It always amazes me how quickly my children sometimes manage to break new toys. So it cheered me up a bit to learn that the boffins at CERN (they have a web site you know) have already broken the Large Hadron Collider.
Hope they kept the receipt.
Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category
Did a security update on my PowerBook today; now it keeps forgetting my wireless network’s name and password. So it really is very bloody secure as it’s now mostly not connected to the internet at all any more. I forgave this behaviour in a £200 (now defenestrated) Asus eeePC but it’s a bit galling in a £1600 Apple pro laptop. Where’s the window?
Home alone and at a loose end, I Googled ‘cool things to do with a Nintendo Wii’ 
(it’s been sitting in the living room not earning its keep) and discovered Wii Transfer. This allows me to stream iPhoto pictures and iTunes songs from the big fat old 320GB iMac in the back room which has all my MP3s on it. I had to shell out £7 for some Wii Points to download the Wii web-browser, but now here I am with a big stupid grin on my face dancing round the living room to the strains of That Petrol Emotion. Doesn’t seem to like long songs, though - the Wii says it doesn’t have enough memory and chokes. So we are spared The Orb’s ‘Little Fluffy Clouds‘ for now…
Never mind the possible end of the universe, on Wedneday. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is an amusing typographical error waiting to happen. You know it’s true.
Went on holiday, weather was awful, nearly died.
It is a paradox universally acknowledged that every year when I leave polluted London for the fresh, sea air of West Cornwall, my asthma always gets worse. 
I don’t know if it’s damp or dust or dander in the chalet where we stay, but it’s always prudent for me to pack a few extra inhalers.
This year, though, it wasn’t enough and out of the blue one evening I had the worst asthma attack of my life - I even said (croaked) at one point “this is it, I’m going to die”.
I probably can’t have been that close to death (though it bloody well felt like it at the time) as I was not guided to any lights, my life failed to flash before me - though the last few pictures on my Flickr photostream did. I remember wondering if I really wanted to be remembered by a photo of the back of a VW camper van bearing the slogan “don’t worry, be hippy”.
Rural health services are often denigrated - indeed it took (what seemed to me) a small eternity for the ambulance to arrive, but then I was staying somewhere fairly remote in the sand dunes which is hard enough to find in the day, let alone at midnight in an area with no street lights.
I do have a lot of time for our local Big London Teaching Hospital - they saved my eldest son’s life and my wife’s life twice. But if you have to spend any of your holiday in hospital, West Cornwall Hospital in Penzance does seem like a particularly nice place to do it. Everyone was incredibly friendly, the place seemed to be awash with doctors and nurses. When I’ve visited our London hospital it seems like you can go all day without seeing a doctor of any kind and hours without seeing a nurse, but in Penzance the ward round was a friendly, ambling affair and medical staff were in and out of the ward all morning. 
It may be standard practice in the NHS now, but it was scrupulously clean - in the morning they pulled my bed out to clean behind it and even cleaned the bed itself (with me in it). Even the food was pretty good - I can recommend the chicken and leak pie, by the way - even if the wine list left a lot to be desired.
I woke up this morning - too early but alive, chest clear, back in my chalet bed. And as I type this, the wind has dropped, the sun is rising, the sky is blue - and there is an improbable-looking half rainbow out at sea. You probably can’t ask for more than that.
Hurtling as I am towards grumpy old mandom, I’ve only recently got the hang of text messaging - T9 predictive text in particular. It took me a little while to grasp the concept at all, but now I understand how it works (and I do think it’s bloody clever) I’m still a bit mystified by some of the assumptions made by the people who compiled the dictionary on my phone. (It’s a Nokia 2310, only £19 and surprisingly waterproof).
For example ‘an’ gets priority over ‘am’. Why? Didn’t they look at some sample text messages? Surely most of them consisted of something like ‘am on the train’ or ‘am on the way home’ or ‘am on a window ledge on the 13th floor’ - maybe I’m being egotistical, but isn’t ‘am’ more useful than ‘an’ as a first choice word?
It annoys me that ‘he’ gets priority over ‘if’ but I suppose that’s understandable - the champion texters on my train are all female and they probably have more cause to use the word ‘he’ than I do. My life by comparison must be a whirl of uncertainty if (there we go again) I need to type ‘if’ so much.
Sometimes there are nice coincidences. Try to type ‘kiss’ and you get ‘lips’, for example. Did they notice that somewhere in T9 or Nokia HQ? I like to think a poetical dictionary compiler did.
I had to send a message the other day explaining that I’d made a particularly difficult phone call. I tried to type ‘I have phoned…’ and it came out as ‘I have sinned…’
Yes, well, thank you and good night, Nuance Communications, your irony department has earnt their bonus this year.
I really don’t like cricket. I ought to love it - I mean I hate sport, and what could be less sporty than standing around most of the time, waiting and running for shelter at the first hint of rain. But I can’t stand it. I think it’s the thought that people actually get paid for playing it that turns my stomach.
Anyhoo, the rugby season is over and the boys have taken up cricket. The cricket parents seem a very different crowd from the rugby bunch, who are amiable and truly from all walks of life. Not so with the cricket dads. They all sat there with their Blackberries and The Sunday Times. One bemoaned the state of the floor in his snooker room. Another moaned that he just didn’t seem to get the time to take the Caterham out for a spin these days. There were phone calls to ‘the boys on the boat in Sicily’ about ‘closing down the deal before we lose the bonus’.
The only light relief came when one dad told a story about how the night before a strange woman had phoned his house and asked for him by name. His wife had taken the call and it transpired she was looking for someone else with the same name. His friends joshed him that he was really just telling them the story to bolster his alibi. The more he denied it the more they teased him about having an affair. I sat in the back row laughing like a drain in the rain.
I was diagnosed with spasmodic torticollis this week - a violent, crippling pain in the neck that came from nowhere, wiped out Tuesday, most of Wednesday and thankfully has now gone away, leaving me with nothing more than a stiff neck.
After seven hours in A&E they eventually gave me diazepam - valium - which left me alternately laughing and screaming. And as such it’s hard not to think that the spasmodic torticollis represents what’s going on in my life, as I’ve been alternately laughing and screaming for a few weeks now. People seem to think that I’m doing something with my life which I’m not and the more I protest the less they believe me. Now I know how Leonard Nemoy felt when he wrote “I AM NOT SPOCK”.
Art imitates life. Life imitates art. Spasmodic torticollis and diazepam have the last laugh.
I said I was voting for Ken. Well I didn’t, quite. When it came down to it, in the polling station, usual Labour party worker sitting outside demanding to see my polling card (fuck off)… I couldn’t quite bring myself to, so I voted Green first and then Ken as second preference. Looks like my guilty hope that Ken would wing it on second preference votes was mis-placed. Serves me right for having my head turned by a very slick Green Party leaflet. And having my head turned by the Green Party candidate…
Cats. And the consequences of cats. Listen, watch and learn:
http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2008/04/24/the-neighbours-cat-won/
Until a few days ago, I had no idea if I was going to vote for Boris or Ken. I don’t really want either of them to win, but despite never having voted Tory in my life, I was tempted to vote for Boris. Why? Because it would be quite funny watching him fuck things up so royally. He’d fuck them up so badly it would, eventually, be bad enough even to wipe that silly impish grin off his face.
I know he plays up his buffoonery, I know he’s not as stupid as he’d like us to believe, but he’s clearly out of his depth. I’ve only watched one debate but Ken wiped the floor with him rather neatly, I thought. Studio floor came up lovely. That mop of blond hair is clearly good for something.
Then I read Charlie Brooker’s very funny Guardian column on why he’s voting for Ken, and that helped sway me. That and the fact that if the Evening Standard want Ken to lose so badly, it’s got to be worth voting for him just to spite them. Recent issues of the Evening Standard are reminiscent of the 1980s Private Eye spoof Daily Mail headline: AIDS THREAT TO LABOUR VOTERS: VOTE TORY AND WIN A MAESTRO. They make Robert Mugabe look like a subtle spin-meister.
Recent Comments