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Hoses of the Holy in the Parallel Universe

December 31, 2005

Enjoy new fiction - get a subscription

While we were away in France, I caught up on my Asimov's reading.

I subscribed, I think, around this time last year, when the dorrar was very weak against the pound, but it took ages for my first issue to come through (I think it was the April/May double issue). I may even have subscribed considerably before I think I did, and moved house at least once before the first issue arrived. Even then, there was excess postage to pay on it, which I could never work out why.

Anyway, I think my subscription is at an end now, but I wasn't going to renew just yet, because I'd only read up to August, which meant I had September, October, November/December, and January backed up on the shelf. But, of course, five days in France and I devoured the lot (in between naps and meals), and I'm gonna renew straight away.

I've always been fond of the short form of SF. Each issue of Asimov's usually gives you a novella (I'm thinking 40,000 words? Correct me if I'm wrong), a couple of novelettes, and several short stories, and the quality is consistently high. It's a great way to discover (and support) new writers or rediscover those you thought were dead (!).

I particularly enjoyed the Kristine Kathryn Rusch novella, "Diving into the Wreck," from the December issue. So impressed, I just ordered 4 of her books from Amazon. As is traditional with Science Fiction, the cover illustration is a long way from being illustrative of the story itself, which is a spooky tale of "deep space diving" into an abandoned ship which is 5,000 years old, and a long way from where it could possibly be, given its type etc.

The story is an example, I suppose, of the New Space Opera. This sub-genre has moved on from speculating about the next few hundred years and has leaped ahead, dealing with mind-boggling numbers, sending humanity into impossibly distant futures. It's exactly the kind of thing that would have saved the Star Trek franchise from falling over itself so badly, by squeezing the various spin-offs too close together. Imagine if they'd jumped forward, say, 5,000 years, into a future in which Earth is a mere legend among the Diaspora of humanity.

Anyway, you can't see that kind of thing on the telly, so you have to read about it in Asimov's and its ilk. The stories will vary, from New Space Opera to Alternate History, to retold legends and myths, psychological puzzles, end-of-the-world tales, stories about the future of the War on Terror, the post-oil economy, nanotech, biotech, that kind of thing. Occasionally, you'll read something so brilliant that you'll head off to check out the rest of that writer's bibliography.

Other SF Magazines are available, or you can try Ellery Queen for mysteries or Hitchcock for horror.

December 23, 2005

It's about this time of year...

...that I like to spend a happy 3 minutes and 33 seconds watching things like this little movie of our Whitsun holiday in the Vendée.

It's a 7.1MB QuickTime file, very compressed, with a nice F a i t h H i l l song on the soundtrack, from her album "Now That's What I Call Fair Use."

Good times. Sunshine. And Summertime.

Yet another quiz... it is Christmas

This time it's the Guardian bumper news quiz.

I scored 38 out of 50. Would have been 39, but I second-guessed myself on one of the answers (which artist's record sales fell after Live8).

Fixture Congestion

It's around this time of year that top football managers' thoughts turn to fixture congestion - between now and the end of the season. And they worry, too, about injuries hobbling their performance, as the season heads into its second half.

Some managers bitterly resent the larger sides' ability to ride out fixture congestion and injury crises with squad rotation, and it struck me the other day that there's a brilliant solution to this, if only.

My visionary suggestion is that - if a team's squad is over a certain number, pick a number - then they can quite legitimately be required to play games back-to-back, or even simultaneously.

When your Liverpools and Manchester Utds and Chelseas swan off to the FIFA World Club Championship, they would still be required to field a team in domestic competitions at home.

When Arsenal play a Wednesday night Champions League game, they'd also have to play, I dunno, Birmingham in the Premiership. This would level the playing field for the other teams, and make for an "interesting" domestic competition.

Unless they chose to have a smaller squad, thus levelling the playing field the other way. Arsenal field a B-team of youngsters in competitions like the League Cup anyway, so why not just formalise the arrangement?

You know it makes sense.

Those Crazy Frenchies

Today's shock news is that the French are to change their "rational" system of car number plates.

I find this strangely upsetting. Apparently, it's considered a waste of money that, if you move house to a different département, you have to change your number plate. But as far as I'm aware it's one of the many laws that most French people ignore, unless they are forced into it - at least until it's time to buy the annual road tax disc.

My in-laws live in the 70 département, Haute-Saône, which is a bit like the French equivalent of Bedfordshire: least visited county. Up the hill in Auxelles Bas, though, the number plates are Belfortian: 90. Belfort, like Paris, has a number all to itself, although the Territoire de Belfort does take in surrounding villages.

We don't play the boring number plate game with our kids in the car - they've been too young for stuff like that till now - but I do like to be aware of the kind of people in front of me. For example, contrary to what the BBC article suggests, Parisians tend to drive like nutters wherever they are. The other thing is, if you're stuck behind something slow, it's sometimes of comfort to know it's a local that you're following, which means they're likely to turn off sooner rather than later.

Anyway, changing the whole system just to save the expense of changing plates when you move is crazy. Why not just register the car once (like the hire companies do) and then keep the same plate regardless of where you end up living?

December 22, 2005

Bad Ideas in Publishing

This morning I received an email from a pro-audio magazine, publicising their new on-line, all-digital edition. This is something I have, up till now, received through the post, in print.

I occasionally read bits of it, scanned the news, scanned a couple of reviews. Nothing much.

Do I want to "click the link" in the email and read a flash-based version?

First of all, "click the link" doesn't work in my email client of choice. So I had to open the mail in another client. Then I had to visit the web site and view the huge flash file, "complete with advertiser links."

Er, no. I'll read on-line articles of interest. I'll read blogs. But I won't hand around for a high-bandwidth, all-singing, all-dancing, animated-page-turning, Flash monstrosity. Ever.

Review of the Year

  • January - kept hanging on me, making me sad with its eyes
  • February - I opted out of this month
  • March - Was this when summer was? I don't remember
  • April - Who said, "April is the coolest month, for people like myself"?
  • May - I think we went on holiday this month
  • June - Blank
  • July - Coma
  • August - I may have had some kind of holiday this month
  • September - Not so long ago, and yet I do not remember
  • October - Or was this when summer was?
  • November - CJ was 8, that's a fact.
  • December - Didi is 5. It is very dark.

That is all.

The Exploding Whale! - Google Video

Just found this mad Exploding Whale video over at Google Video. It's a 1970 news report detailing the unbelievably stupid decision to blow up a whale on a beach.

It's worth watching to the end, to see the aftermath, and to wonder.

I always carried a kind of romantic yearning to see a dead whale skeleton on a beach, y'know, like in comics and cartoons. One you could stretch a tarpaulin over and live in, should you ever run away from home. Never did, though. That, and a light aircraft wrecked in a remote jungle, as recently seen in Lost.

Undocumented Features

For most ordinary Mac OS X users (and I include myself), some of the clever little extras of the OS, like the Services menu, can pass you by. Now, I was aware that I could highlight text and summarise it (in any application written in Cocoa*) using the services menu, and I've been aware for some time of the global spell check that works in any application (written in Cocoa), like this Blogger compose window, for example, so I can use a single global spell check dictionary on anything I write.

Providing the application is written in Cocoa, of course. Which (I suppose) explains why the spell check didn't work in Firefox 1.5.

What I've not really been aware of, until today, is that the Services menu can be populated with just about anything that application programmers choose, and that you, as the user, don't have much of an option to switch it off, bar deleting the application. This Macworld News article goes into detail.

One of the things I miss about the Classic Mac OS 9 is the ability I had to switch off all the unnecessary bits that used processor cycles and RAM. OS X doesn't give you anything like that control, unless you are comfortable in the Terminal window and know UNIX commands, which I do not.

Anyway, the Rob Griffith's call to action prompted Peter Maurer to write Service Scrubber, which allows you to go through much of the menu and switch off Services you don't use and have no intention of using.

Very useful, and it leaves you with a Services menu that might actually be useful. I wasn't able to get rid of absolutely everything, but I did kill a lot, and I went and found the Asia Text Extras and deleted the Chinese text Converter, because (a) it couldn't possibly work properly and (b) if I come across an Asian web page, I have no idea whether it's Chinese, Japanese, Korean etc; and (c), I can always use Google or Babelfish for that kind of thing.

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*Cocoa, in case you don't know, is the silly name for the programming language used to write "native" Mac OS X applications. I think 100% Cocoa applications are supposed to work better: quicker, more stable etc., but there are some major applications that don't use it, for whatever reason. Microsoft Office is one, I'm pretty sure.

December 21, 2005

How the mighty fall

A few years ago, I won a three-month film pass in a Guardian film quiz. During those three months I saw everything that came out (over 60 films, as I recall). This year, I didn't go to the cinema. I didn't rent any DVDs.

I guessed 90% of the answers in the Guardian quiz of the year and scored 19/30. Not bad, considering.

How very dare you!

I don't usually watch that Catherine Tate show, but saw it last night as I was zombied out on the recliner playing MacPipes. Correct me if I'm wrong, but one of these two blokes who got married today is Catherine Tate, no?

learning salsa the "hard" way

Simon will enjoy this.

Having done embarrassingly well on Marie's quiz, I went seeking information about my incorrect answers, and came across her very funny account of a salsa dancing session.

You find yourself squished up in the arms of someone breathing a bit too heavily and sweating a bit too much and quite obviously getting a bit too excited in other ways if you know what I mean. Suffice to say that there is a reason why men dance forwards and women dance backwards.

Most hexcellent.

Io Saturnalia!

Today is the Solstice, so a JesusChristChrist and a ChristyChristChrist to you all. As Wogan said this morning, it's all downhill to Spring from here.

Fact of the day: December 25th was the date of the Winter Solstice in the Julian calendar. The Julian calendar was invented by comedian Kenneth Williams for a special episode of Round the Horne in 1968. ("I'm Julian, and this is my friend Sandy.")

Challenge of the day: How quickly can you hit the delete button when yet another corporate e-card lands in your inbox?

Answer of the day: to the person who arrived at this blog searching for "open presents boxing day" - that is a myth. Boxing day is so-called, because it was the day that all the apprentices ran around collecting tips, in a, you know, collection box, which they then shared out. Open your presents when you bloody well feel like it. Today, for example, because it is the Solstice. Or on the 24th, in the evening, as we always do in France.

Huh

George Monbiot in the Gonad yesterday, talking about car culture, transport policy, and Jeremy Clarkson (of course)... totally ripping this and (the late) Roadrage blog off.

It is strange to see how the car has been overlooked as an agent of political change. We know that the breaking of the unions, the dismantling of the welfare state and the sale of council houses that Margaret Thatcher pioneered made us more individualistic. But the way in which the transition from individualism to the next phase of neoliberalism - libertarianism - was assisted by her transport policies has been largely ignored.

Indeed. It's the kind of thing we've been banging on about for ages.

Here's Simon on the subject, back in July of '04. And my own post, to which he refers from that same month.

More recently, we discussed the Thatcher legacy and how it has fucked not only our transport system, but power generation and pensions, too.

As for Monbiot, he's a fully paid-up member of the global warming lobby, and rails against anyone who holds a more, shall we say, Crichtonesque view. That's his position, and he hates Clarkson and his disciples, too.

Well, if Clarkson has disciples, then they're morons. Clarkson is a great, and funny, writer, with strong opinions with which one is free to agree, or not. Clearly, to agree with everything he says is a form of madness, but that's all part of the humour. Personally, I think we need Clarkson in the same way the Victorians needed Cholera. The equivalent of indoor plumbing and better sanitation for transport will be driven by the likes of him. You need him up there on the screen, because there's nothing mealy-mouthed or weasely about him. He exposes to the world the selfish, grasping, blinkered aggression of the average driver, and it's something we need to understand in order to deal with it effectively.

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My last 3 motorway trips have all been marred by Clarksonesque behaviour. A small-penised Ford Focus driver who charged up the outside lane in order to try to prevent me pulling out to overtake a lorry yesterday morning, and then flashed his headlights and blew his horn at me. All this in the 40 mph speed limit section on the M1 (and I was doing at least 45 mph). And then the small lorry driver who did the same thing last night as I puled into a gap - closed the gap, and even as my car was half way into the lane, attempted to use the size of his vehicle to intimidate me out of the way. And again, the white van man with one headlight this morning. Trying to occupy the clear space on the road into which I'd indicated to pull out, and then flashing his full beams at me (now I can see you, you twat). Here's a response to all these people: when I signal to pull out, I'm not asking permission.

Fiendishly Easy Quiz

Taking a leaf from Lisa's, I've created a quiz over at QuizYourFriends.

I found it fiendishly hard to think of questions after the first one. So sorry.

December 20, 2005

Lauren McLaughlin on Science Fiction Vs. Fantasy

Following on from my post of yesterday, about how some writing defies genre, and how I reckon people like Sci Fiction but just don't know that they do, here's

Lauren McLaughlin in similar vein, talking about a debate going on over here.

Hmmm.. enough links for one post I think.

Lauren suggests some entry-level SF for people-who-say-they-don't-like-it, which is an interesting thing to ponder. A bit like trying to recommend country music for people-who-say-they-don't-like-it (try Beatles For Sale or Help!).

As I said, TV shows like House and Numb3rs are proper SF. I don't like things like Gibson and Simmons, myself, but I know that trying to get Roy interested in Larry Niven didn't work. I'd probably stick to Kate Wilhelm, myself, as she's such a genre-crosser anyway, and her books always have a strong humanist streak.

last chance to send a stupid piece of cardboard to someone who you never see and don't even like much if you're honest

i just thought i'd remind you that if you live in the uk, today is your last chance to send a christmas card to that special someone.

on the whole, i tend not to bother. i'm sort of not part of a family this year so that makes it a bit more complicated. some people DID get one but it's not an exact science. most of the "inner circle" didn't get one. the inner circle know each other too well and are far too cool to fall for all that commercial nonsense. in fact, if i got a christmas card from most people in the inner circle, it would be a danger sign more than anything.

i sent about five. to people i don't know very well. my first ever girlfriend sent me a card and she's inner circle but we've always sent cards so that's different. i might possibly have sent a couple more, but i missed the overseas posting dates by a surprisingly (to me) wide margin.

we used to pass christmas cards around in the office, but thankfully that seems to have ceased, unless there's going to be a last-minute deluge. someone in the office has given me a christmas card today, and i don't know if i should knock a quick one up now to give back. maybe cross out the names in the card i've just been given and return it as from me.

if you are going to send cards, today is a very good day to do it because it will be too late for the recipient to send one back, which is an added bonus. in my twisted mind, anyway.

Talking of...

Annoying advertising media.guardian.co.uk (registration required) reports that the BBC had to pull that horrible digital tv promo that featured the giant head made up of lots of little heads.

It really was an image straight out of the horror genre, the kind of thing likely to give people - especially children - nightmares, and I just can't believe the BBC weren't aware:
"We have been very conscious that some viewers disliked the nature of the trail, although clearly it was not our intention to offend," the corporation said in a statement posted on its complaints website.

I'd just love to meet some of the coke-addled media monsters who came up with the idea. Maybe they're planning future trails in which an adolescent girl turns green and rotates her head like an owl; and one in which an analogue viewer gets his ear chopped off. (James has just said he didn't see it: if you have a mental picture of that woman who was found in hospital with maggots crawling all over her face? That's what it looked like.)

They withdraw the ad, but they don't apologise, or admit they were wrong, like the weasels they are. Weasel words: "The BBC said it received a positive response when tested in front of viewers, and that there had been a rise in digital inquiries since the image went on air."

In other words, fuck you, you complaining bastards, we fucking liked it, and it fucking worked, so fuck off.

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Which last sentence reminds me of the bit on the Daily Show last night, where John Stewart's colleague did a report on the craziness of renaming Christmas. He signed of with, "A Jesus Christychrist and a Christychristchrist."

Excellent.

Talking of...

Murder, do you think it would be justifiable homicide if I killed all the people involved in those irritating Marks and Spencer adverts? You know the ones, "This is not just any old voiceover. This is the most annoying voiceover you've ever heard..."

It's the heavy rotation that gets me. On some of the digital channels, you get it in every single ad break. "This is not just any old handgun. This is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world..."

more life expectancy

here is another test of how long you might live for. probably a little more scientific than the death clock (see rob's post), but somehow just as daft. it would have been a nice touch to calculate the date as the death clock does, but it doesn't and i certainly can't be arsed to work out what the date will be when i am 83.2 years' old.

Sugarland: Twice the Speed of Life

Sugarland are a country supergroup, with a big-haired, big-voiced singer (Jennifer Nettles who also co-writes) and two other songwriters - one of whom, Kristian Bush, is one-half of Billy Pilgrim, and the other, Kristen Hall, has released a couple of solo albums.

Busy, busy people who are certainly not fresh out of the egg, but Twice the Speed of Life is fresh, jaunty, polished (produced by Garth Fundis), and right up my street. Saw them performing "Something More" on the CMA awards and had to get the album.

The back story is interesting. Kristen Hall was sick of baring her soul every night, singing deeply personal songs; so she called Kristian Bush, who was coincidentally starting to think of Billy Pilgrim of more hard work than fun. In other words, this is a case of two songwriters probably sick of the sound of their own voices, who wanted a front. Enter Jennifer Nettles, who clearly has a lot of front, and the voice to match.

I think this is great, a good, commercial country rock record stuffed with corking songs. If you've got sound on your 'puter, head over to the Sugarland web site, which will play some of the album at you as you browse (works if you leave it on a tab in the background). They're on tour with Brad Paisley and Sara Evans at the moment: now, that's a gig I'd like to see.

December 19, 2005

molly's teeth


molly's teeth
Originally uploaded by doglas mccake.
we can't find an nhs dentist for my daughter, and this is the result.

usually she wears a brown paper bag on her head with two holes for the eyes.

You Love It

Simon's been talking about books he hasn't got around to reading, and the sinking feeling that accompanies the realisation that, in fact, you might not get around to reading everything before you kick off.

Then we got into a discussion about books I'd loaned him in the past, and why they are so hard to get hold of (and expensive). Rare books? Who'd a thunk it?

I've always understood that you might want to own a book because of the way it was printed (it used to please me that the Long Eaton Library had a copy of De Aetna, a 15th century book that featured one of the earliest examples of a Roman typeface, and one that for me has a timeless beauty and is still one of my favourites - in the form of Bembo. It's the lettering I always do in my daily doodles). On the other hand, it's surprising how often fairly decent writers become hard to find.

When I was younger, I used to get a warm feeling looking at the wall-of-yellow that was the Gollancz-dominated Science Fiction section of the Luton library. Then, as now, I was cavalier about reading stuff and not knowing who had written it. I'm bad with names and titles, but one writer I became aware of (by the 3rd book of hers I'd read) was Kate Wilhelm. She's a unique voice, and has also crossed genres, writing thrillers and courtroom dramas, detective stories - all with aplomb. As an SF writer, she's more Margaret Atwood than Arthur C Clarke, a fine example of how even pseudo-science can make good science fiction.

Wilhelm writes social science fiction, more than anything, the kind of thing that can be as much detective story or courtroom drama as future history, or can join together the fields of genetic engineering, sociology, and environmental science to create great literature.

I keep meaning to collect together all the various Wilhelm editions I've accumulated (mostly thanks to the internet) and work out which ones I have still to get. My wife got one (miracle!) from the local library the other day, and I said, "Haven't we got this?" We had - but it did take me half an hour to find it - most of our bookshelves are stacked two layers deep.

Talk of Wilhelm's genre-defying habits reminds me that I've been wanting to say something about how popular science fiction actually is - it's just that some people don't realise they're watching it. It's well known that the Fantasy genre is phenomenally popular (Pratchett, LOTR, Narnia, Harry Potter), though there are better fantasy books that haven't been franchised in quite the same way. Beyond the obvious fodder like Doctor Who, Star Trek, Smallville, Stargate, The X Files, etc, The Simpsons, for example, is as much part of the genre as the more obvious Futurama (anything can happen in Springfield, and nobody ever gets older). Then there's House, which (as I've said) was a fantastic explication of the scientific method as applied to diagnosis. Not to mention Numb3rs an FBI/Cop drama which solves crimes using mathematics.

Lost, of course, is pure science fiction, and the ever-popular "what if" style of alternate history (like Fatherland) rests on SF foundations. In fact, a lot of this stuff is much more like science fiction as-it-is-written than the space-time-based material.

Rhythm and Blues

swinging
Saturnalia will soon be here, and with a mere two days to the Solstice, getting any sunlight on the back of the head is a task indeed. For this reason, I am grateful that a Sunday roast dinner always prompts the kids to ask, "Can we go to the park?"

We always seem to arrive when most people are eating dinner (we eat early and often in our house), so it's always quiet, though it seems extraordinary that at around 2 in the afternoon the sun is too low in the sky to be seen through the trees.

We have a good time, though, and although they can swing themselves using the pendulum method, they love to be pushed. I got a great rhythm going, standing behind and between the swings, pushing one with left hand and then the other with right, to squeals of delight.

Then we played on the slide and I taught Didi the art of going down face first... remembering too late that she still has all her own teeth.

James May in the Torygraph: England's green and pleasant land

Fans of Top Gear's best presenter will be keen to read James May's latest column in the Telegraph, in which he argues that people who live in the countryside and who aren't actual farmers should stop complaining about the motor car:
"The harsh truth is that cod country living is a privilege bequeathed entirely by the roads and motor transport. So if you live in Chodford and despise all things automotive, you should live as I imagine country folk did before the car was invented. That is, like a chicken; in your own poo, driven mad by blight and at the mercy of wild animals.

You should ride a donkey, and the road to your damp dwelling should be a rough track beset by bandits and deranged inbreds with huge hands and one eye in the middle of their faces."

What did I say, Roy?

Just before we switched over to Creature Comforts last night (y'know, for the kids), Top of the Pops was on, and they showed 1984-vintage footage of Wizzard singing "I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday."

Didi asked me who the man singing was, and I said, "Roy Wood." At which point CJ piped up, "Is that your friend Roy?"

Tee hee. But what really had me chuckling all evening was the amorous crab at the end of Creature Comforts, saying, "Oooh, I pulled a mussel."

December 18, 2005

Kim Stanley Robinson, Forty Signs of Rain

With the recent publication of Fifty Degrees Below, a sequel to Kim Stanley Robinson's Forty Signs of Rain, I thought it was time to check out Robinson's take on climate change.

As one Amazon reviewer puts it, with this climate change trilogy, Robinson is setting himself up as the Anti-Crichton. Michael Crichton has recently caused controversy with State of Fear, his take on environmental issues, and has been adopted by some elements of the US Congress as a credible sceptic on the issue of global warming.

On this blog, we like to cover the big issues. Which means we don't pay much attention to the whole Iraq thing, which is going to seem very small potatoes indeed should our civilisation come crashing about our ears.

'We can go to them and say, look, the party's over. We need this list of projects funded or civilisation will be hammered for decades to come. Tell them they can't give half a trillion dollars a year to the military and leave the rescue and rebuilding of the world to chance and some kind of free market religion. It isn't working, and science is the only way out of this mess.'" - Forty Signs of Rain, p290

Global warming and climate change can be slippery terms. I believe the latter is probably inevitable, but I think we all know that a phrase like global warming is counter-intuitive, because one of the ways the climate could change is that a lot of us could get very, very cold indeed. Cold enough to consider killing cats and dogs for their fur, perhaps, Mr McCartney.

The issue rests on two questions. Is climate change a result of human activity? And, if so, can human activity do anything about it? I think the answer to the first question is not enough data (which is essentially Michael Crichton's position). And I think the answer to the second is, well, then it's probably too late.

And let's not confuse things by pointing out that the polar ice caps on Mars, as well as those on Earth, are shrinking.

I've never been much of a fan of Kim Stanley Robinson's writing style. He goes in for Hemingwayesque zero-degree narration, which is quite clever, but when the subject matter of the book is a little bit dry, well, it can be a little bit too dry. But it is a sophisticated style, and unless I'm being particularly thick, things aren't necessarily all that they seem. Here, for example, is one Amazon reviewer's take:

this is not as billed - most of the story is lost in the minutia of venture capital funding and the mechanics of scientific research. The most important event in the book (the stopping of the Gulf stream) is disposed of in a short telephone intercept...

Indeed. This reader was certainly reading for the plot, and didn't really enjoy the stuff about venture capital and real-world politics. But, actually, that's the most important thing in Forty Signs of Rain. Robinson's setting it up that way because the way science is conducted, and the way politics works, is precisely why there is not enough data on climate change and why the political will to do something about it is absent.

One of the main characters, Frank Vanderwal, is on secondment to the National Science Foundation in Washington. Just before his year is about to end, he issues a parting shot, complaining that science is conducted wrong, that it shouldn't rely on proposals and response to proposals, and should instead be setting the agenda and demanding funding for certain research. What's wrong with science, and with the politics of global warming, is that it relies entirely on lobbying - on the one hand - and on grant application and review on the other. What governments should be doing, argues Vanderwal, is commissioning research, asking or telling scientists what to research based on what organisations like the NSF - in collaboration with similar organisations all over the world - are saying.

It's quite hard to get your head round, but that's what Forty Signs of Rain is about. First of all, scientists aren't really free to collaborate because of the obsession with capital and money and patents and exploitation of discovery. So there's too much secrecy - and that's within one country, before you even consider the paranoia of governments and security agencies. And research is too dispersed and scattershot, again because scientists are working in commercial environments, looking for breakthroughs that will be profitable.

So scientists aren't really speaking to each other, and they don't really understand each other, and this atomised approach to a huge potential problem like climate change means that nobody is joining the dots, seeing patterns, and identifying possible solutions. And if someone does spot something potentially interesting - as Vanderwal does - then they have too much self-interest for it to be shared with the wider community.

This is one of the cleverest aspects of the book. Vanderwal's internal monologue is sometimes anthropological (we are all primates, fresh from the savannah, and a lot of our behaviour is based on the instincts of primates) and sometimes concerned with game theory, and in particular whether altruism or selfishness will win the game.

This could fool you into thinking that Vanderwal is a good guy, the moral compass to point us through the maze of Washington and scientific politics. Like this Amazon reviewer:

...some fairly poor attempts to inject some excitement in to these scenes of domestic bliss, in the form of an encounter with deadly nightshade and a near miss with the kid and some passing traffic (and with another characters pointless road rage encounter)

The character who has the "pointless" road rage encounter is Vanderwal. Except it's not pointless, obviously. The point is, Vanderwal (observing humanity dispassionately, thinking of us all as primates driven by instinct) is not perfect, and not infallible. He's driving in the multi-occupancy lane and attempts to avoid detection by cutting up a pickup truck in order to hide his car from a patrol car. Clever, he thinks, except the pickup truck driver has an attack of road rage and pursues him through the streets.

In other words, Vanderwal thought he was controlling a situation, but got it badly wrong.

Lesson two. Vanderwal sees a grant application from a mathematician that could have some exciting impact on research into gene therapy. He happens to have connections with a company doing research in gene therapy, so he "cleverly" sees to it that the funding application is refused, in order that the company can make the researcher a job offer and keep his research for themselves.

Except, of course, Vanderwal is outmanoeuvred by another scientist on the funding committee who has exactly the same idea about a company she is connected with, doing research that (it will turn out) is loosely related to gene therapy, but more directly relevant to finding a viable carbon-fixing solution.

As for the deadly nightshade, it was actually poison ivy, and I wouldn't care to suggest that the encounter will prove to be irrelevant.* It might even be interesting, later on.

In any event, Vanderwal is not as clever as he thinks he is, and when he meets a mystery woman later on in the book, you get the feeling he's being played. This is all going to pay off in the sequels to follow.

Forty Signs of Rain lays out the problems with scientific research, the difficulties of political lobbying, and the sometimes awkward human relationships involved in both. The sequel will describe the onset of severe climactic change, when the global temperature plummets. This is set up with two slices of beautiful irony. On the West Coast, an unusually lashing storm (part of a Hyperniño in its 42nd month) causes massive erosion of sandstone cliffs at Encinitas, near San Diego. This is not a fictional threat. This, from the Las Cruces Sun:
Sand and solitude
Want to escape the hordes that descend upon most San Diego beaches? Go to Encinitas and turn west on D Street. The avenue dead-ends where the land plummets to the ocean, and there you will find a wooden staircase leading to the small, narrow beach about 60 feet below. Down here, you will find no hot-dog stands, no lifeguard and no restrooms. But you will find room to spread out, especially on the weekdays. (The beach can be thick with surfers on the weekends.) Just make sure you plant yourself well away from the cliffs, which look about as solid as Social Security's future. "

Turn west on D Street, it says. The land plummets to the ocean, it says. Where are Streets A, B, and C, I hear you ask? Lost to the sea, in October 1889. Robinson merely points out that what happened once will surely happen again.

And on the other coast, more irony. First victim of the coming catastrophic changes in climate? Why, Washington DC, of course, which is a mere 10 feet above sea level and built on a swamp. A couple of storms converge, coincident with a high tide, and politics-as-usual is under water.

Excellent. I'll read the first sequel in the new year.

===

*Poison ivy has interesting properties: only a billionth of a gram of the potent Urushiol oil is needed to cause a rash; and only 7 grams of the stuff would be needed to cause a rash in every person on earth. It remains active even on dead plants for at least five years; and samples centuries old have still caused rashes.

December 16, 2005

Fancy Pants Orange Juice

I'm not one for buying fancy pants orange juice, or indeed any other kind of juice. Own brand does me, most of the time. Just lately, I've taken to buying variations of V8 vegetable/fruit juices and all-fruit smoothies, because it means I don't have to think about eating actual fruit, and can top up a portion or two of my 5-a-day when I'm falling woefully short.

Fruit in liquid form is infinitely preferable to the real thing.

Anyway, for about 70 million years, I have suffered from excess acidity in my stomach, and there is a huge list of foods I never (or rarely) eat. Orange juice has been on my stink list for years: until now.

Because I am just dead impressed at Tropicana's Low Acid OJ, because it really is. Low acid, I mean. And it tastes smooth and goes down easy, without burn.

Top marks.

charlatans, thieves, frauds

Yesterday, I thought I'd phone my insurance company, make sure they had all the paperwork etc. they needed, and that they weren't sitting on my claim waiting for some information that they hadn't bothered to ask me for. You know what these people are like.

First time I phoned, I got a message saying they were experiencing a "high volume of calls", and if it was a "non-urgent" matter, please try later. I decided to do that, because I had things to get on with, but then I got the same message when I tried later and realised that the same message goes out, regardless of time of day and volume of calls.

The truth is that the cheapskate bastards don't employ enough people to cope with the volume of calls, and they use that mechanism to discourage people from contacting them.

Once they've got your money, that is. Because I bet if you phone the quote line, you get a fairly swift answer, even if it then takes half an hour to establish the spelling of your surname and your post code.

So when I phoned again, I ignored that message and waited. 25 minutes.

During that 25 minutes, I probably heard the "Your call is important to us and thank you for your patience" message - well, 25 times. At the best of times, that kind of message is irritating. Irritating because it's meaningless, and because it's insincere. But I defy anyone who has heard it 25 times (and I know 25 minutes is only an average length of time to be on hold) not to be enraged to the point of apoplexy by it. So, not only meaningless and insincere, but counterproductive and stress-inducing.

So I finally got through, and said I was just calling to check whether they had everything in hand. Did I have a claim reference number? No, because I haven't heard anything from you since I made my claim. After we established who I was, she saw that they'd been notified - initially - by the AA, which I knew. And I asked if they'd received the actual form I'd completed, with all the exhausting detail asked for (much more than I gave the AA). No, she said, but really they preferred to do everything by phone.

Oh, really? Is that why you make me hold on for 25 minutes until someone answers?

Anyway, she said she'd check that the form had been received (I sent it on Tuesday the 6th, so 10 days ago) and phone me back to confirm.

Even as I put the phone down, I knew I wasn't going to hear anything. I'd been well and truly fobbed off. See, my worry is that organisations like insurance companies rely on a system of inertia. Like estate agents and conveyancers, they do precisely nothing until you phone them up to give them a nudge. If you don't phone, they assume you don't care enough, and don't ever bother with it. And if you wait too long to phone, your paperwork will be lost and you will have to start again.

And yet, we increasingly live in a culture in which the person who complains is treated as a criminal. I knew, for example, if I expressed my extreme annoyance at the standard-operational-bullshit of being kept waiting for 25 minutes, that I would be addressed as some kind of freak or nutter.

You'd make a note of it, not to ever have dealings with this company again, except they all fucking merge with each other and become one huge edifice which you're obliged to deal with by law, and which has one central call centre with one part-time operator at the end of a labyrinthine voicemail system.

Bastards!

the quality of mucous

can anyone tell me, is mucous the same size in children as it is in adults? i mean the little molecules inside mucous. if the organ or whatever it is that makes mucous is smaller, then surely the stuff that comes out of it is smaller? i don't mean the quantity, i mean that which makes up mucous.

if you know the answer to this, then please let me know. maybe it depends on where the moon is in the sky.

Breaking News About the Moon

Reading up on how the moon was so big and bright last night (turns out it's going to collide with the Earth this weekend, but they're keeping quiet about it, so as not to alarm the public), I came across this BBC Magazine story about why the moon was looking so big in June (first inklings that it was going to hit us).

Apparently, nobody can explain why the moon looks bigger when it's on the horizon than it does when it's high in the sky. I always thought it was some kind of fishbowl effect, caused by the atmosphere being thicker lower down. Obviously incorrect, and yet it's something I've taken for granted for about 30-something years.

Brilliant.

December 15, 2005

Getting Oneself Off Others' Shitlists...

Or GOOOS for short...

I was going to call this 'Karmically Challenged' or 'Karmic Deficit', but despite never having heard either expression in the wild, there is a blog named as per the former, and the latter expression is in common use too. Just goes to show there is officially no such thing as originality.

Anyhoo, I am feeling smug today, as contrary to my announced interests in my Blogger profile 'Not giving Simon his CDs back' (as read by probably four of you who aren't fellow hoosiers), I have today done that very thing.

The most assiduous of readers will have read Simon's occasional elliptical references to musical exchange/retention with/by myself, with two of his rather short Top '89' falling into the 'ask Patrick' category.

I have never been much of a lender, because I know how lousy a borrower I am.

Only several hundred other transgressions to address and I should be in Karma Surfeit territory again... (actually I don't think I ever have been, probably never will be...)

hungover

ribena is made by glaxosmithkline. on my bottle of no added sugar really light ribena is written: "...95% of all uk and irish blackcurrants grow up to become ribena berries." 95%. that's too much, and it's not anything to boast about.

Topical Post

You can't have missed the recent flurry of controversy over Christmas decorations being renamed "Holiday Trees" by some organisations - and the occasional volte-face following customer complaints.

I even read some journo the other day who said something along the lines of, "It's understandable if Christians get annoyed about this kind of thing. After all, we did steal their festival."

Which just puzzled me, to be honest. Because I find it hard to believe that there's anyone who really thinks that we secularists have done anything other than to continue to celebrate the festival in more or less the same way it has been celebrated since the first time someone accidentally ate fermented fruit.

The word is a problem, because Christ-mass does have connotations, obviously. But then so does Holy-day! If anything, renaming a Christmas tree a Holiday tree just reveals the depths of someone's stupidity.

I've mentioned below, vis-a-vis the stream of winter road incidents (and before on Lisa's blog) that the milestone of the shortest day, Dec 21st, when the days really do start getting longer, and we've broken the back of the Dark Half of the year, really is something worth celebrating. If Christmas hadn't already been invented, I would start it now! Personally, I don't care what you call it. The word Christmas is entirely divorced from its religious context - just as the word holiday clearly is for most people. It's as religious as me shouting, "Jesus Christ!" when someone infuriates me.

Anyone who gets up early feels the full force of the Dark Half of the year from the end of October to the end of February. When we were a rural folk, we all felt it, which is why we had a fucking big blow-out at the end of December and another fucking big blow out in the Spring. It's why we light fires at the end of October or beginning of November. Darkness, rain, ice, fog, and wet snow: all these things are shit. For farmers, postal workers, shift workers, for crazy fools who live too far from where they work, the dark days are dark indeed.

If you don't leave the office at lunchtime, if you just sit at your desk all day, you see no daylight. Arrive at work in the dark, leave work in the dark. No wonder people get depressed, no wonder they invented a celebration to cover the period when things are at their darkest, just before they get better. It's our festival, the People's Festival, if you will. It doesn't belong to Christians, or the Coca Cola company, or religionists of any ilk. We celebrate because it's fucking dark and we fucking hate it, and we want it to be over.

Cheers.

Your Apple Aperture Questions Answered

Q. Is there a Windows version of Aperture?

A. No. But look out for a version compiled to run on an Intel Processor in 2006!

Q. Does Aperture run on Panther?

A. No, it does not. You need Tiger version 10.4.3 as a minimum.

Q. Will Aperture run on an iMac G5?

A. If you have a 1.8GHz processor, maybe. But you also need to have the right graphics card. The GeForce FX 5200 is not supported, for example. To find which graphics card you have, choose "About This Mac" from the Apple menu, and then click the "More Info" tab. Select PCI/AGP cards from the Contents list, and you will see the card you have installed. You need one of the following:

ATI Radeon x600 Pro or x600 XT
ATI Radeon X800 XT Mac Edition
ATI Radeon X850 XT
ATI Radeon 9800 XT or 9800 Pro
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro
ATI Radeon 9600, 9600 XT, 9600 Pro, or 9650
ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 or 9600
NVIDIA GeForce 6600 LE or 6600
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL or 6800 GT DDL
NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT
NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500

Q. Is Aperture a Photoshop killer?

A. No, we don't think so. Not in version 1.0, anyway. The editing tools are too basic, and you will need Photoshop for comping, masking, and advanced editing techniques. Think of Aperture as iPhoto on steroids. It's a very quick way of working with RAW digital camera shots - a pro application requiring a pro-spec machine. Now you know why a PowerMac G5 costs more than an iMac.

Thursday Jinx Strikes Again

Since I started working from home on Fridays, Thursdays on the roads have been more of a nightmare than they were before. I'm actually off today because one of the kids is ill, but if I had tried to get to work, I would have encountered this incident, in which 3 people have died.

A southbound truck hit another truck that was on the hard shoulder (asleep at the wheel? It's around 1000 miles from Warsaw to Northampton) and then careened across the road, smashed through the central reservation, and hit a northbound car. "A man has been arrested on suspicion of causing death by dangerous driving."

+++

Update: BBC News is reporting that the motorway is still closed, and has been since 04:30 a.m. Southbound may reopen soon, but most alternative routes are completely gridlocked.

So glad I stayed home.

December 14, 2005

The Death Clock

It's being so cheerful etc.

According to The Death Clock, I am going to die on Valentine's Day 2042. I will be 79 years old.

This doesn't really depress me, except for the thought that my youngest daughter will more or less be as old as I am now. I want my kids to be young forever. Or forever young.

ITV News Channel axed

Question 1: Did you know ITV had a news channel?

Question 2: Have you ever watched it?

I can say that I have watched BBC News 24 and it's RUBBISH! I can't believe how amateurish and shambolic it is. With just one thing to get right - the news - they manage to make a complete hash of it, unable to synch sound and picture, or match the script to what you see on screen. And they have big, dumbass graphics all over the most interesting bit on screen, and a range of identikit presenters who must feel suicidal at the prospect of working there.

Registration required to read MediaGuardian.co.uk. The funniest bit is at the end of the story:
Staff had been hoping for a reprieve until after Christmas after ITV delayed a decision on its future at the beginning of this month.

Only a fortnight ago it hired former Sky News presenter Scott Chisholm to host the news channel's breakfast show, which launched on Monday.

Now, that's comedy.

Buddy Holly - The Singles Plus

Buddy Holly - The Singles Plus

About a century ago, we were talking about 89 essential albums and that, and Buddy Holly was on my list, only the Buddy Holly records I owned were on something called vinyl, long ago sold at a car boot.

So I ordered this from Amazon, and it finally arrived this week. It's an enormous collection, over 40 tracks, and it has everything that I used to own on two vinyl compilations and more. Some of them may be different versions, but it's too long ago for me to remember.

I had a brief discussion with Roy about Holly yesterday. Roy said, "Buddy Holly gives me the creeps. I know it's great, seminal, but there's something about it."

I actually know what he means. These tracks are seminal, archetypal even, but it's hard to be anything other than a detached observer. He was creepy-looking, and he had a creepy voice. Over and above that, you get the feeling that - even after a couple of years - he was being sucked into an entirely different kind of musical direction, and that, had he lived, he would have betrayed all his early promise.

People talk about his innovative arrangements - the strings on "It Doesn't Matter Anymore" for example - but what I hear is the attempt to repackage him, make him "commercial", to de-countryfy him, knock off the rough edges. And when I hear clarinet and saxophone on other tracks, I just think it sounds wrong in the same way those Elvis soundtrack songs sound wrong.

The key to Holly was that he was a skinny white boy and he wore glasses. In appearance, he was your standard all-American nerd. A nice boy who would represent no threat, who would go to college and become an insurance salesman. But then he was singing all this weird stuff, and if he could do it, then it was open to anyone. Buddy Holly wasn't, like Elvis, the white man who sang black music, and he wasn't, like Chuck Berry, a black man who played rock 'n' roll guitar. Holly's music sounded white, but still - obviously - came from the same place that Elvis' and Berry's music did.

When you read about the young Bob Dylan (or the young Robbie Robertson), tuning his radio late at night and picking up powerful stations, bounced across the heavyside layer from hundreds of miles further south, swimming up through the ether with strange-sounding music that opened windows and doors in the mind, this was very much the kind of thing. In fact, it's hard now to listen to Buddy Holly and not think about movie moments of radios tuned to distant sounds that were passing strange.

Don't think of "Peggy Sue" when you read that, or "It Doesn't Matter Anymore." There are songs on these records that are much stranger than that. For example, you know how sometimes (especially in childhood) you can cry so much that for ages afterwards you don't so much breathe as sob? How an intake of breath can have several stages, as the air passes into your lungs in lumps? On one of these tracks, every word that Holly sings sounds like that, every word a sob. Can you imagine being 14 years old and hearing that come over the airwaves late at night?

But how can such absolute anguish sound so cheerful?

It's important, too, that these songs are simple, brilliant, and short. They're easy to play, and they inspire you to try to write your own. You can hear the Beatles on here, from vocal mannerisms to guitar licks. But you can hear the Pixies, too. When Black Francis wanted to Gil Norton to understand why Pixies songs were so short, he pointed to a Buddy Holly record. I once joked that the songs on the Beatles' best album, Beatles for Sale were all around two minutes long: "some are even longer." As I was driving to work this morning, I was on disc 2, and at track 13 it was 7.13 a.m. By 7.32 a.m., track 22 was over.

There's a danger, with nostlagia, that entropy makes everything seem more or less the same, and history is rewritten to incorporate things that didn't fit. Six months ago, we were thinking about "Like a Rolling Stone," and what an amazing thing it must have been when that song first snarled out of a transistor radio. It's hard to imagine a world in which you don't know what someone looks like, where they come from, or what they're about. When you live in an era of Velvet Underground songs in commercial breaks, a world in which implacable foes reunite for the cash or for charidee, it's hard to believe that the world was ever shocked by Paul McCartney and appalled by Ringo.

But Buddy Holly, now. He still has the power to creep you out. And when you think about it, that's pretty powerful stuff.

Dingoes Ate My Boyfriend - the aftermath

There are two things you can be certain of in high-profile murder cases.

The first is that the sobbing relative at the press conference is probably the chief suspect, and that the police have encouraged them to make "an appeal to the media" in order to watch their reactions.

The second is that, following a guilty verdict, you will find out all the things the jury weren't allowed to know, all of which confirm the guilt of the suspect, and it becomes gobsmackingly obvious what a huge risk a "fair trial" can be.

Wild generalisations, I know, but that's the subtitle of this blog. Sort of.

As Marie said in the comments the other day, and as Leesa agrees, the media had it in for Joanne Lees from the beginning, because she didn't play their game. They hated her because she was too savvy. Too savvy to weep on demand, too aware of the prurient interest in her b r e a s t s to pose for photographs like the good grieving girlfriend.

The first thing to nail is that tabloid journalists, on the whole, know nothing about the behaviour of people who have really been traumatised. Those of them who are still arguing that Lees' behaviour was "weird" are just fucking stupid. People's reactions to grief and or trauma cover a wide spectrum, from numb to head-banging hysteria. Nothing is "normal" and nothing is "weird."

I would love for some of them to be put in real fear for their lives for a few hours and see how they react and how many details they remember afterwards. To be a little selfish for a moment, I had a very scary accident on the motorway a couple of weeks ago - a 65mph tail spin caused by a truck pulling into my lane and nudging me - and only blind luck saw me end up, relatively safe, on the hard shoulder. But I didn't weep, fall apart, or take a week off sick. You might think me totally unaffected, but - for example - my legs turned to jelly yesterday when I was overtaking a lorry and it started to signal to pull out into my lane. I still get in a car every day and drive to work, because I know that if I gave into the fear I've been feeling, my life would be fucked.

So Joanne Lees held herself together, and because she didn't put on an act for the media, some of them decided to smear her good name. The person who has murdered a family member and hopes to get away with it will step forward and appeal for help to find the missing one. Lees, on the other hand, must have known from quite early on that Falconio was dead, and that no appeal would bring him back. The only questions she would answer concerned her opinion that the media were bang out of order with all their innuendo.

Last night on 5Live, I heard one of the writers of the (5 so far) forthcoming books continuing to imply that there were inconsistencies in her story, and that - even after the verdict - people would still wonder what really happened.

This came even as we learned that Murdoch had - almost certainly - abducted another girl using similar methods, had a huge collection of firearms and ammunition, a collection of press cuttings on the case, had been telling people - before he was arrested - that he was being framed for the murder, and had changed his appearance and been hiding out in some shotgun shack for 6 months in an attempt to avoid arrest. He had full access to all the police evidence and a laptop computer in order to prepare his defence - and the jury still took just 8 hours (after 8 weeks and 85 witnesses) to find him guilty.

These are the details you learn later, when you realise that the evidence heard in court was the tip of the iceberg. This is the bit I knew was coming. Here's a good colour piece from the Austrlian, which gives some of the flavour.

At the trial, evidence was heard from people who testified that Murdoch had mentioned having to "get rid" of someone who was following him; that he'd discussed the best way to dispose of a body; that he had indeed taken steps to change his appearance. When he was arrested for the alleged rape of a 12 year old girl, police found home-made cuffs made from cable ties - exactly the same as those Lees was wearing when she was picked up by the rescuing road train driver. A lot of the evidence was thrown out by the judge in the interest of a fair trial. Still, Murdoch kept meticulous notes throughout on the judge's behaviour: already preparing for his appeal, knowing he would be found guilty.

And still the writers who have a vested interest in selling their books come forward with the innuendo. Is it a surprise that Joanne Lees is sketchy on the details of what happened? She had a gun in her face, it was dark, she couldn't see her boyfriend, and she thought she was going to be raped or killed. And she can't remember how she ended up in the back of the truck? Dear me. And you know what? I can't remember how I got from the middle lane to the hard shoulder, or how I managed to stop the car.

December 13, 2005

Dingoes Ate My Boyfriend - Blimey!

Quick verdict (8 hours): Murdoch guilty of Falconio murder

Murdoch sentenced to life in prison.

(Earlier, the Jury asked the judge to clarify whether they could find Murdoch guilty without a body. To which the judge replied, "Well, duh. Why do you think we had a frickin' trial, you morons?"

Possibly.)

December 12, 2005

It comes around, it goes around

Here in the seen-it-all-before department, we like to keep tabs on current cultural icons, and remind ourselves where we've seen it all before. I think we've established by now that Robbie Williams is an updated (and slightly less gay, apparently) Elton John (close your eyes and the resemblance is uncanny). But what about some of the current crop of stars?

The escaped mental patient who sings at a piano and wears a hat to conceal a bad hair day? That's right: Daniel Powter is Gilbert O'Sullivan:



Singer-songwriter who sings like a girl and annoys everyone?



Dark-haired songstress who gets your dad all hot under the collar? Call off the search, it's Elkie Brooks:



Slightly old hat by now, but lest we forget, Chas and Dave modelled their act on a once-famous pair of brothers:

dLAN - it works!


dLAN
Originally uploaded by mcmrbt.

This is a ridiculously easy home networking solution for hard-to-wire locations that are unsuitable for wireless.

I converted my garage to a home studio. It places my iMac about as far from my phone socket and modem/router as it's possible to get and still be indoors. I could just about get WiFi reception in there (through several walls), but it was flaky and intermittent, and sometimes impossible. Older readers of the blog will remember that even purchased a booster antenna for my wireless network, but it made no difference, so I sent it back.

I thought I'd try one of these, the Microlink dLAN - ethernet over electrical circuit. The one I'm trying is the high speed starter kit (up to 85 mbps - you get two of the units, plus two ethernet cables in the box).

I didn't bother to look at the manual, of course. I'm a Mac user, so I expect things to just work. Connected it to my modem/router with the supplied ethernet (cat5) cable, plugged it into a free power socket, and did the same thing the other end with my iMac. It took as long to do as it did to type that.

No configuration, nothing to install (on my Mac anyway). Didn't even have to reboot. And it worked immediately - much lower latency than the wireless network, much better speed, didn't have to change any settings (though I did switch Airport off to avoid confusion).

Brilliant!

Nice writing: A Ghost in Darwin

In my periodic trawls through the web for stories on the trial that fascinates me, I have rarely come across a good "colour" piece, but here's one by Steve Braunias on New Zealand Insight. Serves to capture something of the atmosphere of the trial town as the trial proceeds, and - back in time - of what must have been a scary night, when it all went down:
They saw a bushfire. They saw kangaroos. They smoked some dope Falconio had bought in Sydney and stashed underneath the dashboard, and watched the sunset. They played the Stone Roses - Falconio's choice, the band wasn't to Lees' taste. By then, said Murdoch, he had turned off Stuart Highway, and into the Tamani desert, 'rolling along like Tommy tourist'.

Darkness fell..."


Good stuff.

dig!

this rockumentary (if you will)*, recently released on dvd, is as good as everyone says it is, obligatory viewing for anyone who has an interest in blah blah blah etc etc.

anton newcombe, leader of the brian jonestown massacre and star of the film, has an interesting way of dealing with his musicians when they don't play the songs the way he would like; he kicks them. as a failed songwriter/musician myself, i know exactly where he's coming from.

* minus ten points for the 'tap reference, i know.

They think it's oil over... it is now

Simon has filled us in on the big news event of the weekend (unless you read the New York Times). Marie's take on it is a classic, too.

My own interest is in how it started. Because that's the most interesting aspect, isn't it, if you love coincidence and synchronicity? You need two conditions for such a blast: first of all, a leak of some description; and then a spark.

One assumes that workers in such places are hyper-aware of danger of naked flames and sparks. I still switch off my lights etc in the petrol station. We should all switch off our mobile phones when filling up, but do we? Of course not.

My main theory is that there was a smoker there, sneaking a quick fag in what he thought of as a "safe" area. Throwing said fag out of the window, perhaps, of his car, or of a nearby building. It's always the smokers, you see, because their main purpose in life is to pollute the moon and stars. And if they can't do that, they'll make your clothes and hair smell, just because they can. I can't help wondering what this guy was doing, in the immediate beforemath From the Guardian:
Security guard Raheel Ashraf, who had been inside a building close to the depot, described being blown off his feet in the blasts and said: 'It was like being in hell.'The 26-year-old landed unconscious and came round seconds later to be confronted by giant flames. He then leapt 15ft from a window to escape the shattered building. He said: 'All I could hear was this long thundery sound - the after-effects of the bang. I went through one window and landed in a pile of bricks and broken glass.'"

I'm not casting aspersions. Just wondering.

Yes, we have no Banarnias

Meghan O'Rourke in Slate Magazine defends the Narnia books against both the Polly Toynbee secularists and the whacky religionists.

A nice article, because if you did enjoy the books as a child (I have never read them myself), this article reclaims them for you, by reminding us that children read differently, and in fact usually need to have the Christian theme pointed out to them by adults.
In the end, Narnia is not a stand-in or merely an "allegory" for our world. It is, quite explicitly, an alternative to it, complete with its own pleasures and typologies.

====

And, in completely unrelated news, this article on the Beatles' appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show, also from Slate, is very interesting. It's tied to the release of this DVD, which I'm afraid I completely missed.

I remember that Lennon quote about 1964-era American girls looking like "1940s horses", which was all you ever needed to tell me about the cultural impact of the Beats on the gobsmackingly crap cultural atmosphere of the USA in the early 60s. Once Elvis went into the army, that was it: back to the kind of entertainers immortalised in Broadway Danny Rose.

You experience a similar thing in the study of literature. You might read some set text thinking, god this is bad, god this is boring, but it's only when you consider what was popular at the time that you can appreciate your set text's cultural significance.
Ed Sullivan didn't entirely get it, either—and why should he have? He was even older than our parents. Legend has it that, on a trip to England a few months earlier, Ed saw the commotion the Beatles were causing and thought he'd book the lads on his show as a novelty act—until their manager, Brian Epstein, insisted on top billing. You can imagine Ed thinking: Top billing for these kids? Above Frank Gorshin, Myron Cohen, Gordon and Sheila McRae? Above Hollywood's delightful Mitzi Gaynor?!

Another significant factor was that - in terms of the continuity of popular culture - guitar music was a minority interest up till around 1956, when Elvis went national. And that it was a mere 4 years after that that he disappeared into the army and was confined to making those lame movies. So it was as if there had been a brief flurry of interest in guitar music (Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran were dead, Elvis in Hollywood, other rock 'n' rollers were unfashionable again) and then it was back to the strings and the orchestras, until a certain beat combo burst onto the scene.

Dingoes Ate My Boyfriend - the final stretch

The judge has continued his summing up in the trial of Bradley Murdoch, alleged murderer of Peter Falconio and alleged abductor of Joanne Lees. See, this is why trials are so expensive. Last week, they worked Monday Tuesday and Wednesday, then had a day off on Thursday so a juror could go to a funeral, and didn't drag themselves back to work till today, Monday. Even then, a "day" in court barely warrants the term.

The judge started summing up last Wednesday, but presumably had to remind the jury today of what he said. He'll continue tomorrow and then the jury may get to consider their verdict come lunchtime. I'd love to be a fly on the wall at the first vote.

Anyway ABC News reports:
A Darwin jury has been told it would be unfair to reason that Peter Falconio's alleged murderer was a man of bad character because he ran illegal drugs across the country.
...
Chief Justice Brian Martin said because Murdoch traded in cannabis, carried a gun and took amphetamines did not mean the accused had committed murder and assault."

I'm glad he clarified that. Just because he's driving across the desert with a fuel tank full of illegal drugs and carrying an illegal gun doesn't mean he's a bad guy. You know you're in Australia when...

The jury was also told to ignore Joanne Lees' evidence about the man on the petrol station security video. She said she thought it was the man who assaulted her, and other witnesses have said that the man caught on CCTV was Murdoch. But Lees didn't see Murdoch walking, and couldn't otherwise tell it was him.

However, because Murdoch denies it was him on camera, and because other people testify that it was him, if the jury believes the other witnesses, then it means Murdoch is lying about that. And if he's lying about that, what else is he lying about?

So the case rests on that, was it him or not, and the DNA evidence: was it planted/contaminated after the event?

It's a pretty flimsy prosecution case, in the end, after two months of trial. The judge has dismissed Joanne Lees' identification of Murdoch on CCTV, and has told the jury to forget that Murdoch ran drugs and carried guns. Plenty of scope for reasonable doubt, which leaves Lees in the precarious position of wondering what the police will say, should Murdoch be found not guilty.

"We're not looking for anybody else..." Or, "Joanne Lees, I'm arresting you for the murder of Peter Falconio..."?

December 11, 2005

Tift does indeed Rock


Tift Rocks
Originally uploaded by Kurisu.


I Didn't take my camera, because I didn't want to lug it around, but went to see Tift Merritt last night at the Radcliffe Centre in Buckingham. The pictures here are borrowed from various flickr sets.

Performing with two other musicians (percussionist and guitarist), or solo, she inspired the audience to worship in the converted church, taking advantage of the church acoustics to sing without PA or microphone on "Supposed to Make You Happy", and using the in-house grand piano extensively, for example on the crowd-pleasing "Good Hearted Man.".

The only other person I've ever seen who had the guts to step out from behind a mic and perform without amp/PA is Jonathan Richman. To me it's a measure of real class, because I've rarely been at a small gig (particularly one with mainly acoustic instruments) where I didn't feel the PA got in the way.


Tift Merritt
Originally uploaded by cahernan.


Her piano performances in particular were fantastic. I think where she has used a piano at live gigs (judging from the photos on flickr), it's been an electric or digital model. She said at the beginning that she didn't know how it was that she got so lucky as to finish her 13-month Tambourine tour in a church with a grand piano. It was such an intimate venue that you could hear the clump of her high heels on the floor as she kept time.

It was a Buckingham crowd, which meant that I felt like a mere whippersnapper at 43 years of age. The audience was respectfully quiet (allowing for the non-PA moments), but at the same time reluctant to join in with Ms Merritt when she attempted to get them to sing on "Shadow in the Way." She kept making ironic comments about the rowdiness of the crowd, and you felt for her, but I don't think in the end that it detracted from her performance. And since the last gig I went to was characterised by constant and intrusive natter and a steady stream of trips to and from the bar, I can't say I was too sorry.

It was a Radio 2 crowd, too, and I suspect many people hadn't bought either of her albums, but had heard "Good Hearted Man" on the wireless - since that's the only one that was greeted with applause.

Support act was the shoe-gazing and too-twee The Havenots, a Leicester duo who have been touring the UK with Merritt. Sophia, the singer, seems not to have picked up on the way Tift sings from her diaphragm, fills the room, imbues everything with emotion, and, you know, moves about - a missed opportunity, I think. I bought their album anyway, because I'm sure selling CDs at gigs is an important source of income for them. I'll give it a listen and let you know what they're like with a full band.

For the encore, Tift Merritt performed "Sunday" (from Bramble Rose), which she said she hadn't done in so long that she needed the words in front of her. That said, I didn't see her look at them, so it was more for security I guess.

Predictably, she played a tambourine on "Tambourine" (and on "Shadow", I think), and played it so hard that I thought her hand would drop off.


Tift still rocking
Originally uploaded by 5500.


Anyway, to use a technical term, this was fucking excellent and now usurps Maria McKee at the Town and Country in 1991 as Officially the Best Gig Ever.

December 09, 2005

Disney sucks the life out of another children's classic...

...Or does it? Marie is incensed by Disney messin' with the Pooh, but my opinion is that they pooed all over it when they made the original film anyway.

Chris Wild - in the comments - disagrees and thinks Disney's Pooh travesty is OK. What do you think? I can't be clever about it. I just fucking hate Disney.

Friday Fun

Simon's post below about his in-car listening got me thinking. He mentions several good guitar players, of which there is always more discussion to be found over at guitargas. But he made me think of some stuff he has done for me in the past, and what an ego-trip it is to have someone play as well as he does on my own tracks.

Here's one we did last year some time. It's an epic 5 mins plus, and it's encoded at 160kbps, so it's a hefty 6MB plus file.

Simon plays the lead guitar part (obviously). I am proud to be associated with it, and the last two verses, which feature some of my best ever nasty lines.

I Don't Want To #2

(It's #2, by the way, because there's an earlier version of it, without Simon's guitar, and with a better organ part.)

Cameron Succumbs to Everything-is-Connected Madness

What is this new madness? Teenager David Cameron, 19, from Notting Hill, has published a comment piece in the Gonad that clearly indicates he has been reading this blog and has gone quite mad. He even appears to think he is the new Conservative Party leader. Like me, he realises that Everything is connected:
There's a series of issues, all of which are connected with one another and which constitute a great challenge: climate change, pollution, biodiversity, the countryside and waste. The quality of public space and our urban landscape. Working and living patterns and the suburban landscape. Traffic jams, rural juggernauts, the balance between road and rail and carbon emissions from transport. Demographic change and the supply and affordability of housing."

In his madness he even acknowledges that it's impossible to deal with these issues using separate government departments.

Bloody hell. I think we all need to take a pill. It's like I've entered a parallel universe in which the Labour Party are hopelessly right wing and reactionary and the Tories have some kind of vision thing going on.

Update on the Netgear Antenna

Back in October, or Spalio as our Lithuanian readers would have it, you may remember that I purchased a Netgear wireless antenna in order to boost the signal into my garage/studio on Fridays when I work from there.

Well, I persevered with it over several weeks, and ended up returning it this week, because, frankly, it made no appreciable difference in signal strength. In fact, I'd go as far as to say it was sometimes actually worse.

For example, today - with the original 10cm antenna - I have two bars (which is actually 5 bars in the Internet Connect control panel). Well, I never got that good a signal with the so-called booster.

In my opinion the ANT2409 is a useless pile of dog eggs, an expensive Star Wars toy that doesn't even light up.

In my continuing attempts to improve my garage bandwidth, next week I will try one of these, a MicroLink dLAN kit, which allows you to create a network using your mains electricity. A problem-solver, in other words, for hard-to-wire locations which are unsuitable for wireless.

You plug it into the mains close to your modem/router, connect it to the router with an ethernet cable, and then plug another one in near your 'puter, and connect to your ethernet port. Et voila: you're wired. That's the theory, anyway.

If it works, I'll be gutted, because it will mean a bit of cable clutter. And that I wasted money on an Airport Extreme card. And because I'll have to buy one, and it will cost me about £130 quid, less trade discount.

Guardian Unlimited's Ricky Gervais podcast

Top marks to the Gonad for the Ricky Gervais podcast, which had me chuckling on the way home last night. The real star of the show is the (surely fictional?) Karl Pilkington, who holds forth at length on various cock-eyed theories, to a chorus of abuse from Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant.

Recommended - and more to come, so worth a bookmark.

(Incidentally, as I don't have a 'Pod, I just downloaded it and burned it to a CD, which was nice, because the 31 minute show divided automatically into 10 tracks, so it's easy to find a bit you want to hear again. Must be a chapters thing.)

December 08, 2005

More on Apple Aperture


In case you were tempted to get Aperture to try on a below-spec machine... don't!

Says it will run on a single-processor PowerBook G4 1.25GHz, but will not even install on a dual 867MHz G4 machine (with 1.25 GB RAM).

I'll report tomorrow with my findings on an iMac G5 1.8GHz.

=====

Update: Can't install at home yet, because Aperture requires 10.4.3 or higher. I've frozen my home system at 10.3.9 because I didn't want to update Pro Tools and because there's been nothing about Tiger (which I use at work) that I've missed.
So, this will have to wait till I update to Pro Tools 7 and Tiger.

Mobile Madness

I'll tell you what, if NTL does buy Virgin mobile, I will swiftly move my business elsewhere. NTL only want the Virgin name because theirs is so very, very tainted with their shockingly bad customer service record.

(Tip: if a company sales line answers straight away, but its customer services leave you on hold for in excess of 45 minutes, shop elsewhere.)

Given Marie's experiences with T-Mobile, what to do? Tesco, probably, evil but cheap.

Do Waitrose do a mobile phone?

11:11

Lunch.

How long do you last before you eat it?

If I bring sarnies or rolls to work, I usually eat them before 10.30 in the a.m. 'Twas always thus. When I was at school, I used to eat my lunch in morning break, even if it was still frozen (I used to make my packed lunches on Sunday afternoons - including home-baking the rolls).

Obviously, if I bring something different - like a microwaveable meal - I have to survive till lunchtime proper, but you still want to sneak out to the microwave 10 mins before noon, so that nobody gets in front of you with a baked potato. Today I have some of the kedgeree I made last night. I feel bad about it because the smoked haddock is going to stench up the microwave, but that's tough love. Or, I should say, that's tough, love.

Simon eats his lunch for breakfast. And then goes out to the cob van and gets something. And then goes down the road and gets something else. I exaggerate, obviously, for comic effect, but being in the office is boring so you just eat your sarnies early.

Aperture has Arrived

We got our first stocks of Apple Aperture a few days ago, and yesterday we got an NFR copy out of stock to try (except Apple don't do NFRs as such). As a lot of visitors have come to the blog searching for info on Aperture, I thought I'd say something.

First of all, no, you can't have it.

I watched over James' shoulders as he played around with it. He's running it on a dual 1.8GHz G5 with 2.5GB RAM, which just about covers the requirements. He's also got an upgraded graphics card (an GeForce 6800 GT with 256MB RAM), which must help, too.

Anyway, the software looks great, and seemed to run quite respectably on his machine. I will be trying it on an 1.8GHz iMac G5, just to see how it copes, but for professional use, on a professional machine, it looks good.

The magnifier glass thing is a bit of an odd experience. First of all, it seems slightly counter-intuitive that the magnifier is working on the bit your cursor is pointing to, rather than the bit you move the magnifier over (which is not how it would be in the real world, of course). But it does work, very well. At first we thought you couldn't view the image at 100%, and that only the magnifier would allow you to see bits at 100%, but in fact, you can zoom to 100% and view portions of the image at up to 800%.

I'll post more on the long-term experience, and maybe James will add his own words, but it certainly didn't look like a disappointment.

Firefox 1.5 and Me

Been living with it for a week now, and I've formed some impressions which I'm sure you are dying to hear.

Things I like about it:

  • Fast
  • More compatible: i.e. I get full compose mode in Blogger and Gmail.
  • Importing bookmarks was easy

Things I don't like about it:

  • U-G-L-Y - the interface, compared to Safari, is horrible
  • Tabs - individual tabs don't have a close button. So you have to select a tab first and then command-W to close, or click the X button on the right; or (and this goes against the grain for a Mac user, even with a Mighty Mouse) right-click and choose Close Tab from the menu. Trust me, it all takes longer than the simple X you get on each tab with Safari
  • Unable to install a different theme. Given that I find it so ugly, I went looking for some different themes, to see if I could find something more aesthetically pleasing. I get a message saying I haven't enabled software installations. I click Edit Options in order to enable this feature, and I get... well, not nothing, but something that is invisible to the human eye. Something opens, but on my screen it displays as a sliver of white pixels, which sits on top of the open window uselessly.
  • Importing bookmarks was easy, but it did make a bit of a mess
  • Passwords - I just don't like the way it handles password-saving. It's clunky and intrusive, so that you might as well not save the pword in the first place
  • Oh, and although I get the full compose mode in Blogger and Gmail, I have lost the ever-so-useful global Mac OS X spellcheck.
  • All of which is a why of saying that Firefox, whilst web-standards compliant, is not compliant with the standards that matter to me most - which is the Mac OS X interface and feature set.
Given that the list of things I don't like is longer than the things I do, I'm on the cusp of giving up (again) and returning to Safari. Just when you think you've got out, they pull you back in.

December 07, 2005

Xmas parties: avoid sex, drugs and booze

The Register warns against all the things that can go wrong at the Christmas party:
Party balloons can kill: around 3.6 million people in Britain suffer from some degree of latex allergy. And over 1,000 people were injured by Christmas trees in 2002, so make sure they are secure and won't be knocked over by people passing by or pulling cables. Some other tips: keep fresh party food in a fridge before the party; use paper cups, not glasses; move computers out of range of spillages; and avoid indoor fireworks, flaming puddings, candles and smoking."

The ultimate office-do-gone-wrong would surely involve fireworks, candles, flaming puddings, dancing on desks, photocopied bodyparts, coke-sniffing in the disabled toilet, mass food poisoning, and at least two mistletoe-related sexual harrassment cases resulting in £10,000 settlements.

Without a Trace


I stopped watching Without a Trace some time ago, because it was always about kids in peril, and it didn't do what it said on the tin. Because they always left a trace, which is how they were always managing to find people. I wanted it to be about a small, underfunded but dedicated team of compassionate individuals who dug up abandoned missing persons cases and solved them. Is that too much to ask? Instead it was this against-the-clock kid-in-peril stuff and everybody was in love with everybody else.

When I was a teenager I kind of wanted to vanish. I wanted to be hard to find, in demand, on the wanted list. Not by the feds, but by people who knew me. I wanted them to wake up one day and wonder what became of that guy, you know, me. As it turns out, I was ridiculously easy to find. For years. My parents were the only people left in the Dumpstable area who still had their name in the phone book. One phonecall and my mum would have spilled the beans. Everyone else was all Hollywood ex-directory.

I was gratified when my parents moved to the wilds of Stinkonshire - at last! mystery was mine. Except nobody was ever going to wake up and wonder where I was.

ITV bought friendsreunited yesterday. Those people have made a fucking fortune out of a simple and obvious idea that – bizarrely – wasn't one of the first things the internet was used for.

I do think ITV overpaid for it, though. Because growth was good for a couple of years, but then the only way they could increase revenue was by adding loads of features that went beyond the original remit. The genealogy thing, which is a way of attracting nutcases. Dating, for attracting the rest of the nutcases. And jobs, which probably works as well as all the other on-line recruitment things.

But - disappointingly - the number of people registering on the original friendsreunited thing has dwindled to a trickle. The people who haven't aren't going to, I reckon. I think they want to remain lost, without a trace, enjoying their status as the Disappeared. Me, I realised immediately I didn't want to be precious about anything, and I stuck my name on there, on the basis that it will never work if you just lurk. And because there is someone I would happily pay £7 to get in touch with. Or £70.

Still waiting. And she, as the song goes, is too gone to care.*

*I hasten to add that this is not an infidelity thing but an apology-owed thing.