No news is good news

Not much further to report. I get to give my paper this afternoon. Apart from this I have not been overly fastidious in my attendance at talks. Yesterday I explored the heart of the city. As is usual in my trips to England, the main purpose was to stock up on things that I can only buy in the UK. Alas, my baggage is not capacious or reinforced enough to make wholesale shipping of Frazzles to the US a productive endeavour, so I look to smaller and more dense items. In particular, books: I raided a Waterstones 3 for 2 deal to collect specifically titles that have little or no chance of emerging in the US anytime soon (In particular, the Mark Radcliffe novel, and Freakonomics, which is available in the US but not in paperback anytime within the next few years -- the gap between formats is much longer stateside than in UKadia).

Waterstones also seems to have recently engaged in even more excessive price slashing -- they have a regular "books for 99p" offer which appear to be an arbitrary selection of titles, in their entirety. I found one of Lawrence Block's enjoyable "The Burglar Who..." series and snapped that up. They also have a misleadingly titled "Up to half off", which would be better named "Down to half off". By their interpretation, you could quite reasonably sell a book at a discount of a penny. Something should be done! Call trading standards immediately!

I was also on the lookout for music, but both the Pipettes and the much hyped but actually OK LilyAllen aren't out for another few weeks. Guess I'll have to find other ways to track them down.

Ended up in a pub on quiz night. Interesting to see how quizes have evolved: there was a picture round, and most of the other rounds were music based. This is all to reduce the amount of cheating possible with mobile phones and the internets. Only a matter of time before technology allows us to cheat on these as well. Ah, technology: what can't you do?