[MetalMilitia]

Back from London.

We went to see the Tate Modern, Natural History Museum and Science Museum.

Tate modern was kind of suck. Perhaps I'm just a philistine but I cannot understand the vast majority of modern art. My main criticism is that I find a lot of modern art-particularly performance art-indistinguishable from parody versions of itself. You could show me a video of Paul Macartny punching himself in the face with a boxing glove and I wouldn't be able to tell you if it was legitimate "art" or a joke (fyi, this was a legitimate performance art piece in the gallery). Meh, not my cup of tea at all.

The Natural History museum is great for looking at dinosaur bones and stuffed animals and they've got a big Darwin exhibition at the moment as it's like Darwin month or something in the UK. All in all it's a cool place to go, and worth checking out if you get a chance.

The Science Museum is really cool too. It's huge and they've got a lot of good stuff. The V2 rocket they have was the stand-out thing for me because it was so much bigger than I thought it would be. They had all the gyroscopic targeting mechanisms out on show as well which was interesting. There was also a V1 and a few war planes which were good to look at but not as cool as the V2.
They also had a whole floor on the history of computing and mathematics with several versions of Babbage's Difference Engine kicking about. Nerdy stuff indeed.

The journey home was kind of a hassle because my MP3 player's battery died on me and I had to listen to a screaming toddler directly behind me on the coach and an incredibly stupid sounding woman on the phone directly next to me, across the isle.

I don't know what the fuck her problem was but she kept phoning and being phoned by presumably the same person and then talking to him (I assume it was a him) for about 5 minutes each time using only four fucking sentences (or more accurately, sentence fragments/words). She'd say "HI... YOU ARIGHT?..OKAY...YOU ARIGHT?...OKAY...YOU ARIGHT THOUGH?..I'M ON A BUS. A WHITE BUS". I'm not exaggerating. I heard her say "YOU ARIGHT" at least 20-30+ times in 5-6 phone calls. And "I'M ON A BUS" almost as much. She also did this weird thing where she'd take the phone away from her face mid-sentence and look at the screen for about 5 seconds then put it back to her back and continue talking-"okay... yeah..."-as if she'd been listening to whoever she was speaking to.
It wouldn't have been so bad if she wasn't speaking so fucking loudly or if she'd actually spoken in real sentences that I could eavesdrop on.

All in all it was a decent day out.