FREE TO A GOOD HOME said the wicker chair by the big bin on the corner. I touched it; it rocked back and forth. Uneven pavement there; the chair itself was steady. I couldn't use it, of course, but was getting ready to start thinking about whether I wanted it. When came a noise, like, "Noo!" It was the girl with the short pants on the bike that had passed me slowly, coasting and tapping the stone wall with her hand. "Do you want it?" I said. I have become much more easy with strangers in the last eight years. I said it encouragingly. "Oh, I was just thinking," she said—her accent, she's an immigrant like me—"because at work we just sit on these boxes, and it's." Without pity. Man I had nothing on that. I was thinking, Maybe would this be better than my other straight chair? But I hadn't gotten that far, cause I knew I couldn't use it. Was it unsteady? she wanted to know. No it wasn't! I told her cheers, yes really, and she took it and it was pleasant walking in the warm night under the crescent moon.

Friday's yoga session left my lower back sore but loosened. I celebrated by running across town to pay the yoga teacher. That night we had an extra-long game of Ultimate on the rain-softened Meadows; the sky was clear. Our pizza-and-beer followup was unusually satisfying.

Next night, potluck dinner. We went up on the roof and got an Edinburgh panorama: Arthur's Seat, Blackford Hill, Edinburgh Castle (lit up and dignified on its rock), the carpet of pink-gray rooftops and chimneys, and a bloody red-orange sunset in the west. We went to the fenceless edge and peered down into people's flats, where they played Wii, knitted, and folded laundry.

I had to run to Diane's Pool Hall, described by one patron as "not a pool hall but a fightin' hall." First game: rubbish. Second game: run. Third game: rubbish. Our hammered Basque friend called someone a postcolonial motherf_cker, to our great amusement. After closing, we set out across the Meadows and turned up in a children's playground, new and sturdy, its resilient rubber sheets holding our feet still. The swingset seats were wide and the chains strong. The zipline held sure and zipped well. Someone fell over; "Basque down!" was the call. A cute young French couple was called to the scene: A swingset is called a balançoir. Jane Birkin speaks perfect French but sings in a crummy English accent to sell records. We surrounded ourselves with wheezes: What would a James Bond villain say if they had their final showdown in a kid's playground? The cops drove by and said nothing.

Bright and early the next day I went mountain biking. My old chum Jamie brewed a huge cup of strong coffee and loaned me a bike. We cycled along the canal, passing the two songs (mother and daughter) I got to know last year on canal trips. We cut over to the Water of Leith, a strangled little trickle coming down out of the suburbs. We got up into the farmland on the edge of the Pentland Hills. Sheep baaed. The pasture was amber and the heather green. The hills rolled.

Up and down the hills we went, along gnarled rocky paths and loose gravel tracks, up and over the first pass into a quiet valley with a reservoir. Blip said the fish and ba said the sheep. There were the gorse bushes with their coconut-smelling flowers. We kept going and going, up and down tracks until the last peak was too high and the mud was too thick and the view was too sweet, then we rolled down the hill and back along the Water of Leith. Near a gaggle of teenagers playing, we roused a heron from the water; he was great and blue and I've never seen a heron at full span from above: terrifically smooth, those wide wings slowly pulsing.

Back in the city, all were out on the town. Among the cyclists on the canal was one riding an ordinary, or penny-farthing. Another graceful thing. I ate a craload of trail mix and went home and slept.

Things I saw today:

• a wee hawk
• a blue heron, looking enormous from above with outstretched wings
• an ordinary bicycle, cycling pleasantly along Edinburgh's Union Canal.

Sascha Frere-Jones on Portishead: "all that womb-like bass."

Last week, astronauts on the International Space Station got to handle original handwritten manuscripts of novels by Jules Verne. The manuscripts were delivered there by a robot spaceship from Europe, itself called the Jules Verne. The manuscripts are meant to come back to Earth at some point, rather than burn up on re-entry as the ship will do.

I didn't realize how jaded I was about the existence of space travel in our time until I saw that Wikipedia has a banner template for articles about in-progress spaceflights. In other words, there are enough in-progress spaceflights over time to make it worthwhile to design a special banner warning people that the article might change during the mission.

Guys, we're sending handwritten 19th-century books into space with robots. That deserves a what-what. (Jetpacks still to come, of course.)

The red world And corresponding red breezes Went on Geryon did not

I was impressed that any sound at all came out of Ranjit's rotten-stick saxamaphone, let alone the fairly sonorous one that actually did!

There’s a lovely pattern to these words, which come from astronomy:

near	far
perigee	apogee	(Earth)
perihelion	aphelion	(Sun)
perijove	apojove	(Jupiter)
perisaturnium	aposaturnium	(Saturn)
periapsis	apsis	(any body)

The perigee, for example, is the nearest point to Earth on some orbit, and the apogee is the farthest point on such an orbit. (Thanks to Garth of perijove.com for pointing this out to me.) The apogee is also the peak of a trajectory, which is of course also the farthest point from Earth on an “orbit”; and metaphorically, the apogee can be the best point of something, like a career.

I didn’t recognize the peri- or apo- prefixes before this investigation, but there are lots of words that use them. Peri- is used a lot by anatomists to refer to areas close to something in the body—I read about the "perisylvian region" of the brain, which is adjacent to the Sylvian fold, one of the many folds of the brain. Apo- means “away,” generally, and here are some interesting uses:

apostle	(one who is sent out, a messenger)
apotropaic	(something that turns away evil, as stone lions and gargoyles)
apostate	(one who stands away)
apocalypse	(literally, a revelation, or veil-away)

Sadly I couldn't find any more pairs as in the first table.

Peter Schjeldahl knows art, he relishes it, and he sees it with a keen critical eye. He can scarcely write an unmoving line. Take wit:

"Be they ever so cool, Ellsworth Kelly, Andy Warhol, Dan Flavin, and Blinky Palermo can't help stirring the heart, through the eye, with hues as cleanly gladdening as French horns in the morning."

(Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, March 24, 2008, p. 16)

"Courbet's drenching seascapes should come with towels and his steaming nudes with towlettes. He revels in the quiddity of paint: moist dirt. His art isn't about life; it is life precipitated, with raucous panache. Nothing could be better therapy for a bodiless society of cybernetic narcissicisms than the mad wallow of this show."

(Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, March 17, 2008, p. 22)

Dire Straits' "Money For Nothing" holds up really well against DJ Spooky, Godspeed You Black Emperor! and Boards of Canada.

Dreamt. I was checking out some student flats and out the back were these enormous and beautiful fjords, one after another that you could climb to, and filled with these fantastic carnivorous fish. “I had no idea these were here. Right in Edinburgh!” I said. “These are the ones used in the movie Juno,” said the guy there. Looking out to the ridge of the next fjord, I realized I was hallucinating the mythical-looking beasts that were prancing along there—because of the auras that surrounded them, that tipped me off—and I was irritated because I had hallucinated the same thing while watching the same fjords in Juno. To get from the entry hall to the first floor of the flat you had to jump up through a little trap door in the ceiling. I wasn’t sure about that at first—the practicality of it—but I warmed to it. But the students there were very immature undergrads, and I wasn’t sure about living with them.

Our local newsrag of choice, The Guardian (né Manchester Guardian, né Guarniad) has its own font family, of 96 individual faces, commissioned in 2005 for its redesign and switch to smaller, more manageable pages. This much you know. But further, the font has been licensed for exclusive use by The Guardian, and this license expires this year. (This comes on the high authority of the typographica blog.)

I admire large public institutions that commission major typeface designs, particularly unassuming but distinctive ones like this. Whitney, designed by Hoefler & Frere-Jones for the Whitney Museum, is another chic example. To call for a major type family design is something like commissioning a great city building, or a great work of public art. It adds to our cultural heritage, while making a mark for the institution.

The Guardian is a fine paper, not so much for the news—that part is alright, maybe—but for the extras. For much of the past year or so they've been putting out posters, one a day, according to weekly series, cataloging various examples of some category. For example, one week might be themed "Birds," with each day's poster covering a subcategory like "Gulls" or "Hawks." The poster would just be a scattered arrangement of slightly dull drawings of the things, name attached. Not fascinating, but cute.

Just now they're running a series of handsome little chapbooks of poets:

That's from a few days ago. Note how the diversity of weights in the Guardian font family allows them to set the "20" so large while keeping the strokes about the same weight as the rest of the heading.

Today's book collects from Ted Hughes, with intro by Jeanette Winterson (read it online). Each book has an author photo, a reproduced manuscript page, and original reviews from the Guardian pages.

Why do they offer these gifts? It's not in their remit as a newspaper. Perhaps it's for entertainment, to compete with the page three girls offered by every other British daily. I know which I prefer.

I really like this poem, "The Magic Kingdom," by Kathleen Graber, in The New Yorker of Feb 11 & 18, 2008.

Isn't it interesting how, when I started this column in 2002, I had to copy out poems from the New Yorker by hand, but now all the poetry is online and all the authors have their own blogs?

It's tarnicious out there. High winds to be sure; umbrellas inverted. Bins & receptacles strewn across the road. Dogs and cats living together. I'd like the placid haar back, please.

THE AUTHOR'S AUNT writes:

Reminds me of when my nephew was editor of his high school paper. I asked how he chose which letters to the editor to publish. I found out my nephew had written them all, to prime the pump, because the editor had received none.

This is the bowling green I wrote about in January, 2006:

To magnify, click.

Looking back at journals from two or three years back moves me to rapture. I can't believe I went through these things—and in this sequence! How did I survive? Often I look back on a time as idyllic, yet I wrote at the time like things were miserable. This means, for sure, that when things seem bad, they're more fun than they seem. You remember the good things, and the learning experiences; you forget about the stresses. Old Hemingway says, trying to be deep for once, "I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better."

2005 was a big year for me. Some amazing things came into my life. And through calendar trickery, nothing left my life until early 2006. Then everything came apart and left hiss and steam.

In March 2005 I went to Santa Cruz to play Ultimate Frisbee with my college team, and all the old rivalries were gone and I played well and the weather was good and you could see the ocean from the fields and we had a great time playing. A few days later I put in a grad-school application to a long-shot school called Edinburgh on the other side of the world. Next I had a shallow relationship and got accepted to Edinburgh. At the end of May I recorded a vivid, prescient dream of a woman I loved in friendship, loved in a distant, delayed, and hopeful way, and later that year she delighted and sustained me and I had the chance to love her properly, to show her what she meant to me and how we could spend our lives together in blissful contentment. But I bollixed that, or she did or somebody did. That's why in February, 2006, something really good left my life and left an emptiness that has yet to be replaced.

I worried about so many things that were good things nonetheless. I'm so grateful to myself for keeping a record, for sending signals to the future me, so that I can later, somewhat, understand.

I found a pretty good pattern. Check out this table:

No. of England	Me
BERet	berET
BALLet	ballET
CHALet	chalET
shallOT	SHALLot

Discussing this last night, someone conjectured that the name 'shallot' might come from a longer French word like 'shallotte'—which answers.com confirms: "Obsolete French eschalotte, from Old French eschaloigne, from Vulgar Latin *escalōnia. See scallion." The modern French is found to be 'échalote.' So, what at first seems a curious exception turns out to have roots.

The accent I'm calling "No. of England" is, in all likelihood, not that at all but some other, more mysterious cross-section of British society. I will attest that I've heard these pronunciations among several people, in meatspace and on telly, too.

Repudiations & criticisms are heartily encouraged.

From Tesco Metro, showcase of local life:

THE MOM: What are these?

THE KID: They're cookies. Cause it says, "biscuits," so they're really cookies. [Ed.: A! Le petit, doux Américain!]

...

THE MOM Hey, come over here; I see toys!

THE KID: Mom, I know where the toys are.

From Artkrush #76:

Six artists are vying for the opportunity to erect a sculpture on the empty 1840s plinth in the northwest corner of London's Trafalgar Square. Competing for the commission are Bob & Roberta Smith, with an eco-friendly sign promoting art, not war; Anish Kapoor, with an arrangement of five concave, colored mirrors; Antony Gormley, who seeks volunteers to stand on the structure for an hour at a time; Yinka Shonibare, who proposes an enormous glass-bottled replica of the HMS Victory; Tracey Emin, with a life-size model of a meerkat; and Jeremy Deller, who wants to install an actual destroyed car from Iraq.

I think that's the same plinth where was the larger-than-life statue of multiple-amputee Alison Lapper (depicted pregnant).

The BBC has the further scoop on the new shortlist.

I've been studying French. On my recent trip to France I made use of both of my phrases:

• merci
• Je ne parlez Français! (smiling)

The latter was so perfectly delivered that the response was, "Italiano?"

Turns out the skiing in Les Hautes Alpes is a bit better than in the low hills of Western New York State. Who new?

"Clapham Junction?? It's not even a terminus! (small pause) I'm sorry, did that sound incredibly geeky?"

This came in a dream. It is free for your use.

Five rectangular tanks of water, each about one meter deep, five feet wide, ten feet long, and open, stacked on top of one another, with a small gap in between for air to pass. Some kind of minimal struts holding them up. Each one is chock full of plant life: leafy and cactusy, but not choking with seaweed. In the center of each tank is a fragile, rounded, glass bowl where a catfish (two feet long) makes its home; the catfish is free to swim throughout the tank. In one of the tanks, a middle-aged man, just greying, sits still on a chair, eyes level, head above water. From time to time the man climbs out to take a break. Display in a a public place where people can watch from various heights. Should last for several days.

The city looks sweet, mornings like this. There's no one about and I plow quick down the slick black paths over The Meadows into the office. The green grass is hoary-haired, and scratchy too; pigeons nibble down their chow. Those old criss-crossed cranes (cross-gartered?) stand proud above the Quartermile. All them students have buggered off and lone great-coats shift up Jawbone Walk.

Mid-day today, with the clear sun hitting its zenith at the 20° mark, I saw how the frost on the Edinburgh roofs matched the shapes of the chimney-shadows. Warming, I guess, it slipped away as the sun crossed over. Then at 15:30, with the sun going down, frost came back the other way, covering the tennis courts and bowling greens below my office balcony.

A body could almost grow to love this city.

Overheard at a barbershop, in reference to the Nintendo Wii's multiple-games deal (buy one, get several others you don't want at additional cost):

"Oh, that's a con, ay."

At this party, it seemed, no more than two people hailed from any one country. There were two Dutch people, two Welsh blokes, two Italians, two Americans, one Frenchwoman, a Quebecois, and a girl from the Basque country.

Around 1am, someone put on the O, Brother Where Art Thou, soundtrack, loads of people dancing, and to my amazement, several people were singing along.

The spitting is everything. Cacao has peculiar rain-forest dependency. If the pod is not removed, it shrivels and the seeds die. It needs to tempt whatever happens by—monkey, man, squirrel, rat—to stop, wrestle it off its stubby stalk, break it, drink the nectar, eat the pupl (or try to), and cough out the seeds. No creature likes the seeds; the fruit's future is in its immediate ejection. The seeds that end up on the rain-forest floor sprout within hours of exposure to the air.

—Bill Buford, "Extreme Chocolate," The New Yorker, October 29, 2007.

There's a huge crack in the floor of the Tate Modern. It was put there by the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo, and it's not clear how. Impressively, it runs the entire length of the building, in a concrete floor that, surely, was there before and will have to be there later, when the next artist comes to fill the Turbine hall with something else momentous.

It seems that Salcedo has been inspired by her contact with people involved in the Colombian Civil War. Another work of hers in the gallery (Untitled, 1998) is made up of a chair cemented into the back of a dresser, the two structures flush. Uncannily, it evokes the feeling that something awful has happened here, and that we're shutting it up and papering over it. The redundant, asymmetrical lines piercing the surface also bring to mind a human being with a mutant skeleton, just visible beneath the skin. Another creepy piece (Unland: Audible in the Mouth, 1998) fuses together two long wooden kitchen tables of slightly different shapes; they are made to depend on one another to stand, and to compromise their shapes to fit together. There are long human hairs stretched into the surface, cutting into it with meticulously parallel lines. It seems like a torture device, or what's left over in the torture room. In both cases, the effect is especially uncanny because it inhabits such common objects—like the dresser, table and chairs in my childhood home.

The crack, called "Shibboleth," is still more approachable, more playful. I liked watching children look deep down into it ("It's deeep!" they would say), sticking their hands in, wondering how it could be and what it was like. Like myself, they seemed to like moving along it, looking into different bits, not believing, or expecting, that it's all the same. At kid scale, it's an imaginary landscape, something the mind, or a mental spaceship, can soar over, perch on, and otherwise play in. At grown-up scale, it's still a pleasing perplex, but the sinister side comes through as well: this is a division, a marring, a breakage, a catastrophe, a borderline, and a shibboleth, too: it separates us. Something awful happened here, though this time it's not papered over.

As always, the best show is in the crowd, in the reactions. I satisfied my curiosity by walking the full length of it, checking it, repeating to myself, "Yep, it's a crack all right, a real crack." But as I walked out on the mezzanine level, which overlooks the piece, a woman with kids was coming in. I overheard: "...but it's not a real crack, it's a fake crack."

To operate ChipWits, you will need a 128K or 512K Macintosh with the mouse and keyboard connected. ChipWits will also work on a Macintosh XL operation under Macworks XL. An Imagewriter printer must be connected if you with to print the Workshop and Environments screens. However, a printer is not required for using this system.

(Thanks, ftrain!)

Disclosure: I lusted over this game via a blurb in the Whole Earth Review in the mid-’80s.

Alice Waters brings her own capers (puff piece for her new book).

Forty languages are still spoken in Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico, many of them originally used by Indian tribes and others introduced by Eastern tribes that were forced to resettle on reservations, mainly in Oklahoma. Several of the languages are moribund.

Another measure of the threat to many relatively unknown languages, Dr. Harrison said, is that 83 languages with “global” influence are spoken and written by 80 percent of the world population. Most of the others face extinction at a rate, the researchers said, that exceeds that of birds, mammals, fish and plants.

—"Languages Die, But Not Their Last Words," John Noble Wilford, New York Times, September 19, 2007.

[Meta-note: Can you tell I'm doing a tab sweep?]

Mr. Mroué, 40, belongs to a tight-knit generation of artists, writers and filmmakers that has put Beirut back on the cultural map since the end of the civil war in 1990. They have learned to maneuver on the margins of mainstream society, striving to create works of formal precision and political insight with as little interference as possible from Lebanon’s fragile, divided government.

—"Lebanon Bans Tale of Fighters in Militias ," Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, New York Times, August 17, 2007.

Finally, we were motivated by the artistic enjoyment to be derived from designing the wide variety of glyphs found in the Unicode standard. It is an opportunity to contemplate the past, and take part in the future development, of thousands of abstract graphical forms that have been developed through several millennia by generations of scribes in different civilizations.

—Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes, "The design of a Unicode font."

The Unicode font in question is Lucida Grande, a handsome and unfussy font that comes with MacOS X. It boasts more than 1700 glyphs.

Here's a Scottish scene:

Two men are at the trough in a pub loo. A third comes up between, says, "Ey, could you move tha' way a bit." He scoots over, accomodating. The third man goes on, "Used to be, we'd get four blokes on here. Now it's only three. Course, those were shorter, skinnier blokes." The other two chuckle. He says, "With that booth over there, we can get a few more in." He waves at the single stall, protected by a floor-to-ceiling door. Inside, the walls are wheat-pasted, every square inch, with pinups from lad mags—centerfolds, or Page Six girls, as you like. The effect is vaguely revolting. "It's me that put that in, as manager, when I was managing the place a few years ago. That's the best thing I did for the place. Sometimes a Saturday night, it'd be covered in puke..."

Finished with my business, I left him to tell his story to the other gentleman.

Here are some drawings.

A newspaper article the other day talked about decimalization and the brief trauma it wrought on British society. Decimalization, as I'm sure you know, is the event in 1971 when the UK switched from a monetary system that broke a pound into twenty pieces and each of those into twelve smaller pieces. Since then, there are one hundred pence in a pound, basta.

In this article was a big photo of a couple of babushka'd old ladies standing before an informational sign which helped you convert between the old and the new currency. It was neatly designed, and had two columns of figures, running like this (I draw your attention to the headings):

£sd	£p
5/-	25
5/1	25
5/2	26
5/3	26
5/4	26
5/5	27
5/6	27

Now, I was perplexed by this. I knew that the new system, £p, was pounds and pence. I knew that "s" had to be shillings, and I knew there were a load of other coins in the old system: halfpennies, farthings, florins, crowns, et cetera. So I was scratching my head as to what could be the "d" in "£sd." Some other coin than the penny? But what?

Turns out to be more peculiar than that. "£sd" is short for "librae, solidi, denarii," and there you get your explanation for that crazy pounds sign—a hashed "L." "Libra" is a Latin word for "pound" as a unit of weight, and the other two are Roman coins.

There are at least two kinds of slashes in typography, one (the virgule) more of a prose slash, as in "let's have pudding/dessert", and the other (the solidus) more of a fraction slash (as in 3⁄4). The name "solidus," as you now realize, derives from the old British notation for shillings and pence, as in figures like 3⁄6 (the original price of a John Le Carré book I just bought, now valued at £2).

Does the US dollar sign have an origin in some Latin term? Unclear. Wikipedia lists no fewer than eight origin myths for the dollar, all a bit dubious. It seems that the sign itself does predate the republic.

Finally, please enjoy this sign appearing in St. Andrews, Scotland, just an hour or two from where I write.

"Almonds, in particular, have extremely high pollination requirements ... and so California's increasingly large ... almond industry is almost entirely honeybee-dependent."
—Elizabeth Kolbert, "Stung." The New Yorker, August 6, 2007.

Do we live in a fairy-tale, my Unknown? I think we do.

P.S.: I <3 Elizabeth Kolbert.

Unknown, please inspect this swell picture of a bonobo.

I want you all to know about the pensive lemon.

Packed my bag yesterday morning for a beach day in the town of Aberdour, just North of Edinburgh across the Firth of Forth. Out there it was spitting the rain, and there was a sweet gray fog stretching across the water, so we couldn't see the city. A squat little lighthouse, red-turreted, stood on a wee headland nearby, proudly asserting our beach's existence against the gray. Later in the day, someone called, "Look, it's lightening up a bit," and this meant just that we could see the definition of a cloud against the gray sky, and the dim silhouette of the city across the water.

There was much comment on the poor choice of weather for a beach trip, even as we switched into shorts and tossed a disc on the sand. A young lady called out (unironically I thought at first): "I judge the sun to be past a yardarm, so we can drink." But I had underestimated British dryness (even Scottish dryness), as the woman soon proved herself of cunning wit.

The water was not cold, not from the cold air at least, but no one induldged a swim, not even I, who was keen. Instead we huddled in a gazebo and ate lunch, swigging wine from a bottle. Conversation was happy and general. Catch-phrases were made and used within the session.

A few middle-aged picnickers turned up in the gazebo, then, and laughed at finding others "as crazy as us." They were merry, too, and drinking, too—it always surprises me when people over 40 have fun. Is there not a rule against that somewhere?

We retreated to a pub, drinking tea, whiskey, coffee, and ale (not necessarily in that order). An old man at a nearby table tried to tell us some miscellaneous facts; we watched the rugby (rousing rough, that stuff is) and dried and warmed.

Once ready, we trained back into the city and bussed up to someone's flat in the far nether regions of Leith. There I learned of the Wii, a late-model gaming console from Japan. It's games are atheletic, simple, and fun—much unlike the fiddly, cerebral games of yore.

One of the upsides to living in a foreign country is never knowing whether you're looking at something familiar or strange. Were these people geeks? Country people? Snobs? Slobs? I knew not, I couldn't read them; I didn't need to. They were my companions for the day, and fine ones, too.

I sat in a pub last night in a group of six people—we were all enjoying each other's company, happily; and then we realized that none of us knew the whole group, in fact no on knew more than two other people, so our relationships were linked strictly in a chain, like this:

V — E — Al — B — C — An

We were six degrees of separation, spanning the social globe at one pub table.

I was quite pleased at this—not for the geekery of the number six, but for the pleasure of connecting up people who enjoy one another. August in Edinburgh is lively and everyone seems to be having a good time.

Just after seeing Studio Ghibli's Tales from Earthsea. A lot is lost in the translation (to Japanese, to anime, to a PG film) but it brought back good memories for me. I was staggered by those books when I read them, at the low end of the acceptable age-range. They expanded my vocabulary, and my sense of wonder, and (I think) my sense of ethics and my place in the world. Until seeing the movie, today, I'd forgotten what a poetic world Le Guin created, populated with the Archmage and True Names and the Tombs of Atuan (which I still remember as the scariest place I'd ever imagined, and the book where I learned the word 'eunuch'). I desperately want to re-read the books, now.

Jessamyn captured the Free Wi-Fi splash screen of a Unitarian church in Portland. After noting that the church is a liberal community of faith, it invites you to "reach out to the world with a message of healing, hope and transformation."

I'm currently using a linksys community network somewhere in Somerville, MA, and I've done nothing to earn this connection. I'm in a similar boat to the users of that church's Wi-Fi. As a result, I'd like to reach out to you all with a message of healing, hope and transformation.

First, healing. I'm reading The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks. It documents bizarre cases of neurological diseases—for example, where a woman loses her proprioception (or sense of body position), or "witty ticcy Ray," a manic drummer with Tourette's—but, in many of the cases, Sacks helps the patient learn how to cope and become functional. The woman who lost her proprioception, for example, was able to cope by using her vision to keep track of her limbs by focusing hard on them. Sacks is a clear and enjoyable writer with a lot of great stories to tell. I'm glad that these people can be somewhat healed, but even more compelling is the sense he conveys of what a human being can be, even though lost of memory or possessed with wild outbursts like witty ticcy Ray.

As for hope, I read this from Primo Levi's If This Is a Man, an account of his time in Auschwitz:

Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite. Our ever-insufficient knowledge of the future opposes it: and this is called, in the one instance, hope, and in the other, uncertainty of the following day.

When it comes to transformation, I point you at Miranda July's book of wonderful short stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You. Nearly every protagonist in the book undergoes a transformation. I think particularly of the man in "The Sister," who works at a leather-goods factory and for whom, "The new life came easily after this, a growl." To find out after what you will, of course, have to read the book.

Too me, perhaps uniquely, the view of the Charles River at sunset, as seen from the Red Line train when it crosses the bridge, is one of the more beautifully affecting sights to be seen in the urban world.

The hostel I'm staying in has an 8th-floor "city-view lounge" with a view of the Charles River, the MIT dome, and the skyline of Boston. Sometimes I'm leery of hostels, of them being scummy, anxiety-producing places full of noise, cross-traipsing strangers, and (who knows) collapsing beams. But at times—moments like these, looking over the calm blue flow of the Charles and proud flotillas of clouds above—I find that the universe is surprisingly generous in what it offers.

Boston's North End neighborhood is much as I pictured it from Jane Jacobs' description. Running around the outside are big roads, with strip malls and condos here and there; but inside, the architecture seems unreconstructed, and to some extent, the culture is still here, too.

She described it as one of Boston's most alive neighborhoods, and not in spite of, but because of its high destiny, and its narrow streets in their irregular pattern.

Here, I've seen men standing in the middle of the sidewalk, telling jokes and their friends listening carefully to the setup and punchline, men with their chairs set out in the road; families chatting about their affairs on alleys, just off the main street. Great corpulent families cut slowly into the flesh of watermelons. It is a hot day. Everyone seems to be outside.

At an intersection, an old Chevy is blocking the way while waiting for a UHaul to start up; behind him another car wants to get through; he honks (typical for Boston) and yells (less typically): "Just move over! Just move over there!What the <expletive deleted>." And then, with resignation, "Moron." As the Chevy pulls away, I see he is smoking a cigarette out the window, unperturbed.

Just then, seeing me coming, a woman said to her son, "Come here, hon, the street's too skinny." The kid parrots back, "Street's too skinny." The streets here are indeed skinny, in a rather delightful way.

Unreconstructed in most ways, but changed in a few: The woman in the window of the cafe is checking her LinkedIn profile.

Hey, Unknown. I'm rediscovering music. I'm rediscovering listening to music, on my own, without doing anything else. Just clapping on a pair of headphones, laying down on the floor, and letting some disc roll. Letting those sounds fill up my head without any other distractions, not as a distraction from something (like work) and without anything distracting me (like any internets that might come by) from the music.

I like it. I like to just close my eyes, and get wrapped up in sounds. I like remembering that old experience of putting a needle on a record, laying down, and waiting out the pauses between tracks. I like being alone in that dark space, just grabbing on to each chord and each hi-hat and each quiver of the singer's voice. Grabbing on with my mind, I mean. In case you have forgotten about this, please try it again.

---

Stop me
won't you
If you heard this one before
The one where
I surprise you
Showing up at your front door.

It's light past ten every day now, Unknown, and that makes me think of you. It rains a bit every day and it feels soft.

The best thing about Scotland is the air.

"omg my mom joined facebook!!": a quite good NY Times article on social networking and moms.

A friend of mine was asking for a new crush—not necessarily a person. This got me thinking about my crushes and I decided to make a list.

Age	Crush
0–3	No data
3–5	Rocks
5–7	Computers
7–14	Computers, programming, games
10–	Typefaces
14–20	A certain girl, to remain nameless
16–	The Timeless Way of Building
20–	Theatre of the Oppressed
20–	Cooking
21–	Anne Carson
22–	Software development processes
24–	Blogging

Fig. 1: Table of author's crushes (not
necessarily complete).

As always, past performance does not guarantee future returns.

Hey, I saw a seal today! At least, I think it was a seal.

I had walked out to this island off Cramond in Edinburgh and was hanging out, enjoying the sunshine by myself.

Something looking like a big rock (about the size of a big person, and jet black, mottled with white splotches) was a few hundred yards out, near some buoys. It was quite blockish in shape, not much resembling an animal. I figured it was a big rock. At some point, though, I noticed its head moving, and thought, "rocks don't move their heads." Stared at it for the longest time trying to figure out what it could be. I thought of:

• A big piece of wood, broken, with one part floating separately from the other,
• A dog on a raft,
• A person (covert agent?) in a strange-animal suit,
• The Loch Ness monster.

Then twenty minutes or so after I noticed it was moving, it disappeared with a big splash! There was no rock left there, but there must have been one just under the water.

I watched the water, and a few minutes later, its head surfaced some ways away for about a minute (this is when it most convincingly looked like a man in a really lousy costume). Then disappeared again and I couldn't track it.

After looking at seal pictures on Wikipedia (e.g. fur seal, eared seal, and earless seal), I feel it was the right size and shape to be a seal, although none of those picture have the mottled black-and-white color of this thing.

A swell day!

Some interesting women from the May 7, 2007 New Yorker cover, "Style Sheet," by Ivan Brunetti:

Things I learned today in a talk about long-distance navigation in desert ants:

• This kind of ant can find its way home or to food, without pheromones, for millions of steps across a flat desert with no significant visual landmarks. This is "like a person walking for 14 hours and then knowing how to get home."
• The theory is that they do this through "path integration," that is, they keep track of where they are in their heads by adding up all the little movements that they make, one step at a time, and they know the direction of each step by making use of the polarization of the light from the sky.
• Navigation by robots without landmarks is called "dead reckoning."
• Robots tend to do it poorly because any error in measuring single steps will be magnified enormously over a large number of steps. This means that a robot trying to get home this way would have a large error in any direction, and would be likely to end up anywhere in the general (or not-so-general) vicinity of where it started.
• But remarkably, these ants have a consistent bias to one side when returning home. The theory is that this makes it likely that he'll cross his outbound path, thus possibly re-encountering any visual landmarks, which might be useful after all.

In a nutshell: ants are awesome!

This enormous silver thing—a sheet of tinfoil as big as the door on your house—was hovering in the air, three stories up, on my street.

I watched and it shimmered and shifted, hovering up there by the third-floor windows. Then it swooped down, wrenched itself into two other shapes, and zoomed low over the cars passing on the big street.

Before it went out of sight, it jumped up again, up and up, to the third-floor windows again, and it hovered and shimmied, then jetted off around the corner, out of my sight.

I had to chase it! I had to pull down this pending danger before it slapped its bulk across some driver's windshield, causing havoc!

After rounding the corner, I saw it sliding crosswise from high above the street to low above a plaza off the street. A cul-de-sac! My chance to nab it, surely. It floated to the ground, a hefty mass of foil, just light enough to remain an inch above the pavement and drag one corner off and off, out of my reach. Now I could see its plan: it was going to slop around in a big circle, following some circle of wind brought about by this cul-de-sac. Now the real clown act would begin: I'd be chasing it around, always a step behind, as it orbited me and I orbited it. I could see it happening.

But! I was too cunning. I aimed for a point a few strides ahead! In this way, I managed to walk around in circles no more than twice before grabbing hold of that delicious shining cloth, crumpling its lightness in my fist, and binning it into the nearest safe litter bin. A traffic disaster was surely averted. All in a day's work.

A: I learned a new word?

B :Yeah?

A: Cookie-shine?

B: Oh, not this again.

A: Yes! It's real! It means "a tea-party."

B: Wot rubbish! You're more full of rubbish than anyone I know!

A: I would believe that, but...

B: On this particular point... ?

A: Right.

B: "Cookie-shine."

A: "A tea-party."

B: This is from the same dictionary with "skew-whiff" and "pebble-dash"?

A: Yes! It's real!

The Australian girl on the bus is college-age, say 20. She spent the winter here. Now she's escorting her grandmother, and aunt, I think, from the airport. She tells them something about her life, and then laughs, to show how much she loves it. The grandmother has a mischevious smile and her hair is dyed blonde, as she says. They sound Austrian, or German, the older women do.

The girl wants to know if they want to do tourist stuff: see the castle, hike up Arthur's Seat. She's been saving herself, she says, until they come. The grandmother wants to do it all, she is courageous, wants adventure, like the best twenty-year-olds. The grandmother is very curious, wants to know about all the people she's met, wants to know where she's traveled, which country was the nicest, wants to extract a good story from the younger girl with her puckish smile.

She, the girl, worked in a diner until recently; she quit a couple weeks back and now works two hours a day at her hostel, to pay the bill. Loads of Australians at her hostel, she says—they always go out to pubs together, or hang out on the patio, or have barbecues. Two of the guys are chefs and so they all get good meals cheap.

She quit working just to take it easy, she says. Next winter she wants to spend in the Alps, working there, for something different. She quit working at the diner, but her best friend in town, a guy, works there now so she goes back. "Your boyfriend?" asks the grandmother in her Austrian accent. "No, just a a friend," the girl says, and laughs loudly.

With few exceptions the main technical inventions of the first industrial phase had not required much advanced scientific knowledge. Indeed . . . they had been within the grasp of practical men with experience and common sense. . . . From the mid-century this ceased increasingly to be so. . . . The artificial dye-stuffs industry, a triumph of mass chemical synthesis, though its first product (the color mauve) is not universally acclaimed aesthetically, came from the laboratory into the factory.

—The Age of Capital, 1848–1875, Eric Hobsbawm

I went with a friend to some place, called notionally "Chattaqua" or "Chappaqua" in the NE US, some place which is faiirly densely populated but, in this dream, you get something like an acre to yourself, for you and your buddies to pitch a tent in relative peace and harmony. And, they told us that there could be bears, but we take that with a grain of salt. So we pitch our tent and start enjoying ourselves; the first day, I'm sitting in the tent and this bear comes along and starts browsing around; I'm a bit scared but playing it cool. At some point he lays down right next to me. I'm rather nervous, but I figure that being calm is the best thing to do. So I keep going about my business, washing a pot, or relacing my boots, or something. Pretty soon, though, the bear starts talking to me. He says stuff like, "Who are you?" (He talks kind of like Eeyore, in that lazy falling tone that Eeyore uses.) And I start talking back to him. My friend is not around at the moment. We start having a whole conversation; he's real lazy and calm but I have that constant sense that he could swing his paw around and poke open my chest. I want to ask him what he's going to do that day, but I don't want to be the kind of human jerk that things every kind of animal is trying to Get Things Done, so I avoid that topic for a while, until I run out of other things to say. Then I ask him what he's going to do and he sighs, "Lay on the grass; look for food, I guess" (Remember he talks like Eeyore). This goes on for a while but eventually he wanders away; I go to find my buddy, and I remember that Flanders is also with us, but he took his family inside, to a small room inside a building, because he was too scared of the bears. When I see Flanders I want to tell him all about the bear, but he's too freaked out about something (maybe bears) and he talks a mile a minute before running off. I decide to go back to the main camp and tell somebody there. They say, "Oh, of course you got a bear," laughing. "Didn't we tell you there were bears?"

And then I start to see:

The screen is divided into nine sections, each with a looping Simpsons gag. I can only watch two of them, and I only remember one:

A guy is putting together some kind of school newsletter; he sits in the upper bowels of the school by two conveyor belts. One has "Inserts" floating by—some kind of announcements for parents—and the other one pitches downward to where the other students will come and pick up the newsletters. Our guy sits there by a little flap, taking the wide sheets, folding them over the inserts, and sticking them in the slot where they are carried down to the students below. At the moment, one of the bullies is down there waiting; he keeps throwing his backpack up the conveyor where it knocks open the slot for a second. We keep hearing the bully shouting for just a second, when the slot opens: "—DOHNAD—" (rhymes with gonad) "—DOHNAD—" "—DOHNAD—" the bully is getting more and more irritated, and the kid at the top is getting more concerned, thinking, "What is he talking about, —dohnad—?" But he keeps faithfully churning these things out. Finally, he holds the slot open for a second and hears what the bully is saying: "Don't add the announcements!" This in that mildly resentful voice that the The Simpsons bullies use. At that moment I woke up, laughing to myself over the idea that I'm Simpsons gags are being invented by my dreams.

Man, I had some weird dreams last night.

I meet this girl at a cafe or pizza joint. She gives me this newspaper, like an "alternative weekly"; it has a contest in it for "Guess our secret critic's favorites" in five different categories. They're all kinds of musicians, but odd ones, like "Singer-Rocker" and "80s glitter band," and they're all supposed to be female. The girl in the cafe tells me that she publishes the magazine, and they need to find a secret critic before tomorrow, so that they have some answers, and would I be the one? I agree. She goes away and I meet a couple more girls; they turn out to be her fellow publishers. They tell me about the contest, too.

Now they're feeling me out on my musical tastes... I think they know that the secret critic is supposed to be a man, and they want to see what a man's secret tasts might be. Meanwhile, I know that they're with the newspaper so I want to see what kind of stuff they're looking for; so we're both circling around each other, trying to figure each other out. I'm trying to think of acts that are appropriately obscure but not too obscure, trying to think of someone in between Joanna Newsom and Rosie Thomas, for example. At some point one of the girls says, "You wouldn't go for a quick shag, at all, I suppose?" And I shrug and say, "Actually, a quick shag might be just the thing"—which I have no intention of doing, I assure you, even in the dream. Rather, I'm being crafty: I realize that I could parlay some more time with these girls, to figure out their secret tastes. So they take me back to their flat and disappear somewhere, and I'm left alone with the newspaper, trying to figure out what to put for these five categories of female musicians! I woke up as tired as a rotten stone, and as dehydrated, too.

A word to the wise: Do not watch the film Howards End in advance of reading the book. The writing is strong, but the particular images of the film will still win, will still invade your reading. Awkwardly enough, the film is very good, and the book is very good. But if you were to read the book first, then the film, you'd have two good things, while I only have one, having done them out of order.

Dreamt that I got a dog. I was rather pleased about it, in spite of my (real-life) deep aversion to dogs. It was small and slightly shaggy, but not too much so; it was friendly and cute without being too exuberant. I don't know where it came from.

For two days I kept it in my room, and was pleased that I remembered to give it plenty of water. After about two days, though, I realized I hadn't given it any food. It was looking a bit worse for wear. I decided to go out and get some dog food. First I just had to get ready to go out: find my wallet, pick a shop, and all that. And while I was looking for that stuff, some people came wanting to talk and cooed over the dog, and seemed to notice that it was a bit skinny. They said, "Are you feeding it?" I said, "Yes, just going now." They were taking my time but I wanted to go out and get the food right away. I shooed them out and then went back to getting ready to go out. Again some people came, and took my time, and again I was back to preparing to go out. This kept happening, this fretful cycle, until someone dropped a spoon in the kitchen and I was bolt-awake.

Ah, London! That's a ripping good town.

How was it? Lessee if I can remember. I turned up Friday evening and found my hostel, easy as pie. By surprise, I had a rather large room with just one bed. In Manhattan last December I paid more to get a 1/4 share of a room half that size. In London I was well placed, in a safe neighborhood, near a row of nice restaurants and with easy access to the Tube. If you're headed to London, I recommend the Belsize House in Belsize Park.

That first night I ate at a pizza chain—but, like, an upscale pizza chain. I wolfed down a mediocre pizza with a great salad (Was it lima beans? Those big lumpy green things? Why were they so good?), two good beers, and an absolutely smashing dessert: figs in sweet wine plus ice cream, and coffee on the side.

alking out of there, it was lightly drizzly, but hospitably warm. I filled my chest with air two or three times and felt immanently, utterly content; the only sour note in my being was a general kink in my back, the result of umpteen years spent crouching over a terminal. I breathed and stretched, breathed and stretched, walking through the dark, strange London drizzle, and that kink started to work out and I slowly became big, and expansive, happy. I thought of old friends I walked with in Boston, Seattle, and San Francisco, after such fine meals.

Next morning I began my exploration at a randomly-chosen Tube stop ("Bank": not recommended for this purpose) and wandered up to London Tower, and thence to Tower Bridge. Turns out London Tower's not a tower at all! It's more of a castle; explains why I couldn't pick it out in those Elizabethan drawings in my Shakespeare book. Unlike most castles, it's a creamy yellow/pink color, making it somewhat more appealing to the eye.

Near Tower Bridge I found a thing called the Design Museum. Not having much time, I only browsed the book shop, but I did find some nice things about typefaces, book design, and architecture. Then I was off to the fabled haunts of Homerton.

"Wot's that?" you ask? "Homerton? Not heard of it." I was there to check out a photo exhibit of bhikku's, and others. Quite nice, that. I'd have taken an armload of those photos, if I could've. It was great meeting the ol' bhikku, a Friend In Blogspace, and seeing bhikku's scene.

Bhikku exhorted me: "Write about whatever you do next," so here's goes. By rail I went to the South side of this Thames River (River Thames?) and wandered down along it, pondering each huge museum as I passed. There were life out there: loads of people out walking, and buskers. Like, some bozos banging on a tin pan, but they were only pretending; I wasn't fooled. Further on was a woman painted to look like a statue, and holding very still. I was fooled at first, but meh. Then—ooh, then—there was a Bobby in a black vest, white tutu, white stockings, and a white umbrella. When a coin was dropped in the hat, s/he would magnificently gesture thanks to each person in turn, then make some other uberelaborate performance of, saying, pouring tea for her/his kind guests. They'd run off, and s/he'd stop. That was quite good; it was something about the tutu.

Now then, listen up for this bit: further along was a kid tapping with a mallet on what looked like two woks clamped together. It made tin-pan sounds and I nearly ran away, remember the faux-buskers from moments before. Then I noticed he had a friend with a snare drum and cymbals, another with an upright bass, and with them a sax too; I decided to stop and listen. As it turned out, they were rather good. They had me and a big crowd in their thrall for several pieces. To give you the idea, imagine that Dave Matthews Band (at its best) swallowed Sigur Rós, and got ten years younger. They're called Portico Quartet. Don't neglect to see them play if you have the chance.

After that, I went down to this little gallery they have, called the Tate Modern—but oh, ah, what a gallery. I spent 3 1/2 hours on two floors (of four) and could have spent more another day; detailed descriptions and exultations are deferred to another post, in the interests of keeping this one bite-sized (okay, meal-sized).

The Tate is open late on weekends—a nice trait for a gallery. Even at 9:30pm, I found a nice restaurant along the water, where I could watch the city lights on the far side, and eavesdrop on young, well-off Londoners having their dates and bullsh|tting with their friends. There, I got a roasted butternut squash covered by a rather good salad, and a nice Côtes du Rhone wine, to boot. The salad, with rocket, tasted very good, and the squash was nice, too, though really, it was nothing more than a roasted squash. I count it a Good Meal and am surprised that it only cost as much as a similar meal in Edinburgh, in spite of the much better surroundings.

Sunday morning, I hit up Paddington Station. I did not find there any toggle-coated bears, not from darkest Peru nor anywhere else.

From Paddington I wandered through Hyde Park, saw the Statue to Physical Energy (which was not, as I'd hoped, a rendering in stone of an electrical dynamo or of the atom, but just a guy on a horse), and then found myself at the Natural History Museum. They have loads of rocks, as well as this helpful sign explaining tool use in humans:

Had lunch at a very nice bakery, called I think Paul, at South Kensington on Thurloe Street. Highly recommended.

Wandered Buckingham Palace—surprisingly, a great many kinds of birds hang out there. I watched them, and the other tourists, for a spell. It was a wet day, and everything closed early, so not much else happened that day.

The last highlight was dinner at The Mango Room, just near the Camden Town tube stop, a "carribbean" place (carribbean ingredients, that is). This was the best dinner of the trip: a risotto with baby spinach, fried plantains, and "crispy leeks," that is, strands of finely cut, toasted leek—very scrumptious. It was presented with such flair that the two demure young German guys at the next table were driven to distraction when it arrived; I volunteered, "It's the risotto," and they looked it up with interest on the menu. With it I had a terrific wine from Portugal, known as "Vista TR" (but does that make any sense to any one?), and for dessert, bananas flambéed in rum with cinnamon. I'll be making that at the homestead.

Dark and wet, all tired out from walking, I tubed back up to my hostel, merrily merry now for the third evening in a row, and resolved to do this—take a vacation, treat myself to such pleasure—again and again and again.

About a year after moving to the UK, I had the sudden, disappointing revelation that (seemingly) every bit of print in the entire country was set in Gill Sans. Attentive readers of Letters to an Unknown Audience will realize that Gill Sans is the face in which I (cannily, I thought then) chose to set the type of this very column some five years ago. After my awakening, I was everywhere surrounded by bus adverts, corporate logos, directional signage, hand leaflets, and all manner of other printed matter, all of which taunted me with the unoriginality of my choice, which had seemed so novel, so daring, back in the America of 2002.

Imagine my relief, then, when I realized that most of this stuff is not set in Gill Sans, but rather in the iconic face designed by Edward Johnston for the London Underground. The London Underground, you'll recall, was the first subway to have a schematic map and its own "corporate" brand. You'll immediately realize this is true—that circle with the band across its waist is known the world 'round, and who can say the same for the New York MTA's forgettable, inconstant logo? Johnston's typeface, too, is immediately recognizable; although you might not know how to name it, you surely do perceive this face as itself whenever you see it associated with the Underground.

Well, if I thought Edinburgh was plastered with the stuff, London is absolutely three sheets to the wind. The skin of London is made of Johnston's face. Every letterform in the entire subway system, of course, is set this way (and it is massive, the London Underground, with text everywhere), but also most of the signage for roads and tourist attractions, plus a whole load of kitsch that tries to cash in on the London brand (micro-museums, knick-knacks, etc.). I must have spent about 1/3 of my weekend in London watching the signs and noting how many of them were printed in this font (and, a funner sport: trying to discern the digitally set signs from the old skool, the stuff someone painted or smithed out by hand a hundred years ago).

More grostesk typographic trivia that I happened to gather: In a book called Book Design, found in the Museum of Design near the Tower Bridge, I saw a snippet of the (very snazzy) 2002 redesign of the prayer book (was it?) for the Anglican church, which was set in Gill Sans, "A choice," said the marginal note, "which was described by ————— as 'wearing its Englishness on its sleeve.'" (Yet, according to my handy Encyclopedia of Fonts (thanks, Matija!) Gill Sans is "the only typeface designed in Wales"!) Gill Sans was designed ten years after Johnston's face, this time for the "London & North Eaastern Railway" (so says Identifont; I wonder if that's related to the GNER which carried me to London?) The take-home message: it seems that my little Gill Sans is far more British, and far more ubiquitous, than I'd imagined—a blow against me.

Yet, I still find Gill Sans, in this digital, 13pt variety, an exceedingly attractive face. In this setting, and not in all-caps as the railways favour, it works as a text face: It's reasonably readable while keeping the jazziness set to medium-cool. Here at Letters to an Unknown Audience, we practice "slow design," a curmudgeonly resistance to changes—oh, I mean a thoughtful care in overall design. We plan to let the site design evolve slowly, to ever-so-gradually absorb the needs of its author(s) and constituents, without ever rushing to embrace the newest fad or eschewing a style gone apparently out of date. We are here for the long haul, O Unknown.

Woke up convinced that the phone was ringing. It was only the springtime birds singing.

So there's a movement called Slow Food. Have you heard of it? I hadn't, really.

It's the opposite of "fast food," like. Something about slowing down and taking time to eat, with people, indulging in the pleasures of the table, yadda yadda. These are values that I hold so I figure I had to see what it was all about.

There's a chapter in Edinburgh that has monthly Slow Suppers in a restaurant somewhere in town. It's meant to be £10, including a main and a glass of wine—not so bad as meals go in Edinburgh. I screwed up the courage to go down there tonight alone—although the flyer casually, slyly suggested "bring a friend or a colleague along!" After a long day of stating theorems and translating calculi each to each, I cycled home, ditched the bike, then walked up to a place called Wigham's Wine Cellar. Inside, what did I find but a bunch of people hanging about in a restaurant.

I expected the average age to be older than my own, but there were some unwrinkled faces here and there, so I didn't *quite* feel like the only cock at a hen party.

I bumped into the organizer, who helped me feel a bit at home and suggested I take a seat. Each table had about 2 or 3 empty chairs, which all turned out to be spoken for. I set my jacket at the empty table near the front and perused the literature ("Food Production Communitites" was one hefty tome).

Soon I noticed a—dare I say—attractive young lady talking to the organizer. He was making her feel at home, telling her to find a seat, etc. Now I was set! She'd make the rounds and fine no seats empty, then fall back to the same small table as me. But dashed! Instead she inveigled herself into one of the tables I'd found unwelcoming. Blast and bollocks! Sorted asunder.

But then ahoy! another organizer came along and asked if it was my First Time. It was! Well, let's find you a seat, then, she said. Perhaps right at this table over here—she led me to the seat next to the attractive young lady, which somehow now had its coats and scarves lifted away from it, and I was seated.

The woman on my right was a primly made-up, though friendly, middle-aged woman, originally from Belgium. She asked me several times how long I'd been in Edinburgh. The man across was an affable Australian, an engineer who just got work here. He was with his wife—together they cut a fine figure of what age 39 and two halves could be like. They were world travellers, with experiences from all over; but they weren't pushy with their experience, nor show-offs: just two secular humanists on the road of life, enjoying it in their turn.

Finally I got introduced to the solitary lady on my left. She looked just like the girl from Trainspotting (though maybe ten years on) and had nearly the accent to match—that is, charmingly Glaswegish or something thereabouts. Turns out she spent 7 years in Japan, and quite loved it: first teaching English, then recruiting for corporations. Her first degree was in Spanish, and she lived in Madrid for a spell. She described her favorite cafe there: with hams hanging all around, blue tile walls, and good strong coffee.

While she talked about a sauna on an island in Finland she'd visited, where you could run straight out and jump in the sea, I daydreamed about what it would be like to love a girl just for the way she talked about islands and cabins and experience, and not have any ambition that she should APPRECIATE ME. But I soon shook my head clear of it, remembering what I need, remembering how I've discovered my needs these past years.

The food was okay, not quite as good as one might think from an organization dedicated to the pleasure of food. I had the "onion tart"—the vegetarian option—which came on a bed of rocket. Just rocket. They could have put some nuts in the salad, is all I'm saying. Those who ordered the salmon were also disappointed, though the beefeaters reported success; theirs was a heartier dish if nothing else, with a potato concoction on the side. The prim woman on my right had eschewed the salmon for the same reason I did: you can't get wild salmon in this part of the world, certainly not in restaurants in February.

Though things seemed awkward at first (What did we have in common, after all?), we had gotten going over the food, and by the end of it we almost seemed sad to leave one another. I'd found out all about the likes and dislikes—eminently reasonable—of these strangers: what made the Scottish girl leave Japan, where in Asia you had the best balance of good food, with good temperature. When I got up and returned to the table, the Australian women was telling someone about the film Tampopo. I only overheard, "It's a cowboy thing, and they open a noodle shop..." and I knew right away what she was talking about. Our girl of the countryside was quick on the uptake, "Sure; that's what everyone's dream is, in Tokyo, they all want to open a ramen shop..."

I took a slow leave of them, and walked home on my own, now pleased, and chuffed, and floating a bit.

I went to Germany. It was quite alright; you should go there.

Saarland is the region in Southwest Germany where I was. It's pretty; there are bike paths everywhere. The people speak lots of English but it helps to have a comrade who can speak a little German.

The manor house where my cohorts and I stayed is quite posh. There were umbrellas and bicycles near the doors—for your borrowing convenience—there were bottles of wine in racks which you could drink and settle up later. There's a castle on the hill above; a computer science library; good automatic espresso machines.

A short documentary on letterpress. Nice filmmaking—not much insight into the process of printing.

The Gödels finally secured all of the necessary travel documents in January 1940. They feared taking the direct route to America across the North Atlantic. The British might attack and sink their ship. If the Brittish captured them, they would be interned because they were German citizens. Consequently, the Gödels came to America the long way around. They took the Trans-Siberian railway to Vladivostok, one ship to Yokohama, Japan, and finally an American flagship to San Francisco. All told, the journey took seven weeks.

—Stephen Hawking, God Created the Integers

The most splendid dream: I was in Seattle, and snuck into "my old apartment" which was one in a dense block of them stacked up in sheaves just above the beach. I had a marvelous view from there of the water at night, and I snuck down to the beach "like I used to" and, over and over again, paddled my way out on a small raft and rode the tide in, and in, and in, feeling utterly content and not cold, alone on the beach at night. "This is only possible," I said to myself, "because Seattle is not an island, so it's not crowded." For a long time, I rode those still waves though the tide was disappearing, and eventually I lay in a dry concrete park and some skater kids came and circled around me.

As I walked along the street high above the water, I ran into my old friend Hawkeye. I was so thrilled to see him! We walked around some more until we found this thing which was a bus or boat or theatre and thought we'd sneak inside. We were surprised: it was packed with people at this hour! Every seat taken, and the aisle packed with people. We pushed through, and everyone was having a good time, packed in there at some small o'clock in the morning. It turned out they were all there for forgiveness, though in some non-religious way. Some community occassion where all these people got together and someone was going to help them feel better about themselves. They seemed to be doing alright; it was like the easiest-going, most friendly grown-up party you've ever been to, everything calm and easy in the middle of the night.

HIM: Blen's dee-ah eer.

ME: Sorry?

HIM: Ballen's dee-ah theer.

ME (looking at the coated peanuts, sack of cookies, and trail mix in my hands): Oh, right. All four food groups!

HIM: Ah's a geem-ars dee-ah, thah is.

Patricia Marx v. Nancy Franklin:

"Anyone who has a dietary restriction can’t come over, unless you’re a really good cleaner."

Unkown—

Faith again. Down to the RSA, they had video pieces, a big elephant slowly turning, laying down and standing up, its eye, its small eye. Its big legs, seeming light, lifting and setting them down, so softly. And setting its trunk down, too, just the end of it, to rest lightly on the ground. All the while symphonic music blazed from another room.

Went down South from Rochester an hour last night (borrowed ride from neighbors I never knew were there) for a New Year's party at a nice old farmhouse in the Finger Lakes. We had a big bonfire, and launched hand-made tissue-paper hot-air balloons (an armspan tall). We had a FARMHOUSE KITCHEN and LIGHT ON TWO SIDES OF A ROOM and OLD PEOPLE EVERYWHERE (I had thought "YOUNG AND OLD TOGETHER" o well) and some good fun and interesting people.

On the bonfire was a box of back issues of New Yorker mgaazine. Said the paterfamilias, over 60, county coroner, beer in hand, "That's a ritual box of New Yorkers. Finally decided to get rid of 'em! You can get it all on CD now." They went up slowly, a page at a time, peeling away in the hot air and then flying off in flame.

The hot air balloon, after it caught fire, came down in the middle of a vineyard and a landing party went out to fetch it. It was a good eve of the new year. I'm not ready to give up 2006, but ready for 2007, for more life, always more.

Trying to find Penn Station at 6am on a dark morning, I looked up and saw this giant ad photo: a guy shaving in a car.

I thought, "Hey, I know a guy who did that."

Then, "Wait a minute... That's Marc Horowitz!"

On Mess.

I was in some kind of workshop and when I came out there was a guy sleeping in my car. He looked like Dave Chappelle. Also the roof had been sanded down and the plates changed, but I didn't realize this yet. I woke him up and told him to "get outta here." He said, "Alright, but can I just take the number plate with me?" "Yeah, whatever," I said. He took off on a moped.

When I realized I had two plates that were different and the top of the car now had a confederate flag on it (because of sanding, apparently), I took off after him. I could see him, but he was riding on the wrong side of the street and so hard to approach. At some point I switched over to his side, and luckily I became vary narrow so I could fit in beside the oncoming cars like he could. I grabbed him with my hand and gave him a chilly look.

Standing there were some policemen. I was relieved. "I said, this man stole my car, or my numberplates, or something. I want to turn him in." The Chapelle look-alike was quiet and sheepish this whole time. The cop said, "Talk to them inside," sticking his thumb in that direction. Inside there were a bunch of cops using a converted space to work on their robotics project. They were thrilled when it suddenly worked, extending a tiny shaft to poke through a piece of fabric, and angry at the Japanese nuns who'd won the prize money before. They would win this time.