Not UFOs

The lights in the sky weren't UFOs, but the doings of some students from the Arts Institute at Bournemouth (where I work!). They were "Asian-style sky lanterns" left-over from the Fire Festival (put on by some Arts & Events Management students from AIB) earlier this month. Oh well, we'll just have to keep waiting for actual "contact". Lanterns or not, it was a bit nifty how they seemed to move with a purpose and sit in formation.

Swarm, swarm!

Today our apartment building got swarmed by bees. All of a sudden, there were thousands of them flying around. The above video was shot from the window in our spare bedroom. And the below picture is where they settled after a while. According to the news, there were about 20,000+ bees swarming the Bournemouth pier. Most of them were collected by a beekeeper and taken to an apiary. These bees must have been some that had gotten away. Or perhaps just another hive on the move. The news report said they weren't dangerous, they were just looking for a new place to live.

Unfortunately, someone in our building called an exterminator. When I got home from work, there were dead bees everywhere. Bees are protected in England. It's illegal to exterminate them. There's a bee shortage here, too. We found a dead bee on our carpet. I picked it up and discovered that one leg was twitching and its "tongue" was sticking out. Sad.

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On a different note... we were supposedly visited by aliens last night. We totally missed this, but I read about it in the local paper today. There were orange lights flying around in some kind of formation last night. The newspaper is asking for people who saw it to contact them. Guess we better keep an eye on the locals... make sure there's not one of these Invasion of the Body Snatchers things going on! Or perhaps they have something in connection with THESE.

Britain in 2007

Britain obsessed with fame, addicted to junk food: Lonely Planet guide

AFP - 2 hours 24 minutes ago

LONDON (AFP) - Britons are obsessed with celebrity and addicted to junk food and ready meals, a new travel guide said as it shed a sometimes unflattering light on the country.

The Lonely Planet guide noted that more people vote in television talent shows than in elections, saying this was "a symptom of Britain's ever-growing obsession with fame and celebrity."

Britons are fascinated with famous people "even though their 'celebrity' status is based on little more than the ability to sing a jolly tune, look good in tight trousers or kick a ball in the right direction," it noted.

Like many foreign observers, the guide noted Britain's particular problem with alcohol. "Vandalism and nuisance behaviour caused by binge drinking remain serious problems," it said.

On the food front, the guide asserted that Britons eat more junk food and ready meals than all other European countries put together.

All was not lost in gastronomic terms, however. "Without doubt you can find great food in Britain. It's just that not all the Brits seem to like eating it," the book said.

And there are some other good points, including Britain's multiculturalism, which has tempered some traditional stereotypes.

"Brits are just as likely to tuck into a chicken madras as a Sunday roast, or to check out the Notting Hill Carnival rather than Trooping the Colour," said co-ordinating author David Else.

"Everyone can find something which suits them," he said, also hailing how Britons' exposure "to different religions, festivals, music and food allows Brits to experience so many other cultures without even leaving the country."

"We need to revel in this diversity as this is the future of Britain," he said.

Stick A Ribbon on Your S.U.V.

Very, very funny and very, very right-on! But beware, there be profanity in there...

Click Here To Laugh

The American Way

The American way George Saunders
Saturday May 19, 2007

Guardian

Readers of this column may suspect that I am one of those anti-America Americans. I'm not. I love my country, and feel there is much the British could learn from us Americans, namely me. For example, you could learn about the American ethic called Positive Thinking. When I was in your country last year, for the first time ever, I learned a lot about the British. The main thing I learned is that you people do not understand the concept of Positive Thinking. You're always intelligently discussing and considering and pondering and all of that, wasting valuable Action Time. Allow me to instruct you.

Say someone drives a steel spike through your head. Granted: a bad break. But why whine about it? All the screaming and weeping in the world is not going to cause that spike to work its way out. Why not say something positive, like, "Thanks so much for placing that super decorative accoutrement into my cranial region!" The spike is still through your head, but you're not depressing the people around you.

Or say someone steals your parking spot. What an American will do is respond positively, by cheerfully muttering, "Look on the bright side, maybe an hour from now a piano will plummet from that skyscraper and destroy that car from on high."

Or say someone, as a joke, for your birthday, uses a samurai sword to sever your torso from your lower half. What a positive approach to smile and exclaim, "I'm betting there are plenty of things in this universe that hurt a lot more!" Then get yourself stitched up and carry on with your day. There are good deeds to be done, things to be accomplished!

One must smile through adversity. For example, not long ago, I was late for work and trying to get on the subway. This was not altogether easy, because the spike through my head is slightly wider than the width of the train door, and when I turned sideways, the stitches in my waist gave way and my legs fell off.

I was momentarily flummoxed, but then my American brain, from its position on the floor near the snack machine, remembered the all-purpose Positive Thinking mantra. "It's all good!" my mouth exclaimed, as my torso pulled away on the train, waving to me with its foot.

I could see the salutary effect my positive attitude had on my fellow passengers. "It is all good!" they replied as one, except for some foreigner, possibly a Brit, who began to weep at the sight of me, and rather negatively called emergency assistance, bringing everyone down.

At that moment I became aware that something large was hurtling down from on high, headed for my exact position: a grand piano! "Wow," I thought, "it's going to be a super day."

Dogs Are Amazing

It's no wonder dogs are referred to as "man's best friend" when you hear about something like this:

Dog Gets Posthumous Medal for Bravery

How awesome is that? There's clearly a lot more going on in a dog's mind than most people give them credit for. This little Jack Russell saw a problem developing and immediately stepped in to save the day, putting his own life at risk.

I like cats, don't get me wrong, but I don't think they'd do the same. If we were small enough, they'd eat us!

The Concept that's taking viral video by storm

Mentos + Diet Coke = Geyser

Never mind... We're staying public for now

Now that I sent out an invitation to read our newly-privatized blog, we've changed our minds and decided to keep it public and open to anybody. It's my fault. Well, actually it's Google's fault. I should have tested the Blogger.com "Invite" thingy on myself before sending one to you all. You see, it seems Google (who owns Blogger) makes the stipulation that you have to have a Gmail account to log in and read the blog for any longer than a 30-day period. Now, I'm a big fan of Google and Gmail, but we think this is quite lame and completely understand that a lot of you probably wouldn't want to go through the trouble of getting another email address.

So, please ignore that email from Blogger. As before, you will be able to read Project: Expatriated without logging in. Perhaps we'll look into getting a better blog host that doesn't require a specific email address. We'll see.

Anyway, sorry for the confusion!

We're Going Private

We've decided to make our blog "invitation-only" to keep it among friends and family only. This means that you will need to log in to access it. We will make this change on Sunday May 6th. When this happens, I will send "invitations" to everyone we can think of that has been known to read our blog. Please don't feel offended if you get left out, it may just be that the invitation didn't reach you (spam filters), we didn't have a current email address for you, didn't know you read our blog, or simply left you out by mistake. Just send an email to K or me and we will send you an invitation.

What's really going to send us to hell in a handbasket

As much as we're all rattling our sabers about global warming, when you read stories like this --> Honeybee die-off threatens food supply <-- it serves as a reminder of how delicately we are stitched into our ecosystem. Who would have seen something like this coming, for cryin' out loud? It will probably be something like this that wipes out the human race! Not melting ice, rising sea levels, greenhouse gases, cow farts, etc. It will be something as simple as a bee no longer pollinating the flowers that beget the foods that we eat. Call me a cynic if you want, but something tells me that we are at fault for the honeybee die-off just as we are to blame for every other cataclysm facing us. A virus killing off the bees? Yeah, the one and only "virus with shoes": people. You name it... on some level the human "race" is at fault.