Graywrist the Pirate

Aaaargh, mateys!! I've decided to adopt some bucaneering slang in honor of the fact that I am now Graywrist the Pirate. And no, despite what my previous posts might make you think, that is spelt correctly. I mean gRaywrist the Pirate, not GAywrist the Pirate. While doing some dishes after lunch today (a tasty meal of pasta topped with homemade spaghetti sauce I perked up with some greek olives and top-notch feta), I noticed that on my right wrist, just behind that little knobby bone on the outside, was a single gray/white hair shooting off.

This development did not please me initially, and if I recall correctly, I talked some trash to the hair before clipping it off. Something along the lines of "You 'bout to get clipped, homey. Tell all your whitey friends Andy's comin' for 'em. Call me Arnie, cuz I'm the Terminator." And just before I gave him the scissors action, I heard him scream out to the other follicles, "Listen. And understand. That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead... You still don't get it, do you? He'll find you. That's what he does. That's all he does! You can't stop him. He'll wade through you, reach down your throat, and pull your fucking heart out!"

I think that, when I pen my memoirs, I title it "The Wrist of Dorian Gray", since it appears that my wrist is soaking up the aging that the rest of me should be undergoing. I've been taking really good care of myself the last five months, exfoliating my skin, using sunscreen and moisturizer constantly, and I've even dropped about ten pounds or so from eating better, so now I look younger than I did a year or two ago. By 2010, I expect to look like a teenager, but have a huge swath of white hair on my right wrist. Kewwwllll....

Speaking of pirates, here is my favorite pirate joke: A pirate walks into a bar, and the barkeep notices a steering wheel sticking out of the fly in his pants. The barkeep says, "hey Mr. Pirate, do you realize that you have a steering wheel coming out of your pants?" He replies, "Aaaargghhhh...it's drivin' me nuts!"

I love that joke.

The plot thickens on the gay-o-rama

Okay, first of all the internet was going all wonky on me the other day, so I had no idea that even posted, let alone twice. I ended up saving it as a word document to post at a later time, when the net was more cooperative. But, hey! There it is, and twice no less!

So I've done a little independent research, and things are not what they seem with my encounter the other day. First of all, I was rash in saying that I knew this guy is straight. I've known way too many guys who have had girlfriends in the past before coming out of the closet, so that was my mistake, making such a rash declaration.

It now appears that there is no "everybody" in the building that thinks that about me. Turns out that this guy has a well-earned reputation as a closet-case, and he was almost certainly trawling to see if he would get a nibble from me, excuse the expression. He was hoping that I was actually gay so he could try to put the move on me.

So while not everybody thinks I'm gay, I am keeping my string alive of attracting all the gay men within the vicinity to me, while at the same time driving all the ladies away in hordes.

Woohoo...er...I guess...

Can't make the gay stay away

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I have a really bizarre cosmic connection to gayness. My relative gay-osity is the stuff of legends, and I am know to most of my friends as the "gayest straight man alive". Or probably even dead, for that matter. I've lost count of the number of people I've come across who have assumed I was gay, just like I've lost count of the number of gay men who seem to be attracted to me. I honestly don't understand it; it just seems to happen.

Last night, after spending most of the day in the computer lab at my residence hall, I was just packing up my belongings when I noticed that someone was standing right behind me. It was a guy I sort of know, so I talked to him for a few minutes, and seeing as how he just got back from a trip, I asked how it went. Twenty seconds of chit-chat or so later, I left go upstairs to get ready for bed. As I began my ascent, I heard a voice call out my name; looking back, it was the same guy. He came up the stairs towards me, and he seemed sort of nervous and uncomfortable, and when another student passed on the stairs, he got quiet until he passed. My first thought was that he was going to ask if I had any drugs I could sell him.

Oh, if only that was what this was about.

He sort of hems and haws for a bit, and after some to-oing and fro-oing, he finally asks if I am bisexual or gay. Now, I was pretty positive that this guy is straight, and seeing how I am so used to people thinking I'm gay, I never figured he was picking up on me. Turns out that he heard through the grapevine I was gay, and he didn't quite believe it, so he decided to find out for himself. That, and I think he was also trying to give me the heads up concerning the word on the street so I would have a chance to clear my name.

Here's the thing, though: this guy and most of the people he spends time with are exchange students who are here only one semester, and I unfortunately haven't spend much time at all around most of them. Most of my friends are one-year or more students who have been here since last semester, at least, and all of them know I'm straight. So I find it very odd that they would be talking about me, full stop, let alone talking about my sexual preferences. I honestly don’t know where people get this stuff; it’s not like I’m mincing around Byng Place and trying to grab guy’s butts.

Here's the capper, though. When I asked him, "so, who exactly told you I was gay? Who thinks that?"

His response?

"Well, everyone."

Can't make the gay stay away

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I have a really bizarre cosmic connection to gayness. My relative gay-osity is the stuff of legends, and I am know to most of my friends as the "gayest straight man alive". Or probably even dead, for that matter. I've lost count of the number of people I've come across who have assumed I was gay, just like I've lost count of the number of gay men who seem to be attracted to me. I honestly don't understand it; it just seems to happen.

Last night, after spending most of the day in the computer lab at my residence hall, I was just packing up my belongings when I noticed that someone was standing right behind me. It was a guy I sort of know, so I talked to him for a few minutes, and seeing as how he just got back from a trip, I asked how it went. Twenty seconds of chit-chat or so later, I left go upstairs to get ready for bed. As I began my ascent, I heard a voice call out my name; looking back, it was the same guy. He came up the stairs towards me, and he seemed sort of nervous and uncomfortable, and when another student passed on the stairs, he got quiet until he passed. My first thought was that he was going to ask if I had any drugs I could sell him.

Oh, if only that was what this was about.

He sort of hems and haws for a bit, and after some to-oing and fro-oing, he finally asks if I am bisexual or gay. Now, I was pretty positive that this guy is straight, and seeing how I am so used to people thinking I'm gay, I never figured he was picking up on me. Turns out that he heard through the grapevine I was gay, and he didn't quite believe it, so he decided to find out for himself. That, and I think he was also trying to give me the heads up concerning the word on the street so I would have a chance to clear my name.

Here's the thing, though: this guy and most of the people he spends time with are exchange students who are here only one semester, and I unfortunately haven't spend much time at all around most of them. Most of my friends are one-year or more students who have been here since last semester, at least, and all of them know I'm straight. So I find it very odd that they would be talking about me, full stop, let alone talking about my sexual preferences.

Here's the capper, though. When I asked him, "so, who exactly told you I was gay? Who thinks that?"

His response?

"Well, everyone."

I've gotta see a guy about some stuff

It was the end of Orthodox Holy Week on Saturday night, and one of the capstone events is a midnight mass. Seeing as how I went to Mass on Easter Sunday, I figured I'd go with some Romanian friends to the midnight ceremony to see if I couldn't tease out some of the differences between the churches. Initially, we thought that the service coincided with midnight in Romania, making it 10 pm London time, so we arrived at about 9:30 at night. We quickly ascertained that the Mass didn't start until midnight...London time! We quickly went over our options, and since we were planning to go out a club after church, we decided to piss off down to the pub for a few pints to pass the time. I wanted to get fairly intoxicated so I would be in prime position to go out after church, but due to my budget constraints I knew I couldn't do this at a London pub. Also, the thought of sitting in a pub for a few hours straight was a bit much for me, considering that the weather was fantastic out, the first decent night we've had in weeks here. Hmm...a vexing conundrum, indeed. How to solve this problem?

Why, by getting cheap hooch at the grocery store, of course! A capital idea! But this brought up the problem of how to get away from my friends (who were determined to hang out in the pub) so I could sneak down a bottle of wine? I decided to use one of my oldies-but-goodies by making some mention of having to take off for a few minutes. I kept saying the night was too nice for me to not take a walk along the banks of the Thames. After a bit of puzzlement on everyone's part, I made my escape.

It didn't take long for me to realize that, due to my continuing pattern of bizarre behaviour and the vague knowledge that I'm dealing with all sorts of personal demons, my friends now think I have a heroin or crack habit. The fact that I came back from my "walk" -which I actually did take- a wee bit wobbly only added to their suspicions. I'm sure their thinking was confirmed when we all ended up coming back to the residence hall, where the people I was with do not actually live, and started drinking in the basement room of some of my friends. It was while everyone was having a good time that I ended up making one of my patented disappearances into the night air by slipping out the door while nobody was watching and going upstairs to go to sleep. Awesome.


Still, in honor of my proclivity to take off so I can be by myself at the most random times, I figured I would leave everyone with an apropos snippet of some Springsteen:

Tonight I'll be on that hill 'cause I can't stop,
I'll be on that hill with everything I got,
Lives on the line where dreams are found and lost,
I'll be there on time and I'll pay the cost,
For wanting things that can only be found
In the darkness on the edge of town.

The clumsy "Left Hand of God"

I've read that one way to stave off a decline in mental prowess is to perform routine tasks in a novel fashion. Things include taking a shower with your eyes close and trying to do more with your off-hand. In my case, that means trying to do certain things left-handed, sometimes with unintended results. This morning I was making my porridge, and I flavored it with raisins, cinnamon and sugar. After a few spoonfuls, I decided it needed a touch more sugar, so I lifted up my small bag of sugar with my left hand and tried to shake a pinch more into my porridge.

I probably shouldn't do that anymore.

After a few light side-to-side sweeping motions, my hand had a sudden spasm of strength, causing sugar to fly off in all directions across my desk. Good thing I'm preventing brain decline, because I'll probably need that added boost of intelligence to figure out how I'm going to get rid of all the ants I suspect will soon track down the sweet, sweet sugar in my carpet.

Even more unbreakable

My body is quickly falling apart. In earlier comments to my Unbreakable post, I detailed how fragile I've become, and it seems this phenomenon is only getting worse. (And just for the record, Mandy and Michelle, no alcohol or other funny business was involved in my getting hurt while in bed the other night.) Yesterday I went to play in our weekly game of footie, and thought I was over a lingering hamstring pull in my right leg.

Wrong.

I didn't even last 180 seconds. Within the first 3 minutes of the game, I felt a searing pain shoot through my leg and I pulled up gimpy; I thought my hamstring was torn at first. Luckily, it isn't that bad, but now I can't really get any power generated from my right hammy, and I have to take a couple of weeks off to let that muscle heal up all the way. Oh well, at least I didn't hurt it just sleeping.

Broken Glasgow

Scotland is where I'm aiming to spend about a week right after classes get out the first week of May, and I figured I would spend about three or four days in Edinburgh before going up to what I presumed to be the sleepier burg of Glasgow during the weekend. Having yet to research Glasgow, I figured it would be a more quiet and slower-paced city to relax and travel around from.

I'm an idiot.

Reading the paper today, I found out that Glasgow is one of the unhealthiest and most violent cities in the Western world. Typical Glaswegian foods include deep fried candy bars and-get this-deep fried pizza, and the unique combination of copious alcohol consumption and fattening food makes for many a fight in the city, and there have been many many broken bones and cuts from the frenzy. Particularly worrisome to many in the city is the common use of glasses as weapons in fights. To help polish their image for tourists who, like myself, may be turned off by this lifestyle, the city council is thinking of banning bars from serving alcohol in glass cups or bottles to cut down on the number of times these objects are smashed open on people's heads or used to cut open people's faces.

But there is hope yet, as the brave alcohol industry again springs forward with their priorities in order:

Publicans have launched a campaign opposing the ban, which they believe will have a detrimental effect on the city's image.

Yes, that's right, people are more worried about their scotch or beer being served in a plastic cup than having their face cut open by some fat, drunken Sir William Wallace wannabe.

When I go to Glasgow, I'll be sure to hoist my (plastic) cup and make a toast to the fact that my face will be slash-free when I leave their fair city.

Unbreakable

In the comments to my previous post about spraining my ankle on the walk back from Easter Mass, Michelle related to me her nightmarish purchase of Snapple, an ordeal which left her with a sprained ankle, a profusely bleeding hand, and a trip to surgery. Now, that is something I would be embarassed to fess up to, so I believe that I would have instead followed the South Park strategy of blaming it on a random bit of violent crime perpetrated by "some Puerto Rican guy". In case you have yet to see that episode, the Ramsey family, Gary Condit, and OJ Simpson all blame the death of someone close to them on a mysterious "Puerto Rican" guy, so I suspect I would have claimed to have nearly been mugged by a Puerto Rican wielding a broken bottle.

But even though Michelle's injury certainly falls into the realm of the tragi-comic, I think I may have just topped her for most pathetic injury. This morning I woke up with a stinging pain in my left shoulder, and I have no idea how I injured it. That's right, I managed to blow out my left shoulder just by sleeping. I think I'm fragile like a china doll.

100th post

To celebrate my 100th post, I've decided to dedicate a number filled entry to my friends in Portland Oregon, better known to us as Lazy Town. This concerns the Portland Blazers basketball team, and comes via ESPN:

Small-market Portland thinks mighty big when it comes to losing. This season, the Blazers have lost games by 24, 24, 29, 29, 31, 32, 32, 33, 39, 39 and 45 points. And they've lost 48 other games, too.

Jolly good show, boys!

Resurrection Blues

I've come across a few funny things in the newspaper recently, which I share with my friend's for their benefit.

-Cloud watchers in England are uniting to share their passion for watching the skies, as well as to rail against what they see as a bad reputation of being weirdos amongst the general population. One anecdote in the article will certainly help that second cause is the case of the man who realized that he didn't love his wife anymore when she became worried about the effect the rainclouds he was admiring while driving would have on the roads. Here is the key passage:
Kitching claims the ensuing debate cemented his impression of their incompatibility. 'It was one of those instances when you realise you don't appreciate the same things in life,' he said. They have since divorced.

Well played old bean, I can see how being worried about safety while driving can certainly tear a relationship apart.

-A windsurfer got blown off course in Wales, and had to steer to avoid passing cargo ships as he made the perilous 40 mile crossing of the channel. After his three mile journey, British hospitality dominated at the scene: Stunned locals near Lynton, on the north Devon coast, rushed to the aid of the exhausted windsurfer after his three-hour, death-defying ordeal - by taking him straight down the pub.

-The Old Vic Theatre in London has become something of a running joke over the past few years. Kevin Spacey has taken over as director of the theatre, and the company has had a string of critical and commerical flops. The latest flap comes over their production of Arthur Miller's final play, Resurrection Blues. Apparently the director and the actors scarcely know the script, and one of the actresses quit after pushing Matthew Modine so hard he fell offstage. This whole this is a bad farce, and I'd love to see a Producers-style show done about the whole affair. It all sounds like that episode of the Simpson's that highlighted Springfield's cultural deficit, and Krusty the Klown was in play as FDR, and proceeded to jump out of his wheelchair during an impassioned moment.

Use your imagination

I'm fantastically inept at most computer programs, so it was no great surprise to me that I couldn't whip up a doctored picture in Photoshop the other day. I think I was using version 7, so I guess I missed out on the accumulated knowledge of using 1-6, meaning that I felt for all the world like a chimp in a calculus class. I tried to manipulate two pictures to make them merge into one, but all that kept happening was that I got weired lines around various parts of the picture, and sometimes they would turn completely gray-scale and lose all detail. What the hell?
Anyway, submitted for your imaginations to play with, here are the two pics I was trying to meld. The first is my friend Jim's photo of his worksite, currently in the badlands of Iceland:

Secondly, here is the picture of what I imagined to be what they use for transportation out there.


So, to quote the Spice Girls, "tonight is the night, when two become one."

In your minds, that is.

I'm on the Beeb

I went to St. Paul's , one of London's two most famous churches (Westminster Abbey being the other), for Easter Mass yesterday, in part because I occasionally enjoy going to church services in impressve venues, and also partly as penitence for something that happened while I was walking around central London on Saturday. It's a mildly ugly incident, and not one that is particularly flattering to me, so into the "Vault of Shame" that one goes for the time being.

On the walk to St. Paul's Cathedral, I was stopped by a reporter asking about the image of Americans abroad. Apparently, he was with the BBC, so I ended up giving this long-winded answer about how I haven't really encountered any anti-Americanism, and that many of the acts that people see that contribute to the "Ugly American" stereotype might more properly be classified as simply the barely controlled behavior many people tend to exhibit when they are away from home and on vacation anywhere.

I have to admit that I feel a little bit classier now that I'll be appearing on the estimable old Beeb, and I admit it gave me a bit of a spring in my step on Easter. That spring, I'm embarassed to admit, lasted only a few hours, as I managed to somehow roll my ankle while jogging across the street in an effort to beat oncoming traffic. Now my left ankle is sprained, and I look like a colossal jackass for pulling up with a game leg on a completely flat and smooth section of pavement.

Happy Easter!!

Just wanted to wish everyone a Happy Easter. Carry on, all.

Iced cream, you say?

One downer about living in my room is my microscopic fridge. It feels less like a storage unit for my food supplies than it does some sort of emergency device: with what is inside, I could probably survive for only about 36 hours. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I actually have to brush the crumbs off of leftover foodstuffs when I put them away; I don't think I can spare the space those small flecks take up. Putting away groceries, not to mention getting them out, is a perishable version of Jenga, as grabbing one apple or some green beans causing my pesto, yogurt, strawberries to tumble out on to the floor.

Most puzzling is my "freezer". It literally is nothing more than a loop of metal that eats up the top-right quarter section of my fridge. It has a small plastic door and about an inch of ice crusted around the outside of it. I can fit two chicken breasts in a device that takes up as much space as an entire loaf of bread. All in all, highly inconvenient.

But most vexing to me is the fact that it is too small to fit any ice cream in there. I have the choice of eating an entire bin (or pot, as they call them here) of ice cream, or going without. And although it is not uncommon of me to gorge myself on an entire tub at once, I've thus far gone without British ice cream. But someone just told me about a great place in Eugene, Oregon that sells fantastic ice cream, and I find I am now wistful for both Oregon and ice cream. So if anybody out there has ever been to Prince Pucklers Ice Cream in Eugene, let me know how it is, yeah? Cheers.

Have you been thinking of going on holiday in Chernobyl, but have been put off by all that DNA-altering radioactivity? Good news, because now you can live vicariously through someone who decided to cruise through the badlands of the world's worst manmade disaster.

Interestingly, I read a few weeks back that in the days after Reactor 4 blew, the resulting smoldering pile was burning its way through the ground to the water table. If it reached there, the resulting explosion would have taken out Reactors 1, 2, and 3, and the resulting catastrophe, and I don't use that term lightly, would have rendered all of Russia as well as several surrounding areas uninhabitable for generations.

Another interesting bit of info: if I recall correctly, about 400 Roentgens is a lethal dose of radiation. The people on the scene, both those workers attempting to escape as well as those responders struggling to put out the fires, were being exposed to between 25,000 and 30,000 Roentgens and hour. Some who were there died within a week. Another fellow had his arm in bandages for seven years, a legacy of when the radiation caused his skin to essentially slough off after exposure.

Gaylord Focker is an Indian name?

As I’m sure my sister is quite tired of hearing, I love to cook these days. Most days I’m cooking up two of my daily meals, and as the cooking equipment in our building is sub-prison standard, I own all my own pots, pans, wooden spoons, knives, cutting boards, and so on. I even have my own private sponges just so nothing I own has to intermingle with anybody’s else stuff here. Yuck.

Despite being fairly novice in cooking, I think I’ve done alright for myself, and have even started experimenting with my own dishes. I’ve picked out a few tasty ones online though, like Salmon in an orange, red onion and caper sauce. And yesterday I had some good chicken breasts that had been covered in sautéed red onions, garlic and yellow bell peppers and rubbed with chicken stock powder before being all put into the oven to bake. Yum. Even my morning porridge (same thing as oatmeal) now features a freshly made Apple Cinnamon Brown Sugar variation, with freshly diced apples seared, to which is seasoned in brown sugar I caramelize while shaking in a generous dose of cinnamon before mixing in the porridge, milk, and water to bring it to perfection. Excellent.

Last night I had pizza, and although I was too lazy to make the crust, I did make the sauce out of canned peeled tomatoes and tomato paste, which I then cook and season. The whole operation is covered with red onions, artichokes and mozzarella. And it is actually this mozzarella that I find most fascinating. I buy all my cheeses from Neal’s Yard Dairy, and the extra expense is worth it; this is easily the best mozzarella I’ve ever had. Their cheese has me agog, quite frankly. The mozzarella I bought cost $10 for a ball smaller than my fist. But here’s the thing: it is made from buffalo milk on a farm just outside of Naples, and is airlifted to London three times a week. That’s some impressive credentials for a cheese. I think the mozzarella can also speak four languages.
The only thing is that now I can’t shake the image of Gaylord Focker milking a mommy buffalo. I didn’t know buffalos could be milk, actually. But as we all know, the Indians never wasted any part of the buffalo, so I think Gaylord is now an honorary Native American. I reckon Buffalo Teetmilker sounds about right, as far as tribal names go.

About a (home)boy

Precious few things are more laugh-inducing than the shameless borrowing (read: outright thieving and apery) of cultures by people, and this is for several reasons. First, it doesn't fool anybody except the very young or the very senile. In that way, it is sort of like Asian Bullet Bikes. Nobody is impressed by them except junior-high school girls, and those in your own age group with necessarily consider you to be a strutting buffoon. Caveat emptor.

But we've all met people like this, yeah? Someone goes to Spain on semester abroad and comes back with a horriblely fake Spanish accent. The most famously mocked case would be Madonna, and her faux-posh Brit speech patterns after marrying Guy Ritchie.

Look, I'm all for the global mashup of cultures in this era of globalization, but I didn't start to act like an Italian mafioso after spending some time in Rome, nor did I pretend to be a Russian mobster after living with a suspicously wealthy guy from Siberia last term. But I have to admit that there is one group of people that I have a terribly difficult time taking seriously: British rappers.

I've heard a smattering of Brit-hop (yes, I just made that up) while living in London, the different varieties of which go variously by the name "grime" or "garage". What I've heard has been fairly middling, although some stuff has been decent. The few I've seen mentioned most prominently have been Dizzee Rascal, Eskiboy, and Mike Skinner. By the way, love that sweater Mike. I suppose I should mention that Mike Skinner should be excluded from this list, because he is one of the few British rappers I've seen who isn't shamelessly stealing from the American rap scene. Kudos to you.

But the point of all this is that for some reason, I simply cannot reconcile the jarring juxtaposition of American urban style with the British accent. I simply cannot get past the Mr. Belvedere speech patterns. So here's my advice guys, do one of two things:

1) Get an accent coach to get rid of that pesky clipped British accent.
2) Be like Mike. Have your own style, one that doesn't scream Memphis or Atlanta by way of Essex or Kent.

Just some friendly tips, gents. Because this may be the image you are going for:

This is what you look like to people:

That dinosaur and me? We're simpatico.

Last Saturday I woke up early to take advantage of London's spring weather to take a stroll across town to go to a few museums in the South Kensington area. It was a leisurely three mile walk each way, which gave me ample chance to enjoy the views as I crossed London's famous Hyde Park. What exactly it is famous for today is a matter of some debate. While still very popular with people, some scoff at it as a place only used by Rollerblading Americans from the nearby embassy. And I hate to say this, but when they were giving out Embassies in London, America must have been out getting a Slushee and been last in line, because our's is rubbish. In most countries, Embassies are beautiful buildings used to project an image of power and taste. I've read a few stories in architectural publications about how new embassies are being built around the world as a form of international architectural one-upsmanship. But the Embassy for my home country, the land I love, is a huge, ugly office complex ringed with security fences, anti-car barricades, and cheap looking plywood booths for guards to stand in. Ugh.

Anyway, I first ended up at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where after six visits and more than twelve hours spent in the museum, I still hadn't seen everything I wanted. This place is vast, vast and sprawling, vast and sprawling and confusing. Most of the elevators don't go to all the levels, and entire wings are cut-off from the everything on the same floor. It really is sort of a maze to wend your way through and see everything. But the final section I had to see was the National Collection of Glass. It took me about two hours to go through the glass section, and I have to admit I loved every minute of it. Bizarre as it may seem to some, I'm something of glassworks nut, and have gotten to the point that I can spot works from a certain region, or even country, occasionally. They even had a few works I immediately recognized as being from my favorite Finnish design group, as well as some from one of my favorite Hungarian ceramics designers.

But the important part of this rambling story is that I eventually up going to the Natural History Museum, where they just opened a new dinosaur exhibit that contained a life size animatronic T-Rex. Hell yeah. And I have to admit, after waiting in life for twenty minutes to get to it, when you first walk around the back wall and see it standing there, moving about, it is actually sort of scary. I've always felt I couldn't imagine how terrifying it would be to see a full-size adult T-Rex staring down at you. And after being to this exhibit, guess what? I still can't.

The reason for this is that while walking around it, I noticed a sign that said the robotic Rex was only a juvenile, and was only about three-quarters grown, meaning it was about 25% shy of its largest point. What the bloody hell man? Who decides to go to the expense of making an animatronic T-Rex, but then only makes it 75% complete. I think those lazy tossers should take a little lesson in hard work from our friends at the Weetabix corporation.

Anglicisms

You know what I love about the British English language? It's the small things. As a for instance, you can replace "that did" with "what done" in various instances. Here, read a real-life example from some class discussions on the Balkan wars:

"The standard view is that 'it was Milosevic what done it'."

That's awesome. I can't wait until someone asks me, "Who puts those ridiculous rims on their car?" Then I can say, "It was Nalley what done it."