My colleague Ben Elliss responded to my last travel posting by saying “I’m looking forward to reading your upcoming posts about beautiful Slough, Geoff”. So what should I say?
I’m staying at a hotel about a mile and a half from the office, 
and the weather’s been nice, so yesterday and today I left the car at the hotel and walked. The route takes me from a relatively leafy area, through slightly run-down suburbia, along a major artery, and then through a pedestrianised shopping district. My first impression was that I could have been anywhere in the south-east of England, from Windsor to Basildon, from Watford to Croydon. Lots of traffic, lots of construction activity in the shopping district ((just in time for consumer spending to take a nose-dive as people tighten their belts and unemployment jumps)), lots of young mothers with push chairs and preschool children. Fewer pubs than I expected – but apparently that’s another trend: lots of pubs are closing across the country.
The hotel is good, the restaurant is excellent, and all of the wait-staff have impenetrable Eastern European accents. A “glass of wine” is 250mL, which is huge – over half a (US) pint. (And that reminds me: I need to find an opportunity to enjoy a pint of bitter before I leave the country. Maybe this evening.)
Meanwhile, I’m enjoying my meetings with my colleagues here in Slough. (And no door desks….!)
Anathem – first thoughts
Over the next week or so I plan to gather together my thoughts about Neal Stephenson’s new book, Anathem, so that I can write a full review. But here are my preliminary reactions:
Anatham is (at least) three books in one. It’s a science fiction yarn, in which geeks indulge in amazing feats of derring-do to save the world(s). It’s a dialogue about the thorny questions at the intersection of many-worlds quantum science, consciousness, and causality. And the background to both of these is a treatise on the role of science in society, and how the two magisteria – the secular and the scientific – might react against each other over the long haul.
I enjoyed and appreciated it immensely. It deserves careful and patient consideration.
Palin's base
No comments required….
Well, maybe one comment – from John McCain:
Let me just say categorically I’m proud of the people that come to our rallies… I’m not going to stand for people saying that the people that come to my rallies are anything but the most dedicated, patriotic men and women that are in this nation and they’re great citizens.
Travelling along
After two productive days at our Edinburgh office, I drove south today. The trip planner had projected a driving time of six and a half hours to reach Oxford, and that was alost exactly right: my rest/fuel stops added up to an hour and a half, and the elapsed time was eight hours. I kept wishing that I’d had a driving companion to wield the camera: sunrise approaching Moffat, the bands of cloud draped across the Lake District, the army of ghostly windmills marching across the fells, the quizzical sheep gazing at my from the back of a Land Rover… But that was about it for scenery: from Lancaster onwards it was grey with occasional drizzle.
Afte spending a pleasant afternoon with my mother and brother, I went out to dinner with Lorna and my sister-in-law. Then I headed off for the short (one hour) drive to my next hotel in Slough. The first bit was easy: round the Oxford ring road, and an 80mph dash along the M40 to Beaconsfield. Here I turned south towards Slough. I don’t think I’ve actually been down that road since I was learning to drive 40 years ago, and it was just as twisty, hilly, and off-camber as I remembered it. My instructions were to drive through to the A4, turn right, then left…
I missed the left. Drove on, looking for elusive street signs. Finally I took an arbitrary left, intending to work back to the point at which I’d joined the A4. Uh-huh… this is England, not the USA. No grid patterns. The commutative law doesn’t hold here. I plunged on, clearly lost, but using the bright moon to keep heading in roughly the right direction. I knew I should stop and call the hotel, but I wanted to be able to tell them where I was, in terms of a recognizable landmark. I kept driving.
Finally I saw a large roundabout ahead, and just the other side of it a big hotel (but not the one I was looking for). I pulled over, called the my hotel, explained my predicament, and told them where I was. It turned out that I was only twenty yards from the hotel entrance! If I’d stopped a couple of feet further forward, I’d have been able to see their sign.
So all’s well that ends well? Not quite: the hotel is completely sold out tonight, and the only available room was a smoking room. ((My coment to the receptionist: “Congratulations on the booming business climate. Enjoy it while it lasts.” Lots of gallows humour around these days.)) I’ll put up with it tonight, and shift tomorrow.
Oh yes, and WiFi access is £12 for 24 hours. Daylight robbery.
"…the only talent that she apparently possesses"
Christopher Hitchens endorses Obama, and wishes that McCain could be “taken somewhere soothing and restful” – “I haven’t felt such pity for anyone since the late Adm. James Stockdale humiliated himself as Ross Perot’s running mate.” But he has no such tender feelings for McCain’s running mate.
The most insulting thing that a politician can do is to compel you to ask yourself: “What does he take me for?” Precisely this question is provoked by the selection of Gov. Sarah Palin. I wrote not long ago that it was not right to condescend to her just because of her provincial roots or her piety, let alone her slight flirtatiousness, but really her conduct since then has been a national disgrace. It turns out that none of her early claims to political courage was founded in fact, and it further turns out that some of the untested rumors about her—her vindictiveness in local quarrels, her bizarre religious and political affiliations—were very well-founded, indeed. Moreover, given the nasty and lowly task of stirring up the whack-job fringe of the party’s right wing and of recycling patent falsehoods about Obama’s position on Afghanistan, she has drawn upon the only talent that she apparently possesses.
Only in Britain
Whenever I return to Britain and venture into a supermarket, I am confronted with products that I could not imagine encountering back in the USA. For example: I just bought a container of mixed nuts at Tesco. Not just any mixed nuts: “Rosemary & Thyme Infused Jumbo Cashews, Macadamias & Pecan Nuts”. And they’re brilliant: the flavours complement each other superbly.
(I also picked up a couple of cans of “Pimms No. 1 and Lemonade”, premixed for instant upper-class binge drinking. I bet they won’t have things like that at Washington State Liquor Stores any time soon….)
"That could never happen. Impossible."
Nils Gilman discusses how he and some colleagues spent a day last March discussing financial scenarios. By the end of the day…
…we had laid out a scenario whereby the money center banks […] could end up insolvent, necessitating a wholesale nationalization of the banking sector. We then looked around the table at each other and tried to imagine what this would mean for Western capitalism and democracy, and it just seemed too crazy to even consider […] and then finally one of us […] uttered the most taboo words in scenario planning: “That could never happen. Impossible.”
(Via Global Dashboard.)
Just keep on chooglin'
Travel’s going well so far:
- Got a complimentary upgrade on the Seattle-Chicago leg. Channel 9 was on; oddly, our callsign was “United 958 Juliet”.
- Got a window seat with nobody next to me on the Chicago-Heathrow leg. The flight departed late because, with the strong tail-winds that were forecast, we risked arriving before the end of curfew. As it was, we landed on time, in thick fog. I was impressed that we’d accept such a low RVR (runway visual range). Or maybe it was a CAT3 landing. The FA insisted that Channel 9 was on, but she lied: it was Kid’s XM. (Bletch.)
- Heathrow-Edinburgh was packed, but short. We left a little late. because the aircraft arrived late, but made up the time. BMI is really depressing: the cabin interior feels cheap/utility, and even the coffee costs $5. (I passed.)
- Got the rental car, and drove to the Dakota hotel without missing a beat. Anyone would think I’d been here before. (Which I have.)
I just finished lunch (roast halibut with leeks – mmmm!) and I’m going to take a walk to stave off drowsiness.
UPDATE: I wound up walking across the Firth of Forth and back. ((On the Forth Road Bridge – only imaginary friends get to walk on water.)) I made the mistake of not taking my jacket, and it was pretty blustery up there, but I power-walked to stay warm.
Hitchens on "America the Banana Republic"
In Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens considers the present financial crisis, and in particular the abdication of responsibility by those involved:
Now ask yourself another question. Has anybody resigned, from either the public or the private sectors (overlapping so lavishly as they now do)? Has anybody even offered to resign? Have you heard anybody in authority apologize, as in: “So very sorry about your savings and pensions and homes and college funds, and I feel personally rotten about it� Have you even heard the question being posed? O.K., then, has anybody been fired? Any regulator, any supervisor, any runaway would-be golden-parachute artist? Anyone responsible for smugly putting the word “derivative†like a virus into the system? To ask the question is to answer it.
Predictably negative
The McCain campaign really has been predictable. Predictably negative. Predictably cynical. In fact, back in June Obama predicted exactly what they would do. Check this out:
On reflection, I think perhaps that Obama did get a few of his predictions wrong. Not the what, but the how. Did anyone really believe that McCain would stoop to mob incitement? See John Scalzi’s “Your Rallies Are Beginning to Look Like Lynch Mobs”. Or from the Inverse Square Blog:
The grotesque sight of major party candidates standing mute and in apparent agreement as their supportors call for the murder of their opponent is not supposed to be part of the American political process.
It is now.
(And I’m sure I’m not the only person who’s read Allen Drury’s “Advise and Consent” novels….)
UPDATE: Well, better late than never. According to Time, McCain…
… just snatched the microphone out the hands of a woman who began her question with, “I’m scared of Barack Obama… he’s an Arab terrorist…”
“No, no ma’am,” he interrupted. “He’s a decent family man with whom I happen to have some disagreements.”
Perhaps he should tell his Veep candidate….