in britannia

So today is Wednesday, the day that I normally look through the newspapers for food reviews. Well, I'm doing that today, but what stood out was the ratings explanation for the new Spielberg movie "War of the Worlds" in the NYTimes Review. All the way down toward the bottom, we find this warning:

"War of the Worlds" is rated PG-13. Much of the earth's population is wiped out, leaving very little time for sex or bad language.

Excellent.

Keble Ball was on Saturday / Sunday: an 8 - 5 (yeah, you read that right) affair in which partygoers were treated to several large acts on a few different stages while being pumped full of alcohol and food. Also available were two carnival amusements: bumper cars and a big bouncy-castle. Lots of attendees, though not enough to justify opening up a third quadrangle of the college. Drinks were darn strong, and the food was excellent. So why is the overwhelming consensus that it sucked? Well, still relatively fresh in our institutional memory is the 1999 ball when Keble managed to book Fun Lovin' Criminals just after they got big. A blowout affair, the '99 ball sold something like 2500 tickets. I think we sold all of 1000. Combine this with the fact that many other balls have larger and more lavish affairs for essentially the same price. At Trinity College on the night before, £100 bought you a massive food buffet, rides, bands, and a truly elegant affair. At Lincoln College, earlier this year, something like £60 still left plenty of options on the table and the entertainment was excellent. Keble just doesn't have the spaces to put something like this on: sure we've got the quad space and the physical plant, but we don't have larger rooms in which to put up a massage parlor or a proper photo room. And we don't have a giant lawn in which to pitch tents in lieu of those rooms. I mean, hey, I had fun. I enjoyed talking with my friends, mauling them on the bumper cars, and the food was excellent. But at £70, yeah it was expensive. And somewhat unjustifiably so. Next year, I think I'd like to budget myself into some smaller but more impressive balls. Or at least, some cheaper and less absurd ones.

Speaking of budgeting, there's a nice editorial in yesterday's New York Times which details why people don't want to go into teaching. A popular story that I tell a lot of people. So I'm at Princeton reunions and I run across an old friend who's working on Wall Street. He tells me he's just spent the weekend in London with his girlfriend, and in a month he's spending two weeks traipsing around the South of France on vacation. He's just moved into a larger apartment where he now has a concierge and they just found this fantastic cleaning and laundry service. I reply that we both came from work today: how was his job? "Oh, it's terrible," he responds, "I work with complete idiots who couldn't analyze their way out of freshman economics... My boss is a jerk who doesn't respect my contributions, the commute is hell, never enough time on lunch breaks to do what he wants, and the hours are absurd." I think to myself that, while I don't really have the money to pay someone to clean my apartment or do my laundry, and I certainly can't just pick up to London for a weekend or to the South of France for two weeks, I love my job and I don't have to take refuge in a large Manhattan apartment or in London or in France in order to escape from a job that I hate. I compensate for my expensive tastes in food by making my own sushi. I learn to cook better food so that I don't have to go to restaurants. If I splurge, it's on good coffee or a great CD. I actually make more money than I'm spending for all three years of teaching. It's not easy, and I certainly wouldn't be able to afford a family. At that point, I'd have been hard-pressed to afford a girlfriend, frankly. Of course teaching salaries should go up. Of course we should value our teachers with our wallets as much as we do with our verbal praise. One Maryland housing complex is providing free rent to five teachers as long as they keep their jobs in the local school. Kudos to them. But instead of five for free, how about halving the rent for ten? Full student debt relief if the student teaches for five years? Schools should be palatial, kids should have up-to-date textbooks and top flight equipment. How about something simple: if you want me to use the internet more for my students, if you want me to email my kids and put my worksheets online, could you pay my cable modem bill? My former employers, when they implemented a fantastic plan from the trustees, picked one single step on which to start: raising faculty compensation. But when I suggested that they pick up the tab for my internet access, the older teachers just looked at me and giggled.

But two years later, I was the one with a website, I was the one with worksheets online. Students could IM me at home and expect to get a response. And when I travelled to visit other schools, I would grade their homework online and hand it back. One parent was shocked that I would email a quiz to her son and then just *trust* that he'd get it back to me the next day without cheating. Not only did I trust this one student: because we had an honor code in place, I knew I could trust all of them. My internet access cost about $45/mo. It's not cheap. Last idea: if you paid my internet bill, but required that I maintain a website and post every other day? That would certainly make sure that I was using 'net connection wisely. In fact, that's how the people in Gawker media get paid - bloggers who are charged with posting at least, I think, six times per day. No post, no pay. There are certainly faculty who would complain: those would be the less tech-savvy and generally older teachers who are already making a lot more than the fresh college grads for whom this is important money out the window anyway. And again, I didn't get paid for it, I still had the website, I still posted worksheets, and I still fielded IMs from students. So in one sense, I guess I am the sap more than anything. But why should good teaching rely on a teacher's gullibility or altruism in order to succeed?

Rankings make me furious. Rankings make me furious because invariably, the rube who is doing the ranking is some muppet for whom I have very very very little respect. Matt Lauer was on the Daily Show two weeks ago discussing the Discovery Channel's 50 Greatest Americans poll. The top five were announced recently, and there is currently a poll on to determine who's at the very top. The top five, in alphabetical order, are:
Benjamin Franklin
Martin Luther King Jr.
Abraham Lincoln
Ronald Reagan
George Washington

This is, in my opinion, a list I can get behind. But what of the other 45 who made it to the list but not in the top five? Who's on it? Elvis. Oprah. Barbara, George, and George W Bush. George W. Bush even made the top 25! Tom Cruise. Brett Favre. Mel Gibson. Michael Jackson. Dr. Phil. Donald Trump. Truly illustrious company... Tiger Woods made it. I don't know what is particularly American about Tiger Woods, honestly. Who's not on the list but should be? Thurgood Marshall, Leonard Bernstein, John Marshall. Heck, Yo-Yo Ma and Andy Warhol should be on the list.

The American Film Institute came out with the top 100 movie quotes. Now, I think it's kind of silly, trying to figure out what they consider or don't consider a movie quote. But whatever.

Finally, the poll that makes us hate the midwest even more than we do. The Chicago Tribune's editorial board came up with the top 50 magazines in the country. So Cook's Illustrated beat New York. What's sad is that New York beat the New Yorker. People and Vogue beat National Geographic and the Atlantic Monthly. Newsweek and Time (at least they conglomerated the two of them) beat the Economist. This is ridiculous. My top magazine: The New Yorker, followed by the Economist and National Geographic. Number 50 on the list? Lake Superior Magazine. Enough said.

My friend Frank from Princeton (now an assistant prof. at Middlebury) used to be the only math department grad student who was a native speaker of English. As a result, and also because he was an excellent teacher, he won awards for his teaching abilities. For a sense of why, check out this story here. My friend Adam, a standup comic in Baltimore (and also science grad student) does a really funny joke about this.

It rained like crazy today, so I checked out my two online sources for weather in Oxford. First was the Met office, who said that it was raining. Second was Weather.com, which said that it was partly cloudy. Visual confirmation suggests that weather.com was full of it.

But it's an interesting proposition regarding the weather: again, according to the New York Times, the BBC has been getting a lot of complaints about its new weather forecast. Story here. I was particularly amused by the second paragraph: reprinted here in its entirety and without permission:

"We have to be very careful not to make value judgments," Mr. Gibbs said. "If we say, 'It's going to be a fantastically nice sunny day' " - here he mimicked a gung-ho American-style weatherman, perhaps the sort whose on-screen persona might include sunglasses and a "fun" T-shirt - "then we will get letters from people who don't like the sunshine, or who have asthma, or who need the rain because their gardens are dying."

Excellent...

I had my very last evensong this year with Queen's today. It was for the Incumbents, which are the priests around the country who preside over parishes the patron of which is The Queen's College of Oxford. It actually means that Queen's owns the land on which these parishes exist, and that, supposedly, the fellows of Queen's make decisions about how the parish is run and even who is hired to be the vicar. It is truly a strange system.

Anyway, afterward, we had a nice trip down to the Angel and Greyhound Meadow (which is, incidentally, right behind the Angel and Greyhound pub) for several games of what could only charitably be called baseball for complete and utter morons. It's laid out on a pitch that's not exactly a diamond, and the rules seem to be made up as we go along. Certainly, there are "official" rules here, but we didn't use very many of those. Don't forget the little .pdf at the bottom describing how to lay out a Rounder's pitch.

Rules as we played them were as follows: the batter gets to run no matter whether he actually hits the ball. Hit the ball, run. Don't hit the ball, run. Don't even swing? Go ahead. Run. If it's a "no ball", which is what in baseball would be a "ball", they'll call you back after you've run. If you're on base, run whenever the bowler pitches the ball. Whether the ball is hit or not. In fact, even if it's a "no ball" or not. Just run. Truly a ridiculous game.

So instead, I spent some time teaching two of the guys how to swing the bat like an American. Will actually learned and was quite good - he ended up going yard on two at bats. Nicely done. Robin, slightly less successful, though on a fluke he also hit a full rounder (what might otherwise be termed a home run). Interesting commentary from the townies sitting on a bench across the field: "those stupid toffs have no common sense."

Dinner afterward at Freud's, which is a cafe, restaurant, bar, and club all housed in the interior of a former church. I had two starters b/c I'm not feeling terribly well and I want to come home to sleep. I had marinated garlic cloves, which were delicious, and then a babaganouch with pita wedges that was more like babaganouch mixed with hummous. The garlics though were amazing. Innovative without being weird. That reminds me of the dinner I had in Cambridge, MA with Diana a couple weeks ago. We had deep-fried dill pickles, which were exactly what they sounded like: dill pickle spears dunked in batter and then deep fried. They were amazing and innovative, and yeah, a bit weird. But only the first bite or two. The rest of them were just yummy.

The Boston Globe message boards have been a twitter ever since April 25th, when an interview with the two authors of "The Rock Snob's Dictionary" also named the duo's desert island ten, ie. the ten CDs you'd want with you on a desert island. Since then, readers have been writing in their own desert island ten.

I thought about this for a while, and I think I can come up with ten. There's a scism between what I like every now and again and what I could listen to over and over again. There isn't much in the middle: either fortnightly or daily, but nothing that I listen to, say, every three or four days. And wouldn't you know it, a lot of it's classical. Probably not what the two 'rock snobs' had in mind.

1) Glenn Gould: Bach: Goldberg Variations (1955). This is the cleanest and most nuanced expression of Bach I own. It's gorgeous and deep in a very spartan 'zen' sort of way.

2) The Tallis Schoars: Lamenta (1998). Renaissance music from Ferrabosco the Elder, Tallis, Brumel, White, and Palestrina, these are the laments of Jeremiah for holy week. The Tallis Scholars have been criticized for sounding 'too perfect' and not human enough. A fair point, I think, but wow, what a sound...

3) Marsalis: All Rise (2002). Wynton Marsalis, with the LA Philharmonic, Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, Cond. Esa-Pekka Salonen. A beautiful and earthily jazzy expression of hope, love, and faith. The work has its flaws, and Marsalis' own kinks in the composition of this piece present some formidable challenges, but overall, the music is breathtaking.

4) Herbie Hancock: Cantaloupe Island (1994). This is so relaxing...

5) Copland: Appalachian Spring (1989). Orpheus Chamber Ensemble. While most people know the Appalachian Spring suite for orchestra, this is a much more sparse and streamlined arrangement. In fact, this is the original arrangement for 13 instruments, which was all Copland could fit into the pit. The loss of intensity between the full orchestra and the 13 instruments is minimal, but the extra clarity is worth it.

6) Bach: St. John Passion (1990). John Elliot Gardiner, English Baroque Soloists, et al. This is a gorgeous recording of a heart wrenching work. It captures the pathos of the passion without resorting to the sentimentality of other performances.

7) Dave Brubeck: Time Out (1959). This was the first jazz album to change time signatures. The rhythms and harmonies of Brubeck's playing cannot disguise how much fun he is obviously having with the music. One of my favorite CDs.

8) Boston Pops, Keith Lockhart: The Celtic Album (1998). Completely mindless music. Yes, there's the Mendelssohn Hebrides Overture in there, but it's mainly severely sanitized Celtic and Celtic-esque folk music. It's fun, it's light, and it's entertaining. In short, it's pops music.

9) Bela Fleck: Perpetual Motion (2002). This album from banjo virtuoso Bela Fleck is his cross-over album into Classical music. It's far from perfect: the mixing is very bass-heavy and the tempi are inconsistent. And some of the pieces are less successful than others. However, it is a beautiful take on Bach, Vivaldi, and Chopin, along with a few others. Great guest musicians too, including Evelyn Glennie, Joshua Bell, and Edgar Meyers.

10) Tallis Scholars: Josquin Missa Pange Lingua (1986). This is as gorgeous as singing gets. Technically perfect, totally controlled, and devoid of the individualized emotion of the performers, thus allowing the listener to hear whatever he wants to hear.

OK, with the exception of #8, I think this might stand up to a snob's look. OK, time to go.

Happy Father's Day, Dad! Of course, the title of this posting indicates the most pressing thing I miss about Dad. This is, of course, not to say that his inimitable culinary abilities are the be all and end all of my father's skills. My dad is, and always has been, a huge supporter. I think it really was his idea to apply to Oxford at all: I was applying to University College London when my Dad asked me why I wasn't applying to Oxford or Cambridge. I hadn't even considered it, which was stupid of me, and he sort of planted the seed that led to my coming here at all. Dad has always been an amazing source of strengh: thanks Dad.

And, of course, thanks to Calvin Coolidge who, 81 years ago (in 1924), established Father's Day in America. While Mothering Sunday in the UK is about two months before Mother's Day in America, Father's Day in both England and the US is today. So Happy Father's Day!

NPR has, on its front page, posted a story on the History of the Chinese Restaurant in America. I've seen stuff on this before: the exhibit in the Museum of the Chinese in America was profiled in the New York Times back in December. Several years ago, there was another NPR story on Stan Freberg, who used to do a lot of radio humor and did a lot of radio advertisements. Oddly, it's not available on the NPR website anymore. But they actually played a lot off the old radio ads, including some for Chun King™ brand Chow Mein. Either click on the link "Hear a Series of Ads for Chun King and La Choy" or click here. Clips will play on either Real Player or Windows Media Player. My particular favorite is the "hot dog" ad. It's hilarious.

Finally, stupidly, MTV is, evidently, planning MTV Chi, an MTV for Chinese people. At least, that's what's reported in this story from yesterday's New York Times. From the article, "If you're a young Chinese-American or Indian-American, what channel do you tune into to see yourself, to see artists that reflect your lifestyle?" asked Nusrat Durrani, 44, senior vice president and general manager of MTV World. Personally, I listen to NPR. But then again, I've also been described as significantly less Asian than your typical New England prep school and Princeton graduate.

I spent the day not wasting time as much as throwing it out the window wholesale. I just needed a mental health day: I've been horribly stressed this last week. And I didn't want to share it until I had everything fully resolved.

On Monday, when I got back from Boston, I found an email from my departmental secretary reading as follows:

---

Dear Joseph,

Could you let me know as a matter of urgency whether you handed in any essays to Schools on June 2nd? They were expecting some work from you but our records in the Classics Office show that you were not intending to submit work this year.  Either way, we need to sort it out!

---

Being suitably freaked out, I asked around. Evidently, someone in the college office saw it fit to sign me up for modules I wasn't actually officially taking this year, thus making me liable for four 5,000 word essays to be handed in on June 2nd. Oddly, I thought that our departmental secretary was British, so why she typed "June 2nd" as opposed to "2nd June" is beyond me.

Anyway, I got it cleared up finally yesterday. I've been withdrawn from those courses and I will, in fact, be taking all four of my course modules (and my dissertation) next year. Unofficially, I'm finishing up with the first two modules now, so handing in all of that work isn't really going to be a problem, as I've got three out of those four essays actually already written. So, if I've got them all written, why aren't I turning them in? Prof. Parker has a really interesting take on this: since I'm going to be learning more in the next 11 months, why should I pre-submit now essays that would be that much better in one year? I'll get the essays to 2nd draft stage and then polish them off next year. No problem.

Thank goodness I got that cleared up. Thus, I feel like I've earned this respite from work.

The Retail Alphabet Game is NOT easy. This tests your recall abilities as an American consumer.

Crying While Eating is so funny it's disturbing. Or rather, it's so disturbing it's funny. Either way, I'm laughing while cringing. Boy was *that* a stupid joke. 'Ryan' is the funniest: yeah, the guy with the whipped cream.

Of course, I can watch the Daily Show online now, so that's just a chunk of time waiting to be wasted. Also, the Trailers section at Apple.

But seriously, I think it's time to go to the library and get some work done. Pollen has been an absolute nightmare this week. Chuck that in with the pollution, and I'm pretty sure that standing on the street in Oxford lowers life expectancy on its own.

Last night was my last official Queen's evensong of the year, though we're doing a reunion one on Thursday next. It's been a wonderful experience. Oxford's academic literally ends today, though graduate life continues and continues and continues pretty much irrespective of what's going on in the undergrad timetable.

"Do not be alarmed." Words you do not want to be hearing from the head flight attendant on an approach to Heathrow Airport. Nothing major, of course, but when we're all looking at the flight maps in front of us and in addition to all of the other information, American Airlines is also showing us the terminal map for London Gatwick Airport, we start to panic. Still, when we hear over the PA the words "Ladies and gentlemen, do not be alarmed", the first thing that comes to mind is not "yes, we're landiing at Heathrow" but "we didn't need that extra engine on the wing anyway."

I had been having trouble in Boston with my allergies, but New England and New Jersey allergens affect me by causing my sinuses to explode. Headaches when the sinuses expand upward into the cranial cavity, toothaches when they expand downward into the roots of my teeth. In Oxford, it's not my sinuses, it's my eyes, my nose, and the back of my throat, which has become raw and painful. I think I'm exacerbating the situation with too much singing. On Tuesday evening, after evensong, Magdala had a 2 hour rehearsal for our tour to Genoa. It was painful. I also sang yesterday at Queen's, which was much better, but I still come back to my dorm gasping for air and feeling painfully dry in the back of my throat. A bit worrisome, I think.

My friend Marisa is here from Princeton - she's doing summer research on her dissertation (music department) in Oxford. We're spending some time catching up with each other, which is loads of fun. And yesterday, she got the opportunity to sing at Queen's with me when one of our soprani fell ill. Our old conductor and friend from Princeton, Lee, is going to get a kick out of seeing the photo of the two of us in cassocks and surplices. Speaking of photos, this weekend I think I'm going to try to put up photos of Mike & Doreen's wedding, as well as the photos from the RL graduation. Plus anything else that I haven't put up yet, like photos from Queen's Choir's trip to Salisbury.

Dinner tonight shall be a pork fricasee in a three mustard and thyme sauce. I don't really know how many mustards fit into a sauce - I mean, it's pretty much all mustard. Where does one draw the line? Four mustards? Ten? After about 15, aren't we just dealing in minutia? Mustard A uses 10% vinegar. Mustard B uses 15%, and Mustard C uses 20%. Isn't blending them all together just going to give us three times the Mustard B? Maybe I'm missing something. Actually, I'm pretty sure I am.

Anyway, I'm off to dinner now, which will also include "braised rice." I've heard of steaming rice, and frying rice, and also boiling it. I have no idea how one braises rice. Whatever.

Well, Matthew graduated yesterday morning. It was a true sight to see, with the RL boys walking in a monolith of navy blue blazers and maroon & black ties. The first speech by the head of school (brand new this year) was interesting, and while he trotted out a lot of very impressive SAT scores and AP exam results, one couldn't help but wish that he had instead noted individual accomplishments by students rather than making the whole thing anonymous. Indeed, it was an impressive list of achievements, but which could probably have taken place anywhere in New England. The names of the graduating seniors would have made it special.

Valedictory speech was amazing - truly a work of humor, thoughtfulness, and ultimately care and concern. Nicely done! The main speech was given by the new president of MIT, Susan Hockfield. President Hockfield gave a great speech, and from what I heard, she had a lot of practice - particularly just earlier that week at the Winsor School (sister school to Roxbury Latin). Indeed, a speech by the first woman president of MIT might have been very well received at Winsor (an all-girls institution) rather than RL, which is all boys. It was, though, a good speech, though as I might have implied, it was a bit off-target in terms of her audience.

Matt won a fantastic prize at the graduation, which was a huge surprise to my parents. My dad got kind of blubbery during the citation, which did not name Matthew until the very end. But certainly, you get a clearer and clearer picture of who it is during the citation itself. To get a graduation day prize is a wonderful honor, and I would certainly congratulate Matt on this. He truly is a special kid, and I'm really proud of him.

Unfortunately, RL is an ancient school with very little sense of proper temperature or air conditioning. I think it's probably a bad thing when the two most powerful trustees on the board present are mopping their faces repeatedly with their handkerchiefs. Brutal, oppressive heat. That's all.

We went to a couple of parties afterward, including one completely unrelated to the graduation. All of them were great - perhaps I'll say a bit more about them later.

Today I helped Diana cool down her apartment by driving her to Best Buy, driving an air conditioner back to her apartment, helping her carry it up the stairs, and helping her install the darn thing. Now, I'm pretty good with tools, but when all I have is a swiss army knife and the weather is hot, humid, and a sweltering high-80's, I think I got a little frustrated. Thank goodness Diana was there to talk me down. It was really good to see her - a few of my friends at the reunion were asking how I maintained a long-distance relationship. I think that I can say without a doubt that Diana is the only person with whom I would even *consider* doing this. Long distance is hard - the lack of physical proximity is difficult, as it the fact that we can't even call each other every day. But it works: we make sure that it does.

I have had the opportunity to eat everything that I wanted to eat on this trip back to the states. The list is as follows:
hot American bacon. English bacon is wonderful and smokey and delicious, but I miss American bacon. I can get it in England in the form of "crispy bacon", but only cold and in sandwich form.
maple syrup. Yes, the English have pancakes. And they put honey or chocolate sauce on them. This is wrong.
hamburger. Oddly, the English hamburger actually tastes different. The meat is softer and fattier and there are some really odd spices in the meat.
nachos. Mmmm... A big plate of hot nachos with lots of chilis on them. English people can't take hot food, and as a result, hot salsa to them is mild salsa to me.
American beer. I don't mean Budweiser, though I had a Bud as well. I'm talking about delicious microbrewed lagers with an overabundance of hops and bitterness. Lots of character, and a good antidote to English bitters.

Well, flying back to the UK tomorrow morning. I'm done packing and am about to run to bed.

So I went to my 8th high school reunion last night. I'm back in Boston for my youngest brother's graduation from high school, and I had a spare night so I went to my reunion. Since it was an off year, I didn't think there would be a whole lot of people from my class. I was partially right, there weren't massive numbers, but enough to make things interesting. I haven't seen a few of these people in ages.

I must way it certainly was nice to see my friend Marc, who just graduated from medical school last weekend. Doctor Marc... I've known Marc since kindergarten. Phenomenal friend. Also my friend Sarah, who is as loud and vivacious and bubbly as ever: she's doing commercial real estate in Boston. Much more interesting was talking with a lot of people who, while we were in high school, probably never said a word to me.

And that thing about picking up accents? Sarah and Brendan have the worst Boston accents in the world. And by the end of the night, I had strong hints of one too. :)

So Matthew graduates this morning. I'm excited for him, and I can't believe that he's taking this step. First off, I don't know what my parents are going to do... But beyond that, just wow. My baby brother is all grown up and graduating from high school! Congratulations to him.

Sox are headed to Chicago to play the Cubs. Says Jim Belushi of last year's World Series: "Watching the Red Sox win was a very weird experience. It was like having a neighbor win the lottery. At first you're really happy for them because it couldn't happen to a better guy. And then you realize that he'll move into a bigger house in another neighborhood and you never had anything in common with him in the first place and he was really a big jerk. I mean, the Red Sox' celebrity mascot is Ben Affleck. Doesn't that tell you enough?"

Regarding Ben Affleck, I would certainly have to agree.

So I shouldn't have made that crack about having hay fever. I got to my tutorial today and my supervisor said that he wanted to hold the tutorial outside instead of cooped up in his office. And to be fair, the New College gardens are *spectacular*. Anyway, Prof. Parker said that this was my best work yet, and while he certainly had some ways that I could tighten up the essay, the general tenor was that this was a very good piece of writing. So yay me.

My friend Marisa is supposed to be coming into Oxford today for the summer. She said she'd call. She hasn't called. WHY HASN'T SHE CALLED?! just kidding. She's crazy busy. No worries.

It's a gorgeous day, and with Sudafed, I think that perhaps I can venture outside. Though sadly, Sudafed isn't doing anything for my eyes, and those are really itchy right now.

ugh... Tried to sing last night with bad hay fever. Honestly, it felt like I'd submerged myself underwater: I couldn't breathe, I couldn't feel any vibrations in my sinuses. It was awful.

But I did go out for a nice meal afterward. I had a nose-clearing spagetti lucifero, which had peppers, black olives, anchovies, and garlic in a tomato sauce. Of course, once I stepped outside again, I could smell the pollen, and in 10 minutes, I was rubbing my eyes like crazy.

It's a shame that the summer season is also the allergy season. It's gorgeous outside: blue skies, white puffy clouds, green grass, and all I can think about is getting to the library where the air is filtered... Pathetic.

So I found my bike. Seriously - I was walking home from Queen's last night when I saw it propped up against a sign next to the Bodleian Library. No lock, but also no damage. Went out and bought another lock for it: evidently none of the locks sold around Oxford have any hope of surviving, so the trick is to hide your bike among really worthless bikes and hope that no one sees it and wants it.

Finishing off another essay today. Had a Greek tutorial in St. Hilda's College, which is a college most people of my gender rarely get to see. It's Oxford's only all female college, and it's got a lovely location right on the river. Unfortunately, you have to go through the Magdalen roundabout in order to get there, and the roundabout and bridge have been areas of concern lately.

Interestingly, the Boston Globe has an article with this headline: Fight Ageism By Looking Younger. See, I'm not sure that's the solution. I think that's just whitewashing over the problem and slowly contributing to it.

Well done to the Quiz Bowl team of the P. school, who went to a national tournament and made it to the playoffs. Both teams, in fact. I'm thrilled for them - they never made it to nationals when I was their coach... Though I heard that they were a bit ornery and argumentative. It's just like those New Jersey types to argue with their elders. To be fair, though, the guy with whom they were arguing most likely had it coming...

People have been throwing us rave reviews about the Queen's College evensong on the BBC. Though one woman's handwriting turned "superb intonation" into what looked like "suspect intonation". Penmanship just isn't what it used to be...

Leaving for the US again on Thursday for my youngest brother's high school graduation. I'm so proud of him I can barely speak.

So the New York Times is reporting that iPod sales are flattening out. This is the inevitable byproduct of EVERYONE already owning your product. Including, sadly, President Bush. That's like finding out that in the white house bathroom there's an electric toothbrush. Weird.

Globally, though, I think that Apple could be better positioned - the iPod just took off in the last 6 months here in England, and while that's great news for Apple, not much else has been happening on that front. If they could get more people using apple computers here, that would be ideal. And throughout Europe, the iPod really hasn't caught on much.

So there's a better way to listen to the recording that Queen's Choir made on Wednesday. My friend Robin has put the full show up on the web, divided into convenient clips and encoded in MP3 format. Unfortunately, the entire website is in German, so just bear with me while I give you the particulars:

First, go to this website: http://service.gmx.net/mc/l2Nb2UX0CWrhKndTrJ6TRJ1Ly2X0SV. Type the password q1341 in the box labelled "Zugangscode" and click "weiter". This will open a new page when you hit the button "GMX MediaCenter Starten". A page will open on which you will see the files. Tick the boxes of the files you want to download (I recommend, oh, all of them), and then click on the "Datei" menu (top left) and select "Download". If the computer prompts you to save or open the file, click save. It will download as a ZIP file, which should then automatically unZIP as a folder on your desktop (mac) or downloads file (windows). Import said files to your media player of choice and listen in.

Finally, some muppet stole my bike yesterday. It was locked to a fence, which means that someone actually had to cut through the cable in broad daylight, as I know it occurred sometime between 9:30 AM and 4:30 PM. I'm really ticked off. But other than that, it was a good day. And now that I've slowly recovered back onto UK time, I'm getting to be more productive with my work.

On Wednesday afternoon, the Choir of The Queen's College, Oxford was featured on BBC Radio 3's program (programme) Choral Evensong in a live broadcast. It was truly a privilege to sing on the radio, and we've been receiving some very good feedback from people who have had an opportunity to listen. It's an hour long, so make sure you block out a chunk of time if you want to. Daresay, I think we sound pretty good.

Click here for the relevant BBC website.