Where Am I?

Still beavering away on the paper, so not much in the way of blogging, I'm afraid. But I offer some spatial dislocation to my Washington readers. Here's a photo of Kenilworth Avenue:



See, it is Kenilworth Avenue--in Oxford:



Non-Washingtonian readers must forgive me. Washington's Kenilworth Avenue is a typically post-apocalyptic suburban highway stuffed with fast food joints, auto parts stores and mattress warehouses, the asphalt covered in rusty mufflers and the shattered tail lights of Buick LeSabres.

I snapped this a few months ago in London's Shepherd's Bush neighborhood:


To Washingtonians, Hecht Co. was a beloved department store, one of many that have since gone out of business. What struck me about this sign for a London lawyer's office is that it's the same typeface as D.C.'s Hecht's department store once used.

Sexy Beast
Friday I mentioned the hot water that TV nature show presenter Bill Oddie found himself in with his televised descriptions of insect sex (insex?). Today the Guardian's Charlie Brooker shows why he's my favo(u)rite U.K. columnist. I don't know if I could ever be friends with anyone who didn't laugh out loud while reading Brooker's disquisition on animals, sex and animal sex.

Now, back to my paper....

Confessions of a Travel Writer

There's a bit of a to-do over a new book from a travel writer named Thomas Kohnstamm. In "Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?" Kohnstamm admits to various bits of trickery and corner-cutting while working on guidebooks for Lonely Planet. Among the allegations are that he gave a good review to a Brazilian restaurant after having sex with a waitress on a table ("the table service is friendly," he wrote) and that he wrote a Colombia guidebook without ever visiting the country. The former seems to be true, the latter not.

I haven't read his book, but Kohnstamm seems like kind of a smarmy guy, willing to take Lonely Planet's nickel and then diss himself, and by extension them. I was in the guidebook game for a while, rewriting most of the Fodor's travel guide to Washington when I was a freelancer in 1989 and then updating it for the next few years. I never got to have sex with a waitress on a table, though I did French kiss Ling-Ling, the giant panda, behind the National Zoo's snack bar. ("The pandas, a gift from China, are not to be missed," I wrote later.)

I think guidebooks are better now than they used to be. Fodor's, part of Random House, encouraged me to be quirky and conversational in my tone, to divide the city into walking tours instead of alphabetical lists of attractions. Other, narrower guidebooks are on the market now too, with Rough Guide, Access, DK and Lonely Planet earning fans. But there is a bit of sameness to any travel guide, as opposed to a travel memoir.

That's because the first thing you do when assigned a travel guide is read all the other travel guides, just to make sure you don't miss anything. If you think something's a waste of time--Hillwood in D.C. springs to mind--you can't just leave it out. Your travel guide would be lacking. Also, you're not paid that much--or at least I wasn't. I was a lowly freelancer, happy to get the job. I think I was paid $3,000 to write eight walking tours, update the entire front of the book, pull together a history of the city and compile a list of nightlife. My friend Jeanne did restaurants and hotels. I probably earned something like $5 an hour.

And I made some rookie mistakes. I wrote the book on a tight deadline in the autumn and it was published the following spring. I remember visiting some part of the Mall the summer after the book came out and noticing that a view had changed. I had said something like, "Note the uninterrupted vista from the memorial to the building off in the distance." Well when I wrote it was uninterrupted, but that was because there were no leaves on the trees. By summer you couldn't see a thing. I fixed it in the next edition.

There was one cool thing, though: I saw a family using my book, near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. I wanted to walk up to them and introduce myself, but thought that would be weird. At least they didn't look lost.

Friday Grab Bag

I Got You, Beeb
It's turmoil time at the BBC, which must save money by trimming 2,500 jobs, reducing duplication and canceling what it calls "middling" programs. (How you'd like to have worked on one of those?) Because the British love a good strike (we never know when we're going to get our mail, though yesterday our postman said he'd see us at least "for the next few days"), BBC employees are threatening to join the picket line.

The same sort of forces that are facing newspapers are facing the BBC. Of course, the BBC receives money from every household in Britain, courtesy of the TV license fee, something The Washington Post doesn't enjoy. But just as The Post is being buffeted by increased competition and an uncertain marketplace, so too is the BBC.

In his column in today's Guardian, Simon Jenkins observes that the BBC's role as a sort of national surrogate newspaper is being eroded by advances in technology. True "public" broadcasting is the sort that shows up on the Internet. Transform the Beeb into a lean, mean multi-platform machine, Jenkin argues. And he gets off a great line: "Like the Royal Navy, Oxbridge and the Church of England, the BBC has been led to imagine that it can join the 21st century by thinking of ever cleverer ways of staying in the 20th."

Shouldn't She Have Seen It Coming?
Sunlight streaming through a crystal ball on the windowsill of a house in Dorset set the curtains on fire. "It was a most unusual incident," said a firefighter.

In the Zone
My hometown, Washington, D.C., has always been a desirable vacation destination for people who like to live life on the edge. Why? Because you never know what you're going to be charged when you take a taxi cab there.

Though the gear and the pinion wheel were invented centuries ago, and the taxi meter not long after that, in D.C. cab drivers prefer to charge their customers based on something known as the zone system. Posted in each cab--displayed in a curling and yellowing plastic sleeve on the back of the front passenger seat--is an inscrutable taxi zone map that divides the city into 23 separate chunks of real estate. Your fare is determined by how many of those different borders you traverse. Oh, and by how honest your driver is.

The map is nearly impossible to read, especially if you're unfamiliar with the city. Many's the time I've taken a cab from Point A to Point B, only to be charged something completely different when I went from Point B to Point A. It's always been a crap shoot to take a D.C. cab, especially if you're visiting from out of town.

But Washington's mayor, Adrian Fenty, has pulled the plug on the zone system, announcing that D.C. will switch to time-and-distance meters, like just about every other city in the civilized world.

Washington has a lot of quirks to it. (Its citizens don't have a voting representative in Congress for example.) The zone map was one of those, an artifact, it's said, of a time when politicians wanted to cheaply travel from Capitol Hill to the White House. There's also an argument that the zone system is fairer to poor people, who, without cars, use cabs to travel from one end of the city to the other.

Of course, it had the potential to screw every one else, especially tourists. The city has been mulling a change for years, and all sorts of studies have been done. There was talk of some sort of hybrid system, using GPS receivers to automagically determine when a zone was passed. But given that many of the cabs can't even manage working air conditioners or seat belts, it seemed a stretch to think advanced technology would solve the problem.

So meters it is. The taxi drivers supposedly aren't happy and are threatening a strike. Now, do you think they'd do this out of concern for customers? I'm sure some crooked drivers will figure out a way to still cheat, but it's going to take some creativity: circuitously driving on back roads or purposely getting stuck in traffic as the meter ticks over. If they're going to rip us off, let's make them earn it.

Gargoyle of the Week
Two squirrels, clutching their nuts:


And I hope they're red squirrels, since as I mentioned previously, Britain is fighting an invasion of non-native gray squirrels. A hotel in Cumbria has added squirrel appetizers to the menu in an effort to reduce the overpopulation.

Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend.