Friday was one of those days in which circumstance, travel fatigue and profound technological mysteries conspired to block me from filing for too many jet-lagged hours. It’s 9:40 pm London time, I got maybe two and a half hours of shut-eye on the plane last night, I chugged three cans of Red Bull for dinner this evening and I don’t even have the energy to plotz. I’m not explaining/complaining …well, I am. But if you’d been through today’s ordeal…

Love and kisses to the people at Heathrow who sell cell-phone SIM cards at more than double the market value. Hearts and flowers to the geniuses at Radio Shack U.S.A. for selling an expensive computer power cord that doesn’t carry English current. And my sincere thanks to the wonderful guys at T-Mobile U.K. tech sup- port for prolonging the solve time regarding password issues for wi-fi connection at Starbucks. England felt to me like a Third World country today, technologically- speaking — a nightmarish time-capsule revisiting to the bad old computer days of the mid ’90s.