THE BRITISH THREAD II

I think he'll try and make me pay for that.

No he won't, George! Spendius is desperate for a good discussion, in his boredom he even started to pester the girls at the yabberline now.

San Francisco is a poor man's Blackpool, trams but no tower, illuminations, pier, golden mile or George Formby.

I wasn't pestering them. I was "taking a pop" at chittering becoming the sole means of human discourse.

How many times do you assure others that they bring sunshine into the day and that you wish them well before it becomes apparent that it has become nothing but a chirp.

4 times.

You should know that I don't do that, I am German: I cut to the chase without further ado!

And another thing Cal--that's my style of yabber-yabbering and the last thing a yabber-yabber thread needs, by its own logic, is official instructions how it should be done.

Yeah, but you're lacking tact, spendi!

I always took my weight on my elbows and I never, ever asked for money.

No one would give it to you anyways!

I wasn't censoring you on that thread. And I'm not official. I don't post on it often myself, although I like the people. I did think your mode is inappropriate. It's a long running thread with a close culture, a place of peace for the participants, chosen by the participants, and here you go with more mocking, your a2k pattern, another word for which might be chittering, rather like a squirrel needing attention. People talk sincerely there, give your mocking a rest.

That of course is my opinion.

That was funny !

I really enjoyed the rather corny George Formby bit.

San Francisco is many things, bit not Blackpool, I think.

We have trams and we do indeed have a tower - Coit tower named after the eccentric and wealthy Lillie Coit who cut a wide path in San Francisco life. She was well-known for occasionally dressing as a man so she could get into the gambling saloons and stews on the Barbary Coast down below Telegraph Hill. She had a lifelong fascination with the city's firefighters and the Irishmen who staffed it. She gave the city a large bequest to decorate the city she said gave her so much happiness. The arrchitects gave her this replica of a fireman's nozzel - reputed to be a part for which she held a particular fondness. It decorates the top of Telegraph Hill today.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/Coit_tower_lombard_street.JPG

Coit tower really is very, very nice - though parking and going up with the elevator on a public holiday day (here: Memorial Day) is a bit stressful.

Parking anywhere in North Beach or on Telegraph Hill is stressful every day. But somehow we manage.

By the way, Elise and I had a great time in Berlin last May. She even found the site of her grandfather's old house in Charlottenberg. Good food, very pleasant walks around the city. We visited the museums; drove all around the city, finding some very interesting architecture and even one of the very few remaining ghastly socialist apartment blocks on the east side; toured Humbolt and the Frei University in the company of a physicist friend who also took me to visit Otto Hahn's laboratory (now part of the Frei University) where he and Lise Meitner discovered the fissioning of uranium 235. I also enjoyed Potsdam and even eggs in a glass for breakfast at Cafe Einstein, which was just a couple of blocks from the hotel. Next year Munich and Bavaria! (I'm just getting back into this travel thing after becoming saturated with it during my Navy years. I'm not as adept as you - but getting there. - we're going to China in a couple of weeks.)

Trams are symptomatic of our collective nostalgia. At first they were seen as something backward, and ripped up in deference to modernity. Those places that kept hold of them were seen as backward, but not any more.

Blackpool, Amsterdam and San Francisco's trams are all tourist attractions. There's talk in Southampton of re-introducing them, a lot of restoration work has been carried out on vintage trams to ferry the cruise line passengers into a city, with more parks per square mile than any other city in Europe, after Vienna.

Btw thanks for appreciating my sense of humour, there's not a lot of opportunity for chuckles on the Israel threads.

Fancy trams being a tourist attraction!!. They look like kiddie's rides to me. I have a negative attitude to tourist attractions generally. "It's just a pile of stones Bob" Andy Warhol said when they tried to get him out of the limo to climb a pyramid in Mexico.

Tourists seem to just mooch and gawp in between the eating and drinking. Mailer said something about it being a photograph collection operation in aid of being better than the neighbours.

I would rather go to bed than go the China.

Oh yeah!!

You don't know married women Cal.

You're an old stick in the mud though. I've been up the pyramid at Chechen Itza, and I thought it was fantastic. You're the one that's missing out, years of holidaying in Scarborough gave me a wanderlust. You'd get on well with my old mum, she gets pissed off going down to Tescos.