I’m still stuck in London, my plane is not leaving until ten tomorrow morning. If you ran the Nike 10K Run London in Hyde Park today, there is a good chance I saw you crossing the finish line, and if you get an SMS from Nike saying that you can download a video of yourself running to your mobile phone, I probably had something to do with it. If you were one of the many who staggered your way over to the nearest railing and puked your guts out just after finishing, I feel a bit sorry for you - even though you voluntary brought it upon yourself. And if you’re the guy who turned grey and was driven away by a speeding ambulance and you’re reading this, it means you’re still alive and that’s a good thing.

During my stay in London, I’ve got a room at the St. Giles Hotel, close to Tottenham Court Road. It’s all right, the room is a bit small, but I’m not planning to dance around in here anyway, so it really doesn’t matter. The thing that bums me out, though, is that there is no internet access, wired or wireless, in the rooms. When I become absolute ruler of the world, there will be free internet access everywhere. I will also have all people biking in the wrong direction in one-way streets and smokers shot on sight. Either that, or I will have an option on the income tax form where you can state that none of your tax money should be used to treat cancer caused by first hand smoking. There will not be any options covering the bikers.

I digress.

I’m able to find one wireless access point close enough to my room to have a decent signal strength, but it’s secured with a WEP encryption key. As we all know, cracking a WEP key is not a very hard task, but considering that they’ve started arresting people who use open access points (or so I think I’ve read somewhere), I’ll just stick to connecting to the internet via my Nokia 6230i, which works like a charm. It costs me about a million pounds in data transfer charges per kilobyte of ones and zeros, but it means I’m able to get this entry online without having to use the rather clumsy keypad on my cell phone to post. Excellent.

The Bird flu, or the Avian flu, which I think is the proper name for it, is getting a lot of air time in the media here. As someone in Hyde Park pointed out today, the government is urging people not to panic, but it’s on the news 24/7 - “50 million people can die from the Bird flu”. How can you expect people not to panic with headlines like these? A pandemic usually breaks out every thirty or so years, a lot of people will die if this is really a pandemic and we’re really unlucky and unprepared. But let’s be a bit cynical for a moment: Pandemics are a natural thing, they are nature’s way of controlling the number of individual in a population and a way of removing the weak - in this case the non-resistant individuals - from a population. It’s called evolution, you’ve probably heard about it. If you’ve heard about evolution, there is still a chance you don’t accept its existence. If that’s the case we’ll call the pandemic “God’s Wrath” instead.

Anyway.

Don’t get me wrong, dying is not cool, m’kay, but let’s not panic until we have to. Even if 50 million people do die, there is a phat chance it won’t be you or anyone you know. I think we saw media coverage very similar to this when Ebola broke out (it even spawned some really shitty movies), but not that many people died of that one.

Hopefully I won’t be posting any entries in the not-so-distant future with the title “Oh, the Irony”.

To entertain myself here in my internet-less room - yeah, I know I should go for a walk and see London and all that, but I’ve been up since five in the morning and I don’t want to fall asleep on the side walk - I bought a copy of DJ, “Your essential guide to the best new music every fortnight”. You probably find the fact that I’d buy a magazine called “DJ” a bit strange, but that’s because you don’t know anything about my dark, DJ secrets. I DJ’ed for a year when I studied in Grimstad and I loved it. I was just getting the hang of the beat mixing when I quit. Some day I hope to be able to DJ again, to fill a whole dance floor with manic dancers is truly a great feeling. The 14-17 October 2005 issue of DJ contains an article about one of my all time favourites, Board of Canada, which was one of the main reasons why I bought the mag. The headline “Beats, Booze & Groupies” also - not surprisingly - caught my attention. It should be noted that most of the CD that came with the magazine, sucked monkey balls and will probably serve you better as a coaster.