Caltech connection

Edgar, Ray, Glenn, Mary Katherine, Ian, Bobb, Barbara, Jim, Will, Bob, Regina, Steve L, Jeanette, Bill, Lynne

This was one of those weeks when the conversations I heard never really took off, maybe just my luck and if anyone got some exciting exchanges do pass them on.
While Javier arrived exactly on time at 6, Conrads Xmas decorations were still hanging around.

A backgrounder in the LA Times on UK knife crime set some of us off talking about the guns v knives debate. Brits - and middle-class liberal Americans, especially on the east coast - love to deride the US gun culture exemplified by the splendid gentleman who recently shot a family who persisted in talking in the row behind him at a screening of Benjamin Button. When they and everyone else fled, he sat down and watched the rest of the movie!
There is something dramatic about being able to pull a gun on someone, and it always stops the target in his or her tracks. Knives can have a similar effect, like any sudden change in the balance of power in a fight. While guns are reasonable effectively under control in Britain, knives as weapons have spread like a virus in the schools. I was shocked to learn that 250 people died from knife wounds in the UK last year, in a country where 50 murders a year was unusual.
Maybe the actual weapon doesn't matter so much as people's increasingly casual and callous attitude to human life and the rule of law. The police do what they can, but they can't be everywhere all the time and killers know this, however they are armed.
This gloomy mood was surprisingly lifted at the end of the evening by a group of about eight youngsters who had been occupying the big corner booth. It turned out they were all from Caltech, one through JPL, and they were every bit as geeky as you might expect. But they were also highly entertaining, full of stories about Star Trek and Dr Who as well as scorning Caltech's ugly new Astrophysics block - one of them was an astrophysicist. Ian and I bravely clung to our Caltech connection, the flimsy one of using the gym and pool (which they had of course never gone anywhere near).
So impressed were the remnants of our crowd that invitations were immediately issued for any of them to join us in future. Students being students, we will probably never see any of them again, but it was an oddly cheering episode.

CAUGHT ON THE BREEZE
It's the wine not the toothpaste
We get B movies on our kitchen TV
Women are deceitful, nasty, sly creatures
Everyone shOUld have the opportunity of working in a hospital
You're in your once-a-month weirdo mood
Are you wearing someone else's dinner on your pants?
I'm free - no you're not, you're very expensive