London

I just got back from a trip where I, along with three professors, accompanied 49 high school juniors to London. We left on Tuesday and got back around noon on Sunday. We had the opportunity to visit a lot of interesting sites and museums including the British Museum, the National Gallery, the Tate British, the Globe Theater, Big Ben, and the Sherlock Holmes Museum.

In what turned out to be one of the highlights for me, we got to see a real mummy in the British Museum. It was a lot smaller than I had expected, but thoroughly fascinating nonetheless---so fascinating in fact that, after observing it through the glass for some time, I was taken by a lively desire to carry out some experiments with a voltaic pile. As you are all probably well aware, there have lately been theories going around on the resuscitation of human organisms that have been put into a state of suspended animation by various means---including some forms of ancient Egyptian embalming---through the strategic application of electricity. I communicated these ideas to the curator in hopes of attaining the permission to proceed with my designs. I even cited several precedents of electrically stimulated revivification, most notably recorded in Some Words with a Mummy, by Edgar Allan Poe. Alas! my supplications were to no avail. The curator, whose curatorial competence I am now forced to question, responded only with a fit of indignant sputtering followed by a stream of slanderous profanity. The whole thing would have degraded to fisticuffs right there in the museum if several French students with me at the time hadn't held me back. Needless to say, I was sorely disappointed, especially after having taken the pains to transport a voltaic pile all the way to London.

Birthday Cookies

Bonjour à tous! As many of you know it was my birthday about a month ago. Well, I received a special birthday box from my family which included the cookies you see below---yes, those are snickerdoodles cooked in the shape of letters that spell out "Happy Birthday Brian." My mom must have spent a lot of time making these cookies, so I wanted to take some pictures before devouring them. Apparently though, I was not the only one who was eager to do some devouring. My mom later informed me that while the cookies were sitting on the dining room table waiting to be sent, our small, evil, scourge of a cat, Moose, did some nibbling. Consequently there were some pieces missing when I opened the box. Fortunately for the photos, there is some redundancy in the letters that spell "Happy Birthday Brian."