Calling Adam Curry

God help us, we’re going back to England. Back to the Olde Sod, back to that deranged and diseased island which has spawned the best and the worst of modern culture, from Pink Floyd to Princess Diana.

Our track record on Her Majesty’s turf is mixed. The last time we were there we were busted for smoking a chillum huddled under an azalea bush in the Queens Garden across from Buckingham Palace while waiting for the changing of the guard, and given 48 hours to leave the country. It was a perfectly innocent difference of opinion – we though we were invisible, crouched as we were between a bench and and the bush, but the bobbies though otherwise. That was 36 years ago, and we haven’t been back since.

The first time we visited the Merry Olde , ahhh, that was a different story. The Dowbrigade was, at that time, a seventeen-year-old smartass (hard to believe, huh?), fresh off the plane after being deported from Israel, our true Motherland, by the Mossad, for hanging with the wrong people, basically Palestinian intellectuals. That, and having close Israeli associates arrested for some obscure drug and military intelligence conspiracy which we obviously knew nothing about. We were, after all, just a 17-year-old American schmuck.

But when we landed in London, we had in our pocket the address and phone number of a 22-year-old secretary named Yvonne Bley, who lived with her cats in an apartment in Belsize Park. She took us in, all the way in, and it was cold outside. It was early December, winter was in the air, we wandered the heath or stayed at her place in front of the fireplace listening to Astral Weeks and Atom Heart Mother, just released. But wandering down that particular memory lane would quickly lead to diminishing returns, as we know our saintly wife Norma Yvonne is a regular reader.

At any rate, we are off to London again in three days, and don’t know a soul in the entire British Empire, except for Adam Curry, who we hung out with at BloggerCon in Cambridge, like, four years ago. Adam Curry, who probably meets a few hundred people a week like me, and who is currently in California or Calcutta, and who. like most famous people, is unreachable by email. So we don’t have much hope of getting a guided tour of Shakespeare’s haunts from old Adam, despite his best intentions at the time. Besides, Adam Curry is decidedly Big Time, and the Dowbrigade most decidedly is not.

However, in pouring over our stats and log files, we couldn’t help but notice that we get a fair number of hits from England. Should any readers, bloggers or interested third parties know anyone around London or have 411 about London, we will be stuck there teaching the American Legal System to European lawyers for most of July. Tips would be great; what not to miss, places to hang out, how to meet bloggers or new media people, how to recreate our reality in an alternate universe.

We will have private digs in a swanky section of town, near something called Imperial College, and constant internet access, so whatever happens, you can follow the story line right here.