Not My iPod

Okay, I love the iPod as much as anybody, but come on...

Do products have "jump the shark" moments like TV shows? 'Cause it's hard to imagine a better one for the iPod. (And yes, as far as I can tell, this is completely legit.)

1,000 Words

Under the headline "Lebanon Crisis Talks Collapse" on CNN.com. Because sometimes you don't have to say a thing.

Signing Statements

Finally, attention is being paid. Some months ago I started reading articles talking about President Bush's use of signing statements when a bill comes before him to be signed into law. A signing statement, as traditionally used by previous presidents, is designed to record a president's understanding of a new law so that, in any future disputes over that law's purpose and execution, his point of view can be considered together with that of the Congress. An excellent FindLaw column written by Jennifer Van Bergen talks about the history and purpose of these signing statements, noting that in two major cases the Supreme Court has in fact relied in part on presidential signing statements in their consideration of the laws involved.

But yesterday, the American Bar Association issued a report declaring that President Bush's signing statements are violations of the Constitution, and Senator Arlen Spector yesterday announced that he is introducing a bill that will "authorize the Congress to undertake judicial review of those signing statements with the view to having the president's acts declared unconstitutional." The question arises: why are people getting fidgety about these signing statements now, when they've been used since the Monroe administration? What has changed? Are Mr. Bush's opponents simply latching onto a new way to attack him? Or is there something new in the way Mr. Bush uses these signing statements that raises serious constitutional issues? In my view--and that of the ABA and Senator Spector and FindLaw's Ms. Van Bergen--it's the latter.

In our social studies classes, we all get taught the basic catechism of the U.S. separation of powers: the Legislative branch creates the law, the Executive branch enforces the law, and the Judicial branch interprets the law. (As Ms. Van Bergen notes, the idea of "judicial supremacy" has been in place ever since the famous Marbury v. Madison decision in 1803, when Justice Marshall wrote that "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is."

But President Bush's signing statements have routinely crossed the line between "just so you know, this is what I think this new law means" into "the hell with you, this law means what I say it means." The Boston Globe ran an excellent list of examples of Bush's signing statements, first summarizing the law as written by Congress and then the import of the President's signing statement. Very often, the signing statement reads like a letter from the Bizarro world. For example, in December 2005, John McCain managed to push through legislation declaring that U.S. interrogators cannot torture prisoners. It was very plainly a reaction to the ongoing revelations about interrogation procedures at Abu Ghraib, Guantanomo Bay and elsewhere. In his signing statement, Bush simply declared that if he determines that "harsh interrogation" might help prevent a terror attack, then he will authorize it. The plain will of the Congress was simply up-ended. The President baldly declared that he will enforce the law except when he doesn't feel like it. With that, more than two hundred years of Constitutional precedent got tossed out the window.

The White House tries to insist that Bush's use of signing statements has been in keeping with presidential precedent, but they never get specific. White House spokesman Tony Snow said recently, "A great many of those signing statements may have little statements about questions about constitutionality. It never says, 'We're not going to enact the law.'" But how else is one to read Bush's declaration that he will direct the torture of a prisoner if he feels it might further the always-vague war against terror? And as far as I know, no one from the White House has ever produced a signing statement from any previous president that went as far in baldly reinterpreting the law.

As always, what will happen is this: a court challenge will arise as to one or another of these signing statements, and Bush administration officials will claim that they consulted with the office of the White House counsel, or with the Justice Department, and that Alberto "Lapdog" Gonzalez or some other lawyer said it was okay. This allows them to claim they were acting in good faith and that, if the Supreme Court declares a particular signing statement to be unconstitutional, well then so be it, and ain't it nice that now everybody's on the same page. (This was exactly their response to the recent Hamdan decision concerning military tribunals.)

By that thinking, as long as a president can get any of his lawyers to claim they were acting in good faith, then a president can never do anything wrong. Never. Signing statements have become, in effect, a kind of substitute for the line-item veto, except that they aren't being used to remove frivolous budgetary items, they're being consistently used to accrue more power to the Executive branch and to abridge the civil rights of you and me and everybody. They are perhaps the most egregious of President Bush's crimes against the body politic, and it's bloody well about time that the ABA and Sen. Spector and others have started to howl.

Scariest Baby Ever

Just as a follow-up, I was looking around the West L.A. Police Department's site, and came across this description of a car-theft suspect:

A citizen observed a male Hispanic, Black hair, 600 feet, 225 pounds, approx 3 years old.

Now if only someone had gotten a picture....

A Little Bit of Egg in the Night

I was out for my walk, in the (relative) cool of the evening, around 10:30 last night. The police were out, in front of a home, with an ambulance as well, and as I walked past I heard a homeowner saying something about a man who "spoke perfect English" but wrote something or other in Spanish. I heard no more and kept walking on because I'm just not one of those looky-loos who have to stop and luxuriate in the fact that something bad happened to someone else. (A little further on, there were plenty of other homeowners lurking behind half-opens doors, peering through.) And I was just about home, just reaching an intersection that would leave me only a block-and-a-half away.

That's when something hit me on the shoulder. Something damned hard, yet with some give to it. Took a second to put it all together, to realize that someone in that car speeding past had thrown something at me, had thrown an egg at me. And by the time I had all that worked out, the car was already well past, without sufficient street lighting for me to even tell what kind of car it was, let alone its license plate number.

My shirt was wet with egg yolk, but it had been a glancing blow, and most of the egg was on the sidewalk a little beyond me. Still, it had been a surprisingly heavy hit; kinetically speaking, the egg had all the energy of a moving car behind it, plus added energy from a not-bad throw. I was very glad that I hadn't been hit in the face, because that would have hurt like hell.

A passer-by simply shrugged and turned the corner, plainly glad that it hadn't happened to him. (And if I hadn't been just reaching that corner, it absolutely would have been him 'cause he was the next one down the road.) I followed the tail lights of the car until it turned at an intersection a little too far away, and disappeared. And then I stood there like an idiot for a long time, hoping they might come 'round looking for new victims, in the vain hope that I might be able to somehow Get Them with better warning this time. Nothing happened, and I went home to soak my shirt.

Big red welt on the shoulder, nicely egg-shaped; it has lingered, and was still there this morning. Friends tell me I ought to be go to the police and report the incident, just in case my eggsailants were making a night of it. I'm still undecided on that; I'm at work now, and there's a meeting about the movie at 7:00 so I'm not sure when I would have time to wander over to the police station.

I called my 21 year old brother this afternoon to ask him if he had ever done anything like that. Not that it would affect my opinion of him; but if he ever had, when younger and stupider, I was hoping that maybe he might have some insight on the psychology of such a thing. Because I was never that kind of a teenager, I never got my kicks from causing random harm to strangers. Bullying never appealed to me either, probably because I got bullied so often.

It was too dark to see who was in that car. But I think anyone hearing the story automatically assumes they were teenaged boys because who else would think egging someone was funny? (Unless they were dairy terrorists....) I can just picture it, like a movie scene: one guy driving, the other sitting in the passenger seat with a carton of eggs open in his lap. One egg at the ready in his hand, and maybe there's already been one try that missed. Then a new opportunity, just appearing at an intersection, no time to aim, he just had to trust his instinct. It hit, he heard me yell something profane, then he and his buddy high-fived as they sped away. "Dude, that was awesome!"

Of course, it ain't awesome. It's the sort of thing that just makes people angry, and there's way too much anger in the world already. Lord knows how pissed off I still am; it's all I can do to restrain myself from using some really foul language about these two kids and teenaged boys in particular. I'm not a public figure, this wasn't a political statement like the eggings of Bill Clinton or Arnold Schwarzenegger. This was just random mayhem, the attempted humiliation of someone just to make them feel powerful. It is axiomatic that really the opposite occurs: a drive-by egging is pure cowardice; real power would be daring to go up to someone face-to-face, but that would surely make these young louts piss their pants.

When I asked my brother whether he'd ever egged anyone, he said he never had. That once, when he was five and washing the cars with Dad, some neighbors drove by and he turned the hose on them. And Dad gave him such a clout to the back of his head that he never ever considered doing any such thing to anyone ever again. "Huh," I said. "Well let's hear it for corporal punishment."

Damn straight.

The Media Starts to Catch Up

Melissa McNamara with CBS News quoted me the other day in her blog-roundup article called "Blogophile," talking about the poor guy who mistook an Onion article for real news. Which is very cool, and I just wanted to mention it for all three of you who are regular readers.

The Poverty Trap

In Signal to Noise, Marc and I wrote a scene in which a film director, during a Q&A with audience members, poses a question to them: "What's the purpose of film?" he asks. After a little back-and-forth, he finally says something like "The purpose of film is to make you feel. If it also teaches you something, well, that's gravy."

The other night I watched City of God, the spectacular film from Brazil directed by Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund. Because I sometimes do things backward, I had already seen (and admired) Mereilles's follow-up film, The Constant Gardener; finally I got around to this earlier film, and thought it was fantastic. But on the DVD there is also a documentary titled "News From a Personal War," and by the time I had finished watching everything my head was spinning.

The movie and documentary focus on the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the horrific slums that are so bad they have become societies unto themselves where only the police dare venture, heavily armed and in numbers. As the favelas grew shack-by-shack, outside of commercial or governmental development plans, usually there is no plumbing, no electricity, no phones. One character in the film mentions that he has never taken a hot bath in his life--and because the actors were non-professionals recruited directly from the favelas, that happened to be a real comment that the camera managed to capture.

What was most fascinating, though, was the society that grew up within this awful poverty. Drugs provide the capital, and plenty of it: middle-class Brazilians pay good money to feed their coke habits, and that money travels up the hillsides into Rocinha or Cidade de Deus and become the basis for a new society, with the druglords at its head. The documentary featured several residents telling about the essential services provided by the druglords: if someone's shack needs repairs, or a family needs furniture, or a resident needs new shoes, or a family needs a funeral, they come to the druglords and are given money to take care of things. When a druglord's territory is well-established, a very real peace will settle onto that territory, as random crimes are suppressed and folded into the larger efforts of the druglords. Only when territorial disputes erupt does major violence flare up, though at these times the violence is very bad indeed.

Teenaged members of the crime gangs were interviewed for the documentary, each one a perfect fatalist. Life expectancy is about 25 years, and several of the young men interviewed expressed some variation of the "We all die sometime" mantra, using that to justify a life in which absolutely anything goes so long as it serves their private needs. Murder is just part of a day at the office, essentially; indeed, in one startling juxtaposition in the documentary, a young gang member talks about how his first murder really didn't trouble him at all, then the film cut to a policeman who said exactly the same thing about the people he has had to shoot in his quasi-military engagements in the favelas.

It didn't take long for me to begin noticing some patterns in the favelas that also play out in the rest of the world. Why, for example, did Hamas win seats in the Palestinian parliament? Because Hamas has for a long time been providing school and medical facilities for the impoverished people of the territories, filling a need that the established authority, the PLO, had ignored or been unable to provide for. The same is true of Hezbollah in the south of Lebanon, and we see the results playing out in news reports every day now: these well-armed militias have so become a part of daily life in these areas that they are heroes to the people, and the established authority--be it an invading Israeli army or the nearly-impotent government of Lebanon--are an enemy to be defeated. With the same lack of remorse that characterizes the young hoodlums of the favelas.

This is true in Iraq, where the militias of Muqtada al-Sadr and others are largely responsible for the brewing civil war, and in Somalia, where the Taliban-styled Islamist militias have now almost entirely succeeded in ousting the "real" government. How do you think the Taliban was able to take over Afganistan in the first place? The riots in France last year had a lot to do with immigrants suffering from societal poverty who felt they had no option but to rise up against a new set of laws that would have made their lives even worse. And Columbia has essentially belonged to the drug kingpins for decades now.

Obviously, yes, I know: I'm hardly the first person to discover that poverty and economic inequality are big honkin' problems the wide world over (hello, Marx and Engels!). But there's a difference between understanding a thing intellectually, as a thing you recognize from having read some books, and that moment when suddenly you see it all laid out, each link in place, and the pattern becomes clear. For every person, that moment is always individual and distinct. For me, the combination of City of God, the documentary that accompanies it on the DVD, and the hundreds of news reports over the last several years, created that moment: link to link, the whole chain of poverty and its awful effects, wrapping itself around the world.

After all, let us not forget that there is poverty almost as bad here in the U.S. There are parts of Los Angeles where the police almost never go because it's just too dangerous, and the same is true of places like the Robert Taylor projects in Chicago or parts of Harlem. Anyone who's seen The Godfather knows that the Mafia often fills a whole range of needs in poorer communities, as do the Crips of L.A. The favelas are perhaps a step further along than we are in that line that marches from poverty to organization to rebellion, but it's worth remembering--as the differences between American haves and have-nots continues to grow and grow--that there is in fact a direct line to be drawn between poverty and the Taliban, and that if we just sit back and enjoy our comfy lives, ignoring what's going on in our own favelas, one day we might find that our comfy lives have disappeared right out from under us.

MySpace

So a year after taking the blogging plunge and largely enjoying it, now I've done the MySpace thing. Just trying to keep current with the young people, doncha know.

I looked at MySpace a few months ago and just didn't like it. The pages were too cluttered, there was too much stuff all over the place and it didn't seem like anything led to anything except more of the same. All the chaos of modern life, dumped onto endless web pages. But it didn't take long to notice that, for bands at least, MySpace has been a godsend, and sometimes there is interesting music to be found. But I still wasn't terribly interested--who wants to help Rupert Murdoch when he doesn't absolutely have to? (Check here for a lovely MySpace-based parody page for Mr. Murdoch.)

But you know. Things change. And since Zen Noir is going to be in theaters starting September 15th, suddenly MySpace--and the grassroots marketing opportunity it represents--became a lot more attractive. Obviously it's just a tiny part of our marketing campaign, but for a smaller movie like ours, the grassroots end will be important. There's already a YouTube page with the trailer, and we'll be putting up a MySpace page for the movie soon.

As a kind of dry run, I set up my own page last week. And yes, the layout is definitely clunky; but it doesn't take long before you realize that you could spend hours just wandering from link to link to link. (Which is of course exactly why Mr. Murdoch was interested--look at all those ads you're absorbing!) But there is an undeniable kick from finding people on there who you'd have never expected. I looked around for a friend from college, found her, then discovered in her Friends section other people I'd known in college. So then I searched for Emerson College alumnae who attended during a certain span of years, and found several other people I knew. I could probably do the same with people from high school, actors in shows I did, and so forth.

(On the other hand, it was more than a little weird to find my little sister had put up a page reading, in part, that she wants to meet "GUYS!!!!" I mean--four exclamation points? Yikes! Wasn't she just six years old, like, yesterday?)

So all in all, even though old Rupert is profiting from it, well, so am I. And so far he hasn't tried to shove any of his Fox News viewpoint down my throat, so what do I have to complain about? Now if I could just figure out how people are managing to customize their pages, that would be very nice.

Ah, Satire

Apparently I'm not the only person who looked at the news yesterday and reacted with alarm. Over at Salon, their War Room columnist had almost exactly the same take on it all, with better detail; while on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart wrestled with the thorny problem of finding humor in the beginning of "World War III," and solved the problem with Jason Jones's beautiful "Emotional Weatherman" segment, featuring "Shrapnel the Despair Penguin."

Meanwhile, also on Salon today was Rebecca Traister's report on a guy named Pete, an anti-abortion activist who made the unfortunate mistake of taking an Onion story seriously. Liberal bloggers went all crazy-like and have been making fun of the guy all week, and really, how can you not? Trouble is, it's too easy a target. And we all get fooled from time to time, and it's really gonna suck when one of "us" gets something wrong and is mocked across the worldwide web for days on end.

Sure: Pete didn't understand that the piece was satire. A lot of folks didn't quite understand that Jonathan Swift was kidding when he suggested the Irish eat their children, too. That's one of the reasons why we like satire: every once in a while someone doesn't quite get the joke, and then we can have the fun of explaining it to them. It may kill the humor, but it still gets the point across.

Which is one of the things our man Pete still isn't quite getting. In attempting to defend himself, which he (mostly) did with an admirable sense of humor about the whole thing, he asserted at one point "Do you see how they slip their agenda into a 'satirical' piece?" His point was that this piece of humor still had an agenda, which again reflects a complete misunderstanding of satire. Of course it has an agenda--that's the whole point. Satire is really just another weapon in the arsenal of argumentation and, as has been proved time and again by Mark Twain, Bernard Shaw, Stephen Colbert and a host of others, very often this humor-with-a-hook is the most effective way of making a point. The hook catches and sticks, the entertainment of the humor wins you over and then suddenly you realize what you've been won over to.

(By the way, I never commented on Colbert's Correspondent Association speech, but it was brilliant, and all the more delightful for being done right in the face of the President, and it's well worth watching the whole thing.)

But. Let's leave poor old Pete alone, shall we? As Ms. Traister notes, a lot of the reactions in the blogosphere have been just plain insulting; and calls to the man's house are way over the line. The guy made a mistake, and he happens to be on the other side of the ideological line; but I'm telling you, it's awful tough to take the moral high ground on things when you're calling some guy's house just to abuse him. That's a shitty way to make a point, and it only works against the point you're trying to make by causing others to write you off as just another asshole liberal. In other words, you can't get all highfalutin' about Dick Cheney being an asshole if you're an asshole too. So let's just get off Pete's back and get back to business. Enough is enough.

Okay, not quite enough. My favorite bit in the whole thing? It's Ms. Traister's very last paragraph, where Pete suggests that because he grew up in Germany, where the natives famously lack a sense of humor, he has been a complete sucker for satire all his life. Now that's effin' hilarious.

FUBAR

I look at the world, and all I can say is "Holy crap!"

Hamas wanted to provoke Israel and it succeeded. Hezbollah then decided on a copycat provocation and also succeeded.

In India, train bombings. In Afghanistan, eighteen U.S. soldiers died last month after a wave of fresh Taliban violence (yes, they're still out there); the Afghani defense minister is pleading for tens of thousands more troops to get the country back under control. In Somalia, complete chaos. There is governmental chaos in Ukraine, and in Russia there are worrisome signs that the old ways have not disappeared. And it's too depressing even to think about North Korea or Iran.

The planet is hot and getting hotter. Oil may be running out. And the Big One could hit Los Angeles at any time.

I could go on and on but it's just too depressing. Over at Salon, Sidney Blumenthal blames pretty much everything on the Bush administration; and although he's a former Clinton official who would be expected to say such a thing, still his broad-strokes condemnation is disturbingly convincing. And if you feel like having your heart broken, read any of reporter Phillip Robertson's articles from Iraq, here, here or here.

I have nothing to say about any of this just now, it's all too numbing. But hey, don't worry--here in the U.S. we have a new season of Project Runway, so everything must be okay after all, right?

Yeah, That's Right, Comic Books

... ya wanna make somethin' out of it?

(Me, defensive? Oh, no.) I read comic books. I'm not going to write "I still read comic books" because that would imply that it's something I already should have grown out of. No, it's simply this: I read comic books. I also read the great classics, books of essays, biographies, contemporary fiction, plays and screenplays, magazines, and the backs of cereal boxes. I read everything, and comics are just a part of the whole constellation. But for no particular reason, today I'm going on about comics.

I learned to read through comic books. When I was in the first grade they decided it was time to teach us to read, and for a while there, things were going badly with me. Eventually my school sent a note home saying that there might be some sort of learning disability involved. Mom, who knew me and didn't give a shit about statistics and studies, knew that a learning disability was utter nonsense. Pretty soon, she got cagey and smart. I came up to her one night, holding a "Legion of Super Heroes" comic, and asked if she would read it to me. "Well," she said, "I've got some things to do still, so maybe a little later." Slight pause. "But you know, if you learned how to read, you wouldn't have to wait for me to read it to you."

Within a week I had passed the rest of the class in reading skills. It was just a question of motivation, plain and simple. But it was my love for those four-color strips on cheap paper that got me over that hump, and I won't ever forget that.

Given the prevalence of super heroes in pop culture lately, it might seem absurd to even bother defending the value of comics. But three objections to that pop up immediately: (1) super heroes are not the only subjects of comic books, and indeed some of the best comics-related movies, like Ghost World, have been non-super hero works; (2) how many people attending Superman Returns wouldn't be caught dead reading a Superman comic on the bus?; and (3) there are still stories like this one:

Castillo was sentenced to 180 days in jail, a year probation, and a $4,000 fine. Again – in the eyes of Texas, selling a comic book created for adults, from the adult section of the shop, to an adult was deemed a crime because, in the prosecutor’s eyes, all comics are for kids.

That is from a Newsarama story in 2003 about the case of a Txas comic book retailer named Jesus Castillo, who in 2000 was arrested, tried and convicted of selling an adult comic book to an adult. He appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case. Still think that comics don't need defending? Talk to Peter Kuper, whose George Bush parody "Richie Bush" (a riff on the Richie Rich character) got his work seized by U.S. Customs agents.

The above news articles, by the way, were found through the website of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, a not-for-profit that specializes in First Amendment defenses for comics creators. They are, alas, very busy people, and deserve your support.

The list of truly gifted writers working in comics continues to grow. I've already talked about Neil Gaiman here, but of course Neil owes a great deal to Alan Moore (Wikipedia article here, and a nice long interview here). There are also notables like Paul Chadwick, Art Spiegelman, Eddie Campbell, Marjane Satrapi or the late great Will Eisner, father to them all.

But there's been some great super hero stuff as well. I'm a bit tired of all the linking, so I'll just mention Brian Michael Bendis, Grant Morrison, Warren Ellis and Kurt Busiek, and that the stuff Marvel has been doing lately, particularly in its "Ultimates" line, has been spectacular.

So yeah, that's right, I read comic books. They taught me a very clear-cut sense of right and wrong, Stan Lee's insistence on using a college-level vocabulary helped me learn new words, and Gaiman's Signal to Noise gave me my first full-length stage play, while Pat McGreal's collaboration on Veils is moving ever closer to a really fine completed screenplay. You'll never catch me saying a word against the delights of a good comic book, no sir.

The British Museum/Library

After years of desperate longing, I finally went to Europe for the first time in 1989. My mother paid for the trip--she had sold the house after I graduated from high school two years before, and the balloon payment came due in '89. The smart, sensible thing would have been to invest. We traveled.

She had last been there when she was 16, traveling alone and staying in the YWCA in Bloomsbury, directly across from the British Museum. (Things change--the Y no longer provides accommodations, there or anywhere else in the U.K.) Our trip was to take us to England, Wales and Ireland--where we would meet up with my grandparents, who ran a B&B in Kinsale that they closed literally days before we finally got there (but that's a story for another day). Naturally, when we stayed in London, Mom wanted to stay in Bloomsbury.

So we booked a room at the Hotel Russell, which I remember with a warmth it may or may not entirely deserve. (It's "only" a four-star hotel, and seems to be frowned upon in London hotel circles--but the location is spectacular, and I can't remember any complaints from our stay.) We were flying from different locations, Mom from Miami and me from Boston, and my plane got in first.

After a minor adventure with a gypsy cab driver at Heathrow, I reached the hotel and checked in. By this time I was thrumming with excitement, and it was simply impossible to wait a couple hours, stuck in the room, till Mom arrived, so I dumped my bags and immediately hurtled across Russell Square. Looking for the British Museum.

(By the way, apropos of nothing, here's my recipe for avoiding jet lag problems, at least when going to Europe--nothing really helps on the trip back--don't sleep on the plane. Do whatever you have to do to make sure you don't sleep on that long flight over, because once you arrive your natural excitement will keep you awake till nightfall. Then you'll have no trouble getting to sleep through sheer exhaustion, and once you awaken in the morning your internal clock will be pretty well reset. You're welcome.)

Now bear in mind: I was used to Miami museums, which (particularly when I was a kid) barely deserved the name, and the vastly superior Boston museums. Still, I had never seen anything on the scale of the British Museum, so I had no idea what to expect. And although I certainly must have seen pictures of the front facade of the museum, I didn't remember any of it. And by chance, the route I took across the square led me somewhere else--to the old British Library location next to (and connecting to) the museum.

(Looking at a Google map (you have to drill down to the largest magnificatin, then switch to the Hybrid view), the hotel is at what I presume is the northeast corner of the park, directly across the street; I know I walked diagonally across the park, and probably went down Montague Place--essentially, the back of the museum--rather than Great Russell Street.)

This entrance was singularly unimpressive. A door, basically, with I think a guard or two standing on either side of it. A banner maybe. That was it. "Well," I thought to myself. "This should go pretty quickly, then. Good. I'll easily be back at the hotel before Mom gets there."

Just inside the door, a wall was painted with a floor plan for the Library/Museum structure, and certain exhibition highlights noted. I stood there, my eyes going very wide, and started mumbling things. "The Magna Carta. The Gutenberg Bible. The Rosetta Stone. Holy sh--."

Given my literary proclivities, this was perfect. Like God dumping me in literary heaven and saying "Here, have fun." One of the original copies of Shakespeare's first folio was on display, and I stood in front of its display case for a very long time, trying to guess how many productions had been borne from that book. (One of Shakespeare's four known original signatures was right next to it.) And yes, the Magna Carta, and yes, one of Gutenberg's surviving Bibles, the oldest printed books in the world, the genesis of mass communication, right there. There was also sheet music by Beethoven and Mozart; letters from Queen Victoria, from Nelson to Lady Hamilton; and the original handwritten manuscripts for books by Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens, James Joyce.

Eventually I realized that I hadn't even reached the British Museum proper yet, so I forced myself to move along and, basically, sprinted through the exhibitions in easy reach, but by then I had to get back to the hotel. I reached our room, plopped myself on the bed, and only a few minutes later there was the sound of a key in a lock, the door opened, a suitcase got flung into the room, and my mother stumbled in over it.

I had not seen her in months. "Mom!" I said at once, without preamble. "Do you know what they have over at the British Museum?!?"

She smiled. It was going to be a good trip.

Postscript: Mom and I went back to the museum together the next day, and I saw the front facade, saying "Oh, that."

I went back again with Dad several years later, and explored more. But I know for a fact that I've barely explored a hundredth of what is available. The British Library consolidated its London collections into a facility in St. Pancras a few years ago, so that odd little side entrance to the museum probably doesn't exist anymore. But I know that admission to the museum is still free, which is so completely civilized and it's a damn shame that the same isn't true of museums in the U.S.

And now, having relived that charming little experience, I wanna go back real bad...