jonny goes to england

What about some lovely goose fat on your potatoes? Afterwards you can use it to grease up that squeaky door.

Yesterday, I was having a quick dinner at Ping Pong Dim Sum at the south bank branch. Obviously, they serve a big variety of dim sums — that is steamed little pockets filled with different Chinese ingredients. There are buns, puff pastry, dumplings and lotus leaves as wrappers. Buns are basically normal pastry, puff pastry are very soft blown up things (man I really lack the words to describe that!), and dumplings resemble transparent fish skins in looks and taste (just more sticky and less delicious I guess!). The different wrappers can then either be steamed, fried or baked, and get served in typical bamboo boxes (see picture). You order about 3-5 different dim sums for a good meal, each of them around £3.50. The variety in food you eat makes the whole meal enjoyable and quite different to a usual dinner. Modern interior and quick service, certainly good for quick dinners.

Apparently, as I heard through news stories (which I can’t find anymore) and now saw with my own eyes yesterday night, it’s not allowed anymore to wear hats in (certain?) london pubs/bars/clubs! Due to “security reasons”. So that they can also completely monitor your face indoors, wearing hats is not allowed anymore. When will hats be banned from the streets?

Funny enough, just recently BBC reported that a study showed that the massive spending on CCTV cameras failed to cut crime in UK.

Only 3% of London street robberies have been solved using security cameras

What’s their smart plan? Spending even MORE on CCTV.

Guys, you don’t cut crime by security cameras just like you don’t cut bread by looking at it.

While I’m certainly not a fan of US food I found these two spirit and wine jelly at breakfast quite funny. One has tequila the other champagne and I think you just spread it like jam on a bread .. tasted weird but not bad!

Finally, I’m back from my trip to Tucson, Arizona. For once my flights went smoothly without any delays or anything! I went there from Friday to Monday and it felt like I’ve been away for two weeks (which is good!).

The city itself, Tucson, is not very flattering .. resembles more of a desert boot camp than a city. However, our hotel, built on a mountain (they call it canyon), was very nicely situated and was generous in all regards.

The workshop I attended was co-located at the bigger PLDI conference with a couple of hundred participants from all over the world. My talk went fine and I met some nice students from Italy, Germany and US. Here, a still empty room.

Apart from that I went to the Sonoran Desert and was lying at the pool while small, cute hummingbirds were hovering above my head attacking some flowers! Unfortunately, I didn’t make pictures of them direclty!

Oh right, and I photographed cacti. Many cacti. More specifically, most of them are of the Saguaro species which basically consists of a large phallic (!), monolithic trunk.

The whole valley and canyon is covered in large cacti, some are over 15m high and 150 years old! Here is one of them directly in front of my balcony. The flowers on top are the state flowers of Arizona:

And here a few more from the desert:

On my way back, our plane was avoiding a huge thunderstorm around New York which gave us a totally surreal and amazing view on the storm from above and the outside. Every other second lightnings lit up the huge clouds from the inside and made them look like gigantic, deformed lamps.

Also, I found a nice iPodomat in Houston! Unfortunately, it didn’t accept my credit cards for some reason .. so I couldn’t buy a nano for $140

Here is the flickr set for some more pictures.

Hello. I’m in Arizona and it’s warm. I nearly missed my connecting flight in Houston and probably made a record to run from one Terminal E, through US border patrol, scanning left and right index finger, signing documents, collecting baggage, rechecking baggage, queuing for security check, taking belt and shoes off, putting belt and shoes on, running to the terminal train, driving to terminal B, running down the hallway to my gate to just in time catch the flight to Tucson. However, my effort was rewarded by a terribly boring flight. I guess Texas or Arizona does not make a lot of money out of sight seeing. Not to forget about the baby beside me who just learned to speak and said “nana nana” to everything for 2.5 hours.
Anyway, I’m in a fantastic hotel, spent some time on the pool and today at the PLAS workshop where I gave a talk. What you see above in the picture is the view from the lobby on a canyon out of huge windows. More pics are on the way when I’m back.

One quick fact on the weather. It’s so warm here that I’m unable to eat breakfast outside at 7 (!) in the morning because it’s simply too hot.

Onion Jam. Two words of horror and I had it for lunch. You buy a sandwich with “Ham & Cheese”, but what they don’t tell you is that it contains onion jam! Think of onion jam as sugary confiture with lots of onions cut into ..

In other news, I’m flying to Arizona over the weekend. However, I ended up — in an evil twist — to give the talk at the workshop on Sunday! Title of the talk is Lagrange Multipliers and Maximum Information Leakage in Different Observational Models. Wish me luck.

I just realised that the Phoenix Mars Mission — the lastest mars robot from NASA — is led by Lunar Planetary Lab of University of Arizona… in Tuscon! That’s where I’m going next weekend. So I could pop by at their command center and say hello. I’ll think about it ..

I have yet to experience a smooth return travel. The last few times weren’t really optimal!

Last time when I tried to catch a train from Stansted some moron decided to jump in front of the train at the airport. At 8pm on Sunday at an airport! He didn’t only have the wrong intention, he also picked the wrong place and time, and in turn delayed a couple of thousand travelers.

This time my plane got its take-off slot or whatever late which caused to delay everything else.

Anyway, I think the right formula is to pick smaller airports (e.g. City) where waiting times, take off slots, immigration control, baggage reclaim and suicides are easier to organise and cleanup.

Wikipedia refers to a study from the British Cheese Board which states the following:

A 2005 study carried out by the British Cheese Board claimed that when it came to dream types, Stilton cheese seemed to cause odd dreams, with 75% of men and 85% of women experiencing bizarre and vivid dreams after eating a 20 gram serving of the cheese half an hour before going to sleep.

So I thought I’m going to test this out and I bought a pack of blue stilton. One of my housemates decided to join me in the experiment.

First impression of this cheese was that it’s a rip-off from Gorgonzola. Which is most probably the case given that Gorgonzola’s history is few thousand years old and Stilton only 200. It’s drier than Gorgonzola, a bit milder and more salty. I had my first portion last Sunday, 30g before sleep.

The next morning, I didn’t notice any weird dreams .. however I realised how deep my sleep was. I slept like a rock which is usually not the case. That week I took Stilton twice again, last time on Wednesday night. I went to bed at 12:30 and set my alarm to 08:10. Unfortunately, I woke up after 09:30 with the alarm turned off! Now, everybody who knows me better knows that this happens extremely rarely … for me that’s a sign that Stilton is indeed altering sleep patterns. My housemate who also took blue stilton reports similar deep sleep experiences

So … go to your grocery store, get blue stilton and report back