Inland Scenic

with our friend Dr Edward Dickinson cos he has a car, and it was sort of on the way from Telegraph Hill to Mission (sort of), but mostly cos it seemed like the right thing to do, to say we’d ‘done’ SF.

Video:

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

(It’s much slower than this in real time.)

Truth is it’s a bit of a con. It’s only the “world’s crookedest street” cos they’ve built chicanes all the way down, with nice civic planting. It’s not even the steepest street in the city, just the most articificially bendy.

Perhaps this would be more excting if you were from a fairly flat town?

Coming from Wellington NZ, I’m no stranger to genuinely steep narrow crooked streets (or bogus tourist attractions).

Anyway, always great to drive around a cool looking foreign city.

That’s crazy. Coriander is awesome. I can’t decide which I love more, fresh leaves or toasted crushed seeds.

Mind you, the first time I tried it i hated it. But that was when I was little.

I mean, some people don’t even like garlic. Nuts!

In England the idea of a White Christmas is persistent but illusory.

Let’s talk definitions. Wikipedia: “A white Christmas, to most people in the Northern Hemisphere, refers to a Christmas Morning with snow on the ground.”

That’s what it means to me too!

So around Christmas there is mucho snowy tree, snowflake, and snow man imagery.

But according to one report, you have to go back to 1895 to find the last “Christmas-card blanket of snow covering the city on Christmas morning.”

Easy solution: change the  definition.

Wikipedia again: “In modern times, for the purposes of betting, a Christmas is considered “white” if a single snow flake is observed falling in the 24 hours of 25th December, even without a perceivable quantity of snow.”

So the bookies define the term!

More fool them. In 1999, they had to pay out on odds of 50:1 when this happened: “London is officially enjoying a white Christmas after a few flakes of snow fell on the roof of the Met Office weather centre.”

This Christmas it was dry, grey, and bitterly cold. Not exactly song material!

at the Boxing Day sales, like this. This has happened to me before. I wore them out the next day just to try them out, and got blisters. So now I have to take a few days off shoes in general, new or old. It’s like the new shoes are jealous. Shoes to be reckoned with!

is that they don’t use dish brushes. Go to an English supermarket and you’ll be hard pressed to find a dish brush. They wash the dishes with a sponge.

the kind that has a neon-lit sex shop in the basement, but upstairs is legit.

I was shopping for a birthday present for missus, Samuel Pepys’s diary. The place felt dingy enough to have exactly the kind of dogeared, faux leather-bound volume I wanted on the shelf somewhere, but I couldn’t see it anywhere.

When I asked the shopkeeper if they had a copy in stock, he looked at me over his glasses disapprovingly and told me that that was not the kind of book they have in stock here, thank you very much.

I thought that was pretty cute, coming from a purveyor of smut. I believe the diary has its seamy/steamy bits, but evidently not enough to qualify for this guy’s shop.

Here’s a great post on US presidential campaign logos.

Check ‘em out:

http://ralev.com/logoblink/usa-political-elections-logos2.jpg

1. Queueing to buy your envelope from the envelope counter (which doesn’t sell stamps).

2. Queueing again to buy your stamp from the stamp counter (which doesn’t sell envelopes).

3. Queueing a third time to drop of your parcel at the ‘parcel drop-off counter.’

4. Not being able to purchase stamps or prepay envelopes from anywhere else except (2) above.

5. The whole retro slow bureaucratic Communist chic of it!!

Pork scratchings.

A quick digest of Wikipedia porkscratchingfacts:

• In the US, Pork scratchings are called Pork rind, in Australia, it’s pork crackle
• George Dubya said that pork rinds were his favorite snack (bet they loved him for than in Iraq)
• Generally considered the most unhealthy food (no shit!)
• Pork scratchings originated as solid scraps, a by-product left over during the process of rendering pork fat down into (liquid) lard
• Sometimes the fine layer of hair is removed from the skin by burning; however this is not completely effective and some pieces still have the hair attached

Hungry yet?

And the winner is… London Underground, for “Improvement works may affect your journey”.

For which, read: “entire tube lines will close and trains will stop randomly, for no reason, completely fncking up any travel plans you have, overcrowding stations, introducing mo’ stress and chaos into your life, all the while achieving precisely zero improvements, ever.” Hope some dick got paid well to come up with that.