Foolish Questions

There was a time, back around the latter half of the Twentieth Century where it was felt, primarily by Americans, that all the good stuff was invented and built in America. Like superhighways, though the Germans had built the autobahns first, in the Thirties, and unlike on superhighways, you can zoom along at a zillion miles an hour, or 1.6 zillion kilometers per hour, if you’re European and have accepted a rational scheme of measurement, like the metric system. Not that’s there’s anything wrong with clinging to the English system of measurement, especially if you’re going to be tithing the King a few hundredweight of barley, in lieu of this year’s taxes. Oh, wait.

Short history lesson. Americans invented the credit card. They started out as paper cards, which were easily duplicated, so eventually the banks moved to plastic with embossed numbers. Since these only took slightly more effort to counterfeit, the banks eventually added magnetic strips. And that’s where things are today in America. Europeans have decided to go a little further. They added a microchip to credit and debit cards. Instead of swiping the magnetic strip and then signing a receipt, you just insert the card, enter a PIN on the keyboard of the scanner, and you’re done. Thus, the name for these cards is Chip and PIN.

The advantages of the Chip and PIN system are, primarily that it’s much more secure than the old mag-strip. And it’s quicker and easier to use on a day-to-day basis, so easy, indeed, that it’s replacing the old system of swiping cards wholesale.

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We’re living in the City of London, which is, interestingly, not the same thing as London, the city. One is the original city, founded by the Romans and then eventually taken over by multinational banks and insurance firms. Though there was a gap of a few years in between those two events. So the City, also known as the Square Mile, is distinct from London and has its own Lord Mayor and police force, and what appears to be a city ordinance mandating men’s haberdasheries on every block. And wine bars on alternating blocks. We like it here.

We went to a restaurant down the street, which served a pretty decent dim sum. They had a Sunday meal special (it’s dead here in the City on the weekends) with a deal that was ‘Eat all you can manage’. I don’t know, but that seems a lot more genteel than the US equivalent which is ‘All you can eat’. One reminds me of folks sitting around having tea and biscuits on lace doilies, wearing top hats and petticoats, while the other brings up mental images of a pack of wolves tearing apart a caribou. You know, like Golden Corral Buffet. Not that I’d actually know, because Mary never lets me go there, even though they now have cotton candy and chocolate fountains. Chocolate freakin’ fountains, man! You never see chocolate fountains here.

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We are living in the oldest part of London, site of the original city, which has been inhabited by humans for some couple of thousand years. Granted, not quite as long as the Rolling Stones have been touring, but a right goodly amount of time nevertheless. At one time, the City of London had a hundred-plus churches, and remember, this is in an area of less than a square mile. Nowadays, there’s less than fifty churches remaining, but still trade is down and all the churches are making a real effort to attract worshippers, or even just get random passerby’s to stop in. It must be a little lonely being clergy in the City these days.

We saw this placard on a church outbuilding. Mary says it’s just an electrocution caution, but I think it’s an admonition that God may be in a smiting mood, especially if you don’t have the steak and ale pie special. Yeah, and this strikes me as totally bizarre, a number of churches have added side businesses like coffee bars, cafés or even full restaurants. Our favorite church so far is St. Mary-le-Bow, just a couple of hundred feet away from our flat, where you can dine in the crypt. We haven’t done that yet, but we will, because I firmly believe you should never pass up an opportunity to lunch in a crypt.

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We must confess that we’re a bit surprised that the average Brit doesn’t weigh 25 stone, which in Real Amurriccan math is 350 pounds.  Our surprise is based on what we’ve observed in commercials on the telly, which as everyone knows are accurate depictions of everyday life in every country outside North Korea, which doesn’t have commercials, because they’re godless communists.

A good example is one commercial we’ve watched around two hundred times — and we haven’t even been here in London for a week yet — mainly because we don’t have a DVR, and we have to actually sit through the commercials. This is a situation not altogether dissimilar to living in North Korea, that godless commie hellhole. We shouldn’t be shocked by this advert, since at home, in the States, we’ve seen, while fast forwarding through the commercials — as the good Lord and the TiVo engineers intended — advertisements for things like Pizza Hut stuffed crust pizza. We thought the Pizza Hut commercials had inured us to anything one could do to an ostensible foodstuff, but then we arrived in England.

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The last time we passed through Disneyland, we stayed at the Disneyland Hotel, just because we could. I was pleasantly surprised, not having visited this hotel in quite some time, and certainly not since the big renovation. It’s still a hotel that has a lot of features that were cutting edge in 1960, but are a little dated now, but the renovation has moved the hotel solidly into the Seventies, maybe even as late as 1978, when Grease was a hit movie, the BeeGees were hot, and Charlie’s Angels still ruled the airwaves. Ah, what halcyon days those were!

Oh, I’m just kidding. The Disneyland Hotel is actually quite nice these days. And our most favoritest discovery was Trader Sam’s Enchanted Tiki Bar, located near the center of the resort, in the pool area. Enchantment, when it comes to Tiki bars, is only possible if you suspend all manner of taste and sophistication, and allow yourself to exceed the bounds of proper decorum. You have to be able to give in to the wacky, go with the flow and embrace your inner idiot.

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The British, unlike their American cousins, have an overwhelming need to move about using bipedal locomotion. Strange, right? We saw them outside, walking round and round on the Promenade deck in all types of weather, including rain, mist, drizzle, high winds, really high winds and rough seas. If there had been a hurricane, there still would have been a couple of Brits out there, the older the better, trying to take a wee bit of a ramble, before tea, so they could work up a spot of an appetite. All those stories about British explorers expiring on their polar explorations? It’s because they tried to walk there, instead of waiting till someone invented airplanes, so they could fly there.

We’ve eaten more canapés in the past week then in the past three years. Three years in which we ate zero canapés, so it wasn’t much of a stretch. When did Americans give up eating canapés, and why? I mean, first you get to say ‘canapés’, which just sounds swanky. Second, what’s not to like about tiny bite size morsels of snacky goodness? We should all eat more canapés. If hipsters want to do something useful, they could make canapés trendy, instead of fedoras, skinny jeans and artisanal, locally sourced vegan tempeh burgers.

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What’s for lunch?

So now we’re on a ship. Or we were, since by the time I post this we’ll be back on dry land, because, have you seen how much they charge for Internet access on cruise ships? It’s pretty insane, and if there’s one thing I have a fairly good handle on, it’s insane. Our ship, the Queen Mary 2, is nicknamed, affectionately, by the crew as the ArgleBargle. Honestly, I can’t understand a word they say sometimes. This ship is so large that it takes forever to walk from one end to the other (forever in the average American’s terms, being further than the third parking space from the entrance of the Safeway), but fortunately, it being a modern ocean liner, you can stop along the way for a bit of provender. There’s a bunch of restaurants, cafes, cafeterias and the like scattered from bow to stern. More importantly, there are a total of thirteen bars on board the Queen Mary 2. It is conducive to what I like to call well lubricated voyaging.

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Apologies for missing the Monday update, but the stars weren’t in the proper alignment, the sun was in my eyes, and/or the dog ate my homework. But I promise that I have an amazing pretty all right just fair not quite up to par a terribly silly post that I will put up tomorrow. Which might be the third Wednesday of November back there in the States, though I’m not quite sure anymore. Soon, very soon, I’ll be back in range of the beloved electro-magnetic fields of wifi and 4G coverage, and will be able to post. If one wants to be completely honest, and really, I hardly ever am, so this is a time of revelation (hallelujah, brothers!), the lack of Internet access while we’ve been aboard the Queen Mary 2 (or Deux) has been a nice change of pace. The involuntary muscle spasms symptomatic of information deficit syndrome have now faded to minor facial tics that I can keep under control through the liberal application of hard liquor.

So to tomorrow! Ciao!

What’s for lunch?

Well, after two and half days of Amtrak train travel I can say that I have experienced some existential disappointment. I feel like a lifetime of watching movies has been totally wasted.

Not once did a porter offer me a pitcher of martinis as a nightcap, as I was led to understand was the norm, while watching the Thin Man movies.

The cabin we occupied could not have held any more than two Marx Brothers at a time, and you can just forget Zeppo, steamer trunks, suitcases and the camel. Well, if it was a Marx Brothers movie, there was probably a camel or two in there somewhere.

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So, and it’s a sad, sad blog post that doesn’t start with ‘So’, so I’m a going to England, where I hope to learn to speak the Queen’s English in the manner of the newsreaders of the BBC. I also desire to come away from my time there with an appreciation with how to wear a bowler hat with just the right degree of insouciance. This may be a mite difficult, as no one appears to actually wear bowler hats any more, except in period dramas. But one should always have a dream, unless it’s something like building a Bible themed nightclub in Las Vegas, which just came to me for some reason. Now I’ll have to go and have my imagination rinsed out, it’s obviously all gunked up with something.

Anyhow, I’m going to England and this blog is going along. Oh, and so is Mary. For the next three months we’ll be living in London as the English if the English were a couple of expatriates from the US, which of course they aren’t, so I don’t know quite where we’re going to go from there. It’s a thing. And I will document it, as frequently as I can be pulled away from visiting take-away curry places. Because that too, is a thing, and it will be my thing for a while.

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