words, words, words

Sri Lanka lost the Cricket World Cup.
I am going to Geneva for the Swiss Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Cup.
Oh, and today, my Dad, Susi, Louisa and I are all walking to Central London from Hammersmith. Yesterday we went to Kew Gardens.

For everyone who has thought, “my sandwich doesn’t look anything like the advertisement…
Fast food: ads vs. reality

I entered my second submission grappling contest on Sunday. It was the Urban Gorillaz 2007 UK Nationals. My results weren’t so good. I won the first fight by armbar and lost the second on points. I did learn a lot though, and will do better the next one. It was fun.

As part of the hundred greatest novels quest, I just finished “I Claudius”, by Robert Graves.

Now I am reading “Pattern Recognition” by William Gibson. This book is incredible. His writing is so good it makes me jealous.

I won’t go into too much about the plot, but part of the book is about the differences between the UK and the USA. Something that I am feeling fairly acutely living in London. He calls the UK “mirror world”. Of course he mentions the obvious backwards things, the fact that people drive on the wrong side of the road, but he also mentions some more obscure things, like the fact that people are a bit frantic about their vice here, and the British have enormous electrical plugs that look like they would power electric chairs in the States. He mentions something I have found weird, which is the way that people’s voices go up when they say “good bye” on the phone.

I do have one to add to the list: in the States, doors tend to open outward. I think it is must be a fire code regulation. That way if a throng of people are surging out of a burning building they are dumped onto the street, instead of clogging the doorway with their cooked bodies. In London, I suppose they don’t want to inconvenience people by having their doors swing open into a sidewalk, but I walk into a door almost daily.

Kurt Vonnegut died. I’m not the biggest fan of his writing, but I heard him give a lecture whe I was a the University of Florida, and he seemed like a really nice guy.

Here are photos of our trip to Tunisia.

Tunisia 2007