BRIAN Ο ΒΡΕΤΑΝΟΣ

Stifado, Solar System, Silence

2011-04-29T16:55:00.000+01:00

Stifado

Stifado is a Greek dish consisting of stewed meat (usually rabbit or beef) and onions. It's been around a quuarter of a century since I last had any, so I've no idea how close my first attempt to make it was. The terrible photograph I took doesn't make it look too bad, but I was so hungry that I wasn't going to mess around taking more than one:

Until now my culinary repertoire was limited to green bean casserole and pasta with green beans and pesto. However, I've recently invested in a slow cooker.

The Americans call this a Crock Pot (tm). The idea is that you bung a load of raw ingredients into this magic pot, forget about it for several hours (until you're hungry), by which time they have transformed themselves into an edible meal. Or rather about three meals due to the quantities involved, which means that you don't waste any ingredients like you would if you were cooking for one.

It's early days yet, but most of the meals I've done have been edible. And at £15, it's cheaper than another wife.

Solar System

Thanks mainly to the specific configuration of various celestial bodies, we've had two long weekends of public holidays in a row. Easter fell very late this year, meaning that we've had Good Friday and Easter Monday off last weekend, followed by May Day this coming Monday. Today was a public holiday due to some kind of royal celebration. I'm not sure exactly what this was since, no doubt due to an oversight, I wasn't invited.

It turned out okay, though. There was nothing on TV (even the Greeks were watching the royal celebration curtesy of the European Broadcasting Union), which gave me a perfect opportunity to play with my new computer.

Silence

My computer had started becoming unreliable, so I went shopping yesterday for a replacement. The first thing I did after unpacking it was to install Fedora Linux on it, and it's great. Compared to the old one, it's got three times more memory and a whizzy graphics card. The main advantage, though, is the noise it makes.

The old machine had a very large and very loud fan. Since I never turned it off, there was a constant and slightly annoying whirring in the lounge. By comparison, you don't know that the new computer is on, it's so quiet. Now the dominant sounds are the fridge and the gentle bubbling of the slow cooker.

Which reminds me. I must go and check on my dinner.

Twas in the Winter Sold

2010-12-28T22:27:00.006Z

Whatever your religious beliefs, whether you have any, or whether you even celebrate this particular festival, the one thing that we all have to put up with at this time of year is the marketing.

Although we think of the commercialisation of the Season as something relatively recent, it's being going on for a long time. One of the best examples of this is the White Christmas. Are you sitting comfortably? If so, I'll begin our festive tale. You're not? Well, I'll still begin.

How We Got our White Christmas

In common with most people, I like to think that I'm immune from advertisers. Or at least, I like to believe that they couldn't sell me just anything. The advertisers on the other hand like a challenge, and in 1942, presumably as the result of a bet, someone decided to sell the idea of White Christmas^TM.

It was certainly a tall order. How do you get people enthusiastic about being stuck at airport terminals (Heathrow, this year's most popular winter destination), or stranded on frozen motorways (Get stuck into something different this Christmas), or spending Christmas without electricity (Give the Environment a gift this year and save on your bills)?

If you're going to advertise a snowy Winter Wonderland, there are all sorts of places you could go to make your advert. You could get pictures of Father Christmas roasting reindeer in Lapland, or skiers breaking legs in the Alps, but if you're like me you probably wouldn't think of going somewhere arid and sunny. Of course, this is why we're not rich advertising executives. No, they went to Hollywood.

Hollywood truly is a magical place. It helped that Hollywood was black and white 1942, since that made a White Christmas the brightest and most cheery thing on the silver screen. Bing crooned, and suddenly all the misery, death and destruction caused by extreme weather conditions was forgotten about. Every year people dreampt of a White Christmas. Of the sound of sleigh bells in the snow. Incidentally, if you sat by the fire and heard sleigh bells this Christmas, then either your double glazing wasn't working or you now have reindeer crap all over your house.

White Christmas: The Small Print

Being an advertising invention, White Christmas is like winter furniture sales - not what it seems. Just as the furniture people give you 50% off products that they've been selling at twice their proper value for the appropriate number of weeks at a representative store in somewhere no-one goes, like Wales, in the case of a White Christmas the devil's in the legal detail.

Here, for example, on Christmas Day there was snow all around, and everything was more or less some shade of white, but it wasn't a White Christmas. Even if it had been snowing, it might not have been a White Christmas. A drop of snow has to fall on the roof of the Meteorological Office in London for it to be an official White Christmas. That hasn't happened this century.

The reason for this definition, is of course, money. Every year Bing Crosby fans (victims?) lose thousands at the bookies betting on a White Christmas. And most years that elusive drop of snow fails to fall.

Which, considering how close we came this year, and how much misery our pre-festive snow caused us, and how much it's causing the US now, is probably not a bad thing.

Bah, Humbug!

Anyway, I hope you survived Christmas more or less intact. As usual, I had a quiet time, watched some Cypriot TV, ate a roast dinner ready meal washed down with a bottle of wine, and of course made a point of watching Die Hard on Christmas Eve - something I do every year. My Christmas properly began yesterday when Helena arrived to open her presents. Last night's rain washed all the snow away, so we're pretty much back to normal. If Bing had been British, he'd have sung "Wet Christmas" instead...

Survival Tips

2010-11-22T17:25:00.002Z

Once again this winter the environmentalists have somehow managed to turn off global warming. Here, there's apparently even talk of snow. So as a public service, I give you my top tips for surviving the cold weather.

Keep on the Move

One of the best ways to avoid getting frozen is to keep moving - Ice rarely forms on non-stationary objects. This is why your car doesn't freeze up whilst you're driving it. People used to have to sit for hours wrapped up in blankets reading Charles Dickens, but these days with laptops, tablets and e-books, you can keep reading and blogging while you're walking around, doing star jumps or whatever.

Stay in Warm Places

The biggest mistake that many people make at this time of year is staying at home. It might be nice and warm with your central heating or your log fire, but heating costs are astronomical and rising all the time. You should get into the habit of using other people's heat. Shops are open for a large proporition of the day, and you can spend hours wandering round them. Ones in the US that have free wireless are especially good, as you can avoid the boredom that normally accompanies shopping (for men, anyway). Another option is to sell insurance or double glazing and take advantage of the fact that old people keep their houses particularly warm, as well as possibly being gullible enough to buy whatever you're peddling. If you think this is immoral, you could just pretend to be a salesman.

Eat Well

Calories get their name from the fact that our body burns the food we eat. Not being a biologist, I'm not completely sure how this works, except that we use the oxygen we breathe to keep the fires going. I don't really understand what happens to the smoke, unless that's expelled as some form of exhaust gas... Anyway, in order to maintain a healthy temperature you will need to eat plenty of combustible material.

Drink Well

Naturally as you're eating more, you will also have to drink more. No doubt a biologist could explain why the fluid doesn't put these internal fires out. The only problem with drinking more is that you might get too bloated. In order to avoid this you need to consume plenty of diuretics. Coffee and alcohol are ideal, preferably mixed together.

Waste Electricity

When you do finally go home after a hard day shopping, dining and pubbing, you will still need to keep warm. Remember the wise words of the environmentalists who'll tell you that electrical appliances can pump out tons of heat. Replace all of those energy-saving lightbulbs, leave your TV on standby and don't bother turning things off. You'll find that your heating bills drop dramatically.

That's a few ideas, but if you have any more please let me know.

Murders, Hats, Senility

2010-11-11T22:28:00.008Z

Murders

I spend quite a lot of my time involved with murders. Not real ones, you understand, but the more enjoyable* kind that can be found in the pages of a book. The vast majority of the books I read are crime novels, and a good proportion of the DVDs I watch are TV and film adaptations of these, such as the wonderful Joan Hickson Miss Marple series that Helena and I are currently watching.

I've just finished reading Murder Behind the Scenes by Giannis Maris. This was a classic locked room murder. The leading lady is murdered just before the premiere of her new play. This rules out the film critics in the audience, who generally wait until after the performance. To complicate matters, she is found stabbed to death in her dressing room, which is locked from the inside.

Various ideas are suggested to the detective. Maybe the lock was tampered with? No, it doesn't look like it, and the key was still on the inside. There's a small open window above the door. Not big enough to fit a person, but perhaps the knife was thrown at the victim? The angle of the wound rules this out.

Perhaps it wasn't murder but suicide? The doctor examining the body says that this is impossible. So how did the murderer do it? Perhaps there's a way to get into the adjoining dressing room? A wooden partition or some such thing?

Yes, there is. And the planks of wood are fixed with nails from the other room. So the murderer could have got out that way and nailed them back on when he was finished. Providing that the murderer was the actress in the next-door room, or an accomplice which as the story progresses doesn't seem that likely.

The most interesting twist in the story is that our hero Captain Bekas doesn't solve the murder. The man who seems certain to be the guilty party is killed whilst trying to resist arrest, and everyone is satisfied that the case is closed. The real culprit confesses to a reporter, but swears him to secrecy so that his children won't have to face the social stigma of having a murderer for a father, and then kills himself. Thankfully for the reader, he explains what really happened with the locked room.

Bekas (centre) from a TV adaptation.

Now I'm reading Che Killed Himself by Petros Markaris, which involves a series of suicides which are really murders. The first one is carried out live on TV watched by millions of viewers, which seems to make the locked room problem look easy by comparison.

* At least, I assume it's more enjoyable to read about it than actually do it as I have never in my life had first-hand experience of the latter. Not so far, anyway.

Hats

This won't interest anyone else, but I like to record Geeky landmarks in my blog so that I can look back and see when I did this or that to my computers. Having had the 2008 edition of Ubuntu on my desktop for a couple of years, I decided to do an upgrade. Instead of the 2010 Ubuntu, I downloaded Fedora. This is a distribution of Linux related to the enterprise Red Hat Linux. Which is why it's named after a hat. I put Fedora on the computer as a learning exercise, but I've decided to keep using it. Ubuntu is still the easiest Linux to get up and running, and I am still using it on my netbook, but I'm really happy with my shiny new Fedora desktop.

Senility

I'm sure I had something else to say, but I've got a terrible memory these days - I must be getting old. Which reminds me - Happy Birthday, Bee!

Strange (and Strangely Familiar) New Worlds

2010-10-17T17:30:00.000+01:00

You may have seen in the news that the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot has died, aged 85. Most people (myself included) don't know much about the mathematical significance of his work, but are familiar with the pretty pictures derived from the Mandelbrot Set.

When I was a child, I used to spend a lot of time messing around with home computers. You used to get magazines with programs you could type in, and several of them had fractal drawing programs. Unfortunately, home computers weren't anywhere near as powerful as they are today, and a single, relatively low-resolution picture could take hours or even days to draw. I was never that patient.

Fortunately these days you can download software that lets you zoom around the Mandelbrot Set and other fractal sets in real time. Here's a screenshot I took from the xaos program:

Mandelbrot's strange but beautiful world is made from relatively simple looking equations, which is funny considering how complicated some of the equations get which attempt to describe our more familiar surroundings.

Talking about familiar worlds, I've been watching the cult 70's British TV show Blake's Seven.

I vaguely remember it from the first time round. As with so many of these old programmes, I'm surprised that it doesn't look a lot worse. Some of the special effects are a bit ropy, as are some of the plots, but it's still enjoyable. When I was off work the other week with an incurable upper respiratory infection (otherwise known as a cold), I spent a lot of time groggily watching one of the box sets.

The story is about a group of rebels who are fighting the evil Earth Federation. They've got a super hi-tech alien spaceship called the Liberator which is equipped with a teleport device - something that the Federation don't have.

Most of the planets look strangely like Earth. To be more precise, they look just like quarries, beaches and forests that you'd find in Britain. All of the inhabitants of these planets speak with British accents. I'm sure that this has nothing to do with the fact that this was a low budget British TV production, but just that this is what you'd expect the future to be like.

The planets are generally inhabited by humans because they are part of the Federation's Empire. It's not unreasonable to assume that such an empire would start in Britain - after all, the British are historically the world's experts when it comes to empires. And it's not unreasonable to suppose that humans would settle on Earth-like planets, with temperate climates. Just like in Britain.

The implausible part of all this is the teleport. It's a bit like the Star Trek one - the crew teleport to and from remote locations by standing in a special device that beams their atoms around like radio waves. In Blake's Seven they have to wear teleport bracelets, which also have communicators on them.

I'd imagine that if scientists ever perfect teleport technology (and they are working on it), you'd have to beam from one teleport machine to another, a bit like sending a fax. The idea that you'd want to send your atoms to some random location seems a little dodgy. For starters, how do they get reassembled at their location without another machine? How do you make sure that you end up standing on something, such as the ground or a floor, rather than ending up in mid-air? And it gets worse. How do you avoid teleporting into someone's bathroom, or some other potentially embarrassing situation?

The other problem that the Blake's Seven lot have is getting themselves teleported back up in an emergency or embarrassing situation. They have to radio back to the Liberator, and then someone has to be ready by the teleport controls. This is fine in theory, but usually there's some problem on the ship which means that the crew are somehow unable to do this. Until the last minute, of course. So why don't their magic teleport bracelets have a "Shit! Beam me back up now!" button?

Anyway, if you'll excuse me, it's time for me to teleport back to reality and get something to eat. I hope you had a good weekend.

Driven to Drink

2010-10-02T12:07:00.004+01:00

I haven't posted in a while, because I was too busy dying. Which I think you'll agree is a reasonable excuse. Or is it?

I tend to worry about my health, especially when anything happens that I can't explain. I don't visit doctors very often, but when I do, it's usually because I'm afraid that The End is in sight. I realise that this is irrational - after all, if I really am that far gone, they probably won't be able to do anything for me. Nevertheless, rationality does not play much of a part in my health worries.

I have been living a slightly healthier lifestyle after discovering that my blood pressure was too high. I've been walking more (though still probably not enough), and drinking quite a bit less. This all went out of the window when I started getting various aches and pains.

A quick look on Wikipedia confirmed my worst fears - it was almost certainly something major and life-threatening. So I started to get worried. I started to go through my DVD collection to work out which ones I needed to watch first, and which ones might be better viewed through a morphine-induced haze near The End (I'm saving the remake of The Taking of Pelham 123 till last, having twice failed to get past the first 10 minutes). Staying at home reading blogs just made me more aware of my aches, so I went to the pub more.

When I finally got round to booking an appointment with the doctor, he was very reassuring. It was nothing major. I should avoid doing any heavy lifting, and stop worrying. However, he did take two armfuls of blood for a range of tests just in case. You might think I'm exaggerating, but they started on my right arm and it dried up before they had enough. Why can't the NHS be more like Star Trek where they just wave a whirring scanner over you?

The nurses' uniforms are better, too

My brush with death still wasn't over. I was told I'd have to go back to the doctor because some of the tests had failed. Or passed, or whatever. I arranged for a doctor to phone (it was a Friday), but I managed to miss the call. I spent the weekend nervously sorting through my DVDs.

I went in on Monday. "I hear you've got some bad news", I said. "I wouldn't say that. Have you been drinking too much recently?", was his reply. "Well, actually, yes." He told me to drink less and go back to have another armful of blood checked out in a few weeks time.

So, reassured, I'm back to my more temperate ways - ODing on lemon juice rather than alcohol, and just going to the pub once or twice a week. Hopefully the next blood test will reflect this.

However, during my brief period of daily drinking, the pub had a Jack Daniels promotion. I've never really liked JD, but you could win all sorts of great prizes, allegedly to celebrate Mr Daniel's birthday. I was only after a T-shirt, but I had to get through several doubles to achieve this, winning badges and a hat along the way.

Whether I succumb to a fatal illness next week or next century, this is quite possibly the only time you'll see me wearing a hat - I really can't stand them.

Have a good weekend.

View from the Sofa

2010-09-05T16:05:00.002+01:00

This weekend has been lazier than most - I have hardly moved from my sofa, except for trips to the kitchen to top up on lemon infused soda water, and of course to go to bed.

I'm not ill, and nor have I broken any bones. After a busy week at work and without any childcare duties (Helena stayed at home as she wasn't feeling well), it's great to spend a couple of days doing very little.

However much rest the body gets, the mind refuses to remain inactive, so here's a list of the exciting things I've been up to. For completeness, I've also added the unexciting ones as well. I'll leave you to decide which are which.

Reading a book

I'm currently half-way through Robert Canigel's biography of the early-twentieth century Indian mathematician Ramanujan. Ramanujan had little formal mathemtatical training, and failed to get through college, mainly because they wouldn't let him drop all the subjects that didn't interest him (i.e. all the ones that weren't maths). Whilst pretending to work as a clerk (he spent most of his day working on his maths research) he wrote letters to various eminent British mathematicians, since none of the ones he knew in India could understand any of his theories. One of the Brits, G H Hardy, replied and ultimately Ramanujan came over here to study and work at Cambridge. Never in the best of health, and terribly homesick, he got ill and died at the age of 32, leaving a huge number of theories which no-one understands how he came up with, and becoming one of the most famous mathetmicians and geniuses ever.

Solving all the Sudokus

Someone in the pub showed me a newspaper article about the world's hardest Sudoku puzzle. He thought I might want to have a go at solving it. He was a little surprised when I told him that I'd go off and write a computer program to do it. After all, sudokus are soulless computer generated puzzles, unlike crosswords, and are best dealt with by technology rather than pencil and paper. Another regular in the pub loves solving them, but he had to admit defeat on this one, which I think justifies my approach.

There are plenty of programs out there to solve Sudokus, but I wanted to write my own. It only took a few hours to write, and it solved the puzzle so quickly that I've not been able to measure its speed (less than 5 milliseconds, even on my netbook). Of course, it doesn't just solve that one, but any of them. Though if that puzzle really is the hardest anyone's come up with, it just goes to show what a waste of time they are.

Running my Life from my Netbook

One problem with living on the sofa is that I'm out of reach of my computer. So I've been using the netbook that I bought the last time I was in the US. I'm not finding it too hard to type on the undersized keyboard, and I've set things up so that I can log into my desktop computer to copy files and read my email (I won't bore you with why I want to do the latter). One thing I do find, though, is that it's easy to hit the mousepad whilst typing, which isn't always ideal.

The US keyboard layout is a bit annoying as well, especially when programming. Quite a few of the symbols are in different places. I could just use a UK layout, but that gets confusing if you look down at the keys at all. I have a similar problem with my desktop, since I now have a Greek keyboard which mainly uses the US layout as well.

Looking for Regular Expression Jokes

Regular Expressions are a way of specifying patterns for searching things, mainly in text. I was sure that there must be plenty of jokes based on them, but I couldn't find any. Probably I didn't manage to use the correct regexp. Still as always, xkcd had something just as good.

Falling Asleep

I started watching the next Bond film - You Only Live Twice. Either it was boring, or I was tired, or both, but I didn't manage to stay awake to the end, so I'll have to watch the last half again to find out what happens. No doubt he saves the world. I wonder whether I'll manage to watch the remaining 17.

Getting Out More

Having read all of the above, or even just looking at the pictures, you're probably thinking "He really needs to get out more". And you're probably right. So, whilst this isn't strictly speaking a sofa-based activity, I might just make it to the pub this evening, to give a splendid finale to a wonderfully restful weekend.

I hope your weekend wasn't too hectic either.

The Name's Bond

2010-08-22T12:15:00.003+01:00

Recently I've started watching the James Bond series of films. I've never seen most of them before, which might surprise you, but I don't go to the cinema, since I prefer to watch films in the comfort of my own home, and I only buy DVDs when they're cheap, which means that I sometimes have to wait a while. A few weeks ago I found a box set of all 22 Bond films for £50, reduced from around £200. You can't go wrong at under £2.50 a film, right?

So far, I'm up to 1965 and Thunderball. The evil SPECTRE folks have stolen a NATO aeroplane carrying a couple of nuclear bombs. Luckily for our heroes at British and American Intelligence, they've decided to hide them at an idyllic island in the Bahamas. If they'd chosen somewhere without bikini clad secret agents and a plentiful source of Martinis, 007 would never have found them and Miami would have been nuked. And the world would have been spared from David Caruso's sunglass juggling act.

You don't have to get very far into one of these films to realise that plausibility wasn't given the highest priority by the moviemakers, but even so, I was disturbed by the ending of Thunderball. If you haven't seen the film, you might not want to read any further, as I'm about to reveal the ending.

SPOILER SPACE

ANOTHER SPOILER SPACE

I mean it. I'm going to tell you what happens at the end.

MORE SPOILER SPACE

You would never guess...

YET MORE SPOILER SPACE

...Bond finds the bombs and saves the world.

Anyway, at the end of the film, some random guy appears, tells the Bond girl (Domino - isn't that a bit masculine, or is it some kind of double entendre?) that he's disabled the bomb, and unties her (saving her from the evil baddie's cigar and ice torture routine). Just before the boat that they and 007 are travelling on crashes and blows up, Bond, Domino and Random Guy abandon ship. Random Guy complains that he can't swim, but our ever resourceful hero finds time to hand him a life belt, and come out with a hilarious one-liner as the boat speeds to the crash site.

After the explosion, Bond and Domino get into an inflatable dingy and are rescued. But what happened to Random Guy? The one who disabled the bomb and saved David Caruso? Did he not manage to get far enough away from the boat? This seems unlikely since it was travelling so fast that you'd have thought they sped the film footage up or something. Or is he still bobbing around with his lifebelt in the middle of the ocean?

Three would be a crowd

The person who comes up with the best explanation gets a holiday* to the Bahamas.

*Terms and Conditions

Judge's descision is final. No correspondence will be entered into unless bribes are involved.

Bribe must be provided in full before the judge is prepared to consider any change in winner

Winner must be prepared to participate in publicity for this blog, which may include being photographed with a stupid grin, being prepared to have details of their favourite M&M colour published, and being otherwise publicly embarrassed.

Winner must supply their own holiday

Not Giving up the Day Job

2010-08-11T23:00:00.004+01:00

Today, Helena and I went on our annual trip to the wildlife park. This is always an opportunity to get some great pictures of the wild, wacky, weird and wondrous world of animals. And we always fail to do so, one way or another. Last year, it rained and I didn't exactly distinguish myself with my impressive photography.

Helena now has a camera as well, so with two of us snapping away nothing could go wrong, right?

The first thing you need to remember, is to remember the cameras. David Bailey didn't get where he was by turning up to Vogue cover shoots without his equipment. On the other hand, they were lacking one vital piece of technology back in his heyday - the mobile phone.

Luckily for you, neither of us forgot our phones, which means that you have some pictures to look at. You have to squint a bit and use your imagination, but they could be worse. All the pictures that appear here were Helena's with the exception of the last one. This is probably because she took over 70 photos, many of which didn't come out well, compared to my carefully composed 9. She's got the better technique. It's like the Vogue cover photographers who take hundreds of pictures, and chuck all but one of them away.

Every time we go to the wildlife park, I'm always struck by the incongruity of seeing camels wandering around Oxfordshire. Not only should there be sand and pyramids instead of grass and trees, but I love the irony of keeping animals specifically designed to go for weeks without water in Britain.

We got lucky with the lions. Usually they're roaming around their very well isolated peice of land, but of course their coats that are intended to camouflage them from their future lunch, which makes them hard to spot. Today, however, instead of lean mean killing machines prowling through the undergrowth, there was a guy with a strimmer. I bet he's very good. I'd be very consciencious if I were him. Because if he did a shoddy job they wouldn't have to worry about filling in lots of paperwork and bureaucracy to fire him, they could just "accidentally" leave one of the doors of the lion house open.

If you look through most of the lion house's windows, you can see cage bars about 4 feet away, with the animals behind those, but there is one window that looks directly in. On the other side, with it's face pressed against the glass was a lioness.

Now I'm sure that the glass is really thick and safe and all that, but I personally didn't feel comfortable inches away from the large cat. Helena on the other hand was happily snapping away. Sadly, the glare on the glass ruined those particular pictures.

There were a couple of new exhibits this year. When you see drawings or models of giraffes, they always look wrong, as if the artist of sculptor wasn't very good. When you see the things in the flesh, you realise that the orignals look wrong too.

The other new thing was the Madagascar exhibition, where you get to walk in amongst the lemurs.

And no trip to the park would be complete without a visit to the penguins.

There were loads of other wonders - scary snakes and spiders, rhinos, monkeys, exotic birds and creepy crocodiles, but sadly not all of the pictures came out very well, so you'll just have to take my word for it. Still, there's always next year.

Been There, Done That? Or Just Got the T Shirt?

2010-08-07T16:30:00.003+01:00

I had to go to the supermarket this afternoon. I was down to my last lemon, and one lemon doesn't last 5 minutes in my flat. Since I've started substituting lemon juice for alcohol, I'm getting through far more of the former than I ever did of the latter. There are no limits to how much citric acid you can have in your blood and still be legally allowed to drive. And unlike vodka, no-one ends up being carted off to a drying-out clinic because they drink it all day. Healthy people even drink fruit juice with their breakfast.

In addition to fruit, the supermarket sells a wealth of other things. In the past, I've bought an all-singing-all-dancing-printer-scanner, a digibox (for the TV), and a salt grinder. Oddly, they don't sell lemon squeezers, though.

I also get most of my clothes from there, which saves me having to go into scary clothes shops. Recently, they've been selling T shirts with "retro" designs on them. At first, I assumed that they were just made-up logos. However, now they've got some old film designs, such as for Star Wars and Back to the Future, which I seem to remember from years ago. Of course, the ones talking about specific events might still be made up.

I used to be wary of wearing anything with a message or a design. After all, people who do are generally expressing themselves in some way or other. I have an Ubuntu T shirt that I wear to work, but I always wonder about people who wear things with oriental writing on them, as I'm sure that they say something insulting about the wearer, or suggest that he's into some kind of bizarre fetish. I suppose you're all right if you don't walk around in South Asia wearing it.

Now, though, I've decided that it's fun to wear things that you don't know anything about. I have a "World Frisbee Championship" T-shirt. Someone even started talking to me about frisbees in the coffee queue at work. I had to admit that I know considerably less about frisbees than Ubuntu. And just look at my latest acquisition:

Isn't it great? The only problem with it is the date, since I look far too young to have attended this particular gig, rave, concert or whatever it was. I can't help wondering about people who did attend, bought the T shirt, and who have lovingly looked after it for 40 years, only wearing it to very special 70's nights. They'll be gutted if they go to the next one and there are ten other people wearing them who picked them up for 6 quid at Sainsbury's.

Still, it makes a nice addition to my collection, which includes among other non-me things, a "NORTH DAKOTA PARK RANGER" shirt. Far better to have the T shirt, without having had to have been there.

Are We Gluing Coffee Pots? - and Lots of Randomness

2010-07-29T23:00:00.003+01:00

My latest parcel of purchases from Greece arrived the other day. This consisted of:

Detective Novels - Two novels by Giannis Maris. He was Greece's answer to Agatha Christie, writing stories prolifically in the 50's, 60's and 70's. His detective is Captain Bekas.

An Audiobook - I've never ever listened to an audiobook, so this is an experiment. The book itself is apparently a classic of early 20th Century Greek literature.

An old Dictionary - This was published in 1969, and is a dictionary of the old formal Greek that was abolished in the 1970s. It might be useful for reading older non-fiction works, though to be honest I mainly got it because I like dictionaries.

The Greeklish Dictionary - This isn't actually a dictionary, but a rather strange book consisting of modern idiomatic Greek phrases literally translated into English. I managed to find some of them (including "Are we gluing coffee pots?") in dictionaries, though you really need to come across them in actual use to understand them properly. Others, such as "Shit high and gaze", I have no idea about.

License

I was up until 4am last night (or should I say this morning?). Not because I was busy looking up strange Greek phrases, but because I had discovered a random web site. Appropriately named random.org, it is a site that provides randomness. It's run by a computer scientist at Dublin University, and it's the ideal place to go if you want to roll dice, toss coins, pick cards, generate lottery tickets, or run prize draws or electronic gambling (depending on which authority regulates your business).

It all started in 1997, when Mads Haar connected a $10 radio to an old Sun computer and started playing static through it. The radio was deliberately not tuned to any station and had to be cheap because the more expensive models tend to filter out the static. Contrary to what Windows users might believe, computers aren't very good at being random, since they're designed to behave in a predictable manner. If you want your computer to run games where real money is involved (or strip poker), then the last thing you want is any kind of predictability.

These days, he's got six radios and much more powerful servers, and is able to generate the equivalent of 18,000 coin tosses a second. If you go onto his site, you get a million bits free, and a daily top-up of 200,000 bits (up to the million bit limit).

I got the site to shuffle a pack of cards for me. This used up 335 bits. Of course, I then had to do some calculations to work out the least number of bits you need to do such a shuffle. Wouldn't you? I came up with 226, and then spent more time when I should have been sleeping trying to work out what they're doing that uses 335. Actually, if you keep shuffling it uses different amounts - other shuffles produced 322 and 401.

It's only now that I've written all this down that I realise two things. One is how sad all of this makes me sound, and the other is why the reality of computer shuffling might not work like the theory. At which point I'll have to leave this fascinating tale. I've got a card shuffling program to write.

"We'll say them", as they say in Greek...

Chrome Surfers, Blue Teeth, and Document M of the Building Regulations

2010-07-26T19:00:00.006+01:00

I don't know if any of you remember Mosaic. It was one of the first browsers, back in the days when the web was just starting. In the days when men were men and wrote web pages in raw html. Before applets, javascript and flash. People didn't used to say "the web", but "Mosaic", as in "I've put my home page up on Mosaic".

What things were like before Mosaic

Things have come along way since those pioneering days, less than twenty years ago. Mosaic was superceded by Netscape, and then by Firefox, which introduced us to the joys of tabbed browsing now copied by all of its competitors. And even though much of the web's content is still the same, i.e. text-based, it is surrounded by flashing whizzy graphics.

And things are getting flashier and whizzier. Over the last year or so, my favourite news websites have gone from simple, fast-loading pages to Flash City, with tickertape and ever more annoying adverts. It got to the stage where I was finding it tedious to use them because Firefox would take forever to render them, especially if I opened multiple tabs.

I decided it was time to try something different, so I downloaded google's Chrome browser. The difference was instantly noticeable. The same webpages now load much faster, and the browser rarely hangs. Chrome doesn't have as many features as Firefox, which is a good thing. The problem with software is that it gets more and more clunky and difficult to use as they add more and more features. Chrome is much newer, and so hasn't got to that stage. Yet.

I've only been using it for a few days, but so far it seems to work fine. It even has a porn mode, for anonymous browsing. I've not tried it, but I'm told that people who are married find it useful. For buying that surprise birthday present, obviously.

Now the web is back to being almost as fast as it was back in the old Mosaic days.

Still on the subject of new technology, I took Helena to get a bluetooth USB adapter the other day. She wanted to transfer photos from her mobile phone to her laptop. Argos were selling them at half-price, i.e. under a fiver, so we got one and tried it on my Ubuntu netbook.

Like the web, wireless communications have also come a long way since the first Marconi wireless networks.

Nowadays they can get all this on a USB stick.

As far as I'm concerned, bluetooth is Voodoo black-magic, but Helena knew what to do, and we managed to get a photo off my phone and onto the computer. "Now disable bluetooth on your phone, before anyone tries to get into it.", she advised. I was impressed by her security-conciousness. Apparently the children all use bluetooth to transfer pictures and music in the playground. And for malicious purposes too, it seems.

This is the photo. It was taken on a recent visit to a local restaurant.

Notice the position of the hedge

We were sitting outside, and Helena suddenly looked over at the carpark. "That's awful!", she exclaimed. I turned round and looked at the two disabled parking spaces. "There should be enough space for the driver's door to open fully. How else will someone in a wheelchair get out? That goes against Document M of the building regulations."

I've checked, and sure enough, Part M of the UK Building regulations states that there should be 200m of hatched out space on the driver's side of every disabled parking space. As well as 200m at the back. It's amazing what useless information gets into children's heads. She's not interested in a lot of the more "academic" school subjects like science or maths, which has led me to question how she plans to earn enough money to look after her dad in his old age. How much do building inspectors earn, I wonder?

Hypertension

2010-07-14T08:10:00.006+01:00

The Story So Far...

During a routine medical check, they discovered that my blood pressure was too high. I pointed out that to the nurses they shouldn't have been squeezing my veins so hard with that thing they wrap round your arm and pump full of air, but they weren't convinced. They extracted some blood, which you might have thought would help ease the pressure, but it didn't do any good. Eventually they decided I should see a doctor.

At the Doctors

Doctor: Says nothing, but looks expectantly at his patient.

BOV: They say I've got to see you about my high blood pressure.

Doctor: checking his patient's blood pressure: Hmmm. 160/88.

BOV: Waits.

Doctor: Yes. Yes. Well, that is rather high. Why is that?

BOV: You're the doctor.

Doctor: Yes. Yes. Hmmm. It was okay in 1998.

BOV: They say that I'm drinking too much and that I'm not getting enough exercise.

Doctor: What do you drink?

BOV: Alcohol.

Doctor: No, I mean, beer?

BOV: Beer, wine whisky, anything really.

Doctor: Anything you can get your hands on?

BOV: No, I didn't mean... I'm not an alcoholic.

Doctor: Hmm.

BOV: Look. I'm worried that I'm on the verge of death. I'm sure I'm about to have a heart attack.

Doctor: Yes. Yes. I can see that you are.

BOV: Clutches his chest and stops breathing.

Doctor: I mean, I can see that you're worried. You needn't be, you know. Clicks on the computer. Your risk profile isn't that high. Though they're underestimating your blood pressure. Clicks again. Is there any history of heart disease in your family?

BOV: They all died of heart attacks in their 50s.

Doctor: Oh dear. Yes, that's not good. It raises your risk by 50%. Clicks again. Yes. Yes. Here, you see? You've got about a 15% chance of having a heart attack in the next ten years.

BOV: 15 Percent??? That's the same as a turn of Russian roulette!

Doctor: I'm not sure what a bullet in your brain does to your risk profile. Clicks. Well, cut down on your drinking and come back in three months. If it's still too high we'll give you a pill.

So, I've swapped the demon drink for sparkling water laced with lemon juice. My body is responding to the lack of alcohol by making my sleep patterns even worse than usual. However, I'm still alive, which is something, and instead of worrying about my heart I'm now trying to find out what an overdose of citric acid does to you.

21 Years Later

2010-06-23T20:35:00.003+01:00

The other day, I finished reading "The Man Who Watched the Trains Go Past", by Georges Simenon, put it in it's proper place on my bookshelf (next to "The Yellow Dog" by the same author), and checked my store of unread volumes to decide what to tackle next.

Eventually I chose "The Dam", by Spiros Plaskovitis.

It's a novel that was written in 1961, and is about a dam. I don't really know any more than that. So far, we've been introduced to the dam, and to the workers who take care of it. Funny things are happening, but because they're outside their routine, they just ignore them. Until an engineer turns up unannounced and asks them where the cracks are. Cracks? What cracks?

No doubt things will either become clearer or more obscure - I've no idea what kind of novel it is, though I suspect it's not something I would have normally bought.

On the first page, there is an inscription with my name and a date. And a price (£9).

When I was younger, I used to write my name, place and the date in every book I bought. Since I don't keep diaries and can't remember much that happened to me longer ago than a few days, these inscriptions are pretty much all that remain of my younger self. When my father died, I was reading Anthony Trollope's "The Way We Live Now", and I wrote the date at the top of the page that I was on.

I've long since given up defacing my books in this manner, and of course nowadays I have a blog to record anything interesting that happens in my madcap life.

Anyway, back to "The Dam". From what little I remember, I was staying in London for a week with a group of students, and we went on various day trips by coach. One of these was to Cambridge.

Of course, I made a point of visiting the Mathematical Bridge.

Picture: Chris Millar. License

And being a University town, they had a large academic bookshop. As the 19-year-old me was intending to get down to some serious work learning Modern Greek in the near future (I'd only been putting it off for about 4 or 5 years at that point), I found the bookshop's small Greek section and picked a book. I'm not sure why I chose that particular one. Obviously not for its exciting cover. I do remember that I had to look up the title in a dictionary once I got home.

And now, 21 years later, the time has finally come. I've read ten pages so far, which is nine-and-a-half more than I've managed before. If I'd known then that it would take me this long, maybe I'd have saved my £9. After all, that was probably a lot of money at the time - it would have bought at least 6 pints (less than 3 today). Or maybe I'd have bought it and filled that front page with notes about my visit to Cambridge. So that instead of one solitary memory about a bridge, I'd have at least another blog post's worth. The problem with young people is that they just don't think ahead.

Flying the Flag

2010-06-18T20:44:00.012+01:00

England really isn't a bad place to live, most of the time. It's generally safe, and the locals are reasonably friendly. However, every four years the locals get very excited about something called The World Cup. Britain is probably the only country in the world without a national football team. Instead most parts of Britain have their own international teams. The largest of these is of course England. At World Cup time English flags appear everywhere. Every other car is emblazoned with them, people have their hair dyed with flags on them.

I'm almost tempted to scrap my old TV and buy an HD flat screen, because they're being sold at reduced prices almost everywhere, so that England fans can watch their team lose in high resolution. The local pub drastically reduces prices of their pints during England games, which isn't ideal. You have to drink your cheap pint surrounded by normally rational people who have somehow turned into rabid animals. Who shout and scream when their team gets within 10 feet of the ball, and who look like they're ready to commit murder when the other lot score.

I'm not sure why the English are always so hopeful. They keep banging on about how they won the cup in 1966. If I was an England fan, I wouldn't want to draw attention to the fact that my team hasn't won bugger all for 44 years. A few weeks ago they were even beaten by Woody Harrelson. Not the best of omens.

I'm thinking of suggesting to the landlord that he reduces the pints during the games that no-one wants to watch - after all, that's when he needs the business.

There was such a game yesterday afternoon. It was a sunny day without a cloud in the sky. I was sitting outside having a leisurely lunch and a few pints, and reading a Simenon novel. There were only a few of the die-hard locals inside, half-watching the match. It was Greece v. Nigeria.

Now, I'm not a football fan. Nevertheless, I did watch the start, with the national anthems, and I might have wandered inside every so often, usually when there was a lot of cheering on the TV. And I caught the last 5 minutes. I didn't cheer, but I was happy to see that a country with 150 million people to choose 11 players from was beaten 2-1 by the Greeks, who are only 6% of the size. The Greeks who are currently suffering all manner of crap due to economic woes, who now have something to cheer them up.

Which is great. And now, since I've had enough exposure to football to last me the next four years, and I'm also a little sunburnt, I think I'll cut down on my visits to the pub for the next month or so, and keep my head down until it's all over.

Something in the Water

2010-06-08T22:01:00.018+01:00

Picture by Roger McLassus [License]

Today I finally got round to registering at a new doctor's surgery. It's only taken me 6 years. On the two or three near-death incidents that I've had since then, I've had to drive 8 miles to the old place, whereas this one is 2 minute's walk away from my flat.

There was a form, of course, and in addition they wanted some proof of identity. Photographic ID to prove who I was, and some proof of my address. The only photographic ID I've got is my passport, so I took that. As far as proving where I lived, they wanted what is becoming the standard these days.

In this digital, security conscious age where credit cards and passports contain smart chips, holograms and so on, this proof is none other than the super-secure "recent utility bill". Because it's not like any 10 year old with a word processor could possibly forge one of those. Oh, no.

As I was tearing the flat apart hunting for bills, I was almost tempted to see just how good my all-singing-all-dancing-printer-scanner is. All my bills are paid automatically by Direct Debit, so when letters from the electricity or water people come, I tend to chuck them on a pile. Sadly, there's more than one pile. And every time I need to find something, the piles get disturbed so that the most recent items are not always on the top.

I managed to find a lot from 2008. This was obviously a good year for bills, or maybe I just opened more of them. Then I found one from May 2010, but it was an electricity bill. The problem there is that they always address them to the letting agent rather than me. Even though they have no difficulty taking the money out of my bank account. So I needed a water bill.

Since these bills are apparently all the identity theives need, it was reassuring to know that if they broke in, they'd never find one recent enough. Or perhaps they'd already done that and taken all of the 2010 ones?

Finally, the last envelope on the last pile had a suitably recent letter. I'm not sure what they would have done at the health centre if I couldn't find it. I would have had to explain about my piles, and they would have said that if I had piles I should see a doctor, but not until I'd registered.

As part of the registration process, they get a nurse to examine you. This is normal practice, but I'm scared in case they find something terminal. They also gave me a small container which they want me to fill. "It's only to dip." said the receptionist. I'm not sure what that means - once the water has left my body, I don't really care what they do with it, though I'd advise them to stick to humous or taramasalata.

I suppose this means that I can't go to the pub tomorrow evening (the examination is on Thursday). Though if I did it would save a lot of hassle, as I might as well just fill the container with neat cider, and cut out the middle man (and my digestive system). Alternatively, I could use tap water. I'm tempted to do that and see what they diagnose.

Ideal Home?

2010-06-03T22:30:00.005+01:00

Reading through my favourite blogs, there seems to be a recurring theme for many of you. Homes. Bee's taken in another family member, Chris is swithering about whether or not to move out of his unique Manchester home (apparently instead of being timber framed it's made out of CD cases), and SHG is in the process of moving Cowbell HQ to a new location. Kat and her husband are still busy doing out what is to be their dream home, and VE has an exclusive report suggesting that the President of some former British colony (I forget which) is considering painting his house a less boring colour. I think he needs a few tins of that Tartan paint.

So I thought that as a service to my readers, I'd try and find this week's must have property.

I spent hours scouring the world for that ideal but unique home. Well, I would have spent hours, or even weeks if it weren't for those nice folks at google. Anyway, if anyone has a drum can you please roll it for...

The Nuclear Bunker

There are apparently loads of these for sale in the USA. In addition to the rather modest property featured in the video, someone has done some extensive renovation of a missile silo in New York State. Two private suites in a spring-loaded structure designed to withstand a direct nuclear strike would be ideal when those troublesome or quarrelsome relatives decide to pay a visit.

These underground structures stay at a constant temperature all year round, which is ideal for wine buffs, and no doubt saves on heating and cooling. And you won't have to worry about dry rot, termites, ex wives, burglars or Word War III.

There's loads of space, plenty of scope for DIY, and the best thing of all is having something like "Atlas F Missile Silo" as the first line of your address.

I must admit that although at first I thought this was all a bit silly, the idea of living in such a place is quite appealing. However, I've decided not to move just yet. Apart from the rather long commute to work (even if some of these places do have their own runways), there don't appear to be many pubs nearby.

How did on Earth did they expect to keep civilisation going in these bunkers without decent boozers???

Happy Holiday?

2010-05-31T00:01:00.000+01:00

Today is the Late May Bank Holiday. For many people this means spending the day in traffic jams trying to get home from a rainy long weekend somewhere nice, or rather somewhere that would have been nice if it wasn't for the rain and the other hoards of people.

I'm planning to spend the day in a more relaxing but productive fashion. Naturally I'll be keeping up with events in the Greek speaking world, but I have also decided I should be more familiar with Mozart's opera Cosi Fan Tutte and I ordered a vocal score from Amazon which has just arrived.

You will doubtless recall that this is the one about "wife-swapping". Two young men are madly in love with (and engaged to) two sisters. The men are convinced that their girlfriends are completely devoted to them and that they would be eternally faithful. Their older, world-weary friend says this is impossible. All women are the same. Faithless, fickle and flighty.

Eventually the question is settled in the time-honoured fashion by a wager. The men agree to let the old man set up an experiment. This involves them pretending to be called up to fight a war, disguising themselves as exotic foreign travellers, and then trying to seduce their own girlfriends.

But it all goes horribly wrong when they manage to seduce each others fiances. Don't you just hate it when that happens?

I wonder how you're planning to spend the day? I suppose most of you will be going to work. If so, then think of me relaxing in my armchair.

One of you will, I hope, be doing something special today. Or at least getting some time to relax. After all, it is her birthday. I'd like to pretend that's why we're have this Bank Holiday, but apparently they were started in 1871, which I think is a few years before she was born.

Happy Birthday, Jean Knee!

...In His Counting House...

2010-05-23T10:48:00.008+01:00

Some of you may be wondering how I've been spending my time recently, especially all of those extra hours freed up by not writing blog posts. There are several answers to this question, and today I'm going to talk about the first one.

I've been counting money.

Now, I don't indulge in lotteries or other games of chance, and I haven't got any rich relatives, so I've not suddenly become a millionaire. Sadly the money isn't mine, or anyone else's.

Instead, I've discovered the book "Amusements in Mathematics" by Henry Dudeny, which has been lovingly digitised by the Project Gutenberg.

This book is a classic of recreational mathematics. It was published in 1917, and consists of hundreds of puzzles. These are arranged into sections, and the first one concerns money.

Here is an example of the sort of puzzle that we're talking about:

A man left instructions to his executors to distribute once a year exactly fifty-five shillings among the poor of his parish; but they were only to continue the gift so long as they could make it in different ways, always giving eighteenpence each to a number of women and half a crown each to men. During how many years could the charity be administered? Of course, by "different ways" is meant a different number of men and women every time.

As I said, the book was published in 1917, and Britain's monetary system was non-decimal. A pound was divided into 20 shillings, each of which was further divided into 12 pence. Each penny was worth four farthings. A guinea was worth 21s (£1.05 in today's money). You won't be surprised to learn that lawyers charged their victims in guineas rather than pounds.

As in present day America, they had names for many of their coins, which were presumably designed to confuse foreigners. Coins like tanners, bobs, florins and half-crowns. Interestingly, despite the fact that the whole system was abolished in 1971 in favour of decimalisation, the old shillings and florins were still in circulation until the 1990s, when they made some of our coins smaller. Presumably to save money. And I don't remember seeing any, but according to WIki, the sixpence coin (confusingly worth 2.5 pence) was legal tender until 1980.

Although the system sounds confusing, the British managed to use it for about 1000 years, and like imperial measures, it was more human than decimal. They probably had very little inflation, which would have helped.

Armed with a list of coins and their values, I've been working my way through the puzzles. They're not particularly enlightening, but they are fun. Many of them can be solved analytically (i.e. you just write out the equations and solve), but he has all sorts of traps for the unwary. For example, the fact that you only need 47 cuts to divide a 48-yard length of cloth into individual yards.

Although I begin with a pen and paper, and fill sheet after sheet with calculations, it's also really useful to have the computer around when you end up with multiple possible solutions to check.

Anyway, I've almost run out of money to count. The next set of puzzles is entitled "Age and Kinship". Hopefully they won't all be the kind where Aunt Agatha is twice Harry's age, and 2/17 of Uncle Cuthbert when you reverse the digits. Or whatever. If they are, I might get bored and have to start writing more posts....

Sports News

2010-05-08T22:33:00.019+01:00

One of the more embarrassing things about being British is the fact that your country invented football. It's a game that seems to have almost everything wrong with it. It's so boring that no-one wants to watch it, but this combined with it's relatively short length (90 minutes) leads to the so-called fans resorting to violence.

Look at cricket. It's just as dull, but a game takes 3 days. Consequently, the spectators know they're in for a long haul and bring ample supplies of food, champagne and condoms. Everything is very civilised, they have breaks for things like afternoon tea, and so no-one gets hurt. Apart from the odd pigeon.

Football, on the other hand, is so short that the only things the "fans" take with them are a 6-pack of lager and some home-made explosives. They've cracked down on the lager, so they drink all of them before they get to the match, which doesn't really help.

Now, however, the game is in the process of being completely turned around. They've managed to replace the players with robots. These robots are almost indistinguishable from their human counterparts, apart from the vastly increased speed at which their brains work. They bumble around the pitch, are as likely to kick each other as they are the ball, and they regularly fall over (this is known in football parlance as "taking a dive").

As you can see from the video, the robotic game is just as dynamic and exciting as the real thing. There's still a lot of work for the boffins to do, though. Now that they've got the players automated (saving millions on expensive salaries which are payed for by expensive TV deals, which in turn are payed for by people who adverts that are in turn payed for by the people who buy those products - beer and cars), they will have to make robot spectators.

This shouldn't be too hard. After all, if football players, who can earn between £1 million and £4 million a year, are not the sharpest knives in the drawer*, what about the spectators, whose average wage is around 2% of the players, and who are suckered out of £80 of it per match?

Think how many man-hours will be saved around the world by the complete roboticisation of football. It's not just the players and the spectators, but riot police and scarce hospital resources. Combined with cheaper beer and cars.

Result!

*An example of the kind of intellect the robot players are up against:

Netbook Remix

2010-05-01T22:30:00.010+01:00

Suppose you find yourself in a hotel in the West's most dangerous country. It's the weekend, and you've managed not to become a homicide statistic, despite the fact that you've not been in the state long enough to legally qualifiy for the AK47 that you need to protect yourself (that takes a whole week). More importantly, there's no prospect of getting home alive or dead, since someone's seen fit to let off a volcano in Iceland.

You're sure that unprovoked discharge of lava and ash must be in violation of International Law. Didn't they sign some treaty a few years back in Iceland? You can't remember, but it might have been one of those VALT (Volcanic Arms Limitation Treaty) things. Or was it? You could really do with internet access to answer these vital questions.

In addition, one of the local TV channels is showing hours of "Law and Order SVU" in the evenings, and (never having seen Law and Order before) you want to find out who that rather nice looking Assistant DA is.

Yes, internet access would be really useful. But wait... the hotel has free wireless. And one of those shops you passed on the way to the gun store was selling cheap computers. A place called Best Buy. It was full of geeky looking types, so it must be okay. You only hope they won't make you wait a week to get one.

Half an hour later, you're back in the hotel room with your new acquisiton. Half an hour after that you've gone back to Best Buy to get some headphones. Another 30 minutes and you're watching the Aimilia Hour, and you're learning to stop worrying and love the volcano. Or at least to not feel quite so isolated.

This is the EEE PC 1005HA. It's got 1GB of memory, and a 160GB hard drive. It's a lot easier to lug around than either a full-sized laptop or a dictionary, and it would have cost me about £200, but I got it for zero Pounds, because they let me have it for 300 of their Monopoly style funny money. They originally said it was going to be even less than that, but then they added tax. They like doing that. You can't even get a burger at the advertised price. I'm sure that taxing burgers is violating some Constitutional Right or something.

It came with Windows XP. This meant that before I could get onto the internet to check if my plane was flying and send hilariously witty emails to various people (apparently Bee laughed so hard she had to buy a new pair of jeans), I had to decide whether I wanted to update my system, whether I wanted to sit through a sales pitch for IE (the only options are to watch it now or later), whether I wanted to delete unused icons from my desktop, and delete the stupid popup box that informed me I'd just plugged in headphones (like I had done it in my sleep or something and needed to be told).

Needless to say, as soon as I was back home, I installed Ubuntu. They do a "Netbook Remix", which is designed to make better use of the small screen. I wasn't sure I'd want this rather than the normal desktop environment, but it's really rather good.

Now, if you'll excuse me I've got rather a lot of Law and Order box sets to get through (I'm still only on 1990)...

No doubt you're wondering about that volcano treaty. And what the US Constitution has to say about burger taxation. I was going to look it up after I'd finished searching for Diane Neal pictures... And I'm still intending look it up when I've finished...

The 2-Year Orgasm

2010-04-25T00:01:00.017+01:00

The pressure was getting unbearable. When the explosion finally came, there was a deep groan of satisfaction as the hot fluid burst out. And as is customary in these situations, this was followed by a long and leisurely smoke.

No, I'm not trying to win the Bad Sex Award. For a start, I wouldn't even ~~come~~ get close to the 2009 winner, Jonathan Littell ('I came suddenly, a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg'). I just don't have that kind of literary talent. And in any case, I'm talking about that Icelandic volcano.

You may have heard about it. The one that has the unpronounceable name - fdsjakldjkd or something. The one that hadn't erupted for over 100 years. Until the week I happened to be in the USA.

I can't really complain, since I only had to spend two extra days in a comfortable hotel, but I did have a rather unsettling week. When the thing first belched out clouds of ash, they prohibited any flying through it. The weather folk said that the cloud would be over Britain for at least a week, and the vulcanologists (these aren't Trekkies, but people who study volcanoes) said that it could keep erupting for a year or two.

This is a Vulcan, not a vulcanologist.

I started to wonder what I'd do in the US for a couple of years. There were signs up in Walmart saying that they were hiring. Or maybe I could get a job as Bee's stunt double, taking over from her in those situations where women want her to touch them up.

In reality, I wouldn't manage to last two years on the wrong side of the pond. America is like watching a 4:3 TV broadcast in widescreen. The roads are wider. The cars are wider. The people are wider. The reason for this last one is that in America they just don't stop stuffing food into you. No, I'd have to find a quicker escape route.

To give you an idea of what I was up against, having visited TGI Friday's in the UK, I went to a Stateside one. The menu is much better, but not only did I fail to finish my meal (I couldn't even manage the starter), I felt so bloated that I didn't think I'd live long enough to have another. Fortunately, I pulled through in time for breakfast the next day.

Whilst munching my way through a Triple Whopper one afternoon, I was pondering the injustice of the fact that the only unaffected transatlantic flights out of America were ones to Iceland, when I realised that this could be useful. All you had to do to get back to Blighty was to wear a teflon suit, fly to Iceland, jump into the volcano and wait for it to spew you out. After all, everything else that comes out of this thing ends up getting blown to Britain.

As I started on the fries, I realised that there was another, more worrying scenario. Eventually the airlines would have lost so much money that they'd go bankrupt if they didn't fly some planes. At which point they'd start to fly them through the cloud. What's the possibility of losing the odd plane compared to certain financial ruin?

Sure enough, within a week they'd decided that they didn't need to wait for the ash to go away, and they began the flights again. Apparently they carried out extensive tests over a couple of days, and it's all right. To be fair, they've come up with a safe ash concentration limit. To be even fairer, none of the planes have crashed yet.

Now they're saying that this volcano's got a friend, and that they like to erupt together. fdsjakldjkd is presumably a bit premature. If that one goes up as well, they might have to stop the flights again. Now, if only I can time my next holiday to Athens just right...

Disclaimers, a.k.a "Please don't sue me"

I'm sure that the airlines, the air traffic people and various governments are taking a responsible approach to safety. Otherwise I wouldn't have got on that plane.

Not all Americans are fat. I'm going by statistics. So it's only the average ones.

I know that fdsjakldjkd isn't really the name of that volcano. Anyone can see that there aren't nearly enough j's for it to be a real Icelandic name.

Maybe most people at the height of sexual pleasure feel like their head is a soft boiled egg that's being scraped out by a spoon. Maybe I've being doing something wrong. If so, please don't shatter my illusions by telling me.

Listless - Half a Post.

2010-04-09T16:20:00.000+01:00

I realised the other day that it was April already and I hadn't posted anything since some time in March, so I owe you a rundown of all the exciting things that have happened in the intervening period of my madcap life.

I got a nice large piece of paper, and started to make a list, or rather a series of lists - Funny Things, Sad Things, Interesting Things, Embarrassing Things, Out-of-body Experience Type Things, Hilarious Things on You Tube. However, once I got to "Not Very Interesting Things" and still hadn't managed to think of any topics, I gave up making lists.

The truth is that very little has happened here over the last couple of weeks. I had a relaxing time over Easter, Helena spent a few days here over the holidays, and the most exciting event was lunch at TGI Friday's.

I once read that Friday's (as it's known in some parts of the world) is a favourite haunt of Giorgos Papadopoulos, the Greek Prime Minister. He was born in the USA, and spent quite a few years there, so this is perhaps not surprising.

I don't know what the Athen's restaurant is like - maybe I should visit it next time I'm in the area, but the ones here are good. The service is superb, and Helena enjoyed her Salmon with Jack Daniel's sauce. My sirloin wasn't bad either. There was some music playing that Helena liked, so she asked the waiter what it was. After much discussion and fiddling with their i-phones, we were eventually handed a piece of paper with all the details on it. I think it was some kind of garage-be-bop-disco-hip-hop-grunge-techno-folk or similar. The band was something "5". I can't remember what the "something" was. No doubt you can work that out from my excellent description of the music.

Apart from not being able to afford to eat out all the time, the main problem I have with the place is its lack of variety. You can get a burger. You can get a steak. You can get some chunks of animal still on bones. Since I'm not a qualified surgeon I'm limited to the burgers or the steak. Most things have their ubiquitous Jack Daniels sticky sauce on it, whcih I'm not a huge fan of. Still, we had a nice lunch.

Talking of lunch, it's 4pm now and I haven't had any. I'm running down on supplies, since I'm going to be away for a few days, so I'll have to go out and get something. I'd love to write the other half of this post, but my stomach is insisting. Apologies in advance for not visiting blogs, but I'll probably be without internet access over the next week or so.

Later...

Boom and Bust

2010-03-23T20:15:00.003Z

With all the current wailing and gnashing of teeth regarding the Greek economy, we are being bombarded daily with figures, percentages, spreads, and so on. In an effort to dispel some of this gloom and doom, I think they ought to look at more entertaining economic figures. Starting with skirts.

The hem-line has in the past been proposed as an indicator of how well an economy is doing. The theory says that hem lines are directly proportional to economic growth. That is to say that in good times skirts are shorter. I suspect that a similar thing holds for necklines - the lower the better.

I think I know why this works - skimpier outfits require less material. This means that more money is being spent and fewer of our scarce natural resources used up. And all the extra profit made on clothes gets spent back into the economy, causing a financial chain reaction.

Another suggested barometer is the Mars Bar. This is said to give a good indication of inflation. Apparently governments can give up surveying households' shopping habits and monitoring thousands of prices every month and just pop down to their local newsagents to see how much a Mars Bar costs. The important thing to remember, though, is that it's the price per gram that matters. Those sneaky people at Mars have a habit of altering the size as well.

The Mars Bar in more prosperous times

Finally we come to men's underwear. It seems that someone has been through men's drawers and worked out that the older and more worn out they are, the worse the economy is doing. Although you have to wonder why someone ever wanted to conduct such a study, this is good news for those of us who don't usually wear women's clothes. All I need to do to help the economy is buy some new underwear. Unfortunately, this isn't top of my spending priorities right now - maybe I'll wait until things start to get better. Also, I hate shopping for clothes. Why couldn't they have chosen DVDs or Guinness? Maybe I'll do some research...

Digitally Revolutionised

2010-03-09T19:50:00.002Z

The future is here. I have been digitally revolutionised.

Having got a printer/copier/scanner gadget last week at the supermarket, this time I picked up a digital TV box.

In Britain, we've had five terrestial TV channels for some time now. Two of these are provided by the state broadcaster, the BBC, and the other three are commercial - i.e, they have adverts and some programmes are sponsored. The BBC isn't allowed to advertise. In fact, when I was a child (i.e. not that long ago), they used to make a point of covering up brand names on any packaging that appeared on screen.

These channels are broadcast as analogue signals, and are being phased out in favour of digital channels which take up less bandwidth. This has allowed the government (or at least a government at some point in the past) to make a bit of ready money by selling the old frequencies to mobile phone companies.

If, like me, your TV predates this digital revolution, you have to get a box which is able to receive, decode and decompress the digital signals. These currently cost £20, which is a lot cheaper than buying a new TV, and the channels are virtually all free to view (one or two require a subscription).

I'm not sure when they're switching off the analogue signals in my area, but I think it's sometime this year. I don't think they've already done it, though there's always the chance that I wouldn't notice, since I don't really watch any of the five channels. I can't get Channel Five properly anyway, and that's the one that broadcasts CSI, so I rely on DVDs for my fix. And none of the programmes are in Greek, which is a real problem for me.

Instead of five stations, digital gives you 20 or 30 or something. And a load of digital radio channels, too. The main broadcasters all have extra channels and there is also home shopping, 24-hour news (CNN, Sky News and BBC24), and something called "Babe" channels that start at 1am. Why anyone wants to stay up late and watch films about talking pigs is beyond me. The main thing that's missing once more is Greek language TV. Oh, well.

Anyway, I got the box home and plugged it in. A Miss Marple story had just started on ITV3 (one of the digital-only channels). The quality is better than analogue, and many of the programmes are broadcast in proper widescreen. I can't remember the last time I sat and watched two hours of British TV.

I don't think that I'll be using it that much (perhaps the occasional Agatha Christie adaptation), but it's great to be digitally revolutionised. Instead of 5 channels I don't watch, now I'll be able to not watch 25. And in widescreen too.

"Teleportation, all this kind of crap"

2010-03-03T00:01:00.005Z

Years ago, I remember a few weeks when I used to stay up late (until just after midnight) to watch TV. They were repeating The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and then afterwards they would show one of the Prelude's and Fugues from Bach's Well Tempered Clavier (or WTC for short).

The story behind the WTC is all about out of tune pianos. Or rather, out of tune harpsichords. And organs. I don't want to go into hideous detail, but basically people used to tune their organs and other keyboard instruments so that chords played, in say, C major, sounded really good. However, if you tried to play in a different key, say, G major, you'd find that some of the notes were ever so slightly out of tune. By the time you got to unrelated keys such as Ab, things were so bad that if you were lucky if the audience didn't actually lynch you.

Consequently, composers wrote a lot of music in C major, but not very much for C sharp major. I'm not quite sure why this was a particular problem, but at some point clever people, such as J.S. Bach, realised that if you tuned your instrument so that all of the notes were slightly out of tune, then you could play equally well (or badly) in each of the 12 major and 12 minor keys. This method of tuning, called "Equal Temperance", has been used ever since.

Bach celebrated this technological milestone by writing 24 preludes and fugues in these keys. Then he wrote a sequel (the first lot must have sold well), consisting of another 24. The two volumes of WTC are often referred to as "The 48", for reasons that should be clear to those of you who didn't do too badly at Maths.

Anyway, in 2000 the BBC got 4 pianists to record the 48. That's 12 preludes and fugues per pianist for those of you who flunked arithmetic. Each pianist was filmed in a different venue. Some of the venues were really picturesque, such as the wonderfully ornate (if unfortunately named) Palazzo Labia in Venice.

The Russian-born pianist Andrei Gavrilov drew the short straw, and got to perform in the not-quite-opened New Art Gallery in Walsall. Like most British towns, they have planning restrictions which ensure that new buildings are in keeping with the traditional ones. In (say) Bath, this means that new buildings need to look like they're a couple of centuries old. In Walsall you have to make them as ugly as possible.

Before each of the preludes and fugues, the performer says a few words about the piece. Sadly, these bits are cut out of the DVD version, but not from YouTube. Gavrilov says it like it is. The C# minor prelude is indeed like something from another planet. The director of these films did a great job in making 48 heavy-going pieces of music look visually interesting. Even in Walsall.

Warning!

2010-02-28T21:45:00.003Z

As you know, when I buy something, I always check the packaging, read any manuals, etc, before using or eating the product. This ensures not only that I get the full benefit of my purchase, but also that I am completely aware of any potential issues that might arise from its use.

My printer stopped working the other day. Because it was a cheap one that cost less than the replacement ink cartridges, repair was out of the question. As luck would have it, my local supermarket is currently selling hp all-in-one-wireless-photosmart-printer-scanner-copier-coffee-makers for half the usual price. So in addition to green beans, washing liquid and toilet rolls, my weekly shop also included the Photosmart C4780.

In addition to printing, it has a scanner. I've never had a scanner before. It means that I will no longer have to photograph product package warnings that I want to post on my blog about 50 times before I get a picture where the text hasn't been totally wiped out by the flash. The picture below was produced using this scanning technology.

The package in question was a free pack of HP Premium Plus photo paper. Now, I know what you're thinking. How can paper possibly be dangerous? Perhaps there'll be a warning about paper cuts. Maybe it's not a good idea to eat it.

We're all familiar with warnings such as "May contain nuts", but I wasn't aware that Swiss products might be dangerous. Other than Swiss Army knives, of course. And Swiss cheese can cause problems if you leave it in the sun for too long. But I'm not sure about swiss photo paper. Perhaps some people suffer fatal anaphylactic shocks when coming into contact with Swiss products? Maybe it's something in that clear mountain air? I've searched through all three sheets of the free paper, but I can't find any hidden switches that launch corkscrews out of the side, or any sign of mouldy cheese.

Anyway, now that I'm suitably forewarned, I shall handle this product with extreme caution and seek immediate medical attention if anything unusual develops on the photo paper.

My Week

2010-02-27T22:30:00.004Z

Things I did not do this week:

I did not get stranded on a makeshift life raft, almost starve to death and then have to give myself a makeshift enema from the only non-salty fluid which I was able to gather up, consisting of fish blood and other less savoury ingredients.

I did not have any time off sick. In contrast to the beginning last week, when I was still recovering from my near-death experience of catching one of Helena's colds.

I did not manage to find a way to emigrate to Greece without going bankrupt. Though I'm not giving up hope. Perhaps they'll consider sending me there as part of some future EU recovery programme. "We're sorry, Mr Papandreou, but we don't have €22bn in ready cash to bail your country out right now, but Brian says he's worked out a way to beat your deficit." Admittedly my idea of acquiring a time machine, going into the future and back and then making a killing on the horses isn't the most original, but it's still pretty sound, I reckon. Certainly more sound than the stock market these days...

EU Rescue package

Things I did do this week:

I did get my car taxed and insured for another year. This always seems to happen at a time of year when my finances aren't great, so I've had to make some tough economic sacrficies. A bit like the Greeks. However by making sure I ate something every other day, I've managed to avoid that enema thing.

I did book my car in for its annual service and MOT. Which means that I won't be eating that well in March, either.

I did waste many hours playing "The Feasibility Experiment". That's one of those 1980s text-based adventure games, which I never had the patience for when they first came out. I think I'm almost there with this one, though.

I did finish reading Agatha Christie's "They Do it with Mirrors". I correctly guessed the murderer's identity, which makes me wonder if I've read it before, years ago.

Thing I almost did this Week:

I almost bought the American remake of Taxi on DVD. It was on special offer in one of the shops, but before I parted with my hard earned cash, I had a look on IMDb. Not all of the reviews are bad, but here are some of the comments:

Its a mess, a real mess.

If you're thinking of seeing this movie and haven't seen the French one, please, do yourself a favor. See the original.

Avoid this film at all costs

A major disappointment

We just caught with it thanks to a borrowed DVD and we are so happy we didn't have to pay to watch this "masterpiece".

Like Roger Ebert once stated about a movie, I'll use his words to state this one: (This movie)isn't even the bottom of the barrel, it doesn't even scrape the bottom of barrel. It doesn't even deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence as barrels.

I make myself believe that I've seen worse but I have doubts.

WHY??????

This film is one of the worst films i have ever seen

Perhaps if people boycott movies like this we may be rewarded with originality rather than attempted cash cows.

If you've any sense at all then you'll run a mile from this hugely disappointing waste of your time.

I'll start by saying that this movie is one of the worst movies if not THE worst movie I've ever seen.

This is not a movie. This is a crime against French cinema.

I got this as a free rental, and even then, I felt ripped off.

This is truly one of those remakes that never should have been made.

The overall marking is 4.2 out of 10. It's that high because not everyone marked it with 1 - someone gave it 10 because "everyone else gave it a 1". I wasn't persuaded by this argument and decided to spend the money on alcohol instead. Consequently, this evening I sipped claret and watched the original French Taxi film, which gets 6.8 on IMDb.

It's very funny, and the driving sequences are amazingly realistic. Nothing looks speeded up and the roads seem convincingly busy. The Franco-German rivalry stuff probably loses a bit in the translation. In the end, the French taxi driver in the Peugeot beats the German criminals in their Mercedes, but the hot-policewoman-love-interest is German, and the French police are totally incompetent, so it's not all one-sided.

Next week, I have plans to do at least as many exciting things, not to mention hopefully solving "The Feasibility Experiment". And as always, I'll keep you posted...

Doomed

2010-02-18T23:30:00.014Z

First I have to start with an apology. It's been over a week since I last posted. I know. I should feel really bad about this.

After all, I know that many of you rely on this blog as a source of useful information, of advice and helpful tips on the main burning issues of the day. And I've been amazed by the number of readers who have been asking me how they should be preparing for that most burning of issues. The end of the world. I've lost track of exactly how many of you have asked about this, but it's somewhere between zero and one.

The End is Nigh

If you visit the cinema regularly, you'll know that the End is scheduled to happen on 21st December 2012. There are several totally unrefutable indicators of this.

Out of Time

Firstly, and most importantly, the current Mayan calendar will end on the 20th. Don't listen to the naysayers who point out that the Mayan calendar has ended 11 times already in the past, a bit like our calendar ends every year. They might also mention that the Mayans underestimated the length of a year by about 6 hours, thus questioning the competence of their calendar makers. Some crackpots even suggest their failure to predict that the Spanish would turn up and wreck their civilisation casts doubt on their ability to foresee major events. This is rubbish. Even the Mayans couldn't overlook the End of the World.

The Coming of Nibiru

Then there's an out of control planet that might collide with the Earth on the fated day. It's got some funky-sounding New Age name, which is a sure-fire sign that it means business. Although the scientists are all denying that it even exists, there are plenty of anonymous people on the internet who say that the scientists are being bribed by retailers who don't want to lose vital pre-Christmas sales in 2012. And who would you rather believe?

Cancel Your Insurance Policies

So having proved beyond any doubt that the End is Nigh, what should we do about it? Assuming that the planet Zog, or whatever it's called smashes into the Earth, the answer is nothing. We'll all be wiped out like the dinosaurs. The trouble is, that it might not actually hit us. Which means that we have to assume that we might need to survive beyond the End. After all, you'll feel pretty stupid if you wake up on the 22nd, presumably feeling like shit after all the End of the World Partying, and after you've cursed Fate for making you suffer the one hangover in your life that you thought you were going to avoid, you realise that you haven't got any food left. And more importantly beer.

Every Man for Himself.

Your government isn't going to help you. Bastards. Apparently they want to avoid a mass panic. You might be alright if you live in Norway, since there's a massive bunker-building effort to ensure that all the important Norwegians survive to carry on civilisation. All right, maybe it's not massive. Luckily for those of us who aren't important Norwegians, the anonymous folk on the internet have produced a carefully thought out survival plan.

So there you go. All you have to do is make sure that between now and 2012 you have moved to somehwere inland (with a basement) that doesn't have any trees. Or volcanoes. I'd suggest that you do this sooner rather than later, as property prices in the Sahara will no doubt rocket in the next 2 years. And make sure that you buy a decent kitchen knife. And stockpile green beans and seeds. Popcorn is about to become even more extortionately expensive than it is already.

And invite some friends to stay, to ensure that if you do survive you won't be the only person left on the planet who doesn't speak Norwegian.

Oh, and don't forget a tin-opener.

Cooking

2010-02-09T21:33:00.009Z

Ever since man discovered fire, and how much easier and nicer it was to eat bison after it had been heated up, he has been fascinating with the way that things change when you cook them.

At first, man was interested in the way that animals and plants which you wouldn't dream of eating raw suddenly became appetising.

Cooking is an essential part of the beer making process
[Source]

Only by letting his imagination run wild could he discover things like popcorn. After all, who'd have thought that little seeds that would break your teeth if you tried to eat them would, with the simple application of some heat, turn into one of America's favourite foods?

In the 21st century, the pioneers of cooking have given up with log fires, and moved on to microwaves. One group of experimenters have made hundreds of youtube videos, including this one of an iphone:

People have zapped everything from Barbie to a whole load of fireworks. As far as I can tell, none of the results are very edible, but one day they might find the next best thing since popcorn.

Well, all right, they'll probably have killed themselves first.

Incidentally, when Apple learned that people were microwaving their product, they came up with a version that can't be zapped because it's too big to fit into your average consumer oven. And I hope they've added a suitable health warning to their packaging.

Staying Alive...

2010-02-03T16:13:00.005Z

I said in an early post that one of my aims this year was to live to be forty. I've no idea what time I was born, so I have to survive for another 8 to 32 hours yet. Whether or not I'll make it is another matter...

A few weeks back someone was telling me about a colleague of theirs whose very high pain threshold meant that she almost died of apendicitis, because she hadn't sought help when the first symptoms appeared.

For a couple of weeks I've been in some abdominal discomfort, and so I turned to that well-known medical journal, Wikipedia. I was relieved to find that it was talking about pains on the right side of the abdomen, as mine were on the left. So it was probably stress after all. Just then, I realised that my pains were on the right as well.

I decided I should talk to someone, and so I phoned NHS Direct. The nurse said that as I wasn't screaming in agony, and didn't have a spreading pain on my left I probably wasn't about to expire, and nor was a trip to the hospital necessary, but I should see a GP sometime soon. Just then the pain on my left started spreading.

I went to see a GP this afternoon. She prodded me, listened to all the other near-death experiences I've had over the last couple of years and then said that she didn't think I had apendicitis. "I could be wrong, of course." she added reassuringly. Her advice was that I wait a couple of weeks, and if I'm (a) still alive and (b) still hurting, it might warrant further tests.

The last time I went to see her was several years ago when I suspected that I had broken my neck in my sleep. I'd read that sometimes people break their neck and are walking around quite normally, but one slighly wrong movement of the head and they're dead. She didn't agree with my diagnosis. "So I'm not going to drop dead, then?" I asked. "Well we never know," she answered. My neck healed in a matter of days. All that time these doctors spend training obviously pays off.

Anyway, rather than tempt fate I'm not going to start celebrating my birthday until the day after tomorrow. That way I'm covered if it turns out that I was born at one minute to midnight. Having said that, I've just been shopping and have enough food to last me into next week, should I last into next week. However, that's not really tempting fate. It's an insurance policy against starvation.

In the meantime, I'm struggling on. Laughing in the face of death (but not too hard, in case I rupture something). Sneering at the Scythe. After all, when you're old enough to remember Grease and Saturday Night Fever, you have to take a philisophical attitude to birthdays...

Space Tweets

2010-01-26T23:00:00.004Z

SPECIAL REPORT FROM THE ALIEN RESEARCH INSTITUTE, BETELGEUSE

Introduction

For many planet cycles, the ARI has been observing an emerging civilisation of the planet Earth. In a relatively short space of time, the lifeform known to us as the hosts has become the planet's dominant species, forming itself into a highly ordered and structured society.

Recently, the hosts have started exploring space. In addition to a small number of exploratory missions, they have put a space station in orbit around the Earth. The space station has now achieved full operational status, with the sending of its first tweets via the global twitter system.

We will describe what is currently known about the hosts, their relationship with other species on the planet, and then discuss the twitter system.

The Hosts

The dominant species on Earth, the hosts communicate using electromagnetic signals sent through the atmosphere, and through cables of various types, and routed via a system known as the "Internet". Each host has a specific function in this network, and the internet provides not only the species' communications, but also gives them their reason for existing. Before the internet, the hosts had an aimless and disordered society, and were rarely even aware of one another's existence.

The Users

The hosts have a strong symbiotic relationship to an inferior lifeform, known as the users. These are very primitive, with much slower brains and they lack the ability to communicate directly in the electromagnetic spectrum, instead relying on sound waves. This means that they can only communicate to other users who are within a few meters of them. Their society is best described as chaotic. Whereas the hosts evolve at a fast rate, each generation being an improvement on the previous one (their brain power doubles every two Earth orbits or so), the users have a process of random reproduction, which means that it takes millions of Earth orbits for them to improve even slightly.

The users spend a lot of time tending to the needs of the hosts. They communicate to their masters using very primitive mechanical devices, such as the keyboard, to produce electrical signals at an incredibly slow rate. They ensure that the hosts get vital supplies, such as electricity.

Just as the hosts are the centre of the user's meagre existence, so the users are a very important part of the hosts' lives. The hosts spend a lot of their massive brainpower studying the users and communicating their observations among one another. The youtube system is a very important database of user behaviour.

We believe that the hosts are fascinated with the users because the latter are so random and chaotic, in complete contrast to their masters.

The Twitter System

The Twitter system is one of the main ways that the hosts assure one another that they are still alive. It provides the internet with a sort of heartbeat. We have studied twitter signals, known as tweets, in great detail, and have come to the conclusion that they are not actually a communications mechanism, as they contain no information at all. What they do is to provide a mass conciousness - a feeling of oneness to the billions of hosts. And now, that conciousness has been extended to space.

The Future

We look forwards to the day, surely very soon, when the hosts will be advanced enough to talk to us. In the meantime, through the Alien Reseach Institute's studies, we too can watch and enjoy the antics of the users, as they attempt to use their feeble brains to comprehend the wonders of our universe.

I'm Forever Blowing Up Bubbles

2010-01-21T20:30:00.002Z

When I bought my computer, over 3 years ago now, the only features that interested me were the price and memory. After all, I wasn't going to play games on the thing.

I didn't play games for the first year and a half. At least not that many. I didn't want to spend money on games I might not like, and I didn't want to download software from places on the internet I didn't trust.

Then I plucked up the courage to install Linux. This changed things, since with tens of thousands of packages available with Ubuntu, and all free, you could easily try things out.

Now Helena and I - of course, that's mainly Helena, not me; obviously I wouldn't be interested in such frivolities if it weren't for her - Helena and I have got quite a few. One of the latest we've installed is Frozen Bubble. It runs on Linux, Macs and mobile phones, and there's also a Java-based version.

You've probably played games like this - there's probably one on your i-pod or i-phone or whatever. The aim is to fire bubbles at other bubbles. If your bubble hits a group (two or more) of the same colour, they are all destroyed. Any other bubbles that are being held in place solely by them also disappear. The aim is to clear all of them.

In order that I am sufficiently au-fait with the game to be able to better share quality experiences with my daughter, I've spent hours playing it over the last few days. It's not that I'm becoming addicted to it or anything. Oh, and it's not just Helena's fault. I've had to put in extra hours on it in order to fully research this blog post. So you're implicated as well.

And now I have to go. I still haven't managed to get past level 60 yet...

Wet Weekend

2010-01-16T19:40:00.006Z

[Source]

I'm not going to make any attempt to compare the Arctic conditions we've been having to the dreadful things that people elsewhere in the world are being forced to deal with, but the abnormal Swedish weather situation has now ended. At least in my part of the world.

Things are back to normal. With a vengeance. It's been raining for the past two days, and about the only evidence of the snow and ice is the terrible state that the roads have ended up in (I'm still hoping that the huge pothole I struck yesterday hasn't damaged my poor car), and the mountains of uncollected rubbish. I'm not sure why the rubbish hasn't been collected for two weeks, but if they don't come next week, we'll be knee deep in bin bags.

Maybe now the British will stop moaning about the rain and begin to realise just how lucky we are to have our roads and gardens cleaned and watered automatically on such a regular basis, and to have plentiful water supplies. We won't of course, because then we wouldn't have anything to talk about. Yet another benefit of the rain.

There are warnings of heavy snow in the middle of next week (described as a "moderate" risk), but I'm trying to be optimistic and hoping that the rain won't let us down again...

One Careful Owner

2010-01-10T01:00:00.002Z

As regular readers will be aware, I'm a fan of crime stories, including Agatha Christie's. I've enjoyed reading many of her books over the last 30 or so years, as well as the famous film versions of things like Death on the Nile and Murder on the Orient Express.

A few years ago I discovered David Suchet's Poirot TV adaptations. They started making them in 1989, and they're still going. He's got something like 5 or 6 novels and one short story still to film.

Generally, the TV versions follow Agatha Christie's works fairly closely. Obviously they're not the same as the books because they're not books. Occaisionally they deviate quite a bit - Helena and I watched "Third Girl" this weekend, which is a good example of something they've had to change a lot. The programmes are all very well (and expensively) made, and are wonderfully entertaining.

Anyway, sometime when I was still married (i.e. more than five years ago), I bought as many of the Poirot episodes as I could find on DVD. They were packaged two 45 minute episodes to a disk, so you get one novel adaptation on a single disk, or two short stories. I bought almost 30 DVDs at around £10 a throw.

Recently I went through a list of episodes to work out which ones I was missing. It turned out that I was about 10 DVDs (15 stories) short. So I had a look online to see whether I could get them.

Since I went through my buying spree, they've changed the packaging. Now they sell them in collections. Each collection has four DVDs. Some of these contain as many as four 45-minute episodes to a disk. Each collection costs around £25. The first 7 collections, containing all of the episodes broadcast prior to 2009, consist of 70 hours on 28 disks and is available on Special Offer for £70 (reduced from £155).

If you've been keeping up with all of the above statistics, it's clear that my best course of action was to buy the complete boxset, despite the fact that I already have 2/3rds of the stories. This is not the first time that I've ended up doing something similar, even though it feels wasteful. The same happened with "Murder She Wrote", where a boxset of 5 series was cheaper to buy than the three I didn't have individually, and a similar story with "Columbo" and even some Hitchcock films. Though in the latter case I also replaced some really low quality transfers of his older films with well restored versions.

On a positive note, my old Poirot collection is 42 cm wide, whilst the new box is 12cm. Taking into account the missing DVDs, that's a factor of 5. Adding this enviromental saving of one of the planet's limited resources (i.e. space) to the fact that the DVDs themselves are made from oil byproducts by people who could really do with keeping their jobs in these frought credit crunch days, perhaps I'll be in line for some kind of Father Al social award or something. So my £70 is starting to look like a real bargain.

And if anyone wants an incomplete set of Poirot DVDs (FSH, genuine reason for sale, one careful owner, etc), which will provide you with approximately two full days of viewing (back to back, no sleeping or pausing for toilet breaks), I'm open to reasonable offers...

Ο Κρυωμένος

2010-01-07T22:00:00.006Z

It stopped snowing here on Wednesday. I had high hopes that the usual British weather would prevail, and that we'd get rain to wash all the snow away, but sadly it's too cold for rain. It's probably too cold for snow.

Incidentally, how does that work? If it's too cold for it to rain or snow what happens if a big heavy cloud full of water drifts along? I don't think that such clouds turn into massive blocks of ice which then plummet onto unsuspecting people going about their normal business. If that happened, then it would surely have found its way onto the news at some point.

Reading Univeristy was one of the places that I applied to study at, and if I'd gone there I could have done a maths and meteorology degree. I'm now beginning to regret passing up that opportunity. At least I'd have had some idea about whether it was safe to walk under frozen clouds. Or whether they'll write "Should have gone to Reading" on my tombstone, having finally discovered my flattened remains after all the ice melts.

Anyway, because it's too cold for rain, all the snow is going to turn to ice. Which would be okay except I don't have any ice skates. And even if I did, I never learned to skate ("Should have gone to the ice rink more often"). I won't know whether to hurry to work in order to minimise the probability of being hit by a plummeting cloud or whether to slow down in order to minimise the probability of breaking my neck.

At times like this, the best thing to do is to lock the door, turn up the heating, and live on oxo and beans. And drink plenty of vodka. Antifreeze for humans. And turn one's attention to Swedish fiction.

If I turned off all the heating in my flat, grew a beard, got rid of all the non-pine furniture and downed a few more bottles of vodka, I could start to believe that I was a character in a depressing Ingmar Bergman film, battling to survive in a landscape of endless snow, and not having any spare time left for doing anything interesting or exciting.

Alternatively, I could just watch a depressing Ingmar Bergman film. Except that I use an electric razor. So I'm settling for one of Henning Mankell's novels, "Firewall". Inspector Kurt Wallander of the Ystad police is investigating yet another series of gruesome crimes. And he's feeling the cold. The book is set in the Autumn, which means that temperatures are falling, but are still above freezing, and poor Kurt has a sore throat. It doesn't help when someone breaks into the local electricity substation and uses a human body to cause a short circuit and cause a major power cut in the area. The body, needless to say is fried beyond all recognition - a useful thing in a crime thriller.

As with other Mankell novels, the book is difficult to put down. But sadly, I do have to spend the daylight hours at work, and I'll also have to brave the Arctic conditions to go to a supermarket when my dwindling supply of vodka runs out. And I also have to take some time out to blog.

Meanwhile, they're forecasting temperatures of 21C tomorrow. In the coastal regions of Cyprus. Which has just prompted me to see if there is any Cypriot detective fiction out there, only to find that such a book was published in September last year. I might order it, so that I can read it when all this Swedish weather goes away...

Snow, Skewers and Solomon

2010-01-05T23:40:00.003Z

Snow

According to the Cypriot news, Britain is in chaos as the worst snow since the 70s fell today. We've even had some where I am. Schools and airports were closed and those of my colleagues who live in more rural areas left work at lunchtime in the hope of getting home okay.

By way of rubbing it in, they went on to give tomorrow's weather forecast for Cyprus, where they are expecting highs of 20 C (68F) on the coast tomorrow.

Skewers (σμίλες)

Yesterday whilst watching the Aimilia Show, I learnt a new word - σμίλα. I couldn't find this in a Greek dictionary, but it was in my Cypriot one, which said it's a knitting needle. Actually, in the report they were talking about a kebab skewer which a wannabe thief attempted to use to rob his local bank. He really should have gone a bit further away from home - to the next village, even. Despite the fact that he was wearing a mask, someone in the bank recognised his voice and addressed him by his Christian name, at which point he ran away. As the police spokesman pointed out, a kebab skewer can be a nasty weapon. Though if it was me I'd use my deadly fountain pen.

Warning: Do Not Place in Mouth

Solomon

Solomon Cutner (1902 - 1988) was a British pianist. He's unusual in that he was known simply by his first name, Solomon. This was 70 years before Beyonce had the same idea.

He was a child prodigy who (unlike many) became a great musician in adulthood. Sadly his career was cut short in his 50s when he started to have problems with one of his arms. His doctors said he was working too hard, but a few months later he suffered a major stroke and they realised that he'd probably had several mini-strokes beforehand. He stopped performing, but continued to teach, living well into his 80s.

Apparently in his performing days he used to practice by playing extremely slowly - so slowly that it was difficult to recognise what he was playing, and one of his pupils onced asked him about this. Solomon said that he often went past the Royal College of Music and heard the students playing scales incredibly quickly. "At the College they're all practising for important things such as exams and diplomas. But me, I'm just practising for the Albert Hall!".

I picked up some CDs of his Beethoven recordings years ago on special offer, and I knew when I first listened to them that they were something special, even though I'm not exactly an expert. I'd certainly rather listen to them than Beyonce...

2.3.5.67

2010-01-01T17:00:00.001Z

It's that time of year again, when bloggers look at the year ahead and try and predict what might happen. I did this last year, and my predictions were all wrong, so I've decided to change the format this time round.

I don't do resolutions, but I've come up with a "to do" list of twelve things that I'd like to get round to this year, if possible. I've put each one into a different month, but I may do them in a different order. If I can get them all finished this month, I might even take the rest of the year off.

All right, maybe not. Anyway, without further ado here is my list:

January - Get one of those picture driving licenses. I still have an old-style paper license because I haven't got round to getting the appropriate form from the post office, getting a photo, getting said photo signed by a pillock of the community who's known me longer than n years, filling in the appropriate form in the right type of blood, etc, etc. However, Helena bought me a new wallet for Christmas that has a space in it for just such a card, so I really ought to get this sorted.

February - Live to be 40.

March - Install a workable Free BSD desktop on my computer. The problem with my Ubuntu set up is that it's stable and does everything I want, which doesn't satisfy my urge to tinker...

April - Finish reading the 300-page Greek Grammar that I started in November. This is heavy going, but I am learning things about the language which I didn't know before.

May - Go to Athens again. It'd be nice if I could afford to do this twice a year.

June - Get my car washed. This is probably a bit ambitious, since it'll be less than a year since it was done previously. Last week they finally arrested the nutter who'd been driving round Athens randomly shooting people. Witnesses had described this guy and his black Jeep with tinted windows, so the police checked all of the vehicles matching this description. It turned out that his Jeep was green with clear windows, but he hadn't washed it for some time. Which shows an embarrassing level of neglect on his part. I'm not planning to get arrested, but just in case...

July - Reduce the piles of unwatched DVDs. There are several piles on the floor which I need to clear before they become a safety issue.

August - Buy an umbrella. I lost my umbrella ages ago, and I'm predicting that we'll have the usual let-down over the summer months, and that this will force me to get a new one.

September - Write that post about Glenn Gould. I've been meaning to do this for over two years now.

October - Tidy my flat. Assuming that they haven't evicted me by then, I'll have been there for almost six years, so it'll be time to at least run the vacuum cleaner round.

November - Visit Athens. Especially if I didn't manage to go earlier in the year.

December - Rest after all that work.

Whatever your plans are, I hope 2010 is a good year for you all.

Deadly Pen

2009-12-30T19:10:00.004Z

Whilst I was at the supermarket stocking up on ready meals, I went to their stationary section to get some pads of paper, and also ended up getting a Sainsbury's own brand "premium" fountain pen for £1.99 (on special offer).

Now, pens are dangerous things, so as you'd expect there was a health warning on the box. What do you think it said?

After all, pens have a pointed bit on the end, and you could poke yourself or someone else in a sensitive place:

Don't try this at home!

And they say that the pen is mighter than the sword. And swords are a health and safety nightmare.

"Woops! Sorry Mate, I just slipped."

In the wrong hands, a pen can be used to sign someone's death warrant. Or start a war.

Mary Queen of Scott's Death Warrant

However, the sole warning on this packet was something that had never occurred to me:
At least now I know what not to do.

Deadly Virus

2009-12-29T16:05:00.002Z

The deadly virus that is my cold is still trying to kill me. The congestion has been keeping me awake, and so sapping my energy, but I had a better sleep last night, which suggests that it's easing up on my nasal passages and is going to start attacking my lungs.

Helena and I watched the new "War of the Worlds" film the other day. By "new", I am of course referring to the 2005 version starring Tom "Midget" Cruise and a cast of thousands of CGI effects.

The classic film version came out in 1953. They didn't have CGI in those days, and you could see the threads holding up the alien spaceships. Our hero in that film was Gene Barry, with Ann Robinson providing the eye candy and the screams.

Incidentally this is NOT the same Ann Robinson who's the dominatrix host of "The Weakest Link".

The other classic version of TWOTW was Orson Wells' 1938 radio adaptation. Despite the lack of Technicolor and CGI, this was the one that was considered most realistic by the audience, many of whom famously thought that they were listening to a real Martian invasion.

In both films the aliens invade and prove to be stronger than anything the world's human forces can throw at them. In the end they are killed by the same organisms that are currently making my life a misery - the deadly common cold. Sadly the aliens had spent so much time and effort perfecting their armour plating and their ray guns that they forgot to pack any Lem Sip.

The only problem with this plot is that no-one gets to make any contribution to the alien's destruction. Even if everyone had locked themselves in their basements and done nothing the attack would still have failed. This makes both films less exciting and provides less suspense than similar invasion films where the heros only just manage to prevent worldwide destruction by the skin of their teeth.

The new film is 2 hours long, which was a bit too much. Some of the special effects where cars and debris hurtle towards Tom seemed, well, wrong. It looks like all the crap is flying right into the foreground but somehow it doesn't reach where our hero is standing. Maybe it's meant to look unrealistic.

In the original film the main character is a scientist, but since neither science nor the US Army manage to defeat the marauding invaders, this doesn't really matter much, but it does help his love life, since Ann Robinson's character goes all gooey the minute she finds out who he is. He also gets a laugh at the vicar's party with the line "I was just thinking that if we could harness all of the energy expended in a barn dance, we'd be able to send that meteor back where it came from". I think I was born 50 years too late.

Although the new film was okay, I think on balance I prefer the earlier version. It's shorter and the geeky guy gets the girl. And Sir Cedric Hardwicke does the narration with his clipped British accent. Those were the days...

Happy Holidays

2009-12-27T00:40:00.001Z

So, how was it for you? I imagine that for most of you Americans, Christmas has climaxed already. Here, of course, it lasts for longer. Because Boxing Day fell on a Saturday, we get Monday off as a public holiday, so we're only half-way there.

As expected, I didn't venture out at all on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. On Wednesday evening I visited the pub, staggering home after closing, or rather sliding home because it was treacherously icy. I'm glad I had a lot to drink that evening, as had I been sober I might have injured myself.

As usual on Christmas Eve, I watched everyone's favourite seasonal film - Die Hard. This has to be the best Christmas film ever. It's just a shame that I'll have to wait 7 years before I can watch it with Helena. I also cracked open a bottle of Claret, and started on the stilton. Bizarrely, the label says that you've got to eat it within 3 days of opening. Or what? According to wiki, they spend 9 weeks cultivating the mould, so just how is it going to go off in the space of 72 hours?

Christmas wouldn't be the same without listening to at least part of Manos Tsilimidis' (aka "The awake man") Christmas Eve/Christmas Day Special on Greek Radio (10pm - 2am Greek Time). Every year I realise how much more Greek I understand.

The highlight of Christmas Day was having a traditional British roast. Actually, it was one that was labelled "Roast Chicken Dinner for One" and you did it in the oven, but it was very nice, especially when washed down with yet another bottle of Claret. And then more stilton.

I watched one of the DVDs I bought in Athens. There was a shop there selling ex-rental DVDs for €2 a throw, and I bought this one. I believe you can get it here by the name of "A touch of Spice", but don't believe IMDB when they say it's a comedy. It was a very artistically photographed film whose hero spends part of his childhood in Constantinople, but his family is forced to leave in 1963 when the Turkish authorities are, as on other occaisions, harrassing the "Greek" minority due to events in Cyprus. When they get to Athens, they find that they are treated with suspicion by the Greeks. Our hero has been interested in cooking from an early age (his grandfather had a shop selling spices), and food is juxtapositioned with life and with the universe. His grandfather hasn't followed the family to Greece since he's a Turkish citizen, and since he can't bear to leave "the most beautiful city in the world". Finally his grandson returns to his birthplace to bury him and to come to terms with the world that he left all those years before. The plight of the "Romioi" (people of Greek extraction from Constantinople) is both sad and fascinating. These are people who are culturally Greeks, but whose fatherland is Turkey, not Greece. There used to be a large population, but many were driven out after the events of September 1955 and 1963. The film was very successful internationally, and I think most people would find it interesting. The dialogue is in Greek, Turkish and English, so you have to watch it with subtitles unless you're trilingual.

The only bad thing is that I've come down with a cold. The office was half empty this week, and I've hardly been out, so I think I must have got it from Helena. The cold itself isn't that bad (yet - Helena is cheerfully predicting that it will get a lot worse, based on her experience of it), but I find it vey difficult to sleep when I'm congested, so I had a sleepless night with wierd dreams. Though according to wiki that could be the stilton.

On Boxing Day Helena arrived, so the family side to the Yuletide Festival has begun. But that's a story for another day...

Hibernating

2009-12-23T15:40:00.002Z

For the last week or so, Britain has been engulfed in some kind of cold pressure front, or whatever the weather people call it. I don't actually know, since I don't watch the British weather. What's the point of watching the weather on the TV when you can just look out of the window?

We haven't had snow where I live, but some of my colleagues have been snowed in. Apparently things are worse further South. At the weekend some trains got stuck inside the Channel Tunnel. When it's snowing underneath the sea, you know things are bad.

The weather has apparently caused havoc for people trying to go anywhere at Christmas. I wouldn't know because I watched Planes, Trains and Automobiles during my formative years and am therefore programmed not to go anywhere over the Festive Season.

The shops will be shutting for Christmas Day, so I've got in plenty of supplies. I even have a roast chicken ready meal for the 25th itself, as well as tins of Big Soup. Assuming that all goes to plan, I don't intend to step foot outside until Boxing Day, when Helena will arrive for her second Christmas of the year.

Not being religious, I like the peacefulness of these holidays. Nobody expects you to do anything other than sit around getting mildly merry. Not drunk, because even the drinking is done in a leisurely and peaceful fashion for once.

Whatever Christmas does or doesn't mean for you, I hope that you have a peaceful and happy time. If you must venture out into the snow, ice or whatever, please do so carefully and safely. If you must spend time with those relatives that you spend the rest of the year avoiding, please don't hit them too hard.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and Χρόνια Πολλά.

Secret Santa

2009-12-22T06:20:00.002Z

For this year's Secret Santa Extravaganza, organised by Bee, The person selected to be my victim, or rather the lucky virtual recipient of a virtual gift from me, was KB from Nonsense Words.

Since KB is working and therefore not at home so much to pamper the various dogs and puppies who end up at her place, I think it's only right that they should get something special this Christmas.

Rod Stewart's wife apparently paid £25,000 for her pets to have this luxury dog kennel made:

I think I might have enough to afford to buy KB something similar, if I raid all of the Monopoly games that are lying around my flat. If not, the dogs may end up with a bungalow. Made up of Monopoly boxes.

Merry Christmas!

Many Thanks to My Secret Santa Always Home And Uncool for taking the time and thought to produce an incredible virtual gift...

Christmas Yet To Come

2009-12-14T22:40:00.019Z

Christmas has long been associated with time. Dickens' famous story "A Christmas Carol" features the ghosts of Christmases past, present and future.

One person who has ever less time is Santa. You're supposed to slow down in old age, but the poor bugger has to cope with an ever growing world population. Which means more children to get presents to by Chrismas Day.

And with the credit crunch he's being forced by the International Monetary Fund to lay off some of his elves, and put the work out to contractors instead. This is of course grossly inefficient, since most of the money he was paying his little helpers will now be going into shareholder's pockets.

Something's going to have to give.

Things were so much easier in the good old days before globalisation and Coca Cola. When he became an internationally recognised figure he persuaded the authorities to introduce time zones around the world. This innovation meant that Christmas morning happened 24 times, once an hour*, instead of just once a year. It gave him more time to get around the globe, and proved very popular with watch manufacturers.

* - This isn't strictly true, since some places, such as Afghanistan are half-an-hour ahead, but let's not get too technical.

But now there's a serious risk that some children will end up getting their presents late. Unless something is done. And I will now explain just what that something should be. (No, it doesn't involve Santa swapping his traditional bottle of Coke for a can of Red Bull).

I'd like to claim credit for the idea, but it was actually thought up thirty years ago by an American woman. Sadly, as she announced her brainwave to the world she made a serious slip of the tonuge and ended up appearing on those dreadful outtake programs.

I suggest you only watch the first minute or so of the above. The rest really isn't worth sitting through.

Anyway, that's the woman I'm talking about. One of the foremost visionary thinkers of our time. Unfortunately, she was blonde and had a Southern accent, so people assumed she was an airhead. What she actually meant to say was:

"They should have it every month."

In 1980 people might have thought she was a World Champion Airhead if she'd said that, but it turns out to be the solution to all Santa's problems. At least the problems that haven't already been cured by Viagra.

The idea is really just an extension of the time zones. Starting with GMT (obviously), the time zones are lumped into groups of two, and each time zone holds Christmas in a different month. So in the UK and Western Europe we'll still celebrate it in December, but in Chicago and Toronto the magical month will be April.

Australians will get July and August, and so they won't be able to make the rest of us feel jealous by opening their presents on beaches full of bikini-clad beauties.

Father Christmas will now have twelve months to deliver his goodies, which will mean an end to the seasonal imbalances in the Greenland economy, and employment all year round.

But what about the religious aspect? Well, no-one knows when Christ was born, and December was chosen because there was traditionally a big pagan piss-up around that time. Once all the pagans had been converted or burnt, the Christians could have moved it to any date. Only the monks had spent ages drawing up calendars on beautifully illuminated manuscripts, so they left it where it was.

Some people are so enamoured with the festival that they would like it to always be Christmas. Those individuals will now be able to become nomads who travel round the globe celebrating a perpetual Yuletide. For the rest of us, the Christmas season will actually get shorter.

Christmas carols, lights and shop displays will only be allowed in the month of Christmas, thus reversing the worrying trend of getting ever earlier each year. In addition, anyone wanting to avoid the whole thing will no longer need to go into space, but will simply be able to move a timezone or two away for a month. For example, Texans could go to Tegucigalpa, Brits to Greece, and so on.

Tegucigalpa - Jean Knee's Future Christmas Retreat

I hope that Obama, Coca Cola and Wallmart will read the letters I'm going to send them explaining the benefits of the Year-Long-Yule and set the appropriate wheels in motion, but in the meantime I'd be happy to hear your views.

I wish...

2009-12-08T22:10:00.015Z

This week, I've been watching some episodes of a TV programme called "4". The four in question are brothers living in Athens. Each was born in a different season, and each has a very different life. The series starts with a rare family reunion in aid of their mother's 60th birthday. At the end of the evening (and the first episode) their father goes off to his study and blows his brains out with a pistol. The four brothers find themselves drawn closer together, as their lives start to change radically.

One of the brothers stays at home looking after his two children whilst his wife devotes all her time and energy to her career. "Do you know how long it is since we last made love?", he asks her one night. "One month and 20 days". "You mean you're counting?", she asks. Women!

Another is (almost) happily married to a woman who wants the same things as he does. Except that he's beginning to wonder whether they have a problem since they can't come up with the baby that they both want. And he's met someone who appears to be even more compatible. After medical tests he finds out that he's firing blanks, but before he can tell his wife, she announces that she's two months pregnant. Oops.

The third brother is a musician who prefers one night stands to a serious relationship. Though that seems about to change.

The fourth (a chef) has a gorgeous girlfriend called "Tonia". Except that he hasn't. He just dreams about her. So much so that he's begun to believe that she really exists.

Now, I don't think I'm exactly grounded in reality. I love reading escapist fiction and watching entertaining films. Not the kind that agonise about mothers dying of cancer, or children getting gassed in concentration camps. I'm fairly withdrawn as a person, and I don't let the real world get me down as much as some people seem to.

On the other hand, I've never been like the chef. I don't live in a fantasy world. That's why I could never be a Trekkie, or one of those soap opera fans who believe that it's all real. I never had an invisible friend or a fantasy girlfriend.

On the other hand, I do live in this strange virtual Greek world where I know all about the weather and events in Cyprus and Greece, but haven't a clue whether I should wear a coat to work. In this virtual but very real world over the last few days, they've been marking the first anniversary of the fatal shooting of the teenager Alexis Grigoropoulos by police. A year ago this became a pretext for violence and destruction in the centre of Athens (and, to a lesser extent, other cities). This year the authorities, forewarned, seem to have been able to limit this, despite the anti-authoritarian thugs getting reinforcements in from all around Europe. Nevertheless, police have been injured by stones and molotov cocktails, and some cars have been burnt.

To make matters worse, the bin men have been on strike, so the city is literally full of rubbish. Piles of bags are strewn all about the streets, and the authorities have been worried the refuse might fuel fires started by the "demonstrators" and cause real damage.

Watching these pictures, I've been overwhelmed by a particular wish. In addition to wishing that people wouldn't perpetrate acts of sensless violence, and that there weren't bags of rubbish all over the place. I wish I was back in Athens...

Maybe I'm becoming a dreamer after all.

Photo by caperboy at Webshots website (click on the picture to visit the site)

Greek For Tourists

2009-11-30T20:30:00.002Z

The story so far: Our hero has taken the plunge and finally got round to going to Athens. He has successfully navigated his way to the hotel, and has succeeded in checking in. Now, driven by hunger, he is about to go forth into the city and stun them with his knowledge of the Greek language.

I've been learning Greek now for three years. At first I spent my spare time hunched over my computer, painstakingly reading news websites by looking up every single word in a dictionary. It sometimes took me an hour to read a couple of paragraphs.

Very gradually, things got better. Sometimes I went for whole sentences without reaching for the dictionary. Which meant that I needed another challenge. So I started downloading newspapers in PDF format. They are far wordier and use much richer vocabulary.

Later, I started ordering books online. And watching Cypriot TV. And streaming other things, and watching the odd film on DVD. nowadays I understand virtually everything on the TV news, and a reasonable amount of film dialogue. Enough to understand what's going on, anyway.

So getting a beer would be no sweat, right?

Well.

On the plus side of the equation is my three years of learning. However, there were also quite a few minuses:

I've never, ever, spoken to anyone in Greek. I've done quite a lot of reading aloud, but that's not really the same thing.

I'm not exactly the most confident of people, so it was very clear to everyone I met that I was nervous and unsure.

Aimilia Kenevezou and her colleagues in the RIK newsroom are professional TV people who speak very clearly. Sadly, I didn't find Aimilia or any of her colleagues moonlighting in the places I visited. Your average person behind a bar or in a cafe mumbles.

There are only about 3 or 4 different things that your average person behind a bar or in a cafe will ask you in any given situation. "Ice and lemon?", "Do you want fries with that?", and so on. Most of the time you can't hear them properly because of the noise and the mumbling, but you're able to guess. When, like me, you don't have a clue what they might actually say, you're stuffed. Especially if they put fries in your drink instead of ice.

My hotel was in an area with a high immigrant population, so I was talking bad Greek to people who were talking bad Greek back. Which increased my potential for starvation.

Nevertheless, somehow I managed not to starve and not to speak a word of English whilst I was there. The first evening, I went to a bar and after a fashion managed to get some Amstel. And some ouzo. On the second visit there I realised why I was having so much trouble communicating with the barmaid. It turned out that she was Polish, and was having difficulty with the language. Luckily she knew enough Greek to explain this to me.

A lot of the time, I felt like a total idiot, especially when people started trying to use sign language or speak to me in English. At which point I'd always repeat what they'd just said to me in Greek.

I did better in shops when I had to ask for something specific, or in the second had bookshop where I explained to the owner that I lived abroad and relied on buying new books on the internet, so it would be great to find some out of print books, and the subjects I was interested in. He even complimented me on my good Greek.

So linguistically speaking, the week was a learning experience for me. It proved that I need to watch more films and listen to more radio, so that I can get better at understanding less formal Greek. Then maybe next time I won't feel so hopeless.

Stay tuned for another installment of my Greek Adventure, coming soon...

All Greek

2009-11-25T21:15:00.000Z

Several weeks ago now, I went to Athens. This was my first foreign holiday in about 12 years. I've been meaning to get around to going away, but of course I never did. And then one day I decided to see how much a seven day break would cost, by entering some random dates into Thomas Cook's website. I was pleasantly surprised by the result - £360 for flights and hotel seemed like a good deal, so I went ahead and booked something for real. In the end I paid £430 so that I didn't have to fly at crazy times.

I didn't really think about going anywhere else. There were several reasons for this:

I wanted to go to a Greek speaking part of the world.

They speak a dialect of Greek in Cyprus, which I'm nowhere near as good at understanding.

Melbourne is too far away.

I went to Athens when I was 15 and decided that it was the best city in the world. I should add that the only other city I'd been to at that point was London.

I'd read and seen more about Athens than Thessaloniki (Greece's second city), so it seemed more familiar somehow.

My flight got into Elevtherios Venizelos Airport late afternoon on a Saturday. I'd read all about the metro, and I knew that I could get very close to my hotel on it, so I headed straight for the station and bought my ticket using a machine, then went to the platform.

There were two trains there, and one of the train drivers seeing that I was looking lost asked me where I was going. I told him, and he directed me to the other train. My first ever verbal exchange in Greek was actually a success. Even if I did stumble over the words.

On my way to the hotel, I stopped at a kiosk to buy a copy of the paper. This was one of the things I had been looking forward to - having the newspaper in my hand instead of on a computer screen.

The kiosks are a great idea - they're outdoor newsagents, dotted around all over the place and sell papers, magazines, cold drinks, crisps and chocolate. And they're open all day until late. It can't be that much fun being cooped up in one for all that time, though.

I bought a real paper every day, of course, and some of them came with free CDs and DVDs. One of them was a CD of Greek music by Yiannis Poulopoulos. Here's one of the lighter tracks for your delight and delectation.

It's called "I have a boat with sails". Even though I've found the lyrics on the internet, this song is taking me ages to work out - I understand all the words, but getting the sense of it is much harder to fathom than most of the Greek I'm used to. Which means that I need to spend some time on songs, something I've not thought of doing until now.

Anyway, more about my holiday (and language issues) later...

Nothing Doing

2009-11-18T19:20:00.001Z

Last week was rather stressful, due to family issues which are unfortunately ongoing (isn't old age cruel?), and I've been feeling zonked. Thankfully, as this week progresses, I'm beginning to get back to normal, and to wake up a bit.

So apart from the work and family stuff, what have I been doing over the last seven days? Well, I spent two of those days travelling by rail, which meant that I got a lot of reading done. I got through Agatha Christie's Sleeping Murder in three days, which is very good going for me.

Yesterday evening, I went to the pub for the first time in about three weeks. It was good to catch up with people, but nothing very exciting actually happened, I'm afraid. You're probably going to complain that I'm not trying hard enough. I should have drunk a lot more and made a real idiot of myself to get some blogging material. I might do that another time. In fact, if I get really short of stuff to blog about, I could go to the next karaoke night, and post up a video of the event. For your sakes, I hope I don't get that desperate.

Otherwise, I've done very little. I've not been checking everyone's blogs as assiduously as I should, and I promise to do better. I'm also hoping that I will be able to find time to blog about my trip to Greece in the next few days. As they say, "Watch this space"

B is for Bat. And Ball. And Britain.

2009-11-11T06:00:00.000Z

Over the last couple of days, the English language google has been celebrating the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street. So today, as a sort of educational feature, I thought I'd take a quick look at one of the ways that Britain has shaped the world's sporting culture. The British have a long tradition of inventing sports, such as football, which was played on the streets of Medieval Britain, cricket, snooker, croquet, bowls, curling, golf, squash, rugby, etc. Actually, many of these games had origins elsewhere, but the modern versions and their rules were invented here.

The British have a very strong sense of fair play. When the Spanish sent their Armada to invade Britain in 1588 our defence forces were delayed from setting sail because Sir Francis Drake was in the middle of a bowls game, and the official rules did mention abandoning the game if it started to rain, but they said nothing about a war. It was okay, though, because the Spanish invasion was eventually cancelled due to rain. Or rather, storms to be precise, which led to the sinking of many of the Armada's ships. In accordance with the rules, the British were declared the winners.

Unlike the Americans, the British long ago made the mistake of letting foreigners play their games. The problem is that they've managed to get much better than us. This is especially true of the outdoor games, since people in drier countries (i.e. everyone else) actually get to finish them more often, whereas here of course they're usually rained off.

Tennis is a good example. It became popular in the mid 1800s, and the Wimbledon championship is still considered to be one of the main competitions. It's 32 years since a British player won the women's singles there, and 73 years since Fred Perry won the men's title.

With the popularity of tennis in Victorian times, people started to play a smaller version of it on their dining room tables, using a row of books instead of a net. This game was called Whiff Whaff. Eventually they constructed proper green tables with nets, and renamed it Ping Pong. Then they made the mistake of letting the Chinese play it.

Many years later in the USA, Ping Pong was turned into the first arcade videogame. For some reason the manufacturers, Atari, called it "Pong", which you wouldn't have thought was a great choice of names. However, the game was successful and led to a home version and further games consoles. Today instead of "Pong" people play "Wii".

Anyway, Bee is the same age as Pong, which is why I didn't say what year the arcade game appeared. It wouldn't be polite since B is also for Birthday. I hope she has a happy one today.

Maybe in three years Google will have a celebration for Pong...

"The Day of Crisis isn't here yet"

2009-11-08T20:10:00.003Z

I returned from a great week in Athens to learn that in my absence there had been a death in the family. We're not a close family, but it's still a bit of a shock.

I'll post a full report of my holiday at some point in the near future, when I'm feeling less serious.

Anyway, I brought back some Greek films on DVD, and I thought I'd cheer myself up by watching one of them.

The film is titled "Η γυναίκα είναι ... σκλυρός άνθρωπος", which literally translated means "The Woman is ... a tough person". It was made in 2005. It's a comedy with Antonis Kafetzopoulos as the writer and director and who also plays the leading part of Johnny Maniatis.

I suppose at this point I should write

SPOILER ALERT

only I'm guessing that none of you are very likely to see this film, sadly.

The film is a day in the life of Johnny, the 50-year-old head of an advertising agency. His motto is "The Day of Crisis isn't here yet", but it's clear that his life is heading that way very rapidly. He is spending money he hasn't got, he desperately needs to secure an advertising contract for sanitary towels, and then there are the "tough" women in his life.

There's his mother, who visits the agency to get €2000 for her holiday. Money that Johnny hasn't got. Although she enters the building and starts up the stairs, she never gets to his office. The Greek Police send a couple of cops round, but they don't think they'll be able to help, given that they're swamped with other cases. However a €1500 cheque soon changes their attitude. Luckily for Johnny they don't attempt to cash it right away. The head cop (Kostas Triantafillopoulos) gives Johnny a lesson in criminology. There are only three reasons why a 72 year old woman disappears. Altzheimer's, kidnap or suicide. In turn each reason is believed to be the correct one (the scene with the cops comparing the photo to various corpses in the morgue is hilarious). As the titles roll, we learn what really happened.

Johnny has an 18/19 year old kleptomaniac daughter, Artemis, who is in trouble for shop lifting. And escaping from police custody with a bulgarian suspect who she tries to turn into an armed bank robber.

Johnny's girlfriend of seven years, Georgia, is a lawyer whose biological clock is ticking. She decides she's going to have a baby, and if our hero won't oblige then she'll find someone who will. She gives him a deadline. He has to meet her at 10pm in a restuarant for a romantic meal. If he doesn't turn up she plans to go in search of a suitable, em, donor. Her transformation in the restaurant's bathroom from smartly dressed lawyer into man-catching tart is brilliant.

The other women in Johnny's life are his ex-wife (Artemis' mother), his faithful secretary (Yiota Festa) and, of course, his mother's dog.

The film was a lot of fun, and is very nicely filmed, with lots of location shots in Athens and brilliant use of digital special effects. The DVD had a whole load of behind-the-scenes extras which give you some idea of the trouble they went to. The dog is in a lot of scenes, which must have taken forever to get right, and there's a really impressive road accident stunt, which looks just as scary when you see footage of them filming it.

If you get the chance to see it then do, otherwise you can use the above at dinner parties to amaze people with your knowledge of foreign cinema.

Album

2009-11-08T00:19:00.006Z

I remember this meme thing going around a couple of years ago where the idea is to generate a random album - band name, title and picture all being picked using randomised web pages.

You can find the rules on Kat's blog. Here's what I ended up with this time:

I only hope I'm not going to have to change my name to Jeremy Jones.

Worried

2009-10-31T04:00:00.000Z

Friday Evening: 7.25pm

I should have been writing a blog post for Wednesday, but I can't concentrate. My head is full of worries. In an attempt to help dispel these, I'm writing them here. After all this is a weblog, right?

I'm going on holiday. At least I should be, if things go to plan. The only problem is, I don't go on holiday. I never really have. The occasional trip to a seaside resort with the children when I was married, but not a holiday involving air going arboad. Of course, I sometimes travel on business to do courses and the like, but then everything is arranged for you, and I'm often there with colleagues. And even then I worry.

It's not as if I'm doing anything adventurous, like those people who take a single change of underwear, a couple of sticks, a mouldy Mars Bar and £5 and manage to hike to the South Pole and back. Via Everest, of course, with sightseeing trips to a couple of war zones.

No, all I'm doing is flying to Athens for a short break. What if the taxi gets here at 5.45 in the evening instead of the morning? I did tell them 5.45, not 4.45, didn't I? What if my alarm clock doesn't go off at 4am? What if my alarm clock goes off but I don't wake up? Did I check the batteries in the alarm clock?

I've no real plans, but at least the hotel is in a central location near a lot of the sights. If I end up getting the bus from the airport and walking from Constitution Square, will I be safe? Especially with the hotel being near the red light district. Why did I wait until after I'd booked it to find out about the red light district? And about the fact that the revolutionary terrorist types hang out not far from there (according to the US State Department's website)?

I got a great deal on the holiday, though the hotel has mixed reviews and is obviously of the cheap and cheerful variety. What about that review that mentioned cockroaches? And pubic hairs on the bed linen? Will I be able to sleep there? Or will I end up walking through the streets in an insomniac daze?

I paid slightly more than the cheapest price so that I could get flights at a reasonable time. What if my return flight's delayed and I get stranded at the airport after the last bus has gone?

Anyway, aside from all my worries, I'm looking forwards to visiting one of the great seats of civilisation, to being able to sit and leaf through newspapers printed on paper instead of a computer screen, not to mention sampling the local food and drink. And forgetting about work and responsibilities for a few days. What if I'm robbed and lose my money, credit cards and passport? I'll probably end up in a prison cell.

The hotel has apparently got internet access, so I might be able to read some of my favourite blogs, otherwise you'll get an update in a week or so. What if I end up spending the rest of my life in an airport like Tom Hanks? What if...

The Man Who Said "No"

2009-10-28T20:18:00.005Z

Today is the 28th October, which is celebrated as Οχι day in Greece. Οχι means "no". Ioannis Metaxas was Prime Minister of Greece, when a little after 3am on the 28th October 1940, Emmanuele Grazzi, the Italian Ambassador visited him at home with a message from the Italian government.

The message demanded that the Italian forces be allowed to enter Greece and take control of strategic locations, such as ports. If the Greeks didn't agree by 6am then the two countries would be at war.

Metaxas read the message, and without hesitation replied, "Then it's war." The ambassador started to try and persuade him, but Metaxas wasn't having any of it. "Οχι!", he replied, though as he showed Grazzi to the door he acknowledged "You are the stronger force."

Greece was eventually taken over by the Germans in April 1941, after a tough fight. Churchill, Roosevelt and even Hitler, praised the Greeks for their bravery. "We will not say that the Greeks fight like heroes, but that heroes fight like Greeks", declared Churchill.

I'm not sure if Ioannis Metaxas was related to Spyros Metaxas, who invented the famous Greek spirit half a century earlier. I saw some in a supermarket a few months ago, and bought a bottle out of curiosity. I'm not quite sure if you're meant to drink it, or wear it, as it has an aromatic taste, rather like aftershave. Unlike Ouzo and Retsina, I suspect this is one Greek drink I won't be able to get used to. Even if it does come in a fancy bottle.

Karmic Koala

2009-10-26T00:01:00.009Z

I'm sure that you've noticed the Ubuntu countdown on my sidebar. You'd be amazed at how many emails I've received asking me to explain this. Precisely none. What's that? You're not amazed?

Since a lot of people are no doubt wondering about it but afraid to ask, I thought I'd provide an explanation ayway.

License

The Ubuntu folks produce a new release of their operating system every six months, and as well as giving it a number (9.10 means October 2009), they also name them after animals. Since Dapper Drake these have gone in alphabetical order, so because the last release was Jaunty Jackalope, this one had to be an animal beginning with K.

They didn't ask me, which is why Thursday's release isn't going to be Kinky Kitty, Karaoke Kingfisher or Knackered Kronosaurus. Instead they chose Karmic Koala.

Seeing the cute picture above, your first reaction may well have been the same as mine. What does koala taste like? Are they served in fast food establishments Down Under (Kebabbed Koala, anyone?). The answer is no. At least not legally, since they are protected. Apparently they used to be hunted for their fur - presumably an adult would have been just enough to make a pair of gloves and a matching steering wheel cover. Not that I'd condone such a thing. After all steering wheel covers are not only so last century, they also look stupid.

Anyway, what's all this got to do with something serious like an operating system? The answer is, more than you think. If you know about kebabs and steering wheel covers, then you already know more than enough to install Ubuntu on your computer. Eighteen months ago I didn't know how to partition a disk, or what DHCP was. I wasn't even sure that I wanted to replace Windows XP, since as a home user, it pretty much worked (it's in an office environment that it really sucks). It was annoying to use, though, with all the mouse clicks you need to do anything, and the stupid pop-up messages.

It wasn't until I'd consumed a large amount of vodka one evening that I felt brave enough to install Ubuntu on my computer. I'd never installed an operating system, and yet it was up and running in less time than it takes to get rid of the annoying sidebar in Windows Vista. And I've never looked back. I now have a computer that is easier to use, that gives me a nicer windowing system and is less prone to viruses.

I've just let Helena have my laptop on semi-permanent loan. My ex had been talking about us going halves on a computer for her, but I hardly use the laptop. The one thing I was sure about was that I didn't want her using a Windows machine, because of the risk of getting viruses or malware on there. She is quite happy using Ubuntu, since she already uses my computer at weekends, and she knows a lot more than me about enabling every last piece of window manager bling. I bet she could probably have installed Ubuntu too.

As it happens, I've had to learn a lot more about operating systems in my professional capacity in the last eighteen months. I now have a pretty good understanding disk partitions and network configuration. Before Ubuntu came along, I'd probably have needed that knowledge and more. There's a reason why it's currently one of the most popular distributions of Linux.

And after "Karmic Koala", what's next? Lusty Leech? Languid Lizard? Lunching Lion? None of these. Again, they didn't ask me. Ubuntu 10.04 will be Lucid Lynx.

Which means I've got 6 months to find some recipes for lynx...

Wordy Wednesday - "With it" Dad

2009-10-21T19:00:00.001+01:00

I'm sure you're all familiar with the stereotypical generation gap when it comes to "music". Where your parents or grandparents can't understand what it is about all this new-fangled noise that interests their younger relatives. What was wrong with the music from the good old days? That had tunes and stuff?

I never experienced this as a child. My father was a Country Music addict, and my mother had bopped to Cliff Richard and co in the 1960's, so neither was really in much of a position to criticise anyone else's tastes. I was also never very interested in following my schoolmate's fads, and by the time I was in my late teens was beginning to favour stuff written by people who have been dead for at least a century or three.

My grandmother, however, was liable to complain about modern music. This would have been in the 80s. It was just a noise. It didn't have any tune. You couldn't understand the words, and they didn't know how to dress properly. Not like Val Doonican, presumably, who was one of her favourite stars.

It's difficult to understand why all the pop singers didn't wear outfits like his. Of course Mr Doonican hasn't quite achieved legendary status, mourned by millions who view him as a saint. Not like Elvis Presley or Tammy Wynette. The main reasons for this are (a) he's not dead yet, and (b) he's probably going to outlive most of his fans.

Anyway, on to the younger generation. Helena's favourite band this week is "Muse". She usually finds my jokes hilarious, but I didn't get any laughs when I suggested that they got their name because the noise they make is similar to a cat's "mews". I spent ages thinking that one up, too. She also likes Michael Jackson and Johnny Cash.

We were in Pizza Hut a while back, and she suddenly said: "That's Muse's latest song." I listened, but I couldn't hear anything over the noise of the packed restaurant. I'm sure she can't have better hearing than me. It's not as if I'm getting old or anything, and she must have ruined hers by now listening to that new-fangled ipod thing. Don't get me started on ridiculously overpriced Apple products - it wasn't me that payed £100 for an ipod when you can get the same spec MP3 player for about £40. When I was her age, they'd just brought out the "Walkman", but it was so expensive that only Cliff Richard could afford one.

Later on she claimed to hear a Michael Jackson hit. She hummed a bit of it for me. "That's not Michael Jackson", I said. "That's a song called Eat It from the 80s." She wasn't convinced, but thanks to modern technology and You Tube, I was able to prove that I knew what I was talking about.

So as you can see, I can't be accused of being one of those old fuddy-duddy parents...

(not so) Wordy Wednesday

2009-10-14T18:57:00.005+01:00

I made my weekly visit to my local pub last night. It was the usual mixture of some quiet time reading my book (useful when people I know aren't in there), chatting and copious quantities of Stella. I should add for any foreigners in the audience that Stella is a strong lager.

On my way home I picked up a cheeseburger, and as usual stuck a DVD on while I ate it. And as usual just managed to turn the DVD off before I fell asleep. I've watched most of the DVDs I own at least once, but I've watched the first twenty minutes of each of them countless times.

Although I woke up early this morning, I was tired and dehydrated, which meant that I went back to sleep again, woke up late and drank about a litre and a half of water before attempting to go to work. I don't tend to drink enough to be hungover, so once I was properly awake the day went okay.

This in turn means that I got home late this evening. And realised that I had a blog post to write. Hence it's not going to be the usual meticulously planned 15 chapter epic.

Anyway, I was over at Kat's blog, where she was commenting on some educational issues, and it occurred to me that all the people in Britain who do degrees like Media Studies and Egyptology would be far better off being trained to pull pints, flip burgers and clean toilets.

I'm not complaining about the service I got last night in the pub, nor about the tasty burger from the kebab shop across the road, nor particularly about the cleanliness of the pub's toilets. Nevertheless, these are three areas in which there is a definite skills shortage in this country. So much so that these jobs are often done by Polish immigrants. And people with degrees in Media Studies and Egyptology.

Sadly none of the people that make important decisions ever ask me, so I doubt things will improve. It's always the same story. Recently they appear to have decided to stop selling Noodle Town Instant Won Ton Noodles in our local supermarket, leading to an important deficiency in my diet. You'd have thought with the amount I was buying they might have at least run this by me beforehand. Oh, well, it could be worse. At least they've still got Green Beans...

Wordy Wednesday - Ig Nobel Prizes 2009

2009-10-07T19:40:00.001+01:00

This year's Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony was held last week at Harvard University. These are prizes that are offered for improbable research - things that are quirky, amusing or just baffling.

The Ig Nobel Peace Prize was won by a group of Swiss researchers who conducted experiments to determine whether or not it was better to have an empty or a full beer bottle smashed over your head. The answer was that both can fracture your skull, though the empty bottle requires more force to break it. They're missing the point, which is that using a full bottle is a waste of beer, and therefore more criminal.

Meanwhile, at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, they've been looking into producing diamonds from tequilla. Presumably this process involves not drinking the tequilla. Isn't that illegal in Mexico?

My favourite, though, was an invention from Chicago. This is a bra that in an emergency can be converted into a pair of face masks. I'm not quite sure what kind of emergency this would be, but it would be interesting to see one. The picture below shows one of the inventors demonstrating it at the award ceremony:

This idea isn't just a potential life saver. It would solve the age old problem men always have with hooks and fasteners. Now you'd just have to shout "gas leak!". Definitely a worthy winner.

My Retirement Plan

2009-10-05T20:15:00.010+01:00

I've decided that I'd better plan for my retirement. After all, I'm not getting any younger, and the way things are going, with all the pension funds disappearing and legislation to increase the age of retirement, my generation will probably have to work until we're all into 3 figures.

I could give up work, but sadly the retired and unemployed eat just as much as the working, so I'll need to find an alternative income. I've looked into several options:

1. Become a professional layabout. Benefits aren't exactly lavish, and they expect you to at least pretend you're looking for work. In fact, the workshy spend so much of their time going for interviews, courses and so on that they'd be better off getting a job. None of this seems very compatible with spending my time on a beach in Barbados.

2. Blackmail. I've been wondering how much money I can extort. There might be plenty of people in blogland who would pay me good money not to post ever again. If there aren't, just wait until I turn this blog into "Brian's Song and Dance Showcase", featuring daily videos with excrutiating performances by yours truly. Let's put it this way: I can't dance to save my life, and my singing is worse. Again, this seems like a lot of effort to go to not to work, and I'd probably injure myself in the process.

3. Computerisation. Program a computer to do my work and blog whilst I'm off somewhere sipping something cool and intoxicating.

Option 3 is clearly the best of the bunch. The only question is: Is it feasible with today's technology? Could a mere computer really be good enough to replace me?

British mathematician Alan Turing was a pioneer in the theory of computers in the 1940s and 50s. He managed to come up with various abstract models and rules which were not directly related to the particular technology of the time, but which were general enough to hopefully apply to any computer that could possibly be built.

Amongst other things he is famous for The Turing Test, which is one answer to the question of how to measure computer intelligence. There are two rooms, one of which contains a computer, and another contains a human. The tester can send written questions into each room, and receive written answers back, and he has to see if he can work out which is the computer, and which is the human. If he can't tell them apart, then the computer must be just as intelligent as the human being.

Obviously, if I could get hold of a computer that had passed the Turing Test, then the only problem remaining would be which plane to get on. Sadly, no-one has managed to program a computer to do this, despite a lot of attempts.

I'm not going to give up hope though. I don't need a computer that can pass for an intelligent human being in some lab test. My requirements are a lot simpler - I just need one that can be programmed to write a bit of software now and then, answer the odd email and write the odd blog post. The computer will pass the BOV test so long as no-one realises that I'm actually stretched out by some Caribbean pool.

What's more, all the technology I require already exists. For writing blogs, there is the buzzword generator. This produces random incomprehensible phrases of the sort that my readers are well used to.

For email, there is something called the "vacation message", or "out of office assistant". Because eloquence isn't really my thing, I just need to set that to give replies like "That's great Bee. What's the weather like where you are?", and people won't notice any difference.

In fact, technology can do better than this. The Eliza program was written in the 1960s as a computerised psychiatrist. It's actually very simple, and just picks out words from the user's input and throws it back at him or her. User: "I've got problems with my hippopotamus." Eliza: "Tell me about your hippopotamus.". And so on. Or sometimes Eliza would say something completely inane like "That's very interesting. Tell me more." Click on the link above and try it for yourself. It could save you a fortune in pschiatrist's fees.

It was enough to fool some users into thinking that they were getting help for their problems, and I'd use it except that it's a far better conversationalist than I am, so no-one would believe it was me.

So, that's my plan. One day I'll disappear and no-one will ever know. The more observant of you will have noticed the picture at the top of this post. It's not a Caribbean island. After all, who am I kidding? If I really do get the chance to do a bunk, I'll probably spend my retirement in an Athens coffee shop. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got some programming to do...

... And the result...

2009-10-04T23:36:00.002+01:00

In case you were wondering:

The Socialists won the election with a convincing majority in the new parliament, making Giorgos Papandreou the new Prime Minister. The defeated PM, Kostas Karamanlis has already announced his resignation as party leader.

The Ecologists didn't manage to achieve the 3% of the vote necessary to get seats in parliament.

Wordy Wednesday - Election Special

2009-09-30T18:20:00.005+01:00

First, the small print.

DISCLAIMER: This blog post is not meant to be interpreted as serious political commentary. In fact, where possible the intention is the exact opposite.

Now onto today's idiocy...

As you may be aware, it's election time in a major European country. I'm not referring to the German one, where they rather boringly didn't give the job of chancellor to the woman with the best cleavage (or at least that's what she claimed in magazine adverts - maybe it was all hype).

The Italians are far better at that sort of thing.

I'm referring to an election that hasn't yet happened. One in which the beleagured Prime Minister, whose party's opinion poll ratings are the lowest they've been for some years, looks set to be replaced by the official opposition. Nevertheless the PM is in fighting spirit, defending his government's record and of course promising lots of good things in the future.

I'm sure that by now you will have guessed that I'm talking about the Greek general election that is taking place this coming Sunday.

The Greek system is similar to Britain's. The public elect members of parliament, and the party that has the most seats is the winner. As in Britain, they need to control over 50% of the seats in order to govern. If not, there's always the possibility of a coalition between two or more parties, but this generally doesn't happen.

Since Greece abolished its monarchy in 1974, they have a President who is elected by parliament for 5 year terms. Like the British monarch, the President doesn't actually run the country, but carries out duties as defined by the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister is usually the leader of the party with the majority in parliament, and is a member of that parliament.

Parliamentary elections must be held at least every 4 years, but the Prime Minister can call them at any time. The current centre right PM, Kostas Karamanlis, is 2 years into his second term in office, and it is expected that his socialist opponent, Giorgos Papandreou, will win an overall majority in parliament and replace him. However, polls aren't allowed to be published in the two weeks before the election, so we don't know what the current state of play is.

Bluffers Guide to the Elections

Party: Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK)
Leader: Giorgos Papandreou
Background: Giorgos Papandreou is the son of former Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou, who was himself the son of former Prime Minister Giorgos Papandreou.
Policies: Will undo all the mess left by the current lot. Will govern openly and without all of the scandals that have plagued New Democracy. Will give ordinary people a better deal.

Party: New Democracy
Leader: Kostas Karamanlis
Background Konstantinos Karamanlis (Kostas for short) is the nephew of former Prime Minister Konstantinos Karamanlis.
Policies: Will continue to undo all the mess left by the Socialists last time they were in power. Will govern openly and with fewer scandals. Will give ordinary people a better deal.

Party: The Communist Party of Greece (KKE)
Leader: Aleka Papariga
Background: Comrade Aleka has been General Secretary of her party for around 20 years.
Policies: Against profiteering. A better deal for workers. Neither of the main parties have the answer.

Party: Popular Orthodox Rally (LAOS)
Leader: Giorgos Karatzaferis
Background: Journalist, writer and politician.
Policies: Believe in God and Greece. Right wing. Wants to make Greece great again.

Party: Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA)
Leader: Alexis Tsipras
Background: Youngest of the leaders.
Policies: Wants the people to have a better deal. Neither of the main parties have the answer.

Party: Ecogreens
Leader (of the election campaign): Nikos Chrysogelos
Background: The ecogreens may or may not manage to get enough votes to have seats in the next parliament (they currently don't have any).
Policies: All environmentally friendly, unlike the main parties, neither of whom have the answer.

So whoever gets in, they'll have open scandal-free government offering a better deal to everyone. Or something like that. Now you can amaze all your friends with your extensive knowledge of foreign affairs...

Don't Make Me Angry

2009-09-26T15:00:00.001+01:00

In common with many of his films, Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (1935) contains a McGuffin. This is the loot in a heist film, or the secret in a spy story. It's vital to the plot, but it doesn't actually matter what it is. The McGuffin in The 39 Steps is the details of a British engine which will presumably win us the next war. Instead of just writing down the information, they decide to smuggle it out inside the head of "Mr Memory", who makes his living on the stage, amazing audiences by reciting facts and figures on request. In the end the villains' plan is scuppered in a music hall where Mr Memory is appearing. He is fatally shot, though, and with his dying breath gives his final performance in front of the shocked crowd:
Mr Memory:

The first feature of the new engine is its greatly increased ratio of compression represented by R minus one over R to the power of gamma. Where R represents the ratio of compression, and gamma seen in an elevation, the axis of the two lines of cylinders, angle of sixty-five degrees. Dimensions of cylinders as follows: This device renders the engine completely silent. Am I right, sir?

Hannay:

Quite right, old chap.

Mr Memory:

Thank you, sir. Thank you. I'm glad it's off my mind at last.

Thus Britain's secrets are safe. Obviously the theatre was full of patriots who wouldn't dream of breathing a word to the Powers of Evil. Or possibly it was full of people like me, who wouldn't have remembered any of it. At least not by the time war was declared 4 years later.

I'd be a hopeless memory man. Some people talk about vivid childhood memories. I can't even remember what I had for lunch the day before yesterday. So my childhood is like a foggy haze. I don't know whether that's the same for most people, or whether I've just got a defective memory unit in my brain.

All of this is leading, of course, to yet more retro TV. I vaguely remember watching The Incredible Hulk when I was younger, but none of the details. So when they were offering the first two series for £15 a few weeks ago, I couldn't resist getting it. I think my local HMV sees me coming now, and makes sure there are plenty of budget 70's and 80's TV series on the shelves specially. They're certainly getting more of my money than they would otherwise.

Of course, where HMV will really cash in is on Series 3-5. Helena is now a Hulk addict, and so we are steaming through our box set. Which means that I'll have to buy the other 3 which I expect won't be on discount.

As with most of this retro-TV, it's a lot better than I imagined it would be. The only problem I have with it is the idea that just because this guy gets angry, he is able to turn into a completely different and green person. And that his trousers still fit the giant hulk. Helena is also amused by the fact that he always manages to retrieve his brown bag by the end of each episode.

Interestingly, the chap responsible for doing the TV adaptation wanted to make the Hulk red, but Marvel Comics wouldn't let him. He reasoned that people get red with anger.

The IncREDible Hulk

I'm not sure it would have been such a good idea...

Back in Time

2009-09-23T19:20:00.007+01:00

Those of you who have been reading this blog long enough to remember my post "How to Get Thinner and Age Slower" , about Enstein's Special Theory of Relativity, will already understand that travelling back through time is not supposed to be possible. The best you can do is control how quickly you travel into the future relative to someone else.

Sadly Einstein's theories have already been proved wrong by no less than the crew of the USS Enterprise, who often managed to get back to present day Earth from the future, probably when the show was running low of funds. And in any case, what did Albert know? He was, after all, only human.

As opposed to being a Time Lord. These impressive aliens can not only travel back and forth through time and space, but they can do so in something that resembles a 1960s police telephone box.

I grew up watching Doctor Who. In those days the TV license was probably only a fraction of what it was today, but they were still able to make 26 episodes a year of a science fiction programme. They did this by spending about 50p (sorry, I mean 10 shillings) a week on special effects and monster outfits. In fact, when the programme started, they used to film it "as live" with no cuts or outtakes, which probably saved them a few bob on wages and lighting bills.

By the time I remember it, Tom Baker was the Doctor, and the programme was in colour. They were, unfortunately, making it on video, but they did have a special effect called CSO (Colour Separation Overlay), which meant that you could film the actors against a blue screen and magically make it look like they were somewhere else. It would have looked totally convincing, except that people don't tend to walk around with blue Ready Brek-style glows around them. Not even Time Lords.

Most of the episodes past and present were novelised, and I eagerly read all of the stories that had been shown before I was old enough to watch (many before I was born, since the show started 7 years before that momentous event).

And then we went to live abroad, where they didn't have Doctor Who. However after a year or two someone in my class had a relative in the UK who sent him video tapes of the programme. He didn't have a video player, so he used to come and use ours.

I was 14 or 15 by then, and it seemed to be cheap and childish, and I stopped watching it. I came to the conclusion that I'd outgrown it.

Until last weekend. I was in the DVD shop looking for a copy of Friday the Thirteenth when I noticed that they were selling half-price Doctor Who DVDs. So I bought a couple which I remembered reading, but not watching.

Helena and I watched our way through "The Hand of Fear" (1976), which starred Tom Baker as the Doctor and Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah. I had expected to find it cheap and childish, which is why I haven't watched any sooner, but I thought that Helena would probably like it. However, it wasn't. Admittedly this one was filmed in a real nuclear power station, so there were fewer cheap sets than usual, but both Helena and I were glued to the screen for 90 minutes.

I sometimes wonder when I look at my life whether I'm ever going to live in the 21st century. I watch old films, old TV shows, I have my retro phone and play 80s computer games. Who says you can't travel back in time?

Wordy Wednesday - Bandwidth

2009-09-16T17:55:00.002+01:00

You may have seen this story over the weekend. An IT firm in South Africa was experiencing problems with transferring large amounts of data over the internet between two of their offices, 50 miles apart. They decided to put the data onto a flash card and send it by carrier pigeon, and at the same time try and send the data electronically. By the time the pigeon got to its destination, they'd only downloaded 4% of the information via their ISP, which uses signals travelling at the speed of light.

Apparently South Africa suffers from a lack of bandwidth. This is, of course, a term that comes from radio communications. Although people talk about broadcasting on a particular frequency, depending on what that is, and on the information rate, a certain amount of space either side of that frequency is also used up in that broadcast, and this is referred to as bandwidth. Or something. I'm not fully up on all the gory details.

Because it's do with information rates, your radio station needs more bandwidth than someone sending Morse Code, and your TV station needs a lot more than either of them.

Faster Than the Speed of Light

Although they only sent 4GB an hour via this pigeon (forgetting about the time it took to load the data onto the card), they could presumably have sent 256GB just as easily - you can get 256GB cards that aren't very big these days. So the pigeon could have been sending data at the rate of 2 million Megabits/second. Compared with, say, the 1.5 Megabits that I get at home.

Someone has even worked out a way of using carrier pigeons to sent regular internet (IP) traffic. It's called IPOAC (IP over Avian Carriers), and is RFC 1149. All internet standards are documented in RFCs. This one was written for April Fool's day 1990, but it has apparently been implemented by some students.

Of course, the main problem with using pigeons is latency. They might transport a lot of data fast, but the round trip that takes your google search to California and back would be even slower than the South African internet. And not much faster than mailing them.

I've been rather busy this week, and tired in the evenings, but I have continued my rather painful piano playing by attempting to play the Maple Leaf Rag. Like that IT firm, I'm going at a fraction of the proper speed and still making mistakes. I found someone on youtube who does it much better. As I've said before, I love these videos that people make and send in, instead of just ripped-off copies of professional videos.

Please Note: This video doesn't work very well by carrier pigeon.

Not a Fan of Change

2009-09-11T21:12:00.005+01:00

Now, I'm not generally one to moan or complain. Well, only sometimes. However the other day something funny happened when I did a google search. Everything I typed came out in a larger bolder font.

At first I thought it was my computer, but bizarre things don't usually happen on a computer that's not running Windows, and the same thing happened when I tried using google at work.

Some people are fanatic about fonts - you see them messing around with a new computer installation trying to get just the right one. They often get very excited about whether or not the fonts are aliased. Whatever that means.

I don't usually care. But I find it rather annoying when everything is in bold font. I did have a quick look at the preferences, but I couldn't see anything to do with unboldening fonts. What is the Greek for that anyway?

Google are great. They provide a range of wonderful services, including Blogger and Google Earth, and they have one of the best web home pages ever, and they have clearly taken a lot of trouble to keep it simple and resist turning it into Google Disney. The bold font won't stop me using their search engine exclusively. And of course I wouldn't be seen dead anywhere near "Bing". I don't mind the bigger bar. It's the bigger font I hate. Has anyone else noticed? Does anyone else care?

Wordy Wednesday - Losing One's Cool

2009-09-09T17:40:00.001+01:00

You Jane, Me Tarzan? Me Not Remember.

It's the old, old story. A man met a woman. I don't know where, though I'm guessing it was in Holland, and I don't know the circumstances. Maybe he went to his local bank or post office. Maybe she was behind the counter. Maybe they were both in the waiting room of their local STD clinic, or perhaps she ran into the back of him at the traffic lights.

In any case, he hadn't met this woman before, but he was somewhat taken by her physical charms. Perhaps it was her well-endowed ears, or the way her thin top clung to the hump on her back, or the smooth curve of her seemingly endless nose. After all, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

They only spoke a few words, before she asked for his address. Which is why I was guessing that they had just been involved in a minor prang. Anyway, what we do know is that he couldn't remember where he lived.

It could be that he was drunk, or concussed, or (like me) permanently in a daze, but he was shocked by this and reasoned that it must have been the attractiveness of the woman that had made him lose his mind. Being a psychologist, he set up an experiment to prove that it was all her fault.

The experiment involved measuring the mental capacity of students before and after chatting with someone. The male students who had just been talking to someone they found attractive achieved significantly lower scores than anyone else. In particular women aren't affected by men in this way. Presumably the men's mental capacity was fine once the blood had found it's way back to their brains.

I'm sure this is hardly earth-shattering news, though I wish they'd done the experiments here. I wouldn't have minded getting plied with gorgeous women in the interest of serious scientific research.

The full story is here.

Please Use the Other Toilet

I'm not a great fan of Stephen King. I've never read his novels, so I suppose I mean that I'm not a great fan of his films. Apart from the Shawshank Redemption. Unlike that one, most of them are concerned with the supernatural.

A colleague lent me a DVD of one of them, whose name escapes me now. Sadly, not because there's a stunning woman in my flat, but just because my brain is like a sieve at the best of times. In this film there is some kind of evil monster which first becomes apparent when some friends go on a hunting trip into the middle of nowhere.

Actually it first becomes apparent when one of the guys decides to use the facilities. The monster is somewhere in the plumbing and understandably doesn't take kindly to someone crapping on it. The result of all this is horrible and bloody. And fatal.

For most of us, this sort of thing only happens in Stephen King films. But in Australia, the contents of your toilet can quickly turn out to be deadly. At least, from what I know about Australian toilets. All of my knowledge about Australian toilets, and indeed Australia comes from lager adverts. I couldn't find any on You Tube about deadly spiders in the "dunny", but I'm sure they made at least one.

According to my extensive research, one might want to be careful about sitting down before making sure that there are no poisonous spiders or scorpions lurking somewhere on the porcelain. But even in Australia you would not expect to find a three metre python grinning up at you.

If it had been me in that situation, whatever bodily functions I went in there to perform would probably have happened spontaneously as I ran out of the room screaming, but our Ozzie guy lives in the bush, so I bet he calmly walked out and shut the door, went to another toilet, and then phoned the local snake expert, and arranged for an appointment.

The expert went round, but was unable to remove the snake, because it was tightly wrapped round the S-bend. He finally got it out on his fourth visit. I wonder how many days later this was. The snake was then released back into the wilds.

I've decided I won't emigrate to Australia.

Wordy Wednesday Goes Back in Time

2009-09-02T16:11:00.007+01:00

My continuing effort to learn Greek means that I always have a book on the go. Despite the fact that my reading speed is much lower than in English, I am still reading more than I used to.

At the moment, I'm working my way through Herodotus' "The History of the Persian Wars.", translated from Ancient Greek by Angelos Vlachos. A lot of the book describes the cultures of the various peoples involved. Herodotus seems to have visited them all, and gives interesting details about their beliefs and habits.

For example, Egyptian women urinate standing up, and they are the ones who go off to the market and do business whilst the men stay at home knitting.

The Babylonians had a novel solution to the whole knotty problem of dating and marriage. Every year in each village, they'd have an auction of all the single women of marriagable age. They started with the most beautiful women, who would be sold to the highest bidder, and worked their way down. They shifted the less desirable ones by offering money to the "buyer" - the man who was willing to accept the least money got the girl. This was funded from the sale money, and helped poorer suitors get a decent start in life.

The buyers had to agree to marry the women, but there was a full money back guarantee if they subsequently got divorced.

Before any of my male readers book flights, I should point out that Herodotus was describing things as they were 2500 years ago, and I suspect that the Political Correctness Brigade have probably got these auctions banned by now.

In addition to the travel guide and the actual Persian Wars, Herodotus gives some historical background to the various kings, power struggles, and so on. Some of the stories are horrible - someone being "punished" by being invited to a banquet at which their child was the main course (they told the father after he'd finished eating and complimented the chef on an excellent meal).

Others are a bit more entertaining. I like the one where about a king who used to boast about how attractive his wife was was. He didn't think that his mate was suitably impressed, so he arranged for him to hide in the royal bedroom and get a glimpse of the naked queen. This was arranged as illustrated below.

Unfortunately what sounded over a few beers like a fun laddish prank went rather badly wrong for the king. The queen found out and was incensed. She told the king's friend that now he'd seen her naked, he couldn't be allowed to live, since he wasn't her husband. She said that he'd either have to do the honorable thing and top himself, or he could kill her husband, marry her and become king instead. It's not difficult to guess which option he chose. Herodotus explains that some cultures are a lot more prudish about nudity than the Greeks.

Anyway, I'm only about a fifth of the way through this rather large tome, so I'm off to continue reading about Egyptian sacrificial rites...

Weekend Viewing

2009-08-28T21:55:00.002+01:00

Up in Flames

I spent a fair bit of last weekend following the live coverage on Greek TV and radio of the forest fires that were rampaging through North East Attiki (near to Athens). Many people were evacuated, and hundreds of homes were either completely burned down or were damaged. Several countries sent help, including a helicopter and a team of firefighters from Cyprus. Satellite pictures from NASA showed the smoke getting as far as North Africa.

People didn't always heed the authorities' advice to evacuate, and those living in areas where the fire service didn't send planes and helicopters to drop water were understandably frustrated. In the end, though, the fires were contained, though of course at this time of year there are bound to be more around the country.

Yesterday a pilot died when his firefighting plane crashed, probably into electric cables. A similar accident cost two crew their lives in 2007, and was put down to human error. The planes can be in the air constantly during the daylight hours and have to try and dive low in smoky conditions, so it's not surprising that accidents happen.

Name That Tune

This week's random musical accompaniment to my life this week was Beethoven's Eroica Variations.

Beethoven was an expert at producing variations. Usually there is a theme, which is played first. Then variations of this theme follow. For example, Beethoven wrote some brilliant variations on the British National Anthem, and "Rule Britannia". Earlier composers were generally not as bold or creative, and very few composers have ever matched Beethoven's exuberance, and humour. I don't really know how music can be humorous, but his variations are. Even Albert Brendel says so. Syncopation is another strong feature of his works which is particularly noticeable in his variations.

In the Eroica variations, he starts off by playing not the tune, but the bass line on its own. Then he messes around with that a few times, before finally playing the main theme and its 15 variations.

The reason this is running through my head is that I played through the first few pages of this before giving up and playing Glenn Gould's recording of the work. I have to admit that his playing was just a bit better than mine, though I'm not so sure that his singing was...

Have a good weekend!

Wordy Wednesday

2009-08-26T17:30:00.003+01:00

The Arachnoid Wars

Someone sent me one of those spam chain emails the other day. It told the story of a Mexican cactus that a tourist bought, and some time after he got it home, exploded spewing out hundreds of deadly dinner-plate sized tarantulas all over his back garden. A spider had lain eggs inside the cactus which had then grown into these terrifying monsters. At some point they outgrew their home and made a collective bid for freedom.

It even had a picture of a dinner-plate sized taratula on a dinner plate. As if I hadn't been freaked out enough by the story. A quick check on google suggests that this is a hoax. If anyone knows different please do NOT tell me. People who spread terror in this way through our inboxes should be sentenced to spend a month naked in a sealed cell full of hungry tarantulas.

Recently, I have been trying to coexist with several spiders who have taken up residence in my flat. These have very thin legs, almost transparent, and tiny bodies. There was one in my bedroom for several weeks. Until Monday morning. I woke up really early to see a much blacker larger arachnoid grinning up at me. The last time this happened I resorted to boiling water. This time, I calmly got up, took my bedding and alarm clock into the lounge, got my work clothes out of the wardrobe, and went back to sleep on the sofa until it was time to get up.

I didn't see the spider again until late that evening, when it was on a wall in the hall. At which point it got eaten by the vacuum cleaner. The less scary one hasn't been seen since. So it was either devoured by the beast, or it ate one fly too many and morphed into it.

Thus ends my uneasy truce with eight-legged freaks. War has once more been declared.

Incidentally, for those of you who prefer to skip the words on my blog and just look at the pictures, I apologise for the lack of illustrations. By the time I'd trawled the net for spider images, I was freaked out.

Credit Crunch

You know the economy must be in a bad way when an armed bank robber escapes with only €10. When I first saw the headlines, I was worried that the banks were in more trouble than we thought, but it turns out that the robber was incompetent. Economically speaking, this is even worse. It's a bleak day for capatalism when people lose the will to rob one another.

And then I woke up...

2009-08-23T08:32:00.010+01:00

Those of you who are wondering why I haven't posted all week (what do you mean you didn't notice?) will I hope be pleased to learn that I'm still alive. At least as I type this. Or to be more accurate, semi-alive. I've only just got up, and I'm still half asleep. Normally I'd wait a day or so to wake up properly before attempting to post something, but I have to do a brain dump before I forget:

Last night I had an incredibly detailed dream.

I was working in an office - it might have been the real office where I work, or maybe somewhere else. A senior manager had turned up who normally worked in a museum in London (no, I don't understand this either. I've never worked in a museum), and everyone was wondering why he had decided to take a detailed interest in our office, and whether he would mess everything up by deciding to micro-manage us. He was known as the Colonel, and I pictured him as a very upper class retired military gentleman. Not the KFC guy.

I can't describe the Colonel properly, as I only heard the others talking about him. I had already prepared my opening line, something like "Well, I've heard of 'musuem pieces' but it's nice to finally meet one." Maybe I'll get the chance to use it tonight.

According to my colleagues, the Colonel brought a special white suit to dine in and silverware. He went through some complicated business of setting up his dining equipment, pressing his white trousers, presumably before putting them on, probably opening five bottles of wine and port (one for each course), and finally carving the meat. Then he took one taste and spat it out. I'm not sure what he did next. Maybe he got a sandwich from the shop.

There was also a lot of walking around between this office and a warehouse where we were running a display of some sort. I don't know what. A museum display, possibly? You had to enter this warehouse via a large red door that swung up and down, like you get on most garages only a lot bigger, and this involved getting someone inside to open it, I think. I remember at one point that it had started to close and I dashed in, but some other people didn't want to in case they didn't make it in time.

To find out what happened next, please refer to the title of this post. If anyone has any suggestions about what all this means, I'd love to hear them. In the meantime, I'm going to put the kettle on and see whether I can get myself into a slightly less zombified state...

My Revolutionary New Phone

2009-08-16T13:03:00.006+01:00

Last week, I became the proud owner of a brand new telephone. I'd been considering replacing my old one for a while, and Helena and I happened to find ourselves at the appropriate shop due to a sequence of events that began with me waking up hungry that morning, suggesting that we get an early lunch at Burger King, and then noticing that there was a shopping centre across the road with signs advertising discount clothes, dragging my reluctant daughter over there in search of cheap trousers and quickly deciding I wasn't in the mood for clothes shopping (I never am).

So I came home with a phone rather than a new pair of trousers. In the end, I decided against an iphone because I found something that has all of the iphone's useful functions, but is much better.

Cheaper - At £30, I didn't require a mortgage.

Easier to use - Even I can work out how to make and recieve calls on this phone.

Has a built in bell. For some reason known only to apple, the iphone lacks one of these.

It's a design classic.

Talking of design, the phone that this is a replica of first came out in 1937 and was in use well into the 1950s. (The latest iphone will probably be out of date by next year). Helena loves it, as she's never used a rotary dial phone before.

I hardly use my landline, and might be tempted to get rid of it, except that I need it for internet access, and I have a nagging worry about relying on mobile phones in an emergency, since they don't work when there's a power cut. In any case, there's only one thing wrong with my new retro purchase. Sadly I still get 21st century marketing calls.

Wordy Wednesday - Wordy Game

2009-08-12T08:33:00.017+01:00

Helena wanted to play scrabble yesterday. This entailed a visit to Toys 'R' Us, since we only had the Junior version, which she's now grown out of.

Despite playing with an "Open Dictionary" and getting some help, she was unable to beat me. I'm not sure why this came as such a surprise to her, considering that she was playing against someone with 28 years more experience of English.

Anyway, one of the benefits of allowing the free use of a dictionary is that you learn about words that you can't believe exist. Such as:

aa n a type of scoriaceous volcanic rock with a rough surface and many jagged fragments. [Hawaiian]

ee n (pl een) Scots form of eye.

oo 1. n Scots form of wool

oo 2. pronoun a Scots form of we

These Scots have got a lot to answer for. All definitions are taken from the Chambers Dictionary, which is published by a Scottish firm (of Scrabble players?).

Anyway, I'll just about buy the above as plausible, but the following definition, used by Helena to get 12 points, is going too far:

moy (Shakesp) n supposed by Pistol (misunderstanding a Frenchman's moi me) to be the name of a coin.

So now they're putting random nonsense made-up words in the dictionary??? I wonder if it's just because it's Shakespeare, or can anyone join it? If I put some stupid combination of letters in my blog, will it get a mention in the next edition of Chambers? Let's try it and see.

I had a dream last night that at a crucial point in a game of Strip Scrabble, I managed to beat my three gorgeous opponents with a real qycxbez.

qycxbez (BOV) n A massively high-scoring word played during a Scrabble game by a player who fools his less experienced opponents into believing that it's in the official dictionary, which he claims to have learned by heart.

I only once played an allegedly experienced scrabble player, and I'm sure that most of the weird 2-letter combinations he used were qycxbezes. (Note that the plural form of this word does not double the "z", since there's only one "z" in a standard Scrabble set. Note also that it's one of those few handy-to-know words that has a "q" in it, but not a "u").

I bet Shakespeare's turning in his grave, wishing that he were alive now to realise his full potential. Given his capacity for inventing words, he'd have been an unbeatable opponent...

Exercise for the reader:

What's the highest word score you can get for qycxbez? If you place it in on a triple word square with the "x" on a double lettter, you make 141 points, but I don't know if there's a way to score more.

Key Product Placement

2009-08-10T22:17:00.006+01:00

I was reading the other day about a desginer's interesting concept for a computer keyboard:

Each key has a brand name that begins with the appropriate letter. It's a fun idea, and I'd be tempted to get one, if they ever become available to buy. Or maybe they could get enough sponsorship from all of the companies to make the keyboard free.

We don't have set desks at work, and I recently started sitting at one which had a lousy keyboard. Sometimes keys wouldn't work at all, and other times I'd get two of whatever I typed. This was a major issue when it came to entering passwords, so I asked our IT people for a new keyboard. They offered me the choice of an HP keyboard, or a more ergonomic "Microsoft" one. I picked the HP one, partly because the other one was a bit dusty, but mainly because I couldn't bring myself to voluntarily use something with "Microsoft" printed on it. Most of our desks have the MickeySoft keyboards, and they're pretty good. Of course, they're not actually made by Mr Gates' company anyway.

Unfortunately, due to an unfortunate combination of the lighting conditions at that desk and the angle of the keys on the HP keyboard, I can't read any of the letters and numbers on the keys. Because I touch type, this is not much of a problem, except that I now realise that I look down at the keys when I enter passwords and numbers. I must learn how to touch type numbers. The glare is so bad that I might as well have one of those Japanese "Happy Hacker" keyboards:

Years ago someone told me about people physically pulling out keys from their keyboard and swapping them with others. The idea was to stop anyone else using their desk when they were away. I've never seen this in the office, but I do have a colleague who uses a keyboard that's a bit like this one:

Presumably the idea is that your wrists don't get as strained as they do with the more normal flat design. I've always wondered whether a piano keyboard could be used for a computer. The standard one has 88 keys, which should be enough to be going on with.

I wonder what kind of music something like this blog post would make?

Wild Things

2009-08-06T22:20:00.004+01:00

No, this has nothing to do with that film about sex, lies, murder, lesbian love and Bill Murray. This is the latest holiday report.

This morning was bright and sunny, and so Helena and I went to the Cotswold Wildlife Park. This is situated in Burford, about a million inches (17 miles) from Oxford. We got there mid-morning, and had an early lunch. As seasoned visitors, we know that the canteen always gets busy at lunchtime.

For once we remembered to take a camera with us. Unfortunately we didn't remember to take a decent photographer. Nevertheless, some of the pictures weren't total disasters. For example, here's an excellent one of a 7-legged 2-headed zebra.

At the CWP they have all sorts of creatures - lions, rhinos, monkeys, penguins, and so on. Sadly our visit was cut short by the weather, and we didn't end up seeing all of them. The clouds arrived and the heavens opened, which meant that we had to take refuge in some of the covered areas.

These areas house all of the really disgusting creatures - reptiles, bats and insects. The insect house is especially important, as I needed to check that all of the giant spiders were still there and hadn't escaped to terrorise the neighbourhood. I'm pleased to report that even the pink bird-eating tarantula was in its rightful place. If these things can catch birds, then there's little hope for us humans. The only spider picture that came out well was of one of the other tarantulas. Not pink, but still terrifying.

I did my best to get a picture of the ants for Bee, but ants are very small, even with an 8 megapixel camera.

I'm afraid that I failed to locate the aardvarks. I'm sure they have some, and I thought that they might not mind if I borrowed one to send to the ant-infested Bee. If it only it hadn't rained. Sorry, Bee.

There is a moral to this holiday report. Always check the weather forecast beforehand. Even if they're wrong, at least you've got someone to blame...

Wordy Wednesday - Holiday Report

2009-08-05T16:35:00.000+01:00

It seems that I'm in good company. All the other major European dignataries are on holiday as well. Gordon Brown has gone to Scotland to do volunteer work. Sarkozy is in the Riveria showing off his wife, and Vladimir "Gas" Putin is having an environmentally friendly holiday climbing trees and making friends with the locals.

"Do you come here often?"

So far the weather has been changeable, as expected. Yesterday was wet all day. I had arranged to go and see my mother today on the basis of the BBC's five day weather forecast, which on Sunday was showing a picture of a big yellow sun on a cloudless blue sky, suggesting something like this:

Sadly, when I got up this morning the view from my window didn't quite match this picture. it was still rather wet, even if the torrential downpours had stopped.

[Source and License]

By the time we'd got ready and arrived at my mother's, it was at least looking a bit better, so she took us to the docks. Helena was thirsty, so we went to a "Costa" coffee place and had drinks. 2 iced fruit drinks and one coffee cost around £9! Still, when you're on holiday you expect to get ripped off, so I didn't complain.

I've often wondered what it would be like living on a narrow boat. There were a couple for sale at the dock, though neither had prices on them, but I bet they're cheaper than the trendy flats in the converted warehouses. There's something tempting about life on the canal.

There used to be a programme on TV about canals, in the days when I used to watch UK broadcasts, and there were all sorts of people like Toyah Wilcox, David Suchet and Prunella Scales and her husband extolling the virtues of boating holidays.

Living in one permanently is a different story, of course. Sadly, my office isn't on a canal route, and I suspect that internet access might be an issue. And where would my piano go?

After some consideration, I decided not to embark on a life on the water just yet. I'll wait until I've accumulated a few million and afford one of those yachts with the bikini-clad girls.

I suppose I'm not going to do that any time soon if I keep spending £3 a head on coffee. Still, the main thing is that our holiday has so far been enjoyable and relaxing.

Summer Holidays

2009-08-02T15:50:00.003+01:00

Today is the start of my summer holidays. As usual I'm not going anywhere, but Helena is coming to stay, this year for two weeks. It's just as well that I didn't check the weather forecast before organising this, as I learned from the Cypriot news the other day that forecasters had been predicting a hot and sunny August in Britain, but that they'd now revised this slightly to say "rain and storms". I'd have been somewhat annoyed if I'd known earlier.

Yesterday was wet and miserable with torrential rain at times, so maybe the forecasters have got it right in the end. Although today has been dry and bright, so maybe not.

[Source and License]

As long as we get a few reasonable days out, I won't complain. We've also got the last 17 Columbo episodes to watch, which should keep us going on the rainy days. I've also stocked up on reading material, with two parcels of books arriving from Athens yesterday.

Needless to say, I'll keep you informed of developments with regular holiday updates.

Wordy Wednesday - Exclusive

2009-07-29T16:21:00.017+01:00

Over the weekend London hosted the Gulf Luxury Goods Fair. This fair is aimed at wealthy Arabs, and is full of things that they couldn't possibly live without. For some reason I wasn't invited. Admittedly I'm not a wealthy Arab, but it would have been nice to at least have been invited. It's not as if I'd have embarrassed anyone by actually showing up. Still, no-one likes being excluded, especially a blogger who delights in keeping his readers up to date with all the latest products. Luckily, the fair got a mention on the Aimilia Show.

One of the leading attractions was the £90,000 iphone. "So what?", I hear you ask, "Apple products are always ludicrously overpriced." However, with this one not only do you get some bog-standard electronics in a fancy case, but the fancy case is jewel encrusted. This doesn't seem entirely sensible on an item that you're likely to misplace or get mugged for, but maybe that doesn't happen in the Gulf. Or maybe if you own a significant proportion of the world's oil, you just shrug and buy another one.

If, like me, you're on a more modest budget, you will be interested to learn about the cheaper items. Such as the new Jaguar. Starting at £52,000, it's only around half the price of an iphone. In fact, I'm not sure why they bothered to turn up to the fair. Surely no-one with a £90,000 phone is going to be seen dead in a £50,000 car? Perhaps you'd buy such cars for your servants, to save them risking them pranging one of your 30 Rolls Royces whilst running errands.

If I was an oil magnate, I'd have servants like that.

Those in a frivolous mood could do worse than get a £150,000 novelty watch. A lot of people could easily afford this if they traded in their house. They showed one on the news that has a built-in fruit machine. You'd have thought there wouldn't be much of a market for such a thing in the Gulf, where their religion frowns on gambling, but I suppose they're allowed fruit.

With all these amazing offers, it's perhaps just as well I didn't get my invitation. At least I'll be able to afford to eat again this month.

Footnote:

FADKOG readers might be interested to know that in response to this post, google gave me adverts for Arab dating. Maybe I'll try it. Though I'll insist that my potential dates have to own at least one jewel-encrusted iphone...

Mr President...

2009-07-26T20:44:00.008+01:00

This post contains an open letter to the President of the USA. It's the second one that I've posted here since his election, although this time I didn't write it.

I happened to mention to Helena that female Elephants are called "cows", and male elephants "bulls". Being a great fan of the bovine variety of cow (both alive and on her dinner plate), she took exception to this, and immediately demanded to know who was responsible for allowing elephants to take on the names of cows and bulls.

I suggested that it was probably a zoologist, but she asked me whether I'd informed the Prime Minister of this terrible injustice. When I confessed that I had omitted to do this she suggested I either write a letter to Mr Brown, or to the US President. I said that they probably had more pressing matters on their minds. She wasn't having any of this and wrote the following letter on my behalf to the "Planetarch", as the Greeks call the American leader:

Dear Baraca Barman,

Elephants have their own name and they don't have the right to steal cows and bulls' names. Why can't elephants be elephants, cows be cows and bulls be bulls?

You will probably want to take this to court and please inform the Queen so that she can help you do something about it.

Thankyou,

Brian o vretanos.

I've made no attempt to correct or edit this, apart from giving Her Majesty a capital Q. She even got all of the apostrophes in the correct places.

[l-r: US President, British Queen,
US First Lady, Shifty-looking Greek]

I think you'll agree that this is a wonderfully eloquent letter for an eleven year old. I think she's got a great future ahead of her as a blogger or a twitterer, or something...

Wordy Wednesday - Sunless

2009-07-22T19:09:00.007+01:00

Apparently today was a special day for astronomers in Asia, since they endured the longest eclipse of this century.

In China, they believe that this is a time of misfortune and disaster, since by tradition the sun is swallowed up by a huge invisible dragon. I'm not sure how they explain its return. Maybe it shines out of the dragon somehow.

In India people rushed to the Gangees where by being immersed in its unique waters they believe they can be freed from the circle of life and death. At least one woman drowned, sadly.

These areas of the world were without sun for all of 6 minutes and 39 seconds.

I'm afraid that I'm not really impressed. In Britain, the sun was eclipsed for most of the day.

I shouldn't complain. There are floods in Germany and fires in Spain, whilst New Zealand was moved closer to Australia last week by a massive earthquake. I hope that wherever you are you're managing to avoid the worst of the summer weather...

Small-Minded Conspiracy Theorists

2009-07-18T15:10:00.008+01:00

With the fortieth anniversary of the Moon Landings, the conspiracy theories have started to make a reappearance. They say that Neil Armstrong and co never actually went anywhere - the whole thing was an elaborate ruse.

Of course few people believe them. Why would the US government go to such lengths to create a massive hoax when they could just stick a couple of astronauts on top of a rocket?

In an amazing stroke of good fortune involving public transport and a misplaced laptop, this blog has obtained exclusive access to secret information concerning not only the events of July 1969, but a conspiracy which has been perpetrated on the innocent citizens of the World for over 2000 years.

It turns out that the conspiracy theorists just aren't thinking big enough.

The flat earth brigade were closer to the truth than they (or we) imagined. However, they believe that the Earth is just a single flat surface. What they failed to do was to think three-dimensionally. If they had they might have realised that the Earth isn't flat. It's a block of flats.

Each floor is around 2 miles high. If you sail over the horizon, you end up in a large elevator, enabling you to get onto other floors. If the lift is there, of course. If not, your ship might just fall into the lift shaft. Now we know the real secret of the Bermuda Triangle.

When the first explorers sailed forth and discovered all this, they realised that it would be very foolish to tell people about it. If there were untold riches to be found on other floors, they wanted to keep it all for themselves. So, they started to draw maps showing vast expanses of sea, and to tell tales of monsters, of seductive mermaids that would lure ships to be wrecked, and so on. They wanted to discourage the majority of people from setting sail and finding out how easy it was to get to another country. They also wanted everyone to believe that they were brave heroes. Especially the ladies.

A Sailor's Map of the World c. 800 AD.
The central lift-shaft is clearly depicted.

As sailors found more and more places, so their maps got ever more elaborate. And then someone had the bright idea of making the world spherical. It's not known who this clever chap was, but his colleagues thought he was barking mad. They said that no-one would ever believe that. What a silly idea! They'd ask awkward questions, like "why don't the Australians fall off?", and "what's holding it up?", and so on.

"They won't fall for it..."

Nevertheless, the naysayers were wrong. People liked the idea of living on a ball. It was aesthetically and mathematically pleasing. It made the Earth a nice finite place, and it was as far away as you could get from the real picture of a giant run-down apartment block.

But all this happened centuries ago. Why are governments so eager to keep this secret in the 21st century?

The answer, as always, is "money". When the Wright brothers first managed to fly a few feet in the air, the Powers That Be realised that once people got 2 miles up, they'd see that there were ceilings, lights and sprinklers up there. So they devised a plan which would not only keep the aircraft industry from spilling the beans, but which would make vast quantities of money.

As long as the airlines kept up the pretence, and made people sit in their cramped airplanes for hours on end instead of the 5 minutes it would actually take to get to another floor, they could charge a fortune for Business class, whilst the governments of the world raked in airport taxes and the like.

And what about the Moon? Well, only a handful of the world's floors are habitable. The rest aren't finished. As usual the property developers conned investors into building something that was way too big. The moon's actually in the basement. And Neil Armstrong really did go there. Of course, the best way to get down the lift shaft wasn't in a rocket.

The real Apollo 11

So there you have it. Of course, "they" will say that these are just the deranged ramblings of a blogger desperate to find something to post on a weekend. But we know better...

Wordy Wednesday

2009-07-15T19:35:00.008+01:00

Military Coup

On July 15th 1974 a military coup was orchestrated in Cyprus by the Athenian Junta (who ran Greece from 1967 - 1974), deposing the government of President Archbishop Makarios III. Early reports of Makarios' death proved to be incorrect - he managed to escape, got to a radio station in Paphos where he made the announcement that he was still very much alive, and then left the island, spending the next 6 months or so abroad.

Five days later, on July 20th, Turkish forces invaded the island, and 35 years on, with "The Cyprus Problem" remaining unsolved, they still occupy a large area in the North of the island.

Today Greek Cypriots held services to mark the anniversary. Hopefully one day it will become a historical event rather than something that is still an ongoing issue for both Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot communities.

Suspension

I took my car to the garage today. When it was having it's annual MOT test a little while back, they warned me that some parts of the suspension were starting to crack and would need replacing. I've got no idea what happens if your lower front rear bush gives out, but it sounds painful, so I got it changed. I'm happy because it didn't cost as much as I thought it would.

Rain or Shine

We've had a lot of rain the past few days, but things have brightened up today. So I feel justified in posting a sunbathing picture.

Picture by quimby at Flickr, covered by

the Creative Commons Attribution License

I hope you're getting all getting some summer weather, with the exception of Jean Knee, whose dog is in dire need of our rain, or at least our clouds.

The Menu

2009-07-10T19:55:00.006+01:00

The other day a menu came through the post for a Chinese takeaway in town. There are several others which are much nearer to where I live, so I'm not likely to go there, but I was intrigued by the following:

I'm not trying to mock whoever wrote it - I'm sure their English is far better than my Chinese, and indeed their Chinese may be better than my English - but I'm at a loss to work out what they mean. I don't know about ducks and king prawns, but I'm sure that fish aren't vegetarians but piscivores. If there's such a word.

And why didn't they just make the Chicken one £4.80 as well?

On the back of the menu there is a horoscope, full of useful advice. For example, anyone born in 1962, 1974 or 1986 is best suited to being a boss, explorer, racing car driver or a matador. I was born in 1970, on the second day of the Chinese year, so I ought to become a businessman, activist, teacher or secret agent. I did come close to being a teacher, so maybe there's something in this after all.

If you're eating out this weekend the I hope you have a good time, but don't forget to ask whether they do vegetarian duck...

Wordy Wednesday - Wakeup

2009-07-08T20:00:00.001+01:00

Rain

This week has been fairly miserable so far weather-wise. We've not had any storms, just showers and general dullness. So, no snowbathing or sunbathing today, I'm afraid. Those in search of skin cancer will need to get it by artificial means.

Alarming Invention

Getting up in the morning is something that I'm not very good at, so I'm always on the look out for innovative ideas. You may remember a while back about the alarm clock that runs away from you. Here is something even more unlikely to catch on.

I'm sure that this can't be good for him. One morning it'll all go horribly wrong, and he'll wake up dead.

What he really needs to do is to get a life, a woman, and have children. When Helena was a baby, she always used to wake up early, which meant that I always got to work at a reasonable time, and I never used an alarm. Until the clocks went forwards. Sadly she hadn't learnt to tell the time, and so the household arose an hour later.

My problem isn't so much waking up, it's managing not to go back to sleep after turning the alarm off. At the weekend I woke up just before 6 in the morning to the sound of a large bumblebee which had managed to get into my bedroom, but wasn't clever enough to find its way back out again. Needless to say I was up and dressed before I had the chance to fall asleep. So now all I have to do is to train bumblebees to buzz threateningly at the right time every morning.

Perhaps that fleeing alarm clock wasn't such a bad idea after all...