Historical Disneyland: The Tower of London!

Not London Bridge, Tower Bridge.
You can tell because it is made of towers, visible from the Tower of London,
and not,
in fact,
falling down.

Gee, RR Martin,
where do you get your inspirations?

 Went to the Tower of London today. Partly to see the room they'd ripped up and found 1500 executed bodies. Party to see the Beefeaters. Partly to see that punch bowl. (You couldn't take pictures, but obviously someone on the internet has). But mostly it was to stand where Moriarti stood before he smashed the window an stole the crown jewels.

The Tower of London also has ravens that live there. I am surprised that they have not carried off any gold/jewels. They have a magpie glint in their eyes.

ToL: Less a tower, more a bunch of buildings and walls.

 And outside the Tower of London was the above bridge that was painted for a Jubilee. Plus some great views of the Thames and stuff that people are actively constructing along the Thames.

Looking at these new/in progress buildings, I realized:

I totally get the future-London in Star Trek now.

Which of these is not like the others? 

So here's a question for you: which London do you like? 

a. Square Towers? 

b. Giant Faberge Rocket Ships?

Do the crows even have anywhere to land on the giant egg? Do they get confused and roost?

Top three things I learned from Flying: Gullible Travels

I love airplanes. They're fun to jump out of, provided you have a parachute/someone who knows what they are doing. Right now, fully realizing the true meaning of jet lag, I kind of hate them. Last night was DC to Iceland to London.

This was my first time doing international plane travel. It seemed much the same as domestic, except that everything was said in Icelandic.

Lesson 1: stand your ground!

It looks like a circuit board!

If you picked your seat, don't agree to swap with anyone for any reason.

An adorable family asked to switch their son's seat with mine. They said he had a window seat a few forward. This was true, but the windows aren't aligned, so my visibility was halved! (I would care a lot if I was missing more than circuit boards and black sky.) It also seemed to be the loudest seat on the plane. Earplugs and headphones are my new favorite things.

Lesson 2: don't think too hard

#thatawkwardmomentwhen you realize you have no idea
if this is Iceland or clouds. Spoiler: clouds.

Clouds are weird. Deal with it.

Lesson 3: London is tiny
Not really, but when the plane brings you in, down into Heathrow, you enter at just the right distance for the entire city to look like it's made of miniatures. The architecture and cars also work very well to make them look like they are toys.

It is quite possible that I was also suffering increasingly from the effects of sleep deprivation when I was most convinced we were flying very low over a miniature city.

This isn't what I'm talking about. I couldn't take pictures
for the thing I was talking about or else the electronic radiation
would've made a terrible movie plot.

Also everything is culture shock; Taylor Swift was the first thing I saw on tv.

On Travel Writing

There are many kinds of travel writing. I can say this with authority, because I took a class on it one time in college. I was so looking forward to learning exactly how to do travel writing, and I had such high hopes that everything would be interesting and then--

It was a terrible class.

Boring. boring. boring! Everything we read was boring. Dry, melancholic authors who were so jaded by the travel experience that they could not string two sentences together without interrupting them with a jaded modernist sigh. Needless to say, I learned nothing.

This is not going to be that sort of travel writing. You won't find any cynicism here. This is a blog, by Django! Expect pictures. Fun facts. I will even throw in all caps when I SEE THE BEST THINGS EVAR!

ahem. Well, I am a little allergic to all-capsing (sometimes it threatens to capsize a blog post), but if John Adams can do it, by Vanderkemp, so can I!

To keep up to date with my travels, you should do one of the following:

1. Subscribe to blog. You can do this if you have blogger.
2. Click on links I post on facebook. And you can comment either on facebook or on blog. Let's be real, I exist in both places at once.
3. Email me soliloquies about how much you miss me; I will read them, reply a little, and throw a blog link at you, because I believe in efficiency of typing.

I wish I could give you a regular schedule to look forward to, but wifi is not guaranteed in all places at all times.

Setting Historical Presidents

Breaking news!
Everything old is new again and now it's free online!
Never again will you have to reel in the microfilm. (Unless you think you might want to investigate this outdated technology. Spoiler: you don't.)

http://founders.archives.gov/

These primary sources have never been so easy to browse. There are now 119,000 letters of the founding fathers online. This is big. I'm talking text-searchable, fully immersible, easy-to-read transcriptions. Now available to everyone! For the low low price of free! And there will be more to come. People are hard at work belting letters to each other as we speak.

If you've ever wondered what the early presidents and founders had to say before they were famous and, by osmosis, became dense historical tomes--look no further than Founders Online. This is a great unbowdlerized way to investigate the early presidents. You can read what they said about slavery. Learn what people wore. Learn what culturally-sensitive rumors are being tossed about:

"Commodore Porter says that the Turks & other people on the Barbary Coast believe that every Jew who dies turns into a Jack ass, & that the Christians Mount & ride them instantly, & directly, to the Devil."*

Learn early American modes of expression, and that every letter ever written has a closer of "your loyal & obedt. servt."

This is your first stop for papers of George Washington, John Adams (and family), Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin. And if you want Monroe, the fifth and forgotten founding father, a search tells me he authored 719 letters in the collection, and received 552. (Let me tell you, his handwriting did not make those 719 letters easy).

Disclaimers & Tips

• Some of them are not authoritative final versions, but by golly, no one can proofread these things but fully trained handwriting experts and archaic orthography experts. 
• If you are searching terms for frequency of use for linguistic research, be aware that editorial footnotes are also text-searchable, so you cannot infer directly without investigating the results.  

Example: This is an early access document. You can see the disclaimers around the doc and on the sidebar. 

This is a project I've been lucky enough to work with for the past year. I don't know how many hundreds of people have contributed to this massive massive endeavor, but many hours of many people's lives have made this a text-searchable, author-searchable reality.

* Citation: “To James Madison from James Monroe, 22 April 1815,” Founders Online, National Archives (http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/99-01-02-4292, ver. 2013-06-10). Source: this is an Early Access document from The Papers of James Madison. It is not an authoritative final version.

Europe: The Itinerary

What I think I will do, more or less.

I was chided for my last post because it really said nothing important about my trip. Ok, yes, that is a super valid point. But you have to understand--for the past two months I've been staring at the map of Europe and trying to figure out how I can possibly limit all the places I want to see. Because I want to see all of everything ever, and everywhere that ever was, and even some things that never will be. But for the purpose of this trip, I am coming to realize that that isn't entirely possible without a Tardis. 

But I've decided that I am landing in London in late June and flying out of Madrid in early November. So that's, like, four months and two weeks to be a frickin tourist. That gives me options, but it looks like by far the easiest thing to do will be spend a month and a half in Great Britain, and then venture across to the continent and use a Eurail pass to get around from early August to November. Because then I can go everywhere--well, part of everywhere--and it will be awesomeblossumsomuchfunomg. 

Won't that be fun? Yes. 

What I would like to do.
Actually you can just make the whole map
solidly red, and that's more accurate.

My limitations are thus: 

1. I'm carrying my job with me so I need, while not constant, pretty regular internet access. This also means I will lose at a few tourist hours each day to work.
2. The Schengen area limits tourists to 90 days in 180 days for ALL OF THE EUROZONE* minus Great Britain, minus very western Europe (err, really, the whole Shengen agreement is confusing and I hate it with the passion of 1000 suns and at least a couple moons).
3. I simultaneously want to see ALL THE COUNTRIES and spend enough time in the places to a sense of more than the train station. And I want to practice my romance language skills. 
4. My cold-weather phobia

Very generally, see exhibit A, the top map. I am thinking to go to these cities and cool stuff nearby. But please, tell me about all the things I should see. Opinions welcome.

Great Britain 

London, England

Edinburgh, Scotland

Belfast, Northern Ireland

Dublin, Ireland

Cardiff, Wales

London, England

The Continent 

Paris, France; and definitely Versailles

Brussels, Belgium; I am going to eat waffles and drink chocolate. 

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Berlin, Germany

Prague, Czech Republic

Krakow, Poland

Budapest, Hungary

Vienna, Austria

Munich, Germany

Zurich, Switzerland

Milan, Italy

Venice, Italy

Rome, Italy

Naples, Italy

Marseilles, France

Toulouse, France

Andorra

Barcelona, Spain

Valencia, Spain

Sevilla, Spain

Lisbon, Portugal

Madrid, Spain

Plan Europe, and my new favorite Android App

Yeah I've seen the Eiffel Tower before, no big. Wait, shit. That was
just that time I rode some roller coasters and maybe Drop Zone. 

So. Announcement one: And this is big! I'm going to backpack Europe this summer. Yeah. You put those eyebrows back where they belong. And before you go all judgmental about how that's passe and anyone who's anyone has already been to Europe and you really have to go to Southeast Asia or Sub-Saharan Africa or Antarctica or Siberia, because everyone's so real there--stop. That all's next on the list. This is a first step. Necessary too.

I'm a once and future(?) English Major and that lovely English degree (it was also a hipster degree, since it was ironically not printed in English) is really just provisional--it is literally mandatory that I make an epigrammatic  pilgrimage to England. And France. And Spain. All so I can see the fabled places that all those literary expats hung out and walk through the streets, drinking in a heady ambrosia of a primordial soup that spawned modernism. I also maybe have a weakness for super pretty buildings. 

Announcement two: I just got a tablet. A Nexus. Not gonna lie. It's pretty cool. For straight up reading I prefer my Kindle because it's easy on the eyes. Now, for wasting time, a Kindle doesn't hold a candle to Android. I'm easily obsessed with timesinks, and this Nexus brings me into whole new worlds of perfection in the art of timesinking. 

Is it useful for writing? So far not at all. That's my next plan for App-searching. For now, I'm perusing the obvious nexus of Travel planning and Nexus: Travel Apps! Yeaaaaahhhhh!

Since I'm going to Europe, I did some research and learned that there are people in the countries of Europe that speak languages other than English. Weird, right? Totally unlike the U.S. where 110% of everyone speaks English.

Now, I love language. I believe I have demonstrated this by taking five years of Spanish and promptly forgetting all of it. Nonetheless, I made a New Year's resolution to learn 20 phrases in 10 languages. Up until February, I had worked towards this goal by forgetting all about it. But now that I have a tablet to play with I can get technology to do the work for me!

Introducing: the 2nd-easiest-to-Google-for Language Instruction app:  Tourist Language Learn & Speak!

I love that it doesn't tell me to be a traveler and keep it real.
It knows I just want to be a murfurking tourist.

Finally! An app that cares about my New Years resolution. It features 24 languages and very basic, consistent phrases for each of them.* It includes pretty much anything I'll encounter in Europe and excludes pretty much everything native to Africa or South America. This App makes it easy to learn a little of everything. The practical application is limitless; if anyone ever refuses to point me towards a toilet, I can ask them in twenty-three different languages until they roll their eyes and point!

Utility aside, the app is pretty sweet for instant gratification of me feeling like I am learning really small amounts of information quickly. There are words. You click on them. A clear, non-robot voice reads them to you in what I can only assume is flawless pronunciation. They have the same set of numbers, greetings, small talk phrases, and travel directions in most* languages. This week I learned French. All of it. And since I can hear the speaker's clear voice, I can rest easy with the knowledge that my accent is likely incomprehensible to anyone who actually speaks the language. But it's very like pretending to learn a language while a little bit of knowledge sneaks in. It's fun, and it lets me feel accomplished and pleased with myself whenever I get stuck on a level of Angry Birds. 

*The only thing about the program that fills me with the rage of a thousand exploding suns is that some of the languages are missing chunks. It has much more full information for European languages. Useful sections like bus, train, plane, restaurant, etc. are not to be found for Hindi, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. If memory serves, Vietnamese and Arabic may be the only non European origin languages. Hopefully they'll update those into existence later. Because right now I'm just offended that I can't learn all language ever on a tablet. 

Hom Com vs Som Com: Hit Man Rom Coms always win

Let me pose here with a gun while I watch
you run around  and jump on cars.

I made the mistake of watching Knight and Day today, and I was crushingly disappointed.

Don't get me wrong here, I really enjoyed it. I have a deep and abiding love of stupid action movies, stupid thrillers, and romantic comedies*. This was all of those steamrolled into one, and had I just gone into the film expecting a standard thriller-rom-com (which can abrev all the way down to 'tom com') this would have been a success. And really for a Tom-com, Cruise really does know what he's doing. A little crazy never hurt anyone.

I would have fully enjoyed the fine film if no one had told me anything about it. And told me wrong. I don't remember who I have to blame, but I am vexed. There I was ranting about the superiority of romantic comedies about assassins, and how sad it is that so few movies that fit this genre actually get made--and someone recommended Knight and Day. Fiend! So I was all excited, because it's surprisingly hard to find anything in the genre of hit-man rom com (super abbrev: hom com).

Consequently, to this villain's pernicious lies, I spend the first 45 minutes of this film all kinds of pleased, assuming that Cruise is a hit man, and he's gaining Diaz's trust for a larger and more difficult hit. This made his acting really good. The fake friendliness, the flirtation, the extreme sketchiness.

But as I watched further, it became clear; this guy is just a super-secret agent. And that's fine, for some people. There is nothing wrong with a spy rom com, or spom com. Except that I am pretty sure I've never seen truth-serum used as anything but a lame plot device.

The movie flirts with not trusting the main character, but doesn't flirt hard, and we know they're all talk and no daggers. Can I judge the movie for not having a truly psychopathic lead while still criticizing the relationship models in Twilight?

Yes. Yes I can.

To review, these are all of the Hit Man Rom Coms that I have found:

Killers - woof
The Baker/Assassin in Love - had Jaime in it.
Wild Target - had Ron Weasley in it
GPB - you gotta love the 80s.
War Inc. does this count at all?
Mr & Mrs Smith - hom/som com - still haven't gotten through it sober
This Means War - (barely counts) Captain Kirk. awful plot.