austin_dern

How about pictures from our day at Regent's Park?

Negotiations continued into the night.

Londoners spilled all over the lawn at Regent's Park.

Regent's Park kept delivering spaces like this, a sub-garden just off of a piece just off of the main garden.

bunny_hugger bringing the news of our pinball league to the good people at a 150-year-old subway station. Could also be used for her album cover.

I hope you liked. Given that, let me list the humor blog entries of the past week, in case you missed those:

• The Story Of Anyone’s Life, some thoughts about writing biographies.
• Oh, I Don’t Know about this trivia board that challenged my imagination.
• Captioned: Elevators of the 24th Century featuring a screenshot from I don't remember which episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
• Why I Am Not Learning About The History Of Socks and I think you'll agree with my reasons.
• Robert Benchley: The Brow-Elevation in Humor, a book review that spins into an argument that people are not so dumb as they're assumed to be.
• Statistics Saturday: What Warren Buffett Is Warning Americans About, in which I courageously make fun of the clickbait industry.
• Popeye On Another Roller Coaster, in color and sounding weird.
• Things I Learned From 1950s Science Fiction, at least as it appeared on the radio.

Trivia: Seventy Martian craters, ranging in ssize from 4.8 to 120 kilometers in diameter, were visible in photographs 5 through 15 of Mariner 4. Source: On Mars: Exploration of the Red Planet 1958 - 1978, Edward Clinton Ezell, Linda Neuman Ezell. NASA SP-4212.

Currently Reading: Stealing the Elf-King's Roses, Diane Duane.

PS: At The Home Field, about the probability of that thing a few days ago when all fifteen home teams won.

We had breakfast our last morning in the hotel's restaurant. We had forgotten how good their buffet breakfast was, until we went to it the day before. I may have overdone it eating Weetabix but it just feels so like a thing to do while in England as long as jacket potatoes and beans on toast aren't happening.

bunny_hugger's uncle wouldn't be able to drive us to the airport, as he had probate court to get to. That's all right. We made our way through the Underground to Heathrow Airport, which we'd done before. Although this time since we were taking Air Canada we had to take a different and rather longer path to get from check-in to the actual gate. In fact, we were supposed to not start going to the gate until they gave us a half-hour warning; they just wanted us to be ... around ... somewhere else.

We did get put in an extremely slow X-ray screening line. I know everyone complains they're in the slow line, but I watched the many people getting through their screening while we waited, motionless. I'm not sure our screener had ever gotten to play with X-ray machines before.

Also in the long twisting path to get to our gate, we got onto an elevator, pressed the button for the other spot, and saw the other door open without the cab moving at all. I have no explanation for this phenomenon.

The in-flight movie options had changed since we went out, so we couldn't see Birdman after all that. I forget if it was on the way to or back from Europe that I watched The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Battling Battles while dozing off but it seemed to be going on an awfully long time. I did watch, while awake, Breathless and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which were things I'd always kind of figured I should have seen but never actually had. I am glad for seeing them even though they're not what I imagined, really.

I glimpsed several rows ahead of us someone playing the video game Crusader Kings III. This is the only time I've ever seen someone besides me playing the Europa Universalis line of games. I almost wanted to go up and hug him, except I had to suspect he'd have hated that as much as I would have. They're wonderful games but they're really not for everybody.

This would bring us back to Toronto, for my second taste of that country. This time around was less stressful, because most of it was spent in the American Customs Pre-Clearing Zone or whatever they call it. I'm not sure exactly. But since our connecting flight was to Detroit they shuffled us to an alternate corridor and put us in a series of long lines to long lines and apparently this came to satisfy United States Customs. It was nice, in Detroit, getting off the plane just as if we'd come on a domestic flight.

We had a similar impossibly long walk through Toronto for our connecting flight, on a plane that was not quite as tiny as the one we'd flown Detroit-to-Toronto. It did have a mere nine or ten rows, and put bunny_hugger ``two'' rows behind us. The quotes are because ... well. Most of the rows were two groups of two seats each. The very last one was a single row of five seats, with bunny_hugger put in the center, where her knees could be crushed by the drinks cart. This was labelled as a tenth row, rather than break up the AB-on-the-left, CD-on-the-right arrangement of seats that all other rows had. It's a weird little thing. The cockpit had a closed door so bunny_hugger did not have to see what the landing looked like through the front windows. We know of no Fleetwood Mac fans specifically on the plane.

When we arrived in Detroit, since Customs didn't need us, we were with a longer than expected wait between our flight and the Michigan Flyer. And there's not really good places to sit around waiting for the bus at the airport. But we'd been through rather worse, and it wasn't more than three hours after getting to the airport that we were joyfully back home.

Trivia: The Central Pacific railroad had revenue of $22,939.36 for May 1865. Source: Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad, David Haward Bain.

Currently Reading: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L Frank Baum.

We would run out of time. Of course we would. We can hardly finish a museum as rich as that before the official closing hour. For that matter we skipped a movie entirely and there were probably other buildings we missed. We did get to the gift shop. There we found some postcards we could send back to our hipster bar, and to our parents. And better, they had stamps good for international postcard mail. I could have bought any of the books there. (To be blunt, I could probably have written some of the ones about longitude and its history.) But I ended up getting a T-shirt, proclaiming the Prime Meridian, and I'd wear that the first time we got back to our hipster bar. I figure it to do the kind of duty that T-shirts from obscure amusement parks will do.

We walked back through crowds of Londoners scattered on the grass, and didn't end up going back the way we came. We went for the nearer subway stop instead. This would take us naturally toward the Cutty Sark, too. That was closed --- it shut the same time Greenwich did --- but we could at least see it and walk around outside.

This also let us discover Harry's Original Sweetshop, the better to pursue our quest for oddball candies. They didn't have anything remarkably strange there, but we were able to pick up a couple of things, with the thought of snacks on the next day's flights. They did have a nice-looking carousel-themed tin of candies but that seemed too big and too marginal to get for the plane. Too bad.

We went back home, to our hotel, and filled out postcards. And stopped at a convenience store opposite the Underground station in order to buy Starbars. We hadn't gotten them yet that trip, and we didn't get enough. (As it would happen, we'd end up with more than £15 in bills and change left over when we exited the country. That's not too bad in terms of guessing how much spending money we would need, but the amount of it does offend bunny_hugger who sees it as money we can't spend. And we could have got a dozen more Starbars with that, easily.)

We would have to mail the cards, certainly, but we knew where there was a postbox. That would be not far from the underground station for bunny_hugger's uncle, whom we could visit one last time. We did call him to say we were coming --- I think this was the time the front desk clerk insisted we couldn't have the number right because we didn't have the area code, when bunny_hugger had specifically looked up that the area code was not required --- but had to work to convince him not to pick us up.

This was because we wanted to stop in at the Waitrose supermarket also by the Underground station. He had casually mentioned one night how bunny_hugger had been drinking the expensive coffee and then we were wracked with guilt for taking so much from him. He wasn't upset, mind you, and I know he didn't begrudge us that, but we felt like we should get some coffee at least, to thank him and to replenish his stocks.

It happens we couldn't remember what kind of coffee he drank. I was close in remembering the cans he had, although we picked up an espresso rather than a regular blend. It transpired he just reuses the can, and had been drinking some wholly different brand of coffee anyway. Well, the sentiment was there, and understood.

We'd spend the rest of the night there, of course, again in that mixture of casual talk and stabbing confessional and tech support. This was when we finally got his new telephone connected, something that required moving a bookshelf, so good thing I was there. It's also when we got his e-mail passwords finally all reset, for which I was not needed at all. bunny_hugger's uncle spoke of himself as being at that stage where he has intellectually accepted some of the things he needs to do, such as to clear out their home of the things he no longer needs, but emotional acceptance still fails at the moment of doing. His mention of thinking how it would feel to have her coat wrapped around a stranger hit me hard.

It was a strange evening, a basically happy experience glazed with the fear that we might never see him again, or even might never see him in this place again. (bunny_hugger's mother insists he ought to sell the house and move back to the United States. He spoke some of maybe doing that, only he wouldn't want to move back to Michigan, where his family is. The East Coast, maybe. If we could buy him the house just south of ours that might be almost perfect.)

He did say that we'd restored his feeling of living. What a responsibility to have.

Trivia: After 1916 the British government took over the importation of tea for the duration of the war, and imposed price controls on 90 percent of sales. The tea was divided into four (in 1918, three) grades for sale. Source: Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire, Roy Moxham.

Currently Reading: Love Conquers All, Robert Benchley.

For Sunday bunny_hugger proposed we do something we couldn't last time, and go to the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. Well, the museum there, since it's no longer a working observatory. When we were there in July 2012 it was closed for the Olympics, an event not actually happening while we were there. This was a long ride on the Underground, most of it above ground, and we got off at the wrong station because I was reading the directions.

The station didn't have turnstiles to get out, nor to get in. This is something I forgot to mention was true at the Chessington station either. Nobody checked our tickets as we got on, or when we were journeying back home. This felt most weirdly illicit. The United States model is so obsessed with the fear that someone might get something they didn't pay for that there'll be screening out of cheats, even when it would be more cost-effective to skip the checking. I suppose there's limited paths you could get onto and off of the system without a ticket, admittedly. And the European model is based on public transportation being a positive good, while the American model is that it's a form of punishment for people who fail to sufficiently car.

Since we started from the wrong station we passed a number of interesting spots we wouldn't have otherwise, including a splendidly 1950s-ish movie theater, a street fair, and a pleasant old church. It also took us near enough an ice cream shop, on a day finally warm and sunny enough, that we could get a 99 with a clear conscience. This is an ice cream cone with a Cadbury Flake chocolate bar stuck in. (A Flake is a very dry, very airy chocolate bar. I'm not sure the nearest American equivalent; a Twirl or a KitKat comes close.) It goes back to the 1920s and as you might expect the origin of the name is a mystery.

The walk up, and up, and up the long hill gave us plenty of chances to see more Londoners spilled out over the lawn, too. Finally we came in view of a Time Ball, held up on its post, and behind a dense pack of trees was ... a building. Part of the Observatory? We weren't sure, but we were also getting tired of tromping uphill so we went over to it. Yes, we were in the right place, a string of lovely old buildings with observatory domes on top. A statue of James Wolfe with pigeons squatting on its head. People taking photographs down the hill into London. People standing on The Line. People standing on line to get on The Line. A fellow playing Neville Maskelynne explaining the history of the observatory and how time and position relate to people standing on the On The Line line. Plaques explaining why there are several different Prime Meridians, not just The Line, and why the GPS readers people have put zero degrees longitude a couple hundred yards east of The Line. Older men in short pants and tall socks staring at their GPS readers and frowning. I'm making up that last detail but I stand by my claim that was totally happening.

We did not get on the On The Line line. It was way too long; they estimated it would be about 45 minutes to get up to the statue up front, where tradition dictates people take a photograph with one foot in the eastern and one in the western hemisphere. We did grab photographs of our feet on The Line, in parts away from the statue, which didn't take any special waiting.

This is, I admit, a bit of nerdly heaven. I was bitten long, long ago by the calendar and timekeeping and standard-keeping bug and there's no more satisfying icon of How We Measure Things than the prime meridian. Yes, there's the platinum-iridium block to denote the standard kilogram, sitting in Paris, gradually losing mass for no traceable reason. But that hasn't got the high drama of the prime meridian.

The museum portion explains much of the drama. I was well-acquainted with it and I'm proud to say I did not go explaining anything I was not specifically asked to explain. You have no idea how hard it is for a know-it-all to resist showing knowledge of everything. I would expect the crowd there to be two-thirds know-it-alls and one-third people who are somewhat interested and hoping they can avoid setting off a detailed explanation of how Jupiter's moons might be used to find the time.

Trivia: In 1878 Sandford Fleming proposed a prime meridian running 180 degrees of longitude opposite the Greenwich meridian, that is, along the line roughly followed by the International Date Line. (This would have the advantage of allowing the continued use of Greenwich as the prime meridian, as most world shipping traffic and the largest navies already used, without explicitly confirming the British convenience as worldwide standard.) Source: Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time, Clark Blaise.

Currently Reading: The Complete Dick Tracy Volume II, 1933 - 1935, Chester Gould.

We walked up from Baker Street toward Regent's Park, passing along the way a double-decker bus signed ``WEDDING SPECIAL''. I'd never thought about renting a double-decker bus for a wedding. Still not sure what I think of it.

We entered the park to see lots of water, and many, many birds, and in the grass beyond just uncountably many British folk scattered on their lawn blankets. There was also a heron, sitting up close to a fence, staring back at a guy trying to take its photograph. This gave me a moment of worrying about our fish back home, but we had put a net over the pond and it's hard to figure a heron or raccoon doing much with that. (They wouldn't.)

Mostly, then, we walked around the park, toddling along past green spaces and trees and shrubs and flowers and all. Sometimes the line of sight would be broken up by gates, some gold-painted. There's a lovely drinking fountain that's itself a pretty substantial monument. It's even got spots for dogs to drink. The plaque on it says the fountain was ``erected by the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain And Cattle Trough Association'', fairly enough, as a gift of Sir Cowasjee Jehangir, Companion of the Star of India, ``A wealthy Parsee gentleman of Bombay as a token of gratitude to the people of England for the protection enjoyed by him and his Parsee fellow countrymen under the British rule in India'', inaugurated 1869. That's quite a bit for a fountain, yet I can't help feeling like there's probably more story yet there.

As we walked along we found a little side garden, tended into a strictly regular set of lawns and fountains and flower displays and the like. This was another lovely spot tucked within a series of lovely spots and we just sat and took in the quiet for a while. The day may sound like we didn't do much of anything, and I suppose that's so, or sort of so. It's more that we were just being present, rather than trying to do anything.

Walking along further we encountered not just a long pond and a little information panel explaining the species of birds seen in the area, but also a woman feeding some ducks. The ducks seemed unsure about their relationship with her. The woman explained she fed this particular set and talked about how upset she was that some of the baby ducks had gone missing. We could understand feeling that kind of close relationship with the wildlife.

We would stop off for coffee and tea, and the chance to sit and watch large numbers of people enjoying a lovely afternoon. As it happens we didn't get in view of the Zoological Gardens, but we wouldn't have had anything like the time for that anyway. Goodness, we spent quite a bit of time just on the street looking at the window of the Underground's former office for lost-and-found items. They'd put up things reportedly found on the line, and where they were found, such as an iron lost on bus 23 in 1936, a top hat left on Euston in 1950, a movie camera left in Camden in 1936, a suspiciously perfect set of Beatles records lost in 1969, a series of mobile phones, that sort of thing. The actual zoo would take us forever to see.

We went back our hotel so that we could meet bunny_hugger's uncle for dinner. He wanted to drive over and pick us up, so we waited outside, near the Eight Bells again. There were some guys kicking a soccer ball around, cheering whenever the ball hit a bus (there were a lot of buses in the area) or especially when the ball rolled out of control and some passer-by kicked it back. I promised bunny_hugger that if the ball came near us I'd kick it back. It never did. While we worried about them getting hit by a bus they seemed fine. They also reminded us of thinking that, just as Twitter will give out Verified Accounts, some folks need to be Certified Lads. The good kind of lad, in this case.

bunny_hugger's uncle took us almost just across the river, to a spot near an historical marker for Thomas Cromwell. It doesn't explain his relationship to the place. Anyway, we went to a strikingly busy Italian restaurant, one loud enough that it was difficult for bunny_hugger and me to hear one another, much less for him to hear us. It wasn't his favorite restaurant, but he hasn't been able to go back to his favorite, because it was his wife's favorite too. He still feels regularly stabbed with guilt for doing things, or being alive, when she isn't. And he doesn't know how to break the news to the restaurant staff.

This restaurant, Carlucci's, was packed, probably fair enough for a Saturday night in early June that's cool but not cold. We were also seated near one of those monstrously huge family parties that had maybe twenty people present, but enough of them were kids that it seemed like there were eighty squealing kids there. It captivated me how they could make such an awful mess, and yet the staff could clean it up successfully so quickly. Also, this means that bunny_hugger and I have now been to an Italian restaurant in every European country we've visited together, without ever being in Italy, yet.

At dinner we did our best to talk about Chessington, and about our day at Regent's Park, although it was slow going. It was easier chatting back at his home, with some television show that I think was all about what kinds of wildlife was now visible in what parts of the country, and his cat wandering in and out of the house, occasionally acknowledging the calls of her name.

Trivia: The British Parliament passed 120 Railway Acts in 1845, 272 in 1846, and 170 in 1847. Source: The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea, John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge.

Currently Reading: The Complete Dick Tracy Volume II, 1933 - 1935, Chester Gould.

It's Friday morning, how about a little more Chessington in photographs?

Entering the Transylvania area of Chessington World of Adventures. The Vampire roller coaster is the elevated track on the right.

And there's the Vampire roller coaster. Depending on whether you count powered coasters this was either the only one, or else one of the two roller coasters operating that day.

The Dragon's Fury roller coaster, closed for unspecified reasons. Also, the dragon animatronic to the side of the queue was apparently taken out for repairs, even though its claws and tail remain. The sign apologizes that the dragon's off having an adventure of his own.

S'truth! The gift shop inside is mostly tied in to the Wild Asia/Land of the Dragons attractions around it. But tucked within is a snake cage, one of those odd little islets of zoo embedded in the main park.

The Monkey Swinger is remarkably good-looking for being all greys and browns; it's a matter of looking like you mean to be nearly monochromatic. Not obvious here, and something that would've kept us from riding it had we realized it: water jets that spray up and soak the riders. If it were about twenty degrees Fahrenheit warmer and not so windy we'd have slightly less resented the water --- there was a lot of it --- but as it was, yeesh.

It's Friday morning, how about a review of my humor blog and stuff you missed from it since the last week?

• From The Dawn Of Beeps, and my discovery of some early writings about beeps from the Iowa State Horticultural Society.
• Obscene Writing At Silver Beach, Michigan, a place I somehow started calling Silver Lake Beach until bunny_hugger pointed it out to me.
• Robert Benchley: When Not In Rome, Why Do As The Romans Did?, a surprisingly strong anti-Roman-numerals piece.
• Meanwhile, On Usenet it's Subject Line Roulette! You've heard of that, right? Well, you'll get it.
• A Comics Relief, about this weird 1910 experiment in doing newspaper comics in clay.
• Statistics Saturday: 2015 Saturdays versus Other Days, To Date, just about how fast they're coming is all.
• Rube and Mandy at Coney Island, a surprisingly plotless thing from the guy who brought you The Great Train Robbery. But hey, amusement park footage from 1903!
• How I Overcame The Face In My Room, a shockingly true tale about my teenaged years.

Trivia: The normal staircase for the Santa Clara County (California) house built by Sarah Winchester (widow of the Winchester Repeating Arms factory founder) had 42 steps. Each step was two inches high. Source: A Splintered History of Wood: Belt-Sander Races, Blind Woodworkers, and Baseball Bats, Spike Carlsen. (It's not clear to me how much of that remains in the house; it's apparently managed to partially collapse at least once even in her lifetime, a century ago.)

Currently Reading: After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation, Giles MacDonogh.

Chessington World of Adventures is strongly themed, almost like a type case for certain elements of Roller Coaster Tycoon games. Some of these themes are comically gentle, like the Pirates Cove. That had a neat little circular boat ride, the Seastorm, in which the boat cars occasionally swap around, so that you spend half the ride looking at your neighbor behind and half looking at your neighbor ahead. It's reminiscent of the Tilt-A-Whirl motion without being so unpredictable. That makes the ride less fun than a Tilt-A-Whirl, I suppose, but it's an unusual kind of motion anyway, and the boats are fun to see, and even christened with unique names, just the sort of thing a ride like that needs.

The Transylvania area's probably the best-developed. It's also where we got our real lunch, vegetarian burgers with fries and soda. It's really easy to eat vegetarian in Britain (and Europe generally, we've found). The hall was lovely with indoor trees and bats dangling from stuff, all the decor you need. I stopped on the way out to try answering their little ``Quick Survey'' on a mounted iPod, though the thing responded poorly. Possibly too many people with catsup on their fingers had been using it.

When we noticed there were areas called Wild Asia and then the Mystic East we started bracing for comically intended racist stuff. Is that itself a racist supposition on our parts? Perhaps, since all we had to go on for that is our sense that the English aren't quite sure yet why Ireland doesn't love them more. Also that one of the areas was called the Mystic East. It's, again, beautifully set up with all the stations and games and arcade and all that made to look like a little Chinatown. And then along the ride queue to the log flume --- not nearly as body-soaking as the Monkey Swinger, although moreso than the Scorpion Express --- were red signs with yellow text written in the Typeface Used For The Hours And Directions to Every Chinese Restaurant, with jokes of this order:

Man wearing polkadot not good at hide and seek --- he always spotted

Along the path the log flume takes you past buildings labelled as Mr Lee's Laundry and Chan's Cycles. Another building has a sign in that Chinese Restaurant Sign typeface, ``PEEK-ING TOM, [ Something ] Rickshaw Way''. (I can't make it out in my photo.) I don't think anyone's trying to be obnoxious here; it feels like the sort of thing that was an unexceptional joke on United States television up to about 1984 and that now we're embarrassed by.

The log flume's fun, though, and one of its major drops takes you right into a dragon's mouth. With the Rye Playland Dragon Coaster that makes two rides we've been on that send you into the belly of a dragon even though there's no way out that can be both tasteful and logical. Both sacrifice logic and you just end up outside again. We didn't get very wet from the log fluming, though there are water guns set up on the sidewalk outside the ride which passers-by can use for a pound. Fortunately we went through at a time nobody was shooting except one older woman who didn't seem to know how to aim. bunny_hugger didn't even know when we'd passed that dangerous spot.

Among the Mystic East attractions, over one of the ponds, is a Mer-lion statue. It's even accompanied by a plaque explaining the Mer-lion's position at Singapore harbor, and like the small one at Mer-lion park it shoots water out of its mouth. (The large one on Sentosa Island shoots lasers from its eyes.) Why it's there still seems mysterious. As far as I know park owners Merlin Entertainment don't have any Singapore or Singapore-area parks. They have also got a replica of a Giant Buddha of Kamakura, Japan. The placard explaining it doesn't ever quite specify that this is a replica, which probably results in some local kids being retroactively disappointed when they find out this small theme park outside London hasn't relocated a bronze statue dating to 1252 AD all the way from Japan.

I don't want to belabor the point but it is a beautiful place. The park may not be very large. And its thrill rides are fairly modest ones. The roller coaster Vampire is essentially equivalent to The Bat at Kings Island, or Iron Dragon at Cedar Point, roller coasters that people who're afraid of roller coasters aren't afraid to go on. They have got a Disk'O, called KOBRA, a snake-themed counterpart to the Pipe Scream at Cedar Point, Le Grand Tournoi at Parc Festyland, or the Cosmic Chaos at Kennywood that nauseated bunny_hugger that time. (That started the day down, but it would get back into operation before the park closed.) It's better-themed than those counterparts, though, except maybe Festyland's. It's very easy to picture this as someone's favorite park ever when a kid, and to think it's hopelessly tame as a teenager, but to come back and realize how thoroughly it's charming as an adult.

Trivia: Strontium was discovered in 1790 by a doctor working in a hospital lab in London's red-light district, not far from the location of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. Source: The Disappearing Spoon, Sam Kean. (Wikipedia credits Wiliam Cruickshank and Adair Crawford jointly but notes confusion about the exact order of things; Kean doesn't think to specify who he wants to give credit.)

Currently Reading: After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation, Giles MacDonogh.

Enough chatting; how about some Chessington World of Adventures pictures?

Fellow at Chessington World of Adventures changing the signs pointing to the parking lot's exit. We assume he works for the park.

Entrance to the Chessington World of Adventures park. If I'm not mistaken the woman in the center, wearing blue sneakers, is the one who gave us free admission tickets.

Hocus Pocus Hall. Formerly the manor house around which the Chessington Zoo, and later the World of Adventures zoo and theme park, would open. It's an engaging, child-friendly walkthrough haunted house.

The Market Square compass rose. The castles in the background lead to the elevated monorail ride. There's an arcade on the far left; no pinball. Middle left of the frame, bunny_hugger.

A jackdaw waiting for us to give it some hot doughnuts or at least coffee. It would hang around a while and eventually go off and glare at us, dissatisfied.

And while it wasn't so busy a week as has been recently normal for my mathematics blog, there still were a fair number of posts. Did you see them all? Did you read them? You can, yet. Among the recent stuff has been:

• Reading the Comics, July 19, 2015: Rerun Comics Edition, where we left off last Sunday.
• A Summer 2015 Mathematics A To Z: y-axis, featuring more vector calculus than you might have guessed from the name.
• A Summer 2015 Mathematics A To Z: z-transform, not a valid substitute for a course in signal processing, but something that might be useful while you take one.
• A Summer 2015 Mathematics A to Z Roundup, bundling together the whole glossary so you can find pages more easily, I hope.
• Reading the Comics, July 24, 2015: All The Popular Topics Are Here Edition, because, you know. Andertoons and stuff.

Trivia: Mark Twain's Christmas 1890 piece for the New York World spoke of his hope that ``all of us --- the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the admired, the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the savage --- may eventually be gathered together in a heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss --- except the inventor of the telephone''. Source: Telephone: The First Hundred Years, John Brooks.

Currently Reading: After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation, Giles MacDonogh.

We didn't figure to go Alton Towers amusement park. We'd like to sometime. But we wanted to stick closer to London. (If nothing else we weren't sure how much bunny_hugger's uncle would need us.) We were tempted by Thorpe Park, near enough the city. But we decided to go to Chessington World Of Adventures, even closer yet to our hotel. It was near enough we could get there on the Underground, albeit in stretches that mostly went overground. Still, to take the subway to an amusement park is almost perfect for the kind of people we are. We were excited. So were some young women who squealed as the train pulled up to Chessington North, despite the sign there warning to alight at Chessington South for the World Of Adventures. They apologized for squealing; we promised that wasn't necessary.

Though the Chessington South station is near the park, it's not at it, and we joined a small, slightly confused herd of people wandering that direction. We got to the front, and I noticed someone at the parking lot changing the direction of the exit arrows for Aisle B (``Binturong'') and the like. Other parking rows include M for meerkat and O for otter. There's not pictures of the animals at these rows, just the names of them. And they change the exit direction between the start and the close of the day, somehow.

As we approached the ``Welcome To Britain's Wildest Adventure'' entrance a woman came up to us and asked if we'd bought tickets yet. We hadn't. She held out a couple. I was steeling myself for, at best, someone hawking tickets and dickering over the price; at worst, someone hawking counterfeit tickets. She said to take them, and asked for nothing, and walked off after we thanked her, confused. The tickets were valid, and that's how we got into the amusement park for free.

It transpired that the tickets we got had been sold by some promotional deal linked with The Sun, and they could either be used that day or not at all, so the woman wasn't losing anything by giving them away. It's still a kind act.

Chessington World of Adventures was, once upon a time, a manor house, until the 20th century made that an impractical option. In the 1930s it opened up as a zoo, and in the late 80s turned into a zoo with an amusement park, soon to be an amusement park with a zoo. (Coincidentally that's about when Deer Park Funland changed to being Michigan's Adventure, though I'm not sure when they dropped the petting-zoo side altogether to focus on the amusement park business.) Both sides are still going strong --- the zoo just took delivery of a new fossa this week --- although it's easy to spend the day just in the park and see few of the animals.

For that we blame the short hours. Again, the park closed strikingly early, around 5 pm. It was a cool day and it rained a little in the late morning but, still. It was early June. By that time of year even Michigan's Adventure is open till 6 pm. We'd see some of the animals --- just past the entry gate are Asian short-clawed otters, behaving just as you'd expect --- though not enough.

The first attraction we went to was Hocus Pocus Hall. This used to be Burnt Stub Mansion, the original manor house. It had been redesigned as one in the 18th century; before then, it had been an inn. Before that, it had been torn down by Parliamentary forces in the Civil War, and before that, as you might imagine, it was a Royalist stronghold. Apparently its history can be traced back to the mid-14th century. Now, it's a child-friendly haunted house walkthrough attraction, with animatronics and 3-D paintings you wear glasses for and gremlins poking out around all corners, that sort of thing. There's a moral here but I don't know what it is.

It's a splendidly maintained spot, though. And there's gremlin-type gargoyles sitting outside the arches leading up to the house. We noticed the tail of one was broken off, revealing it was stone-painted wood. bunny_hugger put the broken shard of tail back in its proper spot, so it wouldn't stand out.

Trivia: Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son sold better than 30,000 copies per monthly issue from 1846 to 1848. William Thackeray's Vanity Fair did no more than seven thousand. Source: The Age of Paradox: A Biography of England, 1841 - 1851, John W Dodds.

Currently Reading: After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation, Giles MacDonogh.

PS: A Summer 2015 Mathematics A to Z Roundup, a quick guide to all 26 of the A-to-Z glossary postings. Three.

``These represent pears,'' bunny_hugger's uncle said, as he dropped a pouch of dehydrated pears onto the table. The sentence, and its mix of truth and poetry, delighted us. I still smile thinking of it.

Over Christmas his wife died. Nobody expected it. He was devastated. He still is. They were expat Americans; while, I gather, she had a few relatives in the country, he hasn't got any relations. They have friends, certainly, but in a time like this you need a lot of support. We'd be the first people from his family who could even see him. The rest had been phone calls and Facebook messages and elliptic yet poetic e-mails that hinted at his despair.

Going in we were prepared for the case that he might have completely stopped taking care of himself, of the house, of the cat. We were ready to spend the day, or several days if need be, just tidying the house and putting it in livable order. Happily it was nothing near that bad. He might be a bit overwhelmed by the job of keeping a house in order by himself, but not hopelessly so. I admit I have a high tolerance for stuff being piled on tables or chairs, but, that's all a neat mess, if you take my meaning.

He got premade sandwiches from the supermarket down the street, for a simple and informal lunch were we might just talk. And we figured a lot of what we might do was to listen. There'd be a good bit of that. Seeing him --- we would see him nearly every day --- would be this odd mix of amiable chatter, some of it talking about our trip to that point, some of it talking about bits of family lore, interrupted by this nervous pause and then his talking about his depression.

He seems to be holding up to a brutal year. It isn't enough that she died. The barbed ends that come after life keep whipping back. There's paperwork, there's probate court, there's companies that need to slowly process the idea that a person who was alive and well twelve months ago is not now and never will be again.

And there's less formal things. He had a little while before our visit got what appeared to be an e-mail from Apple, reporting that someone had logged in to his wife's iCloud account and could someone please verify whether this was legitimate. That struck him with a particular sense of violation. So part of our visit was spent diagnosing notices like that. In this case, the notice seems to have been a phishing expedition. We explained the reasons we thought it so. He seemed to accept most that an actual e-mail notice from Apple would not have that curious not-quite-grammatical construction that phishers somehow always have. Just to be safe, though, we did help him through resetting passwords on his and his wife's e-mail accounts.

This got to be a bit of a logic puzzle, because he couldn't think of his old password, and didn't have an independent e-mail to which a reset password could be sent. There is a process for that, though, and apparently it isn't automated, or at least it doesn't claim to be.

He'd also hoped to get a replacement phone put in. The old phone was fine, but the answering machine on it still had the messages from his wife's hospitalization, and he didn't want that to be plugged in where an accident might delete them all. This I understand. (Also the new phone has larger buttons, which is probably for the best given his age.) This would wait until Sunday night for us to accomplish, and it required moving a bookshelf with books on it to do, so good thing I was there.

We had originally gone with the idea that we'd take lunch and visit as long as he felt comfortable. But he apparently felt comfortable with us around, that day, and he postponed his only appointment (taking the cat to the veterinarian) so we wouldn't be interrupted. We would spend the whole afternoon and much of the evening, talking and being present and eating and listening, looking at the birds visible from his tended garden (one seemed to be a parrot of some kind, surely a loose pet), or watching television (there was this friendly-competitive auction show that seemed several orders of magnitude better than its United States equivalents, possibly because nobody seemed punchable on it), just being there.

We would finally go back to our hotel. Playing on the news in the lobby as we got in was something about the previous week's roller coaster accident at Alton Towers. We weren't planning to go to Alton Towers, but the accident would affect our next day.

Trivia: In repudiating Mississippi's 1841 obligation to provide millions of dollars in bonds for the Union Bank of Mississippi, Governor Alexander McNutt proclaimed it offensive that the Jewish Baron Rothschild ``shall have a mortgage upon our cotton fields and make serfs of our children'', charging that Rothschild had ``mortgages upon the silver mines of Mexico and the quicksilver mines of Spain. He has advanced money to the Sublime Porte, and taken as security a mortgage upon the holy city of Jerusalem and the sepulchre of our Savior''. The state had 42 cents in its treasury in January 1841. Source: A Nation of Deadbeats: An Uncommon History of America's Financial Disasters, Scott Reynolds Nelson.

Currently Reading: After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation, Giles MacDonogh.

PS: A Summer 2015 Mathematics A To Z: z-transform, my last A-to-Z entry! This one comes from signals processing. Two.