November 29, 2002  

like a jellyfish 28 november 2002

I'm doing a lot of work on our forthcoming "Enhanced Care Interface." I keep mistyping that as "Enchanted Care Interface" or "Entranced Care Interface". Whoops!

I've spent about a week listening to the recent Amorphous Androgynous release, the isness. Amorphous Androgynous are a side-project of the Future Sound of London, so you could legitimately expect lush soundscapes, intermittant beats, and extremely deep noise. Previous FSOL works have been the sort of layered electronica that you just keep getting more and more out of: sort of thing you listen to in bed with the lights off. Or, in my case, put on at parties to get people to leave. As to the new album, well: you'll like it if you like:

• The Beatles
• David Bowie
• Suede

I'm not 100% sure you'll like it if you like the Future Sound of London, mind. OK, it's actually quite good, but it's also quite a departure. And the omnipresent sitar gets on my nerves after a while. Still, I wouldn't have been listening to it for a week unless it grew on you. And grow on you it does. I still prefer the odd instrumental soundscapes (her tongue is like a jellyfish) to the more "song"-orientated tracks (divinity), but there's a lot to like here. After a few days, it's like sinking into a beanbag of sound, man. Now there's a metaphor I bet you've not heard before, but it's better than the overused "hot bath".

Just posted off most of our Christmas packages. So if you're related to us and live in NZ, watch the skies. Keep looking. Keep watching the skies. I've actually done a fair bit of my Christmas shopping via the web this year (Charlotte, watch for an Amazon package), which saves a hell of a lot of time given that I have to post each present an average of 10,000 miles. So: emphasis on durability and lightness. Which slightly blows the traditional "buy the buggers a book" argument out of the water. Actually, thanks to the Royal Mail's slightly arbitrary postage rates, a package containing only books is charged at about 2/3 the rate of a package with anything else (say, a letter) in it. Really. Thus, at an early age, we learn to lie to the postmaster: yes, there's definitely no letters in this package. All suggestions for light presents gratefully received.

Modern IT companies from my perspective: from their trademark acknowledgements ye shall know them. Macromedia have a page on their site dictating specifically how to use their trademark terms. Sun, on the other hand, have no such thing. Moreover, it took me a week, a number of emails, and finally a couple of transatlantic telephone calls to confirm the correct format for a specific trademark acknowledgement. What makes this more galling, of course, is that it's pretty easy to figure out what the acknowledgements should be - but to cover our asses, we've got to get confirmation from the companies concerned. Unless, of course, they're Macromedia, who tell you precisely what to put. Nice kids.

You know you're becoming suburbanised when: you spend an evening bleeding the radiators. And enjoy it.

So the police pulled a badly decomposed body out of the Cam yesterday. Right by one of the sections that I walk past all the time. It's the badly decomposed bit that worries me: OK, they pulled a body out of the river earlier this year, but that was a young guy who'd got incredibly pissed and then fallen in from a rather high bridge, so that's not too surprising. Decomposition would seem to indicate that it's been in the river a while. Which begs the question, where in the river? The bridge in question is about 1km from a large weir, which would have been expected to catch the body. Has someone had a corpse stashed underwater in the Cam for the last few months? Yrch.

November 22, 2002  

slippery kneecap 21 november 2002

Bowling for Columbine was excellent. Some extremely harrowing scenes, some high comedy, and some absolute nutcases. I particularly liked the subtle equating of Charlton Heston with Marilyn Manson, especially given that Manson came off considerably better of the two. Shock rocker in articulate shocker, so to speak. The hype is well justified; well worth seeing.

Fascinating. I've just found out that the statue I admired so much outside the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao was originally commissioned for the Tate Modern in London. Web page with pictures. Statue is 'Maman' [Mother], by Louise Bourgeois. So there you go.

Lisa gave me some sea monkeys for my birthday, about six weeks ago now. There's a couple that have survived the harsh environment of our kitchen windowsill thus far: and they're growing bigger. The big one is at least 3mm from tip to tail. And growing. Soon, once they're big enough, I'll start teaching them unarmed combat. Then the world will tremble before my Sea Monkeys of Death!

Hey, it's an innovative world domination plan, you've got to give it that.

But probably slightly optimistic for brine shrimp.

November 19, 2002  

pass the ritual knife 18 november 2002

If you can, go and see the Aztecs exhibition at the Royal Academy.

Go and see it to see some incredible archaeological treasures, including very recent discoveries from Mexico City (built on the ruins of the Aztec capital Teotihuacan).

Go and see it to see the remains of a culture which survived until the Conquistadors arrived in the 16th century; whose capital city was larger and more grand than anything in Europe at that time. This despite not having the wheel or iron. A giant empire, with its capital city at the centre of the universe, where the flint knife was still the dominant cutting technology. And which was taken to pieces in less than a century.

Go and see it for the statues of Xipe-Totec, "Our Flayed Lord", whose sacrifices were skinned after death. The priests of Xipe-Totec then wore the flayed skins until they rotted off, as a sign of rebirth (like a snake discarding its old skin and growing bigger, stronger).

Go and see it for the jar in which the flayed skins were stored, its surface dappled all over with a perfect ceramic recreation of the bubbles of subcutaneous fat under the surface of human skin.

Go and see it for the astonishingly realistic statues of animals.

Go and see it to appreciate how syncretic the Aztecs were, carefully examining the gods and customs of other Mesoamerican cultures (Toltecs, Olmecs, etc) and incorporating them in their own belief system. It's hard not to make comparisons with the Romans nicking Greek gods - the desire to establish your culture as the legitimate inheritors of the old recognised dominant culture.

Go and see it for the sacrifical knife and sacrificial altar; both having been used for human sacrifice.

Go and see it for the jade masks. Especially for the Olmec mask, dated to around 1200 BC, which the Aztecs had dug up (as part of their own archaeological zeal) and then reburied as a sacrifice for their gods.

Go and see it to see evidence of an astonishing civilisation, contemporaneous with Reformation Europe, beautiful and cruel and quite comprehensively alien.

Go and see it, man. It's well worth it.

Raving about Mesoamerican cultures aside, the rest of the weekend down in London was excellent as well. Went to Discover Dogs on Saturday. It's always a good gig - this is the fourth time I've been (for example, last year's entry), which is slightly alarming. It's basically a dog advocacy day. The Kennel Club run it as a day when you can look at lots of different types of dogs and get to make a bit more of an informed choice about potential dog ownership. In practice, this means that half the exhibition hall is filled by various companies flogging pet supplies, while the other half is filled by various breed clubs. The breed clubs are great - lots of people frothing enthusiastically about a particular type of dog. It reminds me of the times I've volunteered to help out at the UKCPS stall at the Chelsea Flower Show, in the sense that these people basically get to spend a couple of days being enthusiastic about something they really love to total strangers. Mind you, the Chelsea Flower Show doesn't have one of the dogs on the West Highland White Terrier table taking a dislike to one of the Afghan Hounds and barking at it for an hour.

The high point of this years' dog show was meeting the star of Spiderman, Foster. Annoyingly, Foster doesn't have an IMDB credit for his role, but he's the Australian Terrier who appears onscreen 55 minutes in. The stall he was on had a huge Spiderman poster, and it was raking in the kids. As soon as the kids found out that the dog had been in Spiderman, they wanted to pat him and get photos. He was even doing pawprints with a pad of ink. Man, imagine being 8 and meeting the dog out of Spiderman - you'd be notorious in the schoolyard for at least a week. I took a photo. No-one's immune to the cult of celebrity. Nice dog, too.

Saturday night, we went to see Michael Moore's live show. Interesting gig. Haven't seen Bowling for Columbine yet, but we're going this week. The act felt slightly padded - I'm not convinced that Moore was confident that he could keep the audience entertained for two hours just by talking at us, so he had a few sections along the lines of "let's make a prank phone call to nasty people". Still, he was funny and a wind-up in good measures, and managed to get people talking a bit during the Q&A at the end, so that's good. Well worth seeing.

The winter mists have come again. It's another evening of 50m visibility. I'm sitting at my desk staring out the window, and it's like being inside a ping-pong ball.

Syndication I didn't think I'd see: The Register reprinting BikeBiz.

November 16, 2002  

beep me when you're getting near 13 november 2002

Rabbit Proof Fence was extremely good. Class Australian cinema, with added value cinematography. Powerful story, beautifully shot. Style.

You can't see people getting fucked physically on TV because of the censorship laws, but you can see it happening metaphorically, with all this schadenfreude TV, this humiliation TV. To me, that's pure pornography, without the sex.

Irvine Welsh interviewed in The Onion AV Club [source]

What I'm thrashing on the headphones at the moment:

• FC/Kahuna, Machine Says Yes - bleep bleep bloody bleep bleep, and very nice with it. Feels a lot like the bleepier side of the big beat trend from a few years back. The music has a nice edge to it, with a slight tongue-in-cheek funk sensibility. Lots of distorted vocal samples, lots of bouncy driving beats, lots of class breaks. The Chemical Brothers meet Underworld and have a disco contest.
• Autechre, Garbage and Envane - serious knob-twiddlers beloved by electronica devotees everywhere. Each album is four tracks long, about 10 minutes per track, and fairly full-on leftfield bleep music. Good background music - like a slightly more monomoniacal Future Sound of London.
• American Gigolo, the mix album from the International DeeJay Gigolos record label, mixed by DJ Tiga - call me a mad old fool if you like, but I quite like this whole electroclash thing. OK, so a lot of it's pretty dull, but it's got some serious high points. And I missed the early '80s the first time around (I was in primary school), so it's nice to have 'em back. This is a pretty good compilation, and it's quite representative of the scene at the mo. Electroclash compilations tend to suffer quite badly from a dearth of material: there's only about half a dozen name acts in the scene, each of which has one or two recognisable tracks. Every compilation album thus tends to feature the exact same tracks (Fischerspooner's Emerge, Miss Kittin & The Hacker's Rippin Kittin, Tiga and Zyntherius' Sunglasses at Night are the most common examples) with a smattering of less-known space filler. Still, the bleeps are nice & slippy.

And so as another Harry Potter movie is released, the inevitable wave of snobbery starts out again in the popular press. Maybe I should just try and avoid reading the movie reviews. Thing is, half the movie reviews get all sniffy about HP per se, rather than the movie adaptation - and some of 'em even go on to slag off Lord of the Rings as well. It's not so much that they're taking something I rather like to pieces - that's fair enough, that's what they're being paid for. It's that their criticisms tend so much towards the intellectual snob snap dismissal: it's sold millions, it's popular, ergo it's for the plebs. I'll quite happily admit that the HP movies have some (serious) problems; slag 'em off for that, not 'cos you've never read the books and like to feel superior.

Some nice points about politicians sucking up to the motoring lobby.

Now this is a bike-related tattoo. Basic precis: this guy collects antique chainwheels (the bit that the chain goes over at the rear axle if you're not using a derailleur), many of which are quite ornate. He's getting a selection tattooed on his arm in stages. It's worth seeing just for the sheer beauty of the industrial design inherent in the chainwheels. I love the idea of resulting texturised effect (or at least, what will be more of a texturised effect when it's completed).

Off to London tonight, to go see dogs and Aztecs. Sounds like the title of a book, doesn't it...

November 13, 2002  

pleasing curve of glass 12 november 2002

So we're walking home from the movies on Sunday night. It's a nice night; warm for October, not actually raining. We're walking down Elizabeth Way towards Milton Road. As we cross over at the Chesterton Road roundabout, Heather spots movement in the grounds of the GE building on Chesterton Road. This is a fairly large building, surrounded by a bit of park (and parking), with an iron railing fence surrounding the area. Behind the fence, about eight feet away from us under a tree, is a large fox. It's just standing there and staring at us with some curiosity. The railings meant that we could see it perfectly well, and it seemed quite unafraid. We stood there staring at it for about a minute. It stared back. All was quiet. Then a couple of people eating kebabs walked past, and the fox darted back over a slight hillock. We wandered off, marvelling at the joy and beauty of the natural world. And then we noticed that the fox was following us along the inside of the fence, gently paralleling us as we walked along the outside. It kept pace with us all the way along the fence. I'm not sure if it wanted to be fed, or if it had cubs and was keeping an eye on us, but it was pretty damn cool.

So: a nice urban wildlife moment. We've seen a fox in Chesterton before, but this was the first time we've seen one that close around here. Mind you, when we were living in Leckhampton (Corpus's graduate accomodation), which backs onto some large fields, there were a few foxes (and deer). At one point, during a picnic in the garden, we had a fox come over and beg for scraps. I got it to hand feed, which I was quite chuffed with. Still, it's nice to know that there's a bit of wildlife around this end of town. Beyond moggies and hedgehogs. And all the rabbits by the science park, of course.

So why were we walking home that late at night, I hear you wonder? On account of how we'd just been to see a preview showing of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, of course. I fought the urge. I did. I thought to myself "Well, the first movie was OK, but it was nowhere near as good as the book." I thought, "Oh, I'm sure we'll go and see the second movie - but no hurry, eh? Wait for the fuss to die down," I thought. "Don't want to get trapped under a sea of children," I thought to myself. So we decided to wait a few weeks before going. And then on Saturday morning, I decided to idly check how quickly the sessions were selling out. And I discovered that one wasn't. Thus was my downfall assured.

Surprisingly, the theatre wasn't packed. The booking office claimed that the session had sold out, but there were still a few empty seats towards the front. Not too many small children, as you'd expect at 9pm on a Sunday, but still a few. And as to the movie itself, well:

• It looks great. The production design is stunning. One piece in particular - a lock within the Chamber of Secrets itself - was incredible.
• Kenneth Branagh is worth the price of admission in itself. He made an absolutely great Gilderoy Lockhart: preening, full of himself, overdone. Branagh overacted madly, which of course fitted in perfectly with the character of Lockhart - he's the sort of buffoon who always behaves as though they're in a bad amdram production, so chewing the scenery can be regarded as finely observed character acting in this case. Or something. Great outfits, anyway.
• Other casting was generally up to snuff. Whatzisface off The Fast Show was bang on as Mr Weasley, and some geezer no-one's ever heard of did a very impressive Lucius Malfoy. And that little bugger what played Dobby was great, especially considering that the costume can't have been particularly comfortable.
• OK, I know that Dobby was CGI. But good CGI.
• Better than Yoda, anyway.
• It felt similar to the first movie, in the sense that it was slightly "the book's greatest hits". A bit too much emphasis was paid on hitting every single scene in the book, to the detriment of a few scenes. There's a slight tendency to show everything, but not in any great depth. This could lead to confusion if you've not read the book.
• We could easily tell where the small children in the theatre were. There's a scene about 2/3 of the way through that involves spiders. Lots of spiders. Big spiders. As in, the size of a motorbike. During this sequence, all the small children in the theatre pinpointed themselves by emitting a series of high-pitched terrified screams. You could hear the nightmares being burned into the young brains all through the room. I'd thus advise against bringing really young kids to this one. Not that it matters - they're going to pester you into taking 'em no matter what - but you can't say that I didn't warn you.
• Personal nitpick here. At the denouement, the order of two important events was reversed. I felt that this actually worked against the emotional power of the scene, and it annoyed the heck out of me. It added a slightly farcical tinge to the final battle sequence, and for no obvious reason. Why bother changing it? It wasn't broke to start off with.
• On the whole: worth seeing.

My word, but The Filth is excellent stuff. Grant Morrison has bounced back from The Invisibles in tip-top form. Recommended odd-psychedelia twitchout conspiracy comic of the month.

November 09, 2002  

a mass of aches and pains 8 november 2002

So I got hit by a car the other night.

That sounds more dramatic than it is. I was biking home from the gym at about 7:15pm (so it was pretty dark), I was nearly home, and I passed a guy who was about to turn left out of a carpark. As I cycled past, he pulled out into me and hit the rear of my bike. Not hard; he saw me and hit the brakes. He can't have seen me, despite the fact that I had a rather bright front light and a bright orange jacket dripping with reflective strip. The impact was enough to knock me over; I fell into the oncoming traffic lane. Fortunately, the oncoming traffic was a bit more on the ball, and stopped quite sharpish. The driver was quite apologetic, and my bike wasn't damaged (didn't even buckle the wheel), so I'm chalking it up to experience. I'm still bloody sore this morning - I seem to have strained a few odd bits and pieces during the fall, and I'd done a fairly heavy back workout anyway, so it's muscle pain a go-go in Elderland.

Why I quite like The Guardian: one of this years' Turner Prize entries is a written description of a porn movie, so they take Ben Dover to review the artwork. Excellent stuff - I particularly like the descriptions of the reactions of the other patrons.

It's been raining for the better part of a week. The river's flooding again. I've started work on an ark in the back garden. Construction is being slowed because the watertight hull keeps filling with rainwater, and it's a pain in the arse to have to empty it each day. Possibly some form of plug is in order. Not sure about 2 of every kind of animal: I'm pretty sure we've got a hedgehog at the bottom of the garden, and there's the neighbours' budgie, but apart from that it's a bit sparse.

November 05, 2002  

cut so fine 4 november 2002

In the "If they hadn't wanted 'em to stack the vote, they wouldn't have pu the form on the web" stakes, the greatest invention of all time (as voted by listeners to BBC Radio 4) is is ... the bicycle! Churlishly, the Beeb seem to think that the vote was stacked in favour of the bike by certain unsavoury online elements. The fact that the bike got 70% of the vote, leaving everything else well back in the dust, would seem to bear this out. All I can say is, if all the bloody petrolheads out there had cared, they could have organised and stacked the vote themselves. Everyone had the same chance to fix the vote, and to complain that the treadly fans got in first smacks of sour grapes. And to go so far as to ring the editors of bikemagic and accuse them of cheating.... Get it right - the editors only encouraged people to vote, it was the actual users who posted instructions on how to cheat.

Top pick - the new Lemon Jelly album. Stylee. Orbital meets Mr Scruff, in a good way. Very much a jazzy feeling, some excellent breaks, and a plethora of characteristic odd vocal samples. A strangely uptempo chillout work. And it works. Oh yeah.

I managed to stand on a wasp the other morning. Evil little bugger. My foot still bloody hurts.

Someone bought a packet of fudge into work today. It's "Rum Flavour and Raisin". I'm sure that's a literal description, but it just reads funny.

ObGoogle - I've been wondering why I was gettting so many hits for 'poppy plants', and it turns out that I'm second in the results. I take my ego boosts where I can find 'em, folks.

November 04, 2002  

do you have any Tango? 3 november 2002

My [step] father got me a job at the Hotpoint factory to show me what the real values of life were. And the real values of life were discussing football and reading the Daily Mirror every fucking day, so I thought I'd get some new values.

Lemmy, interviewed in the Big Issue

As it was the Reverend Jim's birthday yesterday, we all trumbled off to the movies. Specifically, we went to see 28 days later, the new movie by Danny Boyle (Trainspotting etc). It's basically a post-apocalyptic zombie flick, but it's pretty well done. Largely filmed on DV, which I found annoying, and with a slightly unconvincing ending. In terms of general tone, it felt a lot like A Revengers Tragedy. Song of Stone meets Brain Dead. Some excellent set pieces. At least one moment where everyone, everyone, in the theatre went "Oh my god" (if you've seen it: thumbs). One particularly nice sequence started out roughly thus:

Protagonist 1: We need to get to the other side of the Thames! Let's go under the Dartford Tunnel, which is pitch black and which could contain anything! Including, say, the flesh-rending zombies which we are attempting to escape! Heck, it could even be completely blocked, and we wouldn't know from the outside!
Protagonist 2: Wait a minute - why don't we go back and go across one of the big, wide bridges above ground, that I was filmed stumbling dramatically across during the critically acclaimed opening sequence, and which we thus know are empty and contain no obvious blockages?
Protagonist 1 & 3 in unison: No, we must go through this tunnel, for it is more important that we save ten minutes travelling time rather than have a realistic chance of surviving until lunch.
Protagonist 2, relenting: Well, OK. But this is a really, really stupid idea.

I have a soft spot for any horror movie where the characters do something really, really obviously stupid - and one of them then spends the next three minutes onscreen complaining about what a really bloody obviously bad idea this is.

November 01, 2002  

stormin' 31 october 2002

My word, it's been an interesting fortnight. Sorry for the lack of updating-action, but we've been running around at a fair old clip for absolutely ages.

Probably the most notable event was Heather's graduation on the 19th of October. Stylee. Getting a PhD is always a good thing, and Cambridge certainly pulls out all the stops when it comes to bizarre commemorative rituals, including value added Latin declamations. The ceremony is set up as a sort of assembly line: the university council bowl in and declare that they're ready to start graduating people, then the praelectors from individual colleges lead their students in and introduce them. The introduction is all in Latin, and basically consists of the praelectors certifying that the students are fairly on the ball and are smart enough to be granted the degree which they've been put forward for. Each student is then called forward, and has their hands clasped by the Vice Chancellor, who intones a brief bit of Latin that translates out to "Righty-ho matie, you've got the degree of [x]". Up the student hops, and strides in a confident and enthusiastic way out the back door of the senate house, being handed a degree as they go. Behind them, students from other colleges are stacking up in a sort of holding pattern - only about three colleges are actually present in the hall at any given time. The other colleges are waiting outside the hall, and are marched in as appropriate. Like I say, it's a big assembly line. But with fur-trimmed robes.

So the graduation rocked out. Heather was marched forward with the other students from Corpus Christi, and looked very impressive in her robes. She got to march forward first, a bit of a a change of procedure (see, changing your name from Williams to Elder has advantages for alphabetical lineups). Heather's parents attended, and almost wept with joy when she got doctored. Lovely, innit? After the ceremony, we had a few pictures out on the Senate House lawn, and some champage courtesy of a few mates who'd popped along to congratulate Heather. Very satisfying.

With Heather's parents in town, we ended up hiring a car and doing a fair few missions around the place. Sandringham, Norwich, Plymouth... we did it all, baby. It's always good when people are staying and we have a legitimate excuse to go wombling around the place and check out new bits of the UK. I'd not been to the Southwest before, and rather enjoyed our trip there. Specifically, we went down to Devon to attend a friend's wedding. Heather's parents came along to go to Plymouth for a couple of days.

Dartmoor is interesting. It's whacking great big, fairly desolate, and massively cool. A lot like being home, really. Think of driving along the Desert Road, except with a lot of 20% gradiants (really) and hairpin bends. And local drivers who come up right behind you and tailgate for miles. And, since Plymouth is directly on the other side of it from the wedding venue, we got to drive over it twice. During both a heavy thunderstorm (drive up) and a day during which gale force winds killed six people. At one point on the drive up, a lightning bolt hit a radio mast 100m away from us. Impressive stuff.

The wedding was what I believe our American cousins refer to as a "big-ass fun time", and I couldn't put it better. Both the bridge (Naomi) and groom (Martin) are fun, bouncy, popular people, and Naomi's lead a fairly peripatetic life (Heather met her in Paris), so there was a good crowd of people from most of the globe (including a large contingent from Budapest). We tended to end up hanging out with the yanks - doing the whole "people who talk funny stick together" thing - but everyone there was great. The hotel hosting the wedding was right by one of North Devon's premier surf beaches, so during the ceremony you could glance out the window at no less than six kitesurfers (I counted). Unusually for me, I can recall exactly what the bride wore to this wedding (I normally blank out at "it was [colour] and had bits"), mainly because it was a totally stunning dress. Nice.

Also had the slightly odd experience of meeting Stephen. Or rather, not. One of the wedding guests, from New York, was a dead spit of Stephen. Down to facial hair. Heck, even down to a number of lifestyle choices (as far as I could tell). It was actually quite disconcerting. Fortunately, as Stephen's a bloody good bloke, his doppelganger was as well, so a good time was had by all. We even survived a series of tequila shots - largely through the cunning expedient of drinking the hotel out of tequila before we were all too hammered. Result! And a big shout out to the American massive, any of whom we'd be bloody glad to buy a drink for if we run into 'em again.

Plymouth was rather nice as well. It has the solid likability of any place where the main public gathering place is called The Hoe. Those of you who know us well will be spectacularly unsurprised when I tell you that within three hours of arriving in the town, we were sitting in the Plymouth Gin Distillery, merrily sipping neat gin (really) and learning interesting facts about how gin is made. For those of you who don't know how gin is made, it's a pretty simple recipe:

1. Buy grain alcohol and try to purify it as much as possible.
2. Add flavourings.
3. Dilute it down to around 40% ABV.
4. Bottle it.

This means that tours of gin distilleries are much shorter than those for, e.g., whisky distilleries, breweries, etc, as they completely dispense with the tiresome "using the basic ingredients, actually produce alcohol" step. It also means that gin has a really quick turnaround - a couple of days. Still, it's pretty tasty, for all that the rejected batches are sold as paint stripper (apparantly true).

So, Plymouth: nice place. Lots of cool memorabilia of colonialism - specifically, one old set of steps on the harbour, with a lot of plaques from various corners of the old Empire affirming that this was where the first ship to colonise [x] set off in [yyyy]. Including the first colony ship for NZ, I'm pleased to note. Oh, and the Mayflower. The Mayflower is also the subject of a museum that we didn't go into - not for lack of interest, but because we were more interested in the gin tour. Heather's parents loved the town, and they spent two days there and are thus better qualified to comment than we.

Since this is at least nominally a blog, a goodly swathe of linkage for yez. Nice story about entrepeneurs making and selling biodiesel, being a gay cop in South Africa, and irrefutable proof that retro-tech is the future. That last link is absolutely inspiring, I swear.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: god, I love getting releasses out the door. The sheer immensity of relief, if nothing else.

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