Some of these thoughts probably started in Amanda's head. You know how it is when you're very close to someone, and talk about everything ... it's hard to remember who thought what originally - and often the same thing occurs to both independently.
I've put my Pet Hates on a separate page :-)
Most tourists seem blind to these requests. In particular, I think that the Right To Throw Coins In The Water and the Right To Feed The Animals must be little-known amendments to the American Constitution.
Why is it? Most folks can read the language in which the signs are written (although signs in US national parks could do with more European languages to ensure everyone stays on the trails).
I believe it's the one-more-won't-hurt attitude, the idea that individual action can't make a difference. It's the enemy of both democracy and conservation.
Germans seem loud and brash. It's a stereotype in England that Germans rise at the crack of dawn to reserve deckchairs around the hotel pool by placing their towels on them. I haven't seen that, but I have been to a number of places where many Germans hang around the hotel - despite being in Majorca, LA or even the Grand Canyon.
Japanese, as well as the well-worn photography stereotype, seem to travel in large groups such as bus-tours and experience the environment only superficially. The large group thing is understandable when abroad if you consider the language gap (although I don't know why, say, English for Japanese is harder than English for French). At the Grand Canyon there are many busses of Japanese at the viewpoints, standing and looking where the guide instructs, but very few take even a short walk into the canyon.
I find the English tourist harder to define - being one myself - but one thing I've noticed is the lack of adventure. In San Diego, surrounded by restaurants, I overheard one say to a bus driver "I always hate asking this, but can you tell me where the nearest McDonalds is?"
I could understand it if they were doing something appropriate to the scene - hiking the canyon, climbing the mountain ...
Flash photography of vast scenes is another one that gets me. I'm not really a photo-snob, but honestly, a fixed-exposure camera with automatic flash is never going to get a good picture of the city lights at night, the Canyon at sunset, or whatever. My favourites are the combinations, where you have to stand in front of the Golden Gate Bridge for a flash photo. OK, I can see that for some people it's their first time with a camera, but that still leaves a hell of a lot who do it all the time. I would kill to see these people's photo albums. "Yep, that's me in San Francisco. You can't tell in the black background, but that's the Golden Gate Bridge behind me ... or was it Sydney Opera House?". The other thing I would love to know is what these people think of me, with my camera on a tripod making a thirty second exposure?
Video photography ... people obviously haven't fully mastered still photography, but those with camcorders seem worse. The number of people who video static scenes is beyond belief. The subjects don't seem much better either - most stop moving and talking when the camcorder points their way.
The most incredible bit of home movie making I've ever seen was at Mt. Rainier (Washington, USA) a few months ago. A carload of Japanese folk pulled up at a viewpoint and piled out of the car, one of them armed with a still camera, another with a camcorder. The senior members of the family posed grimly in front of the scenery for the still shots whilst the video cameraman zoomed and panned over the scene. Then, they remained absolutely rigid, wearing exactly the same facial expression, while they were videod for thirty seconds or so. As soon as the cameras were turned away from them, they broke formation and were as happy and animated as anyone could be.
I'd be very interested to hear anyone else's comments on this stuff.
The Rolls-Royce Merlin powered four of the greatest British military aircraft of all time. The Hurricane and Spitfire had one each; the Mosquito had a pair; the Lancaster had four.
If I win the jackpot on the lottery (which is even more unlikely for me than for other people, because I don't play it) I plan to build a factory constructing Spitfires and, of course, Merlins from the original plans.
We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.-- Speech, "Hansard" 4 June 1940
Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth lasts for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their finest hour."-- Speech, "Hansard" 18 June 1940
Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.-- Speech, "Hansard" 20 August 1940
I think it's a great shame. I'm envious of countries like Italy and the USA where patriotism binds people together almost as powerfully as religion.
National responsibility is a bit of a strange idea. A lot of people seem to maintain a generations-old dislike of some countries' citizens and hold them personally responsible for events which occurred long before they were born. The Scottish and English are particularly good at this game.
My first album will be purely commercial. Mainstream rock groups have discovered, accidentally I suspect, that some songs are used by documentary makers or TV news folk as background music. For example, a piece on the fashion industry might be accompanied by Kraftwerk's The Model, Duran Duran's Girls on Film or Madonna's Vogue. Other good themes name people or places. Consequently, my first album will include catchy tunes describing major industries, political parties, social and sporting events and so forth.
My hit follow-up album will offer reverse point-of-view. Many songs are written in the first person to or about someone else. My songs will be based on established hits, putting events from the original songs' subject's point-of-view.
My killer third album will revolutionise school exams. You know how you can remember a song really well, but Schrödinger's equation and the major events of the Second World War escape you? My album will set to music key points from the syllabii of school courses, starting with English, maths, and science. I'll clean up.
I noticed, though, that most people's musical tastes seem to freeze around their 16th birthday. Maybe, then, instead of easy-listening, Radio 2 is really playing music for the tastes of the 40- and 50-somethings. Maybe, in twenty or thirty years time, Radio 2 will be playing the current top rock and pop music. The hard-rock of today is the easy-listening of tomorrow.
Horse racing ... now, I may be over-simplifying, but isn't the horse doing most of the work? It seems to me that not many people would notice if the horses didn't turn up one day, as long as someone rolled a dice to say who'd won. Isn't a sport that exists only for gambling a bit strange?
Motor racing - pretty complicated equipment. Driving a McLaren Honda can (could) definitely make up for a lot of driver skill. I've never been in favour of pit stops either, It detracts from the individual competition to have a whole team of mechanics able to influence events. The notion of having a two-way voice and data link between car and pits is incredible (but has been fact for several years). Not a sport.
Fixed-duration / drawable games like soccer seem a bit strange to me. It's OK for a Sunday afternoon friendly, but the possibility of having no winner seems to blight the game - extra time and penalty shootouts are just ugly botches.
Racquet sports all play to the death. In squash and badminton there's an elegant scoring hierarchy (point, game, match), although the way you can only win a point on serve (else you just lose serve) is a bit odd. I also like the way there's an anti-luck buffer built-in, requiring a certain point differential even after the target number of points has been reached.
My favourite scoring system is tennis. Played to the death, hierarchical scoring, anti-luck buffers, excellent tie-breaks, and every rally wins a point. I think it's a great shame that the modern professional game is dominated by power strokes.
Another weird thing is that two of the most popular sports in the USA - basketball and baseball - derive from English sports played only by young schoolgirls - netball and rounders.
Now I've heard something even more bizarre. In the USA, teams move location if they can't get what they want from the area. The Seattle Mariners were threatening to go if they didn't get a new stadium; some football team moved state. I think they keep their nickname but prepend a different city name.
What's the point? Once your players aren't local, why bother having the location in the name? If you have so little loyalty to your area that you leave town in a sulk if you don't get what you want, do you even deserve to use the name? Surely supporters of "the local team" can't be duped that easily ...
Then they vanished. You couldn't find a Beetle if you looked for one.
Then they were back. They were old; theywere trendy.
I still hated them, but more importantly, I want to know: Where did they go in between?
Then they introduced a new one - cute design, but a bit too expensive to be a "volkswagen" ("car for the people").
Roundabouts are ballet. Sheer elegance of design. Multiple converging streams of traffic, interleave to orbit the roundabout and then disengage to go in multiple different directions. Moreover, drivers with greater skill have an advantage in handling them - a true meritocracy!
What alternatives has the traffic planning world come up with? Traffic lights. The all-way stop. Barf.
That shouldn't be allowed, should it? If the traffic departments want us to suffer a bump as we travel the roads, surely we are legally obliged to suffer a bump?
I wonder if legislation will insist that active suspension must incorporate the facility to simulate a bump when instructed to do so by some external signal. Then we could have smart, virtual sleeping policemen which didn't affect, say, bicycles, buses and cars doing under 20mph, but which gave a big jolt to speeders. Also, the severity of the bump would be the same for all drivers, so a Jaguar driver wouldn't suffer any less than a Mini driver.
c00l, I grab it and keep a copy on my hard disc.
Or at least, I used to. Now I just (try to) remember where I found it, so I can get it when I want it. I think this is a very significant and exciting development. It means that:
These last two points are a bit tenuous. In particular, I try to avoid
pointing to URLs of the form "http://blah.edu/~student/play/...".
Of course, another compelling reason for shedding my bushy tail and cute
little paws is that my hard disc's filling up too,
but it's been 90% full for about eight years now ... it's just that now it's a
90% full 40Gb disc instead of a 90% full 40Mb one.
:-)
The next stage in my personal development concerns the efficient organisation of a 1Mb bookmark file.
But there's a big difference. WWW is dead. You connect not with people, but with their remains. It's completely passive.
Of course, this is a good thing in some ways. Folk can provide general information about stuff without having to make personal replies. If you want, you can usually email them ... if their address still works.
What happens to it when you're bang on the equator? Why has it never occurred to anyone to try it?
I can think of an explanation. Certain groups of people are influenced by certain famous folk, as well as by one another; Certain types of folk will, in a given era, like a particular name - so they give it to their kids; They'll then proceed to raise those kids in a similar way. Consequently all Sharons are alike.
There's another facet to fashionable names ... I grew up without meeting another Adam. Evidently, in the late 80s the name became popular and for a while all I heard in supermarkets was "Adam ... Adam ... Adam ...". It must be wierd to have a really common name.
Why don't Americans have Freeze, Grow, Burn and Fall?
I reckon it's the availability of replacement partners, together with the social acceptance of multiple marriages in those circles. Far be it from me to suggest that they're a bunch of spoiled brats who can't handle not getting their own way 100% of the time.
I saw a telling headline in a US newspaper on the occasion of the wedding of Micheal Jackson (not the structured programming guy; the other one) to Lisa Marie Presley, describing it as Jackson's "first marriage". Once upon a time, that would have sounded as ludicrous as a reading an obituary about a person's "first death".
The Conservatives are the music of Dire Straits;In other words, the other two parties are like two fantastically successful and enduring rock bands, while we are like a flash-in-the-pan bunch of talentless sad-acts chosen only for looks and appealing only briefly to a small section of the populace.
Labour are the music of Simple Minds;
We are the New Kids On The Block!
I don't recall where the Liberals came in the polls ...
I noticed, in Southern California (particularly LA) that the homeless and jobless, the panhandlers, are either black or white. I didn't see a single hispanic beggar.
Meanwhile, low-skill jobs (McDonalds, hotel cleaning) were done almost exclusively by hispanics.
What stops blacks and whites from getting the jobs the hispanics do? Do they not want the jobs, or can they not get them? I can imagine that some jobs would be difficult for a non-Spanish speaker to do, as there would be a real communication problem - many of the hispanics we encountered spoke very little English.
In a McDonalds recently I picked up a leaflet about franchising opportunities, and I realised the McJob label can apply not just to the serving staff but to the managers.
It is McManagement - almost everything is decided by McDonalds, from staff uniforms, training, pay to decor and equipment, and of course products and pricing. They'll even help decide a site. There's little risk because there's a known market for the identical stuff at the identical price, all you have to do is find a spot a little way down the road from the next branch, round up some staff, teach them to speak a little English (optional), and you're away. So what does a McManager do?
A British newspaper cartoonist wondered whether the Oklahoma bomber would also be invited to the Whitehouse for lunch. I wonder how the American people - even in Boston - would react if the British allowed open fundraising for terrorists to maim and kill innocent women and children on the streets of American towns. At a guess, I'd say we wouldn't be top of the Christmas card list.
Transport disasters like The Herald of Free Enterprise at Zeebrugge, and Pan Am 103 at Lockerbie claimed over 200 lives each and made world headlines. Mass-murders like the March 1996 massacre in Dunblane of 15 children with their teacher similarly capture the World's imagination and are (rightfully) mourned and lamented. Disease claims many lives and (in the case of the British BSE episode) is whipped up by the media to national scandal proportions.
Yet 6000 people are killed in road "accidents" in Britain every year (41,000 in the USA), but because people want to move freely around the country they simply blank it out. Fewer people would be killed if we drove slower, but that's inconvenient when you're late for work, so the slaughter continues. Fewer people would be killed if people never drove after drinking, or if they were tired, or when their eyesight was fading, or if cars were built with more crash protection ... but it all costs money and is just too much bother ... so we keep paying the human cost.
I am incensed that we continually use the word accident to describe crashes, because the implication is that no-one is to blame and the event was inevitable. If the event was inevitable, there is no point spending money trying to fight "fate". If no-one is responsible, there is no need to be responsible about driving skills.
People dying alone, all over the world, day-in day-out, is not news, but it is unquestionably the real problem:
More people are killed in road crashes every afternoon than died in the Lockerbie bombing. Why isn't that on the news every day?
I've looked into the news-worthiness of group death a bit more on my death page.