These items are not strictly World Cup related but I figure that someone will someday pop the right search words into Google and, voila, they will find some useful information here.

I’ll start with a London hotel tip. Hotels here are expensive. If you search through the normal channels, you’ll be looking at $150 a night, easy, and probably more than that. (The brutal exchange rate doesn’t make the situation any better.) My five nights at the London Hilton Kensington cost me a grand total of just under $400, though, including taxes and everything else.

How did I do it? I used two web sites: Priceline and BiddingforTravel.com. Priceline is, of course, William Shatner’s favorite travel site, where you name your own price for hotels, air fare, and other travel items. Bidding for Travel is a Priceline users’ forum where people compare notes, bidding strategies, and results. Start there to find out what prices other users have been able to get for hotels in the area you’re interested in and devise your bidding strategy. My winning bid for my stay in London was $66 a night, so obviously it’s possible to get some pretty amazing results.

Now then, onto other topics. London is one of the cultural wonders of the world and offers some truly memorable experiences if you find yourself in the right theater on the right night. My wife and I bagged a pair of these over our last two nights here.

Rock ‘n’ Roll is a new play by Tom Stoppard that is currently in a short run at a tiny theater—er, theatre—on Sloane Square prior to a larger opening elsewhere in London. Stoppard is probably best known to Americans as being the author of the screenplay for Shakespeare in Love, an Academy Award winner from a few years back, but he has written a number of plays over the years and the stage seems to be his true calling. I won’t try to write a synopsis of the play’s plot because I know that any attempt would reduce the play’s epic scope to a two-dimensional caricature. Suffice to say that this is one of Stoppard’s best works yet and his exploration of the relative contributions of musicians and political leaders to human progress is thought-provoking and insightful. The play is also very funny in spots, and Stoppard reminds me of Nick Hornby in this regard. Both are not afraid to include both hilarious and painfully serious moments in the same work, which makes both ends of that spectrum ring truer. Highly recommended.

Speaking of hilarity, long-time viewers of Comedy Central may remember a show called “Whose Line is it Anyway,” an improv comedy show that originally aired in Britain. Many of the performers from the show are still at it, performing twice weekly at The Comedy Store in London. This is not a case of reliving past glories, either— the Comedy Store Players are funnier than ever. Exactly who of the Players will be performing changes a bit from night to night, depending on their outside projects, but you’ll usually get either Josie Lawrence or Paul Merton in the mix. When we ordered our tickets for last night’s show way back in March, we knew that neither of those two would be there but we were hopeful that the “special guest” performer that was promised on their web site would really be special. Turns out he was— Eddie Izzard sat in with them last night. We’re still smiling.