Day 2

I went for a walking tour of london - unfortunately it was raining or drizzling the whole day so I walked around with an umbrella in my hand the whole time and my pant legs were wet! Lets see..
I got off the underground at St James Park and walked to Buckingham Palace, went back thru the park to West Minister Abbey and Big Ben - the parliament is really very pretty and all the buildings.. then across the bridge and I once again passed this statue of the two women riding a chariot - i forget who they are but i do remember that last time i was there i was very impressed then as well. There is so much passion involved in the faces - i will definitely upload the pic when I get a chance. I walked past the Dali museum - the statues were still there and i still loved them. The museum housed Dali statues and picasso watercolors - i was really tempted to go thru it but i thought that i didn't have enough time to spend inside a gallery. Anyway i crossed over the river again on the Jubilee bridge - sat at a cafe and ordered myself a pot of tea - the bloody thing had 4 cups of tea!!! i kept drinking and it wouldn't finish!! Afterwards i was walking up to Picadilly Square where I saw this huge crowd - music and all these gay men.. actually i started seeing a couple of flaming gays whilst drinking tea - and i was wondering what was going on!!
so it seems that London Pride was going on. that is, the gay and lesbian pride festival. There was lots of alcohol and some gay behavior and i am not talking about the happy kind :-P of course it was nothing compared with the Sydney Mardigras. There the gays really show they are gay!! T&A galore!
I listened to some good music whilst walking around and had a really nice free ice cream. I then walked around some more and finally decided to visit Harrods which is supposed to be this fantastic shop which is worth seeing. Ok let me just say looking around a store which sells Armani and Gucci and other brands that i have no idea about and can in no way afford. Harrods is this huge shop where you can get lost going from floor to floor and room to room. Anyway i wasn't too big a fan.
I had dinner with friends here and i met Yasaman who is the niece of one of my 'aunt's Manzar. She is a nice girl :-)

Day 1

When i got there, Rouhi was out but she had left instructions with some cleaners. I had a little nap and since R was coming back about 6-7pm, i wanted to go out for a bit - unfortunately based on advice of R , i went to Richmond which is really nothing but some shops - there is a nice view but that was not even that nice. So I ended up walking a fair bit and got home about 7pm.
I had a nice dinner and chat with R before going to sleep.

Day 0

Normally there is no reason to write about day 0 - that is the day you get on the airplane and leave for the bigger and better things. Alas in my case i need to. United messed me up so bad that i am planning on writing a complaint letter to united upon my return. Seriously these people are defective. Although I was in the check-in line within the required time - that is at least 2 hours before my flight. However due to staff shortages, the line was huge and by the time i got t the front of the time, it was 40 minutes to my flight and they said the flight was closed. Meanwhile they had been letting people from other flights in front and several people from my flight got totally screwed. This very unfriendly woman told me too bad and told me to go and stand in another line. So i went to the other line with several other very pissed off people - My comrade in arms were two american guys - one (Tom) was studying his masters in Oxford on middle eastern studies and actually he was very interesting. More later. The other guy (chris) was a younger undergrad who was going to Oxford as well for a summer of studies and i guess traveling. Can you believe he was also going for studies in middle east? these guys were totally unrelated. they were both on my flight. Also in the line was a girl from Puerto Rico I think her name was Lucy - she was going to Zurich with her husband who was Indian - you don't see that very often right?
anyway after 2 hours in line, not knowing what was going to happen we were sent to the gate for standby. I was lucky number 13. So it seems when you go on standby it is not a first come first serve basis - people with more mileage point than you as well as people who have paid more money for their ticket end up getting priority. Like crazy we all went to the gate and waited, pretty certain 13 people were not going to miss their flight. Anyway suffice it to say we didn't know until the very end of the boarding time and then I was lucky number 13 - some people in the wait list were not there and so i ended up being the final person they ticketed, Lucky me.
The rest fo the flight was pretty normal - i got the middle seat, with two big guys on one side and two other big guys on the other. Fortunately big here didn't mean fat. but they were all really big.
and i watched The Life of Others, the German movie which got the oscar for foreign movie - and although itwas good i kept falling sleep - lets just say the subtitles were not easy to read.
so that was it. I got to London on friday morning and by the time i got to rouhi's house it was 1pm or so.

watermelons

I found the following info VERY useful:
here is what you should watch for to get a sweet watermelon.
- Tap the watermelon with your knuckles and listen for a hollow sound
- There should be little color contrast between the green stripes
- The end should be going from white to light yellow
- Press your thumbs into the skin from all angles. It should be hard all around.
- the stem should still be green. If it's brown and withered, that thing's been off the vine too long

I eat SO much watermelon in summer - they are my absolute favourite fruit - EVER. :-) so sweet and red. I love the seeds. I don't know why they keep producing the seedless kind - that's like nature all messed up. How are we going to have watermelon plants if they don't have seeds? and I am still waiting for the plants to grow inside my stomach!! :-P

Speaking of reproduction, can you imagine birds doing it? It boggles the mind. But they must right. Wouldn't the tail of a bird get in the way?! :-P I am really confused!!!
See what amazing things are in my head?!!

A take on Hollywood

This post will be simply a collection of observations and comments about Hollywood :-)

1 - Kelly Clarkson's new CD My December is really good! I really tried to resist her because of her American Idol connection, alas she is too good a singer and song writer. And she seems like a genuinely nice and fun person. Check out some of her songs: this one ("Because of You") she originally sang along and now in collaboration with Reba McEntire - it's a really nice clip. Also seems she wrote the song when she was some ridiculous age like 15 or 17. This set is of a bunch of songs with Reba McEntire. I wonder why she has started collaborating so much with RM. Not that it is bad, because they seem to genuinely have fun - just wondering. Anyway to finish off, her new CD is really good :-)

2 - Tom Cruise looks ridiculous these days!! his haircut and his clothing etc, he looks like he is trying to look very young and boyish, meanwhile he is not that young Todo!!

3 - I watched the movie The Shooter with Mark Wahlberg on the plane - a really really bad movie. Bad acting, bad plot, really bad plot actually, and lots of "that doesn't make sense" moments.

Damn.. I had all these comments about Hollywood people, alas I started writing about Kelly Clarkson and I lost track of what i was thinking. Oh well. Does anyone else have any insight? :-P

Dancing

Next Tuesday will be the final night of my first semester of Flamenco - I have really really enjoyed myself, learning and dancing. It's a huge rush everytime we go through one of the routines and I actually do it well. Of course many times I don't but hey, it's better to forget those times! :-) It is a shame I won't be performing in the recital :-(
Meanwhile on TV, the new season of So You Think You Can Dance in underway. So every wednesday for the past 2 weeks I have enjoyed 2 hours of dancing on TV - and these couples are really good. Cereally!

[Ref. South Park episode of ManBearPig with Al Gore where he kept saying I'm totally cereal! and I'm super cereal! - Everyone knows how to access the episode if you haven't seen it right? Alvaro and I have been killing ourselves with this expression!! :-P]

Anyhoo, check this site for some of the dances of the night. I recommend watching this one by a hiphop dancer (the guy) and a contemporary dancer (the girl). It is really a lovely piece and the story it tried to tell is just beautiful. I almost feel like it can be about any relationship.
The human body is just amazing to me - when I hear a beautiful voice, when I see a beautiful dance... it always amazes me the power we all have in our hand.. i mean body! :-P

Development of a baby panda

Really interesting set of pictures, chronicling the life of a panda fetus!!
It is interesting that the nose is so big at the beginning! it reminds of what i had heard before that one of the features of the face doesn't change size from when you are a kid. Was it the nose, eyes or ears?!!

Wonderful weekend

Last weekend my lovely husband visited me - It was really a wonderful weekend. There is not much to describe, we played around on my new mac, we had dinner with his cousin Jean and her husband - she is pregnant and she was due last weekend - no show though and we are still waiting to hear :-) It was a lovely night. On sunday we did a little bit of shopping.. and bought a beautiful red shirt for Alvaro.
So it was a quite weekend, not much to write about but very lovely.
Am I overusing the word lovely? :o)

My new macbook

the mac has crashed once;
thunderbird has crashed twice;
firefox has crashed once.

I have not owned this computer for longer than the number of times it and its applications have crashed.
Can it be that windows has been to blame for what it is actually the fault of intel?

update: sorry number of times should have been number of days. Styx is being a stick!! :-P
Also Valardur, my mac did a restart so that is as bad a crash as it can be. :-( It was actually kind of funny, because it took me a while to understand what the screen meant!!

Google

Biogeek has put up an interesting video of Lewis Black talking about Google - It is interesting that is was only today that I was reading the following article about Google being the most invasive of all net firms. The empire they are building is really expanding what now with news of their uni mails being rolled out.

I am starting to have a very bad feeling about Google....

Blog who?

I must confess that although I am a sometime blogger, I don't really read any other blogs except for a couple of friends who rarely update. So the following article was very interesting for me. It lists the top 25 most visited blogs of June. I haven't had a chance to look at more than a couple - but my they are interesting!
Check out Boingboing for the above amazing pic of a baby wallaby. They also have some very nice old mexican music. Then there is downloadsquad which keeps you up to date about downloadable software. And.. well you can read the rest. Unfortunately there are many interesting sites. bugger.
Update:
I just found this other website which is hilarious! It is called SayNoToCrack and the picture above is just one of the posts. About the picture it says "This 15 lb tabby cat chased a bear up two separate trees in rural New Jersey." Here is a link to the National Geographic article. Oh I think I will have to bookmark this website!

Racism Test

Check out this test for racism designed by some people in Harvard.

My results were as do follows: "Your data suggest little to no automatic preference between African American and European American." However I would have to say that I am not sure how good this test is - personally I was getting so confused and the black and white faces looked so much alike that have the time it was simply random! The other half was pseudo-random.

seriously... how reliable can such a test be?!!

Btw, I am on a role today with all my posts! :-)

update: I just saw this comment on digg which i thought was appropriate for me as well...
"Your data suggest little to no automatic preference between Light Skin and Dark Skin." - No it suggests I wanted to win the damn game.. I didn't care what color they were as long as I didn't make any mistakes.
Flawed test for gamers/competitive people.

Extreme 3D experience

I found the following extremely cool 3D experience.

Try the virtual barbershop experience here - you have to put on your headphones and close your eyes.... and wait for the magic. It is amazing!

Also try the other ones the guy has posted - the second link has a woman whispering - and it is so funny some of the comments on that page... seems it was big success for a lot of the guys. One guy went so far as to think of the possibilities if this kind of thing was used in porno movies!

Return of the Fly

Yoo hoo... yes I mean you! Hello!!
I feel like I should re-introduce myself it has been so long since i have written. Yes yes my name is Phly, Gad Phly. Now, will you get me a martini? shaken, not stirred.
WHat!! you have no martini? fine,.. get me my new favourite drink, Mai Tai. yummmm.

Anyhow, i realized that I have gotten out of the habit of updating my blog. It really does end up being a habit - update blog or just send an email about the interesting item to some people? these days i have been emailing.
But with the following item things are going to change.
I read this BBC article about the new bear robots the US military are developing for the transport of casualties in battlefields. The future is coming!! According to the website:

1. Teddy bear face designed to be reassuring (How cool is that!!!)
2. Hydraulic upper body carries up to 227kgs (500lbs)
3. When kneeling tracked "legs" travel over rubble. Switches to wheels on smooth surfaces (ok this was also very cool - i think you can even tell how that would work based on the picture of the legs)
4. Dynamic Balance Behaviour (DBB) technology allows the robot to stand and carry loads upright on its ankles, knees or hips for nearly an hour

Hasta la vista.... senor bear!