Cryonic Suspension

YAMM is likely to be taking a few days off here. I have a circus to run, until sometime late Monday. I'm sure that by Tuesday something will have pissed me off enough to post some sort of screed. Until then, I wish you peace and flowers and hot sex with whatever it pleases you to sex with.

Up. To. HERE.

I've fucking had it. None of us has gotten into position for the Tucker Carlson gobsmack, and that's okay. I have no right to expect any of you to do time for me, as worthwhile as the time might be. But as we enter Week Three (I had to check; I'd have sworn it was Week Four) of Crisis in Media: The Internet Sucks Tucker Carlson's Little Thimble Dick, I'm ready to concede. So everybody please now go write to Nielson and Arbitron and MSNBC now and tell them that we'll all be in our seats at 9 PM every weeknight watching this braindead preppie fuckwit's show, and would they please just stop putting his picture on every fucking Web page in the Universe now please? Please?

I'm going to go spend eight days watching The Cartoon Network now.

Lying Skanks (The More Things Stay The Same)

I've been sort of itching to roll with a good mauling of the President and Judge Roberts for a couple of days now, but then I got busy with my masturbatory fantasies about a certain MSNBC television host, and then I got busy with some other stuff that's going on and coming up (see the Sausage, if you care). And Doctor Death is coming to visit, so I had to kill some mutant mildew to make room for him, and suchlike. And then last night, I just got into some weird paralysis thing where I was unable to tear myself away from the couch and television, which was unfortunate since television is, for the most part, horseshit.

So I sort of skipped the Court mania, at least as far as blogging about it. That's okay, because you have your own blog rounds to make, and they've undoubtedly included yards of verbiage about it. My position's pretty simple:

o The President's code language about "constructionism" and "judicial activism" is all deliberate lies;

o Roberts is a horrible choice, and the choice between militantly opposing him, thereby looking like wingnuts, and laying down for a whopping court-fudgepacking, is even worse;

o The choice of Roberts is purely Rovian, in its devotion to the selection of someone who's probably technically a very good judge and lawyer if you ignore the politics, and in its attempt to distract people from the fact that Karl Rove is a fucking traitor whose worthiness for the death penalty under that charge should seriously be given due process of law; and

o Sweet Irish Christ Please Don't Let Another Justice drop before January 20, 2009.

That about cover it?

24/7 Tucker

Of course, it's a challenge being me in a world where Tucker Carlson exists. I'm trying to be prudent and keep this crusade from taking over my little world. But my friend BlackdogRed emails news of yet more tuckeritude (and invents, in so doing, the delightful word "gobsmackingworthiness"), to be found at TPMCafe. Tucker, it seems, spouted words of support for state-sponsored terrorism on his little fair and balanced MSNBC show, which has sent me on such a tear of late:

[Tucker]: "Actually, I am objectively pro-France. You know, France blew up the Rainbow Warrior, that Greenpeace ship in Auckland Harbor in the `80s. And I’ve always respected them..."

Stalkers and some unusually careful casual observers may note that this poses a serious problem for me. You see, my friend Sasha blogged recently about the FBI's monitoring of the ACLU and Greenpeace. I responded with a half cheek-tongued comment about it being perfectly cool to monitor Greenpeace and EarthFirst!, and thusly initiated a low-level nuclear exchange with another commenter (with whom I am semi-familiar from other circles).

The major problem, I think, in my conflation of these two very different groups was that I was confused, when I made that comment, about who blew up whom in Auckland; it was, of course, a crime perpetrated by French intelligence against perfectly innocent persons and their perfectly legal property. It was a reprehensible terrorist act and I was quite mistaken in conflating Greenpeace with bad behavior in connection with it.

The nonproblem with my conflation was that EarthFirst! is, in fact, a dipshit terrorist organization (much like French intelligence), and while they didn't sue along with the ACLU and Greenpeace, I'd bet a whole lot that the FBI is watching whatever is left of them, too, and if they're not, they should be watching them just as much as they watch the Aryan Brotherhood and the Klan and any of a million militia blobs and revolutionary incipient terrorist cells of which I am unaware. My non-cheek-tongued point was that Greenpeace is pretty fucking insignificant, especially compared to something important like the ACLU.

I also had some unkind things to say in my further comments about the importance of the environmental movement compared to the eventual likelihood of global cataclysm and mass extinction brought on by, say, widespread volcanic activity or the impacts of giant extraplanetary masses (or both). But that stuff's not important; the Web-acquaintance and I exchanged nukes, and she ended the exchange with a pretty witty and bright retort that left no room for further discussion (and rightly so), and everything's as cool as it's gonna be.

What is important here, now, in this place, is that because I was a careless boob, my own literal words placed me in a very odd position vis a vis the whole Tucker gobsmacking thing. I've decided to take the White House approach and pretend that, for purposes of Tucker's gob, I didn't say what I said, and if I did say it, I was misquoted, and that if I wasn't misquoted, I was under the influence of alien orbital mind control lasers and wasn't responsible for my words. Thus, my opinions and Tucker Carlson's, save those on the color of the sky and the smell of poop and other such mundane things, do not occupy the same space and I am free to carry out my mission of satirically calling for a smacked Tuckergob.

We clear?

Tucker Carlson's Gob, Revisited

No one was willing to take the fall on last week's urgent request that someone plant their knuckles in Tucker Carlson's kisser. And since the little snipe's pretty sissy dimples remain unmolested, MSNBC feels free to turn up the heat, in the form of video advertising on the Web. I just saw one on Slate (motto: "Seeing how much we can piss Landru off and still get him to read since 1999") that involves Tucker pretending to be the star of a 1970s police drama, crashing through doorways brandishing a Very Large Pistol, bending a suspect over the hood of a police cruiser, talking urgently on a police radio. The conclusions here are so obvious that it gives me painful intestinal gas just contemplating them.

I don't know how else I can put this. I'm a cripple, people, a heart patient. I can't make time to actually go out into the streets and look for this assclown. Furthermore, Ilse has two small children and she's relying on my bling to send them to military school so that she and I can lounge around and have sex all the time without being interrupted by their needs for juice, dinner, binkies, and a warm place to take a shit, so it's not like I can afford to do the time. It is abundantly clear that this important matter of National Security devolves to you, my beloved friends.

For the love of God, people, punch Tucker Carlson in the gob!

You, Sir, Are No Kitty Kelley

I'm a few days late on this item, which I picked up courtesy of Wonkette, who is still refusing my phone calls and suggesting ice baths, but then I've been so consumed with wishing myself a happy birthday that I just haven't had time to do That Thing I Do For You of late.

So it seems that Edward Klein, august editor of "Personalities on Parade" for the august Parade magazine, and purveyor of not-very-good lies about Senator Hillary Clinton, is very, very unhappy about the vast liberal conspiracy to keep him from spreading his gospel about the Senator's alleged proclivities for carpet. The ever-loveable Howie Kurtz wrote about this for WaPo earlier in the week, here (if you need to log in and you haven't got a WaPo login, then you're utterly pathetic, but you can still use username: hatefreereg@nytimes.com, password: register, courtesy of BugMeNot).

It seems Slow Eddie is unable to get booked on television shows to discuss his hatemongering smear job, and has thus far only appeared on unindicted child molester Sean Hannity's show, and on something on CNN. And got spanked on both.

Joe Scarborough of MSNBC put it best: "I just applied the Kitty Kelley test."

Heh.

Ascending to Heaven

Oh. Well, that's very different, then. It turns out (find your own sources, they're all over the fucking blogosphere, including any sausage to the right that isn't about games or sports) that Karl Rove isn't a bad man after all. He didn't out Valerie Plame, Robert Novak and some unidentified journalist did. To him, Karl Rove. Thank God Karl Rove is on the case. Thank God this isn't all just some White House effort to destroy a political opponent with character assassination and defamatory and misleading statements. We were all really worried there, right?

I'm willing to accept the possibility that Karl Rove did not perjure himself before a grand jury yesterday. I don't think it's tremendously likely, given the stories on top of stories on top of stories. But I'm willing to accept it as a possibility, much like I'm willing to accept as a possibility the notion that Peter Angelos might someday die and free me to give money to the church of baseball, or that Abe Lincoln (whom I don't really like, actually) isn't spinning in his grave at the antics of the party he founded.

So if it was really that simple, why the fuck didn't Rove just say so a year or two ago? I'll tell you why not. Because he's lying.

The dogged fascists who seem to think that there are circumstances where a high-ranking government official should expose, and unilaterally muck up the career of, a covert operative, will no doubt have another opinion. Karl Rove, they'll tell me, doesn't owe me an explanation of anything.

But they're lying too. Karl Rove is a high-ranking government official whose behavior should be above reproach. Kinda like guys who shouldn't jizz on sluts in blue dresses. Exactly like that, in fact, except for the fact that exposing a U.S. government covert operative during wartime, which Karl Rove seems to think this is, would be treason. Have I mentioned that treason during wartime, which Karl Rove seems to think this is, is a capital offense?

By the way, for those of you weak in math, emitting on sluts, while desirable under some circumstances, is neither treasonous nor capital, as offenses go.

Not only are they lying, they're once again exposing their own fundamental arrogance, and the administration's. Which reminds me, when you've completed that Tucker Carlson assignment, find out which Giant Michelle Malkin goes to so I can track her down and complete a similar assignment.

It is possible, though unlikely, that Karl Rove did not technically commit a crime in making whatever statements he did, in fact make about Valerie Plame. But his subsequent lies about those statements--and it's hard to see how he hasn't lied here, given the multiplicity of stories told by Rove and his attorney--certainly have an odor of perjury about them.

Of course, it's a lot worse to lie about where one spilled one's seed.

So Karl Rove should be hanged--or, given the quality of mercy, lethally injected--pursuant, of course, to the rule of law that he so deeply respects, with due process for all.

But what of Scott McClellan, of whom the nicest adjective we have lately read is "pasty"? The blogosphere is likewise consumed and obsessed with this week's daily White House press briefings, of which I have produced here a brief summary:

White House Press Swarm: So Scott, how does the President feel about employing a fuckwit who deliberately exposed a covert CIA professional for political gain?

Mac Pasty: Pat Fitzgerald gave me a note. I don't have to answer that.

WHPS: But you've already answered it, repeatedly, just short of under oath, way after Prosecutin' Pat gave you that note.

MP: I already answered that.

WHPS: No, you didn't.

MP: Yes, I did, infinity.

WHPS: Fuck you.

MP: No, no, Pat gave me a note.

WHPS: Sphincter says what?

MP: What?

You Are My Minions. Coverage you can't get anywhere else.

Howdy Do

It has come to my attention that several friends and acquaintances are lurking out there, reading YAMM for an occasional peek at the ball of bile and phlegm that is the mind of me. Welcomes to those who have recently discovered the burst of happy fun dynamic charismatic mutanogenic Christian energy that is this blog, and thanks to you and everyone for reading.

Worship Me

Because that's what you're supposed to do on July 13.

And I haven't read about anyone punching Tucker Carlson in the gob yet. Get to it, people.

Punch Tucker Carlson in the Gob

Some things make me very, very tired. One of them is, of course, being too stupid to consistently take enough sleep. But nothing sharpens (and penetrates me with) a good solid bleary-eyed fogbank of a morning like starting my usual rounds of the Web and seeing, as my early dose of commercial Web mind control on Salon, the smug kisser of a world-class shitheel like Tucker Carlson.

Tucker Carlson is, as Jon Stewart demonstrated without mercy once upon a time (the video is here, and thanks to BlackdogRed for providing the link when I was unable to dig it up), a purposeless boil on the ass of civilization. His bloviational tendencies are White House press secretaryesque (and more on that later, although I'll just be reproducing what every blog in America has done over the last 20 hours or so). His value to society and the media is incalculable, because it doesn't exist. The notion that he has a primetime television program on a major cable network is an offense to the concept of media.

He is a fuckwit.

And yet , for some reason he's a darling. Wonkette doesn't want to love him, but there's something there that she apparently can't resist. She links to this piece at PittsburghLIVE, which consists of some moron provincial sucking Tucker's dick adoringly, mincing at Carlson's critics ("More objective viewers, however, would give Carlson credit for developing a smart, politically balanced and often funny hour of civilized TV debate"; politically balanced? Are you fucking insane, you little rollover bitch?) and completely missing the point ("libertarian-leaning conservative"? Call a fascist a fascist, you milquetoast starfucker; with twits like you journalizing in your local state, it's no wonder that dangerous criminals like Rick Santorum get elected to the Senate.). I hereby call for all of you to go burn PittsburghLIVE, which is clearly a warped tool of provincial Republicanism.

I'd rename this blog Tucker Carlson Is A Fuckwit or go find him and break his poncy little button nose, but it would be giving him more energy than he's worth. Which is, come to think of it, precisely what I'm doing with these five paragraphs.

(This post was modified two hours after posting to provide a link and a little bit of further exposition.)

It Knows It When It Sees It

Wonkette, who still has not offered to drop the soap for us or introduce us to Jessica Cutler, reports Page Six's (login: no_email_666@yahoo.com, password: nopassword) item about the Young Republicans' decision that Stepford Apprentice Kelly Perdew was too big an asshole even for them. The convention chairman, a particularly disgusting and squashable little bug named Nathan Taylor, is quoted there to the effect that Perdew is a bigger prima donna than he is. Perdew made out much better than our new best favorite friends at Operation Yellow Elephant, who the effete little prig Taylor describes as radicals bent on disrespecting the troops. Even a lying liar like this sanctimonious, self-promoting fascist twit is capable of knowing an asshole when he sees one.

And for those of you who don't pay attention to reality TV: never mind. We used to watch The Apprentice. We'll spend our future sticking with Reno 911.

The Last War

Toots and I were talking, as we often do, and she reminded me of a thing I often say in another context: don't get wrapped up in fighting the last war.

That aside for the moment, there are some fundamental principles involved in fighting successfully. Well-educated military types will likely have a better handle on much of this than I do. But here's something that's real important if you're gonna win a war, in addition to what I often say in another context:

Know your enemy: This is so important, and so transparent, that it's a cliche. Understanding the foe, in and of itself, will not win a war. But not understanding the foe will lose one every time. Examples are too numerous to list: everyone who's ever tried to invade Russia; Hitler's assessment of the British in 1940; every Western power that got involved in Vietnam; the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

One problem with declaring a "war" on terror and terrorists is that it's so very hard to know the foe. You are using a mechanism (a metaphor, really) that doesn't apply, because using tactics of terror isn't a war mechanism; it's a criminal mechanism. You don't fight criminals with war, you fight them with law.

Wingnut quibblers might point out that we go to war on national regimes that support terror. Fine. Finish one before you take on the next. The U.S. failure to stabilize Afghanistan before moving against Iraq in the name of the so-called war on terror was an abysmally stupid overreach, and the resurgence of terrorist activity in Western capitals is a linear result of that stupidity.

Wingnut haranguers might claim it a waste of time to apply logical principles to knowing one's enemy in this war. This foe, the argument goes, only respects strength. This foe is insane and has no regard for humanity. There are innumerable problems with these arguments, starting with the age-old issue of most warfighters thinking that the enemy is insane or irrational. That's stone arrogance, is all. Of course the foe has perfectly good reasons for fighting a war. War is horrible. If you're fighting one with your foe, then your foe has concluded that the horror of fighting a war (or committing what are pretty rightly characterized in a modern context as "barbaric acts") is, on balance, more attractive than rolling over. Your foe is not the tiniest bit irrational--your foe has you reacting to his every move, imposing huge inconveniences on your society in response to each of the creative attacks he inflicts upon you. There's not a damn thing irrational or stupid about it. But your steadfast refusal to confront that? Maybe some irrationality there, ayup.

The strength argument is also pretty self-defeating, if only because in this case, the foe is striking at the embodiment of geopolitical and military strength. Clearly one of the base problems is that the foe does not, in fact, respect strength. And bloviation about "coddling" and "therapy" is just testosterone-driven, chest-pounding idiocy, propaganda targeted at the confused and shocked. At another level--and when it's undertaken by officials of the state, like for instance Karl Rove--it's just more state-sponsored terrorism, in a different name. I mean, really...bellowing at people about their patriotism because their response to grief and shock and terror isn't as bellicose as yours? Go back to whacking girls with sticks in an effort to get them to show you their boobies. It's abundantly possible to mourn without lashing out.

One of these two principles leads to t'other. Or they're in a weird symbiotic feeding frenzy; we don't know our enemy because we're busy reacting, and we're busy reacting because we don't know our enemy. Any military type can see it, and you can bet that at least some of ours do. Either they don't know what to do about it--and there's nothing shameful about having trouble breaking out of an old paradigm--or they're not being listened to by those who make decisions about how to conduct this "war." Given the competence and professionalism that has increasingly marked our military leadership since the end of the draft (and more on that another time), it's hard to believe that the only problem is the former.

And more on the principles of war later on.

A Bim

What an awful day for the most recent protracted topic of this blog. I'm still shaking a bit from the proximity of it all; the bus explosion near Russell Square occurred in a block I've walked many times, one which Ilse and I visited twice during our trip to London last week.

The City has occupied my thoughts at some level for the entire day. I was panicked, badly, when I first heard the news, and settled a bit when all of my London friends had checked in safe within about an hour of my arrival at the office. A beloved friend of mine, and of many of yours, is visiting there now for an extended stay, and of course my good friend Doctor Death, now beloved of you all, lives there.

Those who would tell me that wondering why people plant bombs is the equivalent of offering terrorists therapy are not welcome on my planet. It is apparent to anyone with a brain and a heart that no one perpetrates this sort of organized aggression without some provocation. It is a fool who does not wonder how his actions cause or affect the actions of others. And actions like blowing up a thousand presumptively more-or-less innocent persons--one of whom could easily have been a good friend or more, given only slight variations in chaos--it seems obvious to me that it is one's duty to wonder what motivates that.

Which is not to say that I wouldn't shoot a terrorist, given a gun and a clean shot. I mean a real terrorist, one who detonated a bomb without blowing up himself/herself. I just can't honestly say that I wouldn't. I'm disturbed by that. But I can only seek comfort in knowing that elevates me above Karl Rove. I wish I could imagine that counts for something beyond soul food.

Death's Love Life

So you're looking for the end of the travelogue, and I guess I'll give it to you. I was so wiped upon my return that I couldn't even think about writing. I've caught up on some sleep and readjusted to the clock and even returned to work. So I can try to be unfunny now.

I'm not in a very funny mood. There's an ongoing situation that some loyal readers are aware of, and others would consider trivial, so I'm not going into it, but suffice it to say that it involves the loss of an online home. While I was not overtly wronged personally, others--friends--were, and I must consider the place a thing of history. It's been over a week now, and I'm just not adjusting well to the whole thing. It's an unpleasant and unwanted lifestyle change.

But for you? I'll be as unfunny as ever.

For our last day in London, we hooked up with the ever-popular Doctor Death and headed off to Hendon, which is an outer borough of London, where once upon a time was located RAF Hendon, an important command post for the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. That base is now the site of the RAF Museum, which for little-boy war freaks like me and Doctor Death is just stone cool. The museum traces the history of aviation, focusing of course on British interests, but making more than a passing nod to other aviation pioneers. There are tremendous numbers of preserved airplanes, war and otherwise, and excellent sections of this enormous museum are given over to presentations on the world wars. An entire hall is dedicated to the Battle of Britain, and it's a powerful show indeed.

There's a little cafe in the Battle of Britain hall, where Doctor Death and I enjoyed a lunch of macaroni and cheese, chips, and baked beans. The eminently more sensible Ilse enjoyed just a baked potato, but Doctor Death and I were interested in covering all of the starch food groups.

Hendon is way out in the sticks, and we had a long tube ride to get there and back, and a longish walk to get from the tube to the museum (Ilse and Doctor Death would tell you that I'm a fat, greasy, whiny pansy and that the walk isn't that long). The whole thing exhausted us and we tubed back into the city to rest a bit.

Which, after some rest, led to Saturday's rendition of an ever-popular tourist game in England, that being Trying to Find Dinner After 8 PM. Go on, try it, I dare you. Ilse and I had had some difficulty finding food after our visit to the Tate Modern, which has a restaurant wrongly characterized in some travel guide as "traditional" and more accurately characterized by the Landru Guide as "intolerably charmed by itself and worthy of any stars only if they are neutron stars falling on the proprietors' heads, a veritable tribute to the idea that modern cuisine needs a fucking intestinal lavage and a good beating about the head and ears by enraged persons who like to eat." We ended up at some hideous late-night joint with more traditional British fare, which prompted the odes to mushy peas and microwaved roast beef in my last entry.

So Doctor Death, Ilse, and I set out from the hotel at about 8 to try to find a pub dinner, because that just seemed fitting for our last night in town. It's Saturday freakin' night, people. In a city of something like 6 million people. Pub kitchens close at 7:30 PM, and look at you like you're daft if you ask them at 8 if the kitchen's still open. Four pubs we tried, and every one of them seemed quite ready to call the gendarmes.

So we ended up at a casual Italian place over on Yuppy Restaurant Street, where we'd been eating most of the week. It was charming because the waitress was really hot, and Eastern European (I guessed Russian, she turned out to be Polish). She hated me. But she adored Doctor Death.

Now, Doctor Death is not an unattractive or unpleasant man in any sense whatsoever. He's a tad shy, but he ain't ugly, and he is wicked funny and smarter than any couple-three dozen of me put together, being an actual doctor and all. And Polskette is almost literally dripping all over the guy. If you're reading this, Doctor Death, please tell me you went back to hit on her some more. Or tell me you're gay. Because the speed with which you tucked and ran when she got your zipper down and her hand inside your fly was just disturbing, dood.

And then it was time to come home. The flight back was less daunting; there were no geezers kneeing us in the back, and the movies were okay, although the food was a war crime. We zipped through Customs despite all those condoms full of China White that I swallowed and later recovered for street sale. My only complaint is that it took me until today to feel even tokenly human.

Okay, I'm not funny. I'll go start mining political sites for stuff to rant about. Maybe a Supreme Court justice resigned while I was gone. Or maybe Rick Santorum published a really offensive book, the sole purpose of which was to supplement Eddie Klein's partisan whackjob attacks on a Senator from Santorum's neighboring state.

Oh, wait, this just in:

Santorum Sodomizes Scouts, Licks Self Clean Afterwards

Brief Notes on Cuisine and Culture

Why not just throw a slice of beef in the fucking microwave for eighteen minutes, you fucking gobshites?

It is said that the potato was introduced to these isles by Sir Walter Raleigh in the 16th century. What the fucking fuck did these people eat before then?

I was mistaken earlier. I have never in my life before today seen actual mushy peas. They're mashed. Like green mashed potatoes. Ilse liked them. Then again, you've already reason enough to doubt Ilse's taste.

Tate Modern: Great idea. Badly executed. By far, my favorite room was the one plastered with Soviet propaganda posters, which are as fine an example of modern art as anything else in the museum, although some stuff by a gentleman named Finlay who was deeply concerned with World War II was also very interesting to me. The rest? Feh. And I like modern art.

And finally, one artist who should've been interested in the whole "found objects" thing was the great Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (not that I like her work). What she should have found was a pair of fucking tweezers.

Hark! Hark! My Dogs, They Bark!

We are certainly becoming well-travelled during our stay here in London. It's a walking city, unless you're a fat lazy fuck like me, in which case you still have to walk quite a great deal or enjoy forking over the equivalent of $15 for a journey of less than a mile.

I conclude though, that people who live here and own cars are insane. They drive, of course, on the wrong side of the road, and badly, especially so on streets that were, in many cases, designed and built before the Renaissance. Or farther back, in areas that survived the Great Fire of 1666 unscathed.

And yet the British are masters of transportation (and dilettantes at it, I'm told, compared to the continental Euros). Ilse and I took a trip out to the far reaches of southeastern London yesterday to get a gift for my friend BlackdogRed, who likes putting research in to determine the sketchiest areas of London to which he can send me without actually getting me harmed.

He was less successful this year than last; last summer, as I marched down the Fulham Road in search of the club shop of Fulham FC so that I could get BDR a Brian McBride jersey, I very nearly feared for my life, both because of the neighborhood and because it was a hot summer day and I am, after all, a fat greasy pig. I erred in my research and went, quite reasonably I thought, to the Fulham Broadway tube station, which turned out to be located in a shopping mall right next to the Chelsea football ground. The folk at Chelsea were quite helpful in suggesting that I take three buses down the Fulham Road and keep a sharp eye for the shop. They were helpful beyond the call of duty in that they were also laughing their asses off at the thought of anyone, a Yank especially, visiting the Fulham Club Shop. Unwilling to risk actually riding a bus with the masses, I trooped off down the road, drenched after 300 yards, and walked for a little over a mile, where I found that the Fulham FC Shop is right around the corner from the Putney Bridge tube stop, two stops down the line. Oops.

This year, BDR wanted a jersey from Crystal Park FC. A bit of research showed that I'd have to take a train to reach that part of London, and I was lucky enough to think to phone ahead to discover that the Crystal Palace FC Shop is nowhere near the Crystal Palace train station. Instead, it is near a town called South Norwood, and near a village that verges on the Norwood Junction train station. In short, we got the jersey in about two hours' travel, by foot and rail.

But the trains...they're amazing. Norwood Junction is on a little suburban line (it's actually within what is called Greater London). Trains run to the line's terminus from one or another of the London terminals every five minutes or so, some of them stopping at tiny places like Norwood Junction, most of them expressing on through. Think about it; two- or four-coach passenger trains running five or ten times an hour--out one suburban axis. There is corresponding service along the other axes. That's unheard of in the United States, even in New York City, the commuter rail capital of our country. We made our journey for about six pounds eighty pence, a little over twelve dollars. It would've been close to a $100 cab ride one way. Clearly, the British--and, I'm told, the rest of Europe--know something we don't about transport.

Today has been harder on our feet; we're taking a mid-day break, having taken the subway to Saint Paul's Cathedral: more church, more magnificent, more dead people in the floor, including the Duke of Wellington, and more memorials, many of them to the same guys to whom we saw memorials over in Westminster Abbey, my favorite being that notable loser Lord Cornwallis who, we learned today, got his fat ass sent to Bengal for losing the War of the American Revolution, and died there sweating and malarial. Also buried in Saint Paul's would be Admiral Lord Horatio Viscount Nelson, a spectacular prig, the memory of whom is a nationwide masturbatory obsession. Despite the 20th Century, it appears that the memory of kicking French ass is still a very fond one around these parts.

We also went to the restored Globe Theatre, which is pretty cool, so much so that I'm having trouble formulating any decent mockery of it. Damn you, Globe Theatre.

More later. Now, it's naptime, and later we're off to the Tate Modern to look at modern art. Tomorrow, our last full day here, we'll do War Day Part Two, hitting the Royal Air Force Museum at Colindale and, we hope, the National Army Museum. Until then, please keep jacking up the Sitemeter.