tallpoppy

onward! let 'em have it!

car not well January 31, 2005

hamlet covered in snot January 28, 2005

If - like me - you are a right-thinking person, the prospect of hearing an interview with Alan Moore fills you with fizzing excitement, you will clearly be chuffed to learn that the BBC tonight broadcast exactly that. Alan Moore interviewed by Stewart Lee, including value added extra bits cut from the broadcast edition for reasons of time. Listen to it. Luxuriate in it. His accent's as thick as his beard. And I would expect that - like me - you'll be glued to the radio next Wednesday at 6:30 (or the streaming Realplayer Listen Again thingie) when Alan Moore in turn interviews Brian Eno. Re-sult.

Reason number fifty-seven why I love the BBC. I mean, can you see PBS doing this sort of thing?

And before you ask: yes, I can see National Radio doing it.

I once failed an audition for National Radio, you know.

law of repetition January 27, 2005

This year's Tour is looking nice. Lance is still hemming and hawing, playing the will-he, won't-he mind game with all his competitors, but the Discovery Channel team will definitely be there and running a good turn out no matter what. CSC are going well, with some solid support to Ivan Basso. And there's always T-Mobile, which has one past winner (Jan Ullrich, who may have just managed to overcome his historic off-season pie-eating binge this year) and two other very strong riders (Vinokourov and Kloden) - all three could be challengers for the yellow jersey. Notably, there's room for a new generation of sprinters, with Cipollini retired and Petacchi foregoing the Tour for classics and the Giro d'Italia. At this early stage, it could yet be a very good year for it.

Crisis precipitates change. Precipitation changes crises.

Went to see Team America: World Police the other night. I've not laughed that much in ages. Simple stuff, but from the heart. Juvenile material made by very intelligent people. I'm not surprised it didn't do too well in America, though. And c'mon - you've got to love the fact that it's Trey Parker and Matt Stone who are leading the movement to revive the musical as a cinematic extravaganza.

Of course, we've realised that the only movies we've been to see since Rebecca's birth have been cartoons or animated films of some sort. Ach, well.

On the headphones: Soon by My Bloody Valentine. Crunchy.

In other worthy causes: the New Zealand Flag movement. C'mon, admit it: our current flag sucks, and is virtually indistinguishable from the Aussies. I reckon a new flag is a good idea - the Canadians did it in 1967 to get away from the whole colonial thing (and ended up with one of the best flags in the world), and I think it's high time we did the same. My favourite of the proposed designs is Jeffy James' "Southern Cross" design - bit more colour than the somewhat dreary variants on a silver fern on a black background.

a few messages from our spoonster January 23, 2005

Bit late, this one, because this is usually a Christmas conscience thing, but the tsunami benefit concert handily brings it into topicality.

Hey kids! Tempted to bung £25 towards a worthy cause? Want to help out those less fortunate than yourself? Or - to put it in a somewhat less worthy light - want to scratch that itchy first world conscience? Good on ya. But put your credit card back in your wallet. One-off donations are great for making you feel good for a day. And, y'know, they do come in very handy for helping victims of massive one-off natural disasters such as the Indian Ocean tsunami. But - and I know that this isn't a fashionable thing to point out - lots of other people are dying every bloody day from perfectly preventable causes. Typhoid. Malaria. Fucking diarrhoea, OK? Stuff that's curable or preventable. Cheaply curable or preventable. Often, stupidly cheaply. All that it takes to stop a child in some forlorn shithole somewhere from dying from a simple case of diarrhoea is a course of oral rehydration solution. This is the same stuff that I use on my bike to keep me running at peak efficiency. I pay about 50p a bottle by buying the powder and making it myself. It's sugar and salt - you can mix it up for about 5p. I pay more because I'm a posy bastard in a first world country having a bit of fun on the local B roads. Oxfam, to take one example, pay less because they're doing a serious job in the scrag-ends of the planet to stop people from dying from extreme dehydration. This is an ongoing, unglamourous effort with absolutely no symbolic value. All it does is help save lives.

So don't just put a donation to DEC on the credit card. If you can afford to make a donation to help the tsunami victims, then pick a charity (I'd recommend Oxfam, but up to you) and sign up for a monthly direct debit. Ongoing support for the people doing the unfashionable end of lifesaving is vital.

I don't want to seem to slag off anyone hoeing in after the tsunami - I think this sort of participation and help is vital. It's just that too often, I see people making their yearly donation and then ignoring the problems for the rest of the year. These problems don't go away when you're not being told about them: neither should your solution. One-off situations demand one-off help; ongoing crises call out for ongoing support.

Bit heavier than usual, but there you go.

Read Maisy's Bathtime to Rebecca tonight. Plot summary: Maisy is getting in the bath, then Tallulah pops around to play. After some mix-ups, Tallulah ends up stripping off and getting in the bath with Maisy. How does this filth get on our library shelves? It was all I could do to stop myself humming '70s wop wop funk guitar under my breath while reading. Why, it's almost as bad as Spongebob Squarepants!

For free bonus insanity, check out the Capalert page on the Spongebob controversy! Hey you bloody idiots - We Are Family Foundation is not WeAreFamily. FFS.

intherush January 21, 2005

Now this sounds like an impressive bike. 76 years, used every day, and still running. I'd pay to see that.

I go to the gym in the middle of the day. This has the advantage that the new year's rush isn't too bad; it has the disadvantage that the weights area is usually occupied by the soccer team from the Cambridge Regional College. In there today, I was interested to note that out of the 30 people in the gym, 7 of them were wearing Livestrong bands (8 if you count me). Of them, 6 were from the soccer team. I guess that that Nike tie-in is helping with the youth acceptance, eh?

Not fun: doing a serious leg workout, including a drop set to exhaustion on leg extensions, and then biking back to work in a bloody Wellington-level headwind.

Impressions of various national characters as generated by a comparison of their national holidays:

US: Independance Day. "We're here, and you can't make us do anything we don't want to! Ha ha ha fuck you all!"
Canada: Canada Day. "We exist, you know."
New Zealand: Waitangi Day and ANZAC Day. "We nicked these islands, then we got our bollocks shot off. Yayyy!"
The UK: May Bank Holiday. "Everything's closed."

I burst into flames in a church once. It was quite embarrassing, actually.

Today's factoid: Scissor Sisters' keyboard player, J J Garden, is Graeme Garden's son. Yes, that Graeme Garden - the one from The Goodies. Small world.

toughens you up January 20, 2005

There are some people who - when their loving, caring partner happens to be in pain - leap in and help. I am married to one such person. There are also some people with the forebearance to not laugh like a bloody drain while doing so, and then continue laughing uproariously for five minutes afterwards. Even if the pain happens to be caused by a baby attempting to pull herself up by grabbing handfuls of Daddy's chest and accidentally grabbing Daddy's nipple ring (through a t-shirt!) and doing a chin up with it. I shall refrain from comment about whether Heather belongs to this group or not.

The curious can duplicate this effect by buying a 10kg sack of spuds, taping it to a clothespeg, and then affixing the clothespeg to the nipple of their choice.

Except that the spuds won't wiggle.

Last night, I was nearly knocked off my bike twice. Once by a dozy bastard on a moped who pulled in front of me and then immediately pulled hard left to get onto the hard shoulder - emergency braking and a mouthful of abuse fixed that one. Once by a bloke in a car who decided to go around a mini-roundabout the wrong way to save time. He - erroneously - thought that waving sorry would make everything allright. Twerp. And then I got home and opened the back door. I called "I'm hoooooo-ooooo-oooome!" as I am wont to do, and was treated to the sight and sound of Rebecca crawling rapidly from the front room back to the kitchen to see where Daddy was. Best stress relief technique in the world, I tell you.

Interesting article on how to appear invisible: wear high-visibility clothing. Or: you can do as much work with the laws of physics as you like, but the human psyche always has a few tricks up its sleeve.

A coworker of mine swears that she's heard the cleaners having sex in the downstairs shower at our work. I've seen our cleaners, and oil paintings they ain't (although they do have powerful singing voices). The mind boggles.

oasis soup January 18, 2005

So yesterday, we went out for a Dim Sum lunch with some mates. A nice meal was had by all, most of whom had never had Dim Sum before. About 2:30pm we paid up and left, and I fell down the staircase.

While carrying Rebecca.

I just tripped slightly on the way down, and ended up tumbling down a reasonably long, averagely shallow staircase. I thought I shouted out, but no-one present remembers me doing it. I reflexively cradled Rebecca into me, holding her close into my body. This meant that I didn't have a free hand to try and break the fall, but I wasn't letting go of her for anything. We ended up at the bottom of the stairs with me having acted as a rollcage for Rebecca, who quite literally came out on top. Paul was standing at the foot of the stairs and took her out of my arms as I lay there. Rebecca gave a few cries from the surprise, but was completely unhurt, thank god. I was relatively unscathed - my left shin and shoulder are moderately bruised today, but that's it. For Rebecca it was just another day at the office, with odd things happening to her. For me, it was a heart-stopping moment, and an interesting demonstration that my reflexes in these situations are to protect Rebecca at the possible expense of damage to myself. That's a reflex I'm more than happy to have.

he knew a few things January 14, 2005

Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.

H. G. Wells

The bicycle is just as good company as most husbands and, when it gets old and shabby, a woman can dispose of it and get a new one without shocking the entire community.

Ann Strong, Minneapolis Tribune, 1895

tweekle tweekle thud January 12, 2005

I occasionally troll through my spam folder, as our spam detection software prepends each detected email with the criterion by which the email was flagged up as spam. It's interesting seeing the heuristics in use. Mostly they're pretty technical, as you'd expect - sender listed in SORBS, received via a relay in list.dsbl.org, etc. Each criterion is appropriately weighted, and a high enough score flags an email as spam. It's the non-technical criteria that are interesting: subject line contains "Your Family", for instance. When did families become a source of annoying drivel?

I set 'em up, you knock 'em down, eh?

Things I could have gone my entire life without seeing, number 89: the big, overweight, heavily (and badly) tattooed muscle queen in the gym changing room using the hair dryer to dry his pubes after a shower. Euurgh.

Interesting and disquieting set of 20 facts about the US voting system. These are a) true and b) the sort of thing that - in smaller countries - lead Serious Journalists to look gravely into the camera and declare that there have been Irregularities in the Conduct of the Election. But hey! It's not like it affects what's on telly, right?

I was empowered once. It hurts if you don't stretch properly.

catchy! January 10, 2005

An email I've just sent to the Beeb, in regard to its controversial decision to broadcast Jerry Springer: The Opera last night.

Hi - both my wife and I would like to register our strong approval of the decision to broadcast "Jerry Springer: The Opera". This is precisely the sort of challenging material that our license fees should fund. We commend the BBC for its decision not to bow to the pressure from a pack of conservative nutcases; anyone with half a brain who actually watched the opera in question would have realised that the intent was satirical, and a comment on the media rather than religion per se. Well done Auntie for going ahead and showing it. As for the people who didn't want to watch it: there's an off button for a reason, people. As a football-hating atheist, I'm not absolutely happy about my license fee supporting Match of the Day and Songs of Praise, but I accept that there's a lot of people who want to watch them. Why can't the Christian right accept that occasionally, stuff that they find distasteful but which other people want to watch can be broadcast?

Cheers, and nice one.

Yours, Jack and Heather Elder

There's a claimed figure of 40,000 people who objected to the show being broadcast. You can draw your own conclusions about the validity of people complaining about a broadcast prior to that broadcast going out (all it proves is that at least one person doesn't like the sound of it, and that they're good at convincing other sheep that it is a Very, Very Bad Thing and that to actually shock horror watch it would bring about the end of Western Civilisation - what ever happened to actually having a look at the work of art in question, and then deciding for your bloody self, eh?), but I'm willing to bet that those are funny numbers. 40,000 people? I'm betting it's more like 40,000 emails they're received, or someone saying "Yes, and all the 5,000 members of my church are against it too!" Regardless, I reckon it was a good decision of the Beeb to stick to their guns and broadcast it (can't have hurt the viewing figures, either), and I'd like to get the pro-sanity statistics favourable. So if you saw the program, enjoyed it, and you've got a couple of spare minutes, why not fire off a quick bit of feedback to Auntie saying nice one? It's a small blow for the side of Good, but it's worth a crack.

I should probably also say that I thought that the show in question was easily the funniest thing I've seen for ages, and as for the songs - well, I'll be humming "What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fucking fuck" under my breath for several days. Highly, highly recommended. Particularly if - like me - you were forced to sit through vast swathes of bloody musicals as a child by a fixated sibling. It's therapy, I tell you.

In other news, Rebecca managed to injure herself twice within five minutes this morning. We hear that fateful noise "*thud* waaaaa!", pick her up, staunch the (very mild) flow of blood, and eventually dry the tears. We put her back down on the floor, and the literal first thing she does is fall back onto the same thing. Repeat noise, screaming, etc. She's consistent, I'll give her that.

I have had a good deal of satisfaction over this weekend either footling around on my mountainbike, or watching the Manchester leg of the World Cup. Brilliant action to watch - track cycling is pretty compelling viewing, spanning a range of extremes [BBC track cycling introduction] [Track FAQ]. From the Madison - an hour-long race involving two-man teams acting as relay riders, slingshotting each other forward as they hand over to each other (with associated hideous risks when you have sixteen riders darting between each other, trying to throw their teammates forward while other people are trying to race around them - team GB got wiped out by a Spanish rider stuffing up an overtake). To the keirin, which can basically be characterised as eight riders going around and around behind a wee motorbike, then caning it like madmen for the last 600 metres. To the team sprints, which are basically 45 seconds of three-man teams riding their absolute guts out. To the points race, which is 40k of slog with sprints every ten laps - basically requiring a calculator to find out who won. To the scratch races - first one across the line at the end wins. Fascinating, esoteric, and bloody tense to watch. It's been great. And patriotic.

What with Sarah Ulmer's sterling performance at the Olympics (not satisfied with breaking the world record in the women's individual pursuit during her qualifying round, she then re-broke it in the final), New Zealand's doing pretty well on the track. And with the commitment to more velodromes in NZ, it can only get better.

Also particularly moving was watching Darren Kenny, the British double paralympic medalist, have a crack at the hour record. This is, quite simply, a test of how far you can ride in an hour. Kenny has cerebral palsy, putting him in the C3 paralympic class - and he absolutely slaughtered the record (taking it from 40-odd km to 41.8km). Compelling viewing. Watching someone push themselves so far to the maximum (Eddie Merkcx - arguably the greatest cyclist of all time - described his hour attempt as the hardest thing he'd ever done), and then crack the record - beautiful. Chris Boardman, the current holder of the able-bodied hour record (56.375km), made the point on the commentary that in an hour record, you go absolutely, utterly as hard as you can, you push yourself to the point of collapse - and then you get the record. Or you don't. There's no "he did a good ride", no "he's saving himself for next week" - it's a new record, or you've wasted your effort. Watching one bloke ride in circles for an hour. Pain on his face, and all through his body. At the end his coach had to lift him off his bike. Compelling. Mesmerising. Inspiring.

Rebecca watched it too. She likes the moving colours.

twice the second time January 07, 2005

It's been an interesting wee time since Christmas.

Had a few days off, spent a lot of it just chilling around the house and playing with Rebecca. Knocked off a few bike rides, did several family walks, that sort of thing. Nothing too strenuous, really.

Thankfully, none of our friends or family who were around the tsunami zone were injured (as far as we know). I guess that every once in a while, we get a huge natural cataclysm to take the wind out of our sails, and to remind us of who's really in charge on this planet. The laws of physics can be terrible, terrible things. A brief perspective on the US aid can be found here, where the relative cost of the occupation of Iraq and the tsunami clean-up are compared.

Had a slightly odd moment on New Years' Eve. We were around at Alison and James' place on New Year's Eve, having a mellow one. Rebecca had obligingly kipped out upstairs, we were getting outside of a bottle or two of vin de loquaciousness. I was pontificating about how I realised that I was getting more and more middle-aged and middle-class, because I'd been half-listening to Gardener's Question Time (hey, it was from Oban!) in the car and I'd heard someone mention Phyllostachys aurea. My immediate thought had been "It's pretty nice, but I prefer Phyllostachys nigra" - and the panel on GQT then recommended same. My slightly inebriated point at the time being, it's a sign of something when you're able to anticipate the answers on Gardener's Question Time, y'know? That wasn't the odd bit. The odd bit was when Alison lent forward and said "Maybe they just really like bamboo".

Went on a couple of good bike rides around New Year. They were notable chiefly for the incredible winds - almost Wellington-like. East Anglia's as flat as the proverbial, but that just means that there's nothing to get in the way of the winds. The winds across the fens come straight from Siberia, and you can bloody tell. I passed several birds that were just hanging in place, letting the winds hold them up. I passed them very slowly. Headwinds - tch!

I keep thinking I'm having fugue states, but I'm just dozing off.

I'm currently reading Vernon God Little, by DBC Pierre. One sentence verdict: J T LeRoy meets J D Salinger.

I also spent a fair bit of time over the Christmas break merrily baby-proofing the house. Notably, this included the installation of stair gates at the top and bottom of the stairs, and assembling a playpen for the living room. The stair gates are quite handy - she has a tendency to sit at the top of the stairs and look down in a manner that suggests that she's considering the fun possibilities involved in a headlong plummit without giving forebrain time to the comcommitant risks. We've had several people suggest teaching her to crawl backwards down the stairs, and I'm planning to do that. But in the meantime, the stair gates mean that we can just let her roam free(ish) around the top floor while we do stuff upstairs.

The pen is also most interesting. It's a hexagon, steel, and is designed to replicate her natural environment. It enables us to bung her in it, close the door, and leave the room for whole minutes at a time. We're hardly working in the best traditions of caregiving in our local neighbourhood (bung 'em in the playpen, put Trisha on, go to the pub), but it's handy being able to go to the loo without worrying about what she's up to. Of course, I'm sure she'll shortly work out how to conceal an angle grinder in her romper suit and will merrily cut out some of the bars while we're not looking, but it's the short-term peace of mind that I love.