R and I had our last pastries from Ole and Steen (almond and apricot or orange or something like that), not too sweet, very satisfying. We walked over to Embankment Station and took the Underground to South Kensington. We just used our phones without an app, tap in tap out (unlike NYC where you only have to tap in).

Lots of tunnels to V&A, and we poked our heads out to get a photo of the Natural History Museum. We wandered a bit at V&A. R enjoyed the glass display. The V&A functions largely as an open all the time design library, with the expected strengths and weaknesses. Lots of school groups.

We came back, stopped at Caffe Concerto to get two croissants and they didn’t have pain au chocolate, or at least they said they didn’t which was legitimately odd. I set A. up with brunch: a croissant, a banana, strawberries, a slice of cheese. Then R. and I went to Ship and Shovell, which had order and pay at the counter first pub rules, unlike Sherlock Holmes Pub dining room. We split a fish and chips, he got a side salad and I got a side of onion rings. He had a nettle beer and I had a golden ale which was tasty (Badger, I think). Empty when we got there a little before 1 and full by the time we left.

He headed over to Embankment to take the Underground the other direction to get pictures of Tower Bridge; I went back to the hotel to chill out because I’m about done with the Doing Things part of vacation, and there’s still one more dinner out at 40 Elephants, plus Operation Mincement at the Fortune Theater. If A. is bored, we will try the portrait gallery, otherwise, I’m staying put and possibly snacking if I get hungry. I should probably also pack up because tomorrow starts early.

Later:

40 Elephants was a blast. It’s really just a bar, but after Ship and Shovell, I wasn’t that hungry. A. ate a meal, but R. and I just had a small plate (the chicken karaage) and drinks. I had 2 really good sidecars. The theming is fantastic and the service is good.

We dropped A. off at the hotel, and walked over to the Fortune Theatre to see Operation Mincement. Oree looked good, so I bought a couple pastries for tomorrow for A. and R. which was probably not the best plan because I had to keep track of them and not let them get crushed during the show.

The show was amazing. The book is legit great. Very, very little speaking, almost all singing. Small cast, and gender bent casting played completely straight. The man who played Hester is soooo good at it. I’m going to try to see if I can go see it again. I loved the whole thing. R. didn’t love it as much — he had trouble making out the words. It is a goofy show, but it’s also telling a straight story from history while simultaneously making a whole lot of subtle but heavy hitting points about classism and sexism, ambition, conflict between personal motivations and the needs of the group / collective, and how stories get told later versus what happened in the moment and whose stories get told and just all the really good stuff. Nice zinger at MAGA in it, too.

R. and I had more Pave from Liberte for breakfast (it does not stale quickly, yay!), and then we walked over to the Thames and looked at Big Ben and then over to Buckingham and caught the tail end of the changing of the guard accidentally, learned that Macron was visiting in a couple of days (on the 8th) based on the massive alternating and same sized French and English flags on the mall. We stopped at Chestnut bakery and got A. a croissant and a Nutella brookie (and a croissant for R.s breakfast tomorrow) and then went to a Tesco Express and bought fruit, veg, cooked chicken, cheddar cheese for A. and Stilton for R. On the way back to the hotel, we passed Cream Dream, and I picked up a chocolate and hazelnut sweet for later — that’s the vegan bakery I’d meant to go to last night but did not. Ukrainian. There is a conspicuous lack of Russians in this city, which I’m not sad about at all. It’s a little creepy how many of them there were in Paris, and I’m still kicking myself about that lamp I bought.

We came back to the hotel, and I got a reservation at the rooftop at St James Trafalgar for 1:45 pm, and adjusted our Sherlock Holmes pub reservation from 5 to 615.

I think between Pride and Macron’s visit, we have a partial explanation for why it’s been so easy to get dining reservations. But it might also have been the absence of Russians.

Later: OK, Rooftop was excellent. I brought my umbrella, wore my travel vest and left my visor and sunglasses at the hotel, so obviously, the sun came out and they retracted the roof. Thank you, fucking Murphy, I guess? Great spicy margarita, really really amazing mushroom taco (vegan). R. got the cheeseburger and fries and the skinny fries were mad delicious. I seem to have finally broken my Too Many Burgers streak. England is really good about having vegan everywhere.

We went to the National Gallery and I got some good pics of the Van Eyck wedding and the mirror in the background. Did you know there were miniatures surrounding the mirror? Because I sure as hell did not know that. WTF. The Rosa Bonheur is hung so that if you stand just in the hallway to the gift shop it’s nearly perfect so good on them for doing that right. Claude (one name) has some really nice landscapes with some really useless figures in them. There was a really nice Finnish post-impressionist. The building itself is very beautiful, and there are some nice mosaics on the floor, unattributed as near as I can tell, which is a pity. We’ll probably go back with A. later. It was moderately crowded.

There’s a great picture of Westerkerk, and very little around it. So weird to see it that open to the sky around it!

We saw a super old dude in black and white check suit with hat and amazing shoes.

Dinner was at Sherlock Holmes Pub. They were out of both the pale and the amber, and British IPAs don’t taste like much altho Roland got one anyway. The Sherlock Holmes room / exhibit is very cute. Since it is a Sunday, the menu is different and at first, I thought we had a complete fail on our hands. They still had the fish and chips, so R. got that, and I’d planned to share it with him. But the burger, steak and chicken escalopes were NOT on the menu, so A. wound up with the roast chicken instead, which came with cabbage, stuffing, carrots, duck fat roasted potatoes and a pig in a blanket (sausage wrapped in bacon in this case). I figured I’d split that with her if she hated it. She tried the cabbage (two bites!) but decided no, and she didn’t care for the carrots (probably the thyme, and she doesn’t like them cooked anyway) or the stuffing. But the bird, potatoes and pig in a blanket went down the hatch and she was mad when I tried a bite of the sausage. LOL Calories listed on the menu, with the fish and chips being around 1200 and the chicken around 1300. It’s a good thing we only got the two, especially since we then added some stuff to it.

I had about half the fish, and I ate the stuffing, carrots and cabbage. R. added a yorkshire pudding, which A. tried a couple bites of but passed on. We also got bread, and split that pretty evenly. A. had the brownie with ice cream for dessert; R. and I split a peach melba tatin that was vegan and awesome. I had a single of Glenmorangie because they were out of the Bruichladdich; Roland had a Lagavulin.

A. was pretty hostile at the beginning, and skeptical of the whole Sunday dinner idea but I showed her a wikipedia article about it and she settled down and the whole dinner wound up being fantastic. It was a nice, cozy meal and wasn’t even a crazy amount of money (115 L and I added 20L in tip, and it totaled out to $157 and change).

I was not aiming for the Sunday Dinner Experience, but it’s nice we had it and that it worked out. I think one of the best parts of it was seeing how they portioned things.

Happy Independence Day!

We got an Uber to Musee D’Orsay after breakfast. We did not have lunch. The impressionist trick works on many but not all of the paintings in 5, including Seurat (altho we didn’t make it to Gauguin). A. kinda blew up after about 40 minutes. She liked the sculpture, but there were too many people in the impressionist rooms. Oh well!

We went to Angiolo, but on the way there we stopped at Damonte & Lacarrieu a “concept store”, but whatever, R. like a lamp in the window so we went in and bought it for a lot of money and ultimately paid almost half that again to ship it to us at home. We’ll see if it shows up, and if I later find it for 20% or less the price online somewhere.

Angiolo for ice cream was amazing and had a bunch of vegan options. Really, really great.

Our efforts to reload our Navigo cards and get one for A. went cartoonishly awry, partly because we’re idiots but mostly because we kept getting distracted by a scam artist who was pretending to be helpful. At one point, he grabbed my money, but I grabbed it right back, so shades of that night in De Wallen I guess. He did snag some of the change from successfully reloading the card, but I think he got maybe 6E out of the deal and when he saw I was headed over to the person to complain he cleared out finally. In all the chaos, I’d accidentally loaded another trip onto a card that had one, and then I finally just used coins in the machine helpful guy said didn’t take coins, and it worked just fine. Then the train was crazy crowded and A. freaked out. Why we didn’t just Uber I will never know, but I’m pretty sure R. has learned from this.

We got home, and I made A. a cheese sandwich (so the cheese is now gone). Then we went to Fugue for dinner which was fantastic. Nikka Coffey Grain whisky is wonderful, and the Eau de Vie from prunes is also really yummy.

I cooked the chicken nuggets for A. and did the whole box (it was small) and she wound up eating all of it. Which is fine! And she’s eaten almost all of the carrots and lettuce and had some grapes and an apple. The apple juice was a little too tart. Win some lose some.

In the end, it was breakfast, ice cream and dinner for R. and me (no lunch today), which worked out well.

I did some laundry, but only mine, not anyone else’s. R. says he has clothes to get until he’s home. We made a bunch of reservations for the England days, and mostly planned tomorrow’s travels.

We packed up and checked out and got an Uber to StayCity Gare de l’Est. R. took some convincing, but once he understood the pricing, he was game. We had lunch at “A Place for”, which is like a Paris diner (thank you SIL T. for figuring out what to call that place, because R. and I couldn’t figure out what to call it). I had a really great Manhattan, and fish and chips and a tiny cup of espresso which I gleefully dumped the packet of sugar into. A. had the kids chicken strips and a massive quantity of fries, and a couple scoops of vanilla ice cream.

I went to a Carrefour and bought some fruit, veg, bread, pastry and a box of chicken nuggets. I fed part of the bread and some of the cheese from home for her dinner. R. and I went to Faubourg Daimant (we walked). It’s vegan, and there was amazing food. He had a quinoa dish. We split some bread and fake butter with smoked salt and fake caviar with almond “ricotta”. We had the tater tots with some kind of green sauce which was fabulous. I had the ganache for dessert and he had the apple dessert. I had a mezcal cocktail and he had a spritz, both very herbal. He had a pinot noir. He had the framboise (the best he’s ever had he says) and I had a calvados which was excellent. No coffee. We were stuffed.

We took an uber to Caveau de la Huchette for jazz which we had to stand in line for. It was pretty good, and we met W. (T.’s boyfriend) and SIL T. talked very loudly into my ear and probably could not hear me at all. We walked around a bit, and found Caveau des Oubliettes, which had blues and was better, altho by that time T. was pretty drunk and simultaneously flagging.

There was some kind of music festival between us and the Latin Quarter, so we took the Metro back. We bought navigo cards (probably would not have had to do this if I had set the app up, which I never bothered to do) and loaded them with a single fare to get home. Nice straight shot to Gare de l’Est and an easy walk from there. The Metro is clean and smooth and well-lit and has seats and isn’t terrifying at all, and no one harassed us even a little. Such a change from my previous Paris trip. I might be willing to come back sooner than 23 years. Apparently T. and W. are going to be in London most of the time we are there. Hilarious.

OK, first things first. There’s a really complicated rape in this book. And the whole existence of the main character is a quite epic consent violation. This thing needs a lot of information provided on the tin that I didn’t look for in advance. Given the time frame it was written, this is not hugely surviving, and I’m still uncertain whether I will read any of the subsequent novels, but I am for sure going to take a good hard look at a lot of spoiler ridden reviews first.

SPOILERS!

Here is my contribution.

I’ve been working through kindle unlimited backlog selections, with mixed to negative results. After Nourse’s _The Bladerunner_ (DNF), I decided to look around for medical science fiction written by women with women viewpoint characters. Oh look! Here’s one!

Cherijo Grey Veil is nominally the daughter but actually the modified clone of her “father”, Joseph Grey Veil. She learns about how she came into existence, is completely appalled, and plots her escape. Little does she know that the recently deceased Maggie, the closest thing she had to a maternal figure, and her “father”, both know that she has learned all this stuff, and in fact her “escape” is part of a continuation of her tightly controlled existence.

Cherijo goes to a frontier planet and gets a job working as a doctor in an understaffed colony. She meets Kao, who Chooses her, and a variety of other people including the extremely problematic linguist / Terran / all around oddball Duncan Reever. Nominally Reever will become her rapist, but he’s under the control of an infecting sentient species called The Core at the time, so it’s honestly as much a violation of him as it is of her. I did mention that it was a very complicated rape. Good news, Cherijo’s immune system takes out every last Core particle that infects her. The rest of them try to have her convicted of murder, but she points out that they killed even more sentients than she killed Core so everyone withdraws their charges.

Then Dear Old Dad and the League that Terra belongs to decides that Cherijo doesn’t count as sentient herself, because of the manner in which she came into existence (neither natural nor an authorized pathway) and because she has been under the control of her creator (Joseph) her entire life. Kao is at death’s door, but his Clan has come to claim him and protect her. Kao’s last words are delivered via Reever, and Cherijo gets off of K2 and even gets to stay with her cat, her Chakacat friend, and the pilot who she hired to take her to K2. This, however, leads to a breach between the League and his people, and the book ends with an absolute wild price on Cherijo’s head and anyone who helps her. This in no way slows down her adoptive Clan, but definitely complicates everyone’s life.

All through this, Cherijo is busy being a doctor as a way of ignoring her awful, lonely life. By the time she’s on the Clan’s ship, tho, she’s being bullied into taking better care of herself much more effectively. An empath on K2 tried to do this, but for a variety of reasons it kept going weird.

Oh, and Cherijo gets a message from the deceased Maggie, and then further subliminally embedded messages and all kinds of other weirdness. Clearly, the next few books are going to get successively nuttier, if this beginning is any indication.

So many problems here! First off, that rape. Second, the powerful father who is so ludicrously powerful. It really teeters between believable and not. His contribution medically was to make it so no one ever really needed an organ from anyone else (and thus no rejection issues), so you can kinda see why people are willing to remunerate him so extensively. And it’s also clear he’s ludicrously good and manipulating people albeit more by being a bully than by being charming. I came her for medical SF, and what I got was Chosen One in multiple flavors. Off to read reviews of book 2!

ETA:
Interesting review of what I just read — no real arguments with the summation here, altho obviously, we have different feelings about SF in general.

https://www.thebooksmugglers.com/2010/09/guest-dare-stardoc-by-s-l-viehl.html

ETAYA:

OK, as expected, this thing gets increasingly unhinged for another 9 books before having some kind of time travel event and ending. I’m … not that interested. I mean, twenty years ago, there’s a decent chance I would have absolutely devoured this thing but no. Not right now. Off to go find more medical SF that is a little less frenetically complicated!

Once upon a time, when the first Bladerunner movie came out and I was obsessed with all things Harrison Ford (I got over it, as I think most of us have), I tracked down the Alan Nourse book as a paperback in a library. I tried reading it then, and was incredibly confused. I somehow learned that the movie was based on PK Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and tried reading that, and didn’t much care for that either. I’d always known that the relationship of written works to derivative plays / film / TV series was fraught, but wow, this whole thing was Extra.

Recently, I realized I could access The Bladerunner by Nourse via Kindle Unlimited. I selected it, and it sat around until today, when I tried to read it. And I’ll just say straight up: it’s a really bad book. It’s bad science fiction, because there’s all this complicated pay phone stuff while at the same time there are autohelicopters that you can make video calls from. Make it make sense. Don’t tell me no one had imagined mobile phones. Everyone knew all about tricorders and communicators from Star Trek: TOS, and everyone knew about mobile phones. Cellular phones were ever so slightly later, but plans were in the works by the time this thing was published. It’s just bad science fiction.

That would make it problematic, but nothing can save this book from its reprehensible politics. It’s honestly reassuring to learn that Heinlein dedicated Farnham’s Freehold to Nourse, and Friday was based in part on Nourse’s wife. Nourse’s actual career as an actual medical doctor was, shockingly, even shorter than my career as a programmer, which is really saying something. The description of the robots trying to learn from Dr. Long (surely a reference back to Heinlein) and Dr. Long’s efforts to subvert that process are on a par with all the episodes of bad SF TV in which someone logics some piece of alien something or other into exploding because of a paradox or whatever.

While it is nice to have a depiction of disability in SF, when you name the person with the clubfoot Billy Gimp, it’s real hard to have any respect for the author.

But I think the most insane part of all of this is the backstory on how what sounds like Medicare for All broke healthcare and all of society. This is the weirdest fever dream straight from a Republican member of the AMA in the 1950s, complete with an anti-healthcare mob firebombing the doc’s house, killing his wife and baby, as part of his motivation for providing illicit health care. The eugenics component of the story is exceptionally wild, 100% the kind of nonsense that circulated during the debates leading up to the ACA. In this world, you can only get official health care at government clinics if you agree to sterilization if you get treatment more than three times. They don’t do this to kids under 5, but apparently they really are doing tubals prepubescent girls and vasectomies on prepubescent boys. I think if I kept reading, I’d find out they were euthanizing some of the patients, but I’m not inclined to stick around for that. I nearly bailed out when Doc Long starts smoking a pipe _at the hospital_. But what did me in was the explanation how vaccinations campaigns wiped out natural resistance and that’s why everyone kept getting sick.

“A medical triumph [successful childhood vaccinations against diphtheria in the 1940s and 1950s], it had seemed, until sporadic outbreaks of a more virulent, drug-resistant form of diphtheria began striking adults in the 1970s, with antibiotic treatment now ineffective and the death rate rising to over 60 percent of all victims. Within another ten years widespread epidemics were sweeping the country and mass immunization campaigns were needed to damp the flame of a dreadful disease running wildfire through a population left naked of any natural resistance.”

Ok, what the actual fuck. Obviously, none of this actually happened, but what we’re seeing here is someone who almost certainly was run out of medicine in the 1950’s because he was anti-vax then uses science fiction to predict that diphtheria will kill off 60% of its adult victims in waves, during the same time frame that old people are living longer and longer? How does that even work? Also, having diphtheria does not protect that well against getting it again! Worse than vaccination, actually! This is so weird!

“Rupert Heinz had analyzed this pattern and come up with a frightening thesis: that medical intervention in itself had contributed the lion’s share to the massive spread of this virulent infection. Without immunizations earlier in the century, natural resistance would have kept the milder disease under control; now even a massive immunization campaign would be no more than a stop-gap, with horrible future epidemics to be expected as new virulent strains of diphtheria developed in the population.”

Anyway. While this book is of moderate interest as a window into just how long a certain strain of thinking has been kicking around in some corners of our society (Nourse did not make it to 70, and he died in Thorp, so I’m pretty sure we all know what corners I’m referring to), it’s way too painful for me to actually finish reading.

DNF. Ugh.

I haven’t read any James White in years, but I remember really loving the Sector General stories and novels. Having perused the wikipedia entries for White and Nourse, it’s not hard to understand why I loved White, and why I bounced so hard off of Nourse. Now, while experiencing moderate temptation to reread White, mostly I’m remembering enjoying Jenny Schwartz’s book, Doctor Galaxy, and wondering if there’s anything else current in the mashup of doctor / hospital stories and science fiction that I have sometimes enjoyed and sometimes abhorred.

ETA: I’ve never read S.L. Viehl’s Stardoc series, so I’m off to try a sample of that.

ETAYA: Accidentally stayed up late reading Stardoc. This is not great literature, but at least it’s fun!

Went to DisneyLand. A. was difficult. We did Phantom Manor twice and took pictures and looked at the Lair of the Dragon which was awesome. A. and I really, really, really enjoyed that. It would have been a miserable day otherwise. Pirates of the Caribbean was being refurbished, as was Buzz Lightyear.

We had lunch at Annette’s Diner. A. had the chicken wings and celery and I had a burger and fries. Way too many burgers and fries on this trip already.

R. and I got an uber to a Carrefour and I bought groceries so we could feed A. and sometimes us at the hotel.

We went back to DisneyLand in the evening and did Star Tours, and the Mysteries of the Nautilus, which like the Lair of the Dragon was really awesome.

The third Preiti / Mossa book, and now that they are together they are having problems.

HEY THERE ARE ALWAYS SPOILERS HERE! You’ve been warned.




Where was I?

Oh! Some friends from student days are having difficulty. One, Villette, is up for a donship and subjected to underhanded attacks and gossip. The second, Pretanj, Villette’s cousin, is taking it seriously and knowing a little about what happened to Preiti in the previous books, asks for Preiti’s help, as she does not want to go the Investigators. Preiti attempts to interest Mossa, who says no very strenuously and is generally behaving either weirdly, or like someone with attachment issues, severe bouts of depression and burnout. So probably choice B. In any event, Preiti and Pretanj travel to Stortellen, and Preiti gets a detailed view of what a university other than Valdegeld is like. Villette’s amazing, and has invented something that you pop into your nose and now you don’t need an atmoscarf any more.

Preiti meets a whole lot of friends, coworkers and randos around Villette in or adjacent to Stortellen. Lots of fun getting to know a bunch of stereotypes of academe and other hangers on. So many reasons someone might hate a very successful young academic like Villette! Mossa eventually shows up (I mean, it says so on the tin so we are not particularly surprised) and probably only Preiti is surprised by how long she’s been there and wooo is she mad! Fair, tho.

Their relationship and the case advances, and the friendship between Preiti and Pretanj increases and Villette starts to perceive the danger and we have further evidence of the incompetency and/or evils of academic institutions that really ought to have been supportive and sensible and most definitely are not.

It’s an enjoyable read, but I probably would not start with this book. The tales set along the rails of Giant are a great deal of fun, and the language play Malka Older engages in gets better on each outing.

Last night and tonight are Night of the Koemarkt, which is a free festival in Heerenveen. It ran past 1 am, and the crowds in the street drinking lasted much longer. I wound up getting up and reading for about an hour, then going back to bed and finally getting out the mask because when it was quiet, it was already light out. Oy. The things I fail to research ahead of time.

We had lunch with PJ, A. and J. at the Grand Cafe Park Hotel Tjaarda. It was very pleasant. I had kroketten, which I’ve never done before, but it looks like it should be generally safe and it was tasty. A.’s burger was spiced so she ate her fries and had Dame Blanche. R. had orangekoek for dessert; I forget what he ate. I had tea to drink. We talked a long time. A. almost fell as we returned to the cars, but someone (outside our group) helped catch her and she recovered quickly. She is an amazing woman, and it’s a lesson to me not to be distracted by PJ.

We went back to ShortStay Heerenveen, and left R. there to nap, while A. and I walked around the Saturday Market. I’d already been to several bakeries, but I found another and this one had an anise flavored frysk pastry, keallepoat.

https://fy.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keallepoat

R. and I went to the Madeline snackbar and chatted with the nice young woman who has traveled to Canada. We got fried kipstrips and patat with ketchup for A., who ate the chicken and saved the fries for later. Which might work; I have the small cooler sack and the ice pack. We’ll see. After we left her and her meal in the ShortStay, we went to PokeGuy, where I got the tuna sushirrito, which had surimi in it that briefly panicked me. It was reasonably tasty. R. got a poke bowl and he really enjoyed it. We stopped at a Jumbo where I finally got sukerbrod without milk products, and some more bananas and red grapes.

They’ve gone back to Valk. I’ve had my Duvel, and am thinking about the leftover kip satay from LA Bistro. But maybe that’s breakfast. I have a plan for lunch tomorrow (Den Hespel in Dongen), and I’ve already checked in and paid up for our StayCity in Marne La Vallee, where I got my upgrade to a 5 bedroom Villa, which is insane, but should be entertaining. We all have Disney tickets (altho not for tomorrow) and I’m excited to look out the window for several hours while being mildly blissed out on dramamine and Not Driving.

We had no problems getting on the plane. It was excessively comfortable and every other transatlantic will suck after this. Fortunately, I think we are getting the same going home from Gatwick. (Foreshadowing!) I did not correctly enter my meal request somehow (probably forgot to save it) but the small plates were adjusted so I did get some food. I also got some sleep, and A. was actually happy on this plane. Wow! It was a red eye, so we left last night and arrived today.

After we landed, we walked out to taxi stand (because we did carryon only), then over to app pickup, but neither was accessible to R. who was picking us up, so we returned to the terminal, went out to departures. He was able to meet us there, but he was finicky about parking precisely, and we didn’t understand that. We thought he was going to pass us by, and then when we went over to him and he kept adjusting, I thought he was going to hit us. Nerve wracking. I had a horrible headache on the drive up, so I put the mask / headband headphones on and napped. A little difficulty checking in, and they didn’t make me pay for the first night since it was after checking time for today by the time they got it squared away. The Short Stay apartment is close to everything, which is nice. R. and I went to LA Bistro, and I had a lot of bread and Roland’s Aperol Spritz because I was so out of it I ordered a cocktail that tasted great but had gin in it. I also had chicken satay with fries and a salad, and took some of it back to the room with me. I fed A out of the food we brought with us, and we stopped at an Albert Heijn to get stuff for tomorrow morning (croissant for Ali, some fruit and veg to replenish that food). R. checked into Valk, but I put Ali to bed before we went to dinner and she slept through.