My boss yesterday became aware of the existence of this website

The timestamps on posts on this blog are actually US Eastern time. This is because (a) that is the default for blogger and I was too lazy to change it and (b) back in the days when I used to post every day this meant that I did not have to post before midnight to make a post "that day". However, it also means that if (say) the timestamp says that I posted at 3pm on a wednesday, that actually means I posted at 8pm London time.

Just thought I'd mention that.

Back in London, and redirection

Thankfully it is a little cooler here than there. I have a photograph of an interesting scarf that was on sale in Milan over at ubersportingpundit.

I like Milan a lot

That said, I find Italy's idea of civil society to be a little lacking at times. And by god it has been hot and humid here this weekend.

Role models

Natalie Solent links to a post from Thought Mesh, asking why so few other countries have adopted constitutions similar to that of the United States, given the success of that country. It is of course quite interesting to read the Australian constitution (written in the second half of the 1890s, enacted in January 1, 1901) from this perspective. An awful lot of it is clearly based on the American constitution, and in places it is close to being the American constitution word for word. And of course it is certainly what Thought Mesh calls a "structural constition">, which outlines the powers of government and certain intitutions, without attempting policiy prescriptions. In terms of the particular structure, the big difference is the lack of a directly elected executive in Australia. However, a lot of the written bits of the Australian constitution follow the US model, and the unwritten bits tend to follow the British model. (There are bits of the Swiss model thrown in too).

And as for Thought Mesh's further comment about the US model perhaps being unfriendly to founding fathers who hoped to rule using the model itself and thus unpopular with such people, this sort of issue did not apply in Australia. Australia was already a democracy (or perhaps six of them - the colonies had elected their own legislatures from the 1850s), the delegates who wrote the constitution were country lawyers who had been democratically elected to the constitutional conventions, and the constitution had to be approved by referendum in each of the six states and enacted as an act by the British parliament before coming into effect. All this meant that the document was not intended primarily as a vehicle for the personal ambitions of the people who wrote and enacted it.

And the constitution in question has been an unusually successful one, having provided Australia with peace, prosperity and democratic government for more than a century. The circumstances of its enactment are different to that of the US contitution, but they had in many ways a very similar result.

I am in Milan

I can make a few obvious comments, for instance that it is indeed true that the Italians have no understanding whatsoever of the concept of queueing. (I wonder if the concept immediately becomes understood if you go north and cross the border into Switzerland). They do understand the concepts of food and of coffee, however, so I must be grateful for certain things.

Another thing. Many guidebooks will start the section on accommodation with a description of how hard or easy it is to find accommodation in a city. Often (and this is true of what the Lonely Planet Italy says about Milan), they start with things like "It can be very hard to find a hotel room in \, particularly during \". (In Milan this referred to weeks with fashion shows. In Strasbourg it was times when the European Parliament is sitting). In practice, such comments usually mean the city contains lots of hotels, and it is quite easy to find a hotel room at all times other than when those seasonal activities are occurring. This turned out to be the case in Strasbourg, and it is the case in Milan. I guess that highly uneven demand leads to the ultimate number of hotel rooms being somewhere between the demand levels, whereas more even demand leads to capacity being close to full most of the time (and prices being more constant too). Airline seats are like this too, which is how I managed to fly from London to Milan for £45 return including taxes.

Redirection

I have some thoughts on how Malcolm Glazer might actually make money from Manchester United over at Samizdata.

That's interesting

Yesterday I received a recommendation e-mail from Amazon. You know the kind. "Based on other items you have ordered, we think you will like the following DVDs". Number 1 on the list was "The Terminator". Number 2 on the list was "Sense and Sensibility".

Redirection

I have a piece on a day in Shenzhen in China over at Samizdata.

Redirection

I have a piece on visiting one of my favourite Hunter Valley wineries over at gastroblog.

Redirection

I have a piece on the greatness of Adam Gilchrist (and tangentially on Viv Richards) over at ubersportingpundit.

There really are lots of places I haven't been



create your own visited countries map
or vertaling Duits Nederlands

Although I have a quite a lot of travel planned for the rest of the year, I do not have a single trip planned to a country I have not visited before. I might be able to fit in another weekend somewhere at some point, but that is about it, and most possible destinations are places I have been beofre. So I don't think this map is going to change this year, unless I go to Norway or Switzerland.

Redirection

I have a piece on eating Dim Sum in a local restaurant in Kowloon City over at Gastroblog.

Early Saturday morning song lyrics

Line one is the time
That you, you first stayed over at mine
And we drank our first bottle of wine
And we cried

Line two we’re away
And we both, we both had nowhere to stay
Well the bus-shelter’s always ok
When you’re young

Now you’re older and I look at your face
Every wrinkle is so easy to place
And I only write them down just in case
That you die

Let’s take a look at these crows feet, just look
Sitting on the prettiest eyes
Sixty 25th of decembers
Fifty-nine 4th of julys
Not through the age or the failure, children
Not through the hate or despise
Take a good look at these crows feet
Sitting on the prettiest eyes

Line three I forget
But I think, I think it was our first ever bet
And the horse we backed was short of a leg
Never mind

Line four in a park
And the things, the things that people do in the dark
I could hear the faintest beat of your heart
Then we did

Now you’re older and I look at your face
Every wrinkle is so easy to place
And I only write them down just in case
You should die

Lets take a look at these crows feet, just look
Sitting on the prettiest eyes
Sixty 25th of decembers
Fifty-nine 4th of julys
You can’t have too many good times, children
You can’t have too many lines
Take a good look at these crows feet
Sitting on the prettiest eyes

Well my eyes look like a map of the town
And my teeth are either yellow or they’re brown
But you’ll never hear the crack of a frown
When you are here
You’ll never hear the crack
Of a frown

- Prettiest Eyes, by the Beautiful South, a song that I know from their best of Albulm Carry On Up the Charts. Generally, the songs on that album are more cynical, but I choose this one as an act of optimism as a revolutionary act (as Lloyd Dobbler a la Cameron Crowe might say).

In truth I rather like this

At a dinner party this evening, the question "Is there anywhere you haven't been to?" was asked of me. Of course, the answer is "lots of places", but I am doing my best.

It was a very nice pub

Yes, I know

I am in Strasbourg. Last weekend I was in London. The weekend before that I was in the Hunter Valley north of Sydney and in Sydney itself. The weekend before that I was on the Gold Coast in Queensland. The weekend before that I was in Hong Kong and Shenzhen. The weekend before that I was in London. The weekend before that I was in Millau in the south of France.

I'm tired.

It's a drizzling European Sunday morning

Seriously, where is spring this year?

I am in a cybercafe in the basement of a "Cyber Hotel" in the middle of Strasbourg, that apparently has a PC in every room. I don't actually need that - I brought my own PC - but the wireless would have been nice. Instead I stayed in a more mundane hotel. But c'est la vie (as they say here). As it is, I come here to use the basement cybercafe. I am sure I would have the software build on this PC the way I like it within three or four days if I was staying longer. (Well, other than that it running Windows 98SE on a really slow processor. It's kind of a shame, as the computer has a nice TFT display - it's just the computer itself needs replacing).

Anyway, although Germany is just across the river one wouldn't know it. This is a French city. I have heard more English spoken than German, and the hotel TV only had French channels plus CNN in English. But, there was one exception. At my guidebook's suggestion, I went to a brew pub named Les Trois Brasseurs which was full of people both in the bar upstairs and the cellar downstairs where there was live music. The beer was much better than is typical in France, and this I think may have been influenced by the proximity to Germany. I started talking to a group of Americans, who turned out to be interior decorators from Malibu who were doing work for some extremely rich person over here. They were with some three or four locals with who they were working, and who had brought them to this pub. I had a very pleasant hour or two in conversation, and then something amazing happened. As we were about to pay up and leave, the barman brought us a last round on the house. Whether this was because the French people in the party knew him or were regulars or what I do not know, but I have to say this was awfully nice. It was a good evening.

I am in Strasbourg in Alsace

Strasbourg is a beautiful city, and that it remains so strikes me as doubly impressive given the extent to which this part of Europe has been an issue of territorial dispute over the decades. But of course, although World War One did succeed in getting Alsace and Lorraine back for the French, the fighting did not actually reach here.

And speaking of reaching here, in a very Ryanair way I flew to Baden Baden airport over the border (which is the Rhine, looking rather less impressive than it does in Rotterdam) in Germany and got the bus here from that airport. I have been to Germany several times before, but on those occasions I have travelled around by rail. The amazing thing was that the bus ride was the first time I had been on a German autobahn. And it was a disappointment. The speed limit was 120km/h. Now I was already aware that many autobahns do in fact have speed limits so this was not a surprise. But given the reputation of the autobahn network, it was still disappointing. The speed limit actually increased when we entered France for goodness sake.

I always prefer my cuisine conceptualised



What's the concept exactly? That they speak Indo-European languages in the north and Dravidian languages in the south?

Redirection

I have a piece on lunch at the Sydney fish market last week over at Gastroblog. I shall post some more photos of the event here later, but alas I have to put in a day's work first.