Motors Roaring Through the Afternoon Like a Cat Fuck Yowling

UK Trip, United blogging, constant bleggalgazing, reckless apocalypticism, even I can't take credit for the halving of Blegsylvanian yupyupping these Blog Days of Summer, the deadest ten weeks of Stringtown, the deadest I can remember.

Fuck it, blogtalk! I write to final draft at GAH! and then c/p it to BLCKDGRD. I publish as I go at GAH! so if I accidentally delete everything (which I've done three too many times) I have the published blog to help me recreate the post; also, if I accidentally hit Publish Post instead of Save As Draft (done four too many times) before I want to publish at BLCKDGRD I've no way to pull back the feeds. I am a roobyhoor.

A good friend of the blog wrote to welcome me home from Britain, and in the email chain she mentioned the Noxzema Bottle Blue (NBB) background with white type hurts her eyes. Perhaps she will comment please if her existence is called into question. NBB isn't going anywhere; it's my favorite color, but blogfriend isn't the first to dislike dark backgrounds and since GAH! is default black type on off-white and it's the very same post, GAH! if you like better.

• Your president.
• Yes, I know Obama turned populist during yesterday's presser, but since it's certain to be a point of conversation tonight, more tomorrow. 
• Now Somalia.
• Ideology and rivalry, part three.
• Yes, giving away GAH! requires a pre-GAH! GAH! 
• Capitalism. 
• Capitalism.
• No longer Rome, not yet Greece. 
• Dateline Hell.
• Yes I am such a motherfuckingly happy roobyhoor.
• Austerity, bitchez.
• j30strike.org
• (h/t)
• Ode to work. Mine is in February. 
• Singing penis.
• Yes, please let me know what you think, though I hasten to say I make no promises on the sustaining of Gah and, as I type this, NBB is not going away.
• A rhetorical question. 
• East Bethesda?
• Rockville is silly.
• Clarksburg!
• Some new places in Because Left and Because Right.
• A Mask of Motion.
• Gass. Reread Omensetter's Luck earlier this year, plan to reread The Tunnel late this year, early next year.
• Tom Sleigh.
• Revolution wavers.
• Dead ripe.
• Mining the audio motherlode. 
• Ten to one.
• Heart in your heartache.
• I didn't see it coming.

ARMY CATS

Tom Sleigh

1.

Over by the cemetery next to the CP
you could see them in wild catmint going crazy:
I watched them roll and wriggle, paw it, lick it,
chew it, leap about, pink tongues stuck out, drooling.

Cats in the tanks’ squat shadows lounging.
Or sleeping curled up under gun turrets.
Hundreds of them sniffing or licking
long hind legs stuck in the air,

great six-toed brutes fixing you with a feral,
slit-eyed stare . . . everywhere ears twitching,
twitching as the armor plate expanding
in the heat gave off piercing little pings.

Cat invasion of the mind. Cat tribes
running wild. And one big pregnant
female comes racing through weeds to pounce
between the paws of a marble dog

crouching on a grave and sharpens
her claws against his beard of moss
before she goes all silky, luxuriously
squirming right under the dog’s jaws,

and rolls over to expose her swollen belly.
Picture her with gold hoop earrings
and punked-out nose ring like the cat goddess Bast,
bronze kittens at her feet, the crowd drinking wildly,

women lifting up their skirts as she floats down
the Nile, a sistrum jangling in her paw.
Then come back out of it and sniff
her ointments, Lady of Flame, Eye of Ra.

2.


Through the yard the tanks come gunning,
charioteers laughing, goggles smeared with dust
and sun, scattering the toms slinking
along the blast wall holding back the waves

from washing away white crosses on the graves,
the motors roaring through the afternoon
like a cat fuck yowling on and on.
The gun turrets revolving in the cats’ eyes

swivel and shine, steel treads clanking,
sending the cats flying in an exodus
through brown brittle grass, the stalks
barely rippling as they pass.

3.


After the last car bomb killed three soldiers
the Army Web site labelled them “martyrs.”
Four civilians killed at checkpoints. Three on the airport road.
A young woman blown up by a grenade.

Facts and more facts . . . until the dead ones
climb up out of the graves, gashes on faces
or faces blown away like sandblasted stone
that in the boarded-up museums’

fractured English “leaves the onlooker
riddled and shaken, nothing but a pathetic gaping . . .”
And then I remember the ancient archers
frozen between reverence and necessity—

who stare down the enemy, barbarians,
as it’s told, who nailed sacred cats to their shields,
knowing their foes outraged in their piety
would throw down their bows and wail like kittens.

The Last Mistaken, Ecstatic, Accidental Bliss, the Blind Happiness That, Bursting, Leaves Upon the Palm Some Soap and Water—

A week ago today I was in Edinburgh; it feels like a year ago. During the trip I paid enough attention to The Clusterfuck to know nothing extra-clusterfucked that day but made a successful effort to not pay much attention to any particular day's particular ratfucking by clusterfuckers of us littles or that day's clusterfuckers ratfucking each other, which is their favorite, in fact only, game, the ratfuckers.

Ladies and gentlemen, your president, Mr .06% Less-Shitty. Sure, the particulars of this ratfuck may or not be true, but do you still harbor doubt that it would be true if the motherfucking clusterfucker thought it in his ratfucking interest?

Well, that's how I reengage The Clusterfuck. I'm looking for a word, not pre-nostalgia or preemptive melancholia or post-historic, to describe the sensation of knowing The Clusterfuck's path and cataclysmic cost, if not the precise timetables - I always mistakenly think in kabooms, not the slow and bleak bleeding out, but I'm a romantic - of the inevitable miserable end game. Suggestions solicited!

Wait! A week ago today I was in Edinburgh, the best day of the trip, I sought out and walked to a Hearts' store and bought a hat and a scarf and didn't think of The Clusterfuck once in that hour except of course I did whether I was aware of it or not.

• Ideology and rivalry. 
• Leftists and totalitarianism.
• Beyond alienation.
• History of Corporate. (h/t) 
• The awfulness of TV news.
• Lessons from the revolution.
• Why teachers should strike.
• Diploma empire strikes back.
• Fuckface.
• Wargotz signage ahead.
• Stop reading fiction?
• Giving birth to imagined saviors.
• Especially me.
• This week's new releases.
• Just a city.
• This week's new releases.
• Make your move. 
• We are the sleepyheads.
• Woke up with this in my head. Be in yours:

NEXT DAY

Randall Jarrell

Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All,

I take a box

And add it to my wild rice, my Cornish game hens.

The slacked or shorted, basketed, identical

Food-gathering flocks

Are selves I overlook. Wisdom, said William James,

Is learning what to overlook. And I am wise

If that is wisdom.

Yet somehow, as I buy All from these shelves

And the boy takes it to my station wagon,

What I’ve become

Troubles me even if I shut my eyes.

When I was young and miserable and pretty

And poor, I’d wish

What all girls wish: to have a husband,

A house and children. Now that I’m old, my wish

Is womanish:

That the boy putting groceries in my car

See me. It bewilders me he doesn’t see me.

For so many years

I was good enough to eat: the world looked at me

And its mouth watered. How often they have undressed me,

The eyes of strangers!

And, holding their flesh within my flesh, their vile

Imaginings within my imagining,

I too have taken

The chance of life. Now the boy pats my dog

And we start home. Now I am good.

The last mistaken,

Ecstatic, accidental bliss, the blind

Happiness that, bursting, leaves upon the palm

Some soap and water—

It was so long ago, back in some Gay

Twenties, Nineties, I don’t know . . . Today I miss

My lovely daughter

Away at school, my sons away at school,

My husband away at work—I wish for them.

The dog, the maid,

And I go through the sure unvarying days

At home in them. As I look at my life,

I am afraid

Only that it will change, as I am changing:

I am afraid, this morning, of my face.

It looks at me

From the rear-view mirror, with the eyes I hate,

The smile I hate. Its plain, lined look

Of gray discovery

Repeats to me: “You’re old.” That’s all, I’m old.

And yet I’m afraid, as I was at the funeral

I went to yesterday.

My friend’s cold made-up face, granite among its flowers,

Her undressed, operated-on, dressed body

Were my face and body.

As I think of her and I hear her telling me

How young I seem; I am exceptional;

I think of all I have.

But really no one is exceptional,

No one has anything, I’m anybody,

I stand beside my grave

Confused with my life, that is commonplace and solitary.

Those Who Knew What Was Going On Here Must Make Way for Those Who Know Little

Did you know Washington DC has a professional soccer team?

It's true! and bless Lord Etcheverry, they bought me another day of bleggal vacation before I need reengage The Clusterfuck:

D.C. United has acquired Dwayne De Rosario from the New York Red Bulls for midfielder Dax McCarty, a blockbuster trade that drastically alters United’s attack heading into the second half of the MLS season.

Thoughts, in no particular order:

• This.
• I will not call him DeRo, in any combination of letters and caps.
• Remember that Boskovic was rounding into form when fucking Stevie Pus Nicol ordered Boskovic crippled. McCarty may or not have been traded if Boskovic was running the offense, but if Boskovic was running the offense, McCarty wouldn't have been traded for De Rossario.
• McCarty is 23 and makes $300K less than a washed-up but for - maybe - one more run De Rossario, and with Wolff and Rent-A-D(iver)avies and a league full of proof of the shitty mediocrity of parity, De Rossario might propel United where McCarty couldn't, but this is a one-off season now.
• I understand why McCarty was acquired and I confess that on this shitty blog I not only approved of the trade of Wallace for McCarty, I said I though McCarty would succeed for the lame reason that McCarty's game is modeled on Saint Benny's game. This is why my lowest scores on SATs and GREs were in the logic section: I don't care who eats peanuts on Wednesday.
• United also traded away allocation money for San Jose centerback/holding mid Brandon McDonald, a decent move in the short-term - move Kitchen forward into holding? - but United, with the money they take on for De Rossario and give away for McDonald, it's probable (and not necessarily a bad thing) that United's buying power in the summer transfer window has been reduced.

If De Rossario - who is not a ten but is more of a ten than McCarty - can play balls onto feet FORWARD OF THE MOTHERFUCKING PERPENDICULAR then MOTHERFUCKING YAY!

United wasn't good enough with Dax McCarty as a key cog. They probably aren't good enough with Dwayne De Rossario as a key cog. I'll take the probably aren't over the definitely ain't.

• I got respectful nods and three nice comments in England and Scotland and Wales from football fans about my excellent United raincoat, bought for $75 three seasons or so ago in desperation in a monsoon during a Houston game, best $75 I ever spent. I went into a Liverpool store in Chester while others were shopping, the store clerks noticed, pretended they'd never heard of DC United. "What's DC United?" Fucking scousers.
• Disemployment.
• The psychosis of exceptionalism.
• Witness witless Fred Hiatt, for example.
• America's uniqueness.
• Economic fetishism.
• Kill your heroes.
• Why you should be afraid of economists.
• Jeebus, blog days of summer in our stringtown of Blegsylvania.
• Her marriage is less valuable.
• Blech and blah.
• Nothing about women or lawns.
• It's still OK to hate crackers and christers. 
• Crime in Gaithersburg! 
• Fire Bob Bradley.
• O! That's my favorite photo from the trip, Edinburgh, at Camera Obscura, in one of their outside mirrors, we didn't have time to go inside, dammit.
• Gaddis. One thing I love about vacations is I read well. Next vacation.
• Coover. Been a while. Found myself thinking about the Brunists a month ago or so.
• Suggest a novel for me please. I have a Handke coming from a warehouse in Upper Marlboro, I tried Perdido Street Station and that's not going to work. Anyone like Gormenghast?
• Stream the new Gillian Welch?
• Woke up with this in my head. Be in yours.
• Here's the betting slip on Fulham:

THE END AND THE BEGINNING

Wislawa Szymborska

After every war

someone has to clean up.

Things won’t

straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble

to the side of the road,

so the corpse-filled wagons

can pass.

Someone has to get mired

in scum and ashes,

sofa springs,

splintered glass,

and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag in a girder

to prop up a wall.

Someone has to glaze a window,

rehang a door.

Photogenic it’s not,

and takes years.

All the cameras have left

for another war.

We’ll need the bridges back,

and new railway stations.

Sleeves will go ragged

from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,

still recalls the way it was.

Someone else listens

and nods with unsevered head.

But already there are those nearby

starting to mill about

who will find it dull.

From out of the bushes

sometimes someone still unearths

rusted-out arguments

and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew

what was going on here

must make way for

those who know little.

And less than little.

And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass that has overgrown

causes and effects,

someone must be stretched out

blade of grass in his mouth

gazing at the clouds.

Look What I Just Found Someone Else Just Found!

(h/t)


As long as I'm here:






Just dug out my Roxy Music stash. With or without Eno, it's love, one of a dozen so bands rotating as the second of my two desert island bands with the permanent one.

Done

Day Eight

I never enjoy a vacation fully until it's long over. I always enjoy everything more in the remembering than doing. I am a melancholic. It's 8:30 Saturday evening in London as I type this; by 8:30 tonight DC time, if the planes are not delayed, I will be at home or in the taxi home or still stuck at Dulles going through customs. I'll begin the internal decolorizing and archiving of my vacation within a month.

I straddled, as a child, the toggle from all black and white TV to color TV. The pangs I feel, that rush me when a see a show in black and white, overwhelm me at times. Gavin the Borscht Terrier (who for all my teasing was a decent guy who did us a major favor when we needed one) was telling the story of the World War Two bombing of Coventry, how Churchill knew the bombers were coming but couldn't scramble air defenses for fear the Germans would learn the Brits had broken the German code. England feels black and white but insists on being in color. The war and postwar and empire's collapse in black and white feel more real, fuller, than the color I saw this trip. I feel like I felt when I first saw color television (The Flintstones) at an uncle's house when I was six and wanted the black and white back.

Bath, which we'd seen before but is, if I was to live in England, if I could get a job at university, a place I'd deeply consider, then a drive-by of Stonehenge, still packed with grown adults dressed as Druids for the solstice, then Somerset, which looked like Cambridge, York, Chester only dirtier, grubbier, meaner, now in London, just a couple of blocks from where we stayed two and a half years ago. I could not live in London; even if I could afford it it's too crowded and busy, even if I didn't mind the crowds and constant swirl I couldn't afford it.

When I think of London I think of Laurence Olivier narrating over black and white footage of the The Blitz. John Steed and Emma Peel changed fundamentally when their second season was in color, an entire world of mystery and imagination cheated me. I am a melancholic. I know it was in color that Frank Shultz drove us to the Monessen A&P in his light blue Ford Fairlane when I was six, but I remember the light blue Ford Fairlane, the yellow and red daisies lining the red brick driveway wall, the red and white A&P sign, in glorious black and white.

Day Seven

I was only going to post photos of Day Seven, a very good day until the very end, but holyfuck, Neko Case and Nick Cave cover "She's Not There." (Ten minutes after I post I open gmail and see SeatSix sending me this song. Thanks!)

Stopped briefly at Ironbridge, the first cast iron bridge ever built, seen in top photo. Drive through new housing and commercial developments down into a gorge with three hundred year old homes, odd. One was for sale, but no figure on the sign. Earthgirl and I talk about what it'd be like to live in England knowing we'll never live in England; we talk all the time about not living in MOCO knowing we're living in the house we're going to die in.

Stratford on Avon for lunch, charming and yadda, felt like Dollywood, but whatever, then a drive through the edge of the Cotswolds, Stopped in Broadway where Earthgirl and I sat outside a cafe and drank tea. That? was excellent.

Onto Cardiff. I need to say something about bathrooms and rooms in general in the newer hotels of the UK. This is not a complaint. They are energy efficient. You must put your room card into a dock on the wall in order to activate the electricity, the principle being if you take your card with you when you go out you turn off the lights. The showers and faucets all have buttons to turn on the hot water so that hot water is not used unless specifically requested. The toilets have two buttons, one of one, two for two, with different water flows depending. Cool.

And yes, there are video cameras everywhere. Everywhere. There were six monitoring the entrance to the hotel in Cardiff. London, where we'll be again tonight, you can't go anywhere without observation.

That's the ceiling of a room in Cardiff Castle. The tour didn't offer any other option for Cardiff other than a night trip to the Castle for 55 pounds. Sit in the hotel all evening or that. We though we'd get a long tour of the Castle across all the grounds. We got ten minutes of rushed tour of four admittedly gorgeous rooms - the ceiling of one is above. Click, yo. We were yelled at to not take photos; the guide then amended that to photos but no flashes. Hurry!

The spotlight of the visit, however, was dinner. Fifth rate Welsh dinner theater actors dressed in 19th century Welsh garb and started singing crappy Welsh folk songs. I hate that shit. The head then began audience participation. I'm gone. Gone gone gone. Out. Ten minutes later, Earthgirl too. She went out into the rain to draw and sketch, I sat in the lobby, drank a beer, wrote a first draft.

Last day, Bath, Stonehenge, Salisbury, London. Home tomorrow. Sincere yay!

Day Six

Disappointing, anticlimactic day. Tired of being herded on and off the bus. Last organized tour, at least on a bus, at least in England, we do. We don't want to shop. We don't want to stay when we're ready to go or be told to go when we want to stay. We don't want just cathedrals and castles and city walls. We want to be back in Edinburgh with three more days to explore on our own. We've learned.

Stopped for shopping at Gretna Green on the Scotland/England border which exists solely to give you one last chance to buy more kitschy Scotland shit. Onto the Lake District. Pretty enough drive, nothing omfg. Lunched in Grasmere, where Wordsworth lived and was buried, and where rows of shops exist to sell Grasmere and Beatrix Potter shit and scones for three pounds and pots of tea for two.

Grasmere sheep, yo. Gavin the Borscht Terrier is quite explicit that he believes shopping is what the passengers, especially the women, want, he's quite bwahaha women and shopping bwahaha, and yet, to the credit of the others, few come back with anything more than once and only one person I've seen - a man - comes back with something every time.

That's the Jubilee Clock on the city wall of Chester, southwest of Liverpool near the Wales border. Gavin has been selling Chester as the "crown jewel" of the trip since day one, extolling the cathedral and, especially, the shopping. Since Chester was a walled city, and a small one, shops were built on top of on another with overhangs providing roofs from below and walkways from above. Chester was the first mall in the history of man! You women are going to love it, watch your wallets, men.

Chester's charming and yadda. The above is the roof of a guard's tower on the city wall. Today Stratford on Avon where there are some lovely shops, some town in the Cotswolds where there are some lovely shops, then Cardiff Wales where there are some lovely shops. Saturday Bath where there are some lovely shops and Stonehenge where unfortunately there aren't lovely shops but then Salisbury where there are some lovely shops then back to London and well.

Had time to read last night in a Ramada three miles from anything outside Wrexham, Wales (a high school prom thumping in the pavilion directly beneath our room) and this morning while the others are eating breakfast so have the typing requirement and Sarah Bachmann and Michelle Bachmann and  ITMFA and the only good poor person and buy me this for my birthday and I'm number eleven again and shock doctrine of a sort and believe what you will and every word he offers is a lie and death to the either/or and death to the either/or and we're talking about practice and Clarence Fucking Thomas and brand management and who wants to put you in prison and a third footnote and saving objects from themselves and ALARM ALARM ALARM and incoming e-mail and swinging for the fences and duh and the answer is never and Fire Bob Bradley! and Burtonsville and my future hell and undergirding expectations and seven fragmentary novels and Mirah? and

Day Five

Spent all day in Edinburgh which is more than charming and yadda and where Arthur Fonzarelli urges Edinburghians (and presumably me, though that might be presumptuous on my part) to anarchism from every other public garbage can. While others were shopping I stood on a downtown corner near the train station during rush hour and watched Edinburghians head home, and for the first time on this trip I felt a pull of the familiar. There were tourists about but we did not seem to be the fucking locusts we were in London and Cambridge and York and Melrose, or if we were we were made more invisible by the Edinburghians focused indifference to all else than their private lives. They see the Fonz on the garbage cans but they don't observe the Fonz on the garbage cans. They are no more likely to anarchism than I am for, while I am on vacation at least, both same and different reasons.

Gavin the Borscht Terrier brought aboard the bus Fergus the Kilt, a native Edinburghian of 70 with exaggerated brogue to conduct the tour up and down the streets. Gavin has been rotating the passengers each day in the name of fairness of sight lines, and it happened to be our day to be in the front row. Every time Fergus the Kilt told the same joke he's told at the same spot in Edinburgh every day for who knows how many years he Hehhed and looked at me for my reaction. Gah.

Though the city itself is unlike any I've seen before. The buildings are all of volcanic rock, naturally gray but permanently stained by centuries of residents burning coal for warmth; the smoke, trapped by Edinburgh's constant dampness, caked and embedded in the building's stone, and the entire city is a wash of beige and grey and muted black. The buildings are tall - four, five stories - and the streets are narrow, with chases, long, thin and sometimes harrowing alleys. Very cool. The castle looms over center city while the volcano that provided the city's building foundation looms over the east end. Very much more than charming and yadda.

That's the Scottish Art Museum. It had a small show of Dürer etchings which made Earthgirl's trip and a small room of French Impressionists including one Van Gogh and one of Monet's haystacks. Charming and yadda. Walked all about both Old Town and New Town, visited the castle, had lunch, dinner - Planet and her friends ordered their first legal beers in a pub at dinner; sorry, can't show you the great photos of the faces they made when trying it. And while I can't speak to Scots as a whole, the Scots taking my obviously tourist money were much nicer than the English. I must say, I do now understand the sentiment Fuck the English, but perhaps it's because Edinburgh didn't feel as infested with fucking tourists, though if the Scots hold me in the same contempt as the English but hide it better, does that speak more of less highly of them?

No links today. Late return last night, early leave this morning, no time to read much less compile and order. Besides, I've learned that even if I believe that my heart is 90% pure in posting links even if I admit at least 10% is unadulterated blogwhoring, my Unapologetic Summer Tour of Complicit Middle Class Self-Indulgence is a blogkiller among many of you truer anarchists who hear The Fonz's clarion call and who've always held me suspect and considered me borderline worthy. No obamapostasies today, no fuck the Democrats, no motherfucking armageddonist jeremiads. It seems my anger taking a shamelessly bourgeois vacation bores if not angers some. Discommodate me if you must! Oh the fuck well.

Nonetheless, I had one primary goal (beyond avoiding disaster - someone losing a passport, someone stricken with appendicitus, a daughter, mine or someone else's, running off with a multiply face-pierced Scotsman) and one primary goal alone on this trip, and I'm delighted to say, mission accomplished:

Day Four

Travel day mostly, getting from the Ramada at Leeds to the Novotel outside Edinburgh. Three stops only, the first two very brief: the border of England and Scotland where, yes, some fat fuck with a bagpipe stood next to a boulder with England painted on one side and Scotland on the other, a parking lot in Jedburgh to stand in the pouring rain and look at the ruins of Jedburgh Abbey from three hundred yards, then three hours in Melrose for lunch and the Melrose Abbey.

Best part of the trip so far. All photos in this post are of the Abbey, including the one below from the roof which can only be accessed by a long, tight winding staircase. Double-click the photos, yo. While I'm glad for the rain and mist for atmosphere's sake, it was raining too hard to risk the camera photographing all the heads of humans and animals and beasts carved high on the columns. We heard there's a pig playing a bagpipe but we couldn't find it. I would have shot that.

Gavin the Barker told us tales of intrigue and treachery and bravery, tales of human perserverance in the face of overwhelming odds and tales of human pettiness in the pursuit of power. Whole bunch of stuff about the greatest Scotchman ever, Timmy the Ralph, or something like that. Aren't we glad, he asked us, we live in an age where war is not considered the rational solution to all problems? Gavin is either the greatest actor of his generation or hasn't an irony bone in his body.

I find I'm incapable of ignoring the world while on vacation. Maybe it's because I'm traveling through America in ten years, twenty years, an empire selling tickets to its relics. Without thinking about it, I compiled a list of links YOU MUST READ! and then deleted them (but not before c/ping to an email). Scroll through the past two days of updated blogrolls Because Left and Because Right and find them. You don't need me to do it for you, though I suspect I will be blogwhoring sooner than I think.

Fuck it, its either bleggalgaze after literally just finishing rereading Ishiguro's Remains of the Day (you must read Ishiguro; do it) while on vacation in the UK - and I've three notebook pages of bleggalgazing I'm not typing, at least now - or this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this. You're welcome.

Day Three

When we made our first trip to London two years ago we rode a tour bus for a single day out to Bath and Stonehenge. This is the first time I've ever got on a tour bus with people I'm now stuck with for the next six days. As I type this we've just got back to our room after a truly interminable (because the wait staff sucked) and shitty (because the food sucked) dinner at a rundown Ramada outside of Leeds. We didn't have another option. In the room to the right of us a Japanese family is yelling at each other and opening and slamming cabinet drawers and the bathroom door, in the room to our left an elderly Russian couple is yelling at each other because they both cannot hear and don't want to hear what the other is saying. They sat in front of me and Earthgirl on the bus today, farting, yelling at each other because they both cannot hear and don't want to hear what the other is saying.

The two above photos are from Cambridge, which is charming and yadda. I've never felt so old. I understand the practicality of guided tours, but lordy, the contempt of the locals as pasty old New Zealanders and Russians and Americans and shrunken old Japanese waddle off tour buses with their cameras is deserved. Our tour guide, a Scotsman named Gavin, herds us to the city's chief attraction like a perky borscht terrier then releases us into the tourist traps, barking departure times with pretend threats of abandonment of stragglers.

York was charming and yadda. There are cat statuary about the city, a tribute to the felines' help in vanquishing the rats that brought plague. The old city center is a maze of narrow alleys in which exactly the wool/jewelry/soap/scented candles/touristy trinket establishments you'd expect exist. The York Minster is a spectacular building from the outside and the entrance in. We were told for fifteen pounds a piece each we could see how truly spectacular it is. I paid 40 pence to pee in a city toilet and watched the seat rotate 360 degrees upon flushing to rinse itself off. That? I'd never seen before.

I am having a good time, and since Planet and her friends want nothing to do with us it's been fun walking around with Earthgirl, but it feels so lame, so handicapped and senior-citizened. (We are not the youngest, though we bring down the groups median age). The greasy limp haddock and greasy baby potatoes and a dessert of cat yak called Apple Crisp didn't help. Oh good, the Japanese family next door just invited in all the other friends and relatives on the tour and they're all yelling at the top of their lungs to be the loudest.

We've been given our orders for tomorrow. Wake-up call at 615, bags out for the valet by 645, breakfast at 700, on bus by 745. There will be a seat rotation - every day, move forward four rows clockwise; I'm under the impression this is more about who gets on and off the bus first each stop more than sight lines since the coach has huge windows and there are no bad sight lines, and watching old people fight to be the first off the bus convinces me. We will stop Point A @ whatever time, Point B, then C, etc. Gah.

I did walk into a Ladbrokes and bet three pounds Fulham wins the Premiership next season at 500-1 odds. The man who took the bet laughed, Always glad to take money from Americans. I'll post the ticket when I again have access to a scanner. I am having fun. That's been the most fun so far.