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One light rail, two underground lines, one national rail, one plane, a monorail, and then a 35-mile drive in my Element, and I am home, safe and sound, from London. It hasn’t been a great day, but I probably don’t feel as bad as the executives at Merck do.

It wasn’t a good trip, to put it mildly. The conference was fruitful enough, but the convention center, ExCeL, was located in a pretty empty section of town so far from what we think of as London that I was stuck in my hotel room every night. I guess I could’ve gone out to the city for some fun/sightseeing in the evenings, but it would’ve involved the aforementioned two underground lines and that light rail, and I was a bit worried about how safe that would be after dark.

So I got to England for my first time since I was 5, and I spent 4 hours sightseeing on Monday. Oh, well.

Here are a bunch of pix from that little sightseeing meander:

A monument outside Buckingham Palace. Another view of it. A gate, and another at the same. The front gate.

The monument at a distance.

A WWI artillery memorial near the corner of Hyde Park.

The Princess Di memorial fountain in Hyde Park. This was REALLY disappointing. I was hoping for something more visually stimulating than a circular fountain with granite tiles that somehow represented the ups-and-downs of her life.

Reformer’s Tree, or where it used to stand, in Hyde’s Park. From what I gather, this was a big place of assembly, back in The Day, but got burned down in 1882.

The Marble Arch, which has its share of history. Everything there does, in a way that I simply don’t feel here in America. As I read that Stephenson book during the trip (only 200 pages so far), I marveled over the idea of being somewhere so steeped in history. I guess part of it is that I’m used to New York, where so much of the city is geared around skyscrapers. It doesn’t breathe quite the same way as the foreign cities I’ve visited these past few years (Budapest, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Auckland, Paris).

The Dwight Eisenhower memorial in Grosvenor Square.

The FDR memorial in the square. Looks like “Count FDRula” or something, but that’s how they want to remember him.

I went to the square to see the FDR memorial, since it was on my city map, and I thought it’d be nice to check out. When I saw it, I noticed a weird monument off on the east side of the square, so I went to take a look at it. The inscription read, “GRIEF IS THE PRICE WE PAY FOR LOVE”. I was still puzzled at what it was there for. Then I looked down. It’s the Sept. 11 memorial garden. Evidently, part of one of the girders from the WTC is buried under the stone. The inscription is a poem I’d never read before, by Henry Jackson Van Dyke: “Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is not.”

I’m home now.

I meant to ramble about this last week, when Drudge had an en fuego afternoon, posting links to the Cybill Shepard bad-hair day, the Iranian woman who asked a judge to make her husband only beat her once a week, and the guy who was clocked at 205 mph on his motorcycle.

Now CNN has followed up the story, replete with doubts that a motorcycle can reach 205. My favorite detail–even more than the “going a quarter-mile in 4.39 seconds” part–is that it all took place out on Highway 61.

False-hearted judges, dying in the webs that they spin

“The country where I came from—it’s pretty bleak. And it’s cold. And there’s a lot of water. So you could dream a lot.”

So sez Bob Dylan. Occasional VM reader David Gates interviews him in Newsweek. Give it a read.

“What were the skies like when you were young?”

My hotel’s on the Thames, in Dockland (east London). Not a gorgeous area, by any means. But here’s the view from the terrace outside the restaurant this evening:

Here’s that Millennium Dome. More beautiful views here, here, and here. I’m awfully glad to have the life that I do.

Purple?

The Sunday NYTimes has picked up the story: the presidential candidates are tied in NJ polls. Money quote?

“As the 9/11 message of the Republicans recedes, New Jersey voters will come back home to Democrats,” said State Senator John Adler, co-chairman of Mr. Kerry’s campaign in New Jersey.

“Recedes.” Right.

None of you may have been thinking to yourselves, “Could that Stepford Wives remake really have been that bad? I wish Gil Roth would give that a viewing during a transatlantic flight and let me know.”

So I did. I’m of two minds on this one: it either is that bad, or it’s somehow worse. But at least Nicole Kidman’s good to look at.

I’ll give Van Helsing a shot during the flight back, and answer the same question.

Off to London in a few hours for the PABord conference, continuing the oddball travel schedule which will see me board 27 flights in 2004 (up from 25 in 2003).

Fortunately, I have the 40 gb iPod, a laptop, some DVDs, and a paperback of Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver to keep me company. Last year, I read his Cryptonomicon and The Diamond Age during a few of these trips. We’ll see if I can read his Baroque Cycle between this trip and the Brussels/Amsterdam tilt in December.