How Kevin Smith made the top story on CNN.com

I'd be willing to bet that bookmakers in Vegas are now laying odds on which "Evening with Kevin Smith" dvd will contain the rant about Southwest Airlines.  I'm thinking number 5, depending on how far along they are on producing number 4.

This is not a good thing for Southwest, because Smith is pretty much a self-effacing and honest guy with a pretty rabid fan base.  Which means he's not going to sugar coat it ("Dude, I know I'm fat,") and it's going to get a lot of play online.  Witness the fact that in the middle of the Winter Olympics it topped CNN's web page.  

Probably this won't be a major financial issue for Southwest, but it is going to focus a lot of attention on their fat people removal policy.  Plus a fair number of Smith fans are big guys like him, and I'm betting they're going to be avoiding Southwest at all costs in the future.

Some new insanity

I posted a little bit ago that I was going to be messing around with the html code on this page to make it a little more to my liking.  I'm still going to do that, but I'm going to wait a bit, as I'm going to be doing that exact thing on...my new blog.  Yes, I will now have two blogs, this one, and one I will be operating as part of my Digital Media course that I just started today.  This new blog (which I'm calling A Bad Move) will focus much more on issues pertaining to the publishing industry and generally be of a nature to try and induce the lecturer to give me a good grade on it at the end of the term.  As part of the course I will be messing around with the template, so I figured I'd do it there first where I've got someone to tell me how to fix it when I inevitably screw it up.

So what does this mean for this blog?  Well, probably that I won't be posting here quite as much, except when I've got something that wouldn't work on the other blog.  I'm going to be doing 2-3 posts a week over there, so we'll see how much energy I've got for posting over here.  This blog won't go completely dark (not that I haven't done that before), because I'll eventually lose the other blog at the end of the summer.  

You can check it out here.  Comments are welcome if you're at all interested in what I'm talking about.

The last time I will mention this.

My thoughts on the NFC Championship game:

1.  That wasn't pass interference.

2.  That wasn't a catch.

3.  Childress is a moron.

4.  It's been 11 years.  I can't believe they did it to me again.  I wonder how long it will take to recover this time?

Where I studied today

Today, despite what must have been serious misgivings, I was granted access to one of the oldest libraries in the world, the Bodleian.  It's the second largest in Britain (after the British Library), and is one of 6 "legal deposit" libraries in the British Isles, which means that it has the right to request a copy of any book printed in the UK or Ireland.  The Radcliffe Camera is part of the system, and that's where the four of us who got our cards today went to sit for an hour or so and do some work.  It's not open to the public, so it was pretty freaking cool to be able to go in.

Afterward we went and walked around Christ Church College, where the several scenes from the Harry Potter movies were filmed, including the dining room scenes.  All in all, an excellent day in Oxford.

Snow melt

So the Great British Snow Emergency of 2010 is now over.  The snow all melted inside of two days.  Kind of crazy transition-you could tell something like that was about to happen but it still surprised me.  But then, I'm used to snow sticking around for months.  In unrelated news, I've gone running around Christ Church meadow twice in the last two days, and both the Cherwell and the Isis are almost at flood stage.  Also, both were higher today than yesterday, so if they push up another inch or two I'll have to find a new running route, because mine will be underwater.

Changing the topic, I've become unhappy with the physical dimensions of this blog.  I've already made one foray into editing the html code to make it wider (ultimately I discarded the changes and decided to try again later), so probably sometime in the next week or so this page may be wider than it is now.  Should be exciting.

I just found this article in the New Yorker profiling uber-author Neil Gaiman, which covers his career pretty well and includes some cool facts I didn't know.  Also congrats to Gaiman, who announced last Friday on his blog that he and his girlfriend Amanda Palmer (of The Dresden Dolls) are engaged.

Finally, here are a couple of the photos I took of Oxford in the snow.  I'll see if I can get a couple of shots of the overflowing Cherwell & Isis for comparison.

Train Times

I was a little bored this morning, so when I read this CNN article saying the new Chinese high-speed trains averaged 350kph I wondered what that was in mph.  Turns out it's about 218.  That got me wondering just how fast you could get from Minneapolis to Chicago in a train going those speeds.  According to this site it's 354 miles, so it'd be a little over an hour and a half train ride.  But you wouldn't just get a train straight from Minneapolis to Chicago, you'd at least go through Madison.  Long story short I'm thinking you could have one of these trains averaging 218mph between Minneapolis, Madison, Milwaukee and Chicago and get from one end to the other in about 2 hours (provided you only stop in those cities).  Put the terminus of the train in the downtown areas of each city and it probably ends up being faster than flying.  Sound good to anyone else?

Lost Supper

Holy cow, I love this shot.  The final season of Lost starts February 2nd.

Heathrow

The worst type of airline delays are when they make you just sit on the tarmac, either before takeoff or after landing.  At least when you're in the air you have the sense you're getting somewhere, even if you're just in a holding pattern (mostly because people rarely notice when they're circling).  But when you're just sitting there it seems annoying and pointless.

I landed at Heathrow at 10am, and didn't get off the plane until after 10:30.  Passport control and customs were easy, but waiting for my checked bag was another half hour or so.  Combine that with needing to change terminals to get to my bus, I spent over 2 hours trying to leave Heathrow.  I'll let the fact that the bus's first stop was another terminal pass.  But that's really a long time to spend trying to leave an airport.

On a bus

I'm posting this while taking the bus back from Heathrow to Oxford.  One of the cool things about the UK is that they seem to have wifi in most of their buses.  This is the first time I've used it, and I have to say it's pretty cool.

After a whirlwind 10 days in MN, where I got to see a lot of people, including a couple I didn't initially expect to be in town, I'm back in the UK.  It's clearly been snowing quite a bit here, as all the trees along the road are coated in snow.  The roads themselves seem ok, but traffic's going kind of slow.

It's nice to be back and I'm looking forward to seeing people again, but I've already got some things to take care of.  First off, I need to get my application for another student loan in.  I'm going to need to go grocery shopping pretty quick too.  And to top it off, I found out that my left headphone has given out on me, which means I got to listen to my new cds short one headphone, which is not optimal for Led Zeppelin.

I'll see about posting new pics soon, right after I come out of the jet-lag zombie-state.