microecos

Last Sunday I woke up in Bristol, England and went to bed in California.  What happened in between is not that interesting — basically I woke up late, missed my bus, had a panic attack, wound up taking a cab from Bristol to Heathrow (which was I’m afraid, not cheap), called my wife and woke her up to get my flight info, got laffed at by the driver ‘forgot about the time difference did you?,’ heard about his more notable fares (François Fillon and some British celebrities I’d never heard of), charmed my way through the ticket counter (they wanted to bump me to another flight), barely made my plane, watched some of this Morgan Spurlock show (decent, kind of boring), listened to “Well You Needn’t” about a million times, ate some kit-kats, I dunno I guess that was about it.

POINTLESS SEMIOTIC DIATRIBE FROM THE BACK OF THE CAB: The sign on the back of this British lorry which we are rapidly overtaking inquires: “Well driven?”  Effing brilliant.  Really breaks down the metonymic (synechdochic?) chain summoned by the American version: “How’s my driving?”  Lets you damn the driver without directly insulting the truck.  Blah blah blah dyadic v. triadic sign relation schemes blah blah blah différance recursion representamen, whatever.

MUSICAL INTERLUDE:

Would have loved to catch Maximum Joy, but I guess I was about three decades too late.  Pity.  Also, I didn’t catch nearly the volume of Banksy I was hoping to–in fact only ever saw this one: though from various angles and lights and states of relative insobriety.

Bristol, as Jeffrey Martz observes, has a decidedly Escherian feel, each time I tried to take a short-cut I wound up in interesting places far from my intended destination.  I very nearly missed the Attenborough lecture this way.  This is also how we spotted the fox in a back alley, ’round midnight.  It looked like this,

but with a fox.

THE MOST SURPRISING THING I HEARD AT SVP:

, considering the source–a University of Chicago grad student (name withheld for fear that he might be expelled or worse).  We were admiring at these artiodactyl accouterments

“Animals are not equations,” says he.  “Can I quote you on that?” says I.

SOME MORE PICTURES OF PEOPLE, SINCE I CAN’T TOP THAT:

Here is a photo of @cromercrox I took with my phone:

And here is a photo of @microecos (and assorted internet celebrities including the folks behind Dinosaur Hunting by Boat in Alberta, the Ethical Paleontologist, the Open Source Paleontologist, the SV-POW boys) taken with his:

And of course, there is an interesting story attached to this,

but it involved diacritical maneuvres far beyond my skill set which makes this as good a place as any to stop.

Thanks, and apologies, to all.