You know what they say about the show

You may have heard that last night 30,000 people were evacuated from the downtown bar and restaurant district of England's second largest city, Birmingham (along Broad Street and vacinity). They now say the parcel that was found, that they blew up in a controled explosion, turned out not to be a bomb after all.

I am now in Dublin, but watching Sky News ongoing coverage of this ongoing saga has been a very poignant experience. People are going on stoically about their daily business. But the cloud hanging over Great Britain right now is so heavy you can still feel it here, all the way across the Irish Sea.

Today I go to Oxegen to try to play makeup on any bands I've missed so far that I wanted to see. On the docket are Maximo Park, The Beautiful South, The La's, James Brown, Brendan Benson, the Magic Numbers, and a few others. I didn't have the energy to go out to the festival last night. I didn't have the energy to go down to Cork and visit my friends. But I am determined to recover the gusto needed to finish up this trip and come home. Of all the terrible things terrorism is, we all now how just plain exhausting it can be.

Tomorrow I go back to London to spend the night. And I fly out of London on Tuesday morning. Headed for Minneapolis!