[W]aking up in Denver and then making our way through the most literally breathtaking landscape I’ve ever seen – first the Colorado Rockies then watching the sun go down on the monumentally epic mountains in Utah… I don’t know how I’m going to ever be content with Yorkshire now. Damn. The day after the train goes through the Sierra Nevada mountains and it’s goo goo time, your brain is gone. That’s it.

America… it turns out… is a truly beautiful country. The magnificence of the scenery is then added to by the sheer audacity, courage and engineering-fu to build a train line all the way through it, not to mention everything else they’ve done to this continent.

The only halfway epic rail journeys I’ve done have been sleeper trains across Europe – from Magdeburg to Paris when I switched countries half way through my degree year abroad; and more recently I travelled to Munich by sleeper. On the return leg of that journey, I had the brain-wrenching experience of trying to translate from German to French whilst half asleep at 3am. ¹ I had been rather surprised that in the four berth sleeper car, it was me and a woman who got on two hours after me, when all the literature suggested the sleeper cars would be segregated by gender. Three hours into the night, and the German woman woke me up to tell me that her handbag had been stolen – lifted off her feet by someone who opened the door from the outside. I helped a little in the conversation between the French-speaking guard and the German woman. In fact, I had probably heard the burglary happen whilst barely asleep, as the door opening makes a noise. I had just assumed it was my co-passenger getting up for a toilet break.

So, if you ever travel by sleeper train, make sure you lock your door at night.

USA, Europe – I have occasionally been reading the website www.seat61.com and getting carried away by the ideas of some of the epic journeys you can do – in particular, the 9 day journey from London to Beijing, via Brussels, Cologne, Moscow and the Trans-Mongolian or the Trans-Siberian railway.

Just how many books would you need to occupy yourself in all that time?² How much would it be entertaining and how much of an ordeal?

I particularly like the detail that Russian trains have a samovar in each compartment, so if you stock up with tea bags and instant soup you can provide some of your own food.

A more general problem with holidays and travel

I’m skint and fairly time poor. As a result of making a few ferry journeys, investing a wee bit of an inheritance in HPB, and joining the Camping and Caravanning club,³ every week brings more and more interesting glossy holiday brochures through the letter box.

There are all these wonderful offers and interesting places to visit, and there’s little prospect of me being able to do any more than a fraction of them. Meh.

1. “‘Travailler’, das heisst reisen, oder? / Nein, ‘travailler’ das heisst arbeiten”
2. would it be safe to take one’s Amazon Kindle or would it be flaunting Western wealth and inviting robbery? Would you even be able to charge it?
3. I want to build a camping pod in the garden to replace the current battered shed

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Most of the time he gets fed up of sitting on laps and goes and sits somewhere else. When he does, I can get on with what I’m supposed to do. But I’m a little feart that for once he is out for the count. He certainly looks fast asleep.

The comic is a mix of daily library based antics, weekly book recommendations that are half just interesting, and half intended to be printed out and displayed in libraries.

It reminds me of my time working in a library as a teenager. I still don’t quite understand how, but somehow, while I was doing four A Levels, I still found time to work in a library every other Saturday and make full use of my borrowing privileges. How did I have time for so much reading as well as the school work?

The other cartoon is Adam and Andy, a very sweet innocent cartoon about two gay guys in a long term relationship.

A scary sweet and innocent cartoon that very often seems to be spying on us.

Take this. And this.

It’s almost like they know about my aversion to cleaning and all the cake wrappers in the footwell of the passenger seat of my car.

Today, it’s finally completed and available for download here: Librivox Pygmalion. It is of course the play that gave rise to the musical My Fair Lady, and I play Prof Henry Higgins.

For nearly two years, half the files lay languishing on servers, before one of the excellent co-ordinators at LV made me sit down and record the missing Henry Higgins lines. It was a job I had been putting off for years, but when I finally sat down to do it it took less than an hour.

To make a play at Librivox, we sit separately in our offices and houses across the world, and record the lines of each character one at a time. Another volunteer takes the various sound files and edits them together. The background sounds are not perfectly the same, and you can tell that this is the process we’ve used, rather than an expensive studio process with all the actors in the same place. And yet the finished project is really listenable and enjoyable.

That would certainly solve a few problems.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A little scary how many of the niceties are completely interchangeable and can be performed by total strangers, though.

(via)

This last happened for a posting of mine in August 2008, and my thoughts haven’t much changed:

BritBlog is one of those things that I think is a good idea, and think I ought to support, but actually only read when it happens to crop up on a site I read anyway. Mostly Jonathan Calder.

Thank goodness for Google Link Search, or I’d never be any the wiser!

A message arrived yesterday to say they have a 5-song EP on iTunes for the bargain price of £3.95.

And it’s really good! You should totally buy it.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Memetastic guitar learning has exploded across teh internetz today since Will Howells showed us how - when he wasn’t talking teh noo Dr Whoo.

Since then, I’ve had a go, as has Helen and Duffett Major, Gothic Polyphonist Rob Fenwick, and Dino Ron.

I use fountain pens (when I remember to take them with me), and recently it seems to be harder to buy cartridges. You used to be able to get them in big boxes, now you can only get them in small boxes of six. Which seems a bit of a faff.  Even if they do last for ages.

So I wondered about converting my pens to run on bottled ink.  And googled around a bit, found a few sites, but eventually settled on Andy’s Pens. His website looks a bit dated, but has tons of useful information on it and I was able very quickly to identify the pens I own and indeed see that he had converter kits.  He also has a stock of bottled ink.

So I emailed to ask about availability, and got a reply within 24 hours.  He accepts Paypal, which is convenient, and within a few days, he’d sent me everything I needed at a very reasonable price.  

So if you need to do anything with pens on the internet, try Andy’s Pens.