A little moral dilemma for today...

One of the advantages/drawbacks of working from home is that you have the opportunity to watch significant amounts of day-time TV (with only one eye of course, the other eye is, like, totally concentrating on work). My personal preference is for Law & Order, but if I can't find that then I usually drift over to the History Channel, the Discovery Channel, or maybe even the National Geographic Channel.

But anyways.... I was watching a documentary the other day on the Uruguayan plane that crashed in the Andes in 1972.  The survivors of the crash were trapped for over 2 months and became 'famous' because they resorted to eating the bodies of those who died in the crash in order to survive (see the Wikipedia article on plane crash for more info). The film 'Alive' with Ethan Hawke was based on the accident.

So, I think you can guess where I'm going with this moral dilemma thing, and you'd be right.

The mother and sister of one of the survivors died in the crash and this survivor talked in the documentary about his dilemma - as the 'food' became increasingly more scarce, should he allow other people to eat his mum and sister in order to stay alive? Or should he eat them himself to prevent others doing so?

Irritatingly, he didn't say what he chose to do, so I present the dilemma to you. If you were in the same situation, would you:

1) Allow other people to eat your loved ones, but abstain yourself?

2) Chow down on Steak au Famille rather than let others tuck in?

I asked Omar what he would do and he didn't answer - I assume this means that he definitely would eat me :-)

Personally, I haven't decided yet, although all this talk of meat has made me hungry...

Houston....[insert space/'we have a problem'-related joke here]

Very belated I know, but I've finally got around to putting something up on our trip to Houston at the start of October. Omar was sent there for work, so I thought I'd tag along. If it's good enough for Yoko Ono, it's good enough for me.

Although there were nice oases of greenery in the city (like the Japenese Garden in the photo above), to be honest, Houston was pretty underwhelming (and over-heated), or at least the Medical Centre area that our hotel was in (I'm willing to give everyone a second chance). Although being next to a zillion hospitals, did give our hotel the added 'charm' of being full of the sick and the diseased, which was a bit of a bummer. It's difficult to feel super-psyched about a place when everyone looks like they're suffering.  

That said, the highlight of our trip was the food, which was something of a carnivore's paradise. And apparently it's completely normal to have chicken wings and Belgian waffles... for breakfast:

Admittedly, it took a week for my digestive system to return to normal, unfortunately the Atkins diet doesn't agree with me as much as I was hoping.

To take it easy on blogspot, I've put more photos up on facebook. This is a public album link, so you can look at the photos without needing an account/having to sign in:

Houston photos on facebook 

There are also some photos of Galveston and Kemah Broadwalk, on the Gulf of Mexico coast, where we went for a daytrip. It was just like Blackpool, just hotter and with more water pollution.

But in the end, mostly I was just upset about the lack of ten gallon hats and cowboy boots. Such much for stereotypes....