The Church of Tesco

Even when all other restaurants had betrayed us, Tesco was there, offering up cold sandwiches in boxes for surprisingly cheap. I resisted at first, but her siren song called to me one lonely Sunday night when the Subway's credit card machine broke, and every other restaurant was either closed or super-expensive. It was then that I gave in, finally coming to grips with the fact that this particular brand of boxed meal wasn't that bad. Sure, there were some bizarre combinations--"prawn and cucumber," "ham (no cheese)," and "lettuce and tomato (no bacon)"--but when you found a good one, like this particular ham and cheese combination, it was as good as anything you got at Fred Meyer.

I estimate that, during our time in not just London but the UK generally, Gina and I consumed 2,568 boxed sandwiches. Mainly because every other place was prohibitively expensive for Americans and their worthless currency.

The Devil Flies from Heathrow to Seattle

There is no hell hot enough to match the torture that was the flight from Heathrow to Seattle. It was, without a glimmer of doubt, the worst plane ride I’ve ever experienced. The sheer number of things that had to happen, often far in the past, in order to converge on this one experience almost makes one believe in fate. Bad luck alone cannot begin to explain the series of unfortunate events which led to this travesty. It was ten hours of pure, unadulterated, uncut misery. It makes me never want to fly again, lest these veiled, incorporeal fates work against me once more.

We were sitting in a jam-packed 747, my wife on the middle row aisle and me next to her. The traveler on my immediate right was a large British gentleman who barely fit in the seat. He wasn’t fat, but just very tall, his limbs spread akimbo across the armrests on either side. Directly in front of us was what appeared to be a newlywed couple who was not in any way shy about their amorous relationship. This wouldn’t bug me so much, but the woman was an inconsiderate bitch: she spent the entire flight with her seat all the way back, and actually had to be told by a flight attendant to put that shit up before landing. I’ll get to why this was so horrible in a second.

But it was our rearward neighbors who provided the most aggravation: pre-school boys, probably no more than five or six, one behind me, and one behind the lanky Brit to my right. I’ll call the one directly behind my seat Lucifer, and his brother is Baal. Lucifer had a fantastic habit of either kicking my seat or getting out of his seat and playing on the ground, thus impacting my seat every few seconds. He did this for almost the entire flight, give or take an hour at the end. No amount of yelling or glaring could put an end to this behavior. His brother, Baal, had an unhealthy fascination with the seatback tray, driving it up and down with great force, repeatedly, and causing the entire middle row in front of him to feel something like a vibrating mattress. Again, the child’s primitive brain did not comprehend strong social cues that are normally taken to mean, “Stop that or I’ll tear off your fucking head.” The best part, though, had to be the tantrums often thrown by Lucifer, whereupon he would cry, kick, and generally behave like an infant. And then, the part that really roused my ire: the lackluster parents, who sat on either side of the two devils, and did absolutely nothing throughout the flight.

Fun fact: When my brother, Luke (The Boy) was little, he threw the kind of tantrums people remember for years after they end. When we were forced to fly somewhere together, my mother would bring a blanket, cover her and The Boy, and cover his mouth and basically just let him cry it out. Her efforts were appreciated by the rest of the commuters, I’m sure. She also occasionally dragged the screaming kid into the bathroom, where she would cover his mouth in there and let him cry it out.

The mother used the latter trick after about an hour or more of tantrum-throwing, more out of a sense of guilt than common decency. But she didn’t cover his mouth—the whole back half of the plane could hear that little brat attempting to raise the dead. Her apathy was so overwhelming that my wife at one point glared at their father, who shrugged his shoulders as if to say, “I know this experience is ruining everybody’s day, but fuck it. I’m not doing a thing.” These parents deserve some sort of apathetic parenting award. There’s a nice easy solution to this whole dilemma that many people either don’t realize or refuse to accept: Don’t take preschoolers on trans-Atlantic flights! I don’t think this should have to be written down anywhere. It’s the kind of general knowledge that one equates with knowing the Earth is round or that gravity pulls things down. I experienced several gleeful fantasies involving the deaths of those youngsters, but I think slaying obnoxious children on an airplane is at least a misdemeanor.

But there was a third child! A black boy, about the same age (I guessed) as the Satanic Spawns, but he did not scream or kick my seat, he merely wandered the plane, aimlessly, cavorting down the aisles with exuberant glee. To be fair, he spent the majority of his time at the back of the plane near the bathrooms. We discovered that his father was the lanky fellow next to me, and there was a two or three hour period where that bloke was simply not in his seat. I later found that he was in the back of the plane with his son during that time. While his repetitious tours of the plane did not elicit threats of bodily harm from me, it was annoying nonetheless.

The evil whore in front of me, however, caused me physical pain. British Airways features seats that retract a generous amount, and when the person in front of you has their seat back all the way, you basically have to retract yours as well or else risk a forehead injury. So I had to put my seat all the way back, but here’s where the problems start: Despite being able to retract impressively, the seats on a British Airways plane are not the most ergonomically designed things you’ll ever sit on. They encourage a C-curve in the lower back, not a neutral curve, so those of us with back pain are in for a world of hurt. Even sitting straight up doesn’t totally solve the problem, but laying back aggravates it tenfold. This was worrying because, supposedly, that spinal injection I got two months ago should have eased all pain in that region. I can think of only two reasons why the pain was not only present, but intense: I either made my L5-S1 disk protrude again (by being in that position for 9.5 hours), or another disk collapsed. Lilith slept the whole time, though, like a baby, while I squirmed and writhed in agony.

And then you had the old people. The vast majority of the people flying from Heathrow to Seattle yesterday were obese, aged, or in many cases both. This particular group spent most of its time hulking from their seats to the bathroom and back. It would have been more prudent to simply book seats in the bathrooms. Like the black kid, these instances rarely caused my blood pressure to boil, but were simply indicative of a flight that was completely without calm or stillness.

Matters were not helped by inconvenient facts such as these: I: The plane was fifty (50) minutes late to take-off, meaning that our trip to the connecting flight in Seattle was a hasty one. II: Old people are constantly coughing, wheezing, snoring, snotting, and making noises one does not often associate with our species. As of such, I was in constant fear of infection. III: The sharpness of the movies on the seatback screens are worse than my iPod. IV: The water is heavily chlorinated on British Airways flights, so much so that you can practically taste the deep end. V: They give you free food on British Airways, but it’s still airplane food. That might be chicken, but it might also be turkey stuffing. I remember now why I don’t pine for the days where I was given a “meal” on American flights.

The flight back from Seattle was much more enjoyable. Because I wasn’t stuck behind some bitch who wouldn’t put her seat up, I was able to get into my laptop bag and sneak my iPod out to watch “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.” Interestingly, I noted with some disappointment that the iTunes version of the film removes breasts but not wangs (go figure). By the time the movie ended and I had listened to a few songs, we were home free. And now we ARE home, I’m back on my routine, and everything’s hunky-dory!

An American Paleoartist in London: The Next Day

Today was actually a lot of fun, maybe the most fun day we've had so far. In the morning, we headed to the British Museum, which was pretty incredible. The Egyptian rooms in particular were beyond amazing. We were both hoping that the Great Wave painting would be there, but it was being rotated. Curses! But hey, it's tough not to be totally impressed by the Parthenon room. My gosh. My gosh! We stayed there for a very long time, just wandering around and being in awe. Sadly, the museum filled up very quickly, and before too long it was shoulder-to-shoulder. After leaving, we ate lunch and headed to Victoria Station to get tickets to Bromley South (just 10 pounds for both of us!) to see Down House. Getting around Kent was kind of awkward--bus tickets cost 2 pounds apiece, and Gina thought we only had 3 points on the back. Thankfully, she found another pound in her coin purse, and we are officially out of cash and coins!


Down House was incredible, but I was disappointed that it had become so museum-ee. The Heritage Society clearly rebuilt the whole place, adding signs and glass displays. The most impressive rooms were those that remained unchanged with a red velvet rope keeping people away, precisely because they were unchanged! On the trip back, I suddenly realized I was dead tired, and almost fell asleep on the train. There was a very busty girl who was almost falling out of her top, though, so I had to keep one eye open. LOL! Even Gina was impressed! When we got back, we weren't out of the woods yet. We weren't impressed by the food court at Victoria this time, and walked back to the hotel, only to leave again in pursuit of food. Food was incredibly hard to find! I guess London closes at 7 p.m. on Sundays, because virtually every restaurant was closed. Eventually, we just got sick of walking and settled for Subway. But there was an interesting note on the door--their credit card machine was broken! Oh, damn you, Subway! Right then and there, I converted to the Church of Tesco, and found myself enjoying a Sandwich In a Box and a Coke! Currently, we're watching "The X-Factor." It's much better than American's version of the show (American Idol? America's Got Talent?). We keep hoping to come across Jeeves & Wooster, but I don't think it's on tonight.

An American Paleoartist in London: Day I've Lost Track

I'm not saying I dislike London, I'm just saying I dislike certain aspects of it. The crowds, for instance. The apparantly omnipresent delays and closures in the Underground. The mid-afternoon ceiling work in the Victoria Station that actually closes the ticketing area. The expensive taxi fares, unbelievably expensive train tickets, and Pickadilly Circus. Of course, other parts of London I love. I love the concept of the Underground, though it's clear that the execution of the Underground lacks finesse. I love the architecture and old buildings, especially Parliment and Westminster Abbey.

Gina and I left Bristol early today. Can't say I'm sad to go, although I will miss the sauropod symposium and the poster sessions (there's one about Carnotaurus' arms), but I have people seeing things for me and they will hopefully report back to me, perhaps over a glass of chai back home. Why did we have to leave so early? Checkout time is 11:00 a.m., and our train leaves...today. Gina didn't want to just hang out in the lobby with our luggage, and I don't blame her, so we shoved off after seeing Phil Currie's "new" phylogeny of the Tyrannosauroidea, though it's hardly new. There were actually a lot of "repeats" this year--somebody will have to tell me if this is normal. Examples:

1) At least two presentations about how crurotarsians were twice as diverse as dinosaurs going into the Permio-Triassic extinction. Dinosaurs won, we're not sure why. I'd heard this last year, and I've read a few papers about it since, too.
2) I didn't stay for it, but there's a presentation about Spinophorosaurus, which was published before I flew out here. We all know about it now. Will anything change significantly between the publication of the paper and the presentation?
3) Two new coelurosaurs: Xiongguanlong and Beishanlong. I read about them months ago. And here's the shocker--no new material or information was presented today.

None of the talks blew my mind, but what WAS awesome was Julia's Second Annual Paleo-Blogger (and Blogger Groupies) Get-Together. It was held at a pub across the street from the Wills Memorial Building. Lots of people, new and old, showed up. Mo Hassen and Ville Sinkkonen, Scott Elyard and Raven Amos, the SV-POWer Rangers, Julia Heathcote, Andrew Farke, Mark Witton (briefly), Patty Ralrick, Darren Tanke, and a bunch of a new faces. I got the SV-POW sauropod neck posture paper signed by all of 'em, and two of Darren Naish's books signed by the man himself.

When we got back, we came back to the Curzon and rested for a bit, then headed across Hyde Park. It's beautiful, and I wish we'd gone sooner! It features some absolutely enormous swans. We saw Princess Diana's "house" (read: palace) then headed toward home. We ate very good pizza on the way home, but it was getting cold and I only had a T-shirt on, so we tried taking the Underground home. Oh, sorry, no dice there: the Jubilee line was closed. So we got back on the Central and tried to hit the Victoria. Guess what? Victoria is closed, too! So we got BACK on Central to Picadilly and eventually got back to Green Park. It was a hassle and a half. Is this normal, British readers, for the Underground to be constantly crippled by construction and repair?

Tomorrow we head to Kent for Down House. Should be fun.

How to Get to SVP From My Hotel

Here's the quick 'n' dirty version: Go to my Facebook page, where I've uploaded all the relevant photos. I hope to have more tomorrow. But here's Mike Taylor, Matt Wedel, and Darren Naish presenting their teeth in what's clearly a combined threat display. Terror!!!

An American Paleoartist in...Bristol: Day 1 & 2

Because it's a PDF and I don't have a scanner that can make JPEG's, I can't actually show you the map of the meeting this year. You can find this map at the SVP website. I encourage you to look! Look and laugh and point and chuckle. It looks like such a short trip! Well, it's not. For the confused, SVP this year was held at the University of Bristol, but unlike SVP in Cleveland last year, it's not being held in one gigantic building. Last year, it was difficult enough running upstairs and downstairs between presentations. This year, you must run from one end of the campus to the other. Also--look hard for this--there's a building toward the upper-left corner of the map called the "Victoria Room." This is where the poster sessions are. What that unhelpful map does not include is topology. Bristol is not, as you might expect, flat, but rather mountainous. To further illustrate this point, I will encourage a certain analogy.

Imagine that my hotel, the Broad Quay, is at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. The university is at the top of the Matterhorn. To switch to a different analogy, imagine the university is in New Jersey, and the Victoria Room in Seattle. Thus, every morn I rise at the goddamn crack of dawn, put on my climbing gear, and begin scaling the peak that is Mt. Bristol. And because I don't drink coffee (and they don't have hot chocolate), I stuff my throat with horrible, horrible water in an attempt to re-hydrate. The secret is this: let's say you have a presentation in the Chemistry Building of 10:00 a.m. You also have one, in the other building (across campus), at 10:30. You basically miss the 10:15 presentation because you're spending that time hiking madly toward the Mills Building. That's how it works, and there ain't no gettin' around it. Also, and this is the best part, the lecture "halls" are the size of the average living room. At that size, every talk, including those dealing with the phylogeny of the Procolophonidae, become standing-room only. The distance between your seatback and the back of the seat in front of you is far less than an American airline coach seat.

And then you get to walk further uphill, and much farther away, for the poster sessions. Even these are horribly "organized:" A series of posters will occupy a very small space, arranged rows about two feet wide. All sense of personal space is lost, and shuffling is inevitable. Actually reading the posters themselves becomes secondary to avoiding bumping into other people. And poor authors have basically no room to talk to anybody, because there's a constant stream of other people trying to get by. I spoke with Bill Parker and...another guy...for a little while about two Silesaurus posters, and we were constantly shuffling around to let people through. There are three such poster rooms, all separated by hundreds of feet of hallway.

It's the worst SVP setup possible, really. This is the kind of thing somebody would have to actively work at to fuck up this badly. Tomorrow, I will have pictures of the daily trek(s) so that you can get a better sense as to what we're all going through on a daily basis. I've been told by a source who will remain nameless who was in charge of this year's horrendous layout, but I don't feel comfortable screaming it to the internets. What's worse, the talks this year aren't all that great (nothing mind-blowing), although I'm told that the always-reliable Jerry Harris had a hilarious "smashy-bird, melty-bone" talk involving a life restoration of a headless duck. I understand it generated insane amounts of laughter. I missed it, though: I was hiking back to the Chemistry building.

An American Paleoartist in London: Day 5

I discovered my first beef with the Underground today: Construction! All the time, everywhere! And at the most inconvenient places/times! Victoria station itself was not closed today, but the train ticket booths were, because some idiot decided it was a good time to do roof work. We asked a fellow herding rampaging crowds how long the booths would be closed, and he said a half-hour, tops. Wonderful! We went upstairs to enjoy pizza and a calazone at...some pizza place. And it took a little more than thirty minutes. Perfect! I can hear you Brits chuckling right now. We went downstairs, and of course, it wasn't open. We asked another fellow, as the first one had gone away. This new person said he had no idea how long the station would be closed. Well, this won't be so bad. See, we bought our tickets to Cambridge at Victoria station yesterday, but since it left out of King's Cross, I'll bet we can just buy tickets at any station for any other station. Let's go to King's Cross! Oh wait, we can't. There's a problem at Oxford Circus, exactly halfway between Victoria and King's Cross. Wonderful. I should've seen this coming: the entire Jubilee line was down for like three days when we first got here.


At least this morning was fun. We took the Underground to Trefalger Square and saw the statues and waterfalls (awesome!), then wandered down to Westminster Abby, which was mind-blowingly beautiful! Oh, the architecture! The statues! The Latin inscriptions! We were both kind of disappointed that ol' Chuck D. doesn't have a more prominant tablet--Dr. Livingston (I presume) had one that was about twice as nice. I really couldn't get over how wonderful the building is, especially from the outside. All this gothic stonework sitting in the middle of the city. I loved it! Then we walked across the bridge to see Parliment and Big Ben. I got lots of good pictures of both. Parliment is ridiculously huge. After that, we got into the Victoria station mess, which took forever. We gave up and walked past Buckingham Palace, through Green Park, and back to the apartment. Tonight we're going to Paddington station to buy our train tickets to Bristol (hopefully they're open and/or functioning).

An American Paleoartist in London: Day 4

The more I take the Underground, the more I wish we had something like it in Anchorage, though we haven't the population nor the infrastructure to support such a system. It gets you from place to place really quite fast, and if you have an Oystercard, it's surprisingly cheap. The only danger is accidentally going the wrong way, although even that is basically moot if you can tell your north from south. I suppose there are some complaints to be had, though: mainly the lack of ventilation on the trains themselves. Hot and stuffy, that's the bottom line. But it goes by quick, as I said before, and if you're switching lines, there's some fresh air between trains.

And today we took the actual train to Cambridge for the day, at the suggestion of Mo Hassen. Cambridge is a lovely little college town where there are more bikers than drivers, and more walkers than both combined. Our first stop was King's College, which is not a learning institute but a massive architectural tower built by Henry VI-VIII in devotion to God. It really is an amazing structure, especially the interior, with a huge vaulted ceiling, beautiful stained-glass windows, and complex stone sculptures within. Afterwards, we took a trip to the Cambridge Museum of Earth Sciences, a treasure trove of European fossils in collection trays and cabinets. Hundreds and hundreds of fossils in there, including a few collected by Mr. Charles Darwin himself. Darwin is quite the celebrated scientist in England, which I most certainly appreciate, myself coming from a country that views this man as inspired by the Devil to undermine God or something.

*audible cursing*


I saw Thomas Holtz there, too, and said hi. He was on the SVP Darwin Heritage Tour. After salivating over rocks for awhile, we walked across the street to the Cambridge Zoology Museum, which was even better. Its specialty is extant animals, mostly in jars or in the form of mounted skeletons. The skeletons were so wonderful--every group of mammals was represented. See above: Gina with The World's Largest Pinniped Ever. There were some extinct taxa down there too, most notably a glyptodont and a ground sloth. All of the skeletons were wonderful, though. I especially liked the tapir and the rhino. There was an indricothere skull, and man, is it BIG! After that, we walked to the Cambridge University Library, which is enormous, and saw a small exhibit featuring Darwin's writings and sketches, including a 1st edition of On the Origin. Then it was a very long walk back to the bus stop!

Now here's one thing I noticed, really, for the first time today: where do people EAT in this country? It seems to me there are two kinds of restaurants. In the first kind, you sit at a table with wine glasses and a fancy menu posted on the doors outside so that if you're not super-rich (like us!) you can just up and avoid it. The other kind is a sandwich shop. And I don't mean Subway. I mean, Subway is an option, but my wife has developed some kind of anti-Subway thing, even when it's clearly a superior choice to whatever else is offered...which is unbelievably frustrating.* The sandwich shops here involve pre-made sandwiches in triangular boxes. You literally pick out a sandwich and pay for it, then leave (or stay, but it will cost extra if you stay)(does not compute). Those are my choices. Well, there's Burger King/McDonalds, where you cannot order your food from somebody who speaks English, a hassle I'm not eager to put up with. It's not like the sandwiches are BAD or anything, they're just not great, either. I need to find one of the Indian food restaurants that Scott's always talking about...**

*Today was diagnostic of a very common theme with my darling wife: we pass three or four places with real food (not sadwiches in boxes) (including Subway) and she says it's too expensive (it's not). Out of frustration, she just marches into a Pizza Hut and says she'll get something somewhere else, as if I wanted to go to Pizza Hut in the first place. We leave, she just starts walking in a random direction, only to turn around a few blocks later and says "you were supposed to be taking us to the first place you pointed out." If only she'd mentioned this before! Eventually she just settles on, yes, a boxed-sandwich shop and continues to be angry about it. It's as though she's got some specific American diner in mind, but fails to accept that we're in Europe, where they might do things differently. I, too, remark often that our choices are limited, but it's also something I've accepted. My wife is not always (rarely, in fact) fun to travel with!

**I'm sure she'll say it's too expensive.

An American Paleoartist in London: Day 3

I swear to Cthulhu, I hear less English in London than any other language. French and Russian seem dominant, followed by Israeli and other...Middle Eastern-sounding languages. In fact, London seems comprised, overall, of relatively few Anglo-Saxons. This is not bothersome, it's just wierd to me. This is truly a multicultural, multinational town. It would be nice to order food from somebody who spoke English, though. I'm just saying. Actually, today was really great. We spent the morning at the wax museum. Despite its tourist trappings, it's reasonably fun. The entrance fee is enough to make you briefly lose conciousness, though: 25 pounds per person? Sheesh! At least there's a ride in there, and a haunted house. Sadly, there is no Salma Hayek. After Madam Tousso's (or however you spell it), we traveled north, to Reagent Park, and also the London Zoo. They also charge way too much to get in, but I figure a zoo is expensive to maintain. The zoo was wonderful, although the constant stream of small screaming children was hard to ignore.


The insect house was great, as it included some giant spiders and a small colony of naked mole rats, which I'd never seen. The reptile house had gigantic rhinoceras iguanas, and the bigger one was very active! For my money, though, it doesn't get much better than ground hornbills. We also saw a family of Asian lions: a big male, a lioness, and their two new cubs. FAR too cute for words. At one point, they were all laying together, and the cubs were playing! I know, I didn't get any pictures. I blame the hoard of people swarming the overlook. Now here's something really wierd. At both the wax museum and the zoo, a map cost extra. Four goddamn pounds extra. Really? Four pounds for a piece of paper? At every other zoo I've been to, the map is included in the ticket price, as God intended. Here, it seems like they're trying to bilk you just a little. We actually got a free map (perhaps by accident) from a woman near the aquarium, so it wasn't a big deal, but the very concept of having to pay for a map boggles the mind. As it turns out, the map isn't all that helpful because it leaves so much off, and also doesn't provide an adequate sense of scale, so you end up missing the tigers like three times because it's just not clear where they are.

The only disappointment is that there isn't really a close tube stop to the zoo: we ended up hiking back through the park to Baker Street, stopping for fish 'n' chips on the way. Now we're back at the hotel, and BOY does it feel good to get off the feet! Reagent Park is gorgeous, and it makes me want to wander around Hyde Park and Green Park. We'll see if there's time for that, but I want parks like this in Anchorage! Sure, we have Kincaid, but that's more like a sports park.

An American Paleoartist in London: Day 2

Today we woke up fairly early and headed out in search of the Globe Theater. This turned out to be much more difficult than we'd thought, as the Jubilee Line was closed. So we took a different route and ended up very far from the Globe. Our map guide is impressively detailed, which actually makes navigation more difficult. After probably a half hour or more of wandering aimlessly, we discovered the Globe and took a tour. The tour was great, and we learned a lot about what the theater was like "in the time of Shakespeare." I was most interested to learn that the best seat in the house was above the theater itself, and was reserved for rich men who would spent the performance showing their legs to the ladies. And because the Globe didn't use scenery, actors were constantly narrating the stage direction ("I'm hiding behind this tree!" "We're fighting!").

We then headed to the Tate Modern, which, despite its impressive size, isn't all that great. Considering the enormous empty spaces within, a lot more art could fit in there. Only the first floor contained pieces I genuinely liked. The rest was modern wierd sculptures and a bunch of Warhols and Warhol imitators. Gina and I were both underwhelmed, and went across the Millenium Bridge to see St. Paul's Cathedral.


On the way, we stopped at a place called "Pizza Express" for lunch. Back in the States, when a place has the word "express" in the title, it means that it's essentially a hole-in-the-wall where you get cheap, but often good, food. This was none of those things. We sat at tables with wine glasses and were served by a woman in a suit. The pizzas weren't so much pizzas as deconstructions of pizzas, paring down the ingrediants to their most basic forms. Gina's was shaped like a doughnut. They were sparsely decorated with a minimal assortment of ingrediants, and the crust was thin enough that without the cloaking power of tomato sauce, the plate would have been visible through the dough. We also got dessert: something called "gelato," which is not some kind of gelatin, but instead the common ancestor between soft-serve and normal ice cream. It was very good. The whole meal, including drinks and tip, cost 30 pounds, which seems excessive considering the strange pizza.

We crossed the street to St. Paul's only to be confronted by a horrible entry fee. Maybe if the American dollar were not so weak, we would pony up the dough. Am I the only one who thinks it's odd that a house of God would charge people to enter? Oh wait, it's a Catholic church!

Returning to the hotel was a goddamn nightmare. The sun wreaked its firey judgement from on high, roasting me. Picadilly Circus may in fact be Hell on Earth on a Saturday. If and when I am cast into The Pit, it's going to look something like this. Unbreaking waves of people swarm the sidewalks, going all different directions at once. Sometimes you'll make a crosswalk ahead of the tide and for a brief moment you can breathe, but the billowing crowd immediately overtakes you. Add to this the heat, and the exhaustion from walking all morning, and Gina and I both became quite cranky. The longer I'm in London, the more I notice what it's missing. I hold by my earlier statement that no liquid in this town is free, and I took the time to look today. You can also only buy two brands of pop here: Coke and Pepsi. Derivative brands like 7-Up or Fanta or, yes, Mt. Dew are entirely absent here. Actually, that's not correct: Fanta is present, but it's a bizarre orange juice, not the sweet Sunkist-like soda pop we find in the States. I also haven't found a proper grocery store. We've been procuring out meager food and drinks from a Tesco two doors down, but I have yet to see a Safeway or Fred Meyer equivalent. There is also no AC, and its absence is heavily felt right now.

Not quite sure what tomorrow holds yet. Perhaps the British Museum and the Tower of London.

An American Paleoartist in London: Day 1

Well, technically, yesterday was my first day, but most of it was spent on two different planes. Highlights from the trip:
1) British Airways treats you like a person, not an inconvenience.
2) Our row's flight attendant was kind of a bitch. She didn't ask "tea or coffee?" as much as bark it, loudly, demanding a rapid answer.
3) Jesus H. Christ, the customs line was freaking long. And they only ask like two questions.
3) Dot2Dot is a godsend--I left my DSi on the shuttle, realized it hours later, called them up, and they had it to me the next morning.

Here are some things I've learned about London more generally:
1) Years of watching "Are You Being Served?" and "Keeping Up Appearances" does NOT prepare you for the chatty young British woman trying to get you into the Ripley's Believe It or Not "museum" downtown. She spoke so fast, and with such a heavy Cockney accent, that I can't imagine her fellow Britons could understand her, much less an American. Also, 22 pounds per person? I don't freaking think so.
2) The British are unfamiliar with water fountains, water pressure, or temperate showers. I spent most of today completely parched because my only hydration options were in bottles that cost 2 pounds or more. As for water pressure, there is none in our apartment: water doesn't so much rush from the shower head as fall limply from it. It's like showering in a mobile home. Despite this, the shower also only has two temperature settings: Absolute Zero and The Surface of the Sun. To find an acceptable medium takes much longer than you can possibly imagine.
3) Do not plug your American electronic appliance into a British outlet without something called a "power converter" except for the outlet is in the bathroom that says "shavers only."
4) Something about the air here is making me really bloody productive, cough-wise. I don't know if this is encouraging or worrying. Seriously, I haven't gotten this much sputum out at once in years.

On to today. We spent the morning in the London Museum of Natural History. The highlight of the trip was meeting fellow paleoblogger Mo Hassen, who showed us the library and some exhibits we would have otherwise missed. He's a real nice guy, and very knowledgable about the museum's specimens. I suppose he should--he does work there, after all, but it was great meeting him. I realize now that I should've gotten a picture with him, although we'll see each other at SVP, too. The museum itself was a bit of a mixed bag. You'd think that one of the world's premier natural history museums would keep up with the literature, but it hasn't in any meaningful way. The dinosaur hall is disappointing: poorly-lit skeletons hang from the ceilings, forcing one to use the battery-draining flash to capture them on digital film. A whopping three European dinosaurs were on display: Hypsilophodon, Baryonoyx, and Iguanadon. Well, Dacentrurus was there too, but out of place, in the marine reptile hall. Anyway, there were more American dinosaurs than British ones. Where's Eotyrannus and Xenoposeidon? Give me Neovenator, not Camarasaurus! There was no discussion on dinobirds, no feathers on the (hideous) animatronic raptors, and no pterosaurs (in the hall). It's clear that the museum has made virtually no effort to remain current with paleontology for at least the last decade. I did like this fellow, though:


Next up: the mammal area! Lots of stuffed mammals, including several pangolins and even a golden mole. The best room in the place was the giant hall with stuffed and fossil mammals, including a life-size Baelenoptera musculus life model and skeleton, flanked by skeletons of a bowhead and gray whale. Behind them was a sperm whale, with a restored "melon." Plenty of interesting fossil beasties, including Arsinotherium and lots of extinct elephant skulls. Again, the paleontology is not current. Whales are explained as having mesonychid origins, and Deinotherium has a long trunk instead of a tapir-like nose. Maybe I'm asking too much, but is it really that horrible to want the London Museum of Natural History to stay current with its science?

Mo showed us the museum library, which is extensive and impressive. He also took us to the marine reptile hall, which is far and away the most enjoyable room in the place. Plenty of wonderful specimens of ichthyosaurs and a few mosasaurs and plesiosaurs for good measure. Mo explained that many of the specimens show the original names, but they have been placed in new genera. He also said that the famous fossil of Ichthyosaurus giving birth might not be giving birth. My favorite fossil was a beautiful, complete Eurhinosaurus. It's a much larger ichthyosaur than I thought!

After leaving, we wandered into the Science Museum, saw what it is, and promptly left. Don't get me wrong, technology is great, but the history of steam is not on my list of things to see. Also, we bought Oystercards and took the Underground everywhere. It's fantastic and much easier than I thought it would be, though the shuttles themselves are devilishly hot. After a nice long nap, we explored downtown in an effort to find the Virgin megastore, but never did. Instead, we fought our way through a living sea of people, eventually finding solice in a bookstore where I bought Darren Naish's new "Great Dinosaur Discoveries" book. It's a great read so far, though I'm only five pages in. Not technical by any means, but an interesting history of the science.

Tomorrow we may venture toward the Globe and the Tate Modern. In the coming days before Bristol, we may yet take a day trip out to Cambridge. Also, does anyone out there know the easiest method of getting to Down House?