At the end of summer, I will be joining a few friends on a small bike ride: flying into Krakow, from whence we will head southward, towards the High Tatras in Slovakia, eventually reaching Stary Smokovec before looping back to Krakow. The plan at the moment is slow steady long days in mountains, 60-80 miles per day, and staying in hotels/B&Bs so we don't have to carry camping gear. It seems like quite a difficult ride: any mountain range that includes the word "High" in its name is bound to be threatening, and pictures of the area seem to give the same impression. And at least according to this map the most significant mountains seem to be between Poland and Stary Smokovec.

Now I'm a true flatland boy, and while it's an exaggeration to say that the highest elevation I've ever cycled was a highway overpass (readers in the know will already be aware that the Kokomo, Indiana metro area does not offer many overpass options), the closest I've been to mountain cycling is flying over the Appalachians with my bike in the luggage compartment. Or, riding in the rolling hills west of Madison, Wisconsin. Not quite the same as real mountain riding, that's for sure. Oddly enough, I'm not so concerned about having enough stamina for the climbs: I've been gradually increasing my mileage and trying to find uphill stretches wherever I can (and also planning on doing at least a little training on some "real hills" somewhere away from London). Instead, it's the downhills that worry me most: even on minor downhills I find myself clutching the brakes as if they're trying to escape. Of course this may be a product of riding in and near London: within the built-up sections there's almost always a road crossing, a line of traffic, a construction zone, a small family crossing the road without looking or some other hazard; in the surrounding countryside it's quite typical to find a speeding driver taking his half of the road in the middle. So I'm quite anxious about getting used to riding downhill without squeezing the brakes until they melt and/or my hands turn into cramped claws.

In the meantime, perhaps I will start working on my Polish vocabulary which at the moment is only a handful of words mostly referring to foodstuffs (an ad for Chicago's Czerwone Jabluszko [Red Apple] Polish all-you-can-eat buffet really belongs here). Somehow I doubt the online Polish translator will be very useful on the road. But just in case I've prepared a few useful phrases, even though the online translation may not be very accurate at all:

You can have my bicycle. Please don't kill me.
Wy mozecie miec mój bicykl. Prosze nie zabija mnie.

Thank you for your kindness, but I cannot drink any more.
Dziekuja za wasza dobrotliwosc, ale JA nie moze pic wiecej.

Have you heard of Vanilla Ice?
Ma wy wysluchaliscie Vanilla Ice?

Those should pretty much cover it.

It's official! We've received our official "CITIZENSHIP INVITATIONS":

"APPLICATION FOR BRITISH CITIZENSHIP BY
Dunce

I am pleased to tell you that this application for British citizenship has been approved. To complete the process of becoming a British citizen, you will need to attend a citizenship ceremony to receive your certificate. In the ceremony you will take an Oath or Affirmation of allegiance to the Crown and a Pledge of loyalty to the United Kingdom. This is a formal promise to Her Majesty the Queen and the United Kingdom."

The choice between Oath or Affirmation depends upon whether Almighty God is mentioned or not. We'll do the ceremony sometime in the next three months (to be scheduled quite soon). It only took one month for our citizenship to be approved (from the day we submitted our documents: 20th of March); we were shocked it happened this quickly as the official website gave an expected waiting time of four months. We haven't even thought about planning the party. I guess our applications were very straightforward.

The date on the official letter was the 20th of April (Adolf Hitler's birthday, the date of the Columbine school shooting, and also a date revered by numerous American cannabis users for its resemblance to the not-at-all-secret number 420). In a not very modern twist, both citizenship invitations arrived in a single envelope addressed only to me. I like to think this was only because my name was on the payment slip, rather than Mrs. Dunce being considered chattel.

After I looked for the heavily English-speaking counties (failing to find the jewel in Montana's crown, the elusive 100% of Powder River County), the next step was to examine where English is least-spoken, at least according to the US Census. Judging from the English map I posted yesterday, it was a no-brainer to wander along the Mexican border and find areas where Spanish is especially dominant.

Although I wasn't exhaustive in my search, I think I did pretty well finding Maverick County, where a shade under 8% speak English as their first language (38,560 Spanish speakers, 91% of the population. 375 Kickapoo speakers, and a handful of Aztecan and German speakers round out the mix). Maverick County has a Wikipedia entry that is even less informative than usual, but plenty of historical information can be found at the Handbook of Texas Online (for example, that "[d]uring the decade before the Civil War, the area was a haven for outlaws, slave hunters, and other disreputable people"). The county seat, Eagle Pass, is "The Best Way to Mexico!!!" and "where yeehaw meets ole'" according to its website.

It's easy enough to find counties where Spanish is dominant, but not nearly so easy to find counties where yet another language besides English and Spanish is the most commonly spoken (at least according to the US Census). I noticed one quite easily when I peeked at the language map of Alaska. In the Bethel Census Area, there are 9,005 speakers of Yupik (an Eskimo language also spoken in Siberia, more info here), amounting to more than 63% of the population, vs only 4,950 English speakers (less than 35%). This area is in the midst of the Yukon Delta (and Bethel itself is apparently often called the "armpit of Alaska" by other Alaskans: Wikipedia link [hardly NPOV in wiki terms]). Here is an interesting local news site, and here is a nice local photo site. As far as the Bethel Census Area goes, the Wikipedia entry posed me a clear challenge: "Bethel Census Area is one of only 38 county-level census divisions of the United States where the most spoken language is not English and one of only 3 where it is neither English nor Spanish.". I immediately decided I had to find the other two.

Well, the French map from my first "Language map" entry was staring me in the face, so I thought I ought to start with the darkest French-speaking areas marked there. In the Northeast, there were a few possibilities, but all of them fell far short with more than 75% English speakers (Aroostook County, Maine: 22.37% French speakers; Androscoggin County, Maine: 14.29%; Coos County, NH: only 16.17%). So the next natural possibility was Louisiana, full of French-speaking Cajuns. But again, far short: the best I could find was St. Martin Parish (26.65% French speakers, but 69.74% English). Even Acadia Parish only clocked in with a miserable 17.27% French speaking rate. My next unsuccessful try was German, as there are a few highly German parts of the northern Plains (a few counties in the Dakotas), but the best I found there was McIntosh County, North Dakota (35.55% German, but over 64% English).

This was starting to get frustrating, but then I reconsidered the example of Yupik. What about other indigenous languages spoken only in certain parts of the country? When you think of native American languages, Navajo is the first to come to mind (at least if you are me). And it turns out to be the right place to look: as the Wikipedia entry puts it, "The Navajo people are one of the very few Native American tribes that still use the native language of their tribe in everyday usage.". As it turns out, the MLA site even offers a Navajo map, reproduced below:

And in two counties, Navajo is indeed the most-spoken language. In Apache County, Arizona, they are a majority: 36,775 Navajo speakers (58.39%) to only 24,180 English speakers (38.39%). McKinley County, New Mexico is the third non-English, non-Spanish county: 30,900 Navajo speakers (45.79%), 26,250 English speakers (38.9%), but also a significant number of Zuni (9.04%) and Spanish (5.72%) speakers. Navajo County, Arizona falls a little short (60% English, 25% Navajo). Now that I've solved the mystery I've somewhat run out of steam, but I can't leave without a link to the official site of the Navajo Nation.

In my previous entry, I started playing around with the MLA Language Map. Today I decided to do some more investigations, this time starting with the English map, which shows the percentage of people in each county who speak English as their first language:


First, I thought I'd try and find the county in which the greatest percentage of respondents are English speakers. Guessing from the legend on the map above, it looks like I should be able to find one county with 99.58% English speakers. Looking at the map, though, gives an idea about how hard this may be: vast stretches of the midwest and southeast are marked with the darkest color, including almost all of Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee. It was trivially easy to find counties at 98% or higher (just wander around Mississippi and Alabama) but was extremely hard to cross the 99 barrier.

Where do you find the elusive 99? How about "up in the hills"? The Ozarks was where I found my first, and so far only, 99: Searcy County, Arkansas (99.06%, with only 64 Spanish speakers and 8 Italians). The Wikipedia entry is especially dry (even for a "county" entry) so I offer you some information about the controversy concerning the 1998 election for sheriff (pos-c.com link).

Encouraged by this success, I checked various other Ozark counties without finding any other 99s. Next stop, Appalachia. And surprise, West Virgina brought in the second 99+ (Pleasants County, 99.10%, only 63 Spanish speakers). Here's a small site with some local information (and the dry-as-a-bone Wikipedia entry). It also has a bridge. But Pleasants County is as high as I managed to get. Can anyone do better? You can do searches here.

Next entry: counties where very few people speak English. Of course you would expect to find most of these in the Southwest where Spanish is spoken by a significant population, but there are three counties in the US where a language besides Spanish or English is the most commonly spoken. I have found two of them at the moment, but the third is proving elusive so far.

The Modern Language Association (MLA) has recently launched a new version of their US Language Map which displays language information from the 2000 US Census at variously fine levels of detail (main page here; map page here). One of the most important developments of this map is the ability to display speaker information as a percentage of the population (previous versions just showed raw numbers which gave excessively high weights to urban areas). The percentage-based maps give a very nice impression of linguistic distributions (although note that maps for different languages use different scales:

German:


Italian:


French:


You can also get details of where various languages are spoken (complete list of languages reported to the US Census, LINK). For example, Shawnee is spoken by 490 respondents in the entire US: 140 in Oklahoma, 110 in Ohio, 65 in West Virginia, 25 in Ohio and the rest in other states. Or Luxembourgian which is apparently spoken by 834 respondents (more in Wisconsin and Iowa than anywhere else). Surprisingly, neither Jedi nor Klingon appear on the list.

Regular readers will no doubt be dismayed to discover that, of all the various recurring themes (that) I've suggested (that) will appear here, I've decided to revisit the junk that's appeared through our mail slot (previous entry HERE if you are masochistic). It's been two weeks since that entry, and a mountain of junk has made its way into our entryway (thanks to the good weather and the holiday period, no doubt).

Clearly springtime has brought with it a boom in home improvement services which again were the most common (12 pieces). The highlight in this category was a fairly high-quality corrugated cardboard "SOLD" sign (about A5 size, 6.5" x 8") by an estate agency clearly desperate to grab business away from Winkworth. This category also yielded our first expenditure as a direct result of letterbox spamming, to which I'll return later. The next most popular category was taxi services (6 pieces), although there was massive duplication in this category: three cards each from two different car services (one card for each member of the household including the cat). Restaurants were surprisingly low (6 pieces), and mostly from establishments that have already donated excess paper to us in the past month. Only a couple of election-related items made it through (one Labour, one Conservative) despite the approaching local elections. I guess it's true: they don't want us to vote. One more dodgy clothing collection company, "Island of Hope Ltd", although the fact that they are a commercial enterprise rather than a charity is mentioned much more prominently than the previously-mentioned "Silverwall Ltd.". They also include reference to a website (HERE) which does not entirely allay my suspicions. We also got five miscellaneous ads from shops that I don't have the energy to describe any further.

I think my favorite this time around is the two self-improvement ads from "Professor" Uossof who claims to be "one of the best International Marabouts in Spiritual Healer and Advisor", helping you "solve all your problems regarding Black Magic, Sexual, Exam, Love, Voodoo, Transactions in Business and Self Spirits, Unwanted Union or to bring Lover back from Dark to Bright way". He did at least have the (no doubt psychic) insight to leave us two ads, one for me and one for the lady of the house.

We did make one purchase in this period based on letterbox spam, but this is an unusual circumstance. Our local authority is part of the government's recycling initiative called WRAP (it's unclear what the acronym represents), and is encouraging home composting by offering cut-price home composting bins (details of the program HERE, but we learned about it from the flyer through our postbox). We were one of "nearly 200" households in our area who jumped on the offer of a large compost bin at the knockdown price of £6. So now we will be collecting foul household waste in the back garden for a few weeks before we grow tired of the process and ask the Landlord to take it away and get rid of the smell.

Score for the past two weeks:
14 days, 34 pieces of advertising (2.4/day)

Score so far:
35 days, 64 pieces of advertising (1.8/day)
Total amount spent by the Dunces based on letterbox advertising: £6 (17 pence/day)

The Dunces spent the past week gallivanting around England with the Dunce parents, hence the lack of recent updates. For our travels we were issued a brand new hire car with three miles on the clock; we brought it back with just under 900. Not bad for a long weekend; in this country that sort of mileage can be considered quite respectable. Yes, I know in other countries 900 miles would be considered a long day on the road.

Today is their last day in town and I've crept off to the lab to do a little work. And being very effective at it, as you can see from this entry. Business as usual, then.

It's 43 hours and counting until the Dunce parents arrive for their first visit to London and the UK. Preparations are being made to ensure their maximum well-being and entertainment pleasure. We have sourced the finest drugs the underworld has to offer, made arrangements with exotic entertainers of all sorts, and put together a 24/7 clubbing itinerary that will eclipse even those legendary raves from back in the day. They've both expressed some concerns that our fair city will be unable to meet the demands of their high-flying party lifestyle, and to be honest we aren't sure either. Fortunately the cat has agreed to be on her best behavior, so at least there's that.

The news coverage of H5N1 THE DEADLY STRAIN OF BIRD FLU has now gone into high gear with the discovery of the first known case in the UK. A dead swan was found floating around Cellardyke (a town in east Scotland, stop the sniggering you in the back!). In previous times I believe the focus upon swan deaths would focus upon (a) whether the swan was royal property, and (b) who should be beheaded as punishiment. Now it's all about the DEADLY STRAIN OF BIRD FLU, and indeed, testing revealed that this bird has kicked the bucket, shuffled off his mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible. From the DEADLY STRAIN OF BIRD FLU no less. And how is the population of the UK responding? Hysterically! This morning I saw no fewer than 100 people commuting to work inside plastic bubbles. Council workers clad in HazMat suits are gathering up local birds in giant nets and burning them in local churches which have all been converted into special ultra-high heat incinerators (as a nice additional benefit, the cold weather seems to be a thing of the past). Giant domes are being built over most cities as well, as fast as the various construction companies can proceed: when the project was started yesterday, the target completion date was the day after tomorrow. This has now slightly changed, to early 2021. In the meantime, military snipers are on patrol in most cities, with orders to shoot any entity seen outdoors more than two feet off the ground. Unfortunately these orders failed to consider the possibility that a significant number of non-avian individuals might also be found off the ground. As a result there have been numerous tragic deaths of roofers, window-washers, trampolinists, and passengers riding in the upper decks of double-decker buses. Not to mention all the problems around the airports.

So if you're reading this, and you're a bird, TAKE NOTICE! This is a war and you can't make southern fried chicken without cracking a few eggs.

A few weeks ago I started keeping the various pieces of junk/advertising that have been shoved through our mail slot (first post here), and now that two more weeks of junk have built up, it's time to see what it looks like again. Last time the mail slot was dominated by restaurants' delivery menus, but in the past two weeks we only received four more menus (three for pizza places [one of which featured kebabs on equal billing], one for miscellaneous Oriental). None of which look remotely good (although I was amused at all the spelling errors on the "Basil Pizza" menu. Fata cheese, read onion and vagetable lasagne indeed. You'd think they'd check the spelling given all the money they're spending on their menus).

This time the most prolific category was in home services. I count the three cards from the same taxi service as three items, therefore giving a total of 11 home service offerings. These included satellite TV, a "local & reliable window cleaner", a company offering to cut our utility bills by a lot, a telephone company, a catalog from a DIY shop, a freight/courier company ("we offer our services very efficiently and courteously that 99% of our customers keep coming back with the same testimony", and "the Quality of our services endears us to ALL." although I am not sure how these are quantified. Their flyer advertises rates to Nigeria, Ghana, and Others on request), and an estate agent who seems to have our street wrapped up. But the big winner in the "selling through fear" sweepstakes is the London Gate Company of Chigwell whose flyer shrieks (not literally, but just about) "WHY WAIT TO BE BURGLED?" (obvious follow-up "...WHEN YOU CAN BE ROBBED STRAIGHT AWAY?").

There were three items of political content (local elections are coming soon). In addition to "The Londoner", a monthly newspaper (20 pages this month) from the beloved Red Ken, Mayor of London, the Conservatives have been out on foot in the neighborhood, (perhaps) vainly trying to shake loose the entrenched Labour council. In a genteel and measured manner, of course ("It's a two-horse race, and Labour is the Donkey!" and so on). I'm sure we'll see more of these in the next month; we'll just have to see who does the most footwork.

Only a few pieces of self-improvement junk post this time. Two were very brightly colored and of a religious nature, advertising the Joyous Hour of Worship at the Redeemed Christian Church of God at the Lord's Sanctuary (opposite Argos Stores). Heavily Nigerian judging from the names (and perhaps the fact that they offer services in Yoruba. On the other hand they also feature Portuguese; I'm not quite sure where that fits in). But the last was an especially good one: a high-quality multi-color flyer from a home learning college. Prominently featuring the phrase I'm looking for when making my educational choices, "AS SEEN ON TV". It also features a statement that all successful students are referred to a (particular) recruitment agency. All I can say is, sign me up!

Score so far: 21 days, 30 pieces of advertising.
Total amount spent by the Dunces based on letterbox advertising: £0.

An ongoing series about my love of books.

As I don't recall at all, I started reading at a very early age (surely quite impaired by my terrible vision, as I didn't have glasses yet). There were stacks and stacks of books of all sorts in our house (a TV-free zone, although I vaguely remember an unused TV hanging around in the basement), and I know I was an avid reader from the beginning. The first book I actually remember reading today was Go, Dog, Go!. I thought it was hysterically funny to see the pictures of wild dogs wearing hip duds and driving fast cars towards some sort of dog-only Woodstock-in-a-giant-tree really kept my interest, and I always wished I could some day go to a similar party in a tree.

I also really liked to read my father's Pogo books, although for some reason I failed to recognize any of the references to the Nixon administration, or to any other historical figures for that matter. To me they were just some unusual comics about a group of rural, swamp-dwelling animals who got into various comic antics as they floated around the swamp in flat-bottomed boats (e.g. the poor alligator who was always suspected of eating other characters. Sometimes justly as I vaguely recall).

I was also a fan of joke books from a very young age, and ran into certain problems as I was keen to pass on these jokes even when I didn't quite understand what they were about. One of the few examples I can remember falls into this category, and is also an excellent indicator of the historical period I'm talking about (it's also just as funny today as it was then!):
Q: What's giant, purple and swims in the ocean?
A: Moby Grape!
I think I also caused some inadvertent household controversy when I came across a really unusual and funny joke book the likes of which I'd never seen before. It definitely belonged to my father (a fan of subtle, intelligent humor of all sorts). I can still clearly remember the one I proudly told to my mother:
"Mommy, mommy, can we go for a ride?"
"Shut up, your iron lung won't fit in the Volkswagen."
For some reason, she didn't think it was very funny. And the next time I went to the high shelf to look for the joke book, it had disappeared. Must have gotten lost or something. In my teenage years I amassed quite a collection of sick joke books (mostly in the "Truly Tasteless Jokes" series), but they had a similarly unfortunate tendency to evaporate into thin air, even when stashed in fairly secure hiding places.

Unfortunately, my joke-book-reading tendencies were to a large extent inspired by reading various fictional tales of comedically-blessed, precocious children who always managed to have a giant circle of friends and were constantly the center of attention with their wise-cracking antics. I usually found myself in very diffferent circumstances, and drew the unfortunate conclusion that I just hadn't yet found the right jokes to draw the crowds. So (with the aid of a healthy "humor" section in the public library), I worked my way through the various genres without success. Knock-knock jokes just didn't sit well with anyone (thank goodness I didn't completely remember the one from the above-mentioned disappearing joke book: "Knock, knock"; "Who's there?"; "Nazis"; "Nazis who?"; [and the punchline was something to do with Anne Frank. I'm sure that would have gone down a treat with the under-10 audience]), nor did riddles, cross jokes (there are more than 90,000 Google hits for "what do you get when you cross a * with a")), light bulb jokes (would you believe 295,000 Google hits for "how many * does it take to change a light bulb"?!), puns, funny headlines, shaggy dog stories, and don't even get me started on limericks (Very underappreciated by elementary school teachers, I should say. Especially if they feature islands south of Cape Cod).

A memo was circulated recently by the anonymous educational institute next door to my workplace, concerning upcoming construction works that apparently may be so disruptive as to cause, erm, significant issues of a personal nature:

FOR YOUR INFORMATION:

...To confirm that scaffolding will be erected to the side of (Anonymous) building, on the Service Road Exit ramp, on Wednesday 12 April;

Repair work carried out on Thursday 13 April, and the Scaffolding dismantled and removed on Good Friday 14 April 2006....

The (Anonymous) Institute apologies for any incontinence caused while this necessary maintenance work is carried out.

Thank you for your assistance in this matter.

I've neglected writing about reading too long on this blog, especially since I'm such a book fanatic. Today starts a series of posts about me and books (although we'll see how long I stick to the idea). I'll start with a snapshot of the current moment when it comes to reading.

In general, the amount of time I spend reading is inversely proportional to the amount of time I spend cycling. This is especially related to my commute (it's very easy to read on the bus, and very difficult to read on the bike). Lately I've been riding a lot, so I've been reading much less. Not to say I haven't been reading; my most recent books are as follows:

David Lee Roth's autobiography, Crazy from the Heat. I'm not much of a musician/memoir reader; this one was lent to me by a friend and served an excellent role as toilet reading. In general, Amazon reviewers thought this book was wonderful (average rating: 4.5/5 stars). I found it shockingly incoherent and full of Mr. Roth's giant ego (I must admit, occasionally amusing). It was apparently edited down from thousands of pages; I can't imagine what it was like before the editing process. However, this made it ideal as a toilet read: as the tales he relates don't seem to be in any particular order, and tend to fade from one tale into the next without resolution, one need not adjust the duration of one's transactions to correspond with chapters, narrative units, etc.

Iain Sinclair's Lights Out for the Territory. An excellent counterpoint to the Roth biography which I read in more public places. This one also contains its share of incoherent ramblings, but they're all inspired by Sinclair's psychogeopgraphical journeys around London, and it's full of interesting London characters, obscure locations, objects and events which together make up a sort of London mythology. Each of the sections follows the author on a hike in London, and no detail is too minor to set him off on a string of associations about the area, its people, its mood, and how all of them may have changed as time goes by. His approach to exploring the area resonates with me quite a bit, although my inclinations toward interpretation are substantially less grandiose. (Amazon reviews: average 4/5 stars)

David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster and other essays. I'm a huge fan of DFW, whose Infinite Jest is one of my favorite books of all time. His short stories, on the other hand, have been largely disappointing (and let's not even go into Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity which is infuriating in its unholy union of chatty ramblings about like the greatest math teacher ever and just how cool he was, and (fairly) well put together mathematical content), and I found his previous book of essays A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again mixed: I really really enjoyed the title essay, in which DFW recounts a decidedly unfun experience on a luxury cruise, and also his account of visiting the Illinois State Fair [featuring an incident of overeating sufficiently severe to require medical attention], but others on more highbrow sujects were less memorable/interesting. The same can be said about this one: the essays I enjoyed most were those that revolved around DFW's personal experiences in various situations (Adult Video News awards ceremony; traveling on the John McCain bus during his 2000 Presidential campaign; watching the events of Sept 11 2001 with neighbors in Bloomington, IL). There was also an excellent piece on Tracy Austin's autobiography and how unsatisfied DFW was with its lack of meaningful content (mirroring my own complaints about the massive number of interviews with successful ath(a)letes who just go on and on about doing it for the team, and sucking it up when the heat's on, and giving 110%, and just pulling together like a unit and getting things done, ad infinitum). The title piece was written for Gourmet magazine about the Maine Lobster Festival, and had DFW's characteristic interesting observations about the event itself, before mutating into DFW's opinions about the ethics of lobster preparation and so on (yawn... I've read more of this sort of stuff than I care to acknowledge, and it feels like more of an individual decision at this level). An assortment of hifalutin articles that I sorta skipped over (Dostoevsky, Kafka), and an essay about correct English language usage which has had the fur flying for quite a while (for example, see Language Hat's post "David Foster Wallace Demolished" [scroll down]; google snoot wallace if you want to read more about this particular topic. I have a few opinions on the subject myself but have run out of time to say much for now). Oh yeah, I have to mention the final essay in the book. It was a reasonably-decent discussion of talk radio in the US (and why it's like it is), terribly, terribly marred by inline "footnotes" in boxes (not necessarily corresponding to their narrative location) which broke up the text, were connected to their relevant section by arrows (and sometimes multiple arrows). It was just about impossible to read, a shame because the content was quite good (why? why? why not just stick with standard footnoting, with which DFW is quite well acquainted I can assure you. Apparently when it originally appeared in The Atlantic the notes were formatted in a more agreeable and readable way.).

So that's what I've just read now. Next time, some influential books or events involving books from my youth.

Saturday was really the first day of Spring, as the weather had suddenly shot up from just-above-freezing to well into the teens (C, ie, ~60F). So it was nice to take a bike ride without loads of layers. In order to avoid loads of pedestrians and wobbly rusty bicycles on the riverside paths, I headed north through some lovely urban landscapes, which at least featured decent cycle lanes which were separated from the busy road. Since I didn't bring my camera this time, I'll have to rely on overhead imagery from Google Maps. First, a nice overhead view illustrating the urban landscape, complete with cycle lane (the light red path just to the right of the north-south road). And the kind of scenery you see a lot of: filtration pools, giant muffin tins, and freight yards. It's actually pretty nice to ride in these areas on the weekend because there's so little traffic around the industrial zones (excepting the giant shopping mecca which includes a huge 24-hour Tesco and an Ikea). Especially when you're heading north, being propelled by a brisk (~15-20mph) south wind (experienced cyclists will note that there could be a flaw in this logic). After not so long, however, the cycle lane just plain ended.

Rather than join the throngs of cars on the major highway, I decided to backtrack a bit, then rode about a half mile east where I joined the familiar towpath along the River Lea. There were far fewer pedestrians and rusty, wobbly cycles than I had worried, possibly because the weather looked vaguely threatening. So it was a very pleasant, rather undisturbed ride. I was also far enough north that the riverside environment was much less industrial, featuring instead sights like canal locks, farms, and, er, an army of giant insectlike robots ready to invade London. At this point (well outside of the M25, north of Waltham Abbey), the Lea Valley Park opened up, with loads of paths wandering around the various manmade lakes. Some were (mostly) paved, others were muddy and sandy. Fortunately they were wide enough that a rather deranged cyclist could share them with assorted birdwatchers without any physical contact. I should note here that cyclists seem to be the mortal enemies of birdwatchers, but fortunately the latter are a peaceful sort, limiting their signs of displeasure to tutting and shaking their heads disapprovingly.

At this point I'd gone about 14 miles (in not quite an hour; an excellent pace for city riding), and decided it was time to turn back. Suddenly I realized the error of my ways as I was riding straight into the blustery south wind that had brought the springtime weather and made my northward ride so easy. A mountain bike does not exactly offer many possibilities for minimizing head-on wind resistance, and for a few moments I considered heading off course towards the nearest train station and taking the easy way home. Eventually my miserly tendencies won out over fatigue, and I continued on my not-so-merry way. I decided to stick to the canal/riverside path which seemed the most direct and the most sheltered from the wind (the latter may have just been dead wrong, as the river seemed to channel the wind rather than diverting or blocking it.). My pace on the return was just below 10mph, and my legs had turned to jelly by the time I made it home. A mere fifteen minutes before the skies really opened up.

On Wednesday Mrs. Dunce and I went to the nearby London Drinker beer festival. Our visits to other London beer festivals in recent history (Great British Beer Festival last summer, Battersea Beer Festival in February) have been somewhat less than ideal as we chose to attend the Friday evening session, along with thousands of other like-minded souls who had no doubt been working for the weekend. Both previous festivals seemed impressively overcrowded (I might point out here that I do suffer from a teeny bit of anxiety among crowds of people), and even worse, the selection of drink was seriously reduced by the time Friday rolled around (I think both of these festivals started on Wednesday). At the Battersea festival we were reduced to mopping up various liquids on the floor and wringing the mop into our glasses (or at least, reduced to drinking FOREIGN beer because all the British ales, ciders and perries were long gone). So we decided that our visit to the London Drinker would be on Wednesday, the first night rather than the last.

Unfortunately even on a Wednesday it was quite crowded (exacerbated by the number of wise souls who clustered at the serving areas to enjoy their drinks, rather than moving along so that others could be served). Worse, it seemed like the festival organizers had adopted a slow-release approach to the drinks on offer; it seemed like half (or less) of the beers listed in the guide (LIST link) were actually available. Good for visitors later in the week, not so good for us (Mrs. Dunce was particularly sad that the Damson Porter (official link, one review) by Burton Bridge was not on offer). We did, however, come across quite a few beers that we really enjoyed. It seemed like there were a lot more dark beers than lighter ones, and a real boom in milds on offer (mild has seen quite a renaissance recently. Here's a general description and some examples).

Our vote for the winner was one of the milds:Pig on the Wall Mild although I also enjoyed the Malt Shovel Mild quite a bit. My real favorite was from the FOREIGN department (maybe I shouldn't admit this while my application for British nationality is being considered): a German smoked beer, Schlenkerla Bock Rauchbier. There were quite a few rauchbiers on offer, which I take as an enouraging development.

We left fairly early -- it was just too crowded. But we can hardly take the less-crowded alternative (the festivals are usually also open for lunchtime/afternoon sessions) as our employers may not appreciate this sort of behavior.