October 28, 2003  

clear but cold 27 october 2003

Bit of a hiatus from writing recently, due to a slight scare relating to the imminent arrival. I should emphasise that there's nothing we can spot wrong with the wee'un; however, the routine scan at 20 weeks turned up a slight abnormality in the umbilical cord. Your standard issue, according-to-Hoyle, umbilical cord has three vessels: two arteries and one vein. However, our cord has decided to economise slightly on the arteries, and thus has only one of each vessel (with an enlarged artery to accomodate the required blood volume). After about a week of varying degrees of freakout, we're calm about it. The initial consultation with the midwives actually wound us up, as they were being very open about all the various possibilities and our options. This gave us a bad case of Too Much Information, and we couldn't stop ourselves focussing on the (highly unlikely) worst case scenarios. After a chat with the consultant obstetrician last week, however, we're a lot calmer. He basically reassured us that while this can be associated with certain problems, there are no signs that this is happening in our case. His exact words were "This is a perfectly normal pregnancy," which calmed us down a lot. To confirm this, the Next Generation has taken to booting Heather's insides around a lot. It's quite disconcerting to hear her lying in bed going "Ow! Ow! Ow!" as it lands lucky blows on the bladder.

For the voyeuristic amongst you, here's the scan picture. I reckon it's got its father's hooter, myself.

Listening to The Archers at the weekend (had the radio on while I was cleaning the house), I heard a fairly surprising plot twist. One character was breezily talking about sending spam to another character, and doing it via an anonymous proxy to prevent it being traced. What? When did The Archers become a pack of script kiddies? Shouldn't they be talking more about ill sheep rather than their l33t 0wning sk1llz?

Brief Beeb interview with Chicks on Speed. They're a good band, I tell you!

OK, maybe this is a hint: Mel Gibson is currently making a film version of the last twelve hours of Christ's life. A number of Jewish groups are quite unhappy about this, as they claim to be depicted in an extremely negative way. While filming, the actor playing Jesus is struck by lightning. I'm guessing someone upstairs is wearing a yarmulke.

Reverted to Greenwich Mean Time from British Summer Time over the weekend. Thus, sunset is at 5pm. It's pitch black by 6. And it's only going to get worse. This is where I start getting the value out of my gym membership: it's just too miserable out to get out on the bike in the evening. Ah well. I spent a happy ten minutes last weekend taping 3M reflective tape to anywhere appropriately visible on my bike or helmet, and I've got all me lights fully charged, so I'm going to be lit up like a little Christmas tree as I speed down the streets of Cambridge.

Of course, this time next year I'll have no time for organised exercise. Hmm. Unless I drop my benchpress weight to 4kg, and don't mind lifting something that vomits if I do too many reps at once.

October 16, 2003  

milk spiral in water 14 october 2003

Whoops, forgot to mention that it was my birthday last week. A good time was had by all, especially me. Heather even got rose from her confinement and made me a bacon bagel for breakfast - grand. And I can confirm that 28 doesn't feel much different.

We're about to have our kitchen done up, because we're middle-class. The bloke we're getting to do it is a builder called Bob. Yes, we laughed too. A coworker of mine is having a wall knocked out in his new house. The builder he's using is called Bob. We've checked, and they're not the same bloke. So there's two Bob The Builders around Cambridge. Is this some kind of ploy to get free advertising from the Beeb? Are there more of them?

Got rid of our front fence at the weekend. The original plan had been to dig the posts out, but after this year's drought the ground was iron-solid. Having very laboriously dug down a foot to the first post, and then discovered exactly how well the post was concreted in (a ball of concrete about 18" in diameter and god knows how deep), I decided on plan b: dig down a few inches below ground level, sledgehammer the posts off, and re-cover the remains.

Hence, I spent a good morning on Sunday sledgehammering the concrete fenceposts out of the front garden. Using a sledgehammer is very satisfying: you swing something fairly heavy, it hits something, the target breaks. Grand. As the concrete fenceposts I was sledging were holding up the front fence that I'm getting rid of, most of the work involved standing over the block, swinging the sledgehammer over my shoulder, and bringing it down in a frank imitation of a golf swing. Though you normally don't wear protective goggles for golf. Unfortunately, the fenceposts included three piece of steel rebar inside each post, which slowed things down a bit. That said, the concrete quite obligingly came away from around the rebar, which I could then easily hacksaw off.

The other fun thing about sledgehammers is that you don't actually need to put a hell of a lot of effort in: hiff it up to the right height, put a wee bit of grunt in to get it moving, and let momentum and leverage do the rest. Remarkably effective. Mind you, I've still managed to knacker me duff shoulder as a result.

And it was hard to stop myself from singing "Po' Lazarus" from the opening of O Brother Where Art Thou? while hammering.

October 10, 2003  

tea and beer 9 october 2003

As many of you know, I've been taking driving lessons. It's a bit intimidating, but I'm getting there. I've not hit anything yet (despite some kamikaze pedestrians), and it's all going well. Need to work on my low-speed maneuvres (specificallly, parallel and bay parking), but apart from that I'm going pretty well. This is largely due to my driving instructor, who is good at explaining how to do stuff and very good at offering suggestions when things go wrong. He's also a font of other useful items of knowledge, such as:

• Babies are initially intimidating, but you get over it quickly. You'll soon learn the distinction between the various yells. The real problem comes when they get mobile.
• If you feel a little embarrassed muttering "Only a fool breaks the two-second rule" under your breath to judge following distances, try the lorry drivers' alternative: "Only a twat follows as close as that." Tres butch!
• Half the other people on the road are demonstrably idiots.
• The domestic bursar at a particular Cambridge college is a part-time pole dancer.
• US citizens arriving in the UK have to retake their driving test. Unless they're members of the US military here on a posting, in which case someone mentions to them to remember to drive on the left and then lets 'em loose on the roads. This goes some way to explain why there've been a dozen accidents in the last year involving US service personnel from RAF Mildenhall having serious collisions, many of them head-ons.
• The quickest way from our house to the Rosie Maternity Hospital is probably to skirt around town via the A14, then go past Fulbourn, through Cherry Hinton, and around the back way. Longest route, but least likely to have heavy traffic.

It's a well-rounded education, I tell you.

On the headphones: Chicks on Speed feat. Peaches, We Don't Play Guitars. Inspired electro stomp; particularly given that you can clearly hear (if you listen in the quiet bits) that they're actually using a fretted bass in the background. The sort of stuff you like bouncing up and down to while shouting the (highly simplistic lyrics) at the top of your voice after three pints. Rock! On!

The internet is like the world's biggest small town. Everyone knows each other, all your old deeds are freely available in the public mind. Problem is, that a lot of the reason that people move out of small towns is to escape the social picture that's been built up around them: this is Bob. Bob likes pictures of dogs and is very quiet. Well, maybe Bob moves countries, away from everyone who knows him, and he meets a lot of new people, and he can stop being that guy who is quiet and who likes pictures of dogs. Maybe he's been a bit tired of being that guy. Maybe not. But a change of scene, moving somewhere where you can start again with a new social group, does a lot of people good. And on the net - where things you said ten years ago are lovingly archived on The Wayback Machine. Being able to get away from your past has certain advantages, not just for crims. One reason to use an alias online.

We've all heard the stories of Elvis sitting watching television and shooting the screen out if he didn't like the programme. But he also used to shoot at his cars if they failed to start and he used to shoot at squirrels from the comfort of his toilet seat at his home in Graceland.

Jerry Goldman, director of the Fingerprints of Elvis museum in Liverpool.

OK, that's my new definition of redneck decadence: being able to shoot squirrels while on the loo.

October 07, 2003  

smell of burning wood 6 october 2003

"...once I'd survived that, I literally walked outside and practically fell on my knees."

Uma Thurman, discussing Kill Bill.

So: you literally practically did something, eh? Kind of like what we used to call "almost", isn't it?

Feh. Foolish Hollywood people!

we like to use gaffer tape
but we don't play guitars
give us your gaffer tape
but we don't want your guitars.

Chicks on Speed ft Peaches, We Don't Play Guitars

Just finished reading The Filth last night. Pure, pure class. The lst two issues were some of the most moving stuff I've read for ages. A bit more comprehensible than a lot of Grant Morrison's other stuff, and an absolutely lyrical denouement. If they ever make this into a TV show it'll cost the earth to film and will be banned across the globe. Great stuff.

I'll confess to having laughed like a drain at an article in the most recent issue of Singletrack about cycling in Italy. The article mentioned how the language barrier wasn't too bad - they managed to get the shopping done with an Italian vocabulary consisting of "si", "no", and "Bianchi".

Noticed an interesting facet of the Sainsburys To You online shopping service. Tesco keeps a list of "things you've bought before", which is a pretty sensible way of doing things. Sainsburys take this a bit further: not only does the web site give you a list of the stuff you've bought from them online, it also includes anything you've bought instore if you've used your Nectar card to collect loyalty points (hey, I'm saving for free National Trust membership, OK?). This means that the list of food includes such sensible items as 4kg sacks of rice, right next to double chocolate chip muffins. Cue embarrassed "I was hungry..." mumbling from me. Of course, Heather is exempt from this, as she (inspired perhaps by Michael Moore's tirade against loyalty cards) cut her Nectar card up. Since Nectar has one of the worst rate of return of any customer loyalty card scheme, it's not too bad an idea.

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