Areas of Unrest

QOTD: "The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward." - John Maynard Keyes

Reading: mostly guidebooks

Listening to: nothing at the moment

Decluttering accomplishments: my dining room table is actually visible, which is sadly all too unusual a state. I also have actually boxed up a bunch of books to sell/trade. Yes, books.

10 May 2003 - Off to Points East

I'm leaving for London tonight and on to more interesting destinations shortly thereafter, so this will be the last entry for a couple of weeks. Check back around the end of the month. For those who think that I'm slighting London, it isn't that I don't like the place. After all, Robert is there. But all in all, I prefer my foreign countries to be considerably more foreign.

Anyway, the week dragged on particularly slowly. Despite not having anything vitally important to do, I managed to learn only one more letter of the Georgian alphabet. Actually, learning alphabets is fairly easy, but the problem is limited opportunity to practice. It's not like I have vast tracts of Georgian to sound out. And, of course, it's not a language of a great deal of use anywhere else.

There were at least two interesting news stories this week to distract me a bit. One involves the guy who cut off his arm to save himself when he was pinned by a boulder. This just amazes me. I can't imagine ever having the courage to do something like that, even knowing that the alternative was dying. And, of course, even after that, he had to rappel down the mountainside and hike six miles. I'm both astonished and creeped out by the whole thing.

The other piece that caught my attention was the group of researchers who took a bunch of monkeys and left them in a room with a computer. Not quite the classic room full of monkeys and typewriters, but a reasonable facsimile. It seems that monkeys are partial to the letter "s" and that they don't type all that randomly. I wonder, though, if there might have been something like food residues on that part of the keyboard to bias things? The next logical step is to set the monkeys to throwing darts at the stock listings from the Wall Street Journal.

I'm still hoping to get a bit more housework done before I leave, so I'll stop here. I expect that my vacation will at least give me something more interesting to write about.