photo credit: Leucippus

Cory Q of Monkey River Town suckered WeatherGirl and I into forming a fantasy team for the Tour de France. We’ve never done something like this before, and had to do it in a hurry, so I’m guessing that we will not be stellar performers :-). Still, it was a lot of fun sifting through the participants putting our team together, and will make it even more interesting to watch the stages. Now we’ll actually care who comes in 11th in a sprint!

Our team…

• Magnus Backstedt
• Fabian Cancellara
• Sandy Casar
• Sylvain Chavanel
• Juan Antonio Flecha
• Oscar Freire
• José Ivan Gutierrez
• Kim Kirchen
• Oscar Pereiro
• Yaroslav Popovych
• Riccardo Ricco
• Carlos Sastre
• Christian Vandevelde
• Jens Voigt
• Haimar Zubeldia

We just finished two consecutive day trips to London (Friday and yesterday) and I’m thoroughly tired, and full of undigested photos. This fellow, one of the few I have processed, is from the Egyptian mummification exhibit at the British Museum (Rooms 62 and 63).

On Friday we started down in Greenwich. It was our first time through the Docklands on the DLR — it would be nice to walk those canals and take photos — and our first time to the Royal Observatory and the Prime Meridian. I wish we’d had more time there – it was a beautiful day and there was a ton of cool stuff one could see. Time was tight, though, so we zoomed off to the British Museum before rush hour hit, and spent the rest of the evening there.

While WeatherGirl wandered the museum, however, Sub-Evil and I snuck off and bought tickets for Avenue Q at the Noël Coward Theatre for the following night. He’s been keen to see that ever sense we got here, and it was nice to finally make that happen, but it did mean two consecutive days into London, which is frankly pretty tiring.

Yesterday Sub-Evil and I started at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology on the UCL campus. Sub-Evil is very into Egyptian history, writing, artifacts, etc., so he really wanted to see this. It’s a very cool collection, but pretty desperately in need of a new home, with the collection crammed into old victorian cabinets and spilling down an emergency exit staircase! Next was the British Library, which was just tremendous! The King’s Library alone was worth the (free) price of admission, and the display of the treasures (Magna Carta, illuminated manuscripts, handwritten scores, drafts, diaries, and letters by amazing folks) was really wonderful.

After all that we grabbed some dinner and then headed off to Avenue Q! We both had listened to the soundtrack about a zillion times, so there weren’t a lot of surprises. The production was tons of fun, however, and watching the puppet masters sing, dance, act, and run the puppets at the same time reminded me of the line about Ginger Rogers doing everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels :-).

Now we pack and organize, for tomorrow we’re off to Methwold Old Vicarage for our first stay in a Landmark Trust property!

Our friend Jenny Nellis had a really nasty fall recently, and Jess Larson suggested we send her a happy photo or two. I thought a few shots of WeatherGirl and Jess when we were at the Tate Modern might help :-).

The photo above is the two of them being silly and fun with their hard sweets. The one below is WeatherGirl (on the right) photographing her bare foot with Shibboleth by Doris Salcedo, while Jess is photographing WeatherGirl. We had way too much fun with Shibboleth, which is a wonderfully experiential piece of sculpture, and took a gazillion photos. As you can see, WeatherGirl even took her shoes off in the name of art :-).

Damn :-)

Today, however, I returned to this tab as part of my post-Naples electronic housekeeping. This was mostly dominated by really exciting activities, such as the disposal of hundreds of e-mails promoting conferences and workshops in areas I know almost nothing about; telling me of events back at UMM that I can happily ignore; advertising baby cribs, pick-ups, and houses for sale; and promising to make me an irresistible sexual dynamo that can finally, truly satisfy the woman in my life. (I forwarded the latter to WeatherGirl for review.)

After all that fun, I finally got to the Sedaris tab, and I laughed so hard I nearly wet myself. Then, because my to-do list hasn’t quite gone into triple digits, I wandered around YouTube listening to other “videos” of him reading is stories. (Few of these are actually videos in the sense of “moving pictures”; they’re mostly just audio recordings with a still plopped on top so YouTube will swallow it.) The better part of an hour was spent giggling my way through random stories, and now my stomache muscles are slightly sore, so I thought I’d type for a bit as a form of rest.

There appears to be quite a lot of Sedaris material on YouTube, and everything I listened to was enormously fun. I love his deadpan voice, and suspect the experience of listening to him is actually funnier than reading him on the printed page. I would love to have him on my iPod when going to work, but suspect it would be hard to avoid embarrassing myself by laughing out loud in response to things that the people around me can’t hear.

Some of the bits that I enjoyed in my little distract-o-fest included

• Jesus shaves
• The squirrel and the chipmunk
• Bend over and say “Ah”
• Sedaris on Letterman reading his essay on the Stadium Pal

All definitely recommended.

But don’t blame me if that important project falls behind…

There’s a YouTube group devoted to this thing, and the number and variety of little clips there also speaks well to the Phun’s flexibility. We even have one person building a binary adder, and another a working pinball machine. Very, very cool.

The sad, sniffle, miserable bit is that Phun doesn’t run on Macs at the moment. It supports for Linux and Windows, though, and there are people working on a Mac port, so my fingers are crossed. It just seems like it would be too damn much fun to play with.

Looking for something fun for a Friday afternoon? Hard to beat the joys of Launchball! This is an amazingly fun and clever little game, and I wasted all too many minutes going through the levels. And it’s from the Science Museum just down the way in London.

Don’t blame me for this distraction – it’s all Kjell’s fault.