Hwæt and behold the salvaged things!

Whew, what a couple of weeks it's been. I've been turned into a living, breathing, essay writing machine. I just finished #6 last night, which was on witchcraft. Sent it off at 7 p.m. which is quite good considering at 5 p.m. I had no idea what sort of conclusion I was aiming for. The next few days I will be focusing on the anthropology of law with the question, "A form of violence underlies all legal systems. Discuss." So it's looking to be a batch of pretty heavy stuff. Well, at least the books are heavy...

Just last week I finally found a song that I've been looking for over a year. It had been used in the soundtrack of a play that I attended, but the silly sound manager wasn't able to tell me what song it was. Finally I heard it in a movie trailer, and through some brisk internet searches, I tracked it down. The song is called "In the house - In a heartbeat" and it's from the soundtrack of the film "28 Days Later". The trailer that it was recently included in was "Beowulf" directed by Robert Zemeckis. I've been debating over whether I should go see it. You see, Beowulf is one of my all time favorite stories. If you get a chance, listen to it in the original Old English or more importantly, just listen to a modern English recording. The story of Beowulf was heard for about 400 years before anyone wrote it down (the oldest copy is in the British Library which dates to approximately 1000 AD). If you want to see (in my opinion) the best film interpretation of the story, go rent "Beowulf and Grendel". The costumes and sets are remarkably accurate, and better yet, it's filmed in Iceland, so the cinematography is fantastic.

I'd been looking for ways to store our winter things in the hallway recently. See, the British don't really believe in closets. We have one closet in our flat and it was actually a major selling point for us. Other than that, we have things stuffed under beds and sofas, we have a trunk in the living room and a huge plastic shelfing unit in the kitchen and a few chests of drawers in the bedroom. But we needed a coat rack and a place to store hats/scarves/gloves. So after checking a store and various websites, I decided that these "storage solutions" were ridiculously expensive. So I grabbed some tools and gloves and went dumpster diving. British people don't believe in garage sales (because they lack garages, and it would also be very embarrassing for them) so instead they give their unwanted goods to charity shops or trash it. And in a town full of students, often things are trashed because we don't have the means to transport stuff.

Today I found a metal coat rack that had been abandoned in an alley way and a really cool wooden wine crate that was in a skip. Brought 'em home, cleaned 'em up, and now I have freebie storage! Hooray! I just found another skip walking home tonight, so I might go back again tomorrow and see what they have. It becomes really addictive once you start. There's a fairly substantial subculture of people here in Britain who live almost entirely from dumpster diving - including food. There are grocery stores here that use tons of packaging and won't sell any of the food past it's sell by date (which are very often very conservative). One such grocery store is just up the street from where we live, but I haven't been able to find their bins yet...