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Thursday 20 November 2008
Driven While Distracted
An online project with which I've frequently toyed would be one to which people could post details of drivers who drive while using non-handsfree mobile phones. You could post up the car type, registration, description of the driver and of the particualr thing they were doing when the fact that they were driving without due care and attention. Perhaps you could even post a photograph taken with a mobile phone camera.
Probably there's something legal that would stop me putting that into practice, which is a pity, because I have many many examples with which I could kick-start the project.
Such as the woman trying to get out of a small parking space on Albert Bridge Road this morning, almost heading right across the wrong side of the road because she was talking on her phone and steering one-handed.
The woman driving the Hyundai Getz, registration number LV52 HXA that would be.
Well, Yes: Conventional Is Probably The Word
That's a bit sad - day one of the convention was okay but far from spectacular. It may have been a combination of the venue, the structure (lots of large panels, almost all with people from the 'old' series, telling a lot of the same stories they've been trotting out for the last twenty years). It could have done with more smaller sessions (though they did run 'coffee breaks' which were smaller and cost extra) and in an ideal world a better mix of old and new series items, though in that area the organisers' options are obviously limited.
To be fair, there was a wider mix of people than I'd expected based on previous events, and certainly the new series seems to have brought some new and younger fans to the fold.
Somewhat to our embarassment, we took a 'cutting our losses' approach, and skipped day two, opting to head up into the Brecon Beacons and the National Showcaves Centre for Wales. Which was well worth it.
Horrible journey back into town though - traffic was horrendous.
How Conventional
The last Doctor Who convention I went to is at least seven years ago, but as the programme has resurfaced, so have the number of convention options available. So we're off to Swansea for the weekend for Regenerations.
It'll be interesting to see what the convention-going audience looks like now that in theory at least the programme has been introduced to a whole new audience.
King Of The Mountain
So the news that the new Kate Bush single had its first airing on Radio Two's Ken Bruce show was met with some excitement in our household.
Having listened to King of the Mountain, I'm a little in two minds - on the one hand, it's great to have new Kate Bush material available (and a whole double album coming in less than two months time!), but on the other, I did listen to it expecting it to take off in a way that it just doesn't. I need to listen to it more I think.
Someone or other (music journo for one of the papers) was extremely off-hand about it on Radio Four's Front Row this evening.
Home Again, Home Again
Bad, bad flight home stuck next to an American couple:
"Is this airport we're flying into [Heathrow] a big one?"
Stupid delay because the gate we arrived at shares space with another on which another flight was departing, and they couldn't risk us crossing them.
But eventually I am back in the arms of my beloved and the kitten.
And very pleased I am to be here too.
I'm absolutely shattered - this is not going to be a busy weekend, I can assure you.
Remember BookCrossing?
I mentioned it yonks and yonks ago and managed to release a grand total of two books through it.
So will I have any better luck with MyBookYourBook? I suspect not, but at least the possibility that I may receive demands from people for the books I offer up might motivate me. Of course, I can't sign up to it until I've visited my bookshelves and selected a starter ten, and given the infrequency of my visits home, that might be a while away. Anyway - I'll try to get round to it.
Link via Lyle, by the way.
Explanatory
I've had a couple of mails enquiring about the subtitle that's currently adorning the blog: "It's just the guilt and forever wakefulness of the weak", which has reminded me that I also had enquiries about a couple of previous ones and never managed to get round to explaining them.
So, the last three, in the order they appeared:
"I've studied situations for themes and variations": From The Pet Shop Boys' I didn't get where I am today, because I actually think it's a very good summary of the entire phenomenon of blogging.
"Everybody say "Raxacoricofallapatorius": Was a shameless attempt on my part to be number one in the Google rankings when people searched on the name of this planet, home of the Slitheen from the new series of Doctor Who. It worked too - while I was using it I was consistently the first search return.
"It's just the guilt and forever wakefulness of the weak": From the Rilo Kiley song The Execution of All Things. I like it because it's bleak, and I'm frequently wakeful. Weak? Not for me to judge.
The BA Fiasco II
Meant to blog this last week, but somehow forgot to set it to 'publish':
Further to my recent musing on the mess that British Airways have got themselves into over their catering situation, I wanted to offer a perspective having done some flying with them.
I've taken four short haul flights with them in the last week, and the conclusion I reach is that they're in an even sorrier state than I thought they were. One one flight out of Heathrow, I got a £5 refreshment voucher, on the other, I got nothing at all. On one flight back, I got a sandwich in a triangular plastic box and a plastic cup of orange juice given to me outside the aircraft door, and on the other, a plastic bag containing a cheese sandwich, a small cake and an apple, and a choice of juice or water. (Felt like packed lunch time at school.)
I'm not one who feels that airlines are really under any obligation to provide refreshments to their passengers anyway, certainly not on short haul flights, and I'm going to say categorically right now that in this current circumstance, they'd have been better to have just issued an apology and done nothing but provide the tea and coffee on board that they are - it's not like passengers are paying for the food and drink, and bluntly, seeing BA employees handing out packed lunch bags is embarassing, and only serves to reinforce how low the airline has been brought by a dispute that should never have happened.
What's So Bloody Urgent?
I have emerged, *shattered* from the New York - San Francisco flight. It's only five and a half hours, but it feels like I've been on the plane all day. And once again I marvel at how utterly unwilling to cast off the lifeline of mobile telecommunications so many people are. Well before the plane had stopped taxiing, plenty of the passengers had turned back on their mobile phones and were busily listening to voicemail.
But the most extreme example I've ever seen is the man sitting by the window on my row. Before we pushed back, he'd made at least ten calls to tell people he was sitting on a plane for San Francisco, as well as doing mails on his Blackberry and one last call until we were at the point of being at the end of the runway.
As we approached San Francisco, he was actually back on the Blackberry before we'd landed and on the phone as soon as the wheels were down.
Really, seriously, what can conceivably be so critical that it can't wait five minutes?
Searching
Been a while since I checked the search log for the little box over on the right, so for reference, here are the terms that people have searched on in the site since the beginning of September:
'coren' (What Coren? Alan Coren? Pretty sure I've never mentioned him).
'dieux du stade' (Guilty - Here it is).
'desmond elliot'
'desmond elliot the nigeria actor' (Nope, sorry, not the slightest idea.)
'leamington spa' (Well yes, but only to point out that I don't know anyone who lives there).
'Church of Christ, Scientist' (From the same person who searched for Leamington Spa.... Nothing to see here, move along).
'gillian' (Take your pick - there are a few that are all about Gillian Anderson)
'cock' (Having just done the search myself, I'm thrilled to realise that the majority of uses of the word are actually as part of 'cocktail'. Though there is always this infamous posting.
'nude' (Yeah, there's probably quite a lot of that).
'swire' (That would relate to Claire, I guess. There's a posting that refers to her tangentially (in the plural, as she should be.)
'nude rugby' (comes up more frequently than almost any other search term - the photo is also one that gets bandwidth-thieved more than anything else on the site too - it's here if you must know).
'Ryanair' (yep - there are a couple of mentions).
In-Flight Entertainment
Odd flight today - I don't often get long-haul flights that start early enough for the main meal they serve to be breakfast, but the first flight of the day from London to New York is one such.
Due to a 90 minute delay in departing (when there's a discrepancy between the load sheet and what's in the hold, I'm actually okay with them taking the time to sort it out), I ended up having 'breakfast', at about 12:30, then after doing some work, got caught up on some films I'd missed at the cinema.
I watched The Descent, which is very good - lots of jumps, and very, very creepy. Also extremely bleak, pretty much from beginning to end.
And I also watched a film called Festival, which I've wanted to see for a while. If you've been with me a while, you'll remember that I'm a big fan of a TV series called The Book Group (coincidentally with someone from the cast of The Descent in its cast). Festival is a film written and directed by the woman who wrote and directed that. It's set in Edinburgh at the time of the festival, and it's ensemble-ish, with various plot threads running alongside each other. As with pretty much any exercise of this type, some of the characters and plots work better than others, but generally, there's more good than bad.
It's like The Book Group in that director woman doesn't flinch from a very, very honest presentation of sex, and in the film she's pretty explicit. This isn't beautiful softly lit Hollywood sex - this is as untidy as the real thing usually is. It's also close to graphic enough that occasionally I worried what the people who could also see my screen must think I was watching....
It's probably not what I'd call a great film, but it is a good one that I'll watch out for on DVD.
'Base Camp'
Driving out to the airport this morning, I heard on a newspaper review that one of the tabloids is using this headline on a story about the fact that gay and lesbian couples in the armed forces will be eligible for shared accommodation once civil unions are in place from December, assuming they have a civil union of course.
The paper points out that this is liable to cause anger among heterosexual couples who won't be eligible if they choose not to marry.
I can't believe that people are still trying to get away with this kind of disingenuous crap.
Well if they choose not to marry, they'll be in exactly the same situtaion as gay and lesbian couples who choose not to have civil unions. The point being that they've *always* had that choice, and its associated consequences and benefits. Now, we're just putting everyone on an equal foooting as far as this stuff is concerned.
Shambolic
Went, this afternoon, to Vinopolis with a group of people as a birthday weekend outing. I'd booked us into the Premium Wine Tour (extra premium tastings, a 'how to taste wine' session), and while the afternoon ended up being fun because of the people, I was less than impressed with the place.
To start with, my advance, pre-paid booking was apparently not on their list, and they 'couldn't get into the system'. The hen party group in front of us also had trouble because the Vinopolis employee didn't believe the number of people they'd booked and paid for, despite them having brought their confirmation email along with them.
Then, though I was standing in plain site of their desk, no one bothered coming to tell me that actually they had found my booking, so when I went back to be told 'yeah, your tickets are here', we'd missed the 'how to' session at 2pm. "The next one is at 2.30" I was told, so we waited a while to go in and start, thinking it would be the best thing to do it at the start of the tour.
Having waited and then entered, it turned out that the next session was at 3pm, meaning we wandered the first third of the place with neither 'how to', nor any wine to sample (missing the point surely). By the time we'd gone back through the tour at 2.55, there was already a sizable queue for the 3pm and we barely all got in.
And once on the tour, everyone remarked that there's almost nothing of the 'museum' itself that's really engaging - just a lot of boards with wine/region information and some photos. There's one point where you can smell and touch some of the fruits and spices that are associated with wine tastes and smell, and that's about it except for some tastings of what in fact turned out to be in some cases very, *very* uninspiring wines.
Don't get me wrong, I had a lot of fun, but that all came down to the people, definitely not the place, its people, or its organisation, all of which were decidedly unimpressive.
Life Begins....
....here apparently.
So this is it - The Big Four-Oh.
And how does it feel? Curiously similar to The Big Three-Nine.
Crazy-Bonkers
As noted in the past, I don't tend to blog the detail of my dreams, but this morning I feel the need to mention to nature of last night's.
One thing which I suspect isn't that common, as I tend to get surprised looks when I mention it, is that I have 'serial' dreams, in that sometimes weeks after one dream, I'll step back into its narrative in another and pick up the situation as I left it.
Last night was one such, in which I was once again in a situation I first dreamed myself into about a month ago. This situation was pretty intense, and challenging in many ways, and when I woke up in the middle of it at about 5am, I couldn't shake it. On some levels, I knew that I'd been dreaming, that I was back in my familiar bed with David and Gramsci, and that I didn't need to worry about what I'd been dreaming. But on another level I was still locked into it. I lay there for an hour until the alarm went off, fretting about sorting the situation out, and trying to get my head round the possible implications of the various solutions I was contemplating. All the while, laying in my real bedroom, in my real life, and not actually affected by the fictional situation at all, and desperate to stop worrying about it, because I knew I could.
It was a thoroughly creepy situation, and not one I'm in a hurry to repeat.
The Joy Of Wireless
Look at me! Blogging from the airport.
It is a joy how many places have now got wireless hotspots available.
Heading home to David and Gramsci, ahead of a weekend heading north (well, north-ish - Beverley of all places), for my brother's UK-based wedding party.
It's all a bit hectic in the next few weeks. I've got this weekend, and a trip to Hamburg on Wednesday, then next weekend is my birthday, so I'm expecting to be out a bit.
The Monday after that I'm off to the US for the week, getting back on the following Saturday. Then there's a weekend in Swansea, and the weekend after that we're off to Cornwall for the week.
It's just non-stop, my life.
Paul Daniels' Blog
Everything you ever needed to know about Paul and The Lovely Marvellous Debbie McGee's lives. Here.
September
The arrival of September, as I've remarked in years past, tends to provoke a slightly melancholy turn of mind in me. To start with, there's the recognition that another year is into its final third, and so will soon be over. Couple that with the steady turn towards the autumnal, and the arrival of appreciably shorter days, and the sense that we're falling towards winter becomes inescapable.
And of course my own personal progress through time becomes more tangible as another birthday hits.
But this one feels rather different. Maybe it's because the first two days of the month have been so gloriously warm and bright (and I'm enjoying them in Stockholm, clearly a city which benefits from sunshine more than most). Maybe it's because everyone else seems to think that this particular birthday (a 'biggie') is so much bigger a deal than I think it is myself that I'm not really thinking about it.
But whatever, melancholy or not, I like September.