A Duke student in Britain last week was also annoyed by the proliferation of the Crazy Frog advertisements there. (Via Evanier.)

Saw a matinee today in a mostly empty theater. I was going to say that this was the longest I waited ever to see a Star Wars movie, but then I remembered that I was a deprived eight-year-old who waited seemingly forever to see the movie because my parents didn't want to wait on line. I remember seeing lines stretching forever in the Houston Galleria, this in the days before several-thousand-theater releases. Of course, "forever" to a small kid might just be a few weeks—does anyone remember when the Star Wars phenomenon stopped crowding the theaters so? I did see it in a full movie theater, I think for Keith Goehring's birthday party, though it may have been that of some other E.O. Lovett Elementary classmate, and went on to see it another six times that year. I'm trying to remember the last time a movie enthralled me so that I saw it multiple times in the theater during its opening release. Probably "Pulp Fiction."

As for the movie itself? I entirely endorse my brother's take on the movie. I couldn't hear Yoda talk without thinking of Anthony Lane's hilarious line "Break me a f—ing give." (Ah, how Mr. Shawn rolls over in his grave.) And the continuity errors! Lane notes the implausibility of the lack of ultrasound in the high-tech Star Wars world. The effort to shovel every member of the original trilogy into the backstory seems mistaken to me. Now that we know that Chewbacca fought with Yoda side by side, are we to believe he never breathed a word of the Jedi to Han Solo, even as the legendary last of the Jedi, Obi-Wan Kenobi boards the Falcon? Rumors about a moon-sized battleship didn't sweep the galaxy in the twenty years it was being constructed? How come Leia's going after Kenobi instead of Yoda? If Vader's already the Emperor's life-saving sidekick in III, why is he so deferential to the Peter Cushing in IV? How come the technology has regressed in the twenty years between III and IV? What happened to all of R2-D2's powers? If one can program a droid to be nearly top-level Jedi Master-quality, and individual Jedi Masters can wipe out hundreds of droid army regulars, why not build a handful of General Grievouses instead of millions of cannon-fodder Roger Roger robots? (Damn government contractors!) And how come General Grievous gets a cool name instead of a letter-number combo?

Tyler Cowen gives a public choice reading of the double trilogy, gives a not entirely convincing defense of the movies as movies and links to Easter Eggs in the new movie (like the blink-and-you'll-miss-it scene with the Millennium Falcon, as well as Jar Jar Binks's only line).

Special bonus: my February 21, 1997 review of the rerelease of The Empire Strikes Back. The date brings back memories, since it was the week I met the woman who'd later divorce me, and I know she'd be upset if she googled me and found no reference to her whatsoever.

I'm back in Arlington, Virginia, arriving Tuesday evening after fourteen hours of travel (including an hour queueing at Customs at JFK—and there was a bit of another delay there because of the $#($% Horlicks I bought my father). I didn't blog because my Internet connection was on the fritz for a few days, and I didn't get around to figuring out what it was until today, just because the irony of having easier access to the Internet on a different continent than in my own home amused me. Turns out that a neighbor named Murphy (or a neighbor with a system named Murphy) had set up his own '02.11b wireless network and it was interfering with mine until I changed my channel. I haven't tried to connect to Murphy's wireless yet.

In other irony news, I refinanced my Wells Fargo mortgage with another company, who, while I was in London, proceeded to sell my new mortgage to Wells Fargo. It seems like Wells Fargo and I could've cut a deal that would've made us both some money by avoiding the few thousand in taxes I had to pay with the county to record a new mortgage, but I imagine there's some federal regulation out there prohibiting the bank from offering to cut my interest rate in exchange for a thousand bucks up front.

I spent an hour the morning of Saturday, May 14, programming my TiVo with the utmost of precision to ensure that it would capture precisely the fifteen hours of television and movies I wanted while I was gone, and not clog up the hard drive with Seinfeld reruns. I left for the airport about 3 pm. At 8:09 p.m., Saturday, May 14, as my TiVo was happily recording the full sequence of "Clone Wars," the cable went out, and, because I wasn't home to reset the cable box, my TiVo recorded nothing but static for 17 days. Comcast rebated the 17 days of cable I didn't get, I'll catch the "Deadwood" episodes I missed on June 10, I'll survive without seeing the encore performance of Lindsay Lohan on SNL, and I'll eventually catch reruns of the other shows. Still, as I belt-tighten my budget to account for my paycut, I imagine Comcast shouldn't be demonstrating to me how easy it is for me to live without my $85/month cable. Amusing TiVo bug: because a blank screen apparently takes up so little hard-drive space once it goes through the TiVo compression algorithms, the device had room to select 337 episodes of static it thought I might enjoy.

I didn't use my auto until today. I have keyless entry, and I was curious whether I had successfully shut it off so as not to drain the battery for the three weeks I was gone. I nervously approached the car with the key in hand... and discovered I had left my car unlocked for three weeks. Good thing I have honest neighbors in my garage.

My tremendous thanks to Ruth and Kevin, who put me up for a week and a half, to Eric for being a good traveling companion for another week, and to the readers who wrote with suggestions and good wishes.

What are the odds that two bloggers would be at the same Christopher Hitchens talk? Pretty good, as it turns out. (I can't recognize if that's my lecture companions in this photo, who were waiting for me outside when I had actually arrived in the auditorium first.) From my front-row perch, I could smell the alcohol on Hitch's breath, and he and Wheen polished off a bottle of wine between them during the proceedings. Hitchens was still in fine form: "Faith is the most overrated of the virtues—after patience." Hitchens paraphrasing Karzai: "You fools! You just burned down the library of Jalalabad with 200 copies of the Koran in it!" (Repeating from this article, of course.) And his mildly misogynistic take on Mother Teresa: "To say contraception is the greatest threat to world peace is the hysterical ravings of a crazed virgin." As State notes, the audience questioning was devoted to Iraq. Francis Wheen served as moderator, and his book on "mumbo-jumbo" seems like it would be entertaining. We didn't stick around for autographs. I was impressed with myself that I had purchased the fifteen-pound "Love, Poverty, and War," for ten pounds until I checked my Amazon wish-list and discovered that it was available for $11 in my home country. Katie Newmark suggests that I've received additional utility from the earlier purchase, but I can't say that my internal discount rate is that high.

Kevin got knocked out of the poker tournament shortly after I left Friday night.

I tried again Saturday night at the 110-pound tournament, with 64 players and a top prize of 2000 pounds, but never really got the cards. I saw three showdowns in three hours; I doubled up when I hit a set with my 44, won the blinds once with a pre-flop raise, won another hand after the flop checked through with an aggressive bet on the turn after a blank hit, then bled chips when I got good starting hands that missed the flop and left me with no outs to play aggressively, forcing me to fold early: AKhearts and an all-club flop won by Q9s against a player with top pair, that sort of thing. I fold AQs on the river to a bet on a T9886 board. I went all in with ATo from the big blind against a 2xBB bet from the button and a call from the small blind, and tied with another ATo, and that split pot was my last profit of the night. I open-pot-raise with 98s two off the button, the button calls, the flop misses me, and I fold to a bet. Down to a 6xBB stack, I have K8s in the big blind, the cut-off raises to 3xBB, the small blind calls all in. The Tube will stop running soon, so I go all in—my utility is worse off getting knocked out at 12:10 then at 11:45. As it turns out, I was better off calling and betting the AK5 flop; the cut-off had QQ, calls my all-in bet, and hits his set on the turn. Even a second king on the river doesn't help me, though it would've beat the A7s small blind.

Back at Abbey Road. I saw my cousin again at the British Library, and visited the Science Museum, where they had a working Babbage Difference Engine, made in 1991 using nineteenth-century technology. Nifty, that, as were displays on topology and fairly esoteric stuff that I don't normally associate with museums. An exhibit on arithmetic teaching devices through the ages included a 1979 "Little Professor", which was an 11th-birthday present for me. It probably cost $40 at the time, and was both larger than and a thousandth as powerful as my iPod. I got suckered into paying eight pounds for the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" exhibit, forgetting that I didn't really like the movie that much. Life-sized Vogons reciting poetry and Sam Rockwell's wardrobe if you're into that sort of thing; the occasional plaque making a half-hearted attempt to connect movie events with real-life scientific issues.

Otherwise, did lots of neighborhood exploring and walking; my blisters have blisters, and one of my toes has turned an interesting color. Notes:

• The Sherlock Holmes statue on Baker Street has the engraved possessive "its" misspelled with an apostrophe.
• Cirocco wanted postcards, and I've been appalled at the low quality of what's out there. Picadilly Circus has sophisticated LCD advertising that's reminiscent of "Blade Runner," and all the postcards are of the decade-old neon.
• I've been entertained by the restaurants proclaiming to be American. The "Old Orleans" offers fajitas and quesadillas, but not gumbo. Another more upscale place was advertising "Boston roast salmon." I suppose Australians feel the same way when seeing an Outback Steakhouse; I didn't check the Australian-themed restaurant for whether it had similar misplaced menu items.
• My father asked for Horlicks malted powder, so I went to the O2 center on Finchley, where there's a giant supermarket. The mall is mostly restaurants, so the Sainsbury grocery and the multiplex are clearly the anchors of the shopping complex—and I discovered that my dawdling at the bookstore meant that I couldn't get into the grocery at 5:10 because it closed at 5!? Who closes a grocery at 5? The British do, and that's why they've lost their empire, I tell you. I found it at a smaller grocery that kept more reasonable hours, plus I purchased him the competing brands of Milo and Malteser in case they more closely approximated his platonic ideal of a malt mix. (Horlicks is actually available in an Indian grocery in Herndon, and probably also at the British shops in Clarendon by me and Santa Monica by my brother, so this was a bit of a fool's errand, but I had wanted to see a full-scale British supermarket.)
• I had thought all the NY Yankees baseball caps I saw were being worn by Americans, but I've heard enough British accents to know that it's just a trendy thing to wear here.
• No really exceptional meals. I tried the Yo! Sushi chain, because the idea of chain sushi served on moving conveyer belts appealed to me. It was better than American supermarket sushi, but not that special, and it occurred to me too late that 4 pm was a bad time to be eating conveyer belt sushi. Plus they charged a pound for tap water, the bastages. They offered a duck hand-roll, but the meat was dry and disappointing. Pappadum Cafe was an Indian buffet north of Russell Square that was hit-and-miss. American buffets are "All You Can Eat," while the British ones are the more polite "All You Care To Eat." I did have the 3-pound curry from a hole-in-the-wall in Waterloo so that I could say I've had that experience.
• There is a Lee Ho Fook in Soho, and it does serve beef chow mein, but I foolishly failed to pick up a menu.
• Eric and I stepped into a betting parlour to see if we could wager money on Paris getting the 2012 Olympics, but the attendant had no idea what we were talking about. We did see people betting on fictional CG animated horse races, which is an impressive level of addiction. I'm surprised they didn't have a guy there taking bets on "What number am I thinking?"
• When I returned to St. John's Wood Saturday, there was a huge crowd for a cricket match. A correspondent recommended the cricket experience to me, but I couldn't bring myself to do it, perhaps from too much exposure to the Monty Python version of cricket. I do want to thank all those who wrote in with suggestions, and am sorry that I didn't find the time to take up most of them.