Ruminations, Haunts, and Errors

As Vincent said to Jules, “It’s the little differences.” Notes from a yank’s first trip to England…

• The UK is certainly trusting of their vistors: the immigration form requires only name, nationality, passport info, and local address–a far cry from the more paranoid forms presented by the US and Australia. And the ‘nothing to declare’ lane off the baggage claim area didn’t even have any personnel making cursory checks of arriving passengers!
• I came all this way to see a billboard for the Dixie Chicks? At least the next one was of a stern-looking cricketer.
• Yards and miles on the roadsigns, square feet on the ‘Office space for rent’ signs. I guess the U.S. isn’t quite so backward as I thought.
• Even after midnight, with no traffic, the narrow and windy streets made it obvious why some measure was needed to reduce congestion. Good thing they don’t get Chicago-style winter snowstorms here, they’d never be able to get the snowplows through!
• The similarities between the old parts of Sydney and central London are striking. If it were just the layout and street names it would be one thing, but even the road signage and transportation logos are nearly identical!
• Streets that continually change direction slightly are one thing, and the lack of a standard numbering grid is another, but by far the most perplexing thing about navigating the City is that the name of a street seems to change every block or two. The Pulaski-Crawford discontintuities are trivial in comparison!
• The Sun is noticeably lower in the sky at midday, but at least the Moon wasn’t upside down. Odd to be in bright twilight at 9:45pm.
• In response to a track problem, a sign in Liverpool St. Station indicates that railroad engineers are said to be ‘in attendance’. Wouldn’t it be better if they were fixing it instead?
• Certainly, city planning was a concept far in the future when most of the streets of central London attained their present configurations, but the seemingly haphazard arrangement of streets and architectural styles is truly jarring for a Chicago native.

Finally…pictures are here.

Being in England during the FIFA World Cup, I could not avoid watching or discussing soccer. Actually, I’ve got nothing against the sport, I’ve just never been that interested. At least I finally got a decent answer for why so often it seems that any goal causes the scoring team to erupt in a frenzy usually reserved (in typical American sports, at least) for championship wins: more often than not, goals result not from designed plays but from right-place-right-time chances in busted plays–so the jolt of amazement is usually genuine.

Fair enough, but that still supports my gripe–and the view of many Americans probably–that the game as currently configured simply makes scoring a goal too hard…which is befuddling since there’s really no other objective measurement of the progress of the match! Some might argue that the true measure of the game is in watching the technique and struggle of the players, so a 0-0 match can be amazing. Okay, fine…but if the goals are merely side notes, what’s the point of keeping score? Why not just judge the World Cup finals on style points?

Oh, and I noted one more thing in watching bits and pieces of several matches. Anyone who claims that soccer is superior to other sports because of its neverending flow of play–as opposed to the frequent stoppages of, say, baseball or (American) football–is full of crap. Seeing nineteen players casually jog towards one end of the field while the twentieth saunters over to the sideline for a throw-in is hardly compelling action, and based on my limited sampling this seems to occur with about the same frequency as ’stoppages’ in other sports; that soccer doesn’t stop its game clock for these situations doesn’t change the fact that it’s still essentially a break in the game flow.

Me: A downside of traveling for an IT person is the loads of electronic crap that you need to cart around
Liz: Hmm, I guess I make up for that with shoes

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When John Gilmore’s promising suit against the FAA was denied it was disappointing, for while the courts held that requiring ‘papers’ for travel was in conflict with the Consitution, they left open the thorny issue of secret federal-agency regulations. The story got more interesting this week when it was revealed, on a bet (is this the way the government should operate??), that indeed it is possible to successfully board a flight without showing ID. Yet the resulting scenario where this ID-less traveler boarded faster than those who ‘followed the rules’ shows even more glaring problems with U.S. airline security. For one thing, it reveals that the airlines and FAA (and, by extension, the entire U.S. security establishment) still are fixated on the idea that the most important safety proxy is who you are (or at least who you claim to be) rather than what you are trying to do at the moment. For another, the surrounding story also shows that security-related boarding decisions are in the hands of staff who not only often don’t properly know the laws and policies but also feel empowered to make boarding decisions based on procedural bases alone. Hardly the recipe for a safe and efficient national transportation system.

And all this from someone who was able to sail through security for an O’Hare-to-Heathrow filght with nary a glitch. I can’t imagine how exasperating this situation must be for someone inexplicably stuck on one of those secret FAA/NSA/Star Chamber no-fly lists that were supposed to save our skies from the Bad Folks.