Those things I was complaining about in London? I’ve got documentation. I just started uploading the ten gajillion photos we took when we were overseas. There are more to come, but here are two fun ones involving British hotels and some baaaaad interface design.

The first is our web-enabled tv that showed a 404 page not found error whenever you turned it on. Someone installed something weird and Windows-based on it, and apparently it went all wrong. Like British TV isn’t strange enough.

And then there was the hairdryer, conveniently located and unmovable from the desk drawer.

his movie, with its fantastic effects, original cinematography, and great directing has convinced me to forgive the franchise completely for all of those spiders in the second film.

Ok, I can’t restrain myself to one sentence. Believe it or not, I liked the latest Harry Potter movie even more than the book. For me, these days, the sign of a good action-adventure film is one with absolutely no Grab-my-hand scene, and very little Escape-in-front-of-the-fireball. There was one minor Escape-in-front-of-the-fireball incident, but since Harry’s butt caught fire in an amusing way, I choose to overlook it. There was lots of great, original stuff in this movie, and very little of the cliched crud that littered up the last few films.

Take that Voldemort! Several articles have come out in the Cornell press recently about the Macaulay Library’s huge collection of animal sounds. One of the ways we stay afloat is by licensing our sounds to movie studios. Recently, this has included helping give a voice to Buckbeak the Hippogriff in the Harry Potter movies.

Also, today we are being featured on the Cornell homepage. This is all in buildup to the release of our massive, monumental, absolutely nifty, online collection that will make all of our sounds and videos available for free Real Soon Nowtm. Just you wait. You’ll see.

In other news, it’s snowing here and I’ve got a two-foot high stack of receipts representing three different currencies to sort through from our Euro-trip. We also have that penguin movie sitting in a Netflix envelope at home. And I made matzohball soup last night using this recipe.