Diversionary tactics.

Because I'm procrastinating like whoa (see also: "I think he IS from the future!").

Seriously, the past few days have been incredibly dull - I feel badly even wasting your time by posting this. I've been off of work ('tis the season for people to eat at home, I guess) and therefore spending my time playing xBox, doing the crossword puzzle, and lying on my bedroom floor staring at the ceiling. Tim got me watching "The West Wing," so I've also been doing that.

So, as the current state of my life has become not much more than waiting for my turn to play "Return to Castle Wolfenstein," I'll throw some links your way. (I know you might be saying, "Nate, you used to write about actual things. Hasn't your blog become just another one of those wastes-of-bandwidth in which the 'author' regurgitates the same garbage that every other blog does and blames it on the fact that he's 'feeling uncreative today,' as if there are any days when he actually is creative, and for some reason, feels the need to lie to all three of his regular readers (even though they all know it's just a facade) because he wants them to think that he can actually come up with an original thought once in a while?" The answer is, I never wrote about actual things, and shut up. On we go.)

I don't know why I'm on the impeachbush.org mailing list. I don't mean to knock down the little idealism that could possibly be left in this world, but Bush and Cheney will never be impeached. Not that I don't believe they deserve to be, but our year-old Democratic-majority Congress seems to be missing a backbone. They're taking the Gerald Ford it-won't-be-good-for-the-country approach and saying "Good job on electing a Democratic majority! Oh...you believed us when we said we'd change things? Um...about that...LOOK OVER THERE!" And we, the gullible voters of America, look in the direction of Nancy Pelosi's bony outstretched index finger, while she and the rest of the Dems run the other way.
Anyways, I was saying. Something about impeachment. Oh yeah! Bush and Cheney haven't been impeached, but the town of Brattleboro, Vermont has passed a resolution calling for their arrest should they ever step foot inside the city limits. (If there's any way for a town of 8,300 people to make world headlines/money, this could be it, but my cynicism digresses...). From
the email:

"...Shall the Selectboard instruct the Town Attorney to draft indictments against President Bush and Vice President Cheney for crimes against our Constitution, and publish said indictments for consideration by other authorities and shall it be the law of the Town of Brattleboro that the Brattleboro Police, pursuant to the above-mentioned indictments, arrest and detain George Bush and Richard Cheney in Brattleboro if they are not duly impeached, and prosecute or extradite them to other authorities that may reasonably contend to prosecute them?" The people of Brattleboro answered, "yes!"

The indictment means that Bush and Cheney can be arrested for criminal acts should they ever enter Brattleboro. The indictment would go into effect after Bush and Cheney leave office.

The Brattleboro resolution is becoming a powerful organizing model for cities and towns around the country. The impeachment movement has sunk deep roots throughout this country. The people of the United States are demanding not only that the Constitution be restored, but that the President, Vice President and other officials be held accountable for committing high crimes and misdemeanors.

The Brattleboro resolution shows that even where Congressional representatives are refusing to follow the majority sentiment demanding impeachment, that the people themselves can take action."

I don't know, I suppose it's a start - I've never been a big fan of symbolic actions, though.

Speaking of politics, most of you who aren't brain dead know that Hillary Clinton was the big winner in the primaries last night. Obama did take the aforementioned Vermont and is projected to clean up huge in the Texas caucus, so that's nice. So last night was my couch-and-politics party, which is exactly what it sounds like - me sitting on the couch, watching the West Wing, and checking the scores every five minutes.

You can thank those crazy Belgians (via Ms. Kimberly Pike) for this one: Dinner in the Sky, which you might fancy if you've got an extra ten thousand or so euros just burning a hole in your pocket. Oh yeah, it helps to be okay with heights, as your table is suspended 50 meters in the air:



More pictures on the website, and that's all my rambling for now.

My brain is turning to mush.

Hey kids, I just wanted to take a minute and share with you a couple of things that've been cracking me up lately, because it's Sunday and there's really nothing in my life worth writing about.

Stuff White People Like is a fantasically hilarious blog that's just what it sounds like - a daily discussion on things white people like, from public radio ("After Craig listens to people like Amy Goodman and David Sedaris, he feels like he is an expert on the issues that they talk about like polygamy in third world or how awesome it is to watch an old lady pick apples.") to breakfast places ("To a white person, there is no better way to spend a saturday morning than to get up late, around 9:30 and pile into your Audi or Volvo and drive to one of these little places and eat breakfast with friends. Often times these breakfasts last for an hour or more (hence the long lines and wait times).") So, go ahead and check that out.

And an interesting article, from the Billings Gazette via Fark, recapping a speech by Dr. Terry Housinger, wondering which famous assassination victims could've been saved if we'd known the things we do now about modern medicine.

Guess I'd better go do something productive.

Just checked out the Sitemeter - visits to this blog yesterday quadrupled from the normal number of visits in a day - I had about 40 just from frustrated NYT crossword-ers. And hey, I'm not one to judge - I'm pretty good with words, synonyms, definitions, and things like that, but once we hit arcane classical literature - hellllooo, Google!

Worst parents in the world? These people make their kid think he's getting an xBox 360 for Christmas...and then LAUGH at him when he cries about it.



And Lewis Black, on everyone's favorite Republican:



I'm out.

Friday ramblings...

Sorry my posting's been so infrequent - I don't have a computer anymore, so I have to borrow Tim's if I want to blog. In the end, though, the less I have to subject you to my ramblings is probably better for all of us.

My sleep schedule's still pretty erratic after returning from the other side of the pond. I find myself in bed at 11:30, at latest, and up by 6:30. It's not all bad, I feel like I've got more time before I go to work, but still, I feel kindof...well...old.

I'm doing the New York Times crossword - you've gotta love the clue "pullers of the chariot of Artemis" in the same puzzle as "1990 #1 rap hit that starts 'Yo, V.I.P., let's kick it.'" (For everyone who came across my blog through Google, the answers are "DEER" and "ICEICEBABY." Now leave me alone.)

I'm going to take a little time here, just to say how much I love the internet. (In Jimmy voice) "Have you seen this, have you heard about this?" (A++ for getting that reference, by the way) All of us (well, most of us, anyways) are familiar with the LOLcat macros, popularized by sites like I Can Has Cheezburger, which is basically "YOU HAVE TO SEE THESE ADORABLE PICTURES OF MY KITTIES" taken to a whole new level - people upload their pictures and put captions on them, generally terribly mispelled. For example:



RDR^2.

Anyways...if that wasn't going far enough, LOLbama.com uses the same idea, except replaces the cats with pictures of everyone's favorite presidential candidate. I'll warn you before you click that while most of them are pretty tame, a few might not be safe for work.



Oh! There's also Hillary Is Mom Jeans, a fun little time waster where people blame anything and everything on Hillary Clinton, including such gems as "Hillary tells your supervisor when you come in late," "Hillary canceled Arrested Development," and "Hillary tries to start the wave at baseball games."
Its sister site, Barack Obama is Your New Bicycle, is basically the opposite (although not as funny) - "Obama escorted your grandma across the street," "...helped you move a sofa," and "...picked you up at the airport."

So this is what politics has come to...LOVE IT.

Does anyone have any book recommendations? Books I've just finished include The Corrections, Life of Pi, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, One Big Damn Puzzler...so, I like interesting, quirky fiction.

Anyways, I'm out.

The great UK summary.

I apologize in advance as this is going to be a very long, media-heavy post – such is the case when one attempts to summarize two jam-packed weeks. I attempted to make sense of Blogger’s “read more” link tool, but I’m not a fan of rewriting HTML and getting into style codes and all of that, so we’re just going to have to deal with it.
As you all know, Tim and I spent the last two weeks in London, Edinburgh, and Dublin.
We got into London at around noon on Tuesday, picked up our bags, and took the Tube to our hotel. From what I hear, Londoners complain about the Tube, but it seemed a lot better than Chicago’s el. We never really had to wait more than a few minutes to catch a train, and our hotel was right off of a couple of the lines, so we could get pretty much anywhere we wanted to go within fifteen minutes or so.
I’m not ashamed to admit that we did a lot of touristy things. One thing that’s difficult to get a grasp on is the sheer amount of history that can be packed into one country (England – where the history comes from!”) – here in the States we have our Bostons and Philadelphias, and think two hundred years is a really long time – but then you go to somewhere like Westminster Abbey (really incredible, by the way) and find five hundred year old monuments…it’s just mind-blowing. It’s interesting because, in contrast to some of the other places we were, London is getting to be quite cosmopolitan, the juxtaposition of the castles and monuments surrounded by glass-enclosed office buildings is somewhat striking..
So as I mentioned, we went to Westminster Abbey, so here’s that obligatory picture:



The history in this place is just amazing. Practically everyone who’s anyone in British history is buried there - countless kings and queens, Geoffrey Chaucer, GF Handel, Charles Dickens, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin…the list just goes on and on.
We also spent a lot of time in museums – which was great because most of them are free so you can really pop in and out and don’t feel like you have to spend all day there to get your money’s worth. So we wandered into the British Museum and saw their Egyptian collection and the Rosetta Stone,



Like Westminster Abbey, the British Library is a perfect example of a lot of history packed into one room. We went over there and saw everything from the Magna Carta to Shakespeare’s first folio to sheet music by Handel, Beethoven, and Chopin; to John Lennon’s first draft of “A Hard Day’s Night” (written on the back of a birthday card to his son) to the Gutenberg Bible to DaVinci’s notebooks. If I haven’t said it already (yeah, I know I have), absolutely mindblowing.

We also spent a lot of time just relaxing. Vacations are no fun if I’m constantly on the go, so there were a lot of hours spent sitting in a park with a cup of coffee and a newspaper – which, by the way, was practically indecipherable, especially when you get to the sports pages. As hard as I try, I think I’ll never understand cricket – especially with sentences like “Then Umpire Gary Baxter, having rightfully called no-ball for a high full toss bowled at Oram by Ryan Sidebottom, did not repeat the call when the bowler sent down a second, which Oram spooned to a midwicket where Bell took a stunning catch.” Actual quote.

We also saw the Tower of London, which was pretty interesting, as well as the nearby Tower Bridge. Tim went to the Globe Theater while I sat in a coffee shop attempting to read the paper. We saw more touristy things, like Trafalgar Square, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and Big Ben:









It was nice not really making a conscious effort to get to a lot of places – we didn’t have a specific agenda for each day, generally we’d wander around, see a sign, and say “Hey, do you want to check out….” We spent some time in pubs - I must’ve eaten my weight in bangers and mash (“But you’re American, so you call it ‘sausage in the mouth’…) and steak pies. You can say what you want about British food, but I love that stuff.

We left London on Saturday and flew into Edinburgh. I’ve got to say, this is a city I knew absolutely nothing about – but it was an interesting experience going somewhere and having no expectations or pre-conceived notions.
Edinburgh was great – probably my favorite of the places we went. It’s certainly a walking city – we went all over the place and didn’t take public transportation except to and from the airport – and it’s very, very hilly, a lot like San Francisco – so there were a couple of really sore days there:



The first thing that gets you when you get downtown is the castle. It’s impossible to correctly photograph the enormity of it, but here’s my best shot:



It’s really one of those things you have to see for yourself to properly grasp. You walk around it and there’s a hundred feet of rock going straight up – I guess it makes sense why they decided to build a castle there. We got a chance to wander around the castle for a while, so I got this picture from behind one of the cannons:



And here’s some more random pictures:







We walked up and down the Royal Mile, which is very touristy (and has a thousand kilt-selling shops to prove it) – I attempted to convince Tim to buy one, with no luck:



We wandered down an alley – this one, actually –



And found this pub –



tucked into the side of it. We sat there for a while and drank good dark beer. We ate haggis at a different pub. It was actually pretty good for what it is (ground beef and lamb, sheep’s heart and lungs and oats, all cooked in a sheep’s stomach, served with mashed and sweet potatoes):



And me with my first bite:



Ate more bangers and mash:



And a traditional Scottish dessert called carnachan (raspberries soaked in honey and Scottish whiskey, with oats and whipped cream), all washed down with more dark beer – good stuff.
At some point I had a deep-fried Mars Bar too, which was good, I guess, but really not worth the hype (which is odd, given my penchant for deep-fried foods, but, eh.).



From practically any point in the city you can hear bagpipes – guys like this stand on the street and play “Amazing Grace” and “Scotland the Brave” for spare change:



There’s also the Sir Walter Scott Monument in the middle of the city:







You can take a very narrow stairway up to the top of it, which of course, we did:



We then made the mistake of heading over to Arthur’s Seat, which is basically a small mountain. Don’t get me wrong, the view was very much worth it, but going up the Scott Monument and then doing the steep, hour-long walk up the hill right afterwards wasn’t easy on the legs. As I said, we walked everywhere in Edinburgh, and this was no exception. It was cool how close you are to being completely away from the city. But anyways, here’s that view I was talking about:



Cool, right? We made our way down the hill and came across the ruins of St. Anthony’s Chapel – again with that random history – it was built in the 14th century.



So next we headed to Dublin. Unfortunately, our flight was a little bit…delayed. We got in the air and then found out Dublin airport was closed due to fog, so we had to land in Cork and take a 4 1/2 hour bus ride to Dublin. It was a bit of a pain, but at the very least, we got a free tour of the Irish countryside.
Dublin was really unexpected. The streets and sidewalks were busier that both London and Edinburgh, but again, everything we did was within walking distance, so traffic wasn’t an issue.
Christchurch Cathedral was interesting:





The architecture is phenomenal, and they’ve got a really creepy crypt in the basement.



We hit the outside of Dublin Castle and the Chester Beatty Library, where they have a great collection of old documents, including pieces of the Bible dating as far back as the 2nd century AD.
We wandered around the Temple Bar district for a while, which is full of shops and restaurants.





And the highlight of Dublin was probably the Guinness storehouse.



You take a self-guided tour through the storehouse, which is full of everything Guinness related, from exhibits explaining the brewing process to collections of print advertisements and television commercials. There’s a wall where you take a notecard and write a message for future visitors to see – taking a look through those was hilarious – besides the usual “I love Guinness!” cards, there were a few like this one:



And the one I wrote:



The whole tour is finished off with a pint at the Gravity Bar, which has arguably the best view in the city:





Tim waiting for the Guinness to settle.



Ready to go.



Me likey.

So that was pretty much that. We jumped on the flight back to Chicago on Friday. I took a picture of Greenland as we passed over it:



Got back to Madison on Friday afternoon, incredibly tired. The jet lag is still killing me (I was up at 4 AM yesterday and 6 AM today), but it was definitely worth a few days of exhaustion.

There are a ton more pictures - if you want to take a look at the rest of them, you can go here:

http://s134.photobucket.com/albums/q95/natehamilton82/

And they're all sorted into albums on the left-hand side of the screen.

So where should I go next?

Did you miss me?

I'm hanging out in the Dublin airport waiting for my flight back to Chicago to leave. It's been an incredible experience, but I'll be really happy to get my feet back on American soil.
Keep your eyes open - I'll be posting pictures, videos, and stories within the next few days.

Heating system = epic fail.

Finally, I've got a chance to update. Don't get too used to it, though, as Tim and I are headed to London, Edinburgh, and Dublin tomorrow night.
The new apartment is drafty like whoa. It's insanely chilly in here, especially since we've got strong wind speeds and subzero temperatures. We're going to head to Walgreens and see if we can't find space heaters or humidifiers to get a little heat in this place.
I made videos of our new apartment and neighborhood, so check those out if you'd like:







Hopefully those'll work.

The new job is going well, but I'm pretty homesick for Chicago and still getting adjusted to a population-200,000-city.

See you in a couple weeks!