Category Archives: Uncategorized

Hats for cats

I was challenged to make hats for the cats out of the foil that came from my Easter eggs, like Rapitinui.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get any Easter eggs. I did get an Easter bunny for which I was very grateful.  But no eggs.  So no cat hats this year.

Twitter

OK, I heard about twitter yonks and yonks ago – Alan started using it, then so too did Mike.

Then Mike published a list of texts he’d sent to Twitter last night whilst waiting for a date, and that pushed me back into investigating it this morning when I should have been getting ready to go out. (It’s so often been the source of me being horribly late… “Oh, I’ll just check my e-mail. And Cix. And usenet. And the blogs I follow, and the websites I click on every day. Ooh, that looks interesting…”)

So, Twitter is a quick thing, you tell it a one line post and it puts it on its own website, and makes it available for you to put on other websites. You can update it on the internet and by sending it a text message and through an IM client, although only a set of services I don’t use, like AIM.

So, it’s a bit like a mini-blog. Quick to update, but not so much space for wittering. A bit like the “status” bit of Facebook, but possible to incorporate it in other sites in a very Web 2.0 way.

Two further things occurred since I set it up this afternoon. What if I gave my Sat Nav program the Twitter SMS number? Navicore has a “beacon” function that texts your lat and long periodically to an SMS number of your choosing. I haven’t yet found a use for that, but when I was off round France for a long time, it would have been cool to send a regular series of co-ordinates to somewhere central to record them, and then plot them on a map on something like Google Earth.

Then I wondered about political uses for Twitter. It would be interesting to have people in the media eye to use it. “Ming Campbell is going into PMQs” for example. Or even “I’m in Full Council. This is taking ages!”

Both of those uses open up the chance for people whose interests are not terribly well aligned with yours to use your activity against you. Or stalk you. Is that a risk worth taking?

Poisson d’Avril

OK, so I twigged that Blair wasn’t really going to tread the boards, and that there weren’t really astronauts playing Quidditch.  Neither Iain Dale nor Lord Owen are really going to stand for Mayor of London.

But Troubled Diva reading out extracts from his blog book on Woman’s Hour?  Yup, swallowed that one hook line and sinker.

Even the increasingly silly parts of it.  No trouble believing that R4 wonk thinks TD is a woman.  No trouble believing he’d go with it.  No trouble thinking he’d make a recording trying to sound less butch.

Dear me.  I never was good at anagrams.

Blair to tread boards

Tony Blair’s post-political career is to be theatre, the Observer reports today.

He’ll be appearing in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible as the Reverend John Hale.

Which is the character I played when we did The Crucible at school in 1992.

I spent most of the time of my German exchange (when not playing Civ on my exchange mate’s computer.) I can remember the play, and some of the other people who were in it.

I can remember one strange rehearsal of one of the acts, in which Hale is supposed to ask a married couple to recite the ten commandments and the husband forgets Thou shalt not commit adultery. In the rehearsal, I forgot my lines, and missed out the question. Which made the act go a little quicker than planned and skipped rather a lot of important material.

I can’t now remember any of my lines – or indeed any of the lines from the other shows I’ve been in (there’s a list here). But I can remember the name of my German exchange partner. Googling his name, it looks like he’s just published his PhD. I can’t remember his return visit at all, but there are several things from my stay in Nuremberg that stay with me. In my first hour in Germany, after my first plane trip, with my ears hurting like hell and a headache, it took me 20 minutes to figure out how to flush the toilet and how to turn the tap on to wash my hands. It was one of those lift and turn mixer taps. I can’t remember why the loo puzzled me, but I can remember it had one of those strange platforms.

The other strong memory is of a dinner we had one night where they gave me grated cheese and raw meat and pickles, and we took it in turns to load a mini-saucepan and then put it under a mini electric grill on the table to cook/melt.

I haven’t been in Germany for years now, and my language skills are failing fast. Must go back! But in my mental, unbooked, holiday plans for this year, it looks like Geneva and Brussels are on the list, and possibly Normandy again. Geneva to visit friends variously in the Alps and Geneva itself; Brussels to show P the Atomium and the European Parliament, and the chocolate, and the Tintin murals and and and…, and as an excuse to use the Eurostar once the St Pancras terminal opens this autumn.

Babies stop you sleeping

According to a BBC News article, babies stop you sleeping.

This won’t come as news to Ed, who highlighted the article, cos  he’s had two already and has another on the way.

And I’m sure it won’t be welcome news to my council colleague whose partner gave birth at 11.20 this morning.  But I’m guessing they knew already too.

I’m flat out at the moment and having difficulty fitting everything in because of the election.  I can’t begin to imagine what it would be like having to do all I’m doing AND look after a new born baby.

An evening wasted with David Lynch

Hmm. Just schlepped out to the Broadway to catch the last but one opportunity to see Inland Empire before it’s taken off in Nottingham.

Not entirely sure that was a good use of my time.

It’s hardly as if I’m a stranger to Lynch films – ever since a rather splendid cinema in Paris ran a Lynch retrospective during my time there.  I can’t remember where it was, except it was clearly a building converted to a cinema from a church or theatre.  A huge auditorium, with architectural features like mouldings, and most of the seats on the flat.  I trekked out there on several occasions to watch a whole series of Lynch films, including Eraserhead, Blue Velvet and Dune.

Indeed, that was probably the first time I came across the word “retrospective”.

Years later, a video rental accident later, and an incredulous group of us sat and shouted at Lost Highway – remember the coffee table scene? Years before Mark Oaten…  We even went to see Mullholland Drive – can it really be six years ago now?

So it wasn’t as if we didn’t know what to expect.  And yet still it feels like I’ve been robbed of three hours of my time.  The story didn’t hang together any better than expected.  At least in previous projects, you got the impression that Lynch knows how the tools of cinematography work, even if he has a conscientious objection to narrative coherence.  In this one, it seemed like he forgot key skills like exposure, with the film often (painfully!) too bright or too dark.  Pixellation was a problem at several points.  This wasn’t a beautiful piece of film work, like some other films of his have been.

Still, always nice to ogle that nice Justin Theroux. So much more to him than Kyle MacLachlan.

Bap bada, bap bada

Well, quite by chance we settled down in front of the end of Make Your Mind Up, the new name for “A Song for Europe”
We called the voting totally wrong, thinking two other bands would make it through, but in the end, the one I voted for made it all the way.

Yay!  This is the sort of camp-as-tits OTT shit that Eurovision needs!

Now a dilemma!  Do we go to big gay camping on Shell Island on the 12th May weekend… or do we stay home and watch Eurovision?

And blimey – the guys out of Scooch have not aged well.  All their publicity photos are about 7 years old.  They’re all about the same age as me, born between 1977 and 1980.