Following are some more random observations from my trip to England and Scotland.

• On the way over to England, the wife and I had not been given seats together initially. In an effort to get us seated next to each other, the airline upgraded us to business class for free. If you can ever arrange this, I recommend it.

  We were offered papers for the flight, and I chose the Financial Times. My copy contained an article about Karl Rove which you can’t read online without a subscription, so I won’t provide a link. It was very interesting. My favorite detail was that President Bush has two nicknames for Rove. The first is “Boy Genius.” The second is “Turd Blossom” — the name of a Texas flower that flourishes in manure.

• The only coverage I saw of the Afghanistan elections was on the BBC, and the only point they made was that there was some allegedly indelible ink, designed to prevent voting fraud, that could be easily rubbed off. They quoted a candidate saying this meant the results could not be trusted at all. That was the entire BBC presentation on the elections.

  I didn’t quite know what to make of that. It did seem strange that officials would pass out allegedly indelible ink as a safeguard if it could be easily removed. But was that the only safeguard against fraud? We don’t have indelible ink here in the United States. Can our elections not be trusted? (Don’t answer that if you’re a Democrat — I don’t want to hear it.)

• I believe I already mentioned that there was a national outcry when an innocent 14-year-old girl was shot to death in Nottingham. There were stories about it for days. The police committed over 100 officers to the case.

  Meanwhile, I read a story yesterday about the murder of a 14-year-old boy in South Central Los Angeles. The story got relatively prominent coverage (Page B3) because of the utter sadness of the crime: the boy was apparently an entirely innocent victim caught up in a gang war, who literally begged for his life. However, there is no national outcry, or even statewide outcry; his death will be one of hundreds of murders in Los Angeles this year. And there will not be 100 police officers devoted to solving the case.

  By the way, this disparate reaction is not due to the race of the victims. The girl in Nottingham was black, just like the boy in Los Angeles. It is simply reflective of how commonplace murders have become in South Los Angeles — even outrageous ones like the one described yesterday.

  And our highest priority in this murder epidemic is to free thousands of violent criminals, which we will be doing in this state come November.

• We were in Edinburgh for the opening of the new Scottish Parliament building. We watched part of the ceremony from a point on the Salisbury cliffs high over the city. This building should put to rest any stereotype of the Scottish as miserly. It went 10 times over budget.

• The wife and I, not fans of Scotch, tried some fine single-malt Scotch whisky while in Scotland. While on the plane ride back, I was finishing a book by one of my favorite mystery authors, Lawrence Block, whose protagonist had this description of drinking a fine single-malt Scotch whiskey. It seemed so familiar that I thought I’d share it:

  Slow sipping, that’s the way to do it. You take little sparrow-sized sips, and you keep telling yourself that you like the taste, and by the time you get to the bottom of the glass, it’s true.

  . . . . Somewhere around the fifth sip, it had achieved the virtue of familiarity. I was accustomed to it, and the question of whether I actually liked it no longer seemed pertinent. It was like, say, a cousin. The man’s your cousin, for God’s sake! What do you mean, you don’t like him? You don’t have to like him or dislike him! He’s your cousin!

  That about sums it up. By the way, if you haven’t read Block, you should. He is one of the finest writers out there, whether you like mysteries or not.