life’s a beach and then you die
They were handing out free Mentos at Charing Cross the other week - I couldn’t resist introducing them to some diet cola…
A colleague had tried it with no luck, so perhaps the trick is to do as we did, and warm the cola in a bowl of hot water from the kettle. A smaller nozzle and pin to allow controlled dropping of the Mentos would be good ideas too. I could only get the first Mento to fizz - I added 4 more and nothing much else happened.
A week ago, during a stressful visit to Bluewater, I was dragging the kids around and my youngest was screaming. I wanted to scream too, but possibly for different reasons. I was in M&S trying to buy food and they didn’t have any. It had taken ages to get there because of road works, we’d witnessed the aftermath of a 3-car smash on the slip-road, had driven round for about 20 minutes trying to find a parking space and I didn’t want to go in the first place. Anyway, a foul-looking man looked at me with hatred and said “bloody kids!”. Was he never young?
Last week on the train going home from work, in the far end of the carriage a baby cried. Young woman stopped snogging her boyfriend briefly to say “bloody kids!”. Let’s hope that snogging never ends in pregnancy.
Yesterday a woman had a small dog on the train which kept barking. No-one said “bloody dogs”.
When we had our first child we just couldn’t agree on his surname. I wanted him to have mine, my wife wanted him to have her’s. So we did that awful compromise and he became a double-barreled Booth-Farmer. I don’t like it, but it seemed the least-worst option.
We know one couple that changed both their names to a third name, but this seems frankly bonkers. But I do wonder what happens if Henry Booth-Farmer marries Sophie Rees-Harmer… will their first child be Maisie Booth-Farmer-Rees-Harmer?
I think I’ve found a solution. There’s a girl in Henry’s class with the surname Booth. He should marry her and - in a gesture of right-on feminist solidarity - ensure he and their children take her name.
Both exmonkey and I have noticed this: our jeans used to wear out at the crotch and now they wear out at the knees. Changing nappies, you see.
Cyril Connolly is supposed to have said ‘the pram in the hallway is the enemy of promise’ (although a little googling tells me his book was called Enemies of Promise and the quotation should go ‘there is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall’). Maybe he should have written ‘the knee-hole in the trouser is the enemy of promise’, but then one wonders how many nappies Cyril changed himself.
Will have to track down Enemies of Promise, partly because Cyril Connolly is referred to a few times in the commuting book Notes from Overground by Tiresias, and it apparently contains other corkers like ‘whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising’. I like that. Reminds me a bit of my A-level history teacher Mr Hofton who one day skewered me with this withering remark: “Booth, are you really intelligent, or merely well-educated?”
With a slightly heavy heart I’ve had to install parental controls on the computer in the back room - which meant upgrading the G3 Tower of Power from MacOS 10.3 to 10.4 (Tiger).
The boys had been looking at some very mildly risque videos on a web site they’d got off some friends - eldest is only 7. The computer is in a shared room, but not a room where they’re very noticable, which is probably a bad thing but there’s nowhere else to put it, and I don’t like their sticky fingers on my PowerBook very much. Makes me nervous.
So, another little bit of innocence lost.
But the nerd in me was quite pleased to have figured this out: I had MacOS 10.3 installed on a 20GB drive that had been partitioned in two. I only have an upgrade installer for 10.4 that requires 10.3 to be installed before it’ll run. But once it’s found a 10.3 installation, you can use Disc Utility on the 10.4 updated DVD to repartition / reformat the disc that 10.3 is itself on. So all the files you need for OS 10.4 must be on the updater DVD. And I only had to spend an hour or two shovelling a spare DVD drive into it and updating the OS, and recreating everyone’s accounts and finding wallpaper of James Bond and Thierry Henry and worrying about data I might have inadvertantly wiped…
I kept dreaming of a new kind of laptop. I kept drawing it and doodling it.
It would be about the size of an A4 sheet of paper, have Wifi, run some kind of Linux and - crucially - have no hard drive. A Cambridge Z88, an Apple eMate for the internet age.
Turns out the One Laptop Per Child project are thinking along the same lines. The project aims to design and build cheap, robust laptops for the third world. $100 laptops. Not for me, of course, but for children who really need them.
There was some ballyhoo in the media a while ago that the project - whilst still not going commercial, not selling them in Europe or the US - would let you buy one if you bought one for the developing world. A brilliant idea. Buy 2, get 1.
It’s not quite clear from their web site if they’re really going to do this or not. I hope they do. I want one of these so much, it hurts.
Today on BBC 6 Music, Gideon Coe was getting listeners to vote for ‘great lost tear-jerkers’. Three tracks to choose from, including ‘Ship-building’ by Robert Wyatt and ‘Tank Park Salute’. I hadn’t heard ‘Tank Park Salute’ for years, all my Billy Bragg records are locked on vinyl, away from my iPod, and so I voted for it. It won.
I vaguely remembered the song bringing a tear to my eye back in 1991. I hadn’t reckoned on what having three children and the death of my father would do the emotional power of this song. I cried for ages and keep welling up when I think of the lyrics which have been in my head all day.
Some photographs of a summer’s day
A little boy’s lifetime away
Is all I’ve left of everything we’ve done
I was going to write a small rant about Christmas tree lights (why wired in series, not parallel, etc) but they are almost all working now. A mere 7 bulbs replaced in one set, a mere hour and a half spent with a multimeter and some colourful language.
But, no, this is about toys. Long-time readers may remember my previous discussion about not liking Playmobil because of the amount of time it took me to build the pirate ship, compared with the small amount of time it took my children to demolish it.
This year Henry got the big Playmobil Subbuteo-style football game. Only took me about 15 minutes to put it together, using the usual nicely drawn graphic instructions. But the instructions on how to actually play the game - they’re in German.
Made me laugh almost as much as Mrs Blogmywiki insisting that Eau de Vie de Poire William was a light aperitif and turning the colour of Withnail drinking lighter fuel when she swigged back a capful.
Is it just me, or is the animated film Polar Express a nasty piece of work?
I watched it at the in-laws last year on DVD - I may have had too much goose and port but it made me feel sick. And it’s now showing in 3D at the IMAX cinema at Waterloo - that’s a great way to screw up your kids’ Christmas.
There’s just something sinister about it, and not sinister in a good way. Just bleak and scary with no shred of comfort. And not great to look at, either. Give me any old adaptation of A Christmas Carol, give me that cartoon of Oscar Wilde’s Happy Prince, but above all give me The Amazing Mr Blunden.
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