Your Guide to the British Bathroom

Lots of things are different here, some better, some decidedly worse, some just different. Bathrooms are one place where it seems American ingenuity hasn't quite made the passage yet.

The Loo

Key Features:

• Lever seems to require about three pumps before it actually decides to flush
• Square shape impedes water from swirling
• Seat has sharpish inside lip that hurts to sit on and (one imagines) leaves quite a mark

The Sink

Key Features:

• Separate freezing and scalding water spigots to make washing hands in warm water impossible without filling the sink
• Extra wide basin to keep separate spigots as far from eachother as possible, lest you be tempted to try mixing the water in your hands
• Low flow helps you conserve water!
  

The Shower

Key Features:

• Red switch outside the bathroom controls whether or not the shower is capable of providing hot water - great for getting back at housemates!
• Shower apparatus requires you to push a start button, at which point cold water will immediately shoot forth onto you, becoming hotter in a few moments.
• Multiple ways to end up with a cold shower: adjust any dial for a most refreshing frigidity
• Or, adjust it to WAY TOO HOT!
• Yes, you're seeing that bottom pic right - there is a shower wall only halfway out along the tub on one side. Note that this makes it impossible to bend over to pick up your shampoo without water splashing off your back and all over the room.
  
• Half wall swings out of the way at the slightest touch, allowing for more chances to get your dry clothes wet
• As with the sink, there are separate spigots for freezing and scalding water, making it risky to put a kid in the bath while still filling it without some chance they will get burned.
  

Also, as I am planning to do lots of "Britain is Different: Good" and "Britain is Different: Bad" type posts; I need a name for these. Shall I steal "A little Brit different" from BBC America, or can you give me a better name?

Our sister, er, uxoral blog

Those of you anxious for news and views of our family should head over to the just-launched

http://shellsandthegang.blogspot.com

We're Here!

We made it to Britain. We are safe, sound, and starting to get used to the time change. Right now we're staying in a 2-bedroom flat while we look for a home. More to follow.

Camping out at home

The movers took everything that's going to England today, which means we're sleeping on air mattresses and borrowing towels to dry ourselves with. The end is near, even at the very doors.


In other news, David Mamet has an interesting change of heart.

Decision Tree: NYT Diagram

Here's more from the NYT, this time regarding Gygax and his influence. Snarky, but appropriate in its way:


Here's my path(s):

Are chemicals that enhance brain power 'wrong'?

Interesting piece from the New York Times about the implications of using prescription drugs that allow for better attention or studying. What are your thoughts?

I know.

I'm sorry. It won't be the last time I neglect this blog; it hasn't been the first. Those of you still here, thanks. Its now less than a month until we get on a plane and go to England. We're excited and stressed.

Our house got listed for renters today. Pics in the "Virtual Tour". I find it amazing that houses still get sold or rented when basically all real estate sites have such appallingly poor web design, but so it goes.

I went to England for a couple of weeks, during which I worked about 150 hours, but I still found a little time to go look at houses and eat at some pretty decent pubs and curry houses. I think we're going to like it there. I originally had my heart set on some kind of stone barn conversion out in the country, but after driving through thick fog on twisty narrow roads, and after seeing what town has to offer, the idea of living in town is growing on me. It's a small town, anyway. But it has nice parks and Victorian townhomes, and its pretty. There's still a chance we'll end up in some little village surrounded by sheep, but town is probably where we'll end up. We won't actually find the place until after we're there, but it was nice to have a look around and see what's where.

Now begins the difficult task of sorting through all our stuff; deciding what goes to storage, what goes with us, and what simply goes away. I am fortunate to be married to someone who is a natural organizer, which makes many things about this easier for me - I am not very good at this sort of thing on my own.

On to media reviews:

The England Mix is done - thanks for contributions, you probably will get your copy shortly if you're on my list. If you think you should be on my list but didn't contribute, leave me a little note below telling me what you've done for me lately and get me your address (email to dave dot younce at gmail dot com, don't go posting it in comments) and I'll see what I can do.

Spice, History of a Temptation , by Jack Turner. 3.5 stars out of 5. It's fascinating for people like me, who want to know just how pepper came to be used as a common rent payment, or why the phoenix was said to smell of cinnamon, but its tone is rather academic (I suspect it's Jack Turner's dissertation turned into a book). There are some rather tawdry portions where spices as aphrodisiacs are concerned, but mostly it's about how spices came to have such value that the quest for them fueled the age of discovery. I liked it, but then, I was stuck on planes for hours and hours.

Michael Clayton: I watched this on the plane on my way over to the UK, and liked it quite a lot. Clooney is excellent, as is Swindon. 4.5 stars.

Big Love - Season 2: Oh fine, I admit it - I watched this show despite the many ill-informed email chain letters I got from LDS friends warning me about it's evil depictions of the Church. Actually, the LDS church is rarely mentioned, and when it is, it's usually treated with respect. Mostly I came away from Season 1 saying "Man, I'm glad that's not us". But Season 2 is just too hard to make myself want to watch - the show is really, really good at drama. But watching this family held together by threads is just too much for me anymore. So I'm moving on, but amiably. It was interesting, but I've no time for it anymore. 3 stars.

30 Rock, on the other hand, just gets better and better. We're only about halfway into the first disc of the first season, but it's a keeper. 4 stars.

To Have and Have Not: There's definitely chemistry between Bogart and Bacall, and it's pretty good - if I'd never seen Casablanca I'd have thought this was excellent. I have, though, and Casablanca's the better film. Their stories are similar enough that I think you'll see the connection too. 3.5 stars.

Something the Lord Made: Alan Rickman and Mos Def as pioneering heart surgeons in the mid-20th century. Both are excellent, but the combination of racial tensions and medical suspense makes it harrowing to watch. Excellent, and recommended, but I am unlikely to watch it again. Oh yeah, and its a true story. 4 stars.

As if You Care about ... Cocaine

A few entries back, I mentioned a series of guest posts on the Freakonomics blog about how real life thugs view "The Wire", and I said I'd probably read Sudhir Venkatesh's book. Well, I did. It is probably the first book I've read in less than a week in a very long time - usually I'm splitting reading time between a lot of books, or not really reading at all for a few months at a time. This account held me captivated - it deals not only with the conditions of a poor black housing project, but with the economics of running a crack cocaine gang, and the other sub-rosa economics of car repair, prostitution, stealing cable, bribing housing officials, clergy, police, and everyone else. Also, I was sick a bit this week, and had more time to read than usual.

It took something I knew a little tiny bit about, and gave me a lot of fascinating details I would never have thought of. It focuses not just on how the gangs work in and of themselves, but also how they essentially function as a partial government in a place where there is none, along with empowered old ladies who control the buildings themselves and make sure when a woman is beaten that the culprit is rounded up and likewise beaten, or who take a cut of all the hairdressers' and candy-sellers' incomes as a sort of tax, the same way the gangs tax male hustlers in the buildings.

Now, that doesn't change the fact that there's a negative side to all of this: we're still talking about people in the most abject poverty, many of whom are selling drugs that destroy other people's lives. It's not exactly uplifting stuff. Recommended for those of you who are entreprenurial in nature, with the hope that you direct your energies into another field.

Then, today, I read about a town in Nicaragua where almost nobody works, but where bales of cocaine discarded by smugglers fleeing interdiction wash up on the shore. It makes for a fascinating story, and it's here. So its been kind of a theme this week.

As if You Care: Catch-Up Edition!

Being out of town for 5 days means coming home to about 400 items sitting in Google Reader. Here are the highlights:

1) O'Reilly Radar: Books that Make You Dumb (or smart?) What's interesting here? You mean besides three of my favorite things (data mining, books, and information visualization)? How about the Book of Mormon ranking 30th on the list of smarter books? Just sayin'. Although the obvious counterpoint is to say that if we wanted to be REALLY smart we'd be reading Lolita instead.

2) While we're on the subject of information visualization (and religion), let's hit Strange Maps: Regionalism and Religiosity (not a Jane Austen novel, actually). So here's a map of what the largest congregations are in all the counties of the U.S. It's just the kind of thing Rob and I might spend an hour discussing at work, if only I still worked with Rob. So, instead, we all get to discuss it here.

3) Who's job is it to make me a Homebrew Snow Machine? Somebody get on that. Better yet, build it at my sister's house in Massachusetts, where there's a good hill and colder temperatures (and 3 boys to help with the building).

4) I don't have HBO, and don't watch The Wire, but I know its about criminals in Baltimore. That doesn't stop me from being inexplicably interested in the guest post series "What Do Real Thugs Think of The Wire?" on the Freakonomics blog: Part One Part Two Part Three. WOW. For the faint of heart, I should say there is censored strong language, but if you went to junior high you'll know what the curse words are. I'm probably going to have to get this guy's book. I don't know if I'll ever watch The Wire, but it's just interesting to see this particular demographic react to their own portrayal on TV.

The 10-minute album cover meme

I first saw it here, but decided to do it after seeing it here. The rules:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

The first article title on the page is the name of your band.

2. http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3

The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.

3. http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/

The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

Let's see 'em.

As if you care about... Daveipedia

I have this idea; it's not that great but it's persistent and I'm probably just going to have to do it to make it go away.

Daveipedia!

...is my own collected knowledge, on a wiki, because for whatever reason I can't seem to get enough of them. So, if you're reading this, I probably know you and you probably deserve an entry on Daveipedia.

But! Lots of stuff is already on Wikipedia, and I shouldn't have to duplicate that stuff by hand. I could just make a local copy of everything on wikipedia - excluding the history pages, it wouldn't even break 10GB, and then I could just modify and add to it. That's easy, and totally unappealing. That's just another wikipedia clone with a few additions and modifications. Daveipedia needs to represent what I've come in contact with, not all the things everyone has come in contact with. It's only going to exist locally, on my home machine, for now, to keep from prying eyes and because I wouldn't be able to get to it from work anyway. But it's a place for me to play, and store things I might otherwise forget.

So here's how I want it to work:

- It's a normal mediawiki install, plus my favorite extensions like semantic mediawiki and so forth. Starts out empty; no preloading info from Wikipedia - that's cheating.

- Normally, on mediawiki installations (including Wikipedia), if you make a link to something that doesn't have a page on the wiki, it shows up as a red link; clicking on a red link leads you to a new edit window for that page, so you can make and save it. I want a script or a little mediawiki bot that will find red links on Daveipedia and look to see if a Wikipedia page exists by that name. If it does, great! Go get the page, and load it into Daveipedia. I referred to it; therefore I have come in contact with it. Therefore, it gets a page.

-Obviously, I should only let my red link bot do this to pages I've viewed; otherwise it'll cascade when it gets a page from Wikipedia with new links - it'd go get those, and then their links, and so on forever until I'd have a Wikipedia clone again. No, it should wait until I've visited the local copy of whatever page, then pre-fetch only those pages directly linked to on that page. It will grow organically as I use it, to encompass what I'm putting on there, plus what I'm viewing on there, plus one more link layer out, silently waiting for me to read those pages, and when I do, automatically growing one more layer out from them. I think I know enough to do this, and make it work the way I want.

You knew I was crazy, but you had no idea it went this far, did you? DID YOU?!?

Also, here's 2 quick reviews of movies I've seen in the last 24 hours:
1) I saw Waitress, and I thought it blew (sorry, JPB!) Stupid people making stupid choices and being stupid to each other for an hour and a half, then 15 minutes of it all suddenly getting fixed in the most unbelievable way possible. Unless you're a huge Keri Russell fan, don't waste your time. It did make me hungry for pie, though. 1 star out of 5.

2) I saw No Country for Old Men. This movie is NOT for the squeamish - lots of people get killed, some of them very graphically. But it was excellent - top notch Coen Brothers of old, like Blood Simple or Miller's Crossing. Super-creepy villain. 4 stars out of 5, but not recommended for most of you.

If all goes well tomorrow, I will watch A Midnight Clear, which I saw as a teenager, and remember as being really good. We'll see. High hopes, though.

Those of you itching for a decision tree...

...should check out the work that's been done at Stray Shopping Carts - apparently there's a book, too. When I was a young, cynical LDS missionary on the hardscrabble streets of LA, I would often see black plastic bags floating along the ground or in the air, or fluttering helplessly in a tree, and I would daydream of having a Nature-channel special that would follow them around, while a British narrator in hushed tones talked about what they were doing. This is in the same spirit.

Also, those of you not subscribed to the Shared Items are missing a good chunk of this blog's content, as highlighting a few items is often all I have time for. Comments on them are always welcome in whatever the current post is here, even if it will seem non sequitor to everyone else. And, lastly, Merry Christmas everyone.

Oh, the shame

"Did you sing along to 'The Moody Blues Air Supply - Making Love Out of Nothing at All' yesterday on the way to work?"

Oh, I wish you hadn't asked me that. I was totally belting it out.

The most interesting thing I've read in weeks

Fascinating Account of gangs in LA. Wait till you get to the funeral on page 6. My jaw just kept dropping further and further. Well-written and thorough.

17 5 year olds. I feel decent about that.

post removed. I had accidentally redirected my readers to a site that was forwarding them on to adds instead of the intended content. Sorry, everyone.