layover

I can think of few things more frustrating than having a layover in London, one of my favorite cities, for 3-4 hours. That’s now the case.

If it were just 2 hours, it would be a simple transfer and I wouldn’t even think of it. If it were even 6 or 7 hours, I’d go in just to get a brief taste of the city. But a 3-4 layover means the double torture of a long wait for the flight, but too short a wait to leave the airport safely.

Edinburgh was rainy, but I did have a great discussion over tea with Carol MacDonald of Edinburgh University Press. When people write emails that are both lucid and responsive, I always know in advance that I’ll like them in person. It never fails.

I then went into the Edinburgh Waterstone’s hoping to pick up Zizek’s Tragedy/Farce book, but they didn’t have it. But I did find that they had a 3-for-2 sale on those Oxford “Short Introduction” books. Which ones would you have bought?

My three choices were these:

*The Russian Revolution (remembering Peter Hallward’s Dundee talk)

*The Reformation

*Thermodynamics

Sounds almost like one of Bogost’s randomly generated Latour Litanies.

Heathrow used to be a miserable experience (though frankly, Charles De Gaulle was always much worse in my opinion). But my last couple of times through Heathrow have been more pleasant. I’m in, let’s see… Terminal 5. I guess it must have just opened recently, right? I was here in September en route to Manchester and am sure I had never seen it before.

On another note… there are several reasons I’m glad I didn’t take up sportswriting as a permanent career. One of them is that I don’t think I could have been nearly as good as Bill Simmons, who is roughly my own age. For my sports fan readers, here is his latest piece, on WHAT THE NCAA TOURNAMENT TEACHES US ABOUT NBA PROSPECTS.

What I love about Simmons is the richness of his columns. He can pack so many ideas into a single theme. And since he writes during the internet age, there aren’t word limits cramping his style. He writes gigantic articles that can take as long as an hour or more to savor in full. Whenever his annual NBA player rankings column comes out, I always make sure to prepare a good hot drink first. He’s both insightful and funny. Maybe a few too many references to Hollywood junk films for my taste, but otherwise I wouldn’t change a thing about Simmons.

Here’s one representative sample, about how you can sometimes tell simply from the look on a player’s face whether he has a chance of panning out. And he’s right on the money about Curry:

“Trust your first instinct. If you don’t like the look on someone’s face, the way they carry themselves and/or the way they interact with teammates and coaches, then trust that initial red flag. I remember seeing Eddy Curry in person for the first time (Bulls-Celtics in 2001), watching him in warm-ups and checking out of the Eddy Curry Era right then and there. Hated the look on his face. Part entitled, part angry, part crazy, part ‘I hate warming up, I wish we were eating right now.’ I was done with Eddy in three seconds. Nobody in NBA history had ever succeeded with that specific look on his face.”