Dublin!

I feel like it's been a week since I last blogged, I've packed so much into the past 24 hours! As you can see, I made it to Dublin, where one of the first sights I came across is "Europe's No. 1 Discount Superstore," above. Quite a grandiose claim! And yet, it does seem they sell a little bit of everything. I wonder what "fancy goods" are?

I was up and out of the house just after 5 a.m. yesterday. Olga got very excited, thinking we were all going somewhere, but she didn't seem too disappointed when she realized Dave was staying behind with her. I caught the tube out to the airport for a flight that was pretty much up and then down again. I think it took about an hour.

I met up with my stepsister and her husband at the airport -- their flight from the states arrived about the same time as mine did. They're traveling with two friends, and the five of us all rode into town together and dropped our bags at their hotel. We then took an exploratory walk around St. Stephen's Square (Dublin's biggest downtown park) and the Grafton Street shopping area.

I checked out a handy little Dublin guidebook from the library before I left London, and an earlier reader had left a sticky note inside the front cover mentioning a "BEAUTIFUL Victorian pub" called the Stag's Head. "Good food?" the note said, uncertainly. So we rolled the dice and headed for the Stag's Head for lunch. The place was pretty packed but we ate and the food was indeed yummy. Thanks for the tip, mystery traveler!

We then headed to the Guinness Storehouse, a gigantic brewery-turned-museum full of Guinness history and memorabilia.

Here was the best part -- at the end of the tour you get a pint of Guinness WITH YOUR PICTURE IN THE FOAM ON TOP! How they do this I have no idea. My shoulders look funny because I was bending down and slightly hunched forward when they took the photo.

The others decided to go back to their rooms for a nap, and I still had to go find my hotel, which is outside the city center in a suburb called Rathgar (which sounds like the name of a cruel interplanetary dictator). I decided to walk the two miles to the hotel, which led me through interesting business and residential districts with lots of fun street art like this beautiful portrait of two magpies.

My hotel is the very definition of no-frills. My room is clean but there's not so much as a picture on the wall, and it's on the ground floor with windows looking out at concrete. Fortunately I am here only to sleep.

I had intended to take a bus back into town for dinner, but I discovered that in Dublin you need not only cash but EXACT CHANGE to pay the fare. Buses do not take a debit card, and if you want to buy a bus pass you have to do it at the bus station in town. I started walking back figuring I'd pass an ATM and get some money, but there was no working ATM along my route that would give me any less than €50 and I don't want THAT much. So I  just stayed on foot.

We had drinks at the bar in my stepsister's hotel (my hotel, needless to say, has no bar unless you count the Nescafe and kettle in my room). We were served by an adorable Argentinian waiter named Franco. Then we had dinner at a pub called the Landmark, where an over-amplified singer delivered ear-splitting renditions of Tom Petty songs. We got out of there quickly.

And then I walked back to my hotel. I bet I walked ten miles yesterday -- 28,315 steps, according to my iPhone.

Today there's a parade and some other craziness downtown, and I hope I can get out of here and to the airport without too much trouble. I should be back in West Hampstead around 9 p.m. Whew!

Google Slush

I'm on my way to the airport right about now, so I've set this post to publish automatically. I'll be blogging on Sunday (one day only!) from Dublin.

I heard an interesting discussion on the "QAnon Anonymous" podcast the other day. The podcast, despite its name, is very wide-ranging and goes beyond merely talking about QAnon. The hosts discuss related conspiracies, the peculiarities of right-wing politics, historic incidents of misinformation, manipulation of information and many other topics. I love this podcast. It's a little like sitting around with friends in a college dorm room and bantering about the world's craziness over too many beers.

Anyway, the hosts were talking about Google in a recent episode titled, "Why Google Sucks Now." They started from the proposition that Google has deteriorated, returning less useful search results than it used to, largely because money has corrupted the original Google algorithm. What was once designed to return high-quality search results now returns results that are paid for or otherwise gamed by professional "optimizers," feeding us a lot of junk.

I hope Google doesn't cancel my blog for saying this, but I must admit I find Google results pretty dismal sometimes -- there's nothing I hate more than asking a question and being shown a bunch of Quora threads where other people have asked similar questions but NO ONE seems to have an answer. Or at least not an answer that works. What's the point of that? It doesn't help me to know that other people are merely wondering the same thing I am.

(There are supposedly tricks to get around this. Some people suggest searching a topic and including the word "Reddit," which will then take you to Reddit on the theory that users there will have better filtered out an answer. I have no idea whether or not this works. Why would Reddit be more reliable than Quora?)

The contention is that Google could have stopped this devolution, but opted not to because it was more profitable than efficient search. Ultimately the podcast discussion led to a rather dark place, a future data quagmire, where it's nearly impossible amid a flood of AI-generated word slush to gather any useful information.

As a blogger, I find that pretty bleak. I'd like to think my little blog could still be found someday by someone looking for something I've posted. (What that could be I'm not sure, since I mostly write about my dog and overdue library books.) I have searched for my photos via Google with mixed results. A lot of stuff comes up before me, mostly Alamy images that have to be purchased.

Anyway, that's what I'm thinking about as I write this post and set it to publish while I'm en route to Ireland!

(Photo: Architecture near the Battersea Power Station, in late February.)

Plans and Paranoia

Have I mentioned that I'm going to Ireland? I think somehow I never wrote about these plans, but yes -- I'm flying to Dublin tomorrow morning to meet up with my stepsister and her husband, who are visiting from the states. I'll only be there one night. I realize Sunday is St. Patrick's Day and apparently there's also a big rugby game happening this weekend, so it might be madness. We shall see.

I've had a busy week here. I went to the dentist on Wednesday for a checkup, and fortunately I don't need any immediate work, though I do have a filling that the dentist is concerned about and will probably want to replace in the near future. I'm not thrilled about the idea, being of the "leave well enough alone" school of thinking, but I might let her do it in the fall.

The tooth I had the root canal on several years ago still gives me a twinge now and then -- evidently the dentist who did the root canal (not the one I go to now) didn't get all of the root -- but my current dentist said it seems stable and she sees no need to do anything more. I can live with it. Having spent all that money on a gold crown I'd rather not have to redo it all, or worse, remove the tooth entirely.

In other big news, I think I finished our U.S. taxes last night. I finally got all the supporting documentation uploaded and sent the return to a "tax advisor" for review. I had to improvise on a few things. For example, as I understand it, I'm supposed to report interest from our British bank -- but of course that bank doesn't issue a 1099-INT form, as American banks do. I reported the interest as if I had such a form, even though I do not. Hopefully that will suffice.

Dave and I watched a wacky documentary from Channel 4 the other night about ten-year-old allegations that some parents in Hampstead, the community right next to us, were running a Satanic pedophile ring. It was the craziest story. What began as a parental custody battle soon went ballistic and became an Internet phenomenon that attracted vigilante justice-seekers, one of whom flew over from America (of course) to "protect the children." Several things astonished me:

1. The fact that the initial allegations, which seemed outlandish from the beginning, triggered such an intense response from online activists;
2. The fact that Dave and I were completely unaware of any of this at the time, even though it was happening practically in our neighborhood;

3. The fact that someone in America would read something on the Internet and FLY ACROSS THE OCEAN to personally stalk supposed "pedophiles," rather than leaving the matter to the police to sort out. (The police did investigate but found nothing amiss and eventually the kids involved retracted their story.)

It's like that guy who stormed the pizza place in suburban Maryland because he thought Hillary Clinton was harvesting babies in the basement. What is wrong with people?

My personal theory is that there's a lot of pot-smoking going on out there. I'm not a "reefer madness" believer by any means, but smoking pot can make a person a little paranoid. I think these people sit in their basements, puffing away and reading salacious online chat boards, and soon enough they've gone down a rabbit hole of crazy.

On that note, I'm off to work.

(Photos: Graffiti by Alex -- sometimes spelled Alekz -- in Swiss Cottage and West Hampstead.)

Butternuts and Pirate Monkeys

I've photographed these windows before, in context as part of the shopfront. But when I passed them a couple of weeks ago I thought I'd do a close-up. They need a good cleaning, and some of them seem like they may have a second layer of yellowed plastic behind them, and that duct-tape repair job at upper right has got to go -- but still, don't you love them?

And with that, let's take a look at some other random photos I've stacked up over the past several weeks.

My neighbor had this sitting out with her trash. I had no idea what a "Butternut Box" was, and the instruction to "open and sniff" seemed a little strange. (No thanks!) Turns out it's a brand of designer dog food. Her dog is obviously eating better -- or at least more expensively -- than Olga.

When I went to see the Winter Lights at Battersea Power Station a couple of weeks ago, I was amused to find this pigeon strutting around inside Starbucks, looking for crumbs. That's a pretty enterprising bird. Not only was it inside the power station, but it was also inside an enclosed shop where it knew there would be food. There's a reason pigeons dominate the urban landscape.

A student returned this book to the library with color-coded sticky notes inside the front cover. I suppose they were using those colors to gauge their reactions as they read? Doesn't seem like there would be many "happy/yay! 😊" moments in this book -- at least not until the end.

Found this eye-catching sticker on a street sign. CSKA Sofia is a football club in Bulgaria, not to be confused with CSKA 1948 Sofia. (I didn't know any of this until I looked it up.)

Another fun sticker -- Pirate Monkey!

Here's Olga with some big, colorful graffiti we found last weekend. This wall used to be regularly buffed (painted over) so I'm not sure how long the graffiti will last. Seems like maintenance has diminished lately.

Finally, as I walked home from work a few nights ago, this gigantic tractor-trailer was trying to back into a parking bay behind and beneath the new apartment buildings on West End Lane. It was blocking the roadway all the way across, with a couple of guys directing, and this was during evening rush hour. I was surprised more people weren't complaining or honking but they seemed to take it in their stride. I guess driving in the big city presents plenty of obstacles like this. I'm glad no one was in an ambulance trying to get by.

Siri Makes Another Video

We're having some dreary weather here, though perhaps not quite as dreary as in the video posted by the guy from Wales who found the monolith. We had light rain pretty much all morning yesterday and the plants are loving it. The temperatures have climbed a bit, too, with no overnights below 40º F forecast in the foreseeable future. I'm starting to think about moving the avocado back outside, but I'll probably wait until April at least.

It's really hard for me to type this post because the dog is on my lap -- I'm on the couch, holding the computer with my left arm and typing with my right hand. Cumbersome! Also I'm once again noticing that many of the keys on my keyboard have completely worn away. Instead of letters I'm seeing a keyboard full of round O's glowing like full moons, which is hard to deal with when I'm not typing in a normal position and working from QWERTY muscle memory. I probably need to think about a new computer.

OK, I've shifted the dog.

As you can see, I have nothing to talk about today, really. I did read a fun and poignant column yesterday about the 50th anniversary of "Free to Be, You and Me," the TV special produced by Marlo Thomas back in the early '70s that is seen as a cultural touchstone for people my age. I don't remember watching it when it first came out in 1974, but I remember listening to the record and singing the theme song in our elementary school music class. The message that we were free to become whatever we wanted, regardless of the gender roles society tried to force on us, felt liberating to me even then. Girls could have careers, men could cry, boys could play with dolls, girls should learn to fend for themselves.

Of course, being a gay kid, I'm sure I felt that message more than some other viewers. Those songs told me it was OK to be different -- and even though I was seven years old at the time and wasn't entirely sure how I was different, I knew I was. "Like many works from the early ’70s," wrote columnist James Poniewozik, the show "can seem simultaneously a dated product of a specific time and an artifact from an alternative future that never quite arrived."

I'll leave you with this:

My iPhone made another video of Olga images. It does this now and then, all by its lonesome -- the last one was in November 2022. Unfortunately, Siri tends to be a bit haphazard about cropping. I once again had to manually replace a couple of the videos so you could actually see the dog -- she'd been cropped out entirely -- and as you can see, she's at the margin of several of the photos. But it's an enjoyable little snippet nonetheless, so if you want an Olga fix, feel free to watch.

(Top photo: Reflections spotted on my walk home from work.)

White Cat

As I was walking to work yesterday morning, I saw this perfectly poised white cat sitting on a windowsill. It seemed so perfect I momentarily wondered if it was a garden ornament.

But then it moved! It sure blends in well with that building, doesn't it? I wonder if whoever lives there has an all-white living room, like Daisy Buchanan?

I had a strange realization yesterday. I was helping a boy with his library account, and when I pulled it up on the computer I happened to notice his date of birth -- a little nugget of data that normally doesn't mean much to me. It was July 22, 2011 -- just a few days after Dave and I first moved to London. I was amazed to see that we've been here so long that kids born after we arrived are now in sixth grade!

I looked back at my blog to see what Dave and I were doing around that time. That student's mother must have been in labor about when we moved out of the hotel and into a school-owned house, where we lived for several days while waiting for our apartment in Notting Hill to become available. We went to Bibendum for the first time. And he was probably born when I made that Zen video of shadows on the wall.

It boggles the mind. Where does the time go?

When Dave and I were at "Dune: Part Two" on Sunday, I went to get a coffee before the movie. I was walking through the shopping center where the theater is located when I looked down and saw a beheaded daffodil lying on the floor. Someone must have bought a bunch at the grocery store, and then one of them lost its head. I picked it up and put it in my jacket pocket, and when we got home I popped it into some water. It opened yesterday.

This is the first daffodil we've had indoors all season. I used to have to bring in lots of them, because Olga would break them off romping through the garden. These days she doesn't romp as much, so they stay outside, attached to their plants!

Tofu With Mrs. Robinson

A relatively quiet day yesterday. It was a rainy morning so Olga didn't want to go anywhere. I got our bedsheets to the laundromat and did some minor stuff around the house. I also finished the YA book I was reading, "Plague Land," a zombie apocalypse thriller that's probably too gory to recommend to any kids younger than high school.

Then Dave and I went to see "Dune: Part Two" at the cinema. It was very good. I didn't remember a lot of the details of the plot from the first movie, but I really didn't need to. The second one picks right up and keeps going, but I knew enough generalities that it made sense -- and the scenery and costumes and special effects were all so spellbinding that it was impossible not to be entertained. Definitely a big-screen experience. Dave tried to get us tickets to the IMAX theatre but it was sold out, so we saw it at our normal cinema, and that was good enough.

I told Dave afterwards that "Dune" is a good example of a story that needed to wait for a certain level of special-effects technology in order to be effectively told on screen.

We also had lunch at a Chinese place on Finchley Road that Dave likes. It has been completely remodeled from the last time we were there, and it's very colorful inside, with a whole arbor's worth of artificial yellow-orange wisteria hanging from the ceiling. (Is yellow wisteria a thing?) They were playing an interesting mix of '60s and '70s folk-acoustic music over the sound system. I dined on my tofu and broccoli with brown sauce to the harmonies of Simon & Garfunkel singing "Mrs. Robinson." There was some John Denver in there too.

Multiculturalism! It's kind of amusing.

Oh, good news! My black spot has vanished. I guess it really was just a healing injury. So that's one doctor's appointment I won't need to keep. The hospital still hasn't contacted me to schedule it, so when they do I'll just tell them to forget the whole thing.

(Top photo: A colorful mural near Euston Road, taken last weekend.)