08.24.06

Having some fun

Posted in General at 1:36 pm by site admin

I’m looking out the window right now at a little boy very patiently riding his tricycle up what is, in effect, a very flat concrete river bed. The wake of his trike in the shallow water behind him is daftly mesmerising. What fun.

Some other bits of fun to be had around these parts at the moment:

• Reverent worship of the simple rightness of Brio train sets (yes, I know they’re for ages three and over, but they are robustly well-made and notably dad-friendly)
• Take a look at what’s playing on American radio in real time
• How bored? Put it this way, I just implemented this unclutter your computer advice
• Web startup guide Techcrunch has just launched a UK-specific version, with luck helping to foster a bit more of a UK community for web companies

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08.18.06

New fast automatic Japanese greetings

Posted in General at 12:13 pm by Jon

The most extraordinary little gadget is hidden away in Microsoft Word.

Go to ‘View’, ‘Toolbars’, ‘Customise’, and select ‘‘.

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08.17.06

More spam news

Posted in Meeja at 8:48 am by Jon

This week’s spam news is entertainingly recursive:

AOL to dig up Spam Nazi’s gold

(reported everywhere)

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08.11.06

Blasted heath

Posted in Dreaming of England at 3:20 pm by Jon

Back from a few days finessed away from the city, tucked away on what passes for a hilltop in central Essex. There was a warm pool for the relaxing, there were many animals for the little one to admire loudly and expressively. Also, a lot of beastly hornets, who at least had the grace to make a satisfying splat when got with the swatter.

The real shock was the extent of the dry spell. Crossing Blackheath, it looked bleached, nearly unrecognisable. In Essex, it was harvest time, and the combine harvesters were out in force, all night too. The locals were saying that the crop is so dry this year that much will be lost. Each combine was followed by a huge yellow plume of dust drifting out, and looking suspiciously like the old stubble fires.

Looking out from the slight incline over the flat cropfields, tracking by eye the brute machines with their fiery tails, it looked like the end times had finally come.

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08.04.06

Absolute jaffa

Posted in General, Cricket at 11:23 am by Jon

While enjoying the first morning of the third test against Pakistan (oddly starting on a Friday), I found Cricinfo’s rather nice cut-out-and-keep glossary of cricketing terms.

Retire To postpone or end one’s innings, either voluntarily through boredom when you’re simply too good for the opposition, or involuntarily and in agony, when a nasty fast bowler has taken his pound of flesh

Reverse Swing When the ball is 50 overs old and the pitch is as flat as a pancake, this phenomenon is often a bowling side’s saving grace. First mastered by the Pakistani quicks of the 1980s and 1990s, it involves sideways movement of the ball through the air that is contrary to your average everyday laws of physics. If it sounds like rocket science, that is because it is

Trundler Slow, laborious type of bowler who thinks he’s quick, once was quick, or is simply old, fat and unfit and needs to be put out to pasture. See military medium

And so on and on. Two particularly caught my eye.

First, ‘Cow Corner’, the deep long-on position on the boundary, which is allegedly so named for a real cow corner (with real cows) at Dulwich College. This is just down the road from me, so I must check, though modern Dulwich being what it is, the cows have almost certainly had to move to a cheaper part of town, like Nunhead.

Second, that English eccentricity, ‘Nelsons’:

Nelson - The English superstition that 111 and its multiples are unlucky. The sticks resemble 111, and is loosely connected with Lord Nelson’s physical attributes.

Perhaps I should just accept that it is Friday and my brain has gone off for the weekend before me, but Nelson’s physical attributes (or, as I thought, lack thereof) are at this point mystifying me.

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08.03.06

Spam news

Posted in Meeja at 12:18 pm by Jon

The news story about a guard dog at Wookie Hole that destroyed the things it was supposed to be protecting caught my eye, and not because it’s a typical silly season story.

It was the front page trail for it that tipped me off:

Dog mauls Elvis’s teddy

That’s not a headline, I thought. That’s just a collection of random words lumped together. It might as well be ‘Cockatoo swallows Nero’s shoes’ or ‘Hunger strike hip replacement’.

A sinister thought: perhaps the spammers are infiltrating the news services. Admit it, pretty much every week there’s a news headline you spot that looks as though it comes from a spam email. Now you know the reason.

Semi-relatedly, the Hamstead & Highgate Express is currently offering another example of the art of the ambiguous headline:

George Michael defends Heath cruising

Poor old Sir Edward. He never did anyone any harm on Morning Cloud.

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07.31.06

Takk…

Posted in General at 3:29 pm by Jon

After discovering that Ms Lily Allen isn’t the complete deal until she grows up a bit, it was time to follow a different recommendation, and fetch the latest album from Icelandic mystifiers Sigur Ros (and listen to their MySpace offering).

I know, I know I’m slow off the mark, but all I can say is that it’s a good job I was sitting down and in daydreaming mood when it kicked in.

Our perception of Icelandic music has been irrevocably skewed by the birdlike eccentricity of Bjork Gudmundsdottir, so it’s quite bewildering to be faced by an album quite so beautiful, but also determined to be quite as leapingly mad as possible. It’s not as if they’re living down the stereotype, and this is certainly music you can imagine being forged deep under the lavafields by sprites with a fondness for piano riffs and endless orchestral climaxes.

It’s marginally disappointing that only half the songs are sung in the portmanteau ‘Hopelandic’, which featured across the entirety of the previous album (). Then again, listening to beautiful singing in an alien tongue is one of life’s particular pleasures, and I can’t tell which language it’s in.

A winner, and listening on hot tube trains these last couple of weeks has felt strangely right, as if any minute one would pop out into a hot spring, shimmering with volcanic crystals.

And for that, much thanks.

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07.19.06

Sometimes you just know

Posted in London, Flotsam at 3:18 pm by Jon

Sometimes you read or hear or see of something, and you just know.

A month or so ago I caught, halfway through, some peculiar-looking girl doing a live performance on a late night music show. Something wide-eyed about her delivery made me realise I’d be listening to her a lot in the near future.

I heard the song on the radio a couple of weeks later while fetching cat food. I waited in the car until the end so that I could learn who it was.

Of course, when I learnt that Lily Allen was daughter of TV hack Keith, I was put off mightily. But underneath, I knew I’d be buying the album.

That’s another tenner splashed on the basis of an easy way with a tune and a glottal stop the size of a bus.

Sometimes you just know.

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07.17.06

Travel guides

Posted in Dreaming of England at 1:39 pm by Jon

It really is the dog days of summer. Everything’s slow, difficult, all minds are elsewhere.

In one carriage of the train this morning, I saw people reading travel guides to Prague, Brazil, New York, Guatemala, Greece, Australia.

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07.14.06

Under the sea

Posted in Dreaming of England at 8:11 am by Jon

Large pans of East Anglia are reclaimed land. Reclaimed from the sea, that is, during one of the technological expansions of the last couple of thousand years. This has several important consequences, most of which involving it being flat, dull, wet and salty.

Furthermore, like the Netherlands, there’s a permanent disquieting air of impending disaster, waiting for the next big spring tide that might, just might, be the one that breaches the sea defences. Talk long enough with an older local where I grew up, and two topics are bound to come up: the last big flood (”see that mark on the wall? That’s where it came up to”), and the state of the sea walls, which are always bad. Even when they’ve just been rebuilt, someone’s projection will be already showing that they won’t be high enough to protect against the really big one.

That’s why it’s so brilliantly counterintuitive that, almost exactly opposite where I grew up, they’ve smashed down the sea wall and reflooded the land. I’ve written before about this particularly odd island, and there is, for me, a satisfying rightness about the idea of returning it, at least partly, under the sea. Perhaps it appeals to my submarine soul.

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06.26.06

More reasons to hate football

Posted in General at 3:26 pm by Jon

No time to rant about the lingering death of the beautiful game during this World-Weary Cup (note to self: I need a holiday). However, I’m darkly gratified to see that an intemperate old grouch of mine on the football is by far the most popular post on this site this month.

As ever, I am glad to be of public service, even if it is just providing an echo chamber for howls of frustrated boredom.

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Bee bread and bee trees

Posted in Dreaming of England at 2:40 pm by Jon

Here in the city, it’s nice to get updates on life outside the ant colony. Now supplementing my doses of life in the deep north I’m hearing regularly from old friend Paul who’s finally followed his manifest destiny and set up a smallholding in South Wales.

Today’s lesson (a link pushed my way by Paul): bees.

Shelter — In nature, the honey bee uses a number of natural cavities to build their brood nest. The term “Bee Tree” was once common. It referred to a tree that had a colony/swarm of bees living in it. The reason we can keep bees is because honey bees will adapt to man made hives for shelter.

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05.31.06

George Eliot wrote…

Posted in Bloggery at 2:13 pm by Jon

Comment spam is getting interesting again. I’ve been receiving some lovely comments from, among others, Bob Dylan, Stewart Granger, Harry Houdini and Erich Weiss (hm…), Charles Dodgson and Eric Clapton, all of whom seem to have developed a late interest in MP3 files. My favourite must be this from a novelist who knew all about publishing under assumed names, George Eliot:

I used to use a program called Cool Edit to do this kind of work as well as other audio editing things. I’m not even sure if it’s around anymore. This was a long time ago.

If Our George was using it, it surely must have been a venerable piece of software.

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05.23.06

Flaming buses

Posted in London at 10:16 am by Jon

Woken by a loud bang at about five this morning. Not much noise followed, making it the more mysterious.

Some members of the household, watching the morning news, excitably suggested that the cause was “a shooting in South London”. Spot me the morning where there hasn’t been a shooting in South London.

All, or most, was revealed when, on the way in to work, I walked past a Routemaster bus being hauled up onto a recovery vehicle. The road was covered in what looked like fine mulch: in fact it was sawdust that had been soaking up petrol for the last couple of hours. Some the inside of the bus was burnt out, seats blackened, parts of the frame poking through like broken bones. Uncomfortable memories of last summer, buses and sirens. Funny how the sunshine brings out memories that had been carefully furled away, like sunflowers.

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05.09.06

Lifeboats

Posted in Dreaming of England at 10:22 am by Jon

The medical students out on their rag week were collecting for the RNLI. Everyone, I suppose, has a cause for which they will turn around in a crowd and fight their way back in order to put money in the bucket. For me, it’s the lifeboats.

I grew up in a town with a lifeboat station (it housed an Atlantic, a rigid self-righting inflatable capable of 35 knots). For anyone who has lived close to a lifeboat, or who has known people who work at sea, supporting the lifeboats feels as normal as paying for your milk.

Part of the unrefusable call of the lifeboats comes from an awareness of the never-ending cruelty of the sea, its protean capacity for putting you in trouble. Part comes from the absolute impossibility of reading about the activities of the lifeboats with a dry eye (if you are feeling sturdy, remind yourself of the Wells and Penlee disasters. Part comes from the fact that the lifeboat service is a charity more or less because you could not pay people to risk their lives in this way: it is the sort of sacrifice that must, it seems, be made freely.

For me, I suppose, the RNLI consists of moments that cast a shadow, a horror over the heart. Local men racing down the High Street in answer to “the shout”. The coastguard helicopter clattering low above the river in assistance. The line “For those in peril on the sea”. Simply reading the phrase “lost with all hands” in a history is enough to unman me.

The very worst thing, though, is the maroons. You have to understand that though the water is pretty quiet, you do get used to sporadic unexpected noises. The river I grew up on knows foghorns and klaxons (the timber ships use them to call back the crew before setting sail, which I used to fear as the four-minute warning). On top of this, the yacht clubs along the town front still use cannon to start and finish races. And, across the way, as I’ve mentioned previously, the ministry of defence would occasionally blow something up.

The only noise that stops you in your tracks, though, is two muted pops, the maroons going up. Locals cast their eyes off to the east, over the lifeboat station, squinting for two woolly purple bursts of smoke hanging low in the sky, calling the crew in.

When the RNLI were able to equip the crew with pagers, for a short while they stopped sending up maroons, reckoning it an unnecessary cost. They were very soon reinstated at the insistence of the locals. Of course it is a tremendous instance of keeping the work of the lifeboats visible, and fundraising suffered without it. I, however, like to think of it as a shout to the whole community, a call for their collective willpower to send the lifeboat through the swell and, more importantly, bring it back again.

Locals don’t tend to think about the sailors in distress, funny as that seems. Every ounce of concern is directed towards the lifeboatmen. No seaside community wants its own entry in the famous history, its own collection of RNLI medals, its own stories of sons following dead fathers out on the boats, its own reputation for courage. It wants the lifeboat back in its shed, where it belongs, and the men, still in their oilskins, in the pub, raising their glasses to another easy shout.

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05.04.06

More Boris

Posted in Dreaming of England, Meeja at 4:27 pm by Jon

Did I mention Boris Johnson’s recent inspired run of lunacy? I think I did.

More inspired Borisery:

Piece written for an Italian paper about the elections…

Il Sole 24 Ore, a financial paper

Boris says:

“Why not bung it on the blog to show I am alive?

Yesterday we all climbed Vesuvius!”

[Ed: With our apologies as we have now been asked to remove this piece from the site]

And now this charity football match escapade:

But the crowd’s favourite sounded a note of caution when he said his preparation for the match had been entirely mental. “I haven’t played since I was 18.”

After the final whistle, Boris, lager in hand, said: “There was no malice in my actions. I was going for the ball with my head, which I understand is a legitimate move.

Utterly magnicficent, and yet more evidence that Boris has simply wandered, confused, out of a P.G. Wodehouse novel.

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The Baim Collection

Posted in Dreaming of England, Film at 10:51 am by Jon

An awe-inspiring find comes down the email pipe: The Baim Collection.

The Baim Collection Limited owns and controls all of the copyright works of the late Harold Baim.

Harold Baim was a prolific producer of short films from 1946 to 1983.

There are over one hundred 35mm short films in the collection originally made for release in the British cinema and a couple of feature films. Nearly all of the surviving films are in colour and more than fifty of the titles are available on BETA SP tape.

And what films! Everything from travelogue (such as The English Riviera featuring this beautiful still of Sheila van Damm opening the boot of her Sunbeam) through animal films (the most appealing being ) via short documentaries about printers, wallpaper manufacturing, strippers (no, not wallpaper strippers) and quite honestly who knows what else.

Everywhere you go the eye is drawn to a new gem. Do try Telly Savalas Looks at Aberdeen, and in particular this lovely shot of the car park at Aberdeen airport. Or what, I ask you, is wrong with Pete Murray Takes You to Coventry.

Find of finds, for me, is Baim’s sole feature, 1963’s Cool Mikado, a swinging version of the comic operetta directed by Michael Winner and featuring Frankie Howerd, Tommy Cooper, Lionel Blair and his dancers, Mike and Bernie Winters, Pete Murray (yes!) and Stubby Kaye. I have found my new project in tracking down a viewable copy. Wish me luck.

Update: The nice man at the Baim Collection points out that there is some VHS stock of The Cool Mikado is still available from Amazon. When this is exhausted, he will investigate a DVD version, as he is for other Baim titles. Do write to him with encouragement if there’s anything in the collection you would buy.

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04.25.06

Septimus

Posted in Dreaming of England, Flotsam at 12:46 pm by Jon

Very much to my pleasure yesterday I was served in a shop by a Septimus. It set me wondering what the rules for numerical names really are, specifically:

• At what point do you switch to numerical names? I can think of one fictional Tertius (Lydgate, in Middlemarch, but Primus and Secundus, while possible, seem both overly literal and a little presumptious
• Are female children included in the count? I haven’t heard of a Septima, so I suspect not. But still, if the count doesn’t include girl offspring, things are going to get confusing (Septimus could realistically be the fourteenth child)
• There ought really to be some recognition of numerical status flowing down the male line, if we’re to do this thing properly. The sons of Septimus, by rights should be Primus Septimus and Secundus Septimus, or perhaps Septimus Alpha, Septimus Beta, like indented lists
• Finally, of course, how high do you go, and what happens to the names when you get there? Dodecus? Qindecus? What’s the world record?

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04.23.06

The sound of rubber on plastic

Posted in Dreaming of England, Cricket at 9:38 am by Jon

Father and son time in the park yesterday was enlivened by the overwhelming amount of play going on everywhere. Every twenty yards a little kickabout was going on, underneath a sky bright with frisbees and tennis balls. A raucous scratch game of rounders (Peckham rules, which is to say very few that I could make out) descended into fits of laughter every couple of minutes as someone slipped, dropped or ran in circles.

Most notably, from where we were sitting, I could see half a dozen small groups playing cricket, an obvious carryover from last year’s Ashes. A group of under tens played the unpredictable bounce with steely concentration. A dad bowled endless long hops to his straight-driving son. If we had been looking to fill out all the stereotypes, there would have been an asian father slowly unveiling the mysteries of spin to his sons. They were, in fact, off to my right, under a chestnut tree.

The only thing I couldn’t spot was a Flintoff Flame. The bats and balls were all cheap and cheerful, and I’m very glad.

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04.10.06

Oh Boris

Posted in Dreaming of England, Meeja, Bloggery at 11:20 am by Jon

On Sunday, after a gruelling but very entertaining bout of football (our Italian-ornamented side won, accompanied by many on-field shouts of “Che bella!”), one of the English contingent piped up: “If I just ask this very quickly can you answer and pretend you didn’t hear it? Where can I get a ‘muscleman’ cooking apron?”

Well, quite. I feel the same about the below, so read quickly and pretend I didn’t say it:

The best blog in Britain, I fear, is Boris Bloody Johnson’s. The evidence:

Boris fell off his bicycle on his way to the House of Commons yesterday afternoon and was taken to hospital to have his injured arm checked out.

His bicycle is in a bad state of repair but Boris himself is much better now and surprised at all the attention this minor injury is receiving. “Lord help us all!” he said, upon news that his fall had made it to national radio news this morning.

Lord help us all!

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