in which h-l is a hippy

Every time I visit North America, I get reminded how impractical European ideas about slowing down global warming are. We think the North Americans should just stop using their cars to drive everywhere, and forget how spread out North American cities are. Because they are not short of space, things there are far, far more spread out than at home. For example, the strip mall - a collection of five or six shops in a single-storey, flat building with a huge amount of parking at the front - that simply does not exist in Europe, as we don't have the room. I made rmjwell fall over laughing when I admitted at alt.polycon 11 that I'd thought a strip mall was a place you went to see strippers.

What really brought this home to me was going to the drive-in with futabachan & Amanda. This North American custom does not exist in the UK, or in any part of Europe I've visited. Of course we have cinemas, but never outdoor ones, except occasionally during summer music festivals. It was cool to be there, but weird - it seemed very wasteful to have each individual car blasting its own sound system rather than the cinema using a single one. And drivers were advised to switch on their cars occasionally to prevent their batteries running out. Because electricity generated by non-hybrid cars' petrol engines is so energy-efficient...

Anyway, the movie, Ratatouille, was cool. And seeing it in Canada means that I can go home & see it with Richard, and thus fulfill my desire to see a Pixar film twice within a few weeks. (I always come out & want to see the film again). Nonetheless, it was a surreal experience for me.

h-l go splat

Ahhh, anticlimax - how I hate thee so :P

My trip was really great, but now I'm at home, on my own. I've been around people for ten days, seeing friends and places I don't usually get to see, so now I feel bored and lonely. And I didn't make plans for this week with people here because I didn't know how long it would take to get over jet lag. I wasn't expecting to come home, sleep until 11.30pm, wake up & eat then fall asleep again at 2am and sleep until the morning :/

I have several hundred photos to upload and annotate, and three completely-written livejournal entries to post, plus a few more that are in my head; but my metaphorical Fun and Social bars are too low for me to want to do that right now. Guess I'd better force myself out of the house to buy food. Blah.

They called that Pokemon WHAT?

We had a massive electrical storm and now my net connection is deader than the dodo. As I'd been planning to play my Japanese Pokemon Diamond today and use the net connection to look up words I didn't know, this has thrown a spanner into the works. So, as I'm sitting here with a text file open that contains the Japanese and English Pokemon names, I've decided to write a post mocking the stupid new names (and praising the ones that actually work).

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Finally, consider yourself warned that in 3 hours of boredom while my net connection was down, I managed to write 2609 words of utter drivel about Pokemon. Imagine what my brain could do to the world if only I had the motivation! ;)