Robin Johnson's blog

Wildehouse

2011-11-22T11:13:00.004Z

My short piece Wildehouse will be performed at A Friend of a Friend Theatre's First Drafts, an evening of new writing, at the Charing Cross Theatre, London, on Sunday 22 January.

Samuel Wildehouse is up to his immaculately cravatted neck in it this time and no mistake! There's been a mix-up with an engagement ring and a poodle, his Aunt Lucretia is on the warpath, and his parasitic lifestyle will inevitably drive the proletariat to revolution. Can his indefatigable butler Rinehart get him out of this one? A short piece parodying Edwardian drawing-room comedy and considering whether it's really funny any more now that Edwardian drawing-room comedians are back in political power.

(A full-length play based along somewhat similar lines, In a Handbag, Darkly, will show on the Edinburgh Fringe 2012 if I can get the funds together. Eccentric millionaires are welcome to email me.)

The Big Rock Candy Mountains

2011-11-03T21:18:00.016Z

One evening as the sun went down
A hobo he came hiking,
He said, I just escaped a place
That was not to my liking;
It's a burnin', stinkin' hellhole with
No governmental groundin',
So I turned to flee; I'm a refugee
From the Big Rock Candy Mountains.

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains,
There's a land of devastation,
Where the handouts grow on bushes,
Causin' monetary inflation;
Where the boxcars all are empty
And there's shortages of goods;
And the birds and bees in the cigarette trees
All cough and wheeze with the lung disease
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
You never change your socks,
And little streams of alcyhol
Come a-tricklin' down the rocks,
So the fish all die of poisonin'
And the wadin' birds all starve;
With the whole food chain bein' interlinked
There's a bunch of critters that are near extinct
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
All the railroad bulls are blind,
So they fall out of the carriages
And get mangled on the line;
The bulldogs all have rubber teeth,
And the hens lay soft-boiled eggs,
And the air is rent by the whinin' sounds
Of the scalded chicks and the hungry hounds
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
All the jails are made of tin,
And you can walk right out of them
As soon as you are in,
So there ain't no workin' justice,
And the mob controls the streets,
And you live in dread of bein' woke in bed
By a murderous crook bashin' in your head
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
The economy's kaput;
There's famine, death and poverty
And a plague of athlete's foot;
The folks are gittin' mighty mad,
And they want someone to blame,
But they don't know who; there's a great to-do;
There's scapegoatism and riots too;
It'll probably end in a Fascist coup,
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.

There's civil war and worse in store
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.

Genesis

2011-09-12T10:00:00.005+01:00

It's pretty clear at the beginning that heaven is literally, physically up. The sky has windows in it which God can open to make it rain.

After the two conflicting creation stories, most of Genesis is boring genealogies, who went down to where, who smote whom, and a lot of gratuitous going-in-unto. The intolerance and violence don't surprise me - Noah's flood and Sodom and Gomorrah deserve a mention, but you know those stories already. What took me by surprise was the sheer volume of deceit. It's first nature for these characters to lie to each other at every opportunity. For example, one piece of advice that you might take to heart, if you thought that this book was any kind of moral example, is: if you're a man travelling with your wife, and you're afraid the locals might kill you and force her into sex slavery, tell them she's your sister. Then they'll force her into sex slavery without killing you, and you can relax. This happens three times, I think.

Chapters 37 to 45 are an interesting enough story, although not one with any discernible moral unless it's "If you know there's a famine coming, make sure you stockpile food so you can hold everyone to ransom for it." I can't read this bit without hearing the songs from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat.

Other highlights:

Jacob extorts his hairy brother Esau's birthright from him by threatening to withhold food when Esau is starving to death. He later deceives their father by covering himself in goatskin to dress up as Esau (that's how hairy he is.) God seems to be fooled as well. Much later in the bible, Esau is condemned for selling his birthright so cheaply.

Jacob meets a man on the road, and they decide to wrestle all night. This appears to be consensual, so it's probably one of the few morally unobjectionable bits so far. The man turns out to be God. In a surprise result, Jacob whoops His candy ass. But the match was probably pre-scripted anyway.

Some of Jacob's sons sell their sister Dinah to the ruler of some province or other on the condition that he orders all the men to be circumcised. Shortly afterwards, while the men are clutching themselves in agony, the sons nip in and massacre them - apparently in vengeance for the ruler dishonouring them by treating their sister like a harlot. Dinah's voice is totally unheard in all this.

The Innertube Map

2011-03-07T19:23:00.016Z

The Bike Station, a volunteer-run organisation of good people who recycle bicycles and promote cycling in Edinburgh, have launched a London Underground-style map of the Edinburgh bike paths: the Innertube Map. Have a look at the PDF; it's very slickly designed.

Their website invites feedback, so here's mine.

"Innertube" is a clever name, and I hope it catches on as a nickname for the bike path network itself. I will start using it two sentences from now.
It's pretty. If it's possible, I'd really like to see this displayed at entrances to the Innertube.
The FAQ on the website hints that this was argued to death in the planning stage, but the inclusion and exclusion of short on-road connections between paths - sometimes keyed on the map, sometimes left out - doesn't follow much logic. In particular, a section of Seafield Road, a busy, fumy road used for goods lorries running between the city bypass and Leith docks, is keyed as part of the Leith-Portobello route. At the other side of the map, Roseburn Place, a short, relatively quiet street with cycle lanes and advance stoplines, is just part of the whitespace. It's a pity there's a gap at Roseburn Place, because in reality it is the only piece of route you have to share with motorists to get from the Leith Shore to Glasgow.
An advantage of not connecting the lines up is that this way, the map shows the Innertube's potential. If the funding and the will were in place, a few hundred yards more dedicated cycleway is all it would take to make the Innertube into a proper inner circle of motor-free routes. I won't hold my breath, but it's nice to think about.
Can we stop calling bike paths "traffic-free"? Cyclists are traffic, and so are pedestrians.
Like so many cycle maps, it has a footnote to the effect of "Please cycle with respect." I've never once seen "Please drive with respect" printed on a map aimed at car drivers. In fact, my AA road atlas lists locations of speed cameras and has a page of tips on how to break traffic laws without being caught, in order to help motorists drive as disrespectfully and recklessly as possible. This isn't an ordinary double standard; it's a reverse standard - I don't think the Bike Station became part of it on purpose, but I hope they'll reconsider this for future prints. Pointing out the fact that paths are shared with pedestrians is fine.
Which brings me to my main cautionary point. The Innertube is cool, but it's not the only route available to cyclists in Edinburgh. For still most journeys, the far more useful routes are the roads. Some of the promotion of this map - not the promotion by the Bike Station themselves, but by a news story or two that I've seen about it - is focusing on the dangers of road cycling, and how splendid it is that we can all ride our bikes on the bike paths and be safe and happy. Bike paths are cool - they're green, fun and friendly, and it is a plus that you don't have to be constantly thinking about who might kill you. But we have to be very careful about how they are promoted, or more people will just end up getting irritated at cyclists continuing to ride on the grown-ups' roads. It's a damaging and cycle-discouraging myth that bicycles are dangerous, and too often, the false need to create cycle facilities threatens to make the myth true. I don't want Edinburgh turning into bloody Doncaster.

Good on the Bike Station for putting together this map. I will continue to take the Innertube to work on days when I'm not in a hurry. I hope the map does its job of promoting the bike paths, gets more people cycling, and that it will be even better in future prints.

Breakfast

2011-02-16T11:53:00.015Z

Too common a sight in the dim morning light
Are the workers, poured into their suits,
Downing caffeine-free cola and bars of granola
While hasting along their commutes.
The earliest meal is, to them, no big deal.
They are wrong! It should merit a feast!
A good breakfast-platter is no joking matter –
It sets one apart from a beast!

To begin, there must be a fresh kettle of tea
(Ideally Ceylon or Darjeeling),
And a grapefruit, segmented, and slightly fermented
To expedite easier peeling.
The ham should be fried for five minutes each side
Over flames that are hotter than hellish;
And the egg must be poached on a thick slice of toast
Spread with Marmite and gentleman's relish.

The mushrooms, sauté in a crisp Chardonnay
(Which, of course, you have chilled in the freezer);
The tomatoes, you oil and then gradually boil
In a warm Scandinavian geyser.
The best marmalade is Italian-made
(The Spaniards' attempt is horrific);
You should charter a clipper to angle for kipper
Around the south-central Pacific.

The finest hash-brown can be bought in a town
Only half a day's trek from Khartoum,
And the bubble-and-squeak should be smoked for a week
In the treacherous fires of Mount Doom!
Get some iron to smelt from the Asteroid Belt
To fashion your own frying-pan,
And the sausages must – here's the crux, nub or thrust –
Be as gristly and cheap as they can.

When you fit this cuisine in your waking routine,
You will find that it helps you to function
Through the toils of the day; and, with practice, you may
Even finish in time for your luncheon.

Chess automaton

2011-01-20T15:29:00.006Z

Charles Babbage, in his autobiography Passages From the Life of a Philosopher, wrote that he had considered building a chess automaton to show off as a fundraiser for his Analytical Engine project.

It seems that he offhandedly invented what is now known as a minimax algorithm, and designed an automaton of a cockerel and a lamb playing noughts-and-crosses, which was sadly never built. He concluded that, as chess is really just a slightly more complicated version of tic-tac-toe: "Allowing one hundred moves on each side for the longest game at chess, I found that the combinations involved in the Analytical Engine enormously surpassed any required, even by the game of chess."

This is a rather, er, hopeful assessment by Mr Babbage: the number of possible paths through a (more typical) 40-move game of chess has since been calculated at something like 10¹²⁰. This is so mindbogglingly, amazingly, really, really big that not only is there not enough brass in the universe to construct the cogwheel memory for such a system; there isn't enough space in the universe to store it; and operating this way it would take over 10⁹⁵ years to calculate the first move.^* Babbage's blinding optimism, inventive genius, and crucial fundamental simple error here are striking, but what else might we expect from the founder of computer programming?

The computation problem has since been fudged in a number of ways, and the space problem solved by messing around with electrons, and you can now buy a cheap handheld chess robot for a few pounds. One of these turned up in a charity shop down the road, but unfortunately it looked like this.

I decided to rehouse it in a hollowed-out book. The book is a shabbying 1925 copy of Chess Strategy by Edward Lasker. I'm loth to destroy books, but it wasn't worth anything, it didn't seem I was ever going to read it, and it's on Gutenberg if I ever decide to.

Masking the covers off with a binliner:

The edges of the exposed pages are covered with a few layers of cheap PVA glue, and left to dry under some weight:

Cutting out the cavity with a Stanley knife:

And we're through!

The gizmo is a snug fit:

It is then sprayed brass colour, and covered by a blank page with a window. A couple of gears are supposed to create the illusion that there's a bigger mechanism in there. New labels from the buttons are made blackmail-style from words and letters taken from the scrap pages. You can't read them, because I've drunk too much tea to hold a camera steady.

Same goes for the mini chessboard, with blu-tac backed pieces, cut from the various diagrams throughout the book, which will go on the left-hand page opposite the game window.
http://rdouglasjohnson.com/misc/chesswork-mini-set.jpg

The result
Closed:

Open:

And, finally, enrapt in a battle of wits with a worthy opponent:

Ninja sometimes comes and pushes the pieces around the board when I'm playing, but of course she won't do it for the camera.

____
* Assuming Babbage memory can store a chess position in about one cubic foot, and the Engine can perform one to ten calculations per second.

Play-a-Day #2: Uniforms

2010-11-03T08:06:00.002Z

See also Rachel, who is doing a similar NonNaNoWriMo thing with composing pieces of music.

(A box arrives.)

RAYBURN: Oh boy, our brand new Starfleet uniforms!

(The three open the box and rummage in it, and pull out shirts with the Starfleet insignia.)

DARNELL: Mine's blue!

TOMLINSON: Mine's yellow!

RAYBURN: Mine's red!

(DARNELL and TOMLINSON cough uneasily, and sidestep away from RAYBURN.)

RAYBURN: Oh, very good. Top notch observational comedy there, guys. This hasn't been done to death for forty years, at all.

TOMLINSON: You mean three hundred and forty years?

RAYBURN: It's superstitious nonsense, anyhow. All that stuff about the guy in the red shirt dying first.

DARNELL: You know what they say, Rayburn. There's no smoke without crazy rubber lizardmen slaughtering disposable supporting characters.

RAYBURN: There are 42 deaths in the original series. Only 25 of those people were wearing red at the time. And two of those were just boilersuits. That's barely half! It's not enough data to go on.

TOMLINSON: We're not saying you're dead for sure. We're just saying... maybe it's time to get your affairs in order. Write a will, absolve yourself with as many religions as possible, that sort of thing.

DARNELL: Run up a few debts. Phone some relatives you hate, make 'em say things they'll regret forever.

RAYBURN: (Snaps fingers) Montgomery Scott. Scotty wears a red shirt, and he survived three television series, eight films, a guest appearance in Next Generation and edited in to a time-travel DS9. He wasn't even the first of the actors to die.

DARNELL: Just... take care on your landing missions. Especially if you wind up with three main cast members who start talking to you as if they've suddenly known you for ages.

TOMLINSON: You weren't the Captain's best friend at the Academy, were you?

RAYBURN: I don't think so.

Play-a-Day #1: The Underworld

2010-11-01T20:53:00.012Z

This month, instead of National Novel Writing Month, I'm going to attempt to write a (very) short play every day, some of which I might extend later.

* * * * *

(A disused bar in New York. LOUIE, an elderly, but still formiddable-looking man, dressed in a trenchcoat and fedora, sits comfortably like he owns the place. Slow jazz plays from a jukebox. He goes behind the bar and helps himself to a whisky, then sits down.

MICKY, a teenager dressed in a sleeveless T-shirt and baggy pants, enters with a ridiculous handkerchief tied round his head.)

LOUIE: Micky, see! Did you remember to get milk and whack the Margolani Brothers?

MICKY: No, Uncle Don Louie “The Nose” Cardicci. But I did buy this ridiculous handkerchief to tie around my head.

LOUIE: You did what? Now look here, right? You're gonna follow the family business, see? And the family business is gangsterin', see? An' in this business, you don't put nothin' on your head but a good I-talian fedora. Gatsby's on Fifth'll sort you out with somet'n. Won't make you pay for it, neither. Not unless they want to wake up sleepin' with the fishes!

MICKY: You haven't kept up with the times, Uncle Louie. Gangsters these days don't wear fedoras. Why, if I turned up in the hood with one of those on, my friends or 'homies' would hold me in high ridicule. I shouldn't be surprised if one of them popped a cap in my ass.

LOUIE: Michelangelo Vito Eminem Cardicci! Ain't I raised you right? In this game, we don't “pop no caps in no asses”, see? We occasionally “whack” folks, or “take 'em out”, or “check 'em in to the cement suite at the Hotel Hudson”, stuff like that. You kill someone, you got to have the respect to do it with a proper metaphor, see!

MICKY: Whatevs, grandpa. I'm off to listen to some rap music.

(MICKY exits with a silly walk.)

LOUIE: I only hope it's just a phase.

(A bat flies in the window, and turns into COUNT TYRANSKI.)

TYRANSKI: Excusink me, Mister Don Louie?

LOUIE: Hey, who wants to know?

TYRANKSI: My name is Count Tyranski. I am a wampire!

LOUIE: Look here, Batman! Any wampire takes another step closer to my neck, I might get wiolent, see?

TYRANSKI: You misunderstand my intent, Don. I come here from Transylwania because you and I, we havink similar problems. Ve can maybe helpink each other, yes?

LOUIE: Better make this good. I got two qualified goons waitin', and they bore easily.

TYRANSKI: Qualified goons? You have exams for them?

LOUIE: Yeah, qualified. If you can spell your name right on the answer paper, you fail, see?

TYRANSKI: I come to you, great Don Leader of Gangsters, because I know your problems. I know gangsters dyink out. I know vord is beink now used by younk scallavags in hooded tops, who vould not know a Tommy-gun if they findink one in their bottle of 40.

LOUIE: Well, I guess maybe Micky's right. I ain't kept up with the times.

TYRANSKI: That is vhere I can helpink! Not keepink up vith times is vhat wampirink is all about. Or... it should be. But ve are sufferink now. Havink similar problems to gangsters. Younk wampires now know nothink! It is all these new books, telewision programmes, wideo games. Wampire kids these days don't vant to live in castles, they move to American high schools. Give up all the bitink and turnink into bats and havink only wague psychic powers of some kind. Not even speakink in eastern European accents!

LOUIE: I seen those programmes. Sulky teenagers in leather jackets, right? Not an evening cape between 'em. Maybe you an' me are in a similar fix, Your Countship.

TYRANSKI: Our powers grow veak. But if ve vere to pull our empires together...

LOUIE: ...the Vampire Mafia!

TYRANSKI: Yes! Ha ha ha!

(Lightning flashes. Music plays. TYRANSKI and LOUIE do a dance-twirl which somehow ends with TYRANSKI wearing the fedora and LOUIE the vampire's cape. The couple burst into song.)

LOUIE: You can tell us by our fangs
And by our packs of Cuban smokes,
And our Thompson sub-machine guns
Folded in our opera-cloaks.

TYRANSKI: You can tell us by our evening dress
And jaunty trilby hats;
And our habit, vhen ve're cornered,
Of transmorphink into bats.

LOUIE: If you cross us, then we'll whack you,
And then feast on your remains,
And you'll wake up in the river,
With an empty set of veins.

TYRANSKI: Ve'll remorselessly extinguish
Anybody in our path
TOGETHER: And the only way to kill us
Is a garlic concrete bath!

(Dance routine.)

Hamlet and Aunts and Butlers

2010-10-25T08:01:00.002+01:00

It seems the site that used to host my games Hamlet and Aunts and Butlers has fallen over again, so they are now at www.rdouglasjohnson.com. I'm in the process of moving all my various bits and pieces to that site.

Publishedness

2010-10-22T22:33:00.003+01:00

Stitched Up is now available as an e-Script from Stagescripts (they also manage the performance rights, and a free preview script is available.) A paper script will follow.

Fringe is over

2010-08-30T10:59:00.009+01:00

The Edinburgh Fringe run of Stitched Up went very nicely, picking up large audiences after we realised the trick of sending James Bober out flyering as Sherlock Holmes to get some brand-recognition from last year.

We got some nice reviews:

Fest magazine called us broadly appealing though unashamedly intellectual, and gave us four stars.

Edinburgh Screenworks called us completely ridiculous, and gave us four stars.

The new Twitter-based reviewer FringeBiscuit, which publishes reviews the right size to read a lot of at once, gave us: Light and witty deconstruction of Frankenstein, with a carefully clever script. Guaranteed giggles. 4/5.

The Fringe site has changed its site so that audience reviews are now closed to most people - to submit one, you need to have bought a ticket through the Fringe website, which few people do because buying them directly from the venue is more convenient for all sorts of reasons and gives a better deal to the performers. The Fringe Office have changed this ostensibly to stop performers writing their own reviews, but that sucks. It's invariably obvious when that's happening, and if other shows don't want to play fair, so what? Reading audience feedback is one of the most enjoyable rewards of putting on a show, and there's now almost none to read. We had some kind Twitter and blog mentions though.

After the last performance, one of the cast managed to totally steal the limelight by proposing to his girlfriend on stage.

I'm in negotiation with some publishers about the script and rights handling.

Stitched Up

2010-08-19T10:34:00.005+01:00

After Broken Holmes did so well last year, we are back this year with Stitched Up", my take on Frankenstein, directed by James Bober. We've had this four-star review already, which calls us "shamelessly intellectual" among other nice things, and some publishers want to meet me for coffee this afternoon. Apart from writing it, I didn't have much to do with the actual production work this time, so it was an absolute joy to see it suddenly come to life on the first night. Stitched Up runs every day except Sunday until 28 August at The Space @ Venue 45, Jeffrey Street (off High Street).

And sorry about the lack of blog. In the past year I have also been held prisoner in a bicycle shop, been exiled for two months in Poland due to bureaucracy, and got married.

The first nerd

2009-09-08T10:00:00.006+01:00

Some facts which turned up in the autobiography of Charles Babbage, the Victorian mathematician and inventor who designed and partially built a Turing-complete mechanical computer eighty years before the birth of Turing.

1. As a young schoolboy, Babbage was told the story of a man who sold his soul to the Devil. It occurred to him that the part about the man becoming rich and powerful in his lifetime was a matter of verifiable historical record, but the part about him being damned for eternity could only be conjecture. Accordingly, young Charles attempted to summon the Devil in his school common-room, but was unsuccessful.

2. The first computer error message was "Wrong tabular number."

3. In later life, Babbage claimed to have had a telepathic communication from a piece of Gloucester cheese, which revealed a great deal about the nature and origins of the universe. Unfortunately Babbage deemed the revelation unreliable because a piece of cheese has obviously no real understanding of the universe.

4. Babbage was asked "If you put the wrong numbers into the Engine, will the right answers come out?" twice, both times by Members of Parliament.

5. Babbage took several shiny steel buttons with him everywhere he travelled, but pretended there was only one and that he treasured it greatly, so he could swap it for things.

6. Explaining the Analytical Engine to an audience, Babbage told of how, when it wanted a logarithm to use in its calculations, it would stop, ring a bell, wait for the number to be punched in by the operator, check the logarithm was correct, and then continue. Somebody asked, if it had to check the logarithm was correct anyway, couldn't it just calculate it instead of stopping work to ask for it? Babbage expertly fielded the question: "That is far too simple to explain at present, but if you stop by my workshop in a few days I shall have prepared you an answer."

7. Babbage's use of 'want' in the above may be the first implied attribution of consciousness to a machine, the Engine being the first machine sufficiently complex for it.

8. The child Babbage was shown a miniature clockwork dancer, called "The Silver Lady", at a street exhibition. Much later, he found it in a junk shop, bought it, restored the mechanism, and dressed it in a different outfit each day.

9. Babbage invented the pilot or cow-catcher for steam locomotives.

10. Babbage mentions Ada Lovelace only once in passing in his autobiography, though other sources indicate it was Lovelace who first realised the true capabilities of the Engine.

At the risk of jinxing it, my next farce will probably be about him and Lovelace.

The game's afoot

2009-08-02T22:38:00.004+01:00

A reminder that my first self-written Edinburgh Fringe play, Broken Holmes, opens this Thursday 6 August, running every day except Sundays until Saturday 22nd, at 10:10pm at The Space@Venue 45 on Jeffrey Street. It's 45 minutes long so there's plenty of drinking time before and after.

Thursday 6, Friday 7 and Saturday 8th are previews, which are exactly the same as the rest of the run except that tickets are cheaper.

The play is a darkly comic interpretation of Sherlock Holmes featuring angst, wit, murder, smut, silliness, a puppet, and my own semi-serious theory about where Watson's wife disappeared to after two books.

Please support local new writing at the Fringe - and celebrate Edinburgh scholar Arthur Conan Doyle's 150th anniversary year! - by making Broken Holmes part of your 2009 Fringe fun.

Tickets are £7.50 (£5.50 concessions, all tickets £5.50 on preview nights) - you can book from the venue on 0845 508 8387, or through the Fringe office here.

The elegant variation

2009-07-04T15:11:00.006+01:00

The term "elegant variation" was coined by H. W. Fowler, describing a particularly erroneous journalistic rule – namely, that no word should be used twice in one written piece, or repeated inside some limit like three paragraphs. English teachers propagate this myth; second-rate newspaper hacks obey religiously. Thus, editorial articles, having once mentioned bananas, subsequently reference "bendy yellow fruit", while public figures accumulate curious nicknames — "troubled superstar", "erstwhile ginger prime minister".

Ostensibly, these literary gymnastics prevent readers getting bored from perusing identical expressions successively. However, its real effect instead obfuscates communication, demanding ever obscurer, less precise synonyms because authors exhaust their mental thesauri searching for new alternate lexical strings. Difficulty with composing also increases exponentially. Such arbitrary regulations predictably reduce linguistic freedom, producing unstomachably crippled prose, which sceptical scribes will find becomes easily apparent upon any prolonged attempt to maintain strict avoidance of repetition.

A grammatical mnemonic

2009-06-22T17:50:00.003+01:00

In this world there are many otherwise intelligent people who suffer an extraordinary mental defect:
Namely, the inability to differentiate between the words affect and effect.
Were I a drug-smuggler I would consider having some memory-enhancing steroid trafficked
In order to help these unfortunates remember when to use effict and when to use affict.

And I'll post a full update of my adventures when I've had time to write them up, and when I've escaped from the bicycle shop I'm being held prisoner in.

The pub rot, my birthday, and a voyage of discovery

2009-03-20T00:09:00.009Z

Nobody knows why the pub rot happens. You have a lovely old pub with real beer, rickety wooden stools, a dartboard, a pool table or if it's very lovely a bar billards table, old tin kettles and flintlock pistols hanging from the ceiling, a blazing fireplace ideally with a dog asleep in front of it. Then, on what you believe to be a perfectly normal day, you go in one morning to find the place suddenly and horribly transformed. The tables are chrome-plated, the chairs are faux-leather and have no backs, beer mats have disappeared so everything is slightly wet, and the floor is bare pine boards and not even dirty. The nice old landlord and landlady are gone, and an Australian teenager tries to sell you a pint of ice cubes with slightly alcoholic fizzy-pop poured between the cracks, and asks to see your "scream card".

My formative beers were drunk in the Marquis Wellington on London Road, Leicester. I learnt bar billiards, went to the Monday-night quiz and sometimes won, had business lunch and got my first grown-up programming job, played chess, wrote the zeroth drafts of Nerds and Broken Holmes, gained and lost friendships and relationships, and talked - at a quick estimate - about three weeks solid of complete rubbish. Now the Marquis is dead, or as good as dead, and I mourn him.

So, my last Sunday lunch in Leicester for the foreseeable future will be a few hundred yards up the road, in The Old Horse. I hope the pub rot never spreads that far, and the Horse shows no signs of it yet. It's possible that owls ward it off.

The occasion is twofold. Firstfold, it's my twenty-eighth birthday, almost to the day, although it was actually on Wednesday and I was getting pleasantly sentimentally drunk in Nottingham with an old friend. Secondfold, I'm disembarking that very day, from that very pub, on a voyage of discovery.

I'll be riding my Brompton, with its trailer - you can get a trailer onto a Brompton if you put the coupling axle through the holes where the back castors go - down through England to a suitable port, and chartering a vessel for a voyage south, where I have cause to believe there lies a large body of land waiting for some gentleman-adventurer to explore it. I have a pith helmet and everything.

I'll either reach Rachel in a week or three - she's somewhere in the foothills of the Pyrenees - or get lost, bored, or both trying and hop on a train the rest of the way. I'll be back in summer to start rehearsing Holmes.

Buxton to Leicester

2009-03-04T12:34:00.003Z

The plan was to ride my touring bike from my aunt's house in Buxton back to Leicester around the Macclesfield and Trent-Mersey canals. The bike, with trailer, was to be loaded with all the things I need to live on for a while; spare clothes, bike tools, a few books, laptop, other bicycle - the Brompton - and a tent and blankets for the night. The plan was foiled by the rim tape tearing on the tourer and no bike shop being around, so I had to do the ride on the Brompton. After some messing about with luggage bungee-cords I realised that if you take the back castors off the Brompton, the coupling axle for the trailer fits through the holes, so it's just about possible to pull the trailer on the Brompton with the coupling held high enough for the whole thing not to sway horribly. I had to take less than half of the load, though.

I went by what I thought would be a shorter route round the High Peak Trail and down the Cromford canal through Derby. At the bottom of a 1/8 incline on the High Peak Trail, which you aren't supposed to cycle down, the front tyre of the Brompton exploded. It was worn down to the thread so patching up the inner tube was no use. A long time ago I read on the internet that a tyre stuffed with grass beats walking. It is actually surprisingly not-bad on soft surfaces like towpaths, but horrible on anything paved. I also found fallen leaves to be slightly better than grass. There was no bike shop in Cromford so I set off down the canal.

The towpath was closed about half a mile in. A paper sign informed me, in Comic Sans, that there was a diversion, thattaway, but it was for walkers only and cyclists should "find an alternative route". None was suggested. I had no map so I followed the walkers' route. It took me several hours, put me up to my ankles in mud, and I had to push the bike most of the way, and carry it - with full trailer - over stiles and kiss-gates. It did take me right through a herd of deer though, so it wasn't all bad.

I got back onto the canal path just as night was falling, pitched my tent, and found that among the things I'd left at my aunt's were all my blankets. I slept in my clothes and overcoat and had a rather unpleasant time.

In the morning, a hundred yards down the towpath, it was closed again.

I found a train to Derby, bought a new tyre at the first bike shop I found, and had a lovely ride to Leicester round NCN Route 6, which did include about a mile of the Trent-Mersey Canal.

I went back to my aunt's house yesterday on the train for the rest of the stuff, and can't believe I thought I was going to get it all on a bicycle. It was one of those moments of awkward self-knowledge when you suddenly realise you're a bit odd. Everyone gets those, right?

Attention venue managers and eccentric millionaires

2009-02-20T00:34:00.001Z

Broken Holmes has a web page now.

My big project for 2009

2009-01-05T23:03:00.018Z

is to put the full-length version of Broken Holmes on the Edinburgh Fringe festival. I have rounded up the following provisional cast:

Sherlock Holmes - JAMES BOBER, the world's greatest fictional detective;
Doctor Watson - CANAVAN CONNOLLY, his faithful but ill-used sidekick;
Morgana Scarlet - REBECCA D'SOUZA, a charming murderess;
Inspector Lestrade - PATRICK SPRAGG, a mentally challenged Cockney policeman
(and THE SUMATRAN WEASEL-VIPER as itself.)

These are four of the most talented people I know and I am ingratiated to Providence for none of them being shackled by "real jobs".

If any of my theatry friends are reading this, I'm still looking for tech and stage managers (the stage manager gets to operate the glove puppet) and anyone else who wants to help.

There. It's official now.

Chai Latte

2008-12-17T22:13:00.001Z

Everywhere has its national dish or local delicacy, such as Spanish paella or Malaysian chicken satay;
San Francisco has the chai latte.
You cannot inhabit the cafes and 'peace centres' of the Bay Area and hope to look alternative of arty
Without your chai larty.
'Chai' is a Russian (I think) word for tea, related to the Indian 'cha' and British colloquial "cuppa char"
And 'latte' just means milk, so an etymologist might be forgiven for thinking that a chai latte and an ordinary decent cup of tea with milk aren't too different, but it turns out they are!
The 'chai' itself is an aqueous suspension of one part cinnamon to ten parts sugar, it seems,
And the 'latte' part is a warmed-up dollop of one of the less palatable aerosol shaving creams.
All this is served in a paper cup with a plastic lid with a hole in it so you can sip from it in your BART seat like an infant in a cot without it spilling.
It costs two and a half dollars plus tax, and is a far cry from Earl Grey and a bun in a Lyon's tea-room for a shilling.
But you have no choice. If you are anybody in San Francisco you cannot be seen out without your chai latte in a sippy cup:
It is what shows you are a liberal intellectual, and all grown up.

Ephesus Hyde excerpt

2008-12-05T23:45:00.005Z

The first thousand-or-so words of the zeroth draft of the new story collection I'm scribbling to pass the winter. The characters are taken very roughly from my NaNoWriMo effort last year, but re-imagined somewhat.

Nobody knew where Ephesus Hyde came from. It was not that he kept it secret. When asked, he would say quite openly and matter-of-factly that he had been born on Mars, some two centuries into the future, but people are cynical, and most chose to believe one or another of the various rumours that followed him about. Some said that Hyde, or whatever his real name was, was the son of an aristocrat or an industrialist, driven mad by wealth, by love, by disease. Some said he had escaped from an asylum, or he was not mad at all and the whole thing was an act put on for laughs or attention. His riches came from bank-robbery, or from having spent his saner years working the stock exchange, or from a particularly diligent career in begging or gambling. In all the years I spent with him I did not meet more than half-a-dozen people who believed the Mars story, and I have to admit I was always rather sceptical of it myself.

Here is how I came to work for Hyde. In 1902 I was employed on the steam-engines of the Great Midlands Railway. Engine-drivers are an interesting sort. Every small boy wants to be an engine-driver. When grown men meet engine-drivers, they are instantly reminded of their boyhood dreams, of the series of defeats and chance events disguised as 'life choices' which have led them to spend their waking hours in dreary mills and offices, instead of huffing along at the controls of an express train as they once imagined themselves. They go into a kind of nostalgic trance. But I was not an engine-driver. I was a boilerman.

"And no small boy ever dreams of bein' a boilerman when he grows up," said the driver. "But me, I'm one of the few who made it. Tell a chap you're the king, or a property mogul or a millionaire in hats, and he may be happy for you, or jealous, but it's a matter of luck. Tell him you're an engine-driver, and it's different. You're an achiever where he's a failure. He holds you in awe. Ever seen an engine-driver buy his own drinks?"

We were running the slow service from Birmingham to Derby, as we had been every day for three weeks now. Our friendship had begun poorly, and failed to improve.

"I'm not sayin' I'm better than you, Carson," he told me. "That's immeasurable. But my life is better than your life. Much better."

It was true that his job was better than mine, at least, and as there was nothing in my life but my job, he was probably - excruciatingly - right. He had the dials to read, the valves to turn, the levers and stops and brakes. He had the whistle. If a boilerman touched the whistle rope in a Great Midlands engine, he was dismissed immediately, sometimes without waiting for the train to stop. I had the fire. Fires, once they are got going, are generally capable of keeping themselves alive without much outside help, and aside from tossing in a shovelful of coal every now and then, the bulk of a boilerman's work was to sit still and withstand abuse from the driver. This one's name was Willcox.

As soon as we stopped the train at Barrow-on-Trent, a thin gentleman in a flame-coloured smoking-jacket climbed in to the cab and punched Willcox unconscious. It was the first time I saw Ephesus Hyde, and he couldn't have made a better first impression. He swept his fringe out of his eyes and told me he needed an engineer. I said I was a boilerman. He said it was all the same to him, and asked my name.

"Carson."

"I will call you Jenkins," he said. "I just need somebody with a little technical know-how. I can pay -" and he quoted a figure that would test the loyalty of the most dedicated boilerman in England. Inevitably, I asked him a little about himself.

And that was when he told me that he was a commander in the Royal Time Travel Corps who had been sent back in time to prevent the assassination of Queen Victoria in 1895 by Spanish pirates; that he had missed his stop by a few years and had been foraging for the parts to build a machine for the trip home; that the crucial component, the Leighton clockwork, would be invented in a Home Office laboratory in 1920, and he was biding the time being as a gentleman adventurer. Happily he had gathered that Queen Victoria was not assassinated, so the boys must have got through the job without him.

I smiled, nodded, carefully took a rag out of my overalls pocket, managed to wrap it round one hand without using the other, and tried to reach for the hot poker without his noticing. Pokers, by necessity, are heavy and unwieldy, and they are all the unwieldier when you can't see what you're doing because you daren't break eye contact with the madman who's just boarded your locomotive and punched the driver's lights out. It clattered on to the steel floor, narrowly missing the prone Willcox.

"You've dropped your poker, Jenkins," said Hyde pleasantly.

Calling for help was the only thing for it. I dropped the rag, reached behind me, found the flax cord, and pulled.

The whistle on a steam-locomotive has one design criterion. It is to be loud. It must be audible at the other end of a tunnel or at a level crossing several hundred yards away, and the fact it may be moving at sixty miles per hour into a twenty-knot head-wind means it must be all the louder. From the cab, it is disorienting, to say the least. It feels rather like you're about to faint, but you don't. You just sort of teeter over the edge of consciousness until you realise that, although the madman is gone, there is now an angry stationmaster in there with you, looking suspiciously from you to the heavy poker on the floor to the knocked-out engine-driver beside it, and you suddenly wish the madman were back.

"Name?" demanded the angry stationmaster.

I made up my mind.

"Jenkins," I said.

Cinema fun

2008-11-30T01:34:00.006Z

I spent this afternoon strolling about San Francisco's Chinatown, where ghettoisation is a tourist attraction, and this evening I'm off to see Quantum of Solace:

If you can't read my handwriting, it goes: Car explodes; gadget introduced; Bond operates complex machinery with no training; evil laugh; "Bond, James Bond"; martini; product placement; superhuman jump; parachute; Bond almost dies; baddie with scar; baddie kills other baddie; Judi Dench gives Bond a Disapproving Look; sex; Bond girl dies; skiing; gambling; Bond is double-crossed; dubious accent; exotic location; death other than by shooting; quip; tuxedo; fist-fight.

I'm not the first to have this idea, but it'll make it a bit more interesting. You can use it on the old films too.

The scoter

2008-11-25T23:35:00.004Z

Of all the fowl and ducks and drakes
That swim the planet's ponds and lakes
None are more elegant than scoters;
They're monochrome, just like old photers.
Despite their pleasant-sounding clucks
They're not the friendliest of ducks
So, should you meet one while out boating,
It's best to leave him to his scoting.

Hungry Man

2008-11-17T19:13:00.001Z

Made at the Zeum in San Francisco.

"Sneakers", if you're American

2008-11-17T18:39:00.000Z

With apologies to Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards, writer of Victorian morality-tinged children's nonsense rhymes. I hadn't heard of her until this morning. The original to this one is "Alice's Supper", #66 here.

In the Amazon forest, a woodsman
Hauls a rubber tree down to the ground
Which requires open space, so he's flattened the place
For a few hundred feet all around.
As the great thing uproots, he cheerfully hoots:
"This is for Alice's trainers!"

In a factory somewhere in Asia,
Some seven-year-old quadruplets
Stand all day in a row, as they cut, glue and sew
To pay off their grandparents' debts.
As they flinch from the whip, they joyfully quip:
"This is for Alice's trainers!"

In a nightclub in uptown Manhattan
That's a hangout for drunk CEOs,
A twunt in Italian satin
Wipes a powdery frost from his nose.
He declares with a grin, as he sinks his twelfth gin:
"This is for Alice's trainers!"

The emergency room

2008-11-14T00:27:00.013Z

The waiting-room had comfier chairs than a British one, and a couple of snack machines that accept credit cards. There was a television in one corner of the ceiling showing a cheap reality programme. Television isn't even an escape from reality any more.

The young man behind the counter had a religious symbol round his neck. He took R.'s details and asked if she had medical insurance. She doesn't. He gave her a card for a financial adviser.

We waited, eating burritos, until a woman called out R.'s first name. We went in to an office and R. told her what was wrong. She has had chest pains intermittently for ten years. Once, when she was poor enough for state medical care, a doctor told her it was probably nothing to worry about, but apparently a real diagnosis would have cost too much. American state medical cover, I suspect, is the reason I've seen two or three double amputees per day since I've been staying here, more than I see in a month at home. Cutting off legs is either cheaper than treating certain conditions properly, or becomes necessary when conditions go untreated for a long time.

In the last week, R.'s chest had become more painful than ever. That day, which was two days ago, it was making it hard for her to breathe, which qualifies it as an emergency, so the hospital was obliged to stablise her condition. Stabilise, not fix.

We waited again and ate more burrito. I was prepared for this to be the several-hour wait that you could expect from the NHS once they'd decided you weren't in immediate danger. It was only about half an hour. The same woman took us to a curtained-off booth and said she'd be back with a gown.

We heard the doctor before we saw him. His name was Tom - that's all his name badge said - and we found out later that he wasn't a doctor but a physician's assistant. American hospitals have the power to keep you in against your will, and Tom was telling the woman in the next booth that this would happen to her, to her great distress. He spoke to her as though she were a petulant five-year-old and he were bad with children.

"That's what happens when you check in to a hospital that has no record of you, with an injury like that." I think it was a bloody knee.

He came in to R.'s booth a few minutes later and asked her the questions she'd already answered.

"How old are you?"

"27."

"Pfffff." (A word I've never heard before, only seen as an internet onomatopoeia.) "So it's not your heart, is that what you're worried about?"

"No." She hadn't said anything of the kind.

Sits down. Sighs. "This is an emergency room. We deal with bad stuff here. Now if this has been goin' on for a week, if it was bad you'd have called as a week ago, wuncha?" I noticed he was chewing gum. Probably. It might have been tobacco.

He prodded her half-arsedly with a stethoscope.

"Okay, we're gonna get you a breathing treatment and send you home." He said 'breathing treatment' in the same tone as he might have said 'lollipop'.

He sauntered out. R., in tears, gathered her things and said we were leaving. "Where d'you think you're goin', honey?" Tom demanded as we passed him on the way out of the ward.

R. got a complaint form from the charge nurse, who took her into another room and asked what had happened. The charge nurse said it wasn't the first time Tom had been complained about.

"Who?" asked another nurse conversationally.

"Tom."

"Who?"

"Tom C—." (That's not a swear word; it's my attempt to look journalistic by omitting Tom's real surname, which is Crawford.)

"Who?"

"The jackass."

"Oh."

They said R. didn't have to leave, and sent in another doctor, who I think was actually a doctor this time. He was pleasant and seemed to listen to what R. said. He prodded around and said she needed a mammogram, but they wouldn't give her one. The nurses took blood and urine tests, did an X-ray, and gave her a breathing treatment, which turned out to be a plastic pipe that you suck nasty-smelling smoke out of.

R. left with a diagnosis sheet, not entirely unlike a printed Wikipedia article, of costochondritis or chest wall pain, and instructions to get a mammogram, which she can't afford. It said to come back if the pain was prolonged or caused difficulty breathing.

Yesterday the director of the hospital called R. about her experience with Tom. According to her, and various pieces of gossip, there have been several complaints, he's been given a severe talking-to, and they are not sure what to do about him.

This morning R. was worse, and her neck had swollen up so that she also had trouble sleeping and eating. We went back, and she eventually got a prescription for some painkillers and antibiotics. They said again that she needed a mammogram and again that they didn't do them.

If R.'s pay were doubled so that she could afford medical insurance tomorrow, the company might pay for a mammogram but wouldn't pay to treat anything nasty that showed on it, because it would be a "pre-existing condition"; if she lost her job and home and went back on to state care, they would say the same.

R. will probably be billed upwards of ten thousand dollars for all this. The hospital can't take legal action if she doesn't pay, which is just as well.

The U.S. is the wealthiest country in the world, and the only one in the developed world that dares treat its people this way. Barack Obama's medical plans, if he gets round to them, will probably make things cheaper, but R. and tens of millions like her will still be at the mercy of "the market", i.e. rich bastards who don't want to help.

The Rabbit

2008-10-24T12:04:00.005+01:00

The rabbit is a useful guy
On two important fronts:
He's good at pet, and good at pie,
But he can't do both at once.
So, when you meet a rabbit, such
Is the quand'ry you'll be facing:
D'you put the fellow in a hutch
Or in a pastry casing?

The Tragedy of King George II

2008-10-09T10:16:00.037+01:00

Some fragments from a previously undiscovered Shakespeare manuscript that I found down the back of the sofa this morning.

Act 1 Scene 1

PISTOL: What ho, Bardolph.
BARDOLPH: Well met, good Pistol.
PISTOL: What news of our King, William of Clintstone, gravely ill after his eighth year of reign?
BARDOLPH: Alas, Clintstone is dead.
PISTOL: And who succeedeth him?
BARDOLPH: Two pretenders there were: George d'Ubya, and Sir Alfred of Gore.
PISTOL: Aha! Then in Sir Alfred's bag was no doubt the victory, for he hath the intellect of ten men, having invented the very internet; whereas George d'Ubya is an inarticulate scarlet-neck with the intelligence of a peanut.
BARDOLPH: With passion and fury engagèd they in combat, and d'Ubya was o'erpowered, and as Gore did stand, his foot on d'Ubya's chest, and the latter did wail and beg mercy; then hath the overseer Lord Scotus announcèd that Gore was slain, and George d'Ubya the victor.
PISTOL: Not so!
BARDOLPH: I'truth, 'tis so. Sir Alfred did much protest, but Lord Scotus was unmovèd. Now reigns George d'Ubya in the land of Usa.
PISTOL: Alack and alas, for the man is a half-wit!
BARDOLPH: Then now controlleth a half-wit the economy of a great empire, and the mightiest armies on earth are by half-wit commanded.
PISTOL: It is not, nor it cannot come to good.

Act 2 Scene 1

KING GEORGE readeth in his closet.
KING GEORGE: "Once long ago, in Fairy-story-land,
There lived a boy called"—I like not this name.
"There lived a boy called George!" Ay, 'tis far better.
"And in his homestead kept this boy a pet,
But 'twas no kitten, guinea-pig or hamster."
Enter a SPEAR-CARRIER of the Servants of Secrecy.
SPEAR-CARRIER: My lord, grave tidings from the city of Nyc.
KING GEORGE: What time is this! Seest not thou I am busy?
SPEAR-CARRIER: Forgive me, liege; 'tis news of dire importance.
Foreign powers have attacked the land of Usa!
Where once there stood the twin towers of Nyc,
Now smoke two piles of rubble in their stead,
Like the shoes of a vanishèd magician,
And in Dici, the Pentagonal Palace
Is to a battered trapezoid reducèd.
KING GEORGE: Get thee hence, servant; I shall follow after.
SPEAR-CARRIER: My lord! The Mayor of Nyc awaiteth you.
KING GEORGE: And come I shall, when I am done perusing
This mirthful tome entitled "My Pet Goat".
Seest thou the amusing illustrations.
Here eats the goat the washing from the clothesline!
SPEAR-CARRIER: My lord, I beg you; 'tis no time for goats.
KING GEORGE: I'll come in but a few days hence; Out, out!
Exit SPEAR-CARRIER. KING GEORGE continueth studying the Pet Goat's adventures.
KING GEORGE: The scene of war hereafter I'll attend,
When I'm done reading of my caprine friend.

Act 2 Scene 4

The White Castle. KING GEORGE upon his throne. Enter KING ANTHONY OF BLAIR of the Britons.
KING TONY: Honest d'Ubya, thou didst summon me.
KING GEORGE: Yo, Blair. I did. From thee I wish two favours.
First, thou must explain to me a quandary,
Which hath been weighing on my mind some time.
At Christmas time, how flieth Santa Claus
'Round all the cities of the world so fast?
KING TONY: My lord, he maketh use of pixie dust.
KING GEORGE: Indeed? I gotta get me some of that.
And now, the other matter. God hath told me
The land of the Iraqis to invade;
I trust that I can count on thy support.
KING TONY: Indeed, my lord. [Aside] If thou canst count at all.
KING GEORGE: Awesome. One minute; I'll bring forth a map,
That thou might show me where lieth Iraq.
Exit KING GEORGE. KING TONY gazeth after him.
KING TONY: King d'Ubya of the Yanks—ay, there's a chap,
The fairest and most wondrous chap I know;
Thy muscles bulge 'neath jeans and baseball cap;
Shall I compare thee to a GI Joe!
I love thy simple charm, thy folksiness,
Endearing slips and mispronunciations;
And so to your proposal, I'll say yes—
What matter if we wreck a couple of nations?
If thou dost ask me to invade Iraq,
O noble d'Ubya, how can I refuse?
There is no country I would not attack;
For thee, I'll wage war anywhere, and lose.
And as the ruins of Baghdad burn and smoulder,
I'll stand beside thee, shoulder unto shoulder.

Act 5 Scene 3

BARDOLPH: What ho, Pistol.
PISTOL: What news, good Bardolph?
BARDOLPH: A great tragedy hath befallen us all, for there hath been at the White Castle an enormous robbery of the public treasury.
PISTOL: Zounds! This, having happened while King George d'Ubya's back was turned, will outrage the populace against him.
BARDOLPH: Not behind his turnèd back, friend Pistol, but full before his eyes and with consent. While snoozeth he in the Oval Chamber, burst therein a treacherous mob led by the Brothers Lehman, among them the merchants Sir Frederick of Mac, Lady Frances Mae and sundry others, and awoke him. Appealed they unto him, that they had lost a great sum of money by selling most dodgy mortgages to plague-ridden peasants, and as King George had allowed this, said they, he should reimburse them for their stupidity.
PISTOL: I'faith, what a shower of greedy bastards! I trust even a man of King d'Ubya's limited capability hath enough wit to instruct them to go hence and get stuffèd.
BARDOLPH: He did not so. The Brothers Lehman each an ankle held, and picked him up and shook, and thereout felleth his lunch money. Then let they go, and the King fell; but no wound or injury sustainèd he, for he landed upon his head.
PISTOL: By Jesu! With what sum of gold escaped the thieves?
BARDOLPH: Seven hundred milliard doubloons; two thousand for every man, woman and child in the land of Usa.
PISTOL: Forsooth and marry! 'Tis enough cash to send flying armadas to other worlds, but 'tis beyond the coffers of the sailors of Nasa.
BARDOLPH: Ay, 'tis suffice to bring prosperity to the lands of Africa, but Lord Bono could never procure it; not even by offering to shut up.
PISTOL: 'Twould make a stack of pennies stretching twice as high as the inconstant moon. George d'Ubya cannot be long for the throne of Usa.
BARDOLPH: Indeed. In January shall he abdicate.
PISTOL: Now cracks a tiny brain, and pelts of rotten tomatoes sing him to his retirement. Who succeedeth him?
BARDOLPH: Two pretenders there are: one a man of integrity and charisma with the intellect of ten, and one an aged, belligerent half-wit with a plucky but ignorant handmaiden.
PISTOL: Then nothing can go wrong, for surely the people of Usa know better than to crown a half-wit.

'Overrated' is still a non-concept

2008-09-25T16:23:00.009+01:00

but via MissPrism, here are five books you're supposed to like, but I didn't. (It's supposed to be ten, but I could only think of five so far.) Join the fun, bloggers!

Brave New World, Aldous Huxley. This is almost entirely a remake of We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, and not nearly as good a one as Nineteen Eighty-Four, which is the best political novel ever. Brave New World is written in dreamy, fantasy-novel prose which doesn't really sit well with presenting social and political ideas, but my main problem is I'm not quite sure what those ideas are supposed to be. All right, so in this world, babies are born in tubes and monogamy is discouraged, but so what? (And what do they make wardrobes out of ha ha?)

Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf. I started this in a transparent attempt to be a right-on pro-feminist new man so that women would fancy me, but I couldn't get past the first couple of chapters because it was about a boring gurl buying flowers. Sorry.

Foucault's Pendulum, Umberto Eco. The answer to "Do you have the password?" being "No" doth not a mind-bending metaphysical psychological puzzle make. It was a long time ago that I read it, but as I recall, it takes two or three chapters of philosophising for the genius main character to work that one out. I might be able to enjoy this book by starting it again and skipping two out of every three paragraphs.

Neuromancer, William Gibson. (For some values of "supposed to like" if you're a computer nerd.) I suppose there's some achievement in writing bad fan-fiction for The Matrix fifteen years before it came out.

Everything by H. P. Lovecraft. The man Cyclopean thinks chucking rugose long words about at eldritch random is how Cyclopean to create a horrific atmosphere eldritch, and doesn't even Cyclopean know noisome very many long words rugose Cyclopean.

On the US elections

2008-09-24T15:52:00.018+01:00

I just can't wait till Wednesday, when the Democrats get in,
To see the change America so badly needs begin;
To see them double taxes, nationalise the NRA,
Give everyone abortions! Make everybody gay!
To see the streets of Washington awash with tyrants' blood;
The CEOs of Lehman lying trampled in the mud,
While the tanks roll into Wall Street, like a scene from East Berlin;
I just can't wait till Wednesday, when the Democrats get in.

I can't wait to see the Politburo paint the White House red,
While the Stars and Stripes and Sickle flutters nobly overhead,
And Britney Spears performs the Internationale out back -
And if we're very lucky, they might pull out of Iraq.
I can't wait for Castro's statue to appear in national parks;
See them reconstruct Mount Rushmore to show Trotsky, Lenin, Marx -
And if they're really radical, start public medicine -
I just can't wait till Wednesday, when the Democrats get in.

Two Minutes' Hate: Sarah Palin

2008-09-02T21:15:00.011+01:00

John McCain's choice of running mate is perhaps the worst person in the world.

I'm going to make a deliberate mistake by thinking of her as a woman first and a politician second, because I think that's the mistake McCain has made. There were disappointed Clinton supporters to be won over, and he figured that a woman running-mate was all it would take to do so. Unfortunately, being an idiot, he chose the most wifely, non-boat-rocking woman he could find in politics - she's against abortion in all circumstances*, never stood up for equal pay - and a right-wing nutjob even by Republican standards - creationist, denies man-made global warming, loves to shoot things, opposes gay rights. She also supports no sex education except "abstinence only", and her teenage daughter is pregnant and a shotgun marriage being hastily arranged. Obama has nobly declared this "off limits" politically, but I think it is one of the few family scandals that might not be.

When asked if she objected to the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, Palin said no, because "if it was good enough for the Founding Fathers, it's good enough for me." Even a hellbound limey leftie like me knew that those words weren't put in until the 1950s, a piece of Cold War paranoia against "godless commies", and the Pledge itself wasn't implemented until the late nineteenth century.

Now, as well as McCain's choice putting off any hopeful women or wavering centrists that it might have been aimed at, I've already seen some concerned belming on Conservapedia along the lines of "But now if he dies there'll be a woman in charge of America!" so he just might have alienated some of his own wackos too.

It is my cautiously optimistic opinion that the McCain campaign has not just shot itself in the foot with this one, it's blown its whole leg off.

* January 2009. I have since seen it pointed out that most anti-abortion loons' believing there should be exceptions for cases of rape and incest - i.e., in cases where the woman didn't have any enjoyable sex to be punished for - highlights their hypocrisy. It shows that they don't actually give a fuck about the foetus, just women's sexuality. Minus half a loon point to Ms. Palin. She won't miss it.

Fringe review: The Straight Man

2008-08-07T11:22:00.005+01:00

Disclaimer: my friend Maya is in this one so I'm biased.

The Straight Man is a farce with a promising premiss. Simon, a young Jewish man, wants to break the news to his traditionalist parents that he is engaged to a gentile girlfriend. His plan is to ready them for this by telling them he is gay, bringing an actor friend to dinner to introduce as his fiancé - after this shock, the parents will hopefully accept anything. On the same evening, Simon's unashamedly stereotypical Jewish Mother has invited a friend's daughter round in an attempt to pair Simon off: the girl is the obligatory Farce Retard. Things get sillier, as they should.

The play is in three acts (unless they were scenes), set across several days, unusually for farce. I found the transition between the first two acts jarred a bit, with the sudden and undeserved death of a strong character, which felt rather tasteless, but turned out to be necessary to the plot and the awkwardness was over in a few minutes. In any case, it's better to cross the line than to fall short of it. Act 3 (or Scene 3, or possibly Act 2 Scene 1), set in the registry office with the pretend gay couple still not having found the moment to Go Back In, and the real wedding due fifteen minutes after the fake one, is suitably frantic, taking a few moments out to be genuinely touching, and building up to a Secret About The Past and a nice daft tableau ending.

Highly recommended and all that.

Pleasance Dome, 7-25 August (not 12), 3.45 p.m.

Blasphemy

2008-07-24T20:46:00.013+01:00

Tune: Frosty the Snowman

Jesus the Biscuit
Was a holy, wholesome meal;
All the grown-ups said he was made of bread,
But the Catholics know he's real!

Jesus the Biscuit:
How undignified he looks,
Now he's been impaled on a rusty nail
Through his two least favourite books.

Backstory here and then here.

American Christian Right anti-gay wackaloons

2008-07-22T12:13:00.005+01:00

want you to boycott McDonalds, so for the first time in years, right-thinking people have an excuse to get a Big Mac and fries for dinner. Join me.

Friday snobbery

2008-07-18T10:29:00.004+01:00

Do you wear a string vest?
Drive a van (a white one)?
Are you commonly "muntered" or "largin'"?
If you nodded or yessed,
Read the Star or the Sun;
If you noed, take the Times or the Guardjan.

Latest tinkering

2008-07-15T14:07:00.003+01:00

A quick show-off of the latest development to my Imperial Babbage Machines electrical computing engine:

New speaker

Whole thing

Motorists! A red light on a stick means 'stop'

2008-07-10T17:04:00.000+01:00

Cyclists usually stop at red lights, despite popular opinion and some evidence that we are safer if we don't. If you are a jumped-up teenager driving your mum's car towards a busy junction as the traffic light turns red (hint: if it turns amber, this is a sign it may be about to do so), the immaculately dressed Brompton-rider in front of you may choose to stop at the cycle stopline. This may happen even if you were really looking forward to skipping the lights yourself.

If you felt you were not paying enough attention to the road in front of you, or driving too close behind the cyclist, and might have hit him - despite appearing to have come to a halt perfectly adequately behind the motorists' stopline - this is not an excuse to beep your horn, shout, or call into question his parentage. If you insist on arguing the point, "You need to learn to be a bit more careful" is not a good opening gambit.

I now have a cup of tea and I will calm down in a minute.

Brompton trailer

2008-06-26T10:09:00.000+01:00

Made from a broken baby buggy found outside my flat, a large wire basket, and some old reflectors. I managed to get two cartloads of books across town with it yesterday without it turning over. (Well, only once, and that was trying to get it out the door - it doesn't like being pushed backwards.)

Confessions of a Rickshaw Wallah, #1

2008-06-16T11:40:00.000+01:00

Tricycle-rickshaws - they are often called 'pedicabs', but rickshaw is an older and nicer word - have been operating in Edinburgh for some years now. The business model, from the workers' perspective, is this. Wallahs - I'm going to call the rickshaw operators 'wallahs' or 'pullers' although no one else west of the Urals does; I don't like 'driver', and 'cabber' will cause ambiguity when I get hit by a taxi in seven paragraphs' time - wallahs rent a rickshaw for the weekend, at a rate wavering around £100, going right up during the Edinburgh Festival when you can rake it in like Tichmarsh, right down during the winter, and affected by things like bank holidays, rugby matches and paydays. This weekend the base rent was £105, which went down to £95 after some of the more influential pullers convinced the owner that it was unusually quiet. It's then up to you to charge what you can get. If you're going to work for more than several months, it would make sense to have your own rickshaw, which only one or two people do despite plenty more having been in the job for years. It looks to me like it would be both quite easy and very beneficial to put the whole trade under workers' control, but hey, I'm new.

Two companies operate in Edinburgh. There's some rivalry between the owners, but not the workers.

I did the training about a month ago - a couple of hours' cycling around town, mainly to get the feel of the trikes and tips about where to pick up fares. A few days after that I bruised my ribs playing the extreme contact sport of rounders, so couldn't do any hard labour for a while. I eventually turned up last Friday at around eight o'clock. The business owner sold me some spare inner tubes (a wily tactic) and off I went.

I was flagged down immediately outside the depot by two women wanting to go to Jock's Lodge, which was a short way in the wrong direction. I charged them three pounds each and got them there, them giggling in the back and phoning people up to say they were on one of they bike taxi things, which is a phrase you get used to. After dropping them off I headed to the Grassmarket, which is said to be the easiest place to pick up trade early on.

According to the other wallahs, it was an unusually quiet Friday, but things would pick up on Saturday. It was an hour of waiting at various ranks before three fellows got in the back. This was when I made my first mistake: "Could you put your cigarette out, sir?" and off they went. Not letting people smoke in the rickshaw is a rule that we all sign to, but the fact that it's totally unenforced is one of our best selling points. I added "I'll phrase this carefully: I have to ask you to put your cigarette out" to my mental banter database. (Probably more than half of the rickshaw-pullers smoke, by the way - does that mean they're even fitter?)

I eventually got the feel of the short-trip circuit, waiting at a rank for a bit, taking lifts between the Cowgate and the Grassmarket, a distance of a hundred yards or so, for two pounds per person - and occasionally for three or four pounds up a hill to a small, disreputable part of town known as the Pubic Triangle. I took one third of a stag party up Victoria Street, which is a steep hill and cobbled; the good thing about stag parties is they ride in convoys and want their cabs to race each other, which often means they'll get out and push.

As the night went on the people got drunker, which means they give you more money but less respect. It's apparently jolly fun to ride in a rickshaw making whip-cracking noises, slapping your wallah's arse, and generally Czaring it. If your wallah wears braces, they will be twanged. What price dignity? About eight pounds a head.

This went on tolerably, and somewhat profitably, until about one o'clock, when I was scooting down the Grassmarket with two passengers, past a parked taxi facing the shops, and it suddenly reversed into my back left wheel. I stopped, asked the passengers if they were okay - they thought it was a great laugh - then mumbled something to the taxi-driver. Taxi-drivers do not like rickshaws, and I expected him to blow his top. He gave me a these-things-happen wave and zoomed off. On any kind of cycle, this is the worst 'interaction' I've had with a motorist, and the nicest the motorist has been about it - that is to say, he damn well knew it was his fault. Unfortunately I didn't get his cab number, as I thought everything was all right - it wasn't until I'd finished the lift that I could hear the thunk-thunk-thunk of a badly buckled rear right wheel - the trike must have tilted, putting the two passengers' weight on that side, with possibly extra leverage from a groove between cobbles. I stopped another rickshaw-wallah, got the mobile number for the mechanic, texted, and waited. He arrived, gave me keys to the depot, I took the crippled machine back, wrote down what happened while I could still remember it, and called it a night. The opinion of all the other wallahs I've spoken to is that I'll probably get a discount on the rent since I didn't have the trike all night, but I haven't asked the owner yet.

Saturday was much the same, but with no taxi crash, a couple of longer trips to the top of Leith Walk and to Morningside, which I probably shouldn't have bothered with either of, and, since I could stay out later, drunker people. After chucking-out time people will pay you a fistful of pound coins for a ride up and down the street. I also learnt to be careful of drunken fares who don't have a clue where they are going and will trundle you round another half-mile after you've taken them where you agreed - this happened twice, once worth it for the money and once not. I rode the rickshaw back to the depot at about half past four, through a beautiful sunrise, found I was unable to ride a normal bike in a straight line, got home somehow, and slept all Sunday.

Doncaster

2008-06-12T10:20:00.000+01:00

I went to Doncaster last weekend for a friend's stag do (I know, I can't think why either.) I took the Brompton on the train for scooting about when I got there.

Three observations on cycling in Doncaster:

(1) Drivers unable to share the road nicely. In the hour it took me to get to the hotel on Friday afternoon, I got the worst treatment from drivers that I've ever experienced. Almost every car, and one lorry, passed too close muscling me into the gutter, and of every few car drivers that went past, even on wide roads with an empty overtaking lane, one would beep his horn or throw a visible tantrum at me from inside the car. One teenage boy wound the passenger side window down and started a swearing contest. Every few minutes, an incident of the sort that I'm used to happening in Edinburgh about once a week.

(2) Magic White Paint. On the pavements beside most main roads outside the city centre were painted white lines and the occasional diagram of a bike. Using these cycle lanes is not compulsory, and it is not convenient for anyone: these 'facilities' are typically lumpy from tree roots, covered in broken glass and dog shit, and used (quite rightfully) by pedestrians going far slower than cyclists and with no flow control. They also make junctions much more dangerous by sending cyclists across roads at right-angles where drivers don't expect to see them. So almost all serious cyclists prefer to use the roads when they're confident enough to do so. Where these lanes are common, drivers who do not cycle themselves often think cyclists ought to use them - the confusion is forgivable, even though the aggression isn't.

(3) Almost no cyclists. I saw about half a dozen other cyclists all weekend, and they mostly looked like they were cycling for leisure rather than usefulness (or both.) All but one were trundling as best they could along the pavement, wearing plastic hats. People in Doncaster think cycling is inherently dangerous, even on a pavement cycle lane that you can't do ten miles per hour on.

The web of causes and effects between (1), (2), and (3) is difficult to determine, but (3) is certainly undesirable from a public health point of view, and (1) should not be encouraged by regarding it as an unavoidable truth. I'll have a go:

Bad drivers encourage fewer cyclists, obviously.
Bad drivers encourage pavement lanes because they don't want to share, and (if they aren't cyclists) don't understand that pavement lanes don't work well, so they're likely to support the council in deploying them. And cyclists are more likely to use the pavements if they're scared of the road.
Bad drivers encourage bad drivers because they know they can get away with it.

Pavement lanes encourage bad drivers as drivers resent road cyclists, thinking they should be on the pavement.
Pavement lanes encourage fewer cyclists because cycling slowly on lumpy pavements is less enjoyable and useful than cycling on the road, and pavement lanes imply that road cycling is not safe.

Fewer cyclists encourages bad drivers because drivers aren't used to having to share.
Fewer cyclists encourages fewer cyclists because people don't see lots of cyclists enjoying themselves and think of getting their own bike.

Anyway, I was so scared of my experience on Friday that on Sunday morning I tried to get back into town along the 'facilities' - and spent much of my time trundling the bike around trying to understand where I was supposed to be among the forest of blue "shared use" signs and red "no cycling" signs, often close together on the same length of pathway. Segregating cyclists from the bigger boys does not work.

My Housemate's Rat

2008-05-10T16:23:00.003+01:00

My housemate's rat doth never tire
Of nibbling and chewing;
She's partial to electric wire -
It will be her undoing.

The Philippine Tarsier

2008-05-01T16:05:00.005+01:00

The Philippine tarsier is a prosimian;
It's awfully skilful at climbin' and shimmyin'.
It's tiny enough to fit snug in one's pocket,
But sadly I can't find a pet shop that stock it.

In other news, biscuit tins overflow as biscuit shortage worsens

2008-04-28T15:00:00.003+01:00

My office smells of petrol, because there's a petrol lorry outside, because petrol is being delivered to the petrol station in the daytime, because more petrol is being bought and sold because there is a petrol crisis.

If this is a petrol shortage, it hasn't yet got to the bit where there is less petrol than usual.

Bleeding Canker

2008-04-03T11:25:00.019+01:00

Bleeding canker is a fungus
On the trunk of conker trees;
There'll be chronic consequences,
'Less we conquer this disease!
Should the canker conquer conkers,
Rendering extinct the things,
What will anxious youngsters fasten
On the ends of bootlace-strings?
When the canker zonks the conkers,
We'll no longer hear the noise
Of conkers clonking conkers, strung
And swung by young, uncleanly boys.
Just in case the conker canker
Brings the country to its knees,
Let's concoct an anti-conker-
Canker tincture for our trees,
Or quarantine uncankered conkers
In an anti-canker tanker;
Any plan we can conceive
To save the trees from conker canker!

Union Canal to Linlithgow

2008-04-01T21:57:00.000+01:00

A ride on 14 March along the towpath of the Union Canal from Edinburgh to Linlithgow, 22 miles if I remember right, with Rachel. She took the photographs, which is why she's not in them.

This was a short, dawdly ride with plenty of stops for sandwiches. The canal goes as far as the Falkirk Wheel, where you can switch to the Forth and Clyde Canal to get to Glasgow. I've done the ride back from the Wheel before, but getting all the way to Glasgow is still on my to-do list.

Some barges visible from a pub garden in Ratho. The pub wouldn't serve us outside so we got sandwich bits instead.

Me at a picnic table in Ratho, happy because I have a sandwich.

Some ducks that wanted our food.

Mounds like this are next to long stretches of the canal. I guess they are bings from an old mine.

Some mud.

A visit from the Puncture Fairy...

...and another, five minutes later, on the other tyre.

The reedy canal, getting close to Linlithgow.

I really like the way the light came out in this one.

Taking the lane

2008-04-01T21:07:00.000+01:00

A couple of weeks ago I was returning a hired bike to the shop, and going straight ahead at a busy roundabout. There are two lanes coming onto the roundabout: the first for turning left, and the second for turning left and going ahead. I got into the second in plenty of time, taking a place in the queue in about the position of the left tyre track.

On the roundabout itself I hear a beep and feel something trying to push me over from the back-right: a driver in the lane behind me has pulled out to the right to try to rush past, then apparently wanted to turn left straight through me. The bastard scuffed my trousers but I managed not to fall off. I gave him a Churchillian gesture and carried on.

That is why it is better, at junctions, not to ride in the left tyre track, but to pull out into the centre of the lane.

Yesterday I was doing just that at a particularly hairy junction in town, on a route I don't usually take. The car behind me started moving before the light was green, so I looked round at him, which made me miss the moment it did turn green. I got across the junction, stayed in the centre of the lane till I was past a parked van, then pulled back to the side to allow the fellow past. He swore loudly at me out of the open windows. He'd been unable to pass me for perhaps thirty seconds - that's thirty seconds he could have spent racing to the next queue - and he was already having a minor tantrum.

What he probably wanted me to do was wait at the lights in the gutter, so he could pull up alongside me (illegally, as the junction has an advance cycle stopline) and tear off when the lights changed. This would have left me either trying to pull back into a lane of moving traffic from a stop, or carrying on across the junction to the left of the cars, some of which were turning left themselves.

This is why cyclists take the middle of the lane, particularly when coming up to busy junctions. Sometimes we get tooted at, and sometimes we get sworn at. This is upsetting and a bit pathetic, but I prefer it to being run over.

A dawn raid

2008-03-28T10:39:00.011Z

The doorbell woke me up. It plays a horrible jingly tune which no one knows how to change. It was seven o'clock. I wouldn't have bothered answering it, but I thought I might be expecting a parcel. I pulled on some cord trousers and a woolly smoking-jacket.

It was three burly gentlemen in jeans and anoraks. One of them said they were police, and showed me an identification card which, as far as I know, may or may not have looked like a policeman's identification card. They asked if J. was in; I said I thought he might not be. They said they'd like to come in and see for themselves, and there didn't seem much point in arguing.

I knocked on J.'s bedroom door and said the police were here. He'd have just enough time to throw any severed heads out the window that he might have lying around. J. opened the door in his dressing gown, and one of the men said they were here to detain him in connection with "an act of malicious mischief" happening last year. J. is one of the least malicious people I know, although he can be mischievous. He goes on a lot of protests so it was probably something perfectly harmless that happened on one of those. The fact they were 'detaining' him rather than arresting him betrays that they have bugger-all evidence and can be seen as State bullyboys harrassing an innocent man whatever he did.

J. asked if he could put some clothes on; one of the men went into his room with him while he did that.

The other two were skulking in the hall. They asked me how many people lived here. I didn't want to leave them alone, and I was going to try to say something if they started snooping, but they didn't; they stood together and talked to each other in low voices, occasionally nodding at our various possessions. One snippet of conversation I heard was:

1st. policeman: (Nodding towards a can of lager) Is that spraypaint?
2nd. policeman: Aye, Tennent's spraypaint.

This assured me they were real detectives.

The rest of my housemates wandered out in their bedclothes to watch as J. went off with them quite politely. One of the policemen told the rest of us that it shouldn't be too much trouble and J. would be home soon, as if we were his parents. The words "in time for his tea" hung in the air, unspoken.

There's an old Soviet joke about the reason policemen go around in groups of three: one to read, one to write, and one to keep an eye on the two dangerous intellectuals.

Meat is better than sport

2008-03-24T21:44:00.002Z

Mary had a little lamb
Its name was Fleecy Geoffrey;
She took it to a football match
And threw it at the reffrey.

Fidel Castro

2008-02-19T18:00:00.009Z

Fidel Castro has announced his retirement.

George W. Bush has taken the opportunity to comment that the US will 'help' (force?) the Cuban people to "realise the blessings of liberty". Coincidentally, I feel something similar for the American people at the thought that Sergeant Stupid will leave office within a year. By liberty, of course, he means capitalism. Bush's comment comes with extra stab reflex if you bear in mind that Cuba is where America keeps its illegal prison and torture camp.

In big-L Leftie circles in the UK, Cuba and Venezuela command a kind of idealised admiration, which always reminds me of George Orwell's writings about the exaltation of Stalinist Russia among the British Left of the 1930s. I'll make a few unqualified statements to begin with: Democracy is a good thing. It is a bad thing that Cuba does not have multi-party democracy (they do have elections to the National Assembly, with turnouts that British and American politicians have nightmares about.) It is abhorrent that there is criminalisation of political deviancy there. I am glad I live in Scotland and not Cuba.

Cuba is next door to a superpower that's been trying to wipe it off the map for forty years. The point is that the US cannot have a successful Socialist country existing. The day Cuba allows multiple political parties and free leadership elections, which it should, the US will start pumping funding into the pro-capitalism parties. That is not democracy. Neither is what Cuba has now, but I know I'd rather be a poor Cuban than a poor American.

I understand that to most politically minded people in comfortable, stable, first-world nations, including me, it is a matter of principle that democratic elections are more important than anything else politically. But I wouldn't like to be a Cuban worker when their excellent public health and education go to pot because of a US-bought 'choice' to turn them over to the market.

On a really important note, though, what in the name of Lenin's beard is Castro doing in an Adidas tracky top? The man used to have style. What hope is there for Communism if we can't even look good?

Comments disabled for reasons of boredom.

The Nan

2008-02-10T17:00:00.000Z

The one-a nan's your morma's morma;
The two-a naan tastes great with korma;
I don't suppose I'll ever liaise
With any naaan possessing three a's.*

* Actually, my nan got three A's in her O Level results.

With apowledgements to Ogden Nash

Broken Holmes

2008-02-04T20:39:00.001Z

This is the first scene of my play Broken Holmes, as performed by me and my friend Alex Walsh at a fundraising doodah in a basement in Leicester a few months ago. The video is drunkard-with-digicam-in-nightclub quality, but there it is.

Personally, I'd prefer a goat

2008-02-01T13:22:00.001Z

Because I was arguing about it with a friend this morning, and because I like spending my lunch hour drawing goats in Microsoft Paint, here is the Monty Hall problem in Javascript.

You are on a game show. Behind one of these doors is a luxury car; behind the others are goats. The host knows which door is which. The host allows you to pick one, then opens another. The door that the host opened reveals a goat. You are now given the chance to switch to the remaining door. Should you switch?

Switching doubles your chances of winning the car. Try it.

This is an old problem in probability theory and a wonderful example of how human intuition is, for certain purposes, pretty rubbish.

Later
All afternoon it's been bothering me that it matters whether the host knows where the car is. I can almost understand why this means switching makes no difference, but I haven't yet figured out why I'm winning (switch or no) in 2/3 of cases where the host doesn't open the door on the car.

Later still
It looked like 2/3 because the sample was too small - it moves closer to 1/2 with enough iterations. Switching doesn't make a difference because the host is just as unlikely as you to have picked the door with the car (to leave shut, in his case). I think I understand it now.

The Goth

2008-01-24T22:27:00.000Z

His hair is black; his skin is white;
He only leaves his house by night
And stalks the darkness, pale and wan,
Avoiding streetlamps, lest he tan.
His face a mask of something posthumous,
His clothes are like Tim Burton's costumers'.
A Goth with whom I didn't get
On famously, I've never met -
I say to those who mock and loathe 'em:
They're lovely, once you get to know them.
The harmless, amiable Goth
Meets daily with the sniffing wrath
Of those who hug themselves and quail
Behind the morning's Daily Mail,
Who are aghast and disconcerted
By anyone not pinstripe-shirted.
We must reverse this hostile trend!
Go hug a Goth. You'll make a friend.

Poem number 1391401, manufactured for IBM

2008-01-15T15:58:00.000Z

The IBM Model M keyboard
Was a sturdy, formidable beast;
It was big, it was proud, it was fearfully loud,
And it weighed half a ton at the least.

The IBM Model M keyboard
Quickly came to be loved and renowned:
It achieved worldwide fame for its steel-strengthened frame
And its wonderful clackety sound!

The IBM Model M keyboard
Was designed in 1984
And it rolled off the line until mid-'89,
But they don't roll them out any more.

IBM closed their plant at Kentucky,
And they sold off the warehouses there,
And the joyous k-chings of the buckling springs
Never more filled the factory air.

And we're all using cheap modern keyboards
With some flimsy dome circuit inside,
And our typing is weak, and our faces are bleak,
Our atrophied hands RSI'd.

And they break at a slight spill of coffee,
And we long for a keyboard that works;
But we barely remem-ber the poor Model M,
Which is what they call progress, the jerks.

Pushing Daisies

2008-01-08T13:17:00.000Z

I haven't had a television in my house for about four years now, but thanks to the marvels of modern copyright violation technology it's possible to be a couch potato anyway (even though I don't have a couch either.) Recently I've been watching Pushing Daisies.

Pushing Daisies is a sort of neo-gothic fairytale fantasy-comedy-drama-romance - the fact that I can't easily slot it into one predefined genre or another is a good thing - and probably the best American TV series I've seen in recent years, but I'm worried for it.

The premiss is that the main character, Ned, can bring people back from the dead by touching them. As with all Magical Gifts, there are catches: when he touches them again, they stay dead forever, and if he keeps them alive more than a minute, someone else in the vicinity dies. Ned teams up with a private detective, and they solve murders by asking the corpse who did it. One day the corpse turns out to be his childhood sweetheart Charlotte. He brings her back from the dead but unthinkingly decides to keep her alive (which kills someone else but it turns out he was a baddie so that's okay.) Over the series, Ned and Charlotte gradually get to know each other again and fall in love, but can't touch each other, which allows for a lot of surreal romantic gestures like holding their own hands behind their backs, kissing through cling-film, and dancing in beekeepers' outfits (I know, but it works.) In every episode there's been a new murder to solve, and most of them have even advanced the real plot about Ned and Charlotte. Often the single-episode murder mystery and the ongoing fairytale are twined together quite cleverly.

It's consciously and unapologetically silly, but there are a few faults that a flash of the artistic licence doesn't really excuse. The writing occasionally crosses the line from Lovely Fairytale to Saccharine Disney. One episode featured a "bonobo monkey" which any fool could see was a capuchin - bonobos are apes in the same genus as chimpanzees (and incidentally they're chronically randy buggers; you don't carry a male bonobo on your shoulder unless you have good earmuffs.) And there's a subplot that involves homeopathic 'medicine' being effective - someone even overdoses on it - which offends me more than any amount of reanimation of the dead. All these things can be forgiven because of the sheer loveliness of the story. I have to mention the slick production and nice bright colours too.

It's the story that I'm worried for. The reasons I'm worried are:
1. stories have endings;
2. in this case, where one of the lovers Belongs Dead, the elegant ending is almost certainly a sad one.

These are worrying because:
1. American television series go on for years - the most lucrative syndication deals require 100 or so episodes;
2. American television series, when they end, almost never end sadly. Either it doesn't occur to the writers to write sad endings, or the producers assume that the audience can't cope with them.

My worries were not subdued by the two 'cliffhangers' that were given at the end of the first series. The series - sorry, 'season' - had been truncated to a mere nine episodes by the writers' strike, and I gather they wanted to get the cliffhangers in quickly, but still. This is a story, and stories have endings, and nine 45-minute episodes would have been far more than enough to bring it to a beautiful one. To be fair, there were some interesting threads of plot going on - the creepy, snooping character who's close to discovering the Secret, Ned's relationship with his father in the flashbacks to his childhood, the waitress who's learnt Charlotte's identity and thinks she faked her death - an ending that showed some of those threads starting to come together might have convinced me that it could go on gracefully for another season or one.

But no. One of the characters has a daughter he's never mentioned, and one of the other characters is related to one of the other other characters in a way that it makes no sense for you not to have known about all along. This is what's passed for a cliffhanger, in a story about bringing the dead back to life. It brings the story no closer to finishing, and opens up arbitrary complications that can only help it to go on forever. When it can do that, it stops being a story at all.

I have quiet hopes, but probably the best thing that could be done with this programme is to end it now, a wonderful story until that dreadful Desperate Housewives-esque final line abruptly Ruins It For Everyone. A lesson, for any writer who's willing to listen, on how to kill a story dead forever.

Prove me wrong.

The real issue

2008-01-07T01:52:00.000Z

A phrase I am sick of reading

2008-01-03T18:31:00.000Z

is "leader of the free world" to mean "President of the United States".

(Interestingly, I gather from American friends that this phrase isn't used as often over there as it is in the British media, although I was arguing about it with an American today.)

Presumably 'free' in this sense has something to do with being able to choose our own leaders; presumably it includes the bit of the world that I and several billion other people live in; any office that pretends to lead us, we can damn well all have the vote for. If someone leads us without our consent, "free world" is a misnomer.

It would be a nice fluffy conscientious pro-democratic world-aware thing if we'd all stop using that thoughtless phrase. Gonnae let's.

Merry Multifaith Winterval

2007-12-23T19:41:00.000Z

Frosty the Snowman
Had a mouth made out of coal
And a carrot nose, and some old tweed clothes
And an evil murderous soul.

I built the snowman
On an eerie moonlit night.
How was I to know that beneath the snow
Was an Indian burial site?

    He spoke to me at midnight,
    In a voice as cold as sleet:
    He said he needed a good big feed
    And he wanted bringing meat!

I fetched him some bacon
But he said "This stuff's not fresh -
If it's smoked or cured, it'll be ignored;
I've a taste for bleeding flesh."

Wearing a ski-mask,
I marauded through the town
Raiding homes and vets, stealing family pets,
And the snowman wolfed them down.

    He said, "I don't like these much -
    They've got too much fat and rind.
    There's a kind of meat that I'd rather eat:
    It's the flesh of humankind."

(Crunchetty crunch crunch, crunchetty crunch crunch!
"He's our jolly friend of snow!"
Crunchetty crunch crunch, crunchetty crunch crunch!
"Ow! Help! Make him let go!")

Frosty commanded
Me to fetch my schoolyard friends,
And along we'd trot down to Frosty's spot,
Where they'd meet their snowy ends.

Teachers and policemen
Nearly caught me once or twice,
But before they knew, I'd have shoved them through
Frosty's slavering jaws of ice.

    You'll find me every evening
    Throwing bones off of the bridge -
    Though it's now July, Frosty will not die;
    He still lives in my fridge.

Frosty the Snowman
Is a fiendish crystalloid
With his festive scarf, and his evil laugh,
He has got to be destroyed.

Soon, I'll be ending
All my pain and misery -
'Cause I'm just not built to withstand this guilt,
And I'm going to feed him me.

Brass lightning

2007-11-15T20:40:00.000Z

Certain old IBM (International Business Machines, that is) green-screen terminals used to display erroneous green streaks on the screen while the processor was 'thinking' hard. Users became comfortable with this, and when the bug was fixed, they started believing their machine had stopped 'thinking' when it hadn't. Later models deliberately emulated the green streaks, for the users' peace of mind.

Green lightning, the simulation of obsolete technology, still exists in all sorts of forms, from modern computers with TFT monitors using "screen savers" to the useless external antennas on American mobile phones.

Today, I put some extra green lightning in my IBM (Imperial Babbage Machines, that is) gramophonic loudspeaker, in the form of beer bottle caps between the internal speakers and the tinfoil wall (one)/narrow end of the trumpet cone (t'other). This adds a wonderful old-fashioned tinny buzzing to everything, which I'm not sick of yet.

Woman in early twenties writes crap poetry and owns stupid books

2007-11-08T14:50:00.000Z

And is convicted for terrorist offences.

I have little to say about this, except: who thinks an actual secret terrorism manual has a picture of a skull-and-crossbones wearing a gasmask on the cover?

NaNoWriMo

2007-11-02T13:29:00.001Z

I am doing it. And I'm only about 2000 words behind where I should be by now.

If

2007-10-05T13:03:00.000+01:00

If you can brave the humid tropic jungle,
And leap from branch to branch with furry grace;
Eat food that's fruity, insectoid or fungal;
Grow tufts of grey around your hairless face;

If you can carve the forests Equatorial
In territories used by family groups,
But not be militantly territorial,
And overlap your land with other troops';

If you can make a hole with your incisor
Through solid bark as though it's hardly there,
And drink the sap like lemonade or Tizer,
And mark the spot so all your friends can share;

If you are undomesticably feral,
But you can tame the redwood as you climb it;
If you can sometimes be germline chimeral
(Which isn't found in any other primate);

If you can swing, the Amazon below you,
And not fall in and get your whiskers wet:
Yours are the trees and everything they grow you,
And - which is more - you'll be a marmoset.

I will not be guilted into dressing like a plumber

2007-10-01T17:01:00.001+01:00

This Friday is apparently something called Jeans For Genes Day.

Now, I am all for helping nippers with genetic disorders and will gladly bung my sixpence in the proffered bucket, but really.

Quoth the website: "It's fun, it's simple and it's a great cause! Jeans for Genes is a national appeal where everyone across the UK is asked to throw out the usual dress rules, jump into their jeans and donate £1 at schools or £2 at work to help children with genetic disorders."

I can see, at a cursory glance, three major flaws here:
- the assertion that wearing tradesmen's trousers is fun;
- the implication that wearing tradesmen's trousers is somehow remarkable or rebellious;
- the assumption that one would need some extraordinary excuse to wear tradesmen's trousers if - should one have lost one's sense of decorum in a boating-accident - one chose to.

(This last assumption propagates the harmful myth that telling employees what to wear is part of running a business.)

I know almost nobody who does not habitually wear tradesmen's trousers. I am unlikely to go a day without seeing a pair for at least the next several decades. An attempt to raise awareness of anything by having people wear tradesmen's trousers is doomed from the start: who will notice the difference in any crowd?

If, instead, we were encouraged to spend the day dressed as Gene Kelly, I would gladly pledge a kidney.

The Imperial Babbage Machines Model Three

2007-09-22T23:19:00.000+01:00

Note the now full complement of keys (in two elegant designs!), the Twining's tea-of-tea monitor, and the gramophonic speaker.

There's one serious hardware fault, though: I keep smacking my beer bottle instead of the carriage-return lever.

A demonstration against reality

2007-09-19T08:39:00.000+01:00

Last night at the local hippy café the Edinburgh Film Club showed a film called America: From Freedom to Fascism.

With a title like that, you'd expect the usual anti-war, anti-capitalism stuff - things you've heard before, but which are nice to see people getting angry about. But it wasn't - it was Libertarian tripe. Taxes are bad, abstract money is bad, the Federal Reserve is a massive conspiracy to steal your gold. (It never said it was a Jewish conspiracy, but it implied as much as it dared.) This is why America has been becoming more oppressive and undemocratic since 1913, which is when it was last truly free. An example of how terribly undemocratic America is now is that during Hurricane Katrina, the police took guns away from rich homeowners who wanted to shoot looters. I'm not sure what the linkage was here, but it's possible to implant an RFID chip in your skin - for the next ten minutes, the film seemed to be going on on the assumption that this was routinely done to all Americans. All this was interspersed with Mooresque fat-guy-walking shots and clips of the police beating people up, as though if you disagreed with the fat guy you were in favour of police brutality. The line between reality and fantasy was not apparent.

There was a discussion afterwards.

One fellow began by saying, quite reassuringly, "I must be living on a different planet from that guy." He was shouted down in seconds; someone demanded to know who had paid him to say that. In two minutes someone else had said that "Without a shadow of a doubt, 9/11 was an inside job". I spoke at this point, saying there wasn't a scrap of evidence for that - he said "Do you think buildings can fall at free-fall speed?" I said there was no such thing as free-fall speed. No one cared. I learned afterwards that he was a creationist, so he can fuck off. A few other people said things ranging from the sensible to the hysterical, almost none of which had anything to do with the film.

Nobody cared what the film had actually been about. It was attacking the US government, therefore we weren't supposed to challenge it. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. If you're against them, you're with us.

Usually when people accuse Lefties and hippies of "not accepting reality", they are using 'reality' to mean 'capitalism'. That's dishonest and defeatist. But for the drug-addled hippy fringe Left, if the US government conspired with Jewish bankers, goblins and Elvis to "do 9/11", that makes the US Government undeniably evil. Your worldview would be ratified if that were true. And you can make it true - by literally rejecting actual reality - the idea that some things are, y'know, real, and some aren't.

This is how Lefties start siding with gun-toting paranoid morons.

(Oh... he's dead.)

The Imperial Babbage Machines Model One

2007-09-09T21:09:00.002+01:00

An electrical difference engine built for performance and elegance.
A 'mod' I've done to make my computer look interesting.

Top view of the Model One's keyboard, also showing the seperable rotary calculations unit.
The keyboard began as an old-fashioned clackety number - not a Model M but something similar. I removed the plastic casing and put the bare circuitboard and keys on top of some wrought-iron brackets from Homebase, with bits of rubber inner tube and cloth in between for insulation and shock absorption. The dial thing is a circular slide-rule called The Fowler "Magnum" long-scale calculator, which was found in a local junk shop for a tenner, although I've seen them on the net going for upwards of $200. I'm still half-considering transplanting on some old typewriter keys, but (a) I'd have to buy and destroy a whole new old typewriter; (b) I'm not sure how to glue the keys on without gluing up the mechanisms; and (c) I think it looks kind of cool like this. The monitor is a second-hand Dell TFT affair, unmodded except for the logo.

Front view of the keyboard and main computing unit, showing the electromechanical datum-impulse transfer chains.
Plug cord. The computer 'body' (actually, the real tower is under the desk, as are the ugly white plastic speakers) is an old leather typewriter case, garnished with a few odd decorative chess pieces. The leather pouch for the Fowler calculator, so I don't lose it, is attached to the left-hand side, by an old elastic trouser-brace which runs all round the thing and is handy for keeping pens and things in.

The Imperial Babbage Machines Model One makes a handsome addition to the desk of the gentleman nerd.
This man is better than me.

The Imperial Babbage Machines Model Two.
Now with some typewriter keys - successfully transplanted except for the left shift and tab, neither of which will be the same again, and as you can see there are a few still to do. The main body is a huge A2 (I think) typewriter that I was going to take the keys off to do the rest of the keyboard, but can't bear to destroy. Also made, but not yet in any pictures, are a couple of speakers encased in a tea-caddy and a Cuban cigar box, although I managed to break the electrics in one of them.

Update 23 December 2007
Because I'm getting so much traffic to this post (thanks Slate.com!) - here's what it looks like now. Some extra bits are stuck to the monitor, the 'body' typewriter is changed, the keyboard is new because I broke the old one (and sadly the carriage return no longer works - I'll fix it), and the Fowler's calculator now makes a nice central... thingy.

Elevenses

2007-09-03T17:12:00.000+01:00

(Two English aristocrats, dressed in the style of around 1800, sit it a modern tea-shop, facing each other across a pot of steaming tea and a large plate of sandwiches.)

Charles Grey, 2nd. Earl Grey (1764-1845): You're early.

John Montagu, 4th. Earl of Sandwich (1718-1792): So are you.

Grey: Well, we are both earls!

Both: Hahahahahaha!

Sandwich: (Picks up a sandwich) You see this?

Grey: I see it.

Sandwich: You know what it is?

Grey: Prawn mayonnaise, I think. And the white ones are cucumber.

Sandwich: It's a sandwich, Grey. A sandwich. Indefinite article, small 's'. My diagonally sliced legacy.

Grey: Ah. (He lifts the lid from the teapot to look inside.) And I suppose this is mine. Infused with the delicate aroma of bergamot and citrus oils. I'll be mother!

(Grey pours them both a cup of tea, and adds a splash of milk to his own.)

Sandwich: They put prawn mayonnaise in my legacy. And cut the crusts off.

Grey: Cheer up, Sandwich, it could be worse. The Duke of Wellington has one of his legacies routinely smeared with lard and baked, and the other thrust full of the feet of children and farmers and splashed about in muddy puddles.

Sandwich: Yes, but people remember him for Trafalgar.

Grey: Waterloo.

Sandwich: Whatever. I'll still always be the piece-of-meat-between-two-slices-of-bread chap.

Grey: Oh come on, Sandwich, as if you really invented those. Mankind's had bread and meat both for thousands of years. D'you honestly expect us to believe you were the first to put one inside the other?

Sandwich: Oh, and I suppose no Chinese peasant ever tried dropping a sprig of bergamot, whatever that is, into his cuppa to see what'd happen?

Grey: I never claimed to have invented this stuff. It was named after me.

Sandwich: But doesn't that bother you?

Grey: Why should it? It's jolly nice tea.

Sandwich: Yes, but – look. Waitress!

Waitress (1987-.): Can I help you gentlemen?

Sandwich: What's this?

Waitress: It's a plate of sandwiches, sir.

Sandwich: And this?

Waitress: A pot of Earl Grey. Like you ordered.

Sandwich: Right. And d'you happen to know who these things are named for?

Waitress: Yeah. Couple of earls. Everyone knows that.

Sandwich: Yes, but what did these earls do?

Waitress: Made tea and sandwiches, didn't they? If that's all, sir, I've got other customers to serve.

Sandwich: Hear that, Grey?

(The waitress escapes. Sandwich sullenly spoons a couple of sugars into his cup.)

Grey: I wish you wouldn't put sugar in it. Some poor wallah works an eighteen hour day on starvation wages to pick this. The least you can do is taste it.

Sandwich: Tea and sandwiches. Never mind what I actually did with my life. Never mind that I was a rarely sober, philandering adventurer who got shunted around a dozen useless cabinet jobs and gambled away a fortune.

Grey: But you still had your life. Just because no one remembers it, doesn't mean it didn't happen. You've a bread snack to your name for posterity. That's a bread snack more than most people get.

Sandwich: That's easy for you to say. You probably did nothing but drink tea.

Grey: I put an end to the Rotten Boroughs, democratised the House of Commons, passed laws restricting child labour to 48 hours per week for under-nines, and abolished slavery throughout the Empire.

Sandwich: You pansy liberal moonbat.

Grey: Funny what you go down in history for.

(Both men sip from their cups.)

Sandwich: You're right, you know. It's jolly good tea.

Grey: Quite.

The Gangster

2007-08-30T12:43:00.002+01:00

Once upon a time a gangster was a hard-working gentleman who wore a
Two-piece suit, trenchcoat, and precisely angled fedora
And carried a Tommy-gun in a violin-case so that the police would think he was an innocent musician,
And bravely supplied bootleg liquor to the good people of the United States during the tyrannical era of Prohibition.
But nowadays the title is claimed by a certain class of bedraggled rapper
Who is not nearly so diligent or dapper.
These people call themselves things like "So Solid Crew" and "The Wu-Tang Clan",
And they would not last five minutes in the employ of Al Capone or Bugs Moran,
Because their idea of what makes one a gangster is flailing around grunting to the rhythm of synthetic drums,
And threatening to pop caps in people's bums.
Compared to the pressed pinstripes of the erstwhile Chicago Mafia,
The dress of this modern usurper is very much scaffier,
Consisting typically of baseball hat, gold jewellery, T-shirt, and jeans,
And they think all this makes them wonderfully lawless and countercultural but in fact they are about as lawless and countercultural as a petulant toddler refusing to eat its greens.
And I'm afraid this state of affairs is causing me quite a lot of frustration and angst,
'Cause ya ain't no gangster 'less ya motherlovin' gangst.

Punchline stolen from Moon "God" Tricky.

The One-Bar Blues

2007-08-13T21:39:00.000+01:00

Techno?
Hechno.

The Machete

2007-08-13T15:34:00.000+01:00

I regard the machete
In wonder and reverie.
One side is bludgeony.
One side is severy.

The Emperor Tamarin's Moustache

2007-08-08T15:02:00.000+01:00

Nature's most elegant ornament's
The moustache of the emperor tamarin;
In fairly-judged facial hair tournaments,
He'd give Salvador Dali a hammerin'.
There's no remedy faster or brisker
For one's languor or angst or distemperour
Than to muse on the beautiful whisker
On the lip of the tamarin (emperor).

The Aurochs

2007-08-07T12:49:00.000+01:00

Before the modern cow, before ox
(But after the tyrannosaurus)
Lived a species called the aurochs,
Or Bos primigenius taurus.
(Certain taxonomic gurus
Prefer to use the Latin urus.)

He was a graceful, sturdy beast;
His horns were sharp, his coat was fleecy.
He roamed round Europe till at least
Around the year 6,000 BC -
Then prehistoric humans met him,
Turned him into steak, and ate him.

And that's how these things tend to go,
For nature's infamously vicious;
It's evolution, don't you know:
Survival of the least delicious.
I know this story's kind of saddish,
But he was lovely with horse-radish.

Upon a more attentive reading of Mr. Wales' encyclopedia I now find that the aurochs was not actually extinct until 1627. 6,000 B.C.ish was when domestication began, though.

Fringe review: The Mitch Benn Music Club

2007-08-05T22:55:00.000+01:00

This show was brilliant. Mitch Benn is a very good lyricist and an excellent musician. I'm going to spend the rest of this post picking on one flaw, which I find interesting.

Imagine for a minute that, with just a couple of guitars and a drumkit, I've managed to create the 'sound' of Mitch Benn spot-on, and I've also got the voice down very well. Then come the lyrics.

I'm Mitch Benn!
I'm Mitch Benn!
One of those fat guitar-playing men, etc.

This is a very common pitfall for impressionists - getting the impression itself technically perfect, then having nothing to say. Mitch Benn doesn't fall into it every time, but when he does, he doesn't touch the sides on the way down. The best example is Everything Sounds Like Coldplay Now, which I enjoyed a lot, but only because I actually enjoy the Coldplay style a lot. When Benn allows the subject matter to slide slightly away from the parodied band itself, the songs get much funnier, as in I Never Went Through A Smiths Phase. When, occasionally, he completely separates the two, it's genius - the Eminem pastiche My Name Is (Macbeth) was the funniest song of the night.

Benn jokingly complained that he didn't know why My Name Is was so popular, since it's just him in a bobble hat shouting along to a drum beat. In this age of "production values", it's easy, and often profitable, to forget that the words you're shouting are important.

I never thought it would happen like this

2007-07-20T00:01:00.000+01:00

Aristocrats and senior mobsters
Dine every day on dressed fresh lobsters
And now that's the elite I'm in,
Because I found one in a bin.
Our crass economy of waste
I look upon with grave distaste
But times like these, I'm glad I'm able
To eat crustaceans from the rich man's table.

Risk compensation - the plan - buckling - Melrose - one-upmanship in Langholme - Carlisle - crying and hurting in the Lake District - Kirkby Lonsdale

2007-06-19T11:10:00.000+01:00

One thing that wasn't on my packing list that a couple of people commented on elsewhere is a cycle helmet. Apart from the fact that it's my own damn head and I'll decide what to put it in thank you very much, I know of three reasons why wearing a cycle helmet is not a good idea as you might think. One is the same reason not to wear a helmet while walking - whatever that is - because you are more likely to have a serious head injury as a pedestrian than as a cyclist. Another is that helmets haven't been shown to significantly reduce the risk of injury anyway. A third, and the most interesting of these, has to do with a psychological phenomenon called risk compensation.

Risk compensation is the unconscious tendency to behave more dangerously when you believe yourself to be safer. It is, or should be, an important consideration in the design of safety equipment. Parachutes, for instance. With a parachute, you can fall tens of thousands of feet without a scratch. This fills you with a feeling of near-immortality, of course, so as soon as you strap one on you start buying half-way plane tickets and pitching yourself out of windows mid-flight. Or, as one transport design bigwig once said, there would be far, far fewer car accidents if airbags were replaced by large metal spikes protruding from the steering wheel.

So, strap up Johnny Cyclist with the new No-Smash-3000 Bonce-o-Matic and he'll immediately start skipping red lights, weaving in front of lorries and bouncing short distances on his head. Left to itself, that effect might not be significant enough to overcompensate the actual safety of the helmet. The significant increase in risk comes from the drivers of the motor traffic around him - they have a risk to compensate too.

Nigel the Commuter risks, if Johnny goes under the wheels of his 4x4 and comes off worse, being late for the office, getting a dent in his precious 'roo bars (there are lots of wild kangaroos in the Chelsea area, you see), and just possibly a stain to his conscience. This is what would normally make him give the cyclist a bit of polite elbow-room as he passes. However, if he catches a glimpse of the fluorescent, armoured Bonce-o-Matic, he'll unconsciously think Johnny is that much safer and rip right past - actually significantly increasing the risk of a collision. Scientists have proved all this, in tests.

So, I am safe and smug in the knowledge that my trilby is, effectively, better protection than anything on top of the lycra-clad zoom-zooms who hang around the Edinburgh Bicycle Co-op. Let's hope I don't overcompensate too much for that - risk compensation compensation is a whole new field of calculus.

Anyway. Saturday. The plan was... well, the plan was to have no plan at all. I'd set off on either Friday evening, or first thing on Saturday morning, and I'd probably go down the east coast to avoid the nasty hills. At one on Saturday afternoon I was still in bed. My willpower wasn't boosted by the rain and mist. Eventually I got up, threw everything into the panniers, and bounced the bike down the stairs from my flat. Bike plus panniers are a lot heavier than I thought they would be, and I realise now that it was probably the stairs that buckled the back wheel. I noticed the gentle click of the rim hitting the brake block after perhaps ten miles. I kept going, along a boring A-road running vaguely South, until I got to Galashiels, by which time the shops were closed. My front lamp fell off and came apart, and I managed to scoop up everything except (it turned out) the bulb, which means I can only ride in daylight, but daylight is between about 4 a.m. and 10 p.m. just now, so that's okay. I went five miles east to Melrose and stayed in a youth hostel there, thinking I could get to a bike shop the next day.

Some geo-demographical observations. One, the fish and chips are still just decent at Melrose, but the batter has become hard and they've started offering salt and vinegar. Two, the transition from the Lowland Scots to the North English accent is sudden, and does not follow a straight line of latitude - I was being och-ayed in Galashiels and ay-ooped in Melrose. Three, Melrose is nowhere near the east coast.

The next day was Sunday, and I was out of major cities, which meant all the bike shops would be shut even if I could find one. The choice was between spending a day in the borders and hoping there'd be something open in Galashiels, and pressing on to Carlisle - about 60 miles, I think - risking the wheel becoming unuseable at any point. I decided to keep moving - if the wheel buckled terrible, it would hit the brake rather than fall off, so I wouldn't actually be in danger, and anyway I might just possibly find a bike shop open on the way.

At Langholme I stopped for an ice-cream and asked another cyclist if he knew if there was a bike shop open. He said there wasn't, and asked if there was something wrong with my bike; I said yes, the back wheel was buckled to jiggery. "Well," he said triumphantly, "my back wheel's buckled and my brakes have gone."

I pressed on, crossed the border without too much trouble from passport control (I'm sorry I didn't get a photo of this, but the crisp edge of the shadow of the raincloud over Scotland followed the border exactly) and made it to a campsite just north of Carlisle.

On Monday I went into Carlisle and found a bike shop. The mechanic said that he had ridden twice round the world and never had that much weight on the back of his bike - I'm not sure how, as none of it is either heavy or nonessential, except perhaps the complete works of Lewis Carroll - and I had been in mortal peril of the whole thing disintegrating beneath me. He changed the wheel while I went off for breakfast, and I set off again. The mechanic gave me some directions, which got me lost in half an hour.

I hit the Lake District. There is a reason it is not called the Flat District. (N.B.: This joke made a bit more sense when I thought the Lake District was the same thing as the Peak District.) Some of the downhill stretches were very fun indeed, but the uphill ones made me cry. My right foot felt like it was going to fall off and later in the day I was having mild hallucinations: people lurking in corners; once I thought my chain had come off, and stopped to fix it and it was still firmly on; and once, wishfully, I saw a youth hostel sign that wasn't there. Within probably a mile of the campsite I was headed for I got lost and panicked. There was perhaps an hour of daylight left, and the only place name I recognised from the signposts was Kirkby Lonsdale, where I knew there was a campsite. It was ten more miles - I got here just as it was getting dark and starting to rain. I feel fine after a half-decent sleep, and hopefully that will have been the hardest day of the trip. I'd better get moving.

I'm off out to play on my bike

2007-06-15T13:13:00.000+01:00

I may be gone some time.

Things to do, buy and pack

2007-06-14T09:00:00.000+01:00

Tent. I bought the second cheapest one in Millet's last week. I haven't put it up yet as I only have a shared garden and don't want to look silly. My childhood memories are all of horrid clunky steel-framed prismic monsters, but this is one of those Jelly Drop ones with an X-shaped frame of two bendy carbon fibre poles, so shouldn't be too awful.

Sleeping bag. I haven't bought one yet but will probably do at lunchtime or tomorrow. I have a blanket. Someone told me you'll be warmed sleeping on top of the blanket instead of under it, which must be either wise or ridiculous, but it's hard to tell which without trying.

Panniers. Why are these so expensive? I paid £50 for a pair that almost certainly aren't big enough. The tent won't fit in the panniers, so I need to buy another one of those stretchy hooky bungee things and hope it doesn't fall off. I had two bungee things, but hippies stole one.

Bike maintenance stuff. Spanner, Allen keys, rags, puncture kit, spare inner tubes - I might buy those magical ones self-sealing gel in that magically patch themselves up should you ride over any cruelly-placed drawing pins. Do they work?

Clothes. Yeah. I need to buy some more raggedy type stuff from charity shops, and cut off some old jeans into longish shorts that won't get mangled in chains. I'll pack one smart-ish outfit that I won't wear till I get there. Let's just hope none of the campsites are white tie.

Hat. One modest dark brown pinstripe flat-cap. I'll be sad to be away from the trilbies, but anything with structure would almost certainly get crushed.

Maps. A cheap road atlas of Britain. I should also find a compass, to avoid those embarrassing find-yourself-back-where-you-started moments three days in.

Towel. Hoopy.

Oh, and... bicycle. Needs a few tweaks and some oil, but probably won't fall to bits.

What have I forgotten?

Bouncy!

2007-06-04T12:53:00.000+01:00


  /  \
   #        @         
     O   /      *    /
                     \
     \      /          /

 * * * B O U N C Y * * *

Now with teleporters!

Bouncy is a 3D-accelerated, double-frobularised high-tech video game I made because I was bored.

It's based on a game of the same name that I used to have for an XT, credited to "The Mutant COBOL Programmers' Syndicate". If that person still exists - hello!

This happened

2007-05-31T22:14:00.000+01:00

Anarchists ate my chocolate mousse;
Hippies devoured my sweet.
I was cruelly bereft
By the radical Left
Of my sugary, yoghurty treat.

Anarchists ate my chocolate mousse!
Was it part of some great revolution?
Was my pudding attacked
In a dexterous act
Of confection'ry redistribution?

Anarchists ate my chocolate mousse
In a pointless display of aggression!
The theft of dessert
Is no way to subvert
Inequality, war and oppression!

Anarchists ate my chocolate mousse.
Now is that how Leroux would behave?
Daniel Cohn-Bendit
Would never commend it;
Bakunin would turn in his grave!

Anarchists ate my chocolate mousse!
Don't they have something better to do?
Like blockade at Heathrow,
Smoke a half-ounce of blow
And smash up a McDonald's or two?

Anarchists ate my chocolate mousse,
And I'm feeling a little irate;
You shouldn't have oughtn't,
But it's not that important,
So be off, and go bring down the State.

The Mastodon

2007-05-24T13:55:00.001+01:00

In ancient times, the mastodon
Was hunted for his meat;
These days he gets lambasted on
The show Sesame Street.
To satirise and persecute
This noble, disadvantaged brute
Is not a gentleman's pursuit
And doesn't demonstrate distinction;
Entertainment television
Broadcasting this smug derision
Merits harshest admonision -
It adds insult to extinction.

Free Snuffleupagus.

It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words

2007-05-24T10:43:00.000+01:00

Two words which I have always both loathed and hated
Are 'overrated' and 'underrated'.
'Overrated' is something you say about a band, or artist, or whatever, which you don't like but a lot of other people do,
And 'underrated' is the opposite, i.e. the artist appeals to nobody except you.
There is nothing wrong with differing from other people's opinions,
But there is something wrong with assuming that, if other people like something and you don't, it's because the thing is 'overrated' and the people don't really like it, they are just mindless fawning minions.
Similarly, it is insulting and objectionable
To say that if other people don't like something that you do like, it is because all those people are insane or sectionable.
This is what the words 'overrated' and 'underrated' both imply,
Because for either of them to be possible, each artist must have some correct rating in comparison to which somebody might rate them too low or too high.
If you consider this rationally, of course, the odds against all the people who disagree with you being mad are very long,
So it is far more likely that the overrated thing is actually very good, or the unrrated thing is really terrible, and you are the one who is wrong.
But you never hear anyone saying "Everybody else likes The Stranglewanks and I don't, so I suppose I am probably a lunatic who should be locked up and sedated";
They say "The Stranglewanks are overrated."
You may think that Shakespeare is a better writer than Jackie Collins,
Or Just Jack isn't as good a musician as Henry Rollins,
But in the end that is just your opinion, and something there is no way of verifying,
And still a lot of people talk as if there is some objective, measurable quality of likeableness and that is frankly terrifying.
Supposing one day SCIENTISTS found a method of observing SCIENTIFICALLY which of Kylie Minogue or Charlotte Church was the better singer, or which one out of Vin Diesel and Laurence Olivier was the talentless moron and which one could actually act,
And it turned out that all the artists you liked were awful and all the ones you disliked were excellent and that was SCIENTIFIC FACT.
I think you'd be furious and you'd say "What I like and dislike are not part of the SCIENTIFIC dominion,
And whatever they say I'm entitled to my own artistic opinion."
And so I call for the following two words to be abolished and never reinstated:
'Overrated' and 'underrated'.

The Samurai

2007-05-22T16:25:00.001+01:00

The samurai or ninja
Isn't showy with his violence:
He's trained to kill or inja
With precision and in siolence.
If you've locked your doorhecan
Still effortlessly pick it,
And dispatch you with a shuriken
Before you've time to brick it.
To summarise, the samurai’s
An underrated danger;
We mustn’t laud or glamorise
This tall, dark, deadly stranger.

The Zeppelin

2007-05-17T16:36:00.000+01:00

If you wish to cross an ocean that is too wide to be bridgable,
Consider transportation by the airship or dirigible.
It's stylish, economical, and friendly to the planet,
And it only takes a crew of twenty-four or so to man it.
Although it's rather slower than jet-powered aviation,
The comfortable cabin space allows for relaxation.
It travels gracefully, displaying power and agility;
It hardly ever lives up to its fame for flammability;
So when you go on holiday, the choice is very simple:
What'll be your vehicle? A zeppelin or blimp'll.

The Zombie

2007-05-16T14:08:00.000+01:00

The zombie's goal or raison d'être
Is chewing eyeballs, brains, etc.
And he pursues this aspiration
With the gravest dedication.
He feels no boredom or malaise,
He never asks for holidays,
He doesn't shirk, or skive, or stall -
He's an example to us all!
Why in the world can't everywombie
As industrious as the zombie?

In fact, I just like saying wigwam

2007-05-13T22:48:00.000+01:00

Today I realised that I desperately, longingly, yearningly, burningly desire to live - not in a wigwam, but somewhere with a big enough garden to build a wigwam in. Actually I mean a tipi, but wigwam is a cooler word. A proper one, tall and wide enough to light a fire in, with chimney flaps and an underground ventilation pipe like it says in Wikipedia. I would use it as a little summer-house for relaxation or occasionally cooking dinner in. Unfortunately I live in a first-floor flat with only a small shared back garden, usually occupied by a couple of children and the lady downstairs's rabbit. The poky little tent I've made in my bedroom out of sheets and broom handles is good, but it's just not enough.

Why do I suddenly feel like this? I've never been a particularly outdoorsy type, but in late June I'm planning to cycle from Edinburgh to Leicester, about 300 miles as the crow flies, but perhaps much longer as the software engineer pedals. I'll camp in the wilderness and try to avoid starvation, hypothermia, and being shot by angry farmers. Maybe if I score the triple whammy, I'll get this out of my system.

Mayday, again

2007-05-06T12:49:00.000+01:00

Well, this year's Edinburgh Mayday rally was a little less awesome than last year's.

Last week - before the Scottish parliamentary elections - I bumped into a few Communists who had set up a friendly pavement stall. Most of the other parties were speeding around in double-decker buses, shouting soundbites through megaphones. I'm for pavement stalls. I'm not a Communist, I'm a libertarian leftie, and I'm already unhappy about the implied factionalism in saying so - but hey, we know what we stand together against, right? So I got chatting to them and, as usual, got stung a couple of quid for Dave Spart's latest pamphlet. They talked a bit of sense about how terrible it is that democracy is assumed to be below capitalism - with every single party expected to express its policies in terms of how it will make and spend money - and they were fielding a candidate in the council elections in a ward I don't live in, but nobody for Parliament. So who were they backing?

"Oh, we're not going to vote."

On Thursday, the Left were almost wiped out of the Scottish Parliament. Due to a conspiracy of tactical voting, unfair constituency boundaries (even in the PR seats), broken counting machines, ballot papers that were too hard to understand, the Radical Golfers' Front and, er, more people voting for the other fellows, we're now represented by two Greens and no one else. This became final at about five o'clock on Friday, so at the rally on Saturday morning - star speaker, Colin Fox ~~MSP~~ - the atmosphere was a little glum.

Last year, one leftie accused another leftie of going to swingers' parties, as if anyone cared. The other leftie sued the first leftie, won, and took his own bunch of lefties to form his own leftie party with hookers and blackjack. Some other lefties were so unhappy with the childish behaviour of the first two lots that they left and formed their own leftie party with jelly and ice-cream. And so on. In my region, the biggest splinter party, called - hah! - Solidarity, got just under 3,000 votes. All the lefties together (not counting the Greens) got over 7,000. I can't work out whether that would have been enough for an MSP - for that matter, I can't work out why the Lib Dems, with 36,000 votes, got no regional seats, while the Greens, with 20,000, got one. (It may be something to do with the fact that the Lib Dems did all right in the first-past-the-post seats, and who knows, it may even make sense.) If 7,000 wouldn't have been enough for a single socialist party - a party with as many internal factions as it liked - to get a seat, it'd be a much easier place to start from next time. Of course, if the PR seats were actually proportional, and not divided up regionally like what the first-past-the-post seats are for, we'd probably have MSPs from two or more of the splinter parties anyway.

And still, at the rally yesterday, there were only slightly fewer parties represented than people. The "People's Front of Judea" scene in Life of Brian has never made so much sense. We hate each other more than we hate the Right.

Who's with me in forming the United Libertarian Socialist Cohesion Party? And of course, if any of our members ever say that lefties splintering is a good thing, we'll kick 'em out. Splitters.

Democracy

2007-05-03T13:47:00.000+01:00

Overheard at the polling station this morning, a young woman with the sort of Hame Cyneties accent that can bag a pheasant at fifty yards, talking to a glum-looking Tory candidate: "I say wanted to vayte for you, but unfortunately I'm a Labour vayter."

Did you vote, and are you a moron?

Gnulu fhtagn!

2007-04-27T13:31:00.001+01:00

Tune: Flanders and Swann, The Gnu

A year ago last Thursday I was sailing seas of green,
In a merchant ship around the South Pacific.
When we came across an island none of us had ever seen,
And our misadventure there was quite horrific.
We found ruins that were noisome, rugose, and just frankly weird,
And we might have gone on taking in the view -
If there hadn't been an earthquake, and an Elder God appeared
And declared, in squamous tones: I'm Cthulhu!

I'm Cthulhu!
I'm Cthulhu!
A cthing that's uncthinkable but true!

I'm Cthulhu!
How do you do?
I cthink I'd run away if I were you!

I'm Cthulhu!
I'm Cthulhu!
I'm cthovered in catarrh and slimy goo!
A chthonic ichthyoid,
Whom you've foolishly annoyed -
Oh fhtagn fhtagn fhtagn, I'm Cthulhu!

I was staying in Rhode Island at the end of last September,
Where I thought the fresh sea air might do me good.
And upon my bedside table, facing east (as I remember),
Was a little figurine of varnished wood.
And I felt a creeping horror as I realised its features
Bore a striking similarity to - who?
Hastur? Or Yog-Sothoth? Or one of those Great Outer creatures?
And I seemed to hear a voice: I'm... Cthulhu!

I'm Cthulhu!
I'm Cthulhu!
A ctharacter you won't see in the zoo!

I'm Cthulhu!
How do you do?
You R'lyeh ought to k-now w-ho's w-ho!

I'm Chtulhu!
Spelt 'Cthulhu'!
I'm 'eldritch' every adjective or two!
I'll await beneath the sea
Till the stars are right for me,
Then devour the lot of you -
I'm Cthulhu!

Springtime and hippies

2007-04-25T12:51:00.000+01:00

Some mornings you look out of your window at the sky and notice it is blue rather than grey,
And the birds are chirping and the grass is crisp and green and the wind is moving the trees in a gentle sway,
And you shout Hurrah! and don't bother to grab a coat and skip out of the house with a smile on your face and, in extreme cases, cry out with joy or even start to sing,
But the song sticks in your throat because it turns out it's not summer after all, only spring.
So even though the air is clear and the sun is shining and the crickets are making a remarkable chirrupy racket,
It's worth not a jot because it's too cold to be outside without a jacket.
The enjoyable thing about summer days is you can buy an ice-cream and sit in the park and kick off your sandals and enjoy the warm air and refreshing breeze,
But if you tried that on the kind of day I am describing, you'd simply freeze.
Yet as I write, a band of hippies is clambering its way up Calton Hill with a view to celebrating spring as a time of rebirth and fertility,
Which to my mind is betraying of a certain defect in the mental facility.
Spring, I am afraid, is not something to be celebrated -
It is, for the reasons I have outlined above, something to be mocked, ridiculed, and berated.
If we are to go around stripping off and painting ourselves red and prostrating ourselves before the Spring Goddess every time there's a change in the weather, where does that end up leaving us?
It leaves us being walked all over by Spring Goddesses and laughed at by these beautiful but freezing cold days that take such pleasure in deceiving us.
So I remain sceptical of this wishy-washy neo-pagan faffing and I hope I have been able to explain why,
And we would all be better off staying indoors until at least July.
There are all sorts of ailments these people could catch like hypothermia and pneumonia, and it'd serve them right if they caught 'em,
And spring is my least favourite season apart from winter, summer, and don't even get me started on autumn.

I've never been to Beltane but I hear it's fun. Perhaps I'll toddle along if any of my hippy friends are going.

Two thoughts on fashion

2007-04-19T16:57:00.000+01:00

The modern world's inherent stress
Can be ascribed to hatlessness.
We'd have less riots, wars, and battles,
If fewer people went out hatles.

Moon boots only ever ought
To be worn by an astronaut.
They're not for going to the bar in,
Unless your name's Yuri Gagarin.

Poetic thoughts on xenobiology

2007-04-13T21:17:00.000+01:00

O sweeter still than cherry-cola
Are planets that are extrasolar
And wondering about the chance
They foster animals or plance.
Although we know there's life on Earth,
That sample's hardly random!
We're biased from our very birth,
'Cause that's the world we standom.
Thus, f_L in the Drake equation
Can't be more than speculation.
A decent guess cannot be took
Until we've got more data -
We'll have to get out there and look,
And leave the sums for later.
Oh, what a fascinating topic's
The principle of weak anthropics!

Inspired by a blog post by Alex Walsh

Headwearabet

2007-04-11T16:45:00.000+01:00

A is for an Alice band, a band as worn by Alice;
B is for the Busbies of the guards outside the Palace.
C is for the caubeen, which the Irish wear a lot;
D is for the deerstalker, like Sherlock Holmes has got.
F is for a fez, a fireman's hat, or a fedora;
Homburg, like Lord Eden's hat, is what the H is for a.
K is for the kolpik that the ancient rabbis wore;
P is for the Panama, which comes from Ecuador.
S is a sombrero, like they have in Mexico;
T is for the trilby - that's my favourite, you know.
U is for ushanka, which is furry and fits tightly;
W's for wig, as worn of late by Richard Whiteley.
All kinds of things exist that you can wear upon your head,
But none of them begin with E, G, I, J, L, M, N, O, Q, R, V, X, Y, or Z.

This isn't just food. This is food out of a skip.

2007-04-04T10:36:00.000+01:00

This week, I am eating good food for free. A couple of hippy friends found food in the bins behind a certain upper-middle-class supermarket.

You may be thinking, my god, that's disgusting, you're a revolting man, eating food that has been fished out from among the eggshells and potato peelings and used needles. No. These are nice clean containers, full of neatly stacked food, still in its packaging, found a couple of hours out of its sell-by date at most; nothing is past its use-by date, and it's all good quality stuff packed up with nitrogen. Our fridge and freezer are stocked with meat, fish, vegetables, and delicious wasteful little pre-packed meals, and our fruit bowl is overflowing with stuff that isn't even ripe yet. And we haven't even stopped any other 'skippers' having some - there was far more left behind.

Last night we made monkfish pie with minted potatoes. The potatoes come ready minted, of course, with a knob of butter in the middle of the tray. As if it is too much effort for Johnny Consumer to slice off his own knob and carry it all the way to the potatoes. The mushrooms come in neat rows in a tray with a dimple for every individual mushroom. Someone's job was to design that tray. Someone could not play in the sunshine because they were busy putting one mushroom in each dimple. And no one was even going to eat the mushrooms.

I've heard that something like a quarter of food that goes on supermarket shelves in Britain is thrown out. Many of them put what they throw out in a compactor, out of spite. It's illegal to distribute it to needy people, or to send it off for animal feed. There is absolutely no regulation to prevent this waste. It's one thing that you'd really, really think you could leave to the market, but like most of those things, it isn't.

Jack the Ripper was a liberal atheist

2007-03-14T14:36:00.000Z

I've always thought the internet is a bit like the zoo, in that the animals are more entertaining if you don't bang on the glass. Despite myself, I spent much of yesterday happily vandalising Conservapedia. Conservapedia, if you don't know, is an answer to Wikipedia's constant liberal, atheist bias - for example, the fact that it allows both Commonwealth and American spelling.

My edits were undone promptly of course (mainly), but I was bored and maybe I annoyed a few idiots for a few minutes. It's not like you can fight 'em with reason.

Some of the non-biased, well-sourced facts in Conservapedia - all of which appear to be stable, admin-approved content, rather than vandalism, although it can be hard to tell:

The right to use guns is given to us by our creator.

Abortion causes cancer.

Evolution violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Feminism is bad, right guys? The Bible says so.

Global warming can't explain why some places are getting colder. Or it isn't happening at all. Or it is happening, but on Mars.

Charles Darwin is laughing on the other side of his beardy face now that he's being buggered by tortoises in Hell (weasellishly implied in the last sentence, rather than stated outright.)

Sex doesn't seem to exist.

My favourite sentence on the site - from a talk page rather than an article - is: "Going by Conservapedia's definition of 'liberal', for example the points about gun control, same-sex marriage, amnesty for illegal aliens, foreign treaties, increased power for labor unions, etc., I think we can all agree that Adolf Hitler was undeniabley (sic) liberal in every way that matters."

I'd rant, but I'm happy to let the facts speak for themselves on this one.

First off, I can't stand either of them.

2007-03-02T10:32:00.000Z

Following the revelation that "New" Labour were planning to base their next smear campaign on a candid photograph of Mr. David Cameron pictured in the shockingly compromising situation of - gentlemen, cover your wives' and servants' ears - wearing a top hat and tails, those nice people at Auntie Beeb have released, for the sake of good old journalistic balance, the full version of an image of Tony Blair, with some chums, in his Oxford days.

The young Anthony Charles Lyndon is third from the right in the back row, wearing a double breasted jacket and no tie, his hair a particularly unpleasant form of unkempt - but note, in particular, what he is doing with his right hand.

The rest of the assembly look a foul lot too - with, I think, the exception of the careless-looking gentleman at the bottom right. The fact that he is surrounded by such imbeciles make his aire of debauched disdain all the more admirable. I bet he's the only one who does not have a peerage by now.

The full story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6409757.stm.

Two things in the news

2007-02-22T21:58:00.000Z

The first one is about Texan State Representative Warren Chisum, who sent a memo around the entire State legislature, telling them there was now "incontrovertible evidence" that the entire fields of evolutionary theory, Earth science, and cosmology were made up by a 2000-year-old Jewish conspiracy, and are therefore religious beliefs that shouldn't be taught in state schools. (This from a man who wants creationism in.) The source that he cited for all of this is fixedearth.com, which also asserts - in an embarrassing, missable little footnote in large text right first thing on its front page - that the Earth neither moves around the sun nor rotates on its own axis. Rep. Chisum backpedalled of course, saying it was okay because he hadn't actually looked at that website.

The second one is that chimpanzees have been spotted hunting with spears. What's more, only lady chimps.

Some days I'm prouder of being a primate than I am of being human.

I let a rat run across my keyboard and it happened to type this

2007-02-06T13:24:00.000Z

Some people who I cannot stand 'em
Are those who always misuse 'random'.
It makes me want to reprimand 'em
Or run them down by bike (or tandem).
I do not wish to seem pedantic,
But this ill-usage makes me frantic.
Learn to use a dictionary:
What you mean is 'arbitrary'.

A poem about economics and kittens

2007-02-01T14:33:00.000Z

The course of history has been shaped by many great men, from Jesus to Emperor Nero,
But I'm going to be greater than any of them because when I grow up I'm going to be a superhero.
Now you might think that being a superhero would not be easy,
But for me it will be breezy.
Here's my plan:
Everyone will think I'm just an ordinary mild-mannered web programmer but secretly when I hear the call of duty I'll run out of the room and take off my glasses and get changed in a phone box and become my super alter ego, LAISSEZ-FAIRE CAPITALISM MAN!
And one day in Metropolis City someone would be hoisting a piano up a skyscraper on a rope,
And the rope would snap at exactly the critical moment when a small fluffy kitten ran under the piano and a crowd of aghast onlookers would cry Help us, Laissez-Faire Capitalism Man, you're our only hope!
And I'd arrive on the scene instantly, leaping tall buildings with a speed unrivalled even by the world's fastest race-horses,
And I'd cry NOBODY MOVE! Including me! Nobody do anything, just leave it to market forces.
And the crowd of aghast onlookers would say Laissez-Faire Capitalism Man, shouldn't we get something done?
And I'd say Nope, the blind forces of economics will sort it out in the long run.
And inevitably the rope would break and down would come the piano and the poor kitten would get squished,
And I'd say Well that's all very sad, but ultimately this just shows that it's what the consumer wished.
Because if there were any real economic demand for stronger ropes or rubber pianos or spongy foam kittens that automatically re-inflated,
Then the engineering companies would be on the case and before long the market would be sated.
And the crowd of aghast onlookers would no longer be aghast and they would burst into a grateful cheer,
And say, He's right, if we'd all just change our spending habits there could be 18% fewer pianos falling on kittens next year.
And wipe away tears of grateful satisfaction,
And shout Hurrah for Laissez-Faire Capitalism Man, ever alert for the call to inaction!
And by the time kittens were extinct
And all the pianos in the world were in pieces on pavements so that never again would a child hear the joyous sound of ivory keys being plinked,
I'd have made my fortune and retired to a tropical tax-haven to escape the VAT man,
And the crowd of aghast onlookers would say, I wish we'd called Batman.

A day late for Burns' Night

2007-01-26T10:54:00.000Z

Ah shouldnae have run o'er that moose
Ah've gone and wreckt his little hoose
But if I turn him inside oot, observe:
Yon tiny haggis maks a braw hors d'oeurve.