GRABBINGSAND

Our Revolution … presented us an album on which we were free to write what we pleased. We had no occasion to search into musty records, to hunt up royal parchments, or to investigate the laws and institutions of a semi-barbarous ancestry. We appealed to those of nature, and found them engraved on our hearts.

Thomas Jefferson (June 5, 1824)

Georgia State Rep Tommy Benton has plucked former State Rep (now US Representative) Lynn Westmoreland’s old “Ten Commandments” bill from the 2004 circular file, given it a once over and pre-filed it for consideration after the New Year as HR 941.

Benton is not the first State Rep to attempt a ressurection of Westmoreland’s “religious heritage” legislation. State Rep Tommy Smith presented the very same bill for “show & tell” last June as HR 914.

Westmoreland’s bill is a lengthy read, made all the more bulky by the verbatim copying and pasting of the three documents under consideration. (more…)

We were down to a skeleton crew of five. Due to the severe gravitational pull of other local events like the ritual relocation of a certain pirate, the opening night of RENT (The Movie) and the booking of some inexplicably popular Bon Jovi cover band, the only hands on deck belonged to Nikki, Tony, Joseph, BJ and your host.

We had little luck with the College Sports questions. (Curse you, Ohio State, for not being the answer to one question and for being the right answer to another question.) We all failed to recognize Nikki’s observation that Venus could really be hotter than Mercury. (The greenhouse effect of a planet with an all-gas-all-the-time atmosphere is no joke.) The Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620, not 1632. And the King Kong of 1976 chose to do his rampaging from atop the World Trade Center, as opposed to either The Empire State Building (as he had in 1933 and will again in a few weeks) or The Chrysler Building.

All was not for naught, however. In the end, Woodrow Wilson’s face on the largest bill ever produced in the United States sealed the deal and sent us home with a 1st place victory, thus restoring our championship status.

We also won beer and a bear. Really. A stuffed Falcons-themed bear with a lop-sided head.

Bill Clinton and Al Gore - Putting People First (1992) (1 of 6)
Originally uploaded by grabbingsand.

While cleaning out the closet under the stairs, I went through some old papers and scraps and so on. In among the photos and college newspapers, I found this. Interesting reading, particularly the part about the religious Right gaining too much influence in politics.

Wow. I miss those guys.

SearsWishbook.1979C.P024
Originally uploaded by Sears Wishbook.

A found Flickr photo scan from the 1979 Sears Wishbook. I was seven at the time, so I had to have the Superman PJs for Christmas. And I got red socks to go with them.

Of course, the only super power those faux-flannel PJs gave anybody was the ability to turn a poly-blend blanket into a big, flat Van DeGraff generator.

And yes, I did wear them to kindergarten for Show & Tell. Like any of you wouldn’t.

Based on our recent trip, some observations …

• Tabloid-sized Newspapers. Britain’s tabloid papers are usually poor representations of journalism. Most are loaded with gossip and speculation. Most are focused on celebrity and fueled by rumour. Most are written with a sensationalism that would make a National Enquirer turn to the copy of The Star and say, “Damn.” But they remain incredibly popular, and I know why. It’s the size. There is just something so incredibly appealing about a newspaper that doesn’t make you elbow the person next to you on the train. On top of that, they’re all in one piece and not in sections.

  Thankfully, more legitimate papers have been taking the tabloid-size route in recent years (The Independent, The Times) so even if you don’t want to read about Posh Spice or David Beckham, you can still get your news in a fellow-passenger-friendly format.

• Advertisements for Books. They’re in tube stations, on train platforms, at street corners. In the kinds of spots we usually save for promoting the latest Ashton Kutcher masterpiece, Brits get massive, full-color advertisements for the latest novels. Sure, most of these books are just pop fiction, but it’s a good sign all the same. Reading is fundamental, after all.
• Glass-Bottled Milk. From a milkman. Like Coca-Cola, milk just seems to taste better from a glass bottle.
• Old Men in Suits. You see them on the train or in the Underground. They’re retired, mostly. Maybe they’re on military pensions from service performed fifty years ago. In the American mindset, they have little reason to get all dressed up just for a journey into town, and yet there they are. Good suits, white shirts, neck ties. Some wearing hats that went out of fashion in the US before Kennedy was elected. Most of all, they look proud.
• Costa Cappuccino. Starbucks is good, but Costa is better. When I was there in 2002, I thought I only liked Costa for the corrugated sleeves they put around their to-go beverage cups — it was a texture thing, you understand. But this time, we bought very few coffees on the run. Instead, we’d sit and enjoy and gather up steam for more walking. So I had time to sip and consider and come to the conclusion that Costa is just better. Not sure just why. It just is.
• Free Admission to Museums. You want an educated and aware populace? Let them educate and entertain themselves simultaneously without paying a fee. The most impressive museum in all of London is probably The British Museum. They could charge tourists £5 ($8.60) a head and not lose a bit of daily traffic … but they don’t. Museums in London are free. Special exhibits often cost extra and most museums do use conveniently placed plexiglass boxes to suggest a donation of £3 or so, but an empty pocket or a diminished dollar is no excuse to not go and learn something. So with that in mind … how much is admission to our new aquarium?
• Inevitable Tea. Sooner or later, someone is going to offer you tea. While we all run on a steady diet of coffee, Coca-Cola or sweet iced tea in the southeastern US, it is very rare that anyone is going to go to the trouble of putting a kettle on the stove to make a cup of tea. For such a simple drink, the preparation still resembles a small ritual of boiling, pouring, waiting and stirring. It’s the waiting part that makes it good, I think.
• Doctor Who. If I had never spent so many late Saturday nights in my living room, watching two-year or three-year delayed episodes of Doctor Who on GPTV (WCLP - Channel 18 out of Chatsworth) with the volume down so as not to wake my sleeping parents, would I have developed such a fascination for the UK? And is it any wonder that I just smile like an idiot, knowing that my ten-year-old nephews have become fast fans of the newly resurrected Doctor Who on the BBC?
• Better Bacon (That Isn’t Bacon). We would call it country ham, I think. Whatever you call it, I say it’s awesome.
• Walk-Up Bakeries. On our second morning in Canterbury, we walked through town to St Augustine’s Abbey. I had a map, but decided not to look at it that morning. The heart of Canterbury is a walled city surrounded by a circular road. If north is 12 o’clock, then our hotel was just outside the wall at 4 o’clock. The abbey sits at 2 o’clock and change, so I figured that we could walk from our hotel into almost the center of town, then strike back out just a bit more to the north.

  It worked quite well, and along the way, we passed a little bakery/tea shop with incredible little items in the window. We’d just had breakfast — see Bacon, above — so we were determined to come back by later in the day. And we did. Best under £2 treat of the whole trip, I think.

• Internet Cafes. Some are hidden. Some are sketchy. Some are crowded. But they’re all just the most convenient places. The Internet cafe died out (for the most part) in the US years ago, but I think that was because there was too much of an attempt to balance out the ‘net and cafe aspects. The reality is that access to information at a fair hourly rate is the most important commodity. Coffee in any form is secondary. In one place we found in Cambridge, coffee wasn’t even an option. The place was just a crowded store-front of eighteen PCs with one lonely guy at a counter collecting cash.

  “How much?,” I asked.
  “£1 an hour. You can sit at number 16.”
  “Do I have to sign anything?”
  “Nah. I see you.”

  Customer service aside, this is a place that understands just what they’re offering. Not everyone has their electronic life in their pocket — not yet — but there are times when you need to get to that email, find those directions, check that auction or confess your love … like the guy sitting next to me at #15. He looked maybe 15 or 16. English was his second or third language. The large screen resolution made it where I couldn’t help but notice the gist of what he was writing. It was a Yahoo email full of confessional romance. At some point, he stops and asks the guy at #17 a question. “Dezy-ray. Is it like this spelled? Dee-Eee-Ess-Yiii-ray?” The guy at #17 glances over and rolls his eyes, so I lean to look. “Desire” is what he has typed. I give him the thumbs up. “Oh, thank you,” he says with a smile.

• An Unabashed Love of Pop Music. Pop music is only pop music in England. I’m convinced of this. In the US, pop music is driven by what ought to be popular and what radio stations dictate based on the encouragement of public relations firms and ratings scales. Even stations like DaveFM that claim to be the on-air equivalent of someone’s iPod on shuffle are still constrained by genre or time. But UK pop stations seem to have no such restraints, meaning that Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons can be followed by Shania Twain. Shania can be followed by Angie Aparo. Angie can go into Human League. Human League can go to Madonna. Madonna can … and on and on. It is jarring at first, but still pop in the outright sense of the word. Popular music for the populace, because face it … not everybody has the best of tastes and not everybody follows the latest greats, but only the British are unashamed to admit it.

(Originally, I was going to post this to the Atlanta Metblog … but I thought again, decided against … then I thought again, decided for … then against again. Now, it’s been aging in my draft posts for a few weeks months and I feel obliged to put it somewhere, because I like what the source material has to say about Atlanta then and Atlanta now.

Also, I’ve been too busy to post anything current since we’ve gotten back.)

In 1903, W.E.B. Dubois — then a professor of Economics and History at Atlanta University — made public some very apt and prescient observations of Atlanta. Chapter Five of The Souls Of Black Folk is entitled “Of the Wings of Atalanta” and opens with an epigram by John Greenleaf Whittier. Dubois then starts his description of Atlanta as follows:

South of the North, yet north of the South, lies the City of a Hundred Hills, peering out from the shadows of the past into the promise of the future. I have seen her in the morning, when the first flush of day had half-roused her; she lay gray and still on the crimson soil of Georgia; then the blue smoke began to curl from her chimneys, the tinkle of bell and scream of whistle broke the silence, the rattle and roar of busy life slowly gathered and swelled, until the seething whirl of the city seemed a strange thing in a sleepy land …

It is a hard thing to live haunted by the ghost of an untrue dream; to see the wide vision of empire fade into real ashes and dirt; to feel the pang of the conquered, and yet know that with all the Bad that fell on one black day, something was vanquished that deserved to live, something killed that in justice had not dared to die; to know that with the Right that triumphed, triumphed something of Wrong, something sordid and mean, something less than the broadest and best. All this is bitter hard; and many a man and city and people have found in it excuse for sulking, and brooding, and listless waiting.

It’s heavy writing, very full of the charming, if somewhat cloying, vocabulary of a man in love with words and worshipful of education. But if you fail to see our modern city in that passage, please read on. Pay particular attention to very apt comparisons to the Greek myth of Atalanta, pursued by Hippomenes and distracted by the bling shine of golden apples.

Red Children
Originally uploaded by grabbingsand.

We were in London on Monday. Today is Friday and we’re home. It’s good to be back.

We walked from The British Library to The British Museum. This stretch is described as The Museum Mile, though it felt more like three or four than one. Using the Force — which is not as strong in foreign countries, I have to admit — I walked us from the Library, down Euston Road, then left onto Gower Street. It was only a few blocks, but our route took us through the city campus of the Univesity College of London. Walks become much longer when you’re avoiding oncoming students and breathing diesel from passing taxis.

Once we got to the Museum, it only made sense to rest outside. My little reward was getting this photo of some kids in red on the front steps.

Today, back in Gerrards Cross.

Yesterday was spent in Salisbury. Words do nothing to describe Salisbury Cathedral. Photos might fail as well, though many of them I took. The B&B was the best of the three we’ve visited and we told our innkeeper as much.

Monday night was spent just blocks from Waterloo station. Richard II at The Old Vic. Kevin Spacey makes for a great king.

Monday’s day was all over London. The British Library, The British Museum and the gift shop of The National Gallery. They wanted £9 for admission to the Rubens exhibit, but we figured their collection of lovely postcards would do just as well. Heathens, we. So what. We found a Wagamama nearby for dinner and that is all that matters.

Gatwick tomorrow morning. Hartsfield-Jackson sometime later in the afternoon.

Steeple Silhouette
Originally uploaded by grabbingsand.

I’ve posted and made public the photos I took in Cambridge. Later photos from Canterbury will come … well … later. For now, take a look and see some of what we’ve seen so far.

In Canterbury. This is our second day in the city.

Right now, I’m in the lobby of our B&B, posting from an old school iMac (this one is blue) on what has to be the slowest wireless connection ever. I know how much time has passed because of the many light jazz favorites that have played on the lobby stereo since I started. Did you know there was a Musak version of “Baker Street?” There is. With saxophones.

Visited the massive cathedral here yesterday. Probably the highlight of the trip so far, at least for this city. Walked around the ruins of St Augustine’s Abbey this morning.

Day before yesterday found us in Cambridge.

Somewhere along the way, we lost Tuesday.

Tomorrow, it is back to Gerrards Cross to stay with family and daytrip a bit into London.

Lobby stereo is playing some Irishman’s cover of “Vincent.” Must go.

Cheerio from here. Photos likely tomorrow.