8 a.m.: Bye (smooch). Pick you up from the office at 5.

8:30 am:  Aaaaaaaarhg!!!

So my wife Maryam left the house today with both sets of  keys, and we have these idiotic doors which require a key to unlock them from the inside as well as the outside, and thus, I am locked inside the house. A quick googling of the InterWeb shows I’m not the first blogger in this predicament (here and here for one instance, a forum thread about another, and a question posed on a locksmithing website)Maryam would have to take two hours from work to get home and back to deliver me set of keys and the neighbor we’ve entrusted the emergency set to is visiting family in Wales, so I’ve been inside listening to the Violent Femmes “Add It Up” compilation, which includes the answering machine message from Gordon Gano about being locked inside his own house, and considering whether to go Mcgiver on the front door and pick the lock with household objects. I think, if I dedicated myself to the task, I could do it. But to what end? I wouldn’t be able to lock it without figuring out how to reverse pick the mechanism (does that ever happen?), and well, it’s cold out anyway and I’ve got enough food and coffee to last until 6 p.m., when I get paroled at the end my my spouse’s shift.

There’s a strange irony in all of this. Up until this week for some reason Lambeth County Court has been operating under the notion that the previous tenets of this house still lived here and that the previous owner (who we bought this place from) was still trying to evict them. The notice that had arrived in the mail week before last said that the coppers were going to come today at 11 a.m. and chuck out whoever was in here along with all their stuff. It took a few phone calls, faxes and finally a trip to the courthouse to convince them that we in fact owned the flat now and had no intention of kicking ourselves out of it. But now I think having the cops kick in the door wouldn’t be so bad. As soon as they bust it down and storm in I could say “it’s about time” with a sigh of relief, and then get a new door on the council’s dime that didn’t include deathtrap locks.

Sort of like I suspected I’d enjoy jury duty (the bastards cut short my one day in court by changing their plea to guilty before the trial even began), I’ve also have had an inkling that I might actually be amiable to some sort of house arrest situation were I ever to run afoul of the law, lead a democracy movement in Burma, or continue to live in the U.S. in the coming years. I hold some fairly hermitic qualities as it is. It’s pretty hard on your reputation to tell you’re friends you aren’t coming out because you’re feeling lazy antisocial. But it if you say you’d love to come out, except that you’d be shot as soon as you stepped across the threshold by the Republican Guard, well, that’s about as close to an ironclad excuse to stay in your jammies as you’re going to get.

I’m considering calling out for pizza. I think it’s the only food that will fit through the window opening.

Outside of that, here are five links I’ve been digging on, and which you might if you’re locked inside your house:

Fun: Emma Clarke’s site. The truth of the matter is, most entertainers’ websites are boring, white-bread PR creations that hold little in the way of a reason to visit. Emma Clarke is hardly a big-time celeb, but if you’re on the London tubes, you know her voice. You’ve likely heard it in numerous commercials hawking just about everything. Recently Emma was canned from her London Tubes (”mind the gap,” “this train terminates at Cockfoster,” etc.) gig because she was keeping a blog full of satire tube announcements that the authorities weren’t too impressed by. That’s only one of the time-waste funny things she has there, though, and it’s a great site to accomplish nothing at while waiting for your wife to come home and unlock the house.

Causehead: Hands off the People of Iran. This is the website of a spiffy, fairly new coalition started by a number of UK Iranian exile groups in 2005. Their site has an excellent archive of the torrid history that’s existed between the U.S. and Iran. Secular, socialist, democratic and entirely anti-theocracy, go here to learn more about the real liberation movements in Iran and how U.S. policies are aimed at crushing them. (Or, take the second ‘o’ out of hopoi.org and visit the official website of the Hopi native American tribe.

Tech: Google Hacking Database. Not recently updated but still full of website security holes sitting out there on the web for anyone to exploit. Strangely addictive searching.

Nerdy: The Warp Speed Calculator. I can’t offer a better description than the developers of this widget that works on your Macintosh OS X dashboard: “Have you ever wondered how long it would really take the Enterprise to travel from Earth to Vulcan at warp 5? Or how far the Defiant could possibly get at warp 9 in just five days? What about figuring out how fast Voyager’s maximum speed (Warp 9.975) is in multiples of the speed of light? … The Warp Speed Calculator is designed to answer these questions. Simply input two of three variables (speed, distance, and time), and the widget will calculate the third for you. It will even convert equivalent units, like years to days, light-years to parsecs, or warp factors to multiples of c. And you, too, can sound like a Treknology expert!”

Auto: Figaro. In 1991-92 Nissan made these funky little retro-style cars. I don’t know how well they run, but their look is pretty sweet for a model created in an era when auto design has reached its most boring.

Music for this post: “Time Is On My Side” by the Rolling Stones 

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