Jolly Good

I have lots of good ideas.  They usually involve simplifying our life by doing things like:

having a hammock instead of a bed,
running without shoes,
eliminating the need for cooking and dishes by eating from a bucket,
using floor cushions and a coffee table instead of a couch, chairs, and a dining table,
building and living in an 89 square foot house,
commuting to work via unicycle,
storing all of our earthly possessions in my parents' kitchen (*cough* I promise we'll move it all out when we get back...),

etc.

You get the idea.  Luckily I have a wife, which means that most of my "good" ideas never see the harsh light of reality.  Usually.  Last week, my good idea was to cancel our Wymount apartment contract for the fall because of a better, smaller apartment we found somewhere else.  The manager offered it to us, and we accepted.  Of course, we cancelled our Wymount contract.  And, of course, the current tenant decided to stay after all.  Now we're in the middle of a new adventure--trying to find a place to live when we return to America in three weeks.  Hooray for us!

In other news, we had another eventful week full of reading, classes, and orange-chocolate kit-kat bars.  Module 2 classes officially started this week, which means I began taking my first formal classes in Cambridge; I'd just been working on research prior to this.  I'm taking two classes now--100 Years of Spooks and Spies and Development of the City.

100 Years of Spooks and Spies is, as you've probably guessed, a blast.  Our professor is a great guy who has studied this stuff for years.  Actually, I can't really think of a better place to be if you wanted to study military intelligence--Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6 (and, incidentally, the primary passenger on the only foreign plane to enter US airspace on September 12, 2001) is the master of Pembroke college, and Cambridge is full of research material.  Last Tuesday, a guest lecturer, Christopher Andrews, spoke to the PKP students.  Christopher Andrews is an interesting guy--he's a close friend of our professor, Dr. Martland, and he is the only historian who has been granted access to the MI5 archives.  He wrote the only authorized history of MI5, and last week he spoke to us about Col. Gaddafi.  It was a fascinating lecture about a really bizarre dictator.  Did you know that he called the CIA director on September 12 and offered to send food packets to the US?  Neither did I.  Strange, strange person.

MI5, by the way, is (sort of) the equivalent of the FBI, while MI6 is (sort of) Britain's version of the CIA.  As it turns out, Britain was pretty far ahead of the states in the intelligence game all the way up to the end of World War II.  During the war, the British set up a secret installation - alternatively called "Bletchley Park" or "Station X" - to intercept and attempt to decode German radio transmissions.  At the peak of its productivity, about 9,000 people were working on the project, yet they still maintained absolute secrecy.  Pretty impressive stuff.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The Development of the City class is also quite interesting.  Astute readers will notice that I had originally enrolled in a development economics class.  Well, that's true - I switched out to avoid death by powerpoint.  I figure there's plenty of time left for that once I graduate and begin a real career.  The class I'm in now is taught by a lovely man called Dr. Bullock who has studied architecture and city planning extensively.  I became interested in the topic during my supervision, actually - I was reading a book by James Scott called Seeing Like a State, which explored the effect of city planning on civic behavior within that city.  Extensively pre-planned cities like Brasilia, for example, tend to be somewhat dull and lifeless, but very politically safe; the wide open spaces and lack of small, winding roads make it difficult for chance meetings to occur or protests to begin.

In the class, we've been talking about the reconstruction of Great Britain after World War II, along with some of the efforts that went into the planning of New York.  We've spent some time on the debate between Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, who basically represented opposite sides of the city planning movement in New York in the first half of the 20th century.  Fun fun!

We didn't do much travel this week, but we got to see a little more of the local side of Cambridge.  Yesterday Katie and I took a long walk down Mill Street, which is full of Chinese and Midlde Eastern shops and restaurants. We also went to the Natural History museum next door to our college, where we saw a recreation of the world's largest spider.  It was the size of a dog.  The night before, we hung out with some other students at a local pub and had a picnic of olives for dinner.  The food here is unexpectedly good, actually.  The British apparently haven't caught on to the American obsession with processed food yet.  And I'm fine with that.


Well, we send our love, as always, and hope you're all just doing splendidly.  I'm off to think of some more good ideas.

Katie's words of wisdom for the week: "Eat chocolate.  Painting is fun."

"It's everywhere you want to be."

"The T-Rex was discovered by Sir Isaac Newton in 1753."

"Why is Britain Great?"

"Because they eat eggs, onion rings, and ribs for breakfast."

"Blue Steel"