Not A Blog Archive 2007

Date: 30/12/07

Summing Up

It's that time again, as another number ticks by into oblivion, so I suppose a summary is in order.

For myself, I've known worse years. 2007 was - at least in my own life - probably an improvement on the one before it.

On the 'up' side:

• I still have the job I started the year with.
• No major alarms or excursions on the family front.
• I bought a smart new PC.
• I learned more about coding html and managed some rudimentary css. This was for the revamp of the site back in June which, by and large, was a success.
• I've now had four pieces published on the prestigious Transdiffusion site, with at least one more due in the next few months.
• I also had an amusing letter published in The Independent.
• I've had a healthier winter than last time round: no sick leave since early January.
• I had a fascinating day out in Liverpool, most particularly the Josh Kirby exhibition at the Walker Gallery.
• I re-established contact with a couple of old friends.
• The Council put in new front and back doors.

On the 'down' side:

• The 'higher-ups' in the Depratment still seem intent on getting rid of my job. It's not my manager who's the problem, nor his manager: it's her manager who can't see further than his own preferment.
• My old hi-fi is failing on the instalment plan: the tape decks are already screwed, and the turntable is now starting to go.
• I'm still concerned about why my left leg and right ankle keep swelling up. I still think it's because of my left hip being a bit squiffy, but my doctor thinks otherwise. Perhaps the scan I'm due to have next week will point the way. Although, because the scan is on my kidneys and bladder, perhaps it won't.
• I still haven't learned to play that acoustic guitar I bought nearly five years ago.

In the wider world, however, things seem to be getting relentlessly worse. But that's a Rant.

Date: 24/12/07

Greetings

Last post for the moment, so to all family, friends (near and far, online and off), neighbours, colleagues, visitors and passing strangers, these best wishes:

I wish you a hopeful Christmas,
I wish you a brave New Year.
All anguish, pain and sadness
Leave your heart, and let your road be clear.

(Pete Sinfield,"I Believe In Father Christmas".)

Date: 22/12/07

Blair Finds His Spiritual Home

How appropriate that Tony Blair, self-righteous mass murderer of this parish, should announce his official conversion to Roman Catholicism.

Appropriate, because I'm sure he'll feel very comfortable inhabiting an instiution which bases its actions and attitudes on the voices heard in the heads of a tight-knit, highly-secretive cabal surrounding a leader who claims to be infallible, and where all those who doubt the righteousness of the Great Leader's pronouncements are marginalised, expelled or even killed off.

It should be just like old times, except for one thing...

Watch out, Ratzi baby, someone's after your job!

Date: 15/12/07

Trudge...

Still here.

It's just that other things have been taking up my time.

I had my annual review with the nurse a week last Monday. Everything was OK, except for the fact that the check-up coincided with my left foot, ankle and shin swelling up again, as they have intermittently since about May this year. I was put on my honour to go and see my GP on the Wednesday. So I did.

I told him about my left hip, which has been giving me discomfort for quite a while. He wasn't convinced that that was what was causing the swelling, so I have to go for a scan in January. Things like this play on my mind, especially during the dark months.

Had to go to Bootle last Tuesday for a workshop on our service request system. This would have been of far greater use to us when the system was brought in over eighteen months ago. As it is, the workshop leader probably learned more from us.

The journey both ways was accompanied by freezing cold weather. You could tell which cars in Wrexham station car park had been left there overnight: their owners were going to need ice-picks to clear their windows. Then my connection from Chester was delayed by about eight minutes, which meant even longer standing in the cold. Even the draught which whistles through the tunnels at Moorfields station in Liverpool was icy.

If this wasn't enough, we were half an hour into the workshop (and I was just starting to get warm), when the powers-that-be decided that it was the time to hold a full-scale fire drill. So that was us out in the car park for nearly half an hour.

The journey back was similarly fraught, in that my connecting train from Bidston was about a quarter of an hour late. Bidston station is a desolate place at the best of times, but even more so when the weather's coming straight out of the Urals. We lost a further five minutes on the journey back, so I didn't get home until after 5:30, having left the house at 7:10.

Got home to find a Christmas card from my old Uni chum Greg Coombs (alias 'Del'). I hadn't heard from him for a couple of years, and had begun to fear that the melanoma he'd suffered from after travelling the Andes without sunscreen a few years ago had returned to consume him. I needn't have worried, although he has now moved to Birmingham.

I finished my Christmas present shopping on Thursday, so that's that done.

Friday meant a convivial couple of hours in the pub with my colleague Derek, our previous boss Dave and our current manager Mick. A nice way to round off the week, even if it did mean that all the flexi I'd made up on Tuesday had been wiped out by the time 3:55 on Friday rolled up.

The rest of my time has been spent on my video transfer project, where I've hit even more snags. Pinnacle Studio 10 has proven to be the crankiest crock of crap I've ever had to work with. I've had to reinstall it three times already because of various bugs and gripes.

I've also had to stop my audio tape transfer project, which I was running on the old machine. I tried to convert the same tape three times, and the .wav file corrupted each time. I think it's time I uninstalled all the programs I don't really need from it and did a severe defrag, as it's clear that 384MB of RAM is having trouble cutting it anymore. I don't want to have to transfer that project over to the new machine because it would get in the way of the video transfer shtick.

So that's you brought up to date. I'm working until Christmas Eve but, for a change, I'm taking the rest of the holiday period off and won't be going back until January 3.

Now playing: Real Synthetic Audio's show for October 1, 2007.

Date: 25/11/07

One Of Those Weeks

It's been a particularly frustrating week.

The main annoyance, of course, is my inability to comment on The Big Story (see previous item). It's not that I don't want to: believe me, I do. It's just that it simply isn't safe for me to do so. If it were, I could many a tale unfold. Besides which, I'm in a situation whereby my current job could be taken off me at any time, and where I don't seem to have any protection against their doing so, so I have to hold my fire, at least for now.

The other bugbears of the week have been entirely technological, and once again centre around my new PC. Or rather, around one of its peripherals.

My idea for getting an analog video capture card was that I have so much stuff on VHS tapes, and now no longer have a television to play them on, that it would be a good idea to get them onto CD or DVD before either the tapes crumble to dust or my old Sony VCR decides that it's time to die.

So, I included one in the spec for my new PC - a Pinnacle Dazzle.

Trouble was, I had no cables to connect my VCR to it. So, I examined the options in my usual over-thorough way. First off, the only outputs on the VCR were the standard aerial coax, two RCA-type audio sockets and a SCART connector. So, first off, I would need a SCART adapter.

Taking my lunchtime constitutional on Wednesday, I decided to pop into our nearest hardware store. This usually means that I end up buying something (it's those and stationers I can't resist). I knew that they'd had some video accessories in there from time to time, so it was worth checking out.

Of course, once I got in there, finding anything was a problem because they, like the rest of the retail sector, are suffering from Premature Jollification. I wandered around for a good fifteen minutes before I found what I was looking for. I also found something else I'd been looking for. The capture card has four input sockets: two for audio, one for composite video, and one for S-Video. As S-video is supposedly better than composite, I bought a cable to connect the S-Video output from the VCR to the card.

When I got the stuff home that evening, I found that the SCART adapter was fine, and the audio leads I'd had for some years (to play the VCR's sound through my hi-fi - a bit daft when the hi-fi's speakers were over on one side of the room: it was slightly disturbing to be watching, say, a car hurtle across the screen with the noise of its engines going by over to my left); these leads, too, were OK. Then I hit the snag.

On the capture card, the S-Video input socket is slightly recessed. The main body of the plug was too wide to fit in the recess, which meant that the pins of the plug (a four-pin mini-DIN) couldn't reach the corresponding holes in the socket.

Well, I swore a little. Then I checked the online catalogue of a well-known electrical chain. There I saw an S-Video cable which had plugs which tapered somewhat behind the metal bit. They looked to be just the thing.

Thursday lunchtime found me in the town centre branch of this firm, where I bought the cable. On getting it home, I found that the plugs on this cable were identical to the one I'd already bought, and not tapered at all.

Well, this time I swore a lot.

Friday lunchtime found me back in town to take this second cable back to the shop. There was no problem with a refund, which was just as well, seeing as they said they didn't sell any of that type of cable with a tapered plug, despite what was shown on their website.

I then dashed around town to try to find a cable that would work. One shop (the local franchise of a multinational company) suggested I take the capture card in so that they could find something that would fit. The second place I tried (a subsidiary of perhaps the biggest electrical retailers in the UK) didn't have anything suitable either.

I was in peril of being very late back for work by this time. Walking away from the second shop, I realised that I was going to have to go with composite video instead, reasoning that if it was only a case of transferring stuff off old VHS tapes, quality was not going to be the over-riding consideration. So I went back to my original port of call and bought the cables appropriate to that method instead.

Friday evening saw me installing the capture card and Pinnacle Studio software. Here's where I had the next problem. The security software which gave me such grief the week before when I was trying to sort out a home network (see Techno Tribulations on 17/11/07 for more details) also has a feature which blocks any program it decides is dubious from writing to the system. I hadn't fully realised this until I started to install Studio. Suddenly it was raining pop-ups, all of them telling me that various parts of the installation program had been blocked. I continued with the install, but then found after all had been done that Windows Media Player now wouldn't work: clicking on 'File' and 'Open' just froze it completely.

After searching for advice, which conincidentally led me to removing Internet Explorer 7 altogether, so it wasn't all bad news, I decided to do a System Restore and return things to how they were before the installation problem. Once I'd done that, I reinstalled Studio (disabling the security program first), and all seemed OK.

I hit the next snag on Saturday. My first attempt at creating a video file went fine (although I had to experiment with which format worked best), but the second one proved tricky. It wasn't that I was combining a number of clips which was the issue, although I had to seek advice once more on how best to do this: the problem was that, when I saved the output file, none of the transitions between clips (simple fades up and down) showed on the file when I played it, irrespective of which player I used and which format I saved the file as. The screen just went to black instead.

I could find nothing online which suggested that anyone else had ever had the same problem, but I did notice that Pinnacle had an update file for download. So I downloaded the 'patch' (their word: I don't call a 126MB file a patch; more like a goodly proportion of Madonna's wardrobe) and installed it. Finally, it worked as it should.

(I'd tried the built-in Windows Movie Maker, but that doesn't even recognise the capture card, so that was a fat lot of use)

So I can now start on this winter's Big Project of transferring what I want off the VHS tapes to disk. That will run alongside my ongoing work to transfer stuff off audio tapes to disk, which will be done on my old machine. Then, in time, I'll have to try to get hold of an old reel-to-reel tape machine, because I've got stuff on those reels going back thirty years or more. Hell, I don't even know if the tapes are in any fit state to play anymore.

Date: 21/11/07

Disks Slipped

About this I, of course, can say absolutely nothing. Except, of course, to note with sadness the attempts to once more blame the public sector for the inefficiencies of a private contractor.

For further comment, I refer you to this. And this.

Date: 17/11/07

Techno Tribulations

Technology is like clockwork. Like clockwork, it occasionally goes "Cuckoo!"

Take my new PC. I noticed on Wednesday night that the floppy drive wasn't working. I e-mailed the firm which built it for me. "The power connectors have probably come loose", was the reply.

I had no intention of taking the tower unit back in again, so I open the case up myself. The connector didn't seem to be loose, but just in case, I waggled it a bit and pushed it. I booted up again and there it was.

Then on Friday night, I found that the DVD-ROM drive wasn't working. So it was off with the top of the case again. I can only blame myself for this one: it seems that while I was trying to trace the floppy drive's power cable, I'd pulled the DVD-ROM drive's data cable out. Again, an easy fix.

What has really driven yer Judge potty this week, however, was trying to create a home network between the new PC and my doughty old Windows 98 box. I did everything according to the instructions, and eventually got the XP machine to access the shared folders on the 98 one.

But do you think I could get the old PC to access the share on the new one? Uh-uh. Nothing I did seemed to work. I uninstalled and reinstalled Dial Up Networking at least twice; I gave the machine more protocols than the Elders of Zion; I uninstalled and reinstalled the PCI Ethernet card. Nada, nowt, zilch, bugger all. It wouldn't even ping the XP box. This indicated that the problem may have been with the firewall.

As many of you will know, Windows XP comes with its own firewall. This is, by and large, as much use as a one-legged man in an arse-kicking contest and, as the router has a built in firewall anyway, I disabled the XP one. Still no joy. I checked the configuration of the router firewall as well, but nothing that I changed seemed to make any difference to the problem.

Then, earlier this evening, five days into the curseathon that the process had become, I was reading through some possible solutions to the problem that I'd tracked down online. Someone mentioned that they had a well-known brand of internet security software on their machine, and that they hadn't realised that this contained a firewall.

This gave me cause for thought. You see, the XP machine came with another well-known program on it (a one-month trial 'evaluation' version), which I had thought was only an anti-virus program. I opened it and found that, yes indeed, it too had a firewall program with it. The firewall was enabled. I disabled it and went over to the 98 rig on the other side of the room. It could now ping and XP machine and access the shared folders. Problem solved!

I could have done without the wasted time and the aggravation, though.

Date: 08/11/07

The Triumph Of Hope

Chad Varah, humanitarian

b. 12 November 1911 d. 8 November 2007

Date: 07/11/07

Counting The Days (Again)

As my new PC is ready to collect, and as that means I'll be spending most of the next week rejigging everything, I'd better get this sorted now.

I've done another calendar for you this year. There are some differences from last year:

• There's no theme as such - some of the pictures are more seasonal than others
• The pictures are larger, which also means that the .pdf file is quite a bit bigger than last year's effort (just over 4MB)
• I've done three versions: a UK one with public holidays and clock changes marked; a US one with Federal holidays noted; and a plain one with no annotations

Just choose your calendar below and download. All you then have to do is print and bind.

Date: 03/11/07

What Blew, Pussy(Cat)?

I really am starting to doubt my sanity.

Sitting at my desk on Thursday (or was it Friday morning?), I could have sworn that I saw a dark-coloured pubic wig fall past the window. It couldn't have been a bird - birds aren't hairy.

I wonder if someone's missing it? Whoever it is, they'd be pretty difficult to spot.

********************

Geek Love

In other news, I've finally ordered a new PC. The one I'm typing this on is perfectly adequate for nearly all of what I want to do, but after six and a half years technology moves on, and I can no longer do things with it that I used to. I mentioned the affair of mlb.com and Silverlight before. Now I find that the latest version of Winamp won't work on Windows 98, so I suppose it's time to move on.

My current setup has been more than worth the £960 I paid for it in June 2001. I bought it from a company called Eaglecom in Oswestry which, sadly, no longer exists. The build quality was such that all I've had to replace was the CPU fan (which went after just over four years) and the monitor, which packed up around last Christmas. Oh, and I added some RAM as well.

I know geeks and historians may be interested, so here's what my present system comprises (and here's a picture):

• AMD Duron 800MHz CPU
• Gigabyte GA7-ZM motherboard
• 128Mb SDRAM (later expanded to 384Mb)
• 20Gb U-DMA hard drive
• CD-ROM drive & CD Re-writer drive
• Floppy drive
• 56k V90 modem (augmented later on by a USB ADSL modem when broadband finally reached us)
• 8Mb (!) graphics card
• Onboard sound and 100W USB speakers
• Relisys 15" CRT monitor (replaced with a 17" Acer TFT)
• Windows 98 SE with CD and manual
• Standard keyboard & mouse
• HP DeskJet 840C printer
• Acer ScanPrisa parallel-port scanner

It wasn't quite cutting-edge stuff at the time, but I thought it would do me for everything I thought I'd be likely to do with it.

And so it has proven, at least up until recently. But all things run their course.

I fully intend keeping it running, though; after all, it works admirably in all normal respects. So, once my new system is up and running, I shall transfer much of the data off the old one, uninstall programs I won't need on it, then try to set it up as a dual-boot machine with a flavour of Linux on it (probably Xubuntu), because I want to get my head around open-source operating systems.

So, what's replacing this venerable old friend? Well cop this spec, courtesy of Micro Plus Computers of Oswestry and Wrexham:

• AMD Athlon 2x 4200+ CPU
• Gigabyte AM2 motherboard (*)
• 2Gb DDR2 667 RAM
• 250Gb SATA hard drive
• DVD ROM drive & DVD Re-writer drive
• Nvidia Geforce 8600GS 256Mb graphics card
• Flash memory card reader
• Floppy drive (more for sentimental reasons, perhaps?)
• Realtec 7.1 sound controller plus speakers
• BenQ 17" TFT monitor
• Windows XP Pro with CD and manual
• Multimedia keyboard and optical wheel mouse
• Analog video capture card and software
• Netgear wired router (not sure which model)
• Epson DX8400 multifunction printer/scanner/copier

Final price: £866.95. Ker-CHINGGG!

I think this is what's known in Bollocksese as a 'step change'.

The new system should be ready for me to pick up by the second half of the week, although I won't set it up until next weekend. This is partly so that I can have the time to do the job properly, but also so as to give me a couple more days to figure out where I'm going to put the old one.

(*) If the Americans wanted to torture a computer expert, would they subject him to motherboarding? Just wondering...

Date: 28/10/07

Where In My Head...?

I came home on the bus. The driver had the radio on, and the voice seemed to be announcing the death of someone important. Unfortunately, the volume was too low (or the engine too loud) for me to hear anything coherent other than the remark that the dead person's mother was a Roman Catholic. I realised that I had not been keeping up with the news that day, and wondered who had died.

I got home to find that someone had left my front gate open, and my front garden was full of rubbish of various sorts. I saw a white soft toy (possibly a rabbit) over by the hedge.

Sighing with annoyance at other people's anti-social habits, I walked up the path at the side of the house. As I turned the corner, I saw that on my back garden were two or three of those wooden pallets that bakers use. On each was what looked like a roast chicken, although they seemed rather large for this. One of the roasts was being gnawed at by what looked, at first sight, to be a rather large domestic cat.

The 'cat' got up and, shaking and trembling with some sort of ague, walked towards me. It was then that I saw from its gait and its mottled face that it was, in fact, a hyena. It came up to me and I put my hand out to it. It suddenly shied away, lept across the side garden and forced its way through the hedge.

Baffled, I went back to the front of the house. There, on the corner, was a satchel of some sort. The flap was open, and it had a label on it which said Condé. The satchel had some papers in it, and I went to take it inside for safe keeping.

As I turned around I saw that, in addition to the rabbit, there was now a small, brown teddy bear in the middle of the lawn.

Shaking somewhat, I turned to go through the front door (as the skies were looking ominously stormy) and resolved to phone my mother to ask her if I had lost my mind.

Walking through the house towards the back door, it suddenly went very dark outside and I could now hear the sound of heavy rain. Sure enough, I opened the back door (the key having presented itself to me on the end of the ring it hangs from on the kitchen wall) to see a charcoal sky and a downpour.

As I locked the door again, I turned to see a woman standing by the cooker, having just removed from the oven a baking tray with tiny, round biscuits on it. I didn't recognise her: she was a little shorter than me, and had short, straight black hair. She remarked that the world had become a bizarre place. I could only concur.

It was at this point that I woke up.

I don't want any of this analysing, please. I once recounted to a colleague a dream I'd had about seeing an airliner break up in flight, and was gleefully told that it meant that I had doubts about my potency. I can do without that.

Date: 19/10/07

A Master Departs

Alan Coren, humourist and broadcaster

b. 27 June 1938 d. 18 October 2007

Humourous writing is a difficult enough business. My own feeble muse operates fitfully at best, so I reserve much of my admiration for those who can turn humourous material out on a regular basis and maintain a high quality over a long period of time. In this, Alan Coren was my hero.

Coren had been at it for about fifteen years by the time I first encountered him in a compendium of humourous material published in 1976 (when I was 14). I suppose it was my first real encounter with grown-up humour on the printed page (although I had been 'softened up' by exposure to the likes of Dave Allen and The Goodies on television long before that). There was something there. I wasn't sure what exactly it was (and may not be sure even now): the ability to turn the familiar into the strange and wonderful in order to show us its (and our) absurdity; the talent to grasp the epitome of a character type; the wit to play with language and subvert cliché; the ambience of not just the urbane but the suburban (which dovetailed neatly with my other main humourous reading at the time, Alex Graham's Fred Basset strip).

Of course, I wouldn't have been thinking in these terms at 14: I just knew that here was material which was amusing and well-written.

Then I found out that this man had written actual books of this stuff! Well, OK, the books were collections of pieces which had originally featured in magazines, but I just had to sample his writing at greater length. I think I was 16 when I bought my first Alan Coren book - the paperback of his 1974 collection The Sanity Inspector. Then I really was hooked as I read pieces such as What Every Schoolboy Knows, which shows what could happen when primary school sex education goes critical; Some Day My Prince Will Crawl which gives the feminist versions of some well-known fairy tales; and Believe Me, in which TV magnate Lew Grade became Pope.

Buying more of his books was, alas, out of the question at that time, but I was fortunate in that the library of the college I was attending had a subscription to Punch, which Coren was now editing. So I had fortnightly access not only to Coren (who, not content with just editing the magazine, also contributed a piece to nearly every issue), but to the other writers he was publishing: Basil Boothroyd, Miles Kington, Paul Jennings and George Melly amongst many more (and that's not including the famous Punch cartoons). I supplemented this treasure trove by borrowing his other books from the town library.

After about 1982, lack of money, lack of opportunity and my own changing view of the world meant that I became more distant from Alan Coren, although I did see him on television occasionally (including one of his rare mis-steps, when he took the job of chairman of a mercifully short-lived TV version of Scrabble™), and heard him as a regular on BBC Radio 4's The News Quiz.

It was the late 1990s when I next started reading him. With some trepidation, I ordered a couple of collections of his most recent columns from The Times (where he had fetched up after leaving Punch and following a brief spell at The Listener). Was he still capable of amusing me? Could he still put me in awe of his way with words and ideas?

Thankfully, he could. Although much of his later writing revolved around his life in the semi-mythical suburb of Cricklewood, there was nothing leadenly suburban about it; the flights of fancy could still take wing; the dagger thrust still found its mark.

For Coren could be ascerbic: I well remember a long piece he wrote about visiting Disneyworld, which climaxed in his description of the parade held daily in that saccharine nightmare world. After remarking how thoroughgoingly white the parade was, he recalled that there were two black men standing behind him, one of whom called out, "Hey, man, what time's da lynchin'?"

He could hit you between the eyes with profundity, too. In a piece included in The Sanity Inspector, entitled Good God, That's Never The Time, Is It?, he ruminates on becoming thirty five. This was a significant moment because it represented the halfway point of the old 'three score years and ten' which, he said, was the only remnant of formal religious belief he still carried.

It's a funny piece, partly because it also refers to the effects on a man of having to get up in the night to feed his infant daughter (now the columnist Victoria Coren); but it is shot through with a profound melancholy, one which chimed with how I felt (and how I still feel) about the passing of our years. And then he provides us with what he called 'Life's Little Irony, Number Eight', a line which resounds in my head to this day:

"There's no pleasure, however intense, that cannot be flawed by a brief reflection upon its inevitable transience."

Alan Coren's writing gave me great pleasure over many years, and the flaw is that now there will be no more of it. He shaped my own humour, and my appreciation for well-crafted wit, and I'm most grateful for that.

Footnote: Alan Coren's daughter Victoria has written this wonderful epitaph.

Date: 13/10/07

Nature: Confused

Climate change deniers fall into three broad categories:

1. The Ideological. Typified by the attitude of "It's all bad science done at the behest of ideological extremists who want to take us back to the Stone Age! Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to jump into my SUV and drive the 100 yards back to my six-bedroom house..."
2. The Missing-The-Point Ostrich. Characterised by someone saying "We had three degrees of frost last night! That just goes to show that global warming doesn't exist!", (not wishing to remember that it's November 23rd).
3. The Chip-On-The-Shoulder. Usually heard in the form of "It's all a myth made up by the Government so they can screw more taxes out of us!". (A sub-variant, called The-Chip-On-Both-Shoulders, takes the form of the above, plus the addition of "...and take even more money from us poor, oppressed motorists!").

Seldom in human history have so many sought refuge in denial about something so important, and by such ludicrous strategems as above.

When I was in primary school some thrity-five years ago, we had a superb teacher by the name of David Pritchard. In fact, I would go so far as to say he was the best teacher I ever had. One day, talking about the weather, he said something like, "You notice; the seasons are slowly moving around". OK, he was talking about the precession of the equinoxes, which is a very slow process. But the fact is that the seasons have moved, but due to our own heedlessness more than anything else.

I don't need long-range computer models to tell me that things are getting seriously out of whack. All I need to do is look, especially in my own garden. A couple of years ago, I had a rose in full bloom in my garden...in mid-January! My fuchsia bushes now bloom until Advent. My other rose bush has just brought forth another flower. And, coming out of the house to go to work the other morning, I found this:

Yep, a primrose. In mid-October.

You try and tell me that something major isn't happening, and that it's all got up by cranks. All I can say is, if you live below the 100ft contour line, teach your kids to swim - it's a skill they're going to need.

Date: 06/10/07

On The Home Front

An unusually busy day on the domestic front.

First off, I needed a new mattress. I mean, really needed one. The one I had came with the bed about fifteen years ago, and it had got to the stage where I was not so much sleeping on it as in it. I'd turned it all the ways you can turn a mattress, and bits were starting to stick out so that I became aware of the possibility of waking up in the dead of night to find that I'd been turned into a cocktail sausage.

I'd popped in to a couple of places in town on Monday, when I was on my way back to work from the dentist. The second shop turned out to have what I wanted, and the chap there told me that they always had that model in stock. Trouble was that they didn't deliver on Saturdays, only on Tuesdays and Fridays, and it would still be pot luck as to what time the van would turn up.

This meant calling for assistance in the form of my brother. He's got a Frontera, so folding down the back seats would mean a single mattress would just about fit in there.

So I forewent my usual Saturday morning lie-in so that we could go down there. When I went in I found that, because of some promotional gimmick they had running, the entire staff was dressed in pyjamas. Blue and white striped pyjamas. I saw the same bloke as I had seen on Monday and, as he was balding and was somewhat thin of face and build, I had what I can only describe as an Auschwitz flashback. There should be some law against companies making their employees do things like that.

£79 later, and we were on our way home. Then it was time to load the old mattress into the car and scoot down to the Civil Amenity Site (that's Bollocksese for 'dump', folks) to get rid of it. I'd already rolled the old one up and tied it, so it was a lot easier to handle.

(Hot Tip Of The Day: don't go wrestling with an old mattress if you're wearing black clothing).

Once I'd got home again, I put the second pair of dark green curtains on the line (the first pair having been washed and put out before I went), before going to hoover the bedroom prior to putting the new mattress on the bed.

I ran into a problem at this point, in that my trusty little Goblin refused to suck.

(Look, it's only dirty if you think it is. I deny all responsibility).

I changed the dustbag and merrily got on with it. I then unpacked the new mattress and installed it, before heading back downstairs for lunch.

I thought I'd have a nap after lunch, just in the name of testing the mattress you understand. It's really comfortable, especially compared to what it was replacing, which tended to roll you towards one side or the other and twang alarmingly with the slightest shift in position.

I got up again and, with the curtains still hanging limply in the bright autumn sunshine, I went to do some remedial work in the garden. Part one of this consisted of trying to unblock the drain at the bottom of the downspout at the side of the house. This had been covered up by the hypericum for a couple of years, and I hadn't noticed until I cut the foliage back that it was bunged up with what I suspect was about five years of accumulated bird shit washed down from the guttering. This is foul stuff (or should that be 'fowl'? Probably better not), resembling black porridge. Scooping it out with a trowel was a laborious job, especially as it seemed to go down about a foot, at which point I found out what had become of the metal grid which should have been on top of the drain.

A short break, and it was time to pull up the dog daisies and another plant which I can't put a name to at the moment. The stems are about half a metre tall, and they produce cup-like yellow flowers. What they also produce is chaos if left unattended, because the bloody things expand laterally and take over whatever bare soil is nearby. That's why they needed pulling up: I had a mass of them in front of the living room window, and they're in one or two other places in the garden as well. Just pulling them up wasn't going to be enough: I knew from past experience that I'd need to fork the soil over afterwards to get as many of the roots out as I could. This was back-breaking stuff, and I knocked off at about 4pm.

And that was my Saturday.

Date: 23/09/07

Shhh!

French Mime Artist Marceau Dies

I presume we must now have a minute's silence...

Date: 20/09/07

Another Gallery Update

Various photographs from my meanderings in Liverpool on Tuesday are now in The Gallery's Elsewhere section.

Date: 18/09/07

Does This Train Stop On Merseyside? (*)

(* A reference to this magnificent song by the band Amsterdam)

Had an interesting day today.

I mentioned last week that I was thinking of going up to see the Josh Kirby Retrospective at the Walker Gallery in Liverpool.

This was quite an undertaking for me. As I also said last week, I don't care for travelling very much. If it were possible for me to just click my fingers and be somewhere else, and then click them again and be instantly back home again, I'd be a happy man.

As it stands, however, I view any journey as needing to be planned out with near-military precision.

Although it's a mere thirty or so miles away, I hadn't been to Liverpool itself since October 1980, when I went to see a Hawkwind gig at the Empire. Bearing in mind that it was dark the whole time I was there, I didn't get to see the place at all - just the bits between the bus and the pub, the pub and the theatre, and the theatre and the bus.

Add to this my very unflattering prejudices about the place and its people (developed through sheer hard work over a number of years), and an extra dimension of uncertainty was added.

Well, nothing ventured...I caught the 07:43 bus (which did turn up - thank you, Arriva) down to the station. I was there for eight o'clock, which was a bit of a nuisance, because my train wasn't due until after 08:30.

Anyway, it turned up a handful of minutes late, but given the state of the track on parts of the Wrexham-Bidston line, that's only to be expected.

I'd not travelled on this particular line since 1978, when some friends and me went the two stops from Gwersyllt to the old Wrexham Central and got off without paying (well, nobody asked!). I hadn't gone this far up it since 1972 when, as a boy of ten, I went with my parents for a day out to New Brighton. Gosh, this is adventure!

We passed through all the village stations - Gwersyllt, Cefn Y Bedd, Caergwrle, Hope, Penyffordd, Buckley, Hawarden, Shotton, Hawarden Bridge (which is nowhere near Hawarden; but then Buckley station - previously called Buckley Junction - isn't very near Buckley, either), and then on over the border. Neston, Heswall (which used to be called Heswall Hills way back in the when), Upton and finally to Bidston, where we had to change trains.

Because we were still a few minutes down, the train from West Kirby to Liverpool came in just a minute or so after we'd got there, so it was a quick transfer to Merseyrail for the journey under the river.

Then, at one of the Birkenhead stations (I forget which), an entire class of ten-year-olds got on. They were OK really, but I was quite happy when they got off at James Street.

On to Moorfields and then Lime Street, where it was my turn to get off. As the Wirral line is completely underground, I had to get up to street level. Lime Street station has the only escalator I've ever come across which gives you the 'bends' going up, and vertigo going down. I found my way out of the station, and realised I'd come out on the 'wrong' side. No matter, I went round the corner and found myself in St George's Square.

This was my first happy surprise. Liverpool city centre is full of fantastic old buildings of character: St George's Hall, North Western Hall, the old court building and, of course, the Walker Gallery itself. I took a few pictures as I made my way up.

Inside the Walker, and having finally found the Kirby exhibition, I was slightly disappointed to see that photography was forbidden. Understandable, I suppose, although what they could possibly fear from my cack-handed efforts I can't imagine.

If you're not familiar with the name, Josh Kirby (1928 - 2001) was a Liverpool-born artist who worked in many fields, but is perhaps best known for his work for science-fiction and fantasy publishers. His covers for Terry Pratchett's Discworld™ are the most famous of these.

But that wasn't all he did, and the exhibition was happy surprise number two. The breadth and scope of his work and his talent is fully on display in this exhibition. He not only did book covers (his cover for a version of Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man is rightly regarded as a classic, and he didn't just work in the SF/fantasy field), but he did abstracts (these mostly in the early part of his career), film posters (the one for The Return Of The Jedi is featured here, plus the one for The Life Of Brian which was too rude to be used), illustrations for role-playing games, and even very good jigsaw puzzles.

In all of them, his capacity for detailed and exacting work is clear, allied with a mastery of composition and use of space. His colours are quite extraordinary: the explanatory cards in the exhibition claim that red was his signature colour, but to me a Josh Kirby means the most remarkable shades of blue, almost like enamel, but which are clear and bright without any sense of them blaring out at you.

An hour and a half seemed to fly by, and it still seemed too short a time to go around it, despite my dwelling in front of a number of his works. It was time to move on, as I had other things planned.

My original thought when planning the trip was that I would move on from the Walker to the Liverpool World Museum just a few yards down the road. Looking at their website however, I couldn't see anything there which would hold my attention for long. I then changed tack: it would be a pity, I thought, to go to Liverpool without taking a look at the city's two famous cathedrals, the modern Roman Catholic Metropolitan, and the more traditional-style Anglican cathedral. So, I did some research on Google Maps and planned out my route. It can be difficult to judge the scale of these sometimes, so I wasn't entirely sure how long it would take me.

So, leaving the Walker behind, I followed my supposed route to the Catholic cathedral (or "Paddy's Wigwam" as those incorrigible Scousers call it - you'll know why if you've seen it). After a short while, I found that I'd taken a wrong turn very early on, and was approaching the cathedral from the south rather than the north. This meant a detour, and this coincided with the exit of hundreds of students from their classes (the cathedral is in the university quarter).

Having successfully swum against the tide of the nation's brightest hopes (oh gods, spare us all!), I found myself sitting in full view of the frontage of the cathedral, eating my lunch.

It was shortly time to move on. I knew how to find the Anglican cathedral from there: you just followed Hope Street. That wise philosopher, theologian and failed chartered accountant Kenneth Arthur Dodd once remarked upon the fact the the two major sects of Christianity should have their churches so close to one another, "...and connected by a street called Hope".

A couple of hundred yards later, I was standing beside my second cathedral of the day. It was pretty quiet around there, but then again this church is in more grounds than the other one. I walked around the outside taking photographs for a while (note that I didn't go in to either one of them: this is partly out of a lingering sense of decorum, and partly because I have this totally irrational worry that someone might try to convert me - and succeed), and then moved on to check out my final target of the day.

I'd heard about the strange pyramid-shaped tomb someone had made for himself, and my friend Alex had sent me the photograph he took of it last week: so, the competition was on!

I knew it was in Rodney Street. My main problem was that my initial iterary had not included going right around the outside of the Anglican cathedral (I'd doubted whether I'd have the time), so I had to work out my way back up town.

Needless to say that I got slightly lost. My map wasn't very accurate either, although I did notice that parts of Liverpool aren't very good for having street names properly signed.

After an interesting and unscheduled stroll through the city's Chinatown (where the street signs are bilingual - something I never thought I'd see in England), I found Rodney Street.

(It was here where I encountered my only authentic Scouse smack-head divvies of the day, but I managed to avoid their attentions)

Halfway up on the right is a derelict church. There, in the overgrown churchyard, was the tomb of one W. McKenzie, who had a pyramid erected probably in order to fulfil his wish that he be buried sitting upright at a table with playing cards in his hand (he was a notorious gambler, it seems). It isn't possible to get into the churchyard itself, but the tomb is so close to the road that it isn't necessary.

A few snaps of that, and then...well, then I had nothing more I wanted to do. It was only about 1:10 by this point, and I knew that I wouldn't be able to get a train for nearly an hour. So, I wandered back to St George's Square for while. I would have stayed out there longer, but a hard shower of near-freezing rain came over the city at this point, and I scurried for the sanctuary of Lime Street Station.

Having gone down the same precipitous escalator I'd come up a few hours before, I found myself on the platform and discovered that there was a train for Bidston due any minute. I decided to take it, even though it would mean a slightly longer wait for my connection to Wrexham.

An uneventful journey home followed, and I got back in the house shortly after 4:00.

I'm glad I went. The exhibition was sufficient to override my innate dislike of cities. Who knows? Perhaps I won't wait twenty-seven years until my next visit.

Date: 14/09/07

Gallery Update

As threatened the other day, some of the pictures from my Chester jaunt are now in The Gallery.

I've also made a change in the categories in there. Now, the Everything Else page will contain only things which can't be fitted in anywhere else. The photographs of places other than Brymbo are now in a new section called Elsewhere.

I've also improved the navigation a bit, in that you can now go from each page straight back to the relevant menu page for each gallery.

Date: 12/09/07

It's Better To Travel (Hopefully...)

Off to Chester this morning. I had thought about going on Tuesday, but decided that a day of 'kicking back', 'chilling out' and all the other uncouth phrases of the day would be in order. I am on my two-week September break, after all.

I used to go to Chester five or six times a year, often to the record fairs in the Guild Hall, or to buy records or books I couldn't get in Wrexham, or just to stroll around, but - apart from changing trains there to go to a meeting in Bootle nearly a year ago - hadn't been there for about five years.

(Yes, I know it's only about a dozen miles away, but I don't care much for travelling. I'm waiting for teleportation to come along)

My intention was to catch the 09:05 train from Wrexham General, so I went out and waited for the 08:33 bus...

Which, of course, didn't turn up. Thanks again, Arriva, you bunch of wankers!

(I've given up even complaining to them now - I've had no response to my last complaint. Instead, I intend from now on putting on the Rants page every single episode of non-arrival and serious lateness...then e-mailing a link to the twerps).

The next bus wasn't until 08:48 (in theory), so wouldn't get me to the station on time. Indeed, that one wouldn't even go past the station, and I'd have to walk from the town centre.

I stormed back into the house and shouted at the walls for a bit, but I wasn't going to let Non-Arrival get the upper hand. There was another train at 10:07. It would mean I'd have less than four hours there, but that would be enough.

So I went back out for the 09:18...which turned up about five minutes late, but would still give me enough time to get to the station.

Anyway, I got there in good time and caught the train, arriving in Chester just on 10:30. I walked into the city centre and started doing what I'd gone there to do, namely to take photographs. This was the first time I'd taken my trusty BenQ there, and I wanted to get some shots of the more interesting parts of the city centre itself, before going round the city's old walls.

(Way back in the when, I used to 'do' The Walls in about an hour. Stupid, really, because that gave me no time to take much notice of anything about them. I'm not competitive in that way anymore).

It was also a sort of light-hearted contest with my old chum Alex (aka fiat_knox, aka The Plain Clothes Clown after his recent little snapathon up there.

I went up Foregate to The Cross, then up to the Market Square, taking a few judicious pics on the way, but still hampered by the self-consciousness I referred to in the last entry. All the same, I got one or two useful ones, then headed through Abbey Square (where I got a shot of the 'Norah Batty' plaque, which will replace the mock-up I put in the "A Plaque On Their House" blog post of 10/08/07) and onto the Walls.

There were still plenty of tourists about (and it occurs to me that they might have thought that I was one as well: I should have had a badge saying "Actually, I live quite near here"). As I went up onto the Walls, for example, there was a party of a dozen elderly Americans, and further along, under the Foregate clock, there was a sizeable group of Russians. I also came across a trio of mature Australians further down.

I made a few diversions from the Walls, though. Firstly through the mock Roman Gardens (where some poor bugger whose working day involves him dressing up as a centurion was regaling a class of eight- or nine-year-olds with stories about the Roman bath-houses), then down onto The Groves and into Grosvenor Gardens. This is a delightful area, except for the fact that the pigeons have grown so fat and arrogant that they wouldn't move out of your way unless you approached them at speed on a Harley with knives on the hubs; and you must also be prepared to be propositioned by the most shamelessly forward grey squirrels I've ever come across. They'd certainly see off the ones in my oak tree.

Then, it was time to cross the suspension footbridge and walk along the south bank of the Dee to the Old Bridge at Handbridge. This would be a nicer walk if they demolished the hideous 1970s block of flats at the western end of the path. What is worse still, this monstrosity is painted surgical-appliance pink. From there, I crossed the bridge back to the north side and walked along past the castle to by the Grosvenor Bridge, then onto the racecourse at The Roodee. This is where I nearly came to grief, because I couldn't find a way back onto the road again. I had visions of being found some weeks hence as a bleached skeleton somewhere around the back of Tattersall's.

I found my way back onto the Walls and, pausing only to eye suspiciously a man scarcely younger than myself who was watching the pupils of the nearby girls' school practising hockey, and dodging a smacked-up arsehole who was shouting and swearing fiercely at his tart, I headed for the south-west corner of the Walls, where I went down into the delightful Water Tower Gardens for a few minutes rest before setting off again up towards Northgate.

There's a bookshop right on the Walls on the cathedral side of the gate which I used to call in to every time I went to Chester. Thanks to Arriva (grrrr!), I had no time to stop, because I had only about forty minutes before my train. The same applied to Grey & Pink Records in Brook Street, where I've picked up a lot of stuff down the years.

I can, incidentally, heartily recommend Steve Howe's site Chester, A Virtual Stroll for everything you could ever wish to know about the Walls of Chester and much more besides.

The train (on the Holyhead - Cardiff run, like the one I'd caught that morning) was very slightly late, but no matter. I got back into Wrexham on time, and went to wait for the bus home....

...Which was six minutes late. They must see me coming.

I got home about 3:10, and started uplooading the 121 photographs I'd taken. Oh, balls! I'm doing something wrong. I must be. Just about every photograph which featured stonework or foliage was way too dark, and I've spent the whole evening fiddling with them in Paint Shop Pro to get them looking anything like right.

Others, I'm glad to say, came out pretty good. They'll be appearing in The Gallery at some stage in the next few days, I'm sure.

I'm half thinking about going up to Liverpool next week, to see the Josh Kirby retrospective at the Walker Gallery, but if I'm going to do that, I think I'd better start waiting for a bus right now...

Date: 25/08/07

Not-Sure Shot

Yesterday afternoon was a bit of a disappointment.

I'd booked it off work on Thursday, because the forecast said it was going to be nice, and I'd planned to do something I don't have time to do in the normal run of events, namely to stroll around Wrexham taking photographs.

I wasn't too disturbed when I got up at 6:50 on Friday morning to find that it was pretty grey: the forecast was for it to brighten up by mid morning. So I packed my trusty BenQ and set off for work.

By the time I left work at 12:30, it was still overcast. Still, I'd made my plans and intended sticking to them. So off I strode into town, down into Brook Street, along St Giles Way, back up Mount Street and Temple Row, snapping away at anything which looked interesting, until I came to the Parish Church of St Giles. This was my intended main target, so I walked around the outside taking photographs of it at various angles, plus a couple of snaps of the grave of Elihu Yale (he whose donations - financed by colonialism, tax gouging and overall duplicity - helped expand the American university which has since borne his name).

(I didn't go inside. Although an atheist to the bone, I still feel that taking photographs inside churches is not quite done).

I took a few pictures of the town itself, but not many. I found that I was inhibited by a large degree of self-consciousness when trying to shoot street scenes. I felt I was drawing attention to myself (not a wise thing to do in a town with more than its fair share of chavs, slappers, smackheads and other Darwinian failures), which I found deeply uncomfortable. So, after about half an hour, I headed homewards.

When I uploaded the photographs to the PC, I found that for some reason very few of them had come out particularly well. I've long known that this camera doesn't seem to reproduce reduced-light conditions very well without fiddling a bit with the settings, and I don't think I had the light-meter settings right: everything looked too dark and the sky, rather than being greyish, looked as if it was about to dump a month's rainfall in sixty seconds.

I did some remedial work with the pictures in Paint Shop Pro, but they're still not really right. Nonetheless, some of them are likely to turn up in The Gallery shortly.

PS: They're there now.

Date: 19/08/07

"What Has Eight Legs, And Lives In My House?"

Answer below:

Date: 10/08/07

"Don't Walk Away In Silence..."

(Photograph: Don McPhee)

Anthony Howard Wilson
Record-label boss, broadcaster, journalist, 'professional Mancunian'.

b. 20/02/50, d. 10/08/07.

**********

A Plaque On Their House

Reading this on Joe Gordon's blog reminded me of when I was idly strolling around in the vicinity of Chester Cathedral some years ago (trying mainly to avoid having to look at that hideous monstrosity of a bell-tower they put up thirty or so years ago).

The very good-looking old houses in Abbey Street had recently been done up and I just happened to see a plaque on the wall of one of them which commemorated the event. It was funny, particularly for those familiar with the seemingly endless TV series Last Of The Summer Wine. It looks like this:

Date: 03/08/07

A Good Cause

This appeal brought to you in memory of my colleague, Laura Alexander, who died on 02/08/07.

Date: 14/07/07

Brief Lives Of The Spammers

(Well, one can but hope...)

Six months ago, my ISP cleverly managed to get its Webmail database hacked. The result was that thousands of their subscribers got their e-mail addresses handed over to spam merchants. In my own case, having hardly seen any spam in any of my e-mail accounts for nearly four years, I've now been swamped by the stuff.

One of the main problems with spam, of course, is that you can't easily block it out by sender's name, because the bastards use some sort of random generator process. I was looking through my 'spam' folder the other night, and started wondering about these names: could some of them actually exist in what we laughingly call 'real life'? If so, who are they, and what might they be doing?

I therefore present a short selection of biographies of some of the characters who have been sending me invitations to expand my dimensions in recent weeks, all culled from my forthcumm...sorry, forthcoming three-volume International Dictionary Of Spurious Biography.

Corbett, Renee

One-half of the promising 1970s female comedy duo The Two Renees, whose 1979 series for Border Television would have been a huge success had the company not been off-air for its entire run due to a make-up artists' strike. Later hostess on the Television South-West quiz show That's My Gerbil.

(Not to be confused with the Indian cabaret act The Two Ranees).

Herring, Blair

Famous Mormon fisherman. Claimed that his catch of a freshwater salmon in the Great Salt Lake was a sign that the LDS' dominion over Utah was divinely ordained. He was later found to have bought the salmon from a local kosher deli. Three of his wives claim to have no knowledge of his current whereabouts. The fourth wears a mysterious smile.

Chase, Levi

Extremely unfunny Jewish comedian. Movies include Funny Schmunny, Schtumm and Nothing But Tsuris.

Colvin, Eula

Microsoft corporate lawyer. Killed herself after claiming that she wasn't being accepted.

Myers, Josh

Professional baseball player whose only Major League appearance (for Pittsburgh at Philadelphia) was cut short when he had an attack of hiccups on the mound. In his eighteen pitches, he walked three batters, beaned the home-plate umpire, concussed the cotton-candy salesman in the left-field bleachers and killed the home team's mascot with a 95mph fast ball right down its trumpet. Now an analyst for Fox Sports South.

Lanier, Hung

Star of Louisiana's short-lived porno industry. Movies include You Can't Do That - That's My Sister!, I Like My Baton Rouge and The Battle Of New Whore-leans. Found Jesus in 1998, and married him in Massachusetts in 2006.

Maynard, Ginger

Actress, comedienne and dancer (real first name Edna) plucked from a cotton mill in Oldham, Lancs. by J. Arthur Rank to be 'Britain's Ginger Rogers'. Unfortunately, while filming her second feature Flying Down To Rochdale, a mis-placed clog step broke the shin of her co-star Sandy Powell and her contract was terminated. Her only completed movie, Top Clog, is (for reasons lost in the mists of history) ritually re-run on Slovakian television every Christmas Eve.

Fitch, Norbert

Cincinnati-born author and self-improvement guru. His most famous work, How To Win Money And Influence People, has been read by four US presidents, and has been read to at least two more.

Madison, Irwin

Tenth vice-president of the United States. Holds the record for the shortest span of time to hold the office (33 days), dying of a cold caught from President William Harrison. A small bridge across a creek in a remote part of Vermont is named in his honour.

Rudolph, Marylou

Country and western singer from Alabama, nicknamed The Chocawhatchee Chickadee. Married six times (four times to the same violent alcoholic truck-driver) and mother of two sons (who, true to the family tradition, went on to become violent alcoholic truck-drivers). Stardom beckoned after she filled in at short notice on The Grand Old Op'ry after the infamous Dolly Parton 'bicycle pump' incident. Alas, it was not to be, as Marylou was killed a week later when her husband's truck - in which she was a passenger - took a direct hit from a plummeting Cessna light aircraft.

Harmon, Lillie

Silent-movie actress. Died in 1925 in a mysterious trampolining accident also allegedly involving Roscoe Arbuckle and Oliver Hardy. She was buried in her native Ohio and in neighbouring Pennsylvania.

Moody, Chad

Portland, Or.,-born bass guitarist with the legendary grunge band Facial Wound. Albums included You'll Be Sorry When I'm Dead and In Up To The Knuckle. Died in bizarre circumstances, having asked his wife of 45 days, Rona DePimp, to insert a balloon up his rectum and inflate it with the air hose from the local garage. His remains were scattered over his home state's Painted Hills. Instantly.

Moses, Timmy

In 1972, the eyes of the world wept for the plight of this cute, tousle-haired ten-year-old boy from Silverton, Colorado, who fell 90ft down an old mine-shaft in his home town while trying to rescue his pet dog Rambler. Rambler was rescued after two days of intensive effort on the part of the local fire department. In the joyous excitement which greeted this event, the firemen went off to appear on coast-to-coast TV, and little Timmy was forgotten. It is said that, if you walk past the old shaft late at night, you can still hear a little boy's voice crying, "What about me, you bastards!?".

Keenan, Preston

Son of an English mother and an Irish father, Keenan was unique in having changed sides no fewer than four times during the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916. He is also notable for being the only man ever to have been shot by the IRA after being hanged by the British. His grave is occasionally a shrine for the indecisive.

Neely, Herman

American naturalist and author, whose best-known work Dick Moby tells the tale of its titular hero, an Idaho man obsessed with catching a hump-backed whale. His efforts (doomed because the man never left his home state, and had a phobia of pointed objects) are recounted by the author with great sensitivity and mounting glee.

Manuel, Denny

The legendary 'near-miss' songwriter, whose best-known works include "I Left My Knee In San Francisco", "Wonderful, Wonderful Floyd, Missouri" and "Newark, So Good They Named It".

Cleveland, Austin

Not a person, but a car, the British Motor Corporation's failed attempt to repeat the success of the Austin Cambridge and Austin Westminster. Unfortunately, its poor build quality and tendency to smell heavily of petrol meant that sales were poor, and the last working model was seen being used as a taxi in East Berlin in 1987.

Rivers, Robbie

Mercurial centre-forward who enjoyed a brief Premiership career with Manchester City in the early 1990s, having been bought from non-league Congleton Town for a set of used shirts. His time at Maine Road was not successful, making only 7 appearances in three years (5 of them as a last-minute substitute). His only goal came as a result of having the ball kicked against his head as he lay unconscious after colliding with a goalpost. Last seen selling ice cream in Macclesfield.

Chambers, DeWitt

A legal practice in Baltimore, Md., best known for its pro bono work in getting Sacco and Vanzetti's appeal heard before the Supreme Court in 1986.

Stapleton, Dusty

Nottinghamshire slow-left-arm bowler and occasional batsman. His first-class career lasted just two years before he was forced to retire due to losing his left foot in a freak bee-keeping accident. Best bowling figures: 2-144 v. Oxford University in 1936. First-class batting average: 3.86.

Date: 03/07/07

1985 Revisited

Two years ago, I posted some reminiscences of my final year at University, complete with a photograph of the residents of my Hall at that time.

I was only able to put names to a handful of people at that time, but I've now been contacted by my fellow-resident of Neuadd John Williams, Ali Napier, who has been a fount of information about most of the other people, and has filled in most of the blanks.

There are still a few names missing - could you be the one to complete the set? Get in touch...

Date: 30/06/07

Urgent Notice!

The official Panic Level is now

BROWN

Date: 26/06/07

Ideal...Idyll...Idiot!

The front page of our local evening rag had an advert for a pub right across the bottom of the page. In it, the hostelry was referred to as having...

"...an idealic riverside restaurant."

As a friend (hello Carl) pointed out, "They paid for an advert which was far from idyll".

Date: 24/06/07

"Labour Must Have Soul", Says Brown

Wait a minute, I think I missed something.

I was under the impression that Labour's new boss was Gordon Brown, not James Brown.

Then again, as the legendary singer is no longer with us, perhaps The Dour One is looking to steal his crown. Maybe he's about to start recording a tribute album.

If so, I can suggest some titles from The Godfather Of Soul's back catalogue:

• You've Got The Power
• Tell Me What You're Gonna Do [vocal backing by Harriet and The Harmanisers]
• Try Me
• Money Won't Change You [Statutory instrumental backing by Mervyn King and The Merchant Bankers]
• Say It Loud, I'm Brown And I'm Proud
• I'm A Greedy Man [a split single with The Private Equity Group]
• Funky President

Date: 14/06/07

Admin Notices

I've tweaked the CSS a little bit now, so that the header bar doesn't come as far down the page as it used to. This should help viewability a bit.

Secondly, I'm having problems with some of the internal links. If you click on a link which should take you to a particular item on the page, it doesn't always do it. I'm still trying to figure out why this is happening, but there is a workaround, namely to click the 'Back' button on your browser to take you to where you were, and then click on the link again.

Date: 12/06/07

Walk On...

I went for one of my Walks yesterday.

Following on from my epic Hope Mountain trek last year, I decided to go off in the opposite direction.

One reason was a sort-of promise I'd made to Mike Brown of the Transmission Gallery site that I'd get some photographs of a local AM transmitter which had yet to feature on the site.

Further thought on the matter suggested that I could combine this with something a bit less technological, namely a long walk in the woods.

Unusually, I started this journey by bus. As my targets were at the very far end of the route, I thought that I would start the trek at that end and work my way back.

So, I caught the bus to by the office, ironically enough given that I'm on a fortnight's leave. From there, I...oh, hold on: you'll need a map. Here:

I got off the bus by the office (right-hand side of the map - follow the blue dots), and walked up Croesnewydd Road as far as Ruthin Road. I crossed there and found the footpath which led across the fields towards the transmitter masts, which could be seen in the distance.

The path went in two opposing directions at this point. I felt sure that the right-hand path was the right one (in the other sense), so that way I went. Unfortunately, that one then divided into a left turn or a straight ahead. Because the left one seemed overgrown and unused, I went straight ahead...

...Only to have to turn around after about 60 metres, when I realised that I'd taken the wrong path.

The other one wasn't so much overgrown as underused, because hardly anyone seems to walk anywhere these days - it's getting as bad as Los Angeles - and it was easy enough to walk along. This brought me out behind Bryn Moel, and just past the house I could get a clear view of the masts.

I took as many photographs as I felt were worth taking, and set off on the next stage of the jaunt, down to the picturesque village of Bersham.

It's strange to consider that this area wasn't very picturesque at all at one time, being one of the cradles of the Industrial Revolution, with iron works, mines and mills scattered all over the landscape.

Of course, advanced societies such as ours don't need industry any more, darlings, and so (as is all too common nowadays), the whole area has been turned into an 'amenity'.

The 'amenity' in question here being The Clywedog Trail.

The Trail shadows the road for part of the way, but mostly follows close by the River Clywedog. The whole of this section of The Trail goes through Plas Power Wood. The paths are clear, but I never got that feeling of regimentation that I've had in other, similar environments. Of course, this could have been because there aren't many people using the Trail. I saw two lads on bikes (naughty!), a man walking his dog, a young couple and their infant, a jogger, and the same man walking his dog back the other way.

Finally, after a beautiful, almost enchanting, walk through the woods, I emerged at Nant Mill. A big thank-you to The Woodland Trust for their hard work.

After a brief stop at Nant Mill, I headed back towards the Ruthin Road. It was at this point that I realised that mid-summer was probably not the best time of year for doing something like this. For the first time in about three miles, I had no shade. It was about 1.30pm by this time, so the day was at its hottest.

I sweated down Rhos Berse Lane and across to Heol Offa in Coedpoeth. At the bottom end of this, I got chatting to an elderly lady waiting for a bus. She had family connections with Plas Power (several members of her family had worked there) and I spent an interesting ten minutes or so with her.

It was more than time to move off, however.

My next photograph gives me an excuse for a cheap laugh:

This farm is called Llidiart Fanny.

Yes, it is. Why should I make such a thing...look, will you stop giggling like that? Honestly, you're so immature! It means "Fanny's Gate"...Oh look, I'm...what? Well, OK, I suppose it is funny...at least the first time. And, what's more, it's funny on both sides of the Atlantic, with only a minor shift in anatomical geography separating the common cultures.

I headed off down the lane you can see here, which led down to the valley of the River Gwenfro (this is the same River Gwenfro which becomes nothing much more than an open sewer once it reaches Wrexham).

By the time I got here, it wasn't just the bridge that was weak, I can assure you. All the more so when I knew that the stretch of road on the other side was the steepest part of the whole walk.

I struggled mightily (well, mightily is not quite the word, I admit) to get to the top of the slope, by which time I had sweated through everything I was wearing. Finally, I got to just above where they're building a lot of new houses on the former Steelworks site (the last blue dot on the map), and trudged the last half mile home.

I never try to measure out how long one of these walks is going to be in advance, as I'd probably be put off by the prospect. Today, however, by the time-honoured and highly scientific method of laying the edge of a piece of paper along the route and marking the paper wherever the road bends, I figured that it was about six miles. Tiring, but very worthwhile.

Some of the other photographs I took will turn up in The Gallery soon.

PS. They're there now.

Date: 09/06/07

A New Start

So what did I spend my forty-fifth birthday doing?

For the most part, sitting here putting the long-awaited site revamp into operation. I started at about 2:15pm by deleting the files which were on the web server. It probably wasn't necessary to remove them all, but I felt it would remove the possibility of confusion. It worked, by and large, except for the twenty minutes I wasted afterwards when I realised that I'd deleted a folder which I'd only uploaded a few minutes previously.

This was followed by uploading the new site in its entirety to the server. As the new version is only 2MB smaller that the old one (the space I thought I'd save by using common CSS files wasn't as much as I'd hoped), this took quite some time.

Then, I went through the whole site, checking for screwups. And, of course, I found a few, which I had to correct. I finished the whole thing at about 10:30pm.

I know there are still some 'issues'. Some images (especially the thumbnails on the Gallery pages) haven't loaded properly. I'll sort that out soon.

Some of the changes were long overdue: the old archive pages were ridiculously large and slow to load. Breaking them down by years should help a lot. Also, the naming conventions for page and image files has been made much more consistent (now all I have to do is remember them). Similarly, external links should now all open in a new window or tab (this will be greatly to the annoyance of the purists), and internal links shouldn't (with perhaps the odd exception for practical purposes. I've also had to remove all links which take you to somewhere else on the same page. Due to to the new structure of the pages, the links would have taken you to where I wanted you to go, but the 'Back' button wouldn't have returned you to the place you started from. I find that slightly annoying, but I can live with it.

I hope you'll also find the new navigation panel to your liking. You wouldn't believe how much frustration that one aspect of the new design caused.

All the same, I know I'll have missed some boo-boo or another. I'm sure you'll let me know if you find them.

A lot of people were of assistance (even if unwittingly) in the reconstruction: indivduals such as esmi, Len Oil, kwatq and Jeroen Wenting of alt.fan.pratchett, and the writers of the tutorials at W3 Schools and HTML.net, along with coding experts at individual sites whose writings helped a lot (especially with how to make the site work properly in that crap browser known as Internet Explorer). Mention must also be made of the validation services for HTML and CSS at the World Wide Web Consortium. I hope what I've managed to achieve has been worth the effort for you the reader (end of gushy bit).

I haven't been doing just this, though. I did make time to go out into the garden a few times, mostly to watch the bumble bees hurtling around the buddleia globosa, which is in particularly vibrant mode this summer, largely because I forgot to cut it back last year. Here are a couple of pictures I took.

Date: 02/06/07

Advance Notice

The revamp of the site is now a week away, and it's unlikely that I'll be posting anything more on the site until then, so this is just a note about what will happen next weekend.

As I intend it at the moment, at some point during the afternoon (local time) of Saturday 9 June (my forty-fifth birthday - hint, hint!), the whole of the existing site will go offline and be replaced by a holding page. This is because the new version will be arranged differently, and it's going to be easier (and less confusing for me) just to pull the old site in its entirety.

Once the old site has been deleted from the server, I'll start putting the new version there. As this involves uploading over 900 files, it's likely to take a bit of time. I hope, however, to have completed that part of the job by late Saturday night.

I'll then spend some time testing the site, just to make sure that all is as it should be. Once I'm satisfied that it is, the holding page will be replaced by the new front page, and all will be sweetness and light again.

This timetable is, of course, dependent on reality and unforeseen circumstances not intruding, so should only be considered an approximation.

Please note that if you have bookmarks, favorites or whatever pointing to pages within the existing site, these may well not work after the revamp. If you still can't find them after going to the new front page and picking the most likely destination, please let me know (at webmasterATjudgementalDOTplusDOTcom - replace the capital letters with the symbols) and I'll give you the new url.

I hope you'll like the new layout and organisation.

Date: 18/05/07

Dog Days

Just thought I'd report that the Yorkie dog is fine and well. Apparently, the family acquired an Old English Sheepdog puppy, who is a little on the boisterous side vis-à-vis my little friend, so they're being kept apart for now.

Date: 01/05/07

Strike Out!

On strike today, the second of our little one-day efforts to try to stop this government of lunatics from wiping out large areas of the Civil Service. It's noticeable how little media attention this one has had: the BBC News website stuck it away a long way down inside its 'Business' section (it seems even the BBC thinks the Civil Service is a private-sector organisation now); The Guardian mentioned it briefly, as did the Express (whose report was virtually identical - what price media diversity when the idlers just parrot what comes from AP or Reuters?); The Independent? Nada. The Telegraph, The Mail, The Sun, The Mirror? Zilch.

Anyway, it was a beautiful Spring day, so I had an early lunch and went out with my faithful camera for a walk around the village. Some of the results may well be seen in The Gallery before very long.

And, in case you were wondering, I've finally sorted out the CSS problems with the revamped site. It seems that it was the navigation sidebar which was causing most of the trouble. Now I've rejigged that, everything seems to fit nicely into place, even at 800x600. There are just a few minor coding issues to sort out (like the fact that I didn't know the difference between an 'Alt' tag and a 'Title' tag on images), and then it should be ready to go by the time I take my annual June break. This means that the site will be largely unavailable for a few days, as I'll need to remove everything from the server and upload the whole of the new site. I'll give you more warning of this nearer the time.

In other news, it seems that my little canine friend has gone. He/she hasn't been seen in the backyard since before Easter, and when I went past there last Friday, there was a cat dozing on the flagstones. I hope nothing bad has happened.

Date: 22/04/07

Where Am I?

I suppose an update is in order...

I'm still working on the redesign of the site, and still hope to have it in place by the middle of June.

It's not been going as smoothly as I'd hoped, though, or indeed as smoothly as it looked like going. I thought that I'd go the Cascading Style Sheets sorted, having realised that I'd need two sets; one for Internet Exploiter and another for more standards-compliant browsers.

So, having got things just about the way I wanted them, I made the mistake of asking for comments from people whose experience and opinions I valued.

I say 'mistake', but no blame attaches to those who gave me feedback (thanks to kwatq, Len Oil, Jeroen Wenting and esmi - all of alt.fan.pratchett. The mistake was mine in thinking that I'd got it right. esmi wisely pointed out that, although I'd clearly designed the site for use at a window size of 1024x768 pixels, there were still a lot of people using, say, 800x600, and that the new design didn't look to good at that size.

Suitable chastened at forgetting such a basic point of interoperability, I went back and tried to redesign the style sheets so that they'd work at least tolerably well at the smaller size.

This has not been a happy experience. It's been like watching two lepers arm-wrestling: push the wrong thing and everything crumbles. It has put me in deep grump for over a week now (at a time when the arrival of Spring should be making me mildly euphoric), and has no doubt caused the elderly couple next door to wonder precisely what it is which causes me to shout things like, "No, you f***ing t##t! What are you doing that for?!!, and (in particularly bad moments), Oh, s*** my d***, you f***ing b*****d!".

I'm not through with it yet, but I suspect that I'll have to make do with an unsatisfactory design at least until such time as I can learn more about CSS and why no browser seems properly to support everything in it. All I hope is that people who still have their display set to 800x600 like scrollbars a lot...

As I mentioned, it's Spring. This means that my garden has started once more to command my attention like a hyperactive three-year-old. I spend all Saturday afternoon cutting the grass, because the weather forecast for the week ahead wasn't very encouraging. I've never cut it this early in the year before, and while I was watching the front lawn through the drizzle this afternoon, I swear I could see the bloody thing growing again before my eyes.

In other news: I may be about to have an article published in a very prestigious television and radio history website. More on this nearer the time.

And finally: congratulations to my colleagues Stuart and Sharon on the birth of child number two (a boy called Ianto), who was born last Thursday. As you can see from here, their daughter weighed over nine pounds: this young feller weighed in at an incredible eleven pounds and seven ounces!!! All I know is that, when the news went round the office on Friday, all the men crossed their legs and all the women's eyes started to water.

See you later...

Date: 28/03/07

Cut It Out!

Sometimes I have difficulty believing everything I read in news stories.

Take this one, for example.

I'm not necessarily doubting the veracity of the science of it; it's just difficult not to laugh when the first paragraph of the story reads:

"International experts have backed the use of male circumcision in the prevention of HIV."

and a later paragraph begins with:

"Kevin De Cock, director of HIV/AIDS at the World Health Organization said..."

I can't help feeling that this fine, upstanding official was appointed to his job because of his name.

Date: 18/03/07

What-A-What?

Do you know what a 'Mondegreen' is?

If not, read this first.

Back yet? Oh good.

I was sitting here yesterday, continuing the re-coding of this site for its revamp (due in June, I hope), and in the background I had Steve Tilston & Maggie Boyle's fine 1992 album "Of Moor And Mesa" playing.

The penultimate track is an interpretation of the traditional Irish song "The Banks Of Claudy". I've listened to the track a few times, but this time was different.

Where Maggie sings:

"I slowly steppéd up to her,
And gave her a surprise"

I now heard:

"I slowly steppéd up to her,
And gave her arse a prize"

I can't get to the bottom of it.

Judge's Log: Additional

Here's the line in question. See what you think...

Date: 15/03/07

Say Hello To My Little Friend

I'm not a dog person, really. And most dogs can sense this.

This dog doesn't seem to mind, though. It thinks I'm a dog person, and that's all that matters.

I don't know his name. Hell, I don't even know if he's a he.

All I know is that 'he' lives in a house I walk past on my midday 30-minute escape from the office. All I also know is that I come away from our encounters with my hand seriously licked and the rest of me feeling slightly better disposed to the world.

So I thought I'd put 'his' picture (a still captured from a short video I made with my trusty digital camera yesterday) right here so you can all see.

Date: 04/03/07

Blur-dy Hell!

I took over eighty photographs of tonight's (I'm typing this just after midnight, hence the date) total lunar eclipse.

None of them has come out satisfactorily. This is partly due to the fact that my camera probably doesn't zoom enough to do such a job properly, but it's mostly due to the fact that I don't have a tripod and my hands have never been that steady in any case.

What I've ended up with is a lot of photographs of a Moon looking like a binary star system, or twisted into bizarre shapes.

Since, when all your best intentions go phut!, the only thing you can do is laugh at yo' own ass, I thought I'd show you a couple:

All hail the Cosmic Mushroom!

One for our French friends here, as General De Gaulle clearly still watches over us all.

Date: 17/02/07

Thought For The Day/Week/Month/Year/Epoch...

"Eventually it was discovered that God did not want us to be all the same.

"This was Bad News for the Governments of The World as it seemed contrary to the doctrine of Portion Controlled Servings.

"Mankind must be made more uniformly if The Future was going to work.

"Various ways were sought to bind us all together but, alas, same-ness was unenforceable.

"It was about this time that someone came up with the idea of Total Criminalization.

"Based on the principle that if we were all crooks we could at last be uniform to some degree in the eyes of The Law.

"Shrewdly our legislators calculated that most people were too lazy to perform a Real Crime. So new laws were manufactured making it possible for anyone to violate them any time of the day or night. And once we had all broken some kind of law we'd all be in the same big happy club right up there with the President, the most exalted industrialists, and the clerical big shots of all your favorite religions.

"Total Criminalization was the greatest idea of its time and was vastly popular except with those people who didn't want to be crooks or outlaws.

"So, of course, they had to be tricked into it...

"Which is one of the reasons why music was eventually made illegal."

(Frank Zappa. From the lyrics sheet of his 1979 album "Joe's Garage", which I was listening to this afternoon)

© The Zappa Family Trust

Date: 09/02/07

Goodness, Is It Spring Already?

It snowed for much of Thursday, although it stopped by early evening. Today, it started coming down at again at about 08:30 and hasn't stopped since. This was how things looked when I got home just now:

Fear not! My sturdy old oak tree can take it!

This looks really wintry, doesn't it?

And this, I presume, is the winter equivalent of crop circles:

I'm certain that if I were to tread on one of these squares, I would be immediately catapulted to the distant planet of Thdwix, where I would be enthusiastically and sadistically experimented upon.

I'm able to be so certain because this is quite clearly one of their field agents:

Date: 04/02/07

Walkabout

The weather was so nice yesterday that I went for a good walk (few chances for that this 'winter', what with two solid months of wind and rain and my persistent viral infections).

Got some good photographs, some of which will appear in the Gallery before very long.

PS: They're there now.

Date: 26/01/07

And now, JudgeCo is proud to announce its latest prize winner...

Echidna Of The Week

Our congratulations to Thoroughbred Champion Bosch Priklisodh III (known to his besotted owners as Spike).

This award climaxes a year of triumph for Spike, as it joins his other successes as Supreme Champion at the World Anteater Congress at Bad Grühming, and his third successive victory in Which? magazine's Best Hairbrush category.

Date: 21/01/07

Where I Stand...

Moral Skepticism
You scored 25 Objectivism, 73 Naturalism, and 43 Cognitivism!

Everything about morality can be reduced to naturalistic, emotive or scientific terms - there are no independent facts or true moral propositions. You're walking in the footsteps of Hume, which are pretty cool footsteps. ""Moral Skepticism" names a diverse collection of views that deny or raise doubts about various roles of reason in morality. Different versions of moral skepticism deny or doubt moral knowledge, justified moral belief, moral truth, moral facts or properties, and reasons to be moral. Despite this diversity among the views that get labelled "moral skepticism", many people have very strong feelings about moral skepticism in general. One large group finds moral skepticism obvious, because they do not see how anyone could have real knowledge of anything's moral status. Others see moral skepticism as so absurd that any moral theory can be refuted merely by showing that it leads to moral skepticism. Don't you know, they ask, that slavery is morally wrong? Or terrorism? Or child abuse? Skeptics who deny that we have reason to believe or obey these moral judgments are seen as misguided and dangerous. The stridency and ease of these charges suggests mutual misunderstanding, so we need to be more charitable and more precise. (Stanford)

The Meta-ethical Theories Test

It's as well to know....