Not sure if this makes any sense as I am currently drunk in Xiamen China..

Our usual Danish teacher, Bent, was sick today, so we were split into half and merged with regular level 1 classes. Apparently there are two level 1 classes on the same schedule as our phonetics class, so I wasn't just recycled to phonetics out of convenience, I was explicitly placed in phonetics before I can proceed to level 2. Anyway, the teacher in the new class was more confident than Bent and at first it was a nice change (not that Bent isn't confident, but his body language sometimes undermines his authority) but later it seemed like this guy had a bit more of an edge whereas Bent is invariably polite and exceptional at responding to negative student reactions with more positive teaching. It did mean that the semi-lame 2 minute presentation I prepared as homework was moot, and I'll have all weekend to master the new vocabulary Lars gave me so I can use it in a more extemporaneous presentation instead of a memorized speech.

One student in the class, Tordi, I thought introduced himself as French, presumably a Turkish immigrant since he doesn't look especially Gallic or speak English with a French accent. He is older, in his fifties or maybe sixties, and often struggles in class. In particular his English is very weak, so he doesn't always understand instructions. He was speaking Russian with Andrei the Russian at the second break so I chatted, mostly in English and a little Danish since my high school Russian seems to have been flushed completely by the succeeding three or four new languages I've failed to learn, and Andrei translated when necessary. Turns out Tordi left Afghanistan as a refugee in 1997 and is waiting for things to stabilize enough to go back. He is an ethnic Uzbek, from the north of Afghanistan, got his PhD in cosmology in Leningrad, and taught at Kabul University. He speaks Uzbek, Russian, Turkish, and Farsi, and if I understood correctly also Pashtun, Tadjik, and maybe German, and broken English. Quite possibly he's the smartest guy in the room. Still has trouble with the glottal stops, though. I suggested he had trouble with Danish because his head is simply full, and when Andrei laughed and translated Tordi agreed.

I draw in a sharp breath - I'm about to counter-attack. I'm about to rage, 'Gah! Do you want to stand here and make me promise not to sleep with *every* attractive actress and singer and novelist in the world one-by-one?!' Fortunately, a sudden, swooping gust of prescience brings me Margret's certain reply to this rhetorical question. I keep my idiot mouth shut. That's it then - it's checkmate in two; may as well knock the king over now and salvage a little dignity.

'OK,' I say. Quietly. My gaze weighted down feetwards.

'What?'

'OK.'

'Say it all.'

I look up into her eyes, hoping to see a tiny spark of mercy. There's nothing.

'OK. I promise I will not sleep with Alyson Hannigan.'

The words come out, and, somewhere deep inside me, a light is turned off, forever.

(From Mil Millington)

More than half a year after leaving Seattle, I finally dragged my lazy behind to Amager Kung Fu Skole, a few kilometers south of downtown Copenhagen. Everybody spoke perfect English, but only when they were talking to me, so I understood about zero percent of the group instructions, and just followed along as best I could. Which was moderately well, except for pushups and situps which led in embarrasingly short order to outright muscle failure. But the rest was all familiar - foot position on front kicks is different, hands chamber at the ribs instead of the waist - but it's very much the same art.

The people were very nice. The class was a bit loose, which is disappointing because I've gotten used to a rigorous, formal environment with well-known rules and find it a welcome change from daily reality, but the nice thing about being in a disciplined environment, whether it's martial arts or software development, is that you internalize the discipline and from then on it's always available to you, from inside. So I've been very fortunate to work with some serious ... disciples, I guess, of both martial arts and software development.

Towards the end of class, one of the black-belts was fooling around with a rubber knife at the other end of the room while the instructor kept us in a high horse stance with arms outstreched long enough that my hands fell asleep. And the guy dropped the rubber knife on the floor, and immediately dropped and started doing pushups. This is a rule I'm familiar with: weapons are respected, and clumsiness or carelessness with weapons is punished - and if nobody is watching, you'd better punish yourself if you have any self-respect. When I saw the guy drop for pushups, I had a deep smile and a comforting sense of home.

Okay, I went to class both times this week and it was fine. If I do more homework on the weekend I won't fall out of student mode and have such bad Mondays. The teacher is really nice, and he's done a much better job this week of keeping things moving. The only real killer is when he spends ten minutes helping a single student with a pronunciation problem. Sometimes I can hear the problems - like the Russians, who don't aspirate their plosives - and sometimes I can't. But most of us have different problems, so if he let us split into pairs, where the partner's job is just to listen and indicate right/wrong/close.

My own bugaboo is that I'm completely incapable of distinguishing between the i pronounced as an [i], such as in spis (same vowel as in speak) and the i pronounced as an [e], such as in sikkert (same vowel as in pick). It sounds easy when it's in English, peek/pick, but in Danish they are even closer, only a difference of a few millimeters gap between tongue and roof of mouth, and they can be short or long and I just can't hear it. On the tests, I get nine out of ten wrong, so the next time I try to hear the same way and switch my answers, and I still get nine of ten wrong.

The thing that makes Danish especially tricky to learn is that fast spoken Danish and carefully spoken Danish are almost two different dialects, and when you ask a Dane to repeat something they do it slowly and carefully, adding in new sounds so that you can hear the difference. Thanks, but no thanks - if you don't repeat the original sound, I'll never learn it.

And while slow spoken Danish in informed by about 75% of the written letters, conversational Danish ignores fully half and skimps on the rest. Example: Jeg er, which means "I am," is pronounced [Jai er] if each word is enunciated - that's the Yi with dipthong from Yikes and then the English word err. But in a sentence, such as Jeg er hjemme nu, I am home now, Jeg er is one syllable: [Ja:], like the English word yaw.

The temperature has been bobbling around zero (C), mostly under, since I got back from vacation. Between that and the throat stress from this language, my three-week old cough is likely to persist until summer. Which is quite lovely hereabouts.

Mr Kahneman's work points to three types of over-confidence. First, people tend to exaggerate their own skill and prowess; in polls, far fewer than half the respondents admit to having below-average skills in, say, love-making or driving. Second, they overestimate the amount of control they have over the future, forgetting about luck and chalking up success solely to skill. And third, in competitive pursuits such as betting on shares, they forget that they have to judge their skills against those of the competition.

I release managed OpenACS 5.0 and all I got was this lousy t-shirt blog entry, which I had to make post myself.

From a mail that went 'round the office today:

Speaking of Chinese airlines I’ve never been able to confirm my favorite air safety anecdote...

After a Chinese carrier’s jet slammed into the ground in near zero visibility the last thing on the cockpit voice recorder was the anti-collision system saying, "Pull up Pull up..." and the co-pilot asking the pilot (in Chinese), "What is the meaning of 'Pull up. Pull up.'?"

I found this in an article on user interface design talking about advanced control & warning systems in aircraft and their predominant use of English in the voice warning systems.

Kentis: That was key to the movie to me. Everything today is done in CG [animation], and personally, I don't get the same sense of danger that I do with movies from the '70s and '80s, when you saw stuntmen doing things, and you'd say, "Oh my god, someone was in that car when it wrecked!" So, it was important to work with real sharks, the way their tails flop around like big rats in the water…

Ryan: Yeah, we've all seen sharks cruising by on "Shark Week" but you don't realize how erratic and jerky they can be in the water.

Travis: In movies, there's one shark in the water, that's the one that's going to attack you, as opposed to a group that just hangs out and circles in and waits.

This might sound like empty campaign rhetoric but, in reality, Dean's Internet platform contains the key elements and catch phrases of a more sophisticated master plan for cyberspace concocted by a group of academics and public officials who advocate a "commons" vision of collective Internet governance. Their agenda consists of a three-pronged strategy: (1) Infrastructure: They want telecom, cable, and broadband high-speed networks subject to collective rule via a heavy dose of open access regulation, structural separation or even outright public ownership. And they want the Internet to be treated as a collective asset subject to "democratic rule" through a variety of "nondiscrimination" mandates and other regulatory controls. (2) Spectrum: They want most of the electromagnetic wireless spectrum to be treated as one big commons with very limited exclusive property rights. (3) Intellectual property: They want to water down IP rights and greatly expand fair use rights and the public domain.

I'm sure Mr Thierer meant that as a withering critique. I find it very encouraging. Judge for yourself: Principles for an Internet Policy.

I'm sad to report that my Danish learning process has taken a turn for the worse. After holiday travel caused me to miss a few classes of my Level 1 Danish class, I was rescheduled into a phonetics class, with the idea that, if I can pass it, I can proceed to level 2. However, there are several changes from my prior class that are making me realize how good the earlier class was. First, the original instructor, Steen, was the headmaster of the school. He has decades of experience, is quite unflappable, and seems to be the author of the special technique for teaching pronunciation that makes K.I.S.S. the top DSL (Danish as a Second Language - I think I just made that up) school in Copenhagen. The new guy is very nice, very enthusiastic, a trained linguist, and reminds me a lot of me as a teacher. In other words, he's one big long rookie mistake. Please allow me to enumerate the deficiencies in the new class:

• We meet from 5:15 pm to 9 pm Tuesday and Thursday, compared to 5:30 pm to 8:30 pm M/W/F. This is just too long.
• The old class had a strictly graded test at the end of each day. The new teacher explained his theory that the stress of preparing for the test was using up cognitive resources that could be better spent. Well, speaking for myself, a primary reason for going to a class instead of just sitting at home with a Danish workbook is that I need the external structure and pressure. With the old class, the pressure was to memorize written Danish sentences, certainly a good step in learning a language.
• The teacher subconsciously cheats his pronunciation when he is trying to emphasize points. Some students thought that the difference between the [e] and [i] vowels, which are my personal bugaboo because they are nearly identical, was that the [e] is long and the [i] is short. They thought this because the teacher pronounced them that way for three hours. He wasn't intending to, and he didn't realize he was doing it; he thought he was just speaking clearly for us.
• The old class had a set routine. This is critical in making the time pass quickly. The new teacher has no firm plan and so we spend all of those freed up cognitive resources wondering what we're going to do next.
• The class is too large. The instructor said he wanted only 9, but we have between ten and twelve. The last class had about 13 and felt smaller. I heard that of 18 students in the last T/Th level 1 class, only three passed. So maybe if I stick it out class will shrink.
• Many of the students are sullen. They have completed two or three full three-week courses and then been told they need to take a phonetics class, perceived as remedial. They speak enough Danish that much of the classroom instruction is in Danish. This makes me feel stupid for not knowing enough Danish, which is silly because I've had two weeks of class and some of them have had nine weeks.
• With the M/W/F format and constant preparation for tests, learning Danish becomes a constant part of your life. You're stressed, but it's a productive stress. With T/Th classes and no clear homework or testing, I have four-day weekends from learning; all of Monday, and Tuesday morning and afternoon, are filled with Sunday-night-style "end of the weekend" dread.
• The new class is four and a half weeks long, instead of 3 weeks. So I have three and a half more weeks of this to look forward to. That which does not kill you, makes you resent Danmark.

More things you wouldn't guess about spoken Danish by reading it: os, meaning us, and også, meaning also, are pronouced identically in fast spoken Danish. They share a vowel with the o in kop (cup) and the er in cykler (a bicycle).

Gulvet is pronouced something like ghoul and means, a floor. Køkkenet means kitchen, not coconut, and is pronounced kook-nuh. Hundrede does mean 100, but only half of the letters (hun and either of the es, take your pick) are even implied by the pronunciation.

I live a few blocks away from Christiania, which is a sort of hippie commune founded about thirty years ago when some, well, hippies, occupied an abandoned naval installation and declared independence from the EU, or EEC I guess, or Denmark, or something. It's not like I research this stuff. I've only been in there once. Anyway, it's most notorious for Pusher Street, where you can buy hash from a whole row of stands, like a farmer's market or swap meet. You used to be able to buy narcotics and things as well, but they haven't been openly sold in some time, thanks I gather to internal pressure. There are big signs saying, "No Cameras" and "Just Say No to Hard Drugs." The police raid all the time, but with a right-wing government in office the existence of Christiania as a whole is more tentative than usual. There was apparently a bigger raid than usual the other day, and Pusher Street's days are numbered. The point of this post is, if you are wondering what governmental drug policy looks like when it's part of a serious and cooperative attempt to build a better society, rather than posturing, moralism, hypocracy, denial, and lies, it looks like this:

'I'm duly impressed that Christiania's residents have, once again, demonstrated their ability to address the problem on their own. But the real challenge remains to bring about a state-controlled hash trade. There are plenty of places where hash is not sold under controlled conditions - and not distinguished from harder narcotics,' said [Unity List justice policy spokeswoman Line] Barfod.

If you don't count the whole space travel and humans on the moon stuff, does US federal spending on space represent a profitable research project?

But the fact that the total NASA investment of $55 billion yielded a paltry $5 billion in true spinoffs, creating entirely new products or industries, suggests a very poor return of ten cents on the dollar. Again, this should not be surprising, given the highly specialized nature of much of the engineering and development work conducted by NASA.

So rather than being an unusually good investment paying 7:1 or 22:1 for each dollar invested, NASA has an astoundingly bad 1:10 payoff -- about a factor of 100 worse than the commercial economy as a whole. (Federation of American Scientists)

Here's a counter-point:

A survey of forty-one companies that reported prior commercial success in transforming NASA R&D investments in the life sciences into marketable goods and services was conducted in late 1997 by the Space Policy Institute, George Washington University. Fifteen of these firms provided useful data for this study. These firms alone have cumulatively contributed over $1.5 billion in value added to the economy over the past twenty-five years. The cumulative NASA R&D investment in the technologies represented by the products of these firms was approximately $64 million. An additional $200 million in private R&D from those companies was stimulated by the NASA investment. This additional R&D was necessary for the production, development, and marketing of the com-mercial products and represents the positive leverage of NASA life sciences investments.

...

NASA's life sciences total expenditures over the past 40 years has amounted to approximately $3.7 billion (which includes many mission related projects that have made it possible for NASA to engage in manned space flight and for which there have been with no expected commercial benefits).

On the basis of these conservative estimates taken with mission success of the life sciences effort and ample evidence of other social benefits from the descriptions provided by the users of many specific life sciences spinoff applications, it can be concluded that NASA Life Sciences investments have more than "paid for themselves." (Space Policy Institute, George Washington University)

Note, though, that this report summary only claims that fifteen companies, which produced a total of $1.5 billion of wealth, received $64 million from NASA. It doesn't say that all $1.5 billion was generated from directly from the $64M, and in fact is does say that doesn't actually say that the $64 million NASA spent during the period studied resulted in the $1.5 billion. It actually implies that $264M in investment led to $1.5B, for a roughly 6:1 return.

Bottom line: after 15 minutes of Googling, I found plenty of NASA bragging and contradictory partial answers (though FAS, which had the negative report, is more neutral and plausible than a space program at a university). To learn more, I would actually have to read stuff and think, which I don't have time for today.

During 1990 and 1991, some 696,778 individuals served in the Persian Gulf as elements of Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm. Of these, 148 were killed in battle, 467 were wounded in action, and 145 were killed in accidents, producing a total of 760 casualties, quite a low number given the scale of the operations. As of May 2002, however, the Veterans Administration reported that an additional 8,306 soldiers had died and 159,705 were injured or ill as a result of service-connected "exposures" suffered during the war. Even more alarmingly, the V.A. revealed that 206,861 veterans, almost a third of General Norman Schwarzkopf's entire army, had filed claims for medical care, compensation and pension benefits based on injuries and illnesses caused by combat in 1991. After reviewing the cases, the agency has classified 168,011 applicants as "disabled veterans." In light of these deaths and disabilities, the casualty rate for the first Gulf War may actually be a staggering 29.3 percent.

executive director of the National Fenestration Rating Council

Lots of good airplane books this time. When you are spending many hours, often sick, in planes and trains and stations, and carrying a large bag of books accumulated city by city, you tend to set aside the more challenging reads for later. Books that got set aside quickly included: Metternich's Europe (a collection of early 19th century political and social essays from many sources), A Free Nation Deep in Debt (a history of the world from the perspective of governments and finance, but so far a disastrous failure at actually explaining instead of just describing), Political Control of the Economy (Edward Tufte from before he figured out how to visually present data).

Banks, Iain. Raw Spirit. 2003.

A book in which Scottish author Iain Banks drives around Scotland to visit different Scotch distilleries sounds good on paper, but the result is perhaps quarter-hearted and arguably worth missing even for rabid Banks fans. Skim the introductory pages, in which he tells you how wonderful his cars are and describes in detail the mundane process by which he came to write the book, read the first episode, in which the roads are all delightful swooping "Great Wee Roads" with glorious scenery, the distellery and the people are very nice, and the scotch is complex, probably peaty, and either deservedly famous or undiscovered treasure, and you needn't read any further.

Vinge, Vernor. A Deepness in the Sky; A Fire in the Deep; Across Realtime (includes The Peace War and Marooned in Real Time)

Top-grade science fiction, with well-earned Hugos and Nebulas to prove it. The ideas are amazing (either brain-poppingly original or, even more amazing, brain-poppingly original in 1981 or 1986 and already mundane today); the characters are much better than typical SF. My only complaint is that the writing isn't good enough to merit the title "literature," because everything else is and these books deserve to be read outside the genre.

Swofford, Anthony. Jarhead. 2003.

All of the good things you may have read about this book are true. It's messy, informative, occasionally over-reaching, and something easy and rewarding to read cover-to-cover.

McKinley, Robin. Sunshine

One of my favorite authors, Robin McKinley writes "fantasy" and "children's stories" which are pure joy in every respect. Recently she's been watching a lot of Buffy, and the resulting book (not a Buffy book, but a modern, wise-cracking, serious, scary, profane vampire novel) makes me think that if she'd written one episode for Joss every season, the TV show would have had a seven-year lock on the Emmys.

Cherryh, C.J. Explorer

Cherryh is sort of the Steven King of SF; she keeps churning it out, it all blurs together, it's all very good. Skimming online book reviews, it looks like I skipped book five in this series, but that really didn't matter much. The stories and characters are all very dense; what's most exciting about her writing is how she makes peoples' (and aliens') motivations and hidden agendas not just plot elements but essential narrative elements as well.

I'm working through Peter Singer's collection of his own writing, in part because it's interesting and in part because I'm trying to slowly self-educate myself on the basics of philosophy. I formed the opinion several years ago that the discipline of philosophy was in some sense a failure because, after thousands of years of work, philosophers haven't reported back to the rest of us yet. My evidence for this assertion was the fact that I made it through sixteen years of education, including four years at a liberal arts college which included a diverse set of required classes, without a clue as to the principles and tenets of philosophy. I have been accumulating rebuttals since, including:

• I didn't take any philo classes
• If we define philosophy to be the study of everything in human thought, except the things that have their own disciplines, then philosophy's success is evident in the fact that its domain has shrunk so much as it's "solved" problems and spun them into specialized branches to work out the details (we call these biology, economics, etc), and the remaining issues are necessarily the hardest
• Eastern philosophies such as Buddhism and Confucianism, have reported back early and often, as evidenced by their deep influence on many Asian societies.

Singer's work in Ethics is particularly accessible, in part because ethics are less abstract and in part because his writing is very clear:

It would be possible to bring medical practice into line with the current definition of death in terms of the irreversible cessation of all brain function. [...] From the perspective of an adherent of the sanctity of life ethic, of course, the gain is that we are no longer killing people by cutting out their hearts while they are still alive. (Singer, Peter. Writings on an Ethical Life. p175)

It takes people between eight and ten seconds to process and produce a lasting emotional response to a scene. Camera movement or different camera angles of the same scene can engage people through their orienting responses while providing enough time for them to process the scene.

To get home (Copenhagen) from vacation (the west coast of the United States), I took a train from San Diego to Los Angeles, stayed with my grandmother in LA, and then went to LAX to catch a flight to San Francisco to connect to a London/Heathrow-bound flight, all on United Airlines, before tranferring by bus to London/Stansted for an easyJet flight home, a tedious trick that can save US$1000 in airfare at the expense of a few hours on a bus.

When I checked in at LAX, the flight was already expected to be 20 minutes late, so the automatic check-in machine told me to pick up the phone, where I talked to a lady who told me that I would probably miss my connection, but that she couldn't actually do anything about it, like reschedule me, until the missed connection became reality.

Since I had dutifully arrived at the airport 2 hours in advance, I wasn't keen on sitting in a lovely LAX departure lounge waiting, and waiting some more, for a probably missed connection. I contemplated going across the airport to Southwest in case they had an immediate flight to SF that I could catch on the spot, but ultimately decided not to bother.

We landed in SF over an hour late. The London flight was a few minutes late departing, but by the time I and five Manchester skateboard pseudo-punks (they basically looked like the Partridge family with wheels) had negotiated the terminal, waited for the shuttle bus, waited for the shuttle bus to make a four-point turn to go under the airport to the adjacent terminal that we could have walked to faster if, waited for the elevator up two floors because there weren't stairs, and dashed down the international terminal to the gate, the doors were closed (though the plane was still sitting at the gate).

Next followed a fairly tedious forty minutes at the United counter, where they rescheduled me on a British Airways flight to London at 6 pm the following day. Out of Seattle. And kindly booked me on United to Seattle the following day, and provided a hotel voucher.

I questioned the logic of leaving only two hours for the connection in Seattle, but ultimately shrugged, called Fram, and spent the night in Oakland. (Not technically Oakland, because Fram has moved from one hippie grad student group house south of Berkeley to another north of Berkeley, and now lives in one of the many enclaves in the Bay area named after a city in a different state or country (e.g., Dublin, Pittsburg) whose name I can't be bothered to recall, thought it might have shared phonemes with "Atherton".

As I prepared to decamp from the United counter, I asked if I could retrieve my backpack from the checked-luggage aether. The Customer Service Agent blanched. It was subtle, and a customer who was not being as thoroughly service as I was, or who on fewer medications, might have missed it as she launched into a passive-aggressive explanation of how that might or might not be possible or a good idea. But I saw the signals. I knew it was a Bad Idea.

And since the backpack contained only dirty clothes (hallmark of a precisely planned vacation, I submit) and I had anticipated luggage misfortune by transferring all essentials (especially my toiletry bag, now overstuffed with over-the-counter cold drugs) to the carry-on book bag, I smiled and said, no problem. I don't need it tonight. I just wore my increasingly ripe Apology Shirt for two days, doing my bit for world peace.

My stay in Oakland featured slightly chilly but sparklingly sunny weather, the lovely BART system (trains every 20 minutes. My combined wait time for two trips: 36 minutes), whose motto should be, "as good as European mass transit at twice the price," tasty Tibetan food with a trio of graduate student scientists-to-be (more on the subject of scientificism in a later posting), and, as I did roughly every other day for the last week of the trip, waking up in a state similar to death because my body had not received essential chemicals (pseudoephedrine, naproxen, ibuprofen, chocolate) since the previous night.

Re-drugged and further fortified by a bagel and cream cheese, I was returned to a BART station by the trustworthy Fram and his new Prius (like the Honda Civic Hybrid but with a dashboard map display so distracting you have to click a don't-sue-Toyota-when-you-crash license every time you turn it on.).

Boarding at SF was unproblematic, if you don't count the 45-minute wait to check in - going ticketless doesn't help if they make you miss your connection and then give you a paper ticket - or the minor incident in which I left a green Time magazine nylon bag at one end of the line, so I wouldn't have to kick it forward every few seconds. By the time I though better of the idea (did I mention the chewable anti-emetic that Jon introduced to my pharmaceutical collection I introduced to my internal chemistry that morning? Apparently the sum total of three different "non-drowsy" medications may in fact be drowsiness) and went back the 50 feet to get it, they were about to call the cops.

(Fans of the literary technique known as foreshadowing may be interested to know that I did make discreet inquiries at the San Francisco counter regarding my luggage, and recieved equally discreet assurances. And that I did the same, with similar effect, at the British Airways gate counter in Seattle.)

I would also like to mention that I watched several scenes of Moulin Rouge on the plane - it's still fantastic, engrossing, and affecting even when muffled and squeezed.

Oh, and this would probably also be the place to mention that the BA 747 out of Seattle sat at the gate for an hour and forty five minutes after they closed the door because a cargo door was stuck in the cold. (It was slightly below freezing.) It seems to be that, with four hundred people waiting in the plane, they could have had the factory up the street send down a guy with some WD-40 or something. It was amusing but not surprising to see that the British configuration for a 747 has no fewer than five distinct classes of service. I identified myself as traveling in Peon class whenever asked. I don't know exactly why but I strongly resent the formal fee-based division by class in public services. I hate the idea of toll express lanes, of First Class, luxury suites at the ballpark, and so on.

Everything went smoothly in London. It only took a few minutes to report my lost backpack at the British Airways desk. I was slightly confused when the bus ticket lady said I would "have to hurry" to catch the 3 pm bus to Stansted airport, since it was 2:50 pm and the bus stop was fifty yards away, but, unencumbered by my backpack, I was able to make the distance in the allotted time.

And so, after a lovely two-hour trip through the farm belt around London, watching the truck drivers drive their trucks down the wrong side of the road from the wrong side of their cabins, I reached Stansted, London-area hub of easyJet.

Since United has no agreements with easyJet, I had had to reschedule my easyJet connection to Copenhagen at my own expense: about US$80, and it's a close call in my opinion: whether it's less painful to reschedule via a web site where I can see all of my options but have to pay, from my laptop while sitting in a comfortable chair under the watchful eye of a kitty-cat, using Fram's wireless network, or to get rescheduled for free in a forty-minute standing session at a service desk with a harried woman who plans my itinerary in a phone conversation with an unheard cohort in which my actual existence is the least critical factor in the process.

easyJet enforces a 5kg limit for cabin carry-ons, so I had to check in my green nylon bag with 11 kilos of books, pausing only to remove critical items like housekeys, the water from the water bottle (the nozzle of which pops open in an underpressurized environment, much as, to my tremendous relief, my deafeningly plugged ears painlessly did as well), and a few select chemical supplements for my wellbeing.

(For the benefit of new readers: "chemical supplements for my wellbeing" can be parsed as "chocolate.")

And from that point, everything was according to plan. I was briefly concerned because I had only a few hundred pages left in my pulpy SF book for a one-hour flight and an hour or more of waiting, and I wondered if I should have snagged a backup book from the checked bag, but in the event I mostly snoozed anyway. I took a bus from the Copenhagen airport to my apartment. It didn't even start snowing in Copenhagen until the next day.

In summary: after a two-week vacation with friends and family in Portland, Los Angeles, and San Diego perfect in every way except for a bad cold and an excess of travel, I managed to visit Seattle and San Francisco as well. I was 30 hours late returning to Copenhagen and so missed the Monday Danish class and thus failed the Danish test (for which I studied almost daily - I have witnesses, much to their dismay), and combined with failing a test the first week and missing a test before the vacation since I was already in London, I have failed/missed enough tests that I have to retake the three-week Level 1 class. But I'm not alone: apparently enough other people failed that they are immediately scheduling a new three-week Level 1 evening class just for the repeat students, starting next week. I hope I get the same teacher.

And the backpack was delivered to the office only two days after I got home.

To get home (Copenhagen) from vacation (the west coast of the United States), I took a train from San Diego to Los Angeles, stayed with my grandmother in LA, and then went to LAX to catch a flight to San Francisco to connect to a London/Heathrow-bound flight, all on United Airlines, before tranferring by bus to London/Stansted for an easyJet flight home, a tedious trick that can save US$1000 in airfare at the expense of a few hours on a bus.

When I checked in at LAX, the flight was already expected to be 20 minutes late, so the automatic check-in machine told me to pick up the phone, where I talked to a lady who told me that I would probably miss my connection, but that she couldn't actually do anything about it, like reschedule me, until the missed connection became reality.

Since I had dutifully arrived at the airport 2 hours in advance, I wasn't keen on sitting in a lovely LAX departure lounge waiting, and waiting some more, for a probably missed connection. I contemplated going across the airport to Southwest in case they had an immediate flight to SF that I could catch on the spot, but ultimately decided not to bother.

We landed in SF over an hour late. The London flight was a few minutes late departing, but by the time I and five Manchester skateboard pseudo-punks (they basically looked like the Partridge family with wheels) had negotiated the terminal, waited for the shuttle bus, waited for the shuttle bus to make a four-point turn to go under the airport to the adjacent terminal that we could have walked to faster if, waited for the elevator up two floors because there weren't stairs, and dashed down the international terminal to the gate, the doors were closed (though the plane was still sitting at the gate).

Next followed a fairly tedious forty minutes at the United counter, where they rescheduled me on a British Airways flight to London at 6 pm the following day. Out of Seattle. And kindly booked me on United to Seattle the following day, and provided a hotel voucher.

I questioned the logic of leaving only two hours for the connection in Seattle, but ultimately shrugged, called Fram, and spent the night in Oakland. (Not technically Oakland, because Fram has moved from one hippie grad student group house south of Berkeley to another north of Berkeley, and now lives in one of the many enclaves in the Bay area named after a city in a different state or country (e.g., Dublin, Pittsburg) whose name I can't be bothered to recall, thought it might have shared phonemes with "Atherton".

As I prepared to decamp from the United counter, I asked if I could retrieve my backpack from the checked-luggage aether. The Customer Service Agent blanched. It was subtle, and a customer who was not being as thoroughly service as I was, or who on fewer medications, might have missed it as she launched into a passive-aggressive explanation of how that might or might not be possible or a good idea. But I saw the signals. I knew it was a Bad Idea.

And since the backpack contained only dirty clothes (hallmark of a precisely planned vacation, I submit) and I had anticipated luggage misfortune by transferring all essentials (especially my toiletry bag, now overstuffed with over-the-counter cold drugs) to the carry-on book bag, I smiled and said, no problem. I don't need it tonight. I just wore my increasingly ripe Apology Shirt for two days, doing my bit for world peace.

My stay in Oakland featured slightly chilly but sparklingly sunny weather, the lovely BART system (trains every 20 minutes. My combined wait time for two trips: 36 minutes), whose motto should be, "as good as European mass transit at twice the price," tasty Tibetan food with a trio of graduate student scientists-to-be (more on the subject of scientificism in a later posting), and, as I did roughly every other day for the last week of the trip, waking up in a state similar to death because my body had not received essential chemicals (pseudoephedrine, naproxen, ibuprofen, chocolate) since the previous night.

Re-drugged and further fortified by a bagel and cream cheese, I was returned to a BART station by the trustworthy Fram and his new Prius (like the Honda Civic Hybrid but with a dashboard map display so distracting you have to click a don't-sue-Toyota-when-you-crash license every time you turn it on.).

Boarding at SF was unproblematic, if you don't count the 45-minute wait to check in - going ticketless doesn't help if they make you miss your connection and then give you a paper ticket - or the minor incident in which I left a green Time magazine nylon bag at one end of the line, so I wouldn't have to kick it forward every few seconds. By the time I though better of the idea (did I mention the chewable anti-emetic that Jon introduced to my pharmaceutical collection I introduced to my internal chemistry that morning? Apparently the sum total of three different "non-drowsy" medications may in fact be drowsiness) and went back the 50 feet to get it, they were about to call the cops.

(Fans of the literary technique known as foreshadowing may be interested to know that I did make discreet inquiries at the San Francisco counter regarding my luggage, and recieved equally discreet assurances. And that I did the same, with similar effect, at the British Airways gate counter in Seattle.)

I would also like to mention that I watched several scenes of Moulin Rouge on the plane - it's still fantastic, engrossing, and affecting even when muffled and squeezed.

Oh, and this would probably also be the place to mention that the BA 747 out of Seattle sat at the gate for an hour and forty five minutes after they closed the door because a cargo door was stuck in the cold. (It was slightly below freezing.) It seems to be that, with four hundred people waiting in the plane, they could have had the factory up the street send down a guy with some WD-40 or something. It was amusing but not surprising to see that the British configuration for a 747 has no fewer than five distinct classes of service. I identified myself as traveling in Peon class whenever asked. I don't know exactly why but I strongly resent the formal fee-based division by class in public services. I hate the idea of toll express lanes, of First Class, luxury suites at the ballpark, and so on.

Everything went smoothly in London. It only took a few minutes to report my lost backpack at the British Airways desk. I was slightly confused when the bus ticket lady said I would "have to hurry" to catch the 3 pm bus to Stansted airport, since it was 2:50 pm and the bus stop was fifty yards away, but, unencumbered by my backpack, I was able to make the distance in the allotted time.

And so, after a lovely two-hour trip through the farm belt around London, watching the truck drivers drive their trucks down the wrong side of the road from the wrong side of their cabins, I reached Stansted, London-area hub of easyJet.

Since United has no agreements with easyJet, I had had to reschedule my easyJet connection to Copenhagen at my own expense: about US$80, and it's a close call in my opinion: whether it's less painful to reschedule via a web site where I can see all of my options but have to pay, from my laptop while sitting in a comfortable chair under the watchful eye of a kitty-cat, using Fram's wireless network, or to get rescheduled for free in a forty-minute standing session at a service desk with a harried woman who plans my itinerary in a phone conversation with an unheard cohort in which my actual existence is the least critical factor in the process.

easyJet enforces a 5kg limit for cabin carry-ons, so I had to check in my green nylon bag with 11 kilos of books, pausing only to remove critical items like housekeys, the water from the water bottle (the nozzle of which pops open in an underpressurized environment, much as, to my tremendous relief, my deafeningly plugged ears painlessly did as well), and a few select chemical supplements for my wellbeing.

(For the benefit of new readers: "chemical supplements for my wellbeing" can be parsed as "chocolate")

And from that point, everything was according to plan. I was briefly concerned because I had only a few hundred pages left in my pulpy SF book for a one-hour flight and an hour or more of waiting, and I wondered if I should have snagged a backup book from the checked bag, but in the event I mostly snoozed anyway. I took a bus from the Copenhagen airport to my apartment. It didn't even start snowing in Copenhagen until the next day.

In summary: after a two-week vacation with friends and family in Portland, Los Angeles, and San Diego perfect in every way except for a bad cold and an excess of travel, I managed to visit Seattle and San Francisco as well. I was 30 hours late returning to Copenhagen and so missed the Monday Danish class and thus failed the Danish test (for which I studied almost daily - I have witnesses, much to their dismay), and combined with failing a test the first week and missing a test before the vacation since I was already in London, I have failed/missed enough tests that I have to retake the three-week Level 1 class. But I'm not alone: apparently enough other people failed that they are immediately scheduling a new three-week Level 1 evening class just for the repeat students, starting next week. I hope I get the same teacher.

And the backpack was delivered to the office only two days after I got home.

They're both painfully aware that Danish bands have a reputation for sucking royally, but they're both proud of putting Denmark on the musical map. They're especially touchy about Sweden, the country that has been kicking Denmark's ass in the Scandinavian-rock game since Abba. "Swedes have a lot of self-confidence," Foo says. "In Denmark, there's a lack of self-confidence. Nobody's supposed to be better than anybody else. There's a saying: 'Don't rise above the noise.' That's why every Dane who's ever successful has to leave." So who do the Danes really hate? "The Germans," Foo says. "They invaded us in the Forties, so everybody still hates them. It sucks for the Germans, but you know, they fucked up."

"The French are assholes," Wagner adds.

"Every single one of them," Foo agrees. "Except Serge Gainsbourg. And Brigitte Bardot."