Soaking Wet

Published on March 16, 2008 in Bikes. 2 Comments

I was feeling pretty low yesterday. Stuck in the newsroom on my own on a Saturday night, thinking about things. When I finally got out of there I couldn’t decide whether to throw myself down the stairwell or jump into the river. But when I stepped out into the car-park to get my bike everything changed. It was absolutely pouring with rain. Really tipping it down and I didn’t even have a coat. Usually I would have hummed and hawed, trying to decide whether to leave my bike at work and get the train home. But last night I was very happy to embrace the void, I leapt into it.

The rain was hard and it hurt my face. I couldn’t see much because my glasses were immediately covered in water. The roads were running like rivers, the cars couldn’t see me and my brakes didn’t work. As I cycled onto Waterloo bridge the rain got harder and someone pulled over right in front of me, I was inches away from hitting her. The view from the bridge was indistinct and fantastic. Immediately my depression disappeared and I felt exhilarated and full of manic energy.

All the way home I was riding as fast as I could, swerving and swearing to avoid the nearly blind drivers and the deepest puddles. The music was loud and good and I felt like I couldn’t possibly survive.

I started thinking about how there’s no point worrying about the past or about what might have been. Now is where I have to live and there’s no choice in that. The rain can only make you unhappy if you don’t embrace it. I was already so wet I couldn’t get any wetter. I didn’t feel cold or tired, I felt wonderful and alive. By the time I got home the depressing day at work seemed like it belonged to somebody else’s life. If only it would rain every day.

Live Poet’s Society

Published on March 14, 2008 in Art. 0 Comments

Speaking of poets I love, Mairead Byrne is so sweet. Look.

Big Jim

Published on March 12, 2008 in Media. 0 Comments

I’ve been listening to Ivor Cutler a bit lately and, let’s face it, he doesn’t get played on the radio as often as he should be, so I decided to infringe the copyright and put some on here because there are plenty of people in the world who would love him and who don’t know about him. This track is from Jammy Smears.

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Crock

Published on March 11, 2008 in Shopping. 0 Comments

Crock o compostAm I being a curmudgeonly crosspatch? I expect so. The RSPB has this kitchen compost crock in their Reuse and Recycle section. It is for putting your peelings in on their way to the compost heap. That’s fine. I wouldn’t buy one but if you’ve got a Georgian kitchen it would probably fit in very nicely.

The only problem is that it has an added feature. To keep your kitchen smelling fresh the crock has a carbon filter inside the lid. It’s a disposable plastic filter that can’t be recycled and will be regularly replaced. So now you’re actually creating more landfill waste than you were before you bought the thing.

I’m tempted to think that this is pretty characteristic of certain rural greens. They want to be eco-friendly but they also want things to be ‘nice’. So they object to wind-farms when they spoil the view and they love living in splendid isolation where public transport isn’t an option and we city dwellers must subsidise their local Post Office. But of course that’s very unfair, it’s just a bit of thoughtlessness on the part of the RSPB and I’m sure they’ll sort it out as soon as they can.

Political Playmobil

Published on March 7, 2008 in Politics and Shopping. 2 Comments

playmocop.jpgThanks to Giles for pointing out to me the excellent collection of humorous and political comments that are collecting on the Amazon page for this Playmobil Security Check-Point. Here’s an example:

Thank you Playmobil for allowing me to teach my 5-year old the importance of recognizing what a failing bureaucracy in a ever growing fascist state looks like. Sometimes it’s a hard lesson for kids to learn because not all pigs carry billy clubs and wear body armor. I applaud the people who created this toy for finally being hip to our changing times. Little children need to be aware that not all smiling faces and uniforms are friendly. I noticed that my child is now more interested in current events. Just the other day he asked me why we had to forfeit so much of our liberties and personal freedoms and I had to answer “well, it’s because the terrorists have already won”. Yes, they have won.

I wonder if Amazon will allow this commie protest to continue. It’s supposed to be a super-store not a community centre!

Hopscotch

Published on February 27, 2008 in Media. 3 Comments

Compare and contrast.

The school my daughters go to has a terrible website. Not only does it look bad but also it can only be updated by someone knowledgeable going in to the school during school hours and sitting on a tiny chair to do the typing. This means the content is very stale and thus mostly useless.

So I suggested a site hosted on an external server that could be easily updated by anyone. Great, they said, let’s do it. I did it. The site was running by March 2007. I didn’t want to provide the content so a couple of people involved in the school volunteered to take over the actual running of the thing. I showed them how to use Wordpress and off they went.

Time passed. The summer holidays passed. I contacted them and asked them if there was anything I could do to help. Eventually they showed me what they had done. They had produced quite a big report about the site. It said how often various sections should be updated, who would be responsible, how the navigation could be organised. The site itself was unchanged. In fact, Google analytics told me that nobody has visited it at all for several months. The site is still sitting there, unused. I’ve edited a few things – the term dates are correct now. It only took me five minutes.

Fast forward to nowadays. My dear friends at Stan’s Cafe, a trendy theatre company in Birmingham, had a big meeting last week to talk about their future. One of the things they decided to do was to experiment with some kind of private forum for keeping people in the company informed about upcoming shows and maybe to promote more discussion between members. I offered the director, James, a couple of options: A wiki and a Bulletin Board. He went for the latter, it’s already live, the members are being added today. The meeting took place exactly 7 days ago.

The Stan Talk forum might be a success, it might not. If it’s useful it will thrive, if it isn’t it will wither and die. It doesn’t really matter either way because we didn’t spend too long making it and it didn’t cost much. The school site has already had many more words written about it than it will ever contain. Maybe it will serve a useful purpose one day but it won’t be there to impress the OFSTED inspector who is coming on Thursday.

I’m tempted to conclude that this is the difference between effective organisations and ineffective ones. But I know that the school is very well run, the leadership is excellent and they handle the business of schooling children very well. It’s the accompanying bureaucracy that cripples their ability to move quickly and act decisively.

I’m not sure what the moral of the story is, apart from watch out if you ever get asked to work with a Local Education Authority. Make sure you don’t rely on them to make any decisions and don’t allow them to have any role that could impede your progress because it they can, they will.

Bye Facebook

Published on February 12, 2008 in Media. 3 Comments

facebook drainI was spending too much time on Facebook and I was starting to worry about just what sort of place it really is. So I deleted everything and deactivated my account.

You may not know this, but you can’t really delete a Facebook account. It always remains available to be re-activated so that you can return when the cold turkey gets too hard to bear. There is a way of making the account un-useable though. You just have to add the contact email address of your account to someone else’s account. Because the Facebook computers won’t let the same address appear in two accounts your deactivated account will completely lose its email address and thus become impossible to reactivate.

Now all I’ve got to do is find someone who will add my email address to their account temporarily, and I’ll be gone forever. (Having said that, I have just opened up a new Flickr account…)

Cilice

Published on January 21, 2008 in Religion. 1 Comment

Nun CiliceOK, now I’m worried. We were talking about cilices last night at work. According to www.cilice.co.uk, motto How Luminous is Darkness, a cilice is a spiked metal belt or chain worn strapped tight around the upper thigh. It hardly needs saying that this is a Catholic thing, in particular they are worn by members of Opus Dei. The idea is, I think, that the discomfort caused is a penance for your sinfulness. The thing that’s worrying me, though, is that I find the idea of a woman wearing one so very intriguing! The concept of someone thinking she’s so sinful that she needs to atone for it by wearing a spiky metal garter-belt, it’s so weird, so revealing. That was what I always used to find so attractive about Catholic girls; they knew so much about sin it was always at the front of their minds. And let’s face it, the upper-thigh, strapped tightly, contrasting with the delicate metal-work wrought by Italian nuns, it’s a compelling image. Mama Mia, Agent Provocateur should be selling them!

Aus Liebe zum Automobil

Published on January 10, 2008 in Politics. 1 Comment

Hindu SwastikaRatan Tata, the head of Tata Motors who today launched the world’s cheapest car, is obviously quite a fan of the German motor industry: He described the new Tata Nano as a people’s car, an obvious reference to the Volkswagen, the car costs 100,000 rupees, similar to Hitler’s target for the VW which was 1000 Reich Marks, and the Tata site talks about the company’s blitzkrieg of new products at the New Delhi Auto Show. Still, they played a predictable Strauss track at the launch rather than Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries so maybe there’s nothing to worry about.

Check it again

Published on January 6, 2008 in Bikes. 1 Comment

Broken cableI was just looking my bike over before going to bed in anticipation of tomorrow’s ride in to work. I gave the brakes a squeeze and the back ones felt a bit weird. Gave them another one and snick the cable snapped, just like that. So now I’ll have to go on the train, with the suits and squares. Still, at least I’m not DEAD!