March 27, 2003  

skiffle shank 26 march 2003

It would appear that the British troops in Iraq consider themselves much better at urban fighting than the US. Their argument is simple: spending the last god knows how many bloody years in Northern Ireland has given them a good whack of experience of being in a city where a large number of people don't like you and many of them have guns. Apparently the difference between Belfast and Basra is largely one of degree: more people who don't like you, more guns. And, handily, less danger of extensive official inquiries if you accidentally machine-gun innocent bystanders. See, America - if you'd had more occupation forces around the place, you'd be in better shape for this.

Looks like Cannondale have been bought out of Chapter 11. Their chief creditor, Pegasus, has bought the sensible bits of the company, and has notably turned a nose up at the motorsports division. That'll teach them to hemorrhage cash. And it means that the bikes are being made once more. Good thing too: there's plenty of people throwing money at high-end motorbike development, far less of them throwing money at high-end bicycle development.

We've had some damn good weather recently. Why, it's gone over 15 degrees! Twice! OK, hyperbole aside, it's been getting pretty comfortable to wander around without a jacket, so we're groovy. And this morning I crossed my yearly rubicon, and started wearing shorts to work again. Damn, but it's a good feeling. Particularly not having to fart around with cycle clips before hopping on the old treadly in the morning. Of course, this being the UK, the weather'll be lovely for about a week, then we'll get a fortnight of "more typical spring weather" i.e. pissing rain and wind. But in the meantime, I've got kneecaps to show off.

March 25, 2003  

subcutaneous grime 24 march 2003

I won the red nose day cheesecake guess. Go me! Thanks to the requirement to guess in grams, the UK types were foxed and a good old Kiwi guess got there. I credit it to the shrewd estimation powers that NZ's habit of selling dairy products in easy-to-remember metric amounts gives you. Or: once you're used to how big the Great NZ One Kg is, you can estimate kilos by eye surprisingly effectively. Nice cheesecake, too.

We've just had a large argument at work about exactly how many illegal acts (and what kinds) it would take to get you fired from here. In a hypothetical manner, of course, rather than a "so, what you up to at the weekend?" context. Although given the rumours about Alf's last trip to Amsterdam...

So I bought a heartrate monitor off Ebay a couple of weeks back. It was cheap, it ws in good nick, and I figure that buying the odd gadget will make cardio exercise more interesting. And, as a plus, it tells you how many Kcal you've burned, which is kind of a fun fact to know. One of the other functions it has is automatic calculation of your Body Mass Index. Now, the BMI is just a quick lookup of your height vs weight. It's a reasonable rule of thumb, but it doesn't take your build into account, nor muscle mass vs fat mass, body fat percentage, etc. Anyway, I enter my height and my weight, and get my BMI (29 or so). At the time, I'm just fiddling around setting the thing up, and I can't remember whether that's good or bad. And then it helpfully changes the display at the top half of the screen to a scrolling text band reading "BMI: Overweight". Cheers for that. It's curiously dispiriting being insulted by a machine. It's like having your scales make sneering personal remarks.

Went to a fancy dress party on Saturday. For a laugh, we both went in drag - Heather wore a very fetching suit and fedora combination, and I wore a frock. Man, you get some funny looks as a big hairy guy buying frocks and costume jewellery from charity shops, don't you? My personal favorite was buying a 6ft strand of beads at Oxfam. I went up, handed it over, and was fixed with a steely glare from the old lady behind the counter. "Buying these for a particular reason?" she asked. "Er, for a fancy dress party," I replied. "Good." she said in an ominous voice. It makes you wonder if Oxfam is regularly besieged by cut-price transvestites, padding out their illicit wardrobes with tired-looking couture from the 80s. Anyway, the beads complemented the frock (British Cancer Society, £3.75) splendidly, and the costume was a hit. Chicks dig drag, dude.

The weather's been much nicer recently, and we've been doing the odd long walk around the place. For long, read six to seven hours. Had good one yesterday - round the villages west of Cambridge. The weather hit up to 20C, not too much wind, lovely. And we crossed the Greenwich meridien twice. Once without realising it, once after with the aid (?) of a marker stone. Nice.

Police chief: The fuck you do, son! Those savage maritime bastards have kidnapped the president! They say they've given him 34-DD breast implants and a crash course in sexy pole dancing techniques.
Slade: Is that likely to affect his executive decision-making ability?
Police chief: The Libertania has opened fire on sanity and the nations of the free world, motherfucker. The fuck are you day-glo sons of bitches?

Grant Morrison, The Filth [link]

See? Now that's a comic book. And, as a bonus, it's considerably more accessible than Morrison's previous work (notably The Invisibles).

March 15, 2003  

an interrupted panting state 14 march 2003

Ah, red nose day. One of those noble and inspiring moments when showbiz types who've made it big donate their time to help out those less fortunate - usually the showbiz types who haven't made it big, and who're helping out in a cynical attempt to raise their public profile by rubbing shoulders with the A-list on camera. Not that I'm denigrating the effort - I'm good for a few quid once I've got a few beers in me later tonight - but the enforced jollity does occasionally grate. The danger of these events is that they reinforce the idea that donating to charity is a one-off, an occasional event that you do with all your mates: charitable donation as football match or pop concert. A better way would be to try and persuade people to give a wee bit more regularly - £5/month, say. The problem is, regular and unpublicised donations are a hard sell - but having a day where you can effectively exploit peer pressure to extract donations ("Come on, mate, everyone else in the office has put a couple of quid in... it's for charity, you know!") is an easier and more effective sell. What charitys should really be doing is passing around direct debit forms at drunken office parties this evening, with everyone egging everyone else on to sign up for higher donations ("Only £20 per month? I'm signing up for �25...").

Of course, I had to break halfway through writing that to whack an entry in for the office "Guess the number of sweets in the jar" and "Guess the weight of the cheesecake" stakes. I passed on the "Guess the weight of the sourdough loaf", though. Sourdough loaves are all well and good, but I figure the chances of sharing them out around the team if we win are fairly minimal.

I just asked my coworker why he was laughing hysterically. And the answer is... the Guardian's cricket commentary. Diamond.

March 11, 2003  

phenylalamine and mozarella 10 march 2003

Good weekend, that. Had Blair in town, prior to his imminent Southwards departure. A few people over on Saturday night, a curry on Sunday, and intermittant wandering around Cambridge and going "woo". So, y'know, nice. Worth noting were the choice of farewell presents that people came up with. We got him a pewter tankard to remind himself of his time in the land of CAMRA. Jim decided that the fair land of Albion would be better represented by a Carry On video and a dancing penis. Talk about postmodern: differing individual perceptions of nationhood. Or something like that.

So we're chilling at the FSG yesterday. Geezer pulls up on a very nice mountainbike. Specifically, a Cannondale Gemini 900. Said bike doesn't look too heavily used - which does lead one to wonder if the guy had spent £2300 on a big-hit "freeride" bike (about 6" of suspension travel at both ends) basically designed for riding off big things and onto bigger things, just in order to tool around Cambridge (flat as a pancake)? Tch.

Amusing anecdote from coworker: on a trip to India, he found a restaurant which offered the following menu item:

CONTINENTAL BREAKFAST: Coffee, croissant, cigarette.

Class.

March 08, 2003  

lightly for ten minutes 7 march 2003

For various reasons, some of my coworkers spent ten minutes this morning laughing at the names of people who'd won the National Ethnic Coalition of Organisations annual medals. Halfway through, they collapsed into laughter at the name Yogi Berra. "Did his parents have a particularly cruel sense of humour?" chortled one of my coworkers, wiping the tears of hilarity from his eyes. It took me five minutes to explain who Yogi Berra was and why a cartoon character had been named after him. I mean, just look at all this guy said. I dunno - you think the yanks have overwhelmed everyone with their monolithic corporate monoculture, and then it turns out that the Brits missed all the good bits.

What we're reading at the moment: well, I've been motoring through the old Sarah Waters. Extremely readble, very well-written - and you've got to love the combination of Dickens pastiche and explicit lesbian plotlines, don't you? Seriously, above and beyond the qualities that spurred the beeb to make Tipping the Velvet into primetime telly (I believe the expression is "high concept", as in you can easily explain why people will want to watch it - in this case, probably pitched as something like "intelligent Victorian social criticism with red-hot lesbo action!" - a shoo-in for BBC2), she's ridiculously worth reading. I've got through Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith so far, and they're both excellent. Highly recommended.

Thanks to Fopp's slightly odd stocking policies, I've been in luck recently. The most notable thing I managed to pick up has been Solesides Greatest Bumps, the Quannum compilation covering the history of solesides records. Lovely, lovely beats. Much early DJ Shadow, Blackalicious, and Latryx. If you're only going to buy one hip-hop album this year, make it this one. Fuck, man, even if you weren't going to buy a hip-hop album this year, it's only £7 at Fopp. Take a punt, dude.

For all those of you who're still idly hoping that the US isn't going to start bombing the fuck out of the middle east, I'd like to point out that B-52s are landing at our local US air bases. Yup, to carpetbomb Iraq, you start out from East Anglia. And they're ready to start. Armageddon, line on the left, one cross each...

"photos of having freezing water dumped on your head"? Weirdoes.

Repec' to tha J-Dawg for passing on this innovative response to US warmongering. One of those messages that us expats read and think "Well, I'm pretty sure that I don't know her, but the name's a bit familiar...."

A good weekend is on the cards. Our mate Blair (or "Dusty Crane" Rhodes as he's known around the campfires of half of Asia) is heading back off to the fair shores of home. I understand that it became politic for him to give up his peripatetic Edinburgh existence for the foreseeable future (something to do with a statute of limitations - I didn't catch all the details), so he's doing a whistle-stop tour of the UK prior to catching the tail end of summer back home (y'bastard). He'll be spending the weekend here, and we've vowed to do our best to make his last recollections of the UK fragmentary and embarrassing. Should be a good laugh.

Off to see Bowling for Columbine tonight. "But wait," I hear you cry, "surely you've seen that and waffled on about it before?" Well, yeah. But I've only seen it sober. I've not yet seen it while drunk. You know how in NZ, when you're going to a 10:40pm movie, you maybe get a meal, maybe meet in a cafe, something like that? In the UK, you get to the pub and drink as much as you can before you get to the theatre. It's some kind of macho thing, I think - whose bladder can last the whole 2 hours, that sort of thing. You know how in most countries, binge drinking is a stage you go through at uni? In the UK it's a whole cornerstone of the way of life.

OK, maybe not. But, y'know, hyperbole is fun.

March 05, 2003  

i prefer the term 'salvage' 4 march 2003

The weather's getting warmer. And warmer. I was wandering around with my fleece off yesterday, exposing my arms to the sunlight. It can only be a matter of time before the shorts come back out. Actually, we were out in shorts on sunday - bike shorts, to be specific. A lovely day, so we decided to take a quick 15 miles or so. A fine way to get some mild exercise.

Spurred on by the fact that Planet X Bikes are now sponsoring them, I had a bit of a look at the Trials Kings's web site. Well worth a look if you fancy seeing young blokes doing frankly foolish things on rigid bicycles.

The other day, we got an internal bulletin about all the philanthropic stuff our company does. It's actually pretty good stuff - the company helps support various workers doing voluntary work in their communities, provides equipment and support for fundraising, etc. I even checked out, and our official corporate charity seems to be excitingly areligious. As part of this bulletin they gave a potted summary of the activities that various offices had organised. The list was impressive: this office raised US$5000, that office $4000 ... and our office was in the list. £46. Well, don't we look the stingy bunch of bastards? Of course, they're only counting official, corporate-sanctioned charitable activities that are listed with HR - so the £90 I raised in last years' London to Cambridge bike ride doesn't count. Or Micky's sponsored swim for the Samaritans. Or... Maybe I should try and register with our official Corporate Benifence Department this year. I might get a corporate t-shirt.

Slightly random moment last week, when Fidel Castro lookalike Phil turned up completely out of the blue. Turns out that he was taking an unexpected holiday in the UK, remembered that we were in Cambridge, and got our number from directory enquiries. Connected world, ho! Anyway, we ended up going for a curry and a few pints, and having a good old chat about events back home in NZ. It was an extremely pleasant evening, and it's great to hear about what's actually happening back home. A fine time all around.

Due to Heather's recent history of back trouble, we decided to acquire a rack and some panniers for her bike. After extensive research on the internet, and taking all the variables into account, I decided that the best course of action was to steal one. I say steal; I mean, of course, salvage. Specifically, I was walking past a derelict bike and thought "hey, that rack looks like it'd fit Heather's bike..." It's not like I make a habit of this. That particular bike has been abandoned (to my certain knowledge - I walk past it about four days a week) for the last two months at least. I figure, why spend cash on a rack when I can reuse an abandoned one? Aluminium doesn't rust, and it's in perfectly good nick, hence. So yesterday evening I spent a useful ten minutes with a multi-tool (mainly 8mm and 10mm ring spanners, plus a certain amount of philips screwdriver love) and emerged triumphant. I need to pick up a couple of bolts at lunchtime today and Heather's bike will be cargo-ready.

Mind you, it reminded me of the easiest way to become invisible in public: crouch down next to a bike, pull out some tools, and start fiddling. I swear to god, you could strip a bike down to its component parts in public, and no-one'd say anything. As long as you look confident, no-one challenges you. It's like walking around an office building with a clipboard. Heck, I've even had mates hacksaw the locks off their bikes without anyone calling them on it. I was stripping parts off a bike by the side of a well-trafficked road for about ten minutes, and none of the passersby gave me a second look. And that, my friends, is why bike theft is still a profitable crime.

Mind you, I can talk. I don't spend my time checking credentials on people with hacksaws. And wouldn't it be an annoying world if we all did, eh?

I've been very run down recently. A nagging flu that lasted about a fortnight, I'm on the verges of a mild cold, and I've been having problems with my left wrist. Still, a few early nights and I should be OK.

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