And now, really more than you ever wanted to know, 2009 Closeout Edition
Five excellent places I visited in the UK:
—Peak District
—Kelvingrove Museum, Glasgow
—Edinburgh Military Tattoo
—Summits of most of the Three Peaks [Snowdon (highest point in Wales) and Scafell Pike (highest point in England)]
—Natural History Museum, London
Five excellent words and phrases brought to me by England:
—give it a miss [decline an invitation]
—kip [nap]
—lie in [as in, "having a bit of a..."; staying in bed past the accustomed time of arising]
—sort [take care of; "I've sorted the holiday plans"]
—twig [realize; comprehend]
Five excellent and highly underappreciated things about the US:
—Being able to send mail from the mailbox located at your personal home
—Free mail forwarding when you move
—A late November holiday to rein in the beginning of the Christmas season
—NFL commentators who are impeccably dressed (i.e., not wearing Smashing Pumpkins T-shirts from 1996) and actually contribute to one’s understanding of the game
—Summers that include sunshine and its associated warmth and vitamin D
Five unexpectedly excellent things about the UK:
—Speedy domestic mail service
—The canal system, in particular the bit of the Staffordshire-Worcestershire Canal that provides the quickest walking route from our house to the village
—Relative ease of accessibility to stroopwaffels
—David Attenborough, best nature program narrator of all time. I would listen to him narrate paint drying. Americans who got Sigourney Weaver instead on the Discovery Channel/BBC Planet Earth series: you were robbed!
—Starbucks on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral
Five excellent foods brought to me by England:
—Co-operative brand black currant and liquorice toffee candy
—Pick ‘n’ Mix at the movie theatre
—Bananas grilled with chocolate and marshmallow
—Toffee apples
—Tiger bread [technically a Dutch introduction]
Five best books:
—Adventures on the High Teas: In Search of Middle England by Stuart Maconie [Two years in a row for this guy!]
—Beautiful Boy by David Sheff [Heartbreaking. Drugs are bad, kids.]
—Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury [I love the bit where technology has advanced to the point of wall-sized TV screens, but hasn't progressed past CRTs and no one has computers. The trouble with writing about the future, I suppose.]
—Great Expectations by Charles Dickens [A little slow to getting around to reading this one, but worth it.]
—Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates [I can't remember whether I liked the movie better. It does have Leonardo DiCaprio in its favor.]
Five or so excellent commercials:
—Compare the Market series
—Ford S-Max
—Give it a Ponder series [not British, but still awesome]
—Know Your Limits
—Robinson’s All Natural
Five best movies:
—Black Book and The Counterfeiters [These go together because they're both excellent foreign-language films about World War II that I watched around the same time. Go ahead and throw in Defiance for good measure.]
—Chinatown [According to the Schwartz Theory of Movie Endings, this is the only movie I've ever seen that has an unequivocally bad ending.]
—The Hangover [The one movie I saw with Stephan this year. Hilarious, if you're into this sort of thing.]
—In Bruges ["It's in Belgium." (And it's rated R for a reason. Don't say I didn't warn you.)]
—Young Victoria [This is the only movie included herein that is approved for parental viewing. Seen in the Kensington High Street theater just down the road from where Queen Victoria was born and brought up. Featuring my introduction to theater pick 'n' mix, and a giant gummy shark my friend Sharon tried to choke on.]
Five most important things I learned:
—Not to drive with an empty or poorly fitted roof rack atop my car, offer hot drinks to accident victims, or rev my engine at elderly people in crosswalks
—How to letterpress
—The correct order in which to turn on and off the television and its assorted auxiliary components so as to save pushing one extra button each time and to prevent the further abuse of Stephan’s long-suffering patience
—The most efficient way to empty the water out of the washing machine when the pump stops working. Again.
—Keyboard shortcuts for the £, ¡, and — [Alt+0163, Alt+0161, and Alt+0151, respectively (and by the way, that is an inverted exclamation point, especially helpful for yelling things at Spanish-speaking people like ¡CENAIDA!)]
