The Swell Season for Arnophilia

I got a phone call midday Tuesday (in Berkeley, CA) from an 'unknown' number, & it was Sam Amidon calling from Oxford, England, looking for recommendations for a pub to sit & read in for a while! I navigated him to the Turf Tavern, which is hidden up a windy alley & has a beautiful beer garden & rare ales on tap. Here's a video he just posted of him singing at the Royal Festival Hall (in Bangladesh I think).

Thomas Lovell Beddoes by Bus

Our friend Mrs Eley-Nelson just created a quick website to display Thomas Lovell Beddoes bus slogans. (She is a descendant of the family of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, who is a death-obsessed neo-Jacobian Romantic poet.) The images were created with the help of the bus slogan generator. Click on this image to see all of her Beddoes Buses.

Thou Art Sheffield

Whilst playing that infamous zombie fast food card game, Give Me The Brain, I condescendingly referred to a traveling friend as "SHEFFIELD!"at a tense moment during the competition. Silence filled the room. Miss Williams is of course from Shropshire, far from Sheffield. The rest of the evening, other people were referred to as Sheffield, or as various other incorrect homelands. And as the weeks passed, my mistake faded into the half-remembered half-dreams & giselle grazing the Mid-Eastern steppes. Until this morning! when this e-mail landed in my inbox with a thud:

from Miss E____ Williams _____@gmail.com to _@itwaslost.org date Fri, Feb 6, 2009 at 3:14 AM subject I'm blaming you mailed-by gmail.com

Just wanted you to know that you may have had a hand in determining my destiny. . . whilst filling in an application form in a panic, I was confronted with a last minute choice of location - London, easy, Birmingham, well why not, then. . . .SHEFFIELD. I have never been to the place. In fact, had you addressed me as "Leeds" or, heaven forbid "Crapstone", I might have ended up there, so, umm thanks, maybe.

So don't cross me, or I shall send you to some Northern English town.