so the sailors would know and adjust their clocks on ship accordingly. The exhibit wryly said, “This was proven not to work.”

This was the super-cool house the astronomer lived in next to the Royal Observatory.

And this is Cricket standing with one foot on either side of the meridian.

The British, much to their credit, are not Puritans, and they sell hard, soft and in-between liquor in the supermarket. This made us laugh. It is a glass of wine. Seriously. An individual glass of wine with a yogurt-style aluminum peel-back lid.

I don’t drink beer, but Cricket does, and he sampled several bottled beers back in the hotel room. Here are a few.

I made him buy this beer after we returned from Greenwich.

Beer ended up being a big part of this trip. I always insist on eating and drinking wherever the locals do, and that meant we were in pubs almost every night. Cricket then got to try two different on-tap beers every night. One of his favorites was the banana bread beer. I even tried a tiny sip, and doggone it, it did taste surprisingly like banana bread.

I tried to be a trooper, alcohol-wise. There was a menu advertising pear cider and the description was mouth-watering (“known for its strong fresh pear notes with a hint of vanilla”), so I ordered it. Unfortunately, it was carbonated, and I can’t drink anything carbonated, so Cricket, being the best boyfriend in the whole world, got a second glass and poured the pear cider back and forth, back and forth, over and over until it wasn’t fizzy anymore. Best. Boyfriend. EVAR. It ended up being delicious, by the way.

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London, Part 2.

Sunday, February 20th, 2011

And we’re back! So, London. Let’s start with the Tower of London. First of all, that’s a misnomer. There’s a bunch of towers in a walled area. It should be called the Towers of London. Plural. It feels good to get that off my back.

The weather was really, really good. I know! I was surprised as well. It made hearing all about the various horrible tortures and beheadings so much more pleasant. There also was a nice view of the strange London skyline. That building in front there is called The Gherkin.

The Tower of London is famous for housing The Crown Jewels. Sooooo pretty. This was one of my favorite moments of the trip. I showed Cricket the magical, magical shiny hats and asked him which was his favorite. He informed me that he really liked the door. Yep, the big giant steel door. Some of the finest jewels in the world were directly in front of him, and Cricket was digging the enormous steel bolts on the door. DUDE, BIG SHINY ROCKS! THE BIGGEST AND SHINIEST! THEY DON’T GET BIGGER! OR SHINIER! Fine, go look at the door. Sigh.

They also had a lovely collection of suits of armor. Here is Henry the Eighth’s.

Everybody assumes that the big bulbous codpiece is due to Henry being really, umm, gifted. I read somewhere that it’s actually because he had The Syph and anything touching his junk was really ouchy, so there was a lot of padding in there to keep Mr. Happy from bumping into anything hard, like a big metal suit of armor.

I also learned about Edward the First. He reigned from 1272 to 1307. He was 6’2″, which nowadays is pretty tall, but can you imagine in 1270? It must have been like being surrounded by Oompa-Loompas all the time. Anyway, it got him his nickname Longshanks and they had to build him a special bed because his whole lower half would hang off all the pre-existing beds.

Cricket was really excited about this gun. Once he explained it to me, so was I.

I might screw this description up a little, so please forgive me, I know close to nothing about firearms. Back in the day, you fired a shot and then you had to do this whole procedure with the powder and the musket ball and the flamey stick, it was a slow and tedious process. If you look closely, this gun has two barrels – and two firing mechanisms. You could fire one, and then quickly fire the other.

This was awesome. You know, if you went somewhere in the United States and they had a vermin problem, they would shut down until the problem was taken care of. In the Tower of London, they have signs like this.

How freakin’ great is that? “Keep a lookout for my friends and family!” And an adorable Quentin Blake drawing! It makes the spread of pestilence so cute. Sadly, I saw no rats. Disappointing.

I did see ravens, though. The other thing the Tower of London is famous for is the ravens. Ravens are really, really large crows. Really large. Like small turkeys. I, of course, am obsessed with them. There are presently six of them living in the Tower, and I made friends with the green-anklet one. Here is a picture of Green-Anklet hanging out near my feet.

And here he is sitting on a cannon and saying, “Blaaaaah!!”.

If you are planning on visiting the Tower of London, you should know there are a million stairs. And not just normal stairs, oh no. Awful 15th century stairs, all weird heights and jinky angles and tight spaces. My calves were tender for two days after. Now, anyone who knows me knows I am about as far from an athlete as it gets, so chances are this won’t be as much of a problem for you, but still. Lots and lots of awkward stairs. Up, down, spiral – it’s like a stair fetishist’s dream come true. Just so you know.

Now, signs. Crickets loves a good foreign sign. Since he has brought it to my attention, I am now aware of signs. Here are a few.

I am very immature.

Tee hee hee. Also:

Snort. Giggle.

This was my favorite sign. It was often all by itself, so I had no idea what it was referring to. This was the conversation that went on in my mind when I saw it.

“DON’T DO IT!”

“Huh? Do what?”

“AT ANY TIME!!”

“I…I don’t know what-”

“JUST DON’T DO IT!!!”

“Okay…I’ll try not to?”

“NEVER!! NEVER DO IT! EVER!!”

And then The Mad Hatter and the March Hare tried to shove the Dormouse in the teapot.

At my job, the proofreaders often have a difficult time with documents that come from the UK, because even though we speak the same language, some of the grammar and punctuation rules are different. For example, they use commas way less frequently. There was this sign in the bathroom:

And Cricket had to listen to me yell,

“Guests are reminded to take care when standing or walking on wet surfaces. For additional safety COMMA! non-slip rubber mats are available in the bathroom and also from Housekeeping. Moisten the base of the bath first COMMA! then place the mat in the bath.”

Dating a Grammar Nazi is fun.

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London, Part 1.

Thursday, February 17th, 2011

I’m back from London, and I have brought with me the dreaded Lung Rattle, Accompanied by Nasal Snot. I make this upsetting horking noise, like a cat regurgitating lawn clippings, it’s not good. But other than that, it was a great trip. I have sorted through all the pictures, and I will end up blogging about 110 of them. They’re all cropped and organized, but first I want to talk about the picture-free aspects of the trip. I was in London for six days. I had been there before, but Cricket had not, so we did all the tourist attractions, and since I hadn’t been there in eight years it was nice to have the refresher course. London is a wonderful city, but it has one huge tragic flaw in my book: its street layout. Here’s the city planning of London – Romans arrive and name it Londinium in 43 A.D. There are some houses. They put a street near those houses. Then there are more houses. Another street appears near them. And so on and so forth, with absolutely no concern whatsoever for, you know, any kind of order or anything. It’s a horror to navigate. A street map of London looks like Dr. Seuss took some acid and dropped uncooked spaghetti on the floor. Here’s a map I found on the web.

See? The streets change names and have odd angles, and they’re leaving out all the smaller streets and alleys and dead ends. It’s like Lower Manhattan, but all over. I was so sad. If I lived there, I would have to have a chip put in my neck so people could find me after I wandered off so I wouldn’t get mired in a peat bog and be found perfectly preserved thousands of years later.

My favorite comedian in the whole wide world is Patton Oswalt, and I have a bootleg performance of him in Atlanta in 2002. He talks about one of his trips to England and Ireland, and I pulled a small chunk out for you to listen to. Warning: some coarse words.

patton-oswalt

Now, I’ve heard that for years, and I was like, oh, game shows can’t be that different in England. Hoo boy, was I wrong. I was in the hotel one afternoon and I caught a bit of a show called Countdown. First of all, it’s like the SATs. You have to be good with both letters and numbers. Second, they have a resident lexicographer named Susie Dent, who they occasionally go to for fun word info (in the episode I caught, she explained the origins of some of our favorite dinosaur names for a good three minutes, which in game show time is a month and a half). There’s no background music. There’s no cheering. Watching it is like penance for a crime. These two contestants bust their humps with word and number problems for a half-hour. The loser got (I’m not making this up) the Oxford Dictionary and a mug with the Countdown logo on it. The winner, who was on his eighth day, they didn’t even mention what he was going to win, whenever that happened. I had to look it up. Brace yourself: He or she wins a leather-bound copy of the twenty-volume Oxford English Dictionary, worth £4,000, which is about $6,000 (okay) and THE UGLIEST TEAPOT IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD.

So let’s review: The contestant I saw had been on the show for eight straight days, I have no idea how many more days he has to be on to win, and when he does wins, finally, he will bring home $6,000 worth of books and an affront to mankind masquerading as a teapot which he will most likely display on his mantle to appall people’s good taste for years to come. I’d like to see this show last on American television for two episodes. On the Game Show channel, at 2:00 in the morning. Even then, it wouldn’t happen.

Tomorrow, I’ll start on the many cultural wonders I saw, but for now, after editing all those pics, I’m going to bed.

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T’raveling to T’ronto.

Sunday, January 16th, 2011

I bet you’ve been wondering where I’ve gone. I have been working like a dog—brutal, brutal work. I was busting my butt at my normal 12-hour-day pace, and then I was asked to go to a high-end casino/convention hall for a meeting, which would kill my Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. No problem, I packed up a bunch of laptops and clothes and plugs and dongles and clickers and toiletries and took a car to the casino. Although I don’t gamble, I couldn’t help but think about how an online casino platform like MILD88 offers a much more convenient way to enjoy gaming without having to deal with the hustle and bustle of a physical casino. If you do enjoy occasional casino gaming, you’ll have a lot of fun spending time at fun88. You may also check out LevelUp casino if you’re looking for awesome rewards!

I did get to eat good food and sleep in a mad-comfortable bed and take a 900-degree shower where I came out looking like a boiled ham (that was my desired appearance, strangely enough. I like very hot showers.). I came back to the office on Monday evening expecting a nice relaxed week, but no! I was immediately told not to unpack because hey, you’re flying to Toronto tomorrow for another meeting! Jolly fun! Here’s the problem: I don’t mind working. I HATE HATE HATE flying places for business. To begin with, flying is a hassle of epic proportions. Now add two big ole heavy laptops and a projector to your carry-on, all of which you must unpack and lay out for the scanner along with your shoes and jacket and other possessions of DANGER!, and you have a colossal pain in the posterior. I make a very poor pack-llama. But for the bulk of this trip I was kickin’ butt, until The Incident. The pitch team and I were holed up in a meeting room at one of our sister offices, Publicis Toronto, which is in an old factory. The benefit of that are the giant windows and the wide-open spaces. The not-good thing is that the floor subtlely changes height all over the place by about and inch and a half. All over. So when everyone went to dinner, I decided to stay behind and work on some stuff, the CCO kept me company, and I got a phone call. So I’m not rude, I went into one of the cubicles waaaay on the other side of the building. I jabbered away, finished my call, and stepped out of the cubicle, not noticing the distinct difference in height. I then proceeded to collapse on myself like a fat deck of cards, lightly twisting both of my ankles, but mainly twisting the hell out of my right knee. I laid there like the Heisman Trophy on my side, making hissing and groaning noises and trying not to poop myself from the pain. Which is how my company’s CCO found me. Awesome. Really dignified. I made it through the meeting on the next day and got home with my 40-pound, $6,000 carry-on luggage, but I did it all while hobbling like Frankenstein. What tiny shreds of sex appeal I had blew away in the breeze when I entered the room with my stiff-legged Weeble penguin gait. Here’s the best part: I called my mom that evening of The Incident to inquire on the best type of care (apply ice). I then asked her to make a doctor’s appointment with an bone-n’-joint doctor. The next day she tried to make an appointment but they asked for my insurance info, which she didn’t have. So she called Cricket and asked him if he knew it, and she also called Börrke at the office and asked her. Now that Mummy had informed the entire planet of my debacle, I kept getting text messages like “ARE YOU OK????” and “Call me!!!! R U in a hospital?!?!!!” and the like. Lots of unnecessary drama. It turns out that I have what the medical community likes to call “a boo-boo”. Basically I just twisted it, now there’s a little swelling and a lot of ouchies, but it should go away by itself in ten days or so. Moral of the story: Jessica better not have to travel for work any time soon, because it sucks so very hard. I swear to God, I will go all Münchausen and break something on myself every time until they stop making me go.

In an unrelated note, I love how Canadians say the word “sorry”.

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Washington D.C. – Roller Derby and the Zoo.

Tuesday, January 4th, 2011

As you can probably deduce from the title, I went to Washington D.C. to visit a friend of mine, Moss. And we went to the Roller Derby. And the Zoo!

First, Roller Derby. I had never been to it, and I’ve always wanted to go. For those of you that don’t know, to simplify it down to its raw basic nature, it’s a bunch of strong women rollerskating with other strong women pushing each other out of the way, often knocking each other down and getting points for their team in the process. While it’s similar to every other sport in the world, the thing I like about this particular activity is the sense of humor. For example, the participatin’ ladies all have really swell nicknames. And they pick numbers that are related with those nicknames. My favorites:

Ovary Action – 28 Days
Chinese Cheker – 5354
Hoova Dayum – H2O
Marion Barrycuda – 311 (remember, this is Washington D.C. – ergo, funnier)
Dyke Diggler – 13 inches

There’s also HaBitchual OffendHer, Rachel MadHo, Lois Slain (she’s a reporter in real life, so that’s extra-cute), Ivana Tripabitch, Peaches N Cruelty and Wham Slam Bambi. The warm-up round was “Grinches vs. Santas”. The regular players had festive holiday nicknames like Blitzkreig Blitzen and Thumpa Coal, and they came out before the game and were introduced by the announcers. The grinches (dressed all in green) skated around the track in the shape of a Christmas tree, and the Santas (dressed all in red) formed the shape of a sleigh. Even the lead skater had a blinking red nose.

I tried to take pictures of the “jams”, as they’re called, but those girls move FAST. So here are my shots.

The next day Moss and I decided to see the pandas at the Zoo, but first we toddled off to experience the magic of chili. There’s a place in Arlington called The Hard Times Cafe. They have four kinds of chili. And they will put any combination of those chilis on a variety of substances. I chose half Texas chili, half Cincinnati chili on tater tots. Excellent decision, I must say.

Outside the Mecca of chili goodness was an oldey-timey truck…

…with a statue of a horse on the back, wearing mittens on its ears and fake antlers, and this sign propped up on its side.

Which is awesome.

Moss also showed me The Spite House. Here’s the story: A guy owned a house. He also owned the seven-foot alleyway between him and the house next door. People used to cut through the alleyway all the time, which really cheesed his crackers. So, Grumpy Guy built a house in the seven-foot alleyway, which is supposedly the thinnest house in America. It is called The Spite House and people do live there.

Now, on to the zoo. We did in fact see a panda, but he was far, far away, so I couldn’t take any pictures of him. I had never seen a panda before, and sure enough, they look like a soft, pillowy, black and white bear-shaped object. Which is nice to know. We also saw Indian elephants, a tiger, orangutans and a male lion roaring, which I had also never experienced, even though I have been to Africa a bunch of times, so that was so very cool. It is astonishingly loud and the sound really carries. It reverberates in your abdomen. I found a video of a lion roaring.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOaQmkAlhUA

Does anyone who reads this watch Dirty Jobs? There’s an episode when Mike Rowe goes worm-grunting. You shove a wooden stake into the ground, rub an iron thingie over it, and it makes a groany sound. This causes the worms to come to the surface. You collect them and sell them to fishermen. The lion’s roar made me feel like a worm being grunted.

http://dsc.discovery.com/videos/dirty-jobs-worm-grunting.html

Here are some of the beasties I got to take pictures of. The bestest one was the red panda. Normally, when I see red pandas, they are in trees and they are napping. This was the first time I saw red pandas sauntering around, doing red panda stuff. I got some great shots of what might possibly be the cutest animal in all of creation.

So cuddly.

I was in the small mammals building, and there was a window casting a sunbeam right into the meerkat’s habitat. And a meerkat was standing right in it. It was precious.

And other meerkats were just standing around because, you know, that’s what they do.

There were also degus, which are small rodents that live in South America. They do a great deal of napping. And look, there’s a degu napping on another degu! Awwww.

In one of the habitats there was an armadillo being all invisible and buried underground, but if you looked up OMG burrow owls! Teeny tiny owls that live in holes in the ground! So happy!

Elephant shrew. Prehensile snoot. Lotta rooting around in the ground debris.

Poisonous froggies.

And the lamest scientific name ever. So not creative at all.

It was a lovely trip. I may have to swing by Washington D.C. again soon.

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Rockin’ my grump.

Monday, July 26th, 2010

I’m sorry, were you just on your way to bed? Hey, guess what? No bed for you. We’re going to sit here while I tell you about my craptacular evening, and you’re going to listen to the whole thing.

I had a wonderful weekend. I went up to Massachusetts and saw a play and went to a craft show and checked out some galleries and ate some lovely food, it was just delightful. Then my father drove me to Wassaic, which is about a third of the way back home, to catch the train back to White Plains. I caught the train, all was well, but two towns later, the train stopped. And now we weren’t going anywhere. I figured there’s a signal problem or something and continued listening to my iPod. The conductor got on and informed us there was a fire on the tracks in Patterson and as soon as he got more information, he would inform us. Time passed, the earth rotated a bit more, and then the nice conductor man informed us that no trains were moving above Southeast and we should look for alternative modes of transportation to get where we were going. Armed with that little nugget of knowledge, I called Cricket and asked him what he would do in this circumstance. He said to get a cab to take me to Southeast where I could continue on my merry way. So I called a local cab company and got a guy to come. The cab-guy didn’t have any cabs available that evening, but he realized we were in a bind, so he came to pick us up in his own car. Oh, and then there was drama. I offered to take a bunch of people with me and there was pushing and shoving and yelling. Two hippie artists who were on the train with me came with, as well as three older women. In order to avoid a fight, I offered to sit in the trunk area of this hatchback cab, where there was something like nail polish remover leaking all over the floor and it soaked my pants. At one point the male irritating artist hippie said, “We can all ride together, but we all have to be on the same page, man. We can’t be quibbling over little pieces of leather, man.” I wanted to punch him in his little hippie mouth. Oh, and his girlfriend took the front seat without offering it to any of the older women riding with us, like it was owed to her, because, you know, they make documentaries, man, not like us status-quo squares. Anyway, we started on our fifty-minute journey to Brewster, and the driver, who is a nice 55-year-old man, says, “I’m sorry for your tough trip. I’m going to try to make you all laugh,” and we’re all thinking NOOOOOOOO please don’t. Let’s all sit in silence and think about life and its vicisitudes. But we said nothing, so he told us he used to be a pilot for TWA and proceeded to dictate every moment of the remaining trip as if it was a flight (“Hello everyone, welcome to flight 703 to Phoenix, we’re just starting our assent…”), taking breaks periodically to say driving instructions to himself (“Go, go, make the left…. NOW!”).

Oh no, there’s more. He also spoke like Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd to us (we were all apparently wascally wabbits, who knew), and after we stopped at a local Mobil station, he told us he liked to make sounds like a cymbals and drums with his mouth. He then put on ABBA’s Greatest Hits and both beatboxed and made rocket-taking-off-noises (“Fwoochsh!”) to three, count ’em, three songs, until the crappy hippies yelled that they hated ABBA and he needed to turn it off, which I think hurt his feelings a little bit. The he informed us that he could smell anything, like a beagle, and howled like a beagle (“Barrooooo!”). Finally, we arrived at the Brewster station and got comfortable to wait for the next train. Not five minutes after we arrived, a train rolled into the station. OUR train. The train we were JUST ON. I guess they had cleared up the fire situation shortly after the cab left. The whole cab trip was for nothing. We all just dejectedly boarded the train again and sat back down. So my one-and-a-half-hour trip took three-and-a-half-hours and involved a mentally ill cab driver, two arrogant young hipster snotbags, and three tightly wound older women who I had to calm repeatedly. I now reek of acetone and my pants are ruined. Good times, good times.

Addendum: Snorth has informed me that I was not riding with hippies, I was riding with hipsters. It’s a subtle but important difference. I stand corrected. So, for your information, hippies = dirty, friendly pot-smoking free-lovers. Hipsters = the ass-weasels that rode in the car with me.

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Budapest and Prague – Part 5.

Saturday, April 3rd, 2010

On my last day in Prague, I went to Kutna Hora, a city an hour outside of Prague. Originally, Kutna Hora and Prague were keeping pace with each other in size because Kutna Hora had a large silver ore running under the city. Therefore Kutna Hora was where the money was minted. However, the mines ran dry, there was a fire in 1770 and Kutna Hora fell behind. So now Prague is the capital with 1.5 million people and Kutna Hora has about 23,000. It does, however, have a lovely cathedral and the reason I came to Prague in the first place – The Ossuary of Sedlec.

Before I show you the pictures, let me tell you the backstory: There was monestary. The monestary has a little graveyard. In the 13th century, a monk went to the holy land and when he came back he sprinkled holy land dirt in the graveyard. Suddenly, EVERYBODY wanted to be buried there. During the Black Death thousands of people were buried there. A chapel was built in the center of the graveyard, many graves were exhumed and bones put in the ossuary/basement. In 1870, the Schwartzenburg family, who owned the property, asked Frantisek Rint, a woodcarver, to put the large piles of bones in some kind of order. And hoo boy did he ever.

It’s a small building. You walk in, and there are stairs right in front of you.

The temperature drops dramatically as you go down the fifteen or so steps, so much that you can see your breath. As soon as that happened, I couldn’t not quote The Sixth Sense. I said, “I see dead people”, and it was true. Approximately 40,000 dead people, to be exact.

Is this not the greatest thing EVER? The chandelier is rumored to have at least one of every bone in the body. And that’s the Schwartzenburg family crest. I know this doesn’t look like that many deceased people, and that’s because there are four ginormous piles of bones in each corner of the room. Note my mother laughing at me because I was so ecstatic about being there.

I was in heaven. I wanted to stay there forever. Check it out: Rint even signed his name in bones.

I held up the whole bus because I didn’t want to leave. But there were other things to see in the town. And a lovely town it was.

There was their cathedral that was built during the Great Competition with Prague. This one is called St. Barbara.

St. Barbara wasn’t as high or as breathtaking inside as St. Vitus, but it did have a few beautiful and unique qualities. One was the paintings on the vaulted ceiling.