Off to Philly

Taking a break from the blog for a few days because I'm off to Philly to see ma soeur. Will do best to avoid WhartonStalkerGuy. He rang today to try to ferret out the details of my trip. I pretended I had forgotten the flight time and airline. Might not be an overly cautious measure to check in to the Hyatt under a false name. When I get back I will tell you all about CuteFirst YearRowingGuy.

DC hijinks

Apologies for blog hiatus. Just got back from four days in DC. Am sworn to secrecy about the events of the weekend by my bashful travelling companion, "Pubshy", but I can, I think report to you a conversation overheard in the Smithsonian Museum of American History, just by the part of the First Ladies' Gallery where George Washington's wife's dresses were on display:

American teen (maybe 16): "Miss Reeves?"
Teacher: "Yes?"
American teen: "What's the name of, you know, the First Lady?"
Teacher: (gesturing at the exhibit) "You mean, Martha?"
Second American teen: "Martha Stewart?"
American teen: "No, not her, I mean the First Lady now."
Teacher: "Laura? Laura Bush?"
American teen: "Yeah."

I quite liked the Museum of American History - there were a lot of interesting bits and pieces ranging from the hat Lincoln wore when he was assassinated, to the Deep Blue computer that beat Kasparov at chess. There were Enigma machines (an American father was commenting to his son, "you know, like Brad Pitt in U-571"), early FBI fingerprinting machines, and the same kind of morse code machines they had on the Titanic. And there was a whole load of stuff we didn't have time to see about war and Brown v The Board of Education and jazz. If I lived in DC I would spend a lot of time there, ideally at strange times of the day when the hordes of hapless were not around. I hate trooping round with hordes of hapless, it makes me want to kick the back of people's knees.

We also visited the National Gallery of Art. I am not very good at viewing art, but this was a nice building: lots of space, not overcrowded, and lots of lilies growing in pots. Also a tippity top museum shop. I am absolutely positive there are a whole bunch of people who go into museums to eat and to shop and leave without seeing any of the paintings.

On Saturday, we went to a spa in Georgetown. The lady who did my facial was called Johnnie and within 30 seconds had elicited my life history, present situation and future aspirations, and was trying fix me up with a 25yr old English guy called Dan who is her house mover.

She was very business like. American facialists, unlike English ones, believe in cleaning out the pores manually, which means attacking you with a stainless steel torture device. With my eyes covered with a bandage it was left entirely to my imagination what this device looked like (it felt like dagger-nosed pliers) but when I eventually saw it, it turned out to be a Lilliputian spoon with a tiny hole in the middle. She strongly recommended aginst rushing out to buy one, because, she said, "you can do a lot of damage to yourself". I dread to think.

Beast of Sydenham

Fear stalks the streets of Sydenham after resident is attacked by a black cat the size of a labrador. Man was calling to pet when 'panther' struck says The Guardian

It has probably slunk off to a neighbouring suburb to become the Penge Panther, the Catford Cheetah or the Beast of Beckenham by now. But residents of the blossom-filled streets of Sydenham were still shaking last night as a father of three told how he had been mauled by a black cat the size of a labrador.

Tony Holder, 36, was calling in his tabby, KitKat, at 2.15am yesterday when he spotted his pet being savaged by a 5ft-long animal. The black, panther-like creature then sprang at him in his back garden.

Billy Rich, 44, was looking out of his window at 5.30am when he saw a black creature leap across the road and bound south towards Mayow Park.

"I see a ... thing," he said.
"What's he supposed to have seen?" asked his ex-wife.
"The beast of Sydenham," your correspondent explained.
"The only beast of Sydenham is him," she replied, prodding a finger at Mr Rich.
"On the news they said it was as big as a Doberman, but it wasn't," insisted Mr Rich. "It was big and black and I thought, fucking hell, what was that?

Parents said they would be keeping their children indoors. "The garden is secure but I wouldn't let my little boy Morgan go out and play today," said Kelly Wood.
"He's 19 months. I think he's quite an edible size."

more here

Uncyclopaedia

A little while ago I joined a couple of webrings, which are like virtual blog clubs. One is called BritBlog, the other one BloggingBrits. The main reason I joined is that they have natty little flag logos that appear on one's website.

Anyway, much to my horror, I got an emailed notice today that BritBlog has started publishing a Top Ten of its most visited member blogs and - even worse - a Bottom Ten. Before now, I wasn't much worried that my humble blog was only visited by less than nine people (that includes my visits four times a day whenever I want to remind myself what I did last week). But now, I am terrified. What if I appear in the Bottom Ten - the most unloved, awful, boring websites on the world wide web? To give you an idea of how all to easy this would be to do, the blogs in the Top Ten get up to 5,000 visits a day. The Bottom Ten get between one and three.

Now, I bet you're thinking, why don't you just withdraw from the webring? Well, this is easier said than done. Apparently I am a link in a chain. If I withdraw, it screws everything up. I had to agree not to screw things up when I joined. I could go back on my word and screw things up anyway, but the webbloggers have obvious ways of extracting vengeance.

So my only alternative is to start being more thrilling and controversial.

* * *

OK, so I just sat here for 15 minutes trying to think of something thrilling and/or controversial. Didn't get very far, so instead I am going to resort to plain theft and steal something from this brilliant website called the Uncyclopaedia. Its definitions are far better than anything in the EB. For example:

Washington
Depending on context, Washington is variously a person, a city and a state.

The person

George Washington (1732-1799) was America's first Prime Minister. Along with Dwight Eisenhower he stormed the beaches of Normandy, found them to be full of Communists and announced, "I shall return." He also authored the American classics the Declaration of Independence and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. That latter work earned him a place in history, as his mug now decorates the American three-dollar bill.After adding the much cooler sounding "Carver" to his last name, He went on to invent the peanut, peanut butter, jelly, (but oddly did not put 2 and 2 together and invent the PBJ) and the poorly received peanut prophylactic

The city
With a burgeoning population of 710,000, the city of Washington is Utah's fourth largest city, after Spokane, Gary and Andermatt. Most Washingtonians are proud to be part of the city's vibrant cultural heritage, which includes luring tourists to their deaths under cover of darkness.

The state
The state of Washington is reputed to constitute that feeling in-between happiness and nervousness, as when one discovers that the condom they thought they lost in the back seat is in fact just to hand.


England

England was founded in 753 BC by the master race, marked by bad teeth and an addiction to crumpets. Modern English still believe themselves to be better than everyone else, but centuries of breeding with outsiders has made this no longer the case. (This is in contrast to France, whose inhabitants believe themselves superior, but in fact, never were.) At the height of its power, England controlled nearly one third of the world. Its colonies have since become independent, with the notable exceptions of Alaska and Palestine. The national sport of England is making up Oscar Wilde quotes while eating pie. The economy of Britain is supported primarily by Cloud Mentioning and Marmite.

Some famous people from England: King James, who wrote the bible. L Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology. George Washington. (I didn't know that! 222B) Margaret Thatcher.

Cloudy

Standard-issue weather in Britain, it is in fact the official dogma of the Church of England that all clouds originate in the British Isles. Washington, Oregon, and Michigan also claim to have clouds, but Britain has a copyright on that weather pattern, and has sued them for billions and billions

Carousing with Kate and Naomi

Croydon (as in London Borough of_ ) is an angular grey blancmange of industrial estates, public housing, office buildings and chainstores: a very large town but nothing to attract the attention whoever it is that hands out city status. It would seem a strange choice for my father to select its registry office (the UK wedding equivalent of a US town hall) as the venue for his wedding, as the invitation that arrived this morning indicated was the case.

However, let's look at the bright side of Croydon to see if we can think of a reason why it commends itself as a venue for joyful nuptials.

It is, after all famous for producing supermodels: namely Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss. My own experience of Croydon is not that its general population are particularly beautiful or underfed, but one has to assume that two supermodels originating from one town tells you something. Possibly that supermodelling is the ideal career if you don't want to spend the rest of your life in Croydon.

Croydon is also home of the eponymous "Croydon Facelift". This is a hairstyle for women which involves pulling your hair back into a very tight ponytail on top of your head with the aid of several multi coloured scrunchies. If done tight enough, it has the effect of a facelift without the knife or the expense. Croydon Facelifts are evidently the styling of choice among a group of people known as "chavettes". Chavettes (and their male counterpart chavs) emerged as a major phenomenon relatively recently in the UK. Seemingly from nowhere, "chav" become the Oxford University Press's Word of The Year for 2004. As I have not been fully immersed in British culture for a while now, I'm still not 100% clear on where chavs came from or who exactly they are, except I think I know I don't aspire to be one. The best description of the chav I have seen can be found here. And if you want to find out whether you are an unsuspecting chav, here's the place to do it.


A Croydon Facelift


Fourthly - and possibly its most credible claim to fame - there used to be an airport in Croydon. Indeed, it was the number one airport in Britain in the Dark Ages, before Heathrow was invented. As "The Gateway to the Empire", it was a byword for glamour and romance: Charles Lindbergh and Amy Johnson were regulars.
Glamorous Croydon airport, c 1920

Then in the Second World War, it was an RAF fighter station and home of RAF Transport Command. But in typical British fashion, some bright spark went and invented Heathrow after WW2, and glamorous Croydon Airport was shut down and turned into an industrial estate and public housing.

So: absentee supermodels, a dubious hairstyle and a defunct airfield. Odd choice, odd choice. All I remember about Croydon Register Office (the UK wedding equivalent of a town hall) dates back from a wedding of a distant relative I attended in 1987. The only reason I remember anything at all was because it was the day after the random hurricane that hit the UK, and trees were lying across all the roads. Anyway, I do remember a wind swept streetcorner and a grey concrete office building, and the muted noise of the Croydon Flyover a few yards away. CRO is the sort of place that doesn't have a picture of its exterior on its website because it might put people off. I am sure the inside has had a Croydon facelift since 1987, but the interior picture on the website is the size of my thumbnail and cannot be enlarged so it's hard to tell. If it wasn't Croydon, I would take its self-description as "elegant" at face value and not worry too much about it.

Having said all this, however, perhaps the venue is rather appropriate for my father. He is not a religious type or sentimental type. A five minute wedding for $50 and a minimum fuss is probably right up his street. And knowing my father I dare say there is at least one pub within five minutes walk for pre-nuptial drinking. And also knowing the way my father operates, he'll probably bump into Kate at the bar.

Lost for Words

I am worried that I have run out of things to say on this blog. Noone has dinged me lately (not since the United Nations on Thursday at any rate), NewKitty is happily roosting over at BostonKate's house, the bacteria in the septic tank continue to chomp away undisturbed - in short nothing's happening except the clock is ticking down to deportation day.

You know I am desperately scratching for straws when I tell you that the only thing passing for a semi adventure this week was when I accidentally showered myself and my BGL-leaving-present Prada handbag with gasoline at the World's Worst Gas Station. (I asked for a cloth to clean up, the man went to fetch one, then walked straight past me and started wiping the side of the car with it.) I've had to leave my bag outside for two days running to evaporate the gas.

* * *

The other thing that happened this weekend was that my mother went to Cuba. Not permanently, just for holiday. Before she left she sent a particularly detailed email about her travel details, then while she was about it, details of her travel insurance, home insurance, and car insurance. This might seem over the top, if it wasn't that my mother lives in a very old house which is always either being burgled or damaged in storms. Plus, only a couple of months ago she bashed up her Mercedes in an accident. So I can kind of see why she put all that stuff in. However, the new man in her life, who neither my sister or I have ever yet had any dealings with, was copied in on the original email on the grounds that he is supposed to be picking my mother and her friend up from Gatwick airport on their return. For some reason he thought it would be appropriate to "reply to all", after my mother's departure, with the one line sentence to the effect of "You forgot to say whether you prefer cremation or burial." I spent a good deal of time in the car this morning trying to think of suitable email replies I could send to this stranger which would let him know what an ass he was. But I couldn't come up with anything that I could be even 51% sure would not upset my mother.


* * *

So this coming weekend I am going up to DC to meet "Pubshy" who is over from the UK. It's kind of appropriate that DC is the venue for a weekend with someone who is so paranoid about appearing anywhere in print, even heavily disguised on a humble little blog that only about nine people in the world seem to read. It is after all the city where Deep Throat and Bob Woodward would have assignations in underground car parks, where John Le Carre spies would rendezvous on benches alongside the Reflecting Pool, and where Kevin Costner would run around pretending not to be a deep cover Soviet mole. So I am not sure what I am going to be able to tell you - I may have to leave out every identifying proper noun.

Mid Atlantic Dither

One of the questions I am asked most often is "so do you want to stay here?"

I always get a bit irritated by this question. I mean, if I didn't want to stay, why would I still be here? It's not like I am Tom Hanks in Terminal. But Americans are very proud of their nation, and I guess that there is an element of fishing for compliments: in other words, whatever their views on immigration, Americans rather like knowing that people are willing to swim the Rio Grande/hurdle electric fences/entertain marriage proposals from WhartonStalkerGuy in order to live in their country. So usually, when I get asked this question, I nod and wave vaguely around me and reply "of course, who wouldn't?"

However, I must confess that this question has caused me quite a lot of private thought. If immigration issues, jobs and family were all equal, on which side of the Atlantic would I really want to live? Where is my rightful geographic destiny?

Lots of Americans here in Middleofnowheresville think that Britain is the best thing since sliced bread. As far as I can gather, this has a lot to do with the fact that Americans in Middleofnowheresville are all in love with Tony Blair. The gun toting folks out in the rural areas which surround town love it that he is the no1 ally of the US armed forces, not some effeminate European pussy ( the Daily Regress doesn't talk much about Cherie and her lifestyle guru..)
Then the folks in town, who are the ultimate granola eating birkenstock wearing liberals, think Blair is great because he never invokes God in political speeches (again, the Daily Regress doesn't report how that's just because his media handlers won't let him talk about God). Townfolks have this image of Britain as an organic, crime-free, pro-choice nirvana with - and where they get this bit from I have no idea - excellent state schools.

The bizarre thing about this is that when one actually lives in Britain, one is hard pressed to find groups of people sitting around congratulating themselves on the fact that GM foods are labelled, or that very few murders happen with guns, or that the House of Lords isn't threatening to ban abortion. Living in Britain is about gas prices four times as expensive as in the US, six month waits to have cancer diagnoses, getting your house burgled three times in a year, and putting up with public transport strikes every other fortnight. Plus of course, moaning about the miserable wet cold gloomy weather.

The true benefits of living in Britain are things that Americans in Middleofnowheresville don't know about. The Archers, and those brown paper bags of cook chill Indian or Chinese or Thai food you can get from just about any supermarket on the way home from work. The Style section of the Sunday Times. The ability, if one so wishes, to go on booze cruises to Calais with a £1 token from the Daily Mail. Cider. Shoe shops. 25 days holiday. Cheese that comes from cows.

I do remind myself of these benefits. And I also think about the benefits of living here, because there are also quite considerable. A great climate. Nice friendly people. IHOP. J Crew. Crate & Barrel. College football. 200 cable TV channels. Funnel cake and string fries.

It really is a dilemma, and it's been causing me a lot of trouble. There's really no easy way round it - or so I thought.

Then I discovered Project Implicit. If you have ever heard of a book by Malcolm Gladwell called Blink you will already have an idea of what this is all about. A bunch of psychologists here at UVA, along with Harvard and Washington, have got this online research project going to test social implicit cognition, that is, your subconscious feelings and attitudes which you might not even know you have.

They test this by something called the implicit association test (IAT), which tries to discover what automatic subconscious associations you might have between concepts (eg science or arts) and attributes (eg male or female). One well known variation of this is the Race IAT, which shows that most people have a subconscious automatic preference for white over black. There are also IATs for just about every other preference dyad you can imagine: since discovering Project Implicit I have discovered I prefer cats over dogs, southerners (US) over northerners, and gun control over gun rights.

So you can imagine I was pretty excited when I discovered that Project Implicit has websites targeted at specific English speaking countries, including the UK, and that one of the UK IATS specifically attempts to discover your subconscious preference for the UK versus the US. Perhaps now I could attempt to tap the subconscious side of myself to find out which side of the Atlantic I should be on, and not have to do meditation like Seattle Treeza told me to.

I took the test. It involved sets of sequences of words and images flashed up onto the screen. In the first sequence, you had to press E on your keyboard every time you saw an image or word representing the US (GW mugshot, Stars and Stripes etc) or a positive word like love, enjoy, happy, glorious. Whenever you saw a UK image or word, or a negative word like hate, despise, evil, horrible, you had to press I on your keyboard. Then it was swapped over, and the US were the bad guys, the UK the good guys. So I pushed keys like a lab rat for five minutes, then pressed the space bar and held my breath. What would be the truth, the answer to my geographic destiny?

"You have very little or no automatic preference for the United Kingdom over the United States."

In other words, we have PhDs and we don't know either.

Ewww!

So there's this new word: "Ewww".

I think it is college-undergraduate-speak for "yeuck".

Anyway let me tell you something Ewwww-some. The legislature of the commonwealth of Virginia (the laws of which were recently rated fourth best in America - Delaware was first, natch) recently spent a ridiculous amount of time considering a state law to ban... women wearing low rise trousers that expose thong underwear. It was not passed, fortunately, maybe because after some discussion, the Virginia House of Delegates was not willing to extend the new law to ban builders' bum. I kid you not.

* * *

Tomorrow I am going to be photographed for a thing in a magazine called ECHHO tomorrow which is is apparently being sent to 20,000 educators around Europe. It's about the case I wrote. I did tell AuntyAnne in Darden Business Publishing that if she wants to sell copies of this case, submitting my mugshot as a publicity material is not the way to do it. She didn't believe me, so I emailed her a real mirror-breaking photograph of me with my godson at New Year. There was a short pause. Then she emailed me back, offered to meet me an hour and a half before the photoshoot to make sure I was wearing enough makeup, and if not, she would put more on personally.

* * *

In the absence of any other interesting things happening on in my own life today, here are my top three TV shows right now:

1) The Jackson Trial (E-TV)
There are no cameras allowed in the Michael Jackson courtroom, so E-TV have rather cunningly reconstructed the courtroom, hired lookalike actors, and everyday they reenact absolutely everything that happened during the previous day's proceedings. It's really riveting stuff. They've given the actor playing the defence attorney Thomas Mesereau a white wig that makes him look like Worzel Gummidge. And WackoJacko is played by a white actor with a fake nose, which I expect the real Wacko is probably quite pleased about.

2) Lost (ABC)
Lost is just so great I really don't want to spoil it for you because it's bound to be on in the UK soon. But it's about a bunch of survivors from a plane crash on a desert island who suddenly start realizing that they are not alone on the island. There isn't anyone dead famous in it, except one of the Irish hobbits from LOTR.

3) JAG (CBS)
One would think, considering the fact that JAG is all about the US Navy and Marine Corps, that its audience would be largely male. In fact, the audience is almost entirely 35-50 year old women. The reason for this, everyone knows, is the totally 100% hot guy who plays Commander Harmon Rabb, formerly US Navy fighter pilot, now hot shot lawyer in the JAG Corps. This season is this guy's very last season. If I were CBS I would not bother carrying on.

As One Does

OK, I just got off the phone with my dad. He just got back from Australia, where he goes twice a year. He is not exactly communicative: it's meant to be parents who have to squeeze information out of their children, not the other way round.

Our conversation commenced with a fairly typical exchange along the lines of me asking him if he'd had a nice time on his trip, him replying that he doesn't go to Australia to have a nice time, and me asking if he had managed to have a nice time anyway.

We then progressed onto confirming that we were both well, and moved rapidly through a short selection of standard topics: work, the tax rate on my case competition prize money, Jonny Wilkinson's career, and Palace's uncertain future in the Premiership.

All that took about seven minutes, at which point dad started saying repeatedly (although denying indignantly that he had jet lag) that he was going to bed.

As I have not spoken to my father since Christmas however, I was not about to give up so easily.

"So, dad, did you fly Qantas?"

"Cathay Pacific"

"First class?"

"Business class."

"Your OneWord Alliance Emerald-Platinum-Exclusive cardholder status didn't work for an upgrade this time?"

"Not this time."

[Pause]

"But I got an upgrade last time. Yes, I sat next to a very pleasant young lady on that trip."

"You did?" [at this point I am a circling fish, scenting bait and knowing it is bait but nonetheless desperately wanting it]

"Yes, we shared a bottle of shampoo." (I assume this means champagne)

"Dad! Frolicking in the first class cabin with a young lady!"

"I wasn't frolicking. We had a nice chat for about an hour out of Hong Kong."

"All right Dad, tell me who it was."

"I pretended I didn't have the faintest idea who she was, of course."

"DAD!!!!"

"Nicole Kidman."


* * *

I must say, even I was impressed at this point. Dad has a track record of bumping into famous people in airplane cabins and hotel lifts, engaging them over conversation, and then not mentioning it for months, or even years: past scalps he has confessed to have included the Sultan of Brunei, Kojak, Stefanie Powers and Rumpole of the Bailey. Whereas my entire haul of celebrity travel encounters is as follows:
1) sitting behind Jools Holland, going London to Paris, and,
2) checking in behind Gary Barlow at Venice airport, then accidentally being mistaken for his PA at Frankfurt airport, and being rushed (with GB) in a limo from a Lufhansa plane to a BA one which was being held on the ground for him.

But right now, I had some important questions for my father.

* * *

"Dad. So you are saying you sat next to Nicole Kidman on the plane and talked to her for an hour?"

"Yup".

"What was she like?"

"Very normal."

"Did you see her eating?

"She picked. And we had a couple of glasses of shampoo each."

"What did you talk about? (Tom Cruise? Steve Bing? Her stalker?)"

"Business."

"What sort of business?!"

"She asked me what I was doing in Australia. So I said."

"So, you talked about diamond merchanting for an hour and never once got onto the subject of who in Hollywood is a real bitch, or what's Jude Law like, or is Tom Cruise really gay?"

"Yup. I'm going to bed now."

As one does.

The End

Not the end of this blog, fear not. I mean the end of the cat situation. One of the reasons I've been a bit quiet on the blog front the last few days is because of rapid escalation of events a propos des chats.

(The other reason is that I semi-volunteered to write a memorial article about Vince in the Darden alumni magazine - print deadline, tomorrow - a task which I didn't think too much about at the time of volunteering but which has proven to be just as difficult as one might think if one had thought about it).

Anyway, in a coordinating marketing and PR campaign (strategic goal: reunite NewKitty with rightful owner) last week I placed FoundCat ads in The Daily Regress and C-ville, then went to get some posters printed and laminated at Kinkos. I tied the posters to Stop signs at strategically selected junctions around the neighborhood. Not too many junctions, as Kinko's charges about $3 per poster. Then I rushed home to watch the telephone.

After about three days of the telephone ringing silently, I have to say I had given up. When the phone rang at 6.15 on Friday evening, at first I thought it was TurkeyGuy. But it turned out to be another guy with an ultra thick West Virginia accent, claiming to be Newkitty's owner!!!

Here, according to this guy (who said his name was Dan Brown but who is definitely not the author of The DaVinci Code) is NewKitty's rather Dickensian life story.

2000 Newkitty born. First owner abandons him at SPCA. (UK note: SPCA= like Battersea Dog's Home but does cats too)
2000 Newkitty adopted from SPCA by Dan Brown and wife. NewKitty (according to DB) is happy.
October 2004 DB and wife move to an apartment. Newkitty does not like being confined to an apartment.
Christmas 2004 (Christmas!!!) DB takes Newkitty back to SPCA!!!
In the queue at the SPCA to turn Newkitty in, DB meets unknown woman who offers to take Newkitty "off his hands". DB hands Newkitty over to UnknownWoman, without bothering to take name or address.
Jan/Feb 2005 Newkitty runs away (escapes?) from UnknownWoman.
mid Feb 2005 Newkitty shows up under LandladyLynn's porch.
March 2005 DB sees his former cat on poster.

Most of this sad tale was related when Dan Brown showed up to ID Newkitty on Saturday morning. I must say that Newkitty did not look overly enthusiastic about the reunion. We were almost relieved when Dan Brown said he didn't much want Newkitty back.

So although lots of mysteries have been cleared up (such as the real gender of Newkitty: the hotpink collar I had bought him has been quietly removed) , the question remains: what to do with him? Sapphirethecat is still not enamoured with NewKitty, and I have looked into shipping cats home to the UK and it's the most frightful hooha.

Then there is a Darden FY called Dan Dammerman (or is it Dam Dannerman?) who says he wants a cat, but he lives in a bedsit whose front door is few feet away from one of the busiest roads in town. Then there is BostonKate and Lloyd, whose Zephyr apparently likes other cats, but they have a landlord who is less keen.

One thing that NewKitty's story has decided though: the SPCA, which had seemed like an undesirable but possible option, now appears unthinkable.

Daytrip

Yesterday I went to Philadelphia, all dressed up in my smartest candy pink wool jacket, the one which the woman in the shop assured me "don't worry it's too tight across the bust, you'll never want to button it up". I don't think she counted on how howling winds might subvert that prophecy.

This time it was not a road trip. Normally I would be happy about avoiding a solitary six hour schelp past two major cities, but on this occasion I was flying on a US Air prop plane in extremely high winds. The outbound journey was horrible, the worst I have ever taken anywhere. Like when the plane you're on loses one or two hundred feet of altitude and the bottom of your stomach hits your throat, only it happened about sixteen times on the 50 minute flight. The businessmen on the flight weren't exactly screaming and waving their rosary beads, but there were an awful lot of white knuckles clamped to armrests.

Meanwhile, in best b-school tradition, I was deciding how I could apply a framework to this situation and analyse it. The obvious place to start was with a probability tree. If in doubt, always draw a tree. Anyway, it seemed to me that there was about a 33% of me throwing up before the end of the flight, 67% not. If I waited to get the sick bag out of the seat pocket in front until I definitely knew I was going to chuck, I felt that there was a 25% chance I would get it out in time. Alternatively, I could choose to attempt to throw up on the lap of the man next to me instead. I felt this could be achieved with a 70% chance of projection accuracy. Even if I did get the sick bag out in time, I estimated a likely 85% accuracy with the bag. (I didn't feel I could guarantee 100% accuracy - for one thing as Professor Pfeifer likes to say, perfect information is hard to come by, and for another, if the vomiting coincided with another sudden drop in altitude, it could be plastered all over the ceiling whether I liked it or not.)

Moving on to the payoff of each outcome, if I got the sick bag out in advance and sat with it poised ready, and then didn't throw up after all (67% chance), it might not cost me anything but I would look like a feeble hyperchondriac drama queen in front of the cute guy sitting across the aisle ($???). If I didn't get the sick bag out in advance, and threw up without it (18.1%), I would merely end up looking pathetic and rather smelly. Normally, with a fresh change of clothes in the bag, I would be able to accept this outcome. On this occasion, however, on my way to an interview with only a spare pair of shoes in case the firm I was visiting turned out not to be the sort of place to approve of knee high leather boots, this outcome seemed sub optimal (likely payoff = $200 for an emergency trip to an Ann Taylor to buy a new suit).

At this point, being a systems thinker, something occurred to me. What if the mere act of getting the sick bag out increased my odds of chucking up? My poor nauseous brain could not cope with this new sub division of the probability tree. Maybe I needed something fluffy and non-quant to solve this one. What about Spirit of the New Workplace? That meant raisin meditation: sounds good, only one slight snag: no raisins at 26,000 feet. Aha! Managerial Psychology. What about the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People? I quickly troll through te seven habits... think win/win .. seek first to understand, then to be understood.. . None of them really seemed to fit the situation at hand, except perhaps be proactive.., which could be interpreted as stop messing round and get the sickbag out, or alternatively stop messing round and get the cute guy's digits before you barf.

Inspiration finally struck with one of our Managerial Psych texts "The Inner Game of Work" by Tim someone (I think). The basic idea is that if you focus all your attention on a very small element or aspect of whatever crappy or pointless task you are doing, and monitor how it changes as you do the task, you will get distracted from how crappy the task and start feeling really good about it. The only problem with applying this to my situation was that I wasn't actually engaged in any task, other than trying not to barf. The drinks trolley was a no-show due to the turbulence, and I did not have the stomach to read my book, which was all about how young girls become drunkards.

So instead I focused on the position of my elbow on the armrest between me and the man next to me. How long could I continue to edge my elbow fractionally along the rest, before the man next to me got pissed off and elbowed my elbow off? I know it sounds trivial, but it is surprisingly effective. I was distracted for the remaining twenty minutes of the flight, pink jacket intact, and without needing the sick bag once. See mum, my MBA was good for something.
* * *

The regular reader of this blog may be wondering whatever happened with the whole septic tank hoo-ha. Well, don't panic, you ain't missed nothin'. Drama, as I implied, unfolds in slow motion over here in Middleofnowheresville. Absolutely zero has happened since the last man who came to poke around with a stick was here.

But today, another man showed up to give a third opinion. This one I liked. His name was Mark, and he does exactly what it said on his box (or, in this case, shirt): DIGS. I'm strongly in favour of a bit of bulldozer action: none of this pathetic mincing around with sticks. Anyway, it looks like I might finally get some... I'll keep you all posted.

A Little Cat Drama

I'm not the sort of pesky blogger who litters her blog with endless links to other people's stuff. HOWEVER, as an unashamed supporter of London 2012 (sorry dear sister, but until you quit your addiction to day long outlet shopping splurges I can't take seriously your squeakings about £20 a year extra council tax) I couldn't help but snigger at this: Street Riots Mar Paris Bid for the Olympics

Talking of which, I was a little disappointed to learn that the sports that are going to be nearest me in Regent's Park if London gets the Olympics and if I still have my flat by then, are
1) baseball
2) softball
3) road cycling.

Not exactly bodice rippers, eh? And even then we might not have 1) or 2), because they are - deservedly many including me might say - finally on the IOC list of sports for future elimination.

My only hope is that someone decides that having 6,000 people jam onto Horseguards Parade for the beach volleyball competition, only 50 yards from the prime minister's front door, might be too much of a security risk, and it gets relocated.

* * *

This weekend, LandladyLynn went off to a corporate junket in a place called The Forest in South Carolina. It sounds a cross between Camp David and Bohemian Grove (for more details on Bohemian Grove, see Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City...). Among the delights The Forest had to offer were turkey hunting - funny how that keeps cropping up - quail shooting, golf, and then - for the ladies, a sightseeing tour of Charleston. I tried for days to persuade her that she should not be constricted by old fashioned sexist notions about ladylike pursuits, but Charleston apparently it was.

Anyway, I digress. The point about all this was, that this weekend I was on triple cat duty. As if an increasingly bouncy and Tigger-ish NewKitty and an increasingly sulky and uncooperative Sapphirethecat were not enough to deal with, this week Boston Kate and family are in Florida and I had long ago volunteered to look after their Zephyr, le chat extraordinaire. Zephyr is a most apt name for this beast, as he has this tendency to howl through a house at gale force, scattering cat biscuits, litter crumbs and cardboard box shreds as he goes.

Knowing that Sapphirethecat (who in every aspect apart from looks bears a striking similiarity to Marlon Brando) would likely explode at the sight of a single additional alien paw on his territory, I was happy to keep Zephyr at BostonKate's house on the other side of the mountain in Keswick, and commute between the two locales. Returning home from an exhausting pitch black pursuit around the garden trying to bring in Zephyr last night, however, I was unprepared for what awaited me when I returned home.

Up till now, NewKitty has had enough sense to steer clear of Sapphirethecat's territory, particularly the sacred supper dish. But last night, all sense of selfpreservation seemed to have deserted him: he was scoffing Sapphire's cat biscuits. Sapphirethecat was not pleased. I took an executive decision to remove NewKitty to the sitting room for his own safety. But Sapphire not only followed, but he walked up and hissed in NewKitty's face. (I am about ten times heavier than Sapphirethecat and I can tell you that witnessing him hissing is a frightening sight, reminiscent of a brown furry Mafioso cobra.)

At about that point I heard a noise that sounded a bit like someone eating catbiscuits back in the kitchen. I did a quick head count, and decided that all the cats I was meant to be supervising were present and accounted for, either hissing or being hissed at. It did not take an MBA or a degree in physics to work out that someone else was indeed eating catbiscuits in the kitchen. All three of us hightailed it to the kitchen, yelping our heads off. And there was yet another cat, head down in Sapphire's supper bowl.

Momentarily united against a common enemy, the three of us charged at the intruder, who fled in the opposite direction out through the french doors to the porch (which I had left three inches open for some excellent but forgettable reason). Unfortunately, this moment of brotherhood and camaraderie only lasted about eight seconds, from the moment the first hiss was uttered to the departing flick of the grey tail of the catburglar as it vanished into the dark.

There was nothing for it. After touring the rest of the house to make sure that no other random animals could enter that night, I decided that NewKitty's freedom to roam had to be curtailed, at least temporarily, for the health and sanity of all concerned. For one thing, Sapphirethecat, who is a creature of delicate appetite, would end up with no food at all at this rate. So I went to bed, putting NewKitty in my sitting room downstairs to discourage any nocturnal roamings. Or so I thought.

1am Scratching at the door. Then thumping. Repeated. Harder, more determined thumping. Bedroom door (which had been firmly closed) springs open. NewKitty triumphantly marches in. I get up. Put NewKitty back in the sitting room. Shut sitting room doors. Shut bedroom door. Barricade it with a suitcase. Return to bed.

4am. Wake to thumping and rattling noise. Repeated. Continues for ten minutes. Stops.
4.30am Thumping and rattling start again. Realize that someone is hurling themselves repeatedly against the sitting room doors.
5am Thumping and rattling once more. Can't stand it.
5.25am Argh.
5.45 am Going mad.

7am AAAAAARGH.


TODAY IN NUMBERS

Cats vigorously encouraged to spend the day outdoors roaming the woods - 1
Calls to local newspapers with classified Found Cat departments - 3
Laminated colour copies of Found Cat posters made by Kinkos - 5
Number of senior Darden administrators who stopped their cars to enquire why I was messing around with Stop signs - 1
Number of cats dining from Sapphirethecat's supper bowl this evening - 1
Tolerance of any cat that keeps me awake for one millisecond with thumping on door tonight -0% (early flight to Philly tomorrow....)
Destination of any cat that indulges in thumping on door behavior tonight - the green plastic tarpauline over the woodpile in the yard.

Vegas inflation

Spooky WhartonStalkerGuy has proposed again. But this time he wants $15k. I don't understand what has happened in the last three weeks that makes him think he is so valuable all of a sudden...

The Episode Where Big Reads The Book

On the penultimate season of Sex And The City, Carrie writes a book based on her newspaper columns. But Mr Big, who she meets up again with in California, is horrified by what he reads in it. He insists on sitting up all night with the book, obssessing about how he is portrayed.

What I don't understand about this is, how come Big (and all her other men, girlfriends and gaypals) never noticed they were being written about until the book came out? I mean, she has been writing those newspaper columns every week for at least five years and not one of her friends, as far as I can remember, ever so much as squeaks a whimper. I wish I knew what measures she took to secure this extraordinary licence to dish.

I, in contrast, am beginning to feel the heat. There is an enormously long list of things and people I would like to write about, but day by day it's being chipped away at. "Pubshy" (you know who you are) for example, is coming to DC for the weekend over Easter and has forbidden me to type a single syllable into this blog about it or I die. I would dearly love to write about work and all the crazee people there, but that's probably suicidal too. And now my mother is reading this (hi mum! happy mothers' day yesterday! ) that's taken a whole load more potential topics off the drawing board...

* * *

I think we've seen the last of TurkeyGuy's tail feathers. I took him to LiveArts to see Evita on Friday, a production for which EnglishJustin built the sets. To be fair, he had said he wanted to see Evita, but I am guessing he would probably have preferred a romantic outing a deux. Instead he got a barrelload of my friends, and I've never seen a group of people with less in common with someone. EnglishJustin did his best in the universal language of drill bits and 3 sixtyfourths of an inch (for it turned out that TurkeyGuy used to build sets too) but other than that it was fairly painful. TheSplash took me aside at one point and enquired, in the nicest possible way, whether TurkeyGuy and I were an item. I replied that I didn't think so, no, to which TheSplash replied, emphatically, "Good". I was about to ask him exactly, out of interest, what about TurkeyGuy had offended him so much - for on this occasion TurkeyGuy had actually kept most of his more inflammatory redneck opinions to himself - but then the TurkeyGuy himself appeared so we had to shut up and pretend we were talking about the weather.

Poor TurkeyGuy. The best thing about his brief appearance in my life is that I've learnt a whole load of interesting stuff about how one goes about hunting wild turkeys, without actually having to sit around for days in cold damp woods trying to shoot one. This information has all been passed onto Ricardo for his upcoming new Tarantino collaboration.

* * *

While on the subject, I had thought WhartonStalkerGuy had completely dropped off the side of the planet. (Having had Meredith teach me how to look people's photos up on Google Images, I was in the most part relieved about this). In one sense I was right. He had dropped off the left hand side of the planet, on a trip to Seoul, Tokyo and Shanghai. I think I'm going to keep very quiet about my trip to Philadelphia on Wednesday.

New Kitty Official Publicity Shot

New Kitty, aka the Boomerang Cat. This is its publicity shot, the one that's going up on lampposts.

Things to Make and Do

There has recently been a lot of stuff on NPR about how certain people are paid by companies to plug stuff to all their friends. I am not one of those people.

However, there is some stuff I'd like to plug all the same...

www.skype.com I was somewhat surprised when my laptop's telephone rang today. Firstly, I hadn't even realised my laptop had a telephone. Secondly, when I finally figured out how to pick it up, who was on the other end of line but El Ricardo, the father of my godson. Ricardo lives in darkest Suffolk (England, not Virginia), a place even closer to the middle of nowhere than here. But his voice was so clear it sounded like he was in the same room, not 3000 miles away, and I wasn't even using a headset or microphone. Best of all, it was one hundred percent free. Nil money. I like that. Anyway, I strongly recommend you all go out and download the Skype software (also free) so you can get your computer's phone ringing too.

www.biddingfortravel.com This site sort of reminds me of the I Love 7s, only it takes itself even more seriously. The basic idea is that you can make a request (free) to BiddingForTravel with your requirements, and a brutally efficient crack squad of nerds will work out a bidding strategy for you to get the flight/room you want for the lowest possible price on Priceline. I say brutal, because if they don't like the way you ask, they will unilaterally erase your request and/or ask you to resubmit in the officially approved manner. If your ego is too fragile to cope with that, or if you just can't be bothered to go through that hooha, the site still has useful data on what other people have successfully bid recently for rooms in different areas. Alternatively you can suddenly wake up in the night and remember that you have a classmate who works at Priceline and will give you all the data you want without you having to cosy up to any touchy nerds and their algorithms.

http://www.seatguru.com Very simple. You just select the airline and type of aircraft you will be flying in, and it will tell you everything you need to know about what seat to ask for and what seat to avoid like the plague.

Enjoy. More next month.

Short dictionary note

"moonpig" proper noun: custom greetings card outsourcer located in Lot's Road, Chelsea, UK: also verb, as in "I'm going to have to moonpig my mother pronto because even El Gigante doesn't (yet) sell Mother's Day cards three months before it happens here."

Boomerang Kitty

This morning Newkitty ran away. I took it out with me for some air when I went to get the mail, and halfway there it jumped off my shoulder, and bounded back up towards the north steps to the back porch. It looked back at me, miaowed pitifully three times, and then disappeared down the steps on the other side and vanished. I searched everywhere - all round the house and even underneath it - but NewKitty had gone. I was pissed off - I had played baroque recorder sonatas to this cat. Didn't our time together mean anything?

Of course I wondered if I had been locking up the cat against its will. Perhaps it had an owner some place (it's definitely not a wild cat: it's front paws have been declawed) it has been desperate to get home to. But we had opened doors for it, and invited it to go outside several times, and each time the cat had refused. It just didn't add up.

By nightfall, after having made several excursions into the woods in the snow, banging NewKitty's supper dish with a teaspoon, I had given it up as a bad job and assumed it was probably somewhere in West Virginia by now. But then, at 6pm, as I was standing by the french windows in the basement, a little face pressed itself against the window: New Kitty, the amazing Boomerang Cat.


* * *

For everyone who knows I was working on a writing a case for the Arthur Page Society competition in December, I heard today that my case won the first prize. Not the grand prize, but the one below that. Like the Premiership and the First Division. The First Division may not be where the mega bucks are, but it's a hell of a lot better than non-league football.

http://www.awpagesociety.com/newsroom/2005cases.asp

The Cat That Came In From The Cold

Ten inches we didn't have, after all, but enough even so. It's melting now, but driving to El Gigante yesterday in LandladyLynn's 4x4 on an emergency Diet Coke and bacon run, it was blizzard conditions, like a scene from Cold Mountain. [Much of which, incidentally, was shot in this state]. Even the screened in back porch was full of powdery snow, and the little aluminium cat food bowl which LandladyLynn keeps out there for any stray passers was frozen over. It was no day to be outside.

It was probably about two weeks ago, coming home from our Jackson Pollock-esque marbling session at BostonKate's house, when I noticed a flash of a movement through the beam of my the headlights. Over the next few days, the blur of movement slowed down and took the form of a tiny thin brown and white patched cat. Next time it started snowing, some nifty detective work following its little trail of pawprints indicated that the cat had taken up full time residence under the back porch, subsisting on, one presumes, mice and melted snow. Which is not a very comfortable billet, given the temperature this month have fallen down as low as minus ten celsius at night.

This week, as the weather worsened, LandladyLynn started putting out a few cat biscuits in the back porch for the beast, (now known as "NewKitty") and yesterday, with very heavy snow bucketing down, the cat was already waiting outside the french windows between porch and dining room. It seemed churlish not to let the cat sit just inside in the warm to eat its supper. While the cat was still munching, in a very hasty-Oliver-Twist-please-don't-take-the-bowl-away mode, LandladyLynn announced she was going out to dinner and said would I mind showing the feline visitor the door when he/she was done eating.

Easier said than done. I tried picking up the remaining food and putting it back in the porch to try to lure NewKitty out, but even a half starved beast was not so stupid as to fall for that schoolboy trick. No right minded animal, vegetable or mineral would have volunteered to sleep under the porch last night. I tried picking up NewKitty him/herself, but it saw me coming and bolted between my legs and hid between the bookcase and the desk. At around this point, just as I was beginning to panic that I had just let a potentially flea ridden rabies infested stray loose in someone else's house, I saw an ominous set of dark brown whiskers approach around the corner: the whiskers of Sapphirethecat - the deceptively heavy 15 year old male Burmese cat -in-residence.

Not being a feline expert, I desperately tried to remember what one is meant to do in the event of cat fights. Are you were meant to spray them with a hose, or throw a duvet on them, or distract them with a roll of toilet paper? While I was dithering, however, Sapphirethecat had seen NewKitty and was stalking it slowly but purposefully between the chairlegs and under the diningroom table, like a tiger padding through through the jungle.

NewKitty (outweighed probably five or six to one by Sapphirethecat) pretended to be completely oblivious, resolutely looking anywhere except at the approaching enemy. I held my breath, literally rooted to the spot in dread. Sapphire was within three feet, now one, now three inches. NewKitty actually put its paw over its eyes. Sapphire stretched out his head and sniffed. Poor NewKitty cringed. And then Sapphire turned around. And stalked off.

Phew. I decided to strike quickly, and, praying that I would not be clawed to death, pounced on NewKitty before it had time to realize what was happening. I must say that I did consider the sensible option: throwing it out into the back porch, but outside looked so bleak, I couldn't face it.

So I took it downstairs to my basement and shut it in my living room with the heater on, the spare litter box, and some water and cat biscuits. Later, as it curled up on my tartan cushion, we watched the final, appalling episode of The Bachelorette on TV together and then I played it the recorder to see if it liked music. NewKitty rested his head on my arm. And we both hoped that LandladyLynn would not call the animal shelter in the morning.