One Time in London I'd Gone out for a Walk

My apologies for the dearth of posting recently. Things have been hectic at work, sandwiched around a three-day trip to London for the Fourth of July weekend. Since I know you're all on pins and needles for my thoughts on the trip, here's a brief photo diary:



This has to be the most inexplicable advertisement I've ever seen. I took this shot in an elevator at the Covent Gardens tube stop. I still can't decide whether this is some sort of joke and English gays know that South Carolina isn't noted as a haven of tolerance for...just about anyone or if it's just the worst idea ever. Come to think of it, you could do a pretty good movie in which gay Londoners go to Myrtle Beach, only it would be a little derivative of this:



Needless to say, I know what picture is going up on the blog on the Friday before the Georgia-South Carolina game.



This is a shell from the largest gun that the Wehrmacht produced during WWII. The gun required a crew of 1,400 to operate, it took six weeks to assemble, and the Germans fired about 45 shells from it for the entire war. If you ever wanted a perfect example of German over-engineering, this is it.

The shell, incidentally, can be found at the Imperial War Museum, which currently has a bitchin' James Bond exhibit on the occasion of Ian Fleming's 100th birthday. Sadly, because photos were verboeten in the exhibit, I don't have pictures of the nuclear bomb from Octopussy or Ian Fleming's desk or the note that Stalin sent to Fleming denying a request for an interview. I didn't know much about Fleming before going to the exhibit, so I was interested to learn that his passions were golf, gambling, drinking, smoking, and women. Sound like any fictional secret agents we know? I also found it interesting that Fleming's father died in WWI when Fleming was eight and Fleming then found a father figure in Rear Admiral John Godfrey, Fleming's boss in WWII when Fleming worked in naval intelligence. Accordingly, M is supposed to be Bond's father figure in the books, which makes Dame Judi Dench's casting in the role a little interesting. Speaking of the Dame, here's the trailer for Quantum of Solace:



Other than the fact that there are some parallels to License to Kill, one of the weaker Bond movies, it looks good.



Yes, that is in fact a man playing a guitar in a trash can. I took this shot in Cambridge.



This is pretty much the only sports-related picture that I snapped in London. Behold, the outside of the Emirates from a train speeding by! I was pretty far removed from the world of sports while I was across the pond, with the exception of watching the extended highlights of the Federer-Nadal match. I'm not going out on a limb when I say it was one of the best tennis matches I've ever seen. It's rare to see a game/match in which the two teams/players are both at the top of their game. The closest college football parallel I could think of was the Texas-USC Rose Bowl. I was a tennis fan as a kid, but had lost the fever as an adult. Now, I'm certainly looking forward to the U.S. Open.



This is proof that I am, in fact, a 14-year old. I am quite confident that the term means something different in England than it does to the Beavis and Butthead generation in America.