Major Marty Reporting in From the UK

Yes, I'm here reporting to you from a dingy internet cafe on Charing Cross Road in London. I've manged to break out of my comfortable bubble in Dupont Circle for a bit of time and expand my horizons all the way across the Atlantic. It's a bit liberating to spend a little time in a city where everyone appreciates coffee and no one talks about Paris Hilton. All the comforts of home with none of the crap I hate about... home.

I quickly learned that London is in the same class of city as New York - busy as all hell with nowhere near the right amount of space for anything you want to do. Variety abounds here in all aspects of life. Hipster seems to be the fashion for all men - straight and gay. And the food... my god! The food! Here are some observations I found significant in the last few days, in true Major Stroodler list fashion...

- After about two hours, I noticed that I started to get a "Madonna fake-British" accent. Words like "hello" and "you" and "water" were coming out all strange. I actually had to force myself to say them they way I always do.

- Pizza Hut is actually a classy place here. I liken it to California Pizza Kitchen in the US, and people can't get enough of it.

- Everything is measured in metric - except the important stuff. "Inches of snow", "feet of altitude", Pounds... oh, wait... Seriously, the news reported that London is supposed to get six inches of snow tonight. Was it too hard for them to convert, or did 15 and a quarter centimeters sound too terrifying?

-No one likes to touch each other here. There are millions of people walking the streets and clogging the sidewalks, yet there is huge effort to move quickly enough to avoid even a slight brush of the coats. I think it's the vestige of some dormant politeness that has since withered away from most Londoners.

-Bird Flu is a BIG DEAL here. A few turkeys got sick over the weekend on a farm in Scotland and it's been the biggest news for days - even bigger than a letter bomber that is apparently terrorizing the country. They gassed something like a million birds, incernerated them, and have now quarantined all the people within a two mile radius of the farm.

-They have ten second commercials here. Most are the normal 30 seconds we have in the US, but every once and a while you get this weird flash of some product or gimmick for 10 seconds.

-There's a lot of crazy here. Just not 20 seconds ago, two drunk guys stumbled into the internet cafe I'm sitting in, fell into a table and computer, started fighting, and got thrown out.

There will be more to come later. I'm headed to Dublin in a few days, and I'm told that the difference between the two cities is like night and day. At least the time zones are the same.

Whew.