Can London actually be considered to have a grid system? If you're insane, the answer is yes. But it's a nice try nonetheless.

Six days left in England… time to do all those things I haven’t done. Unfortunately at this point, the business of winding up my affairs leaves me with time to do little more than the Tank Museum – but I think that alone should be enough (alas, I leave exactly when “Tankfest” begins this year). Anyways, here’s what I’ve been trying to read when possible:

– Scott Tobias writes a great piece on Starship Troopers – “the most subversive major studio film in recent (or distant) memory” – for The Onion A/V Club:

Starship Troopers isn’t a satire about any specific war, it’s a brilliant dissection of how all wars work—how they’re packaged and sold via propaganda, how the enemy is (in this case, literally) dehumanized, how young people are sent eagerly to sacrifice on the front lines.

– The problem I have with Apple isn’t for OSX, it’s for the ‘iOS’. But Steve Jobs seems to have abandoned the former in favor of his glorified content distribution channel.

– How do you replace the Humvee?

– Kyle Mizokami at Japan Security Watch demonstrates Japanese urban warfare tactics through the power of Youtube.

– Starbuck dissects the real capabilities of the Russian PAK-FA and finds it sorely wanting.

– Harry’s Place reminds us of the simpler times, when a good Communist joke was as easy to find as a Trabant in East Berlin:

Three men in a Soviet labor camp were discussing why they were there.

“I got to work ten minutes late,” said the first, “so I was accused of sabotage.”

“I got to work ten minutes early,” said the second, “so I was accused of being a foreign spy.”

“I got to work exactly on time,” said the third, “so I was accused of buying a Swiss watch on the black market.”

– Hitler: disciplinarian, no-nonsense leader of men, saviour of oppressed minorities? Apparently, in India the answer is yes.

And the past week on Automatic Ballpoint:

It was even quieter than last week, somehow, as I bottled up all my rage and released it at once, much like a certain oil well in a certain gulf of a particular nation.

U.S. Soldiers march through a southern English coastal town, en route to board landing ships for the invasion of France, circa late May or early June 1944.

Just a reminder, posting will continue to be quite light for at least the next two weeks. Two exams are this week, and the second will be spent on tying up loose ends here before I head back to America (insert sigh of relief here).

– Debtors’ prison begins to make a return (via Global Guerrillas).

– The size of a New York City block – the subunits of the grid – is rather bizarre compared to other major American cities. No Boston included on the chart though, it would have been nice to see a well-drawn blob.

– ASCAP, the RIAA, and other titans of the music industry set their sights on a villainous group of dastardly ‘copyright infringers’: small coffeshops and library cafes. Because as usual, government is a tool to enforce the will of corporations.

– San Francisco is getting an unprecedented event to beat even Fleet Week: the Russian guided missile cruiser Varyag (not to be confused with the now-Chinese aircraft carrier Varyag) and three ships of the Japanese MSDF will be paying a visit to San Francisco at the end of June.

– Sean Wilkes takes over for Mike Slagh as editor at Secure Nation, and Alex Pedersen realizes that the only thing worse than a non-state actor detonating a nuclear weapon on American soil would be that group not detonating it on say, Pakistani soil.

– If you haven’t seen it already, Jon Stewart had a great interview with Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, who seems slightly more for real than I’d imagined. The whole three-part series is online now.

And this past week on Automatic Ballpoint:

– I posted two interesting pictures. This one compares the size of Chinese and other world cities, and this one is an amusing banner from McSweeney’s. It was a light week.