No England Photos Yet (but 390 words on Star Trek)
And here I go again with the rationing of the photos. Really, I’ve got enough for 2-3 posts, of London and Oxford and all that. And they’re even uploading as I write this. Thing is, I know that tomorrow the Discovery of Paris class isn’t going anywhere new (we’re having an end-of-class picnic-type thingy, same place as we were just last week, Bercy). And the end of the semester is approaching, so I’m not going to have irritating French-teacher things to write about for much longer. And since “here’s pictures of somewhere new I went” and “here’s something I don’t like about the French educational system” are basically the two things I do most often here, you know, I feel I really should be watching my supply carefully. I will, of course, be going to all sorts of new and exciting places in my remaining month or so here. But I don’t know precisely where yet, so, you know, best to be on the safe side.
With that in mind, here’s some more pictures of Paris 8 en grève! This was the total blockage of last Thursday:
Hey look, they added cardboard boxes:
You know, if it were me doing the blocking, I’d leave the down escalator un-blocked, and keep it running (maybe heavy-duty epoxy over the little emergency shutoff switch control panel type thingies). Because that would be really kind of humiliating for anyone who wanted to go through, right? They couldn’t just slip through politely, they’d have to run. You’d be forcing them to make more effort, take a stand, not just ignore some people handing out pamphlets. And that’s just counting, of course, the people who are in good enough shape to outpace an escalator, which would be most but certainly not all of the people trying to get in. I think, psychologically, it would be interesting.
After last week, I’d assumed that they would move to block all side entrances as soon as possible; I only checked them out because I knew my Thursday-morning professor is a stickler for attendance. And behold:
Hey, sculpture!
Aforesaid prof leads class out car entrance:
Students have wised up, block other entrance (doesn’t take much, really, seeing as it’s already about 10′ of fence):
Okay, so I’ll put up a few photos of London, from my wandering about looking for my hotel. Here’s bits of Hyde Park and whatnot:
Congestion Pricing! I have fond memories of debating this in my last two Honors College seminars. If I recall correctly, I usually came out as either for or against.
Achilles, I believe. Or one of them types, at any rate.
They encourage green building practices.
Yes, they really do have these things. For real. All enclosed like that. You keep expecting Superman to pop out or something.
London street signs: combining the stark style of New York with the high-visibility placement of Paris! Okay, so they were actually for the most part pretty good, when there was nothing blocking line-of-sight (I could read them from half a block away, which is a pretty good distance). But still, nothing beats signposts on corners for ease of navigation.
There were variations on this sign All. Over. The. City. It’s creepy.
And I’ll stop there with London. Oh, I just realized that I never uploaded the crêpe pictures! I can make crêpes, see? From a real authentic French instant crêpe mix:
Didn’t have enough milk for a whole packet, so I eyeballed the measurements:
Okay, so geometrically it could use some work. But it tasted goodly.
In other news, I saw the new Star Trek movie with my friend at Oxford. It was quite entertaining. Of course whenever you get a reboot thing like that, people are all wondering about whether it will or won’t conform to series canon, whether the new actors will live up to yada yada yada. The plot amounts to: “Screw canon, we have time travel!” The movie takes every ridiculous thing about the franchise and just runs with it, giggling maniacally as it goes. It takes guts to have your characters basically lay out, on screen, why you have license to change anything you want (see above re: time travel). The plot, if taken seriously, would require Starfleet to be run by idiots. I don’t mean this in the way some people do when they get into the whole Enterprise vs Star Destroyer type of thing; comparing Starfleet and the Galactic Empire is absurd, since one is basically NASA with a few guns just in case, and the other is an ancient-conspiracy-backed militaristic authoritarian regime. Sorry, I had a valid point to make before succumbing to a geekiness… oh yeah. The plot has Starfleet command acting like a bunch of idiots, or it would if you were supposed to take it seriously, but the movie doesn’t ask you to. Instead, it just seems like everybody is in on the fact that the universe really does revolve around the main characters. The audience isn’t expected to believe that, say, alien species — even those not on the best of terms with humans — are going to let themselves be identified by names ripped from human mythology. Three guys parachute onto a planet: two Main Characters, one fellow in the unfortunate red tunic of the Engineering crew. Yeah. We all know who’s going to die. And the scriptwriters know that we know. So they make Mr. Redshirt an unlikeable, blindly gung-ho idiot who’d have a Darwin Award with his name on it no matter what. And I swear some of the lines were just written as “Insert technobabble here, preferably but not necessarily including a reference to the original series.” In short, I’m impressed with the net result. You just watch this and part of you goes “Wheee!” and the other part can’t help but stand back and admire the craft that went into it. It’s one of those few times when being acutely aware that what you’re watching isn’t real is a good thing.
Wow, did I just write almost 400 words on Star Trek? I’m not even a fan of the franchise. Nothing against it, you know, just never really watched it. Hm.
