To Burnham Market, the poshest small town in England, for lunch. It’s still the lovely place I remember from when we used to go there two decades ago, but has gone spectacularly up-market — to the point where it now resembles nothing so much as Chelsea-on-Sea. Streets choc-a-bloc with Porsche Cayman and Toucan Touareg SUVs, boutiques selling trinkets that cost more than the Gross National Product of Ecuador, cheery gels with names like Camilla and Eugenie and Amanda wearing green wellies — you can imagine the scene. But still, unaccountably, charming. I was reminded of the time, years ago, when a good friend of mine dreamed of buying a little house in Burnham Market and settling down to a career writing scandalous novels. (She never managed it, and became an academic instead. But today I imagined her casting an ironic eye on the visiting Yuppies, and using them as characters in a comic novel.)

Our plan was to lunch in the Hoste Arms, but given that (a) we arrived at 1pm, (b) it was wet and cold (and (c) the middle of the holiday season to boot) we should have known better: it was heaving with lunchers. So we found a small cafe and had lovely pea soup and sandwiches instead.

And then we stumbled on the loveliest little secondhand bookshop which had the best collection of biographies I’ve seen in a while — including Chester Anderson’s short illustrated biography of Joyce and the fascinating biography that John Wyse Jackson and Peter Costello wrote of John Joyce, James’s reprobate of a father. I walked out clutching both, and only £11 poorer. Bliss.

We reached Cley yesterday afternoon just as the light was running out. It was a grey, overcast day when all of Norfolk seemed to have gone brown (though if you looked carefully at the hedgerows that turned out not to be true: there were red berries everywhere). As we turned towards the beach a huge flock of birds suddenly started into the air, turning and twisting and making those astonishing fleeting patterns that lead mathematicians to work out flocking algorithms. And they headed seawards and were gone from sight, almost as quickly as they had appeared. We parked under the shingle bank, now much reduced since its glory days, and prepared to get out for what we imagined would be a brisk walk. But then I opened the car door the wind promptly forced it shut again, so it was clear that something more than a brisk constitutional was on offer. Something that required firm resolve — and serious outerwear. So we opened the boot and, in the shelter of the lid, dressed as for the South Pole.

When we got to the top of the bank, the full force of the wind hit us. There was an angry brown sea, with a heavy swell and sizeable waves pounding against the shore. Interestingly, they were coming in at an angle of about fifteen degrees to the line of the beach, so suddenly one saw how this coastline is constantly being reshaped.

We turned into the wind and began to walk. It was eye-wateringly cold, with the wind scything through anything (like trousers and hats) that wasn’t comprehensively windproof. And yet the strange thing was that the beach was dotted with tiny, pyramidical structures which, on closer inspection, turned out to be tented bivouacs, each one containing a fisherman who sat there, staring intently at a massive fishing rod, resting on a tripod support, and each at the end of a line which had been cast far out into the raging surf. It was absolutely surreal, and made one wonder what it is that induces people to undergo such discomfort in pursuit of private obsessions. And then to marvel at it, for it is what makes us humans so interestingly perverse.

But much as I admired the fishermen’s fortitude, mine wilted in the teeth of the gale, and we turned back and sought the shelter of the car and, later, the blazing fire of an hotel. Ernest Shackleton would not have been impressed.

Tiger Woods’s unbelievably naff other place in Florida. Described by one observer as “a cross between a discount motel and a beachside nursing home”.

Phil Greenspun has decided not to order the Cadillac Escalade after all.

Imagine a group of engineers so gifted that U.S. taxpayers were willing to spend more than $50 billion to keep them together. These folks designed a vehicle that weighs 6000 lbs. empty and is advertised as having safety advantages over cars designed by companies that operate without continuous government assistance. Tiger Woods, a man whose physique is presumably far more durable than average, drives this vehicle across a lawn and into a tree at a pretty low speed. Did he bound out of his Cadillac Escalade without a scratch? According to the New York Times, “Woods was slipping in and out of consciousness. [the police] said Woods suffered lacerations to his upper and lower lips and blood in his mouth, and that he was treated on scene for 10 minutes before being transported to a nearby hospital.”

Yep. I’ve cancelled my order too.

One of those offers one cannot refuse.

I would like to make an offer of a Christmas present: unlimited helicopter transportation for him and his family, at no cost to him or the U.S. taxpayer, through the end of his reign.

Background: the U.S. military has spent the last 10 years or so trying to buy some replacement helicopters for presidential transport. They settled on a huge $30 million Eurocopter with three screaming jet engines that put out a big welcome mat for a cheap heat-seeking missile, such as the Stingers that U.S. tax dollars purchased for the Taliban during the 1980s. By the time our military and Lockheed Martin added some anti-missile defenses and some U.S. manufacturing, the cost of each 14-passenger helicopter went up to about $400 million, far in excess of what airlines pay for the 853-passenger Airbus A-380. The program was shut down, in theory, but recently Congress authorized a $100 million gift to Lockheed Martin to keep the program alive (source). Does the U.S. really need to spend $15 billion on a handful of helicopters that will be used mostly for 10-minute hops? And should we buy helicopters that are so heavy that it will require several C-5 cargo planes to get them to foreign destinations (the president of the U.S. always travels with his own helicopters rather than borrowing local ones)?

Running the existing helicopter fleet is not cheap. There are literally 800 pilots, mechanics, and administrators, all paid federal salaries and pensions that are more than double their private-sector counterparts (source). Jet fuel is purchased in prodigious quantities.

I happen to own two nearly brand-new four-seat Robinson R44 helicopters. Powered by efficient Lycoming piston engines, these burn less fuel in a 130 mph cruise than each Eurocopter engine would burn at idle. Currently we use these for flight training at East Coast Aero Club, but in the interest of sparing the taxpayer from further ruin, I would be willing to move them down to Washington, D.C. I will also move myself down and one or two additional instructor-pilots from East Coast Aero Club. All of us have more than 1000 hours of helicopter experience. All are U.S. citizens and one of us is an Army veteran (given the recent tragedy in Texas involving a continuously promoted and decorated Army officer, it may be necessary to clarify that, to the best of our knowledge, he was not simultaneously serving in the U.S. Army and waging jihad on behalf of Al-Qaeda).

Footnote: Phil Greenspun founded ArsDigita and teaches web application programming at MIT. He writes an entertaining blog.

… in 1988, a terrorist bomb exploded aboard a Pan Am Boeing 747 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people.

This used to be Borders bookshop in Cambridge. Closed last week.