2003-06-05 10:11 (EST)

[fla.a.a.aIN] over you

I'm heading off shortly, at 1030 local time, which is 0530 in the UK, and I'll be at Heathrow 0620 tomorrow, and my mum's house an hour or two later. Luckily I sleep reasonably well on planes and my dzhinnan tonique fund is in reasonable health, because I am old and weak these days and my endurance is not what it was.

Still, it has been an enjoyable and productive trip, and I'm looking forward to doing some more Studly Analysis when I get home. (Should I get Courant and Hilbert in English, or insist on learning German to read the 1924 original? Decisions, decisions. But there's no doubt about the book itself - it really is as good as people say it is.)

2003-06-04 10:46 (EST)

It's almost civilised, really.

The USAians I get to meet don't seem to be entirely typical in their political views - the current administration is, um, not especially highly regarded in the circles in which I move, even if the prevailing consensus is somewhat to the right of the Nouvel Obs. Which is blunting my capacity for satire somewhat. These people have favourite ("favorite") Boondocks strips for crying out loud!

One of the regular themes of the USAian ex-pat visiting back home is the shopping-induced sensory overload and option paralysis so - strictly in the interests of science - I invited myself along on a grocery shopping expedition yesterday. I'm probably not the best judge in these matters, given my lack of enthusiasm for shopping normally, but even I could tell that there were substantially more brands of, say, feta cheese than I would expect to find in Yoorp, not to mention the ice cream. I regret to have to inform my Varied Reader, though, that existential doubt was not induced. (This has been attributed to as to how it was a relatively small supermarket.)

I am of course eating far too much stuff, and drinking just about enough. My hosts are all very keen on micro-brews and (in one case) Newcastle Brown Ale (which I hadn't touched since my undergraduate abuses thereof) so your spared any sarcasm on that front, too, although Budweiser is fine by me just so long as it isn't chilled to untastability (which it usually is in bars of course). I even got took ("tooken") to an "Irish pub" which was in fact a kind of cross between an Irish bar, a restaurant (sheperd's pie, yum yum), and a good idea (which is even less authentic than showing CNN and the Stanley cup finals on two TVs over the bar).

I think I am fated never to understand the appeal of CNN or its competitors. Having surfed past them briefly looking for baseball, they seem to fill the far-too-much time at their disposal by speculating wildly and irresponsibly about criminal cases (mainly juicy murders, yum yum) that have yet to come to court.

Tomorrow I set off on the way home (Massachusetts here I come, if we're still counting airporst) so I may very well go quiet again for a bit, sorry.

2003-06-03 1022 (EST)

Madeleine moves in

I'm busy with Mssrs. Courant and Hilbert just now, but still. Readallaboutit:

En l�ngre tid har Madeleine velat flytta hemifr�n. - Ja, det �r klart, det vill v�l alla ungdomar. Men mamma och pappa har inte tyckt att det har varit n�gon bra ide'... s�ger hon.

Nu kan Expressen ber�tta att hon och juridikstuderande pojkv�nnen Jonas Bergstr�m sedan tv� m�nader bor tillsammans.

[Madeleine has wanted to leave home, like, forever.
- Yah, obviously, all young people do, right? But mummy and daddy didn't think it was such a good idea, she says.

Now Expressen can reveal that she moved in with her law-student boyfriend two months ago.]

2003-06-02 17:23 (Delaware time)

Delawhereabouts.

I've got a long post on my lap-top but that's not accessible right now, so.

Every time I go on a plane I get off in a different time zone, but in the FDRUSA everyone already knows which one Philadelphia is in, so there's on need to, say, announce it over the tannoy. Plus, on short internal flights you don't get fed, even if you're changing for another 2 hour flight in St Louis, Missouri, and there isn't enough time there to eat between flights.

The car from Philly (as we call it over here) was tops, though - an ultra-stretched limo with multi-colored neon trim inside. Shared with two other passengers, and none of us appeared to be native speakers of American. (I had the driver down as Slavic, but he turned out to be Portugese, but that always happens.) We got stuck at a level crossing for 20 minutes clock time (about an hour and a half in irritation time) and the whole journey took about as long as either of the flights, but that always happens as well - the coach from Bristol to London, Heathrow takes at least as long as flying from LHR to Venice.

And, counting airports which is cheating but I didn't start it, I've now been to Florida, Utah, Illinois, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware. Everyone kept telling me that the Florida Keys are not representative of the FDRUSA in general, and I don't need to be told that about Utah, but now I'm gearing up to make a bunch of sweeping generalisations from a point of view of Iill-informed but unassailable self-righteousness, so stay tuned.

2003-05-30 18:15 (Utah o'clock)

Utah overload

Sessions start at 08:30 and continue till after 19:00. I'm really ready for this to stop, but they're doing it tomorrow too (which is of course a Saturday, for crying out loud) and there are two sessions I absolutely have to attend.

And I've just got ("gotten") an email confirming me as principal author for a paper to be given at a conference in San Diego in the autumn ("fall"). I think next year I'll see if I can just stay in Europe ("Yoorp") and recover.

2003-05-29 07:04 (Utah time)

Esquisse d'une travelogue

Yow! N-thousand mathematicians and 4 networked computers, see? Anyway: American Airlines now charges for gin and tonics on transatlantic flights - shun them; it's ridiculously pretty here - the last of the snow cover melting on the mountains in 90+ of the preposterous local "Farenheits"; I've pretty much figured out how "baseball" works; there's an astonishing amount of really outstanding science going on here, but most of it is well over my head; I wrote my talk at 3:30 local time the day I was speaking (I hadn't realised it was the first day) after throwing up the previous evening from some kind of FoodStrokeLag effect, but it was OK.

I'm off to Delaware on Sunday, and bandwidth should improve there. Be good!