Hmmm. Something went wrong with my blog. It says this got posted on the 18th, but it doesn’t actually appear anywhere on my page! So this will be seen after the Day 2 post, but it’s actually from before. Sorry about this bloggy time travel.
I’m in England! How cool is that?
Pretty frakkin’ cool.
I arrived a bit late, held up over Heathrow airport (shocker). But here’s how I knew I was in England:
Turns out I was neither authorised nor authorized, but I knew that it was missing the “z”, and, worse, if I mentioned it to someone, they would say it wasn’t missing a “zed”.
Anyway, after an hour in line to show my passport and a short ride through London (on the “tube”), I met up with the lovely Gia, who escorted me home. After knockin’ about for a time, we went over to the headquarters for Nature magazine so I could record a soapbox speech for their podcast (I’ll have more on that when it goes live), and Gia could do some voiceovers for them.
On our way over, who did we see but Gia’s husband Professor Doctor Brian Cox! Here they are texting each other, because modern Londoners never talk anymore:
After all that we went to the BA/James Randi/Nature magazine meetup at a pub called the Rugby Tavern, and it was great! Lots of good folks showed up, including some old skeptic friends (hi Sid, Mark, Med Tech, Tom Siefert) as well as a new friend, Iszi, who is a skeptic… and you’ll be seeing more of her later. Heh heh.
Anyway, after much jocularity it was time to head home. We took a taxi, and I saw Big Ben, the Millennium Wheel, Parliament, St. Paul’s cathedral, and some other British stuff. Tomorrow we head off to Geneva and CERN. That’s going to be amazing. I have no clue when I’ll be back on the ‘net, but I’ll keep trying to post as often as I can. Bear in mind, too, that I am currently seven hours ahead of Boulder time, and when we go to Geneva it’ll be eight hours, so posts may go up at funny times. Stupid round planet.
