Sto(ut)opia

Wedding Day – Las Vegas 07/05/10, 06.00

2010-07-03T11:48:00.010+01:00

[Slightly belated post]

Too excited to sleep so I get up and take a stroll about. Inevitably there are people still in the casino – some starting early some finishing late. You can normally tell the difference between the early and the late shift depending on whether they’re drinking coffee or booze. Usually...Vegas is not so much the city that never sleeps as the one that got thrown out of school for Attention Deficit Disorder.

I head outside where gardeners are starting to hoover the grass (seriously – it’s all artificial nowadays) and mosey amidst the joggers and stragglers over to the nearest Starbucks to buy a couple of lattes. The sky’s an azure desert blue, the wind’s died down, and it’s a beautiful day in Sin City. A beautiful day, in fact, to get married.

The ceremony’s fabulous. Nice, simple and uncluttered, with the photographer – a cycling nut – as a witness. A lot of couples get married at The Chapel of the Flowers, but the place did a very good job of making us imagine for a minute that we were the only ones. And, as far as we were concerned, we truly were – the only two people living and breathing on the planet for those moments. Kate looked heart-wrenchingly beautiful and the ceremony and photo shoot afterwards was full of love and laughter. Brilliant, utterly, utterly, brilliant.

The only way to top it was with landscape, so we got changed and headed off to the Valley of Fire, about 60 miles north of Vegas. It’s a stunning place; a desert ecosystem dotted with giant red sandstone formations (it doubled for Mars in Total Recall) on which the Ancient Pueblo Peoples drew petroglyphs on the rock whose purpose and meaning remains elusive to this day. More than anything though, there’s a real feeling of age and gravity to the place; a timeless, brooding ancientness which makes it as different from Las Vegas as it’s probably possible to get while remaining in the same universe.

From there we headed up the Stratosphere to the Top of the World restaurant. It’s not, of course, but the views from the windows as the restaurant slowly revolves 800ft above The Strip are pretty spectacular – lines of neon and light stretching to the desert horizon in petroglyphs all of their own. Food, wine, more food, more wine, and a significantly wallet-lightening bill later, and our wedding day was pretty much done.

It was, of course, only the start of the journey though...

Defining Vegas moment: in a bar where a giant volcano that took up the size of a standard English semi erupted, spewing out a girl in a bikini who promptly slid down a waterslide and into a giant margarita mixer, whereupon she began dancing Esther Williams style while people on stilts stalked around egging the crowd to clap along. Mad. And it wasn’t just the margaritas talking – promise.

Most amazing non-wedding Vegas moment: 250 miles away or thereabouts at the rim of the Grand Canyon. The seminal horror writer HP Lovecraft used an interesting literary cheat in his works, saying that Cthulu and his ilk were ‘too horrible to describe’...and so, he didn’t. As a writer myself I can only admire the cheek (while, being paid by the word, decrying the potential lost income). But Reader, to paraphrase the man himself, words truly cannot convey the majesty and the wonder of the Grand Canyon. Go there, see for yourself.

Dumbest Vegas moment: Anything involving a fruit machine and beer for a dollar.

Weirdest Vegas moment: The last exhibit at The Atomic Testing Museum. The museum is great, chronicling the Nevada nuclear tests from back in the day when the mushroom clouds could be seen towering over The Strip, but then it gets to the point where it justifies the continued funding of the testing facility (even though the Test Ban Treaty remains in force). So, you end up with lots of stuff about terrorism, some bits about rogue states and nuclear suitcases, and then a chunk of I-beam girder from the World Twin Trade Towers in New York. And you end up touching it because you can .

Most equestrian Vegas moment: Riding through Red Rock Canyon on the back of a couple of ponies. Inevitably, Kate (experienced rider) got a perfectly behaved horse called Stagecoach, while I (second time ever in the saddle) got a stubborn-minded git called Big Joe who wanted to stop and try and eat every single bit of vegetation that came under his hooves. About half-way through I started calling him Evostick...

Foodie Vegas moment: Vegas does a lot of food blandly in portions that would make Jabba the Hutt blanche. That said though, the corned beef hash at Tiffany’s 24-hour Diner & Pharmacy (you can picture the clientele for yourselves) was pretty spectacular in a ‘That’s really unhealthy but I’m glad I’ve eaten it’ sort of way. Plus we got to say we’d eaten breakfast at Tiffany’s afterwards...We really did eat in all the best places.

The science news cycle

2010-03-05T07:22:00.000Z

How the media helps the world get hold of the wrong end of the stick and give it a damn good tug...

phd051809s.gif (GIF Image, 600�667 pixels)

Grading Gear...

2010-03-02T13:03:00.001Z

An article I wrote about grading the BBC's Top Gear for High Definition magazine. Not often I get to quote AA Gill twice in the same piece. You'd think he might return the favour sometime...;-)

WELCOME | High Definition magazine

The end of advertising

2010-03-02T11:07:00.001Z

Interesting presentation to say the least...

Faster Future: Publishing possibilities now and beyond: Time to end the failed experiment of advertising

A brief interlude...

2010-01-31T15:38:00.002Z

Written for a New Scientist competition to write a short story about the future in 350 words or under.

Border Point

The border point was along a quiet, non-electrified B-road in the middle of the countryside. It was secluded and there were guns. Richard held Jeanette’s hand.

“So, you want entry into Rutland?” asked the Guard.

Richard swallowed, but stuck to the plan. “Citizenship actually....Refugee status even,” he added, seeing the look on the Guard’s face.

Don’t babble, he thought to himself. Be strong. You’re the one with the power here.

He babbled.

“Look, we’ve been on the move for a year now, ever since Surrey enacted the Native Wealth Laws and threw us out because Jeanette was born in Kent. We work where we can – we work hard, we’re science teachers – but no-one wants us. Lincolnshire has given us a five-day transit visa but it runs out today and if we’re caught we’ll be Interned.

“And,” he concluded in a whisper,” I can’t let that happen.”

They stepped off the road to let an oil-burner go past. Richard coughed from the stench of its exhaust. There had even been a driver behind the wheel. What sort of Godforsaken backwater was this?

“Look, mate,” said the Guard. “There’s not a lot I can do. Unless, of course, you have special reasons for me to look into your case...”

He left the sentence hanging. Richard sighed.

“Bananas?” said the Guard. “Tea? Coffee? We’re landlocked here and trade negotiations aren’t going well.”

“I’m sorry,” said Richard. “We’ve given away everything just to get here.”

The Guard leaned in and whispered earnestly. “Can you fight? It’s starting to look mean over Leicestershire way.”

Richard shook his head.

“Well, then, be off with you,” the Guard shouted. “We have no use for your type here.”

“But where can we go? We’ve tried all the borders!”

“Have you tried the sea?” the Guard sneered, and stalked off.

Richard went to leave and reached for Jeanette’s hand, but she took a step forwards.

“I can show you how to make mustard gas,” she said.

The Guard turned.

Alcohol map

2010-01-31T08:45:00.001Z

One from Strange Maps-

"It matters where we are, for it helps determine who we are. Or, as the quote often attributed to Napoleon states: Geography is destiny. That destiny extends to drink, as demonstrated by this map. Where we are determines to a statistically significant degree what kind of alcohol we prefer. Or is it the other way around: the kind of alcohol preferred is determined by the place where it is produced?

This map shows Europe dominated by three so-called ‘alcohol belts’, the northernmost one for distilled spirits, a middle one for beer and the southernmost one for wine. Each one’s existence and extension are a mix of culture and agriculture."

442 – Distilled Geography: Europe’s Alcohol Belts - Strange Maps

Time Traveler Essentials

2010-01-15T07:53:00.001Z

This is quite simply brilliant: a cheat sheet for mad scientists to hang in their time machines so that they can fundamentally rebuild civilisation (or at least make serious amounts of money) if they end up stranded back in the past. Have to admit to thinking about this in the past, probably as a result of a boyhood collision with some L Sprague de Camp book or other, so there's definitely a market for it!

Would presumably also work in advent of nuclear war, asteroid impact, or any other chance to rebuild civilisation. Nifty

TopatoCo: Time Traveler Essentials Print

Newspapers and technology

2009-12-30T09:16:00.001Z

Interesting piece in The Economist:

Newspapers and technology: Network effects | The Economist:

"The internet may kill newspapers; but it is not clear if that matters. For society, what matters is that people should have access to news, not that it should be delivered through any particular medium; and, for the consumer, the faster it travels, the better."

Bugger Avatar

2009-12-22T09:38:00.001Z

[via sfx]
"According to New Zealand’s Dominion Post Peter Jackson is secretly developing a sci-fi film based on the Mortal Engines books by Philip Reeve.

The newspaper claims that Weta Workshops is already busy with designs, but a spokesman for the company would only respond, “any comment should come from Peter.'

The article also points out that Jackson has also optioned the rights to the historic-fantasy Temeraire novels by Naomi Novik, which tell an alternative version of the Napoleonic Wars where tame dragons are used for aerial attacks."

SFX: the leading science fiction, fantasy and horror magazine:

Somali pirate stock exchange

2009-12-03T09:39:00.001Z

This is the point where the world actually turns into a Bruce Sterling-written satire.

Somali pirates have set up a stock exchange to attract investors, according to Reuters Here's one woman's brief story:

"Piracy investor Sahra Ibrahim, a 22-year-old divorcee, was lined up with others waiting for her cut of a ransom pay-out after one of the gangs freed a Spanish tuna fishing vessel.

'I am waiting for my share after I contributed a rocket-propelled grenade for the operation,' she said, adding that she got the weapon from her ex-husband in alimony.

'I am really happy and lucky. I have made $75,000 in only 38 days since I joined the 'company'.'"

Wonder when the futures market will kick off?

Somali sea gangs lure investors at pirate lair | Reuters

The Epic HDTV Buyer's Guide Flowchart - HDTV - Gizmodo

2009-11-22T10:23:00.000Z

Because there are flowcharts and there are flowcharts

The Epic HDTV Buyer's Guide Flowchart - HDTV - Gizmodo

BBC turns down the flow

2009-11-13T08:48:00.000Z

Chris Forrester on trouble at t'mill.

BBC cuts HDTV bit-rate - Rapid TV News: "Now we know why the BBC’s HDTV images are suffering. Ordinary viewers have been complaining about the BBC’s picture quality, and there’s little doubt amongst the industry’s ‘golden eyes’ that the bit-rate spigot is being tightened."

20121? It's going to be a long three years

2009-11-12T18:22:00.000Z

A potentially useful infographic to be deployed and referred to at any point over the next three years when Some Idiot in the Pub starts banging on about how the world is going to end in 2012.

It's not.

Honest.

The only significance to 2012 is a) that the likes of me will have been writing about the broadcasting of the Olympics for what will feel like forever by then and b) the events of Rush's seminal 2112 are still 100 years in the future ;-)

Anyway: here's the link: 2012: The End Of The World? | Information Is Beautiful

Foursquare

2009-11-09T08:26:00.000Z

Feel really quite torn by this. On one hand, being someone of a fairly geographic and map-oriented persuasion, being able to geographically track my friends and my life is immensely appealing. On the other though, at what point do you stop experiencing the world fully unless it's foursquared, facebooked or tweeted - nevermind the privacy issues.

It's the consumption of tourist spaces by photographs taken to the next level. The experiential nature of being somewhere has to be validated with evidence which, as it moves towards the realtime web, means that that validation inevitably dilutes the actual experience of being there.

As to foursquare, no iPhone and working from home kind of puts the mockers on that, but I do kind of wonder for how long.

foursquare

Andy & Kate’s Grecian Odyssey – A Decent Proposal

2009-10-23T09:44:00.004+01:00

The short version: I asked Kate to marry me. She said yes.

The long version: Galaxidi was perfect. I’d been waiting to ask Kate to marry me for some time, and the blue waters of Galaxidi’s twin harbours with the yachts gently lapping at their moorings and even the cries of the gulls seemingly somnolent in the Mediterranean sun looked to provide a perfect backdrop. The hotel was in the budget range, but the room was large and clean, painted in a jaunty blue and white, and had a balcony overlooking the aforementioned dappled waters, so that fitted the bill too.

There were only two problems. The first, was the election. Delphi is meant to be the most romantic of the Ancient sites in Greece – haunting, mysterious and slumbering under the weight of history – but it was closed because of the election. Whether they were worried that people would go there and consult the Oracle before voting, we didn’t know. Certainly the election was arousing passions, one Greek TV channel having an entertaining version of the Brady Bunch opening credits where men in insets in the main picture simply shouted at each other for an hour or so. But either way, Delphi as a romantic hors d’ouvre to the evening’s main course of pledging undying devotion was a bit of a #fail.

The second was champagne, which is not a regular commodity in your average Greek taberna or corner shop. Luckily, however, Galaxidi is just a couple of hours down the coast from Athens and has been well and truly discovered by the Greek yachtie set, which means that an awfully nice young Dutch chap living there could walk me to a shop which sold the stuff at daft prices to even dafter yachties. He shook me by the hand and wished me luck. “I hope she says yes,” he said.

What do you mean *you* hope she says yes, I thought.

I went through the checklist.

Location – check
Balcony – check
Sparkling sea - check
Sunset – check
Champagne – check
*Cold* champagne – well, almost
Fly done up (always worthwhile) – check
Girlfriend – check
One knee – check
Ring – check

So, no time like the present then...

I have no idea what I said. I just remember grinning foolishly afterwards and being very, very happy. In fact I really don’t remember much of the rest of the evening. There was good wine and good food in a restaurant overlooking the darkening harbour, there were even a couple of cold beers afterwards. But to be honest, it’s all a bit of a blur – just floating along on a happy cloud with the world turning on its axis around us by way of a novelty. We became the centre of things. What I do remember is that every time I looked down at Kate’s hand there was a silver band arcing across her finger and it just looked very, very right.

Andy & Kate’s Grecian Odyssey – A Brief Note About Driving

2009-10-17T17:09:00.002+01:00

We did a lot of it, about 2100km in total, and everywhere we went we saw little roadside shrines by the road marking the point where some unfortunate had come unglued from the tarmac and then from life in short order. These aren’t your normal wilted bunch of flowers by the road, these are mini churches full of offerings and the fact that there are so many of them concentrates the mind rather wonderfully.

The theory part of the Greek Driving Test must be the quickest exam in the history of the world (“Can you see that sign? Yes? You’ve passed, well done.”) and we’re not sure we ever worked out the actual rules at road junctions. What seems to happen in an absence of markings is that people turn up from different directions and, depending on speed, make urgent or really urgent eye contact with each other. Some sort of telepathic code is then passed between the drivers, one mashes his foot to the floor, the others stamp on the brakes and/or swerve, and everyone carries on to the next junction and repeats the process. Still, it seems to work well enough, though perhaps the fact that the hire car we had was a sort of greeny yellow that you can only by rights get if you dip metal in the sea at Sellafield for about five years helped our progress.

Andy & Kate’s Grecian Odyssey – Meteora Shower!

2009-10-17T16:48:00.004+01:00

If you’ve ever watched The Shining, you’ll have some idea of what our hotel in Meteora was like. It was a giant, five-star place perched on a hill at the end of a dirt track that was crewed entirely by an Eastern European couple with their obsessive compulsive kid, who had his toys lined up in regimented rows in the enormous, vaulted central hall.

“What time do you serve dinner?” we asked, naively.

“We don’t do food.”

“You don’t do *what*?”

Turns out, after a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, that they did do food, but only when tour groups were staying and, as the one that was there that night were all going out to eat, it was a big of crisps or a drive to the nearest village. Hmmmm. We wondered around the place, it’s huge marble staircases, and echoing lonely corridors and wondered exactly how much money was being laundered through the place by Russian drug czars. Maybe there’s an exchange scheme going on, and somewhere on a Russian steppe Greek hoteliers are selling weed to bemused cossacks.

The view was good though. Once upon a time, around the 11th century, a monk went up a rock and became a hermit. Then some others went to join him, which kind of blew his hermit status, but did give them the werewithal to start building a small monastery. Some other wandering hermits in search of a nice, high place to perch saw this, and climbed up a nearby rock and repeated the process (which became rather a matter of survival when the Turks invaded). Do that a few more times and you have Meteora, a landscape of smooth sided rocky pillars with (nowadays) six active monasteries perched precariously on their precipices and undoubtedly one of the most stunning landscapes on Earth.

Once reached only by rope ladder and windlass, steps were finally built up to them in the early 20th century and the monks, knowing a good thing when they saw it, started opening their monasteries to the tourist trade. These places are fascinating, the biggest – Moni Megalou – in particular being a repository of some of the best religious art it’s ever been my pleasure to clap eyes on (as well as some entertainingly feisty stuff painted around the time of the German occupation [1]. Dodging the inevitable puffing and panting tour groups and spending some time in the incredibly ornate churches on our own was an amazing experience, especially as the Orthodox frescoes are not exactly restrained when it comes to depicting the travails of the martyrs.

The pictures (and there are plenty more of them here) really don’t do it justice, so we suggest you grab any opportunity to head up there yourselves at some point and yank firmly with both hands. Just watch out for the Hotel Meteora and the bloke at the reception desk typing ‘All work and no play makes Vlad a dull boy’ time and time again...

[1] Greece has, at one time or another, been occupied by pretty much every invading force in history, with the result that you can point to pretty much any part of the Greek landscape and the history books will tell you that x number of people got massacred there a few centuries back. The value of x is often distressingly high.

Andy & Kate’s Grecian Odyssey – Acropolis Now!

2009-10-16T09:11:00.003+01:00

Much to my shame, I realised as we were planning this trip over the summer that my knowledge of Greece comes from the following really rather limited sources:

Asterix – the books [1]
300 – the film
Rumbustious legends involving Zeus having sex with girls disguised as a bull/white swan/whatever
Shirley Valentine – the film

Thus, while Kate was charting a route around the Peloponnese for us, I wasn’t really much help, as comments such as ‘Can we see where Getafix added the blue dye to the magic potion so the Romans would get disqualified from the Ancient Olympics for taking banned substances?’ were met with a slightly frosty look.

However, despite my best efforts at disruption, a route was planned, hotels were booked, and following a quick bout of post-IBC swine flu, we headed off to Athens as a first stop. Come what may, I figured I had to know a little bit more about the country when I got back than I did before I went. It wouldn’t be that hard...

Pretty much the first thing I did find out was that Kate had used me as a drugs mule on the way out. Rifling through the Lonely Planet on the rooftop terrace of the Acropolis View Hotel (which does exactly what it says on the tin) while working out what to see first, I came across the bit that said Codeine is banned in Greece and you can get in fairly brisk amounts of trouble for carrying it around.

“Did you bring those Co-Codamol pills in case your back starts hurting?” I asked innocently

“No,” she replied, “you did. They’re in your rucksack.”

She swears that she didn’t know too...

Anyway, we decided to celebrate my non-arrest and cavity search at the border by heading up to the Acropolis the day after and having a look around. So did several thousand other people at exactly the same time. The word ‘Acropolis’ comes from the Ancient Greek, ‘acro’ meaning ‘many and ‘polis’ meaning ‘idiots’ [2] and the site was absolutely rammed. It’s on every nation’s Europe in 7 Days itinerary and there’s a constant stream of coaches turning up at the base of the site, disgorging their slightly befuddled occupants, and then retiring for a quick cigarette [3] while their camera-wielding passengers get herded in round the monuments and ruins and then herded out again.

Is it worth the experience? I’m not sure. Managed to trot back there again towards the end of the holiday and went in with about 15 minutes of opening time left when there were much less people and it still didn’t have an aura about it. Maybe that’s because of its history. The Parthenon – the Temple of Athena built by Pericles and one of the most famous buildings in the world – has been variously used as an ammo dump, blown up, eaten alive by acid rain, and had some of its most sumptuous treasures nicked by the British. As a result, it resembles more of a World Heritage Building Site than anything while the Greek authorities pursue a fairly aggressive intervention and rebuild it, using new marble where the old bits have been subject to a little bit too much gunpowder, acid or avaricious Brit nobility. In fact, there’s a lot of this going on round the country, with the result that some ancient monuments almost look as if Frankenstein actually retrained as an architect: a horde of crazed Igors going round cementing old bits of marble together with new ones and not always worrying too much about the concrete in-between.

It’s beautiful up there in its own way, especially as you look down on the multitude of white buildings of modern Athens lapping up against the surrounding hills like a frozen sea, but there are places in Greece that have a far far better sense of the historical and yes, even the sacred.

And that’s even on its own slopes as we move away from The Acropolis and things get much saner very quickly. Walk around the Ancient Agora and there’s almost no-one about; sit on one of the marble seats of the Theatre of Dionysus, looking at the stage in front of you where Aristophanes first debuted Lysistrata and The Wasps, and Aeschylus first depicted Agamemnon's dysfunctional family ties, and you can almost have the place to yourself; head to the National Archeological Museum and you’ll find crowds, but now most of them have been siphoned off to the new Acropolis Museum the footfalls are a lot sparser than they could have been.

Which was a good job too as Kate became glued to the Antikythera Mechanism in quite an impressive way. Plenty about it all on the web, but suffice to say for the moment that:

“it’s an ancient mechanical calculator (also described as the first known mechanical computer) designed to calculate astronomical positions. It was recovered in 1901 from the Antikythera wreck but its complexity and significance were not understood until decades later. It is now thought to have been built about 150–100 BC. Technological artefacts of similar complexity did not reappear until a thousand years later.”

So there. In fact, she ended up performing a circular dance around it with another Antikythera-obsessive, both fairly crazed with excitement as they gestured and pointed out significant aspects of it to their other halves. Who made it? Why and where? How did the knowledge get lost? And, more importantly, would it help you buy a train ticket up to Meteora?

Okay, perhaps not the latter, but while buying said tickety may sound like a trivial thing, it turned out to be a task that Hercules would have had more than one problem with. Go to station, get sent to ticket office in other part of city, wait in queue, get told when it’s your turn that there will now be a ten minute break for some reason, wait for ten minutes, wait for another ten, and another, start ruminating that if this is how bad it is to get a ticket what might it be like to travel on the trains themselves, phone up Hertz and start your car hire three days early.

Time for one last meal before we went though, down in a lovely part of the city where most of the shops sell religious paraphernalia for the Greek Orthodox Church. Which, given that the average Orthodox village church makes a Catholic cathedral look like a Wesleyan chapel, is a fairly serious amount of bling. Given the fact also that Kate is by now making great strides with the Greek language (while I’m still at the smiling sweetly and saying thank you in English a lot stage) the waiter turns to me and says “You should marry her.”

Now, it’s funny that you should say that...

[1] Asterix is actually the foundation of all my knowledge of the Ancient World. Sadly...
[2] This is a lie. But it might as well not be...
[3] Well, not the coach, but the driver will. Greece has elevated competitive smoking to an artform and no opportunity for a crafty fag can be missed

Brooker vs Windows vs Mac

2009-09-28T13:57:00.000+01:00

The Gruaniad's Charlie Brooker in coruscating form...

"Seriously, stop it. I don't care if Mac stuff is better. I don't care if Mac stuff is cool. I don't care if every Mac product comes equipped a magic button on the side that causes it to piddle gold coins and resurrect the dead and make holographic unicorns dance inside your head. I'm not buying one, so shut up and go home. Go back to your house. I know, you've got an iHouse. The walls are brushed aluminum. There's a glowing Apple logo on the roof. And you love it there. You absolute MONSTER."

Cthulu + interweb = amusement

2009-09-27T10:52:00.001+01:00

Don't ask me why, it just does...

Sydney, Mars

2009-09-23T07:42:00.001+01:00

Nothing quite like a red dust storm to turn a city you know into something you quite manifestly don't. Luna Park? More like Olympos Park as Sydney becomes Big Man's playground. BBC NEWS | Have Your Say | Your pictures: Sydney dust storm

3D to the Home Begins in the U.K., by Jay Ankeney

2009-09-21T21:23:00.000+01:00

Just so I know where it is!

3D to the Home Begins in the U.K., by Jay Ankeney

Fire in the Hole!

2009-09-05T11:00:00.004+01:00

A stunning NASA image of the fires that ranged above LA this week. Nothing more to add than that - just satellite porn basically.

A history lesson

2009-09-04T09:35:00.001+01:00

A nice one from the Daily Telegraph:How 20 popular websites looked when they launched.

All brings back fond memories from back in the early days of all this interweb malarkey of giving up and going to another site whenever you'd see a jpeg loading...

Naming metal bands

2009-08-20T14:41:00.000+01:00

Presenting the rather wonderful etymology of heavy metal band names...

flow_heavymetal.jpg (JPEG Image, 1700x1100 pixels) - Scaled (72%)

Left behind...

2009-08-17T09:11:00.000+01:00

Interesting one from the Grauniad.

Has the left missed its moment? The radical American writer Rebecca Solnit fears so. 'It felt like last October [the peak of the banking panic] was the golden moment to put forward an alternative vision,' she says. 'What's been dismaying is that there has been so little coherent response from the left since.'

Has the left blown its big chance of success? | Politics | The Guardian:

Hmmmmmm

2009-08-08T08:26:00.000+01:00

Scientists Track Down Source of Earth’s Hum | Wired Science | Wired.com: "After discovering the mysterious low-frequency buzz in 1998, scientists figured out that the Earth’s hum is caused not by earthquakes or atmospheric turbulence, but by ocean waves colliding with the seafloor. Now, researchers have pinpointed the source of the Earth’s “background noise,” and it looks like it’s coming primarily from the Pacific coast of North America."

Kill or cure? Sell papers either way

2009-08-07T22:41:00.002+01:00

Mind boggling. There is a technical term in the newspaper business for the moment when a newspaper, having reported an event with great conviction one week, says the opposite the following week with equal conviction. It is called a “reverse ferret”.

This site is a veritable index of ferretology as, in its own words, it "Help[s] to make sense of the Daily Mail’s ongoing effort to classify every inanimate object into those that cause cancer and those that prevent it," - and often discovering that they do both at some point or other.

Warning: reading this site could affect house prices...

Kill or cure?:

Where is everywhere?

2009-04-20T16:09:00.003+01:00

Interesting one via New Scientist: a map which shows how far away everywhere is from everywhere else temporally:

"The maps are based on a model which calculated how long it would take to travel to the nearest city of 50,000 or more people by land or water. The model combines information on terrain and access to road, rail and river networks (see the maps). It also considers how factors such as altitude, steepness of terrain and hold-ups like border crossings slow travel.

Plotted onto a map, the results throw up surprises. First, less than 10 per cent of the world's land is more than 48 hours of ground-based travel from the nearest city. What's more, many areas considered remote and inaccessible are not as far from civilisation as you might think. In the Amazon, for example, extensive river networks and an increasing number of roads mean that only 20 per cent of the land is more than two days from a city - around the same proportion as Canada's Quebec province."

More here.

Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre

2009-04-15T14:16:00.001+01:00

Dr Who's Planet of the Dead episode as redone by The Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre. Really rather brilliant.

YouTube - Planet Of The Dead - Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre

Kermode & Mayo - not for long?

2009-04-09T11:13:00.000+01:00

Looks like Simon Mayo has declined a move up to Salford when 5Live relocates and, as a result, the best hour of radio in existence is under threat.

Still, a good interview with the Good Doctor K. Prize quote: "God's role in the world? Oh, come on. I'm just a guy who likes The Exorcist."

Drawn to the devil: 5 Live's horror-loving film reviewer Mark Kermode talks to Mark Lawson | Film | The Guardian

3-D: The Future of Movies - TIME

2009-03-30T07:57:00.000+01:00

A 3D piece from Time with some interesting stats and facts in.

3-D: The Future of Movies - TIME

Post BSG

2009-03-29T10:33:00.000+01:00

io9 assesses the runners and riders for that all important quality sci-fi dosage.

Your New Favorite Tv Show: What Show Is Your New Battlestar?

Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab (1950-1951)

2009-03-24T13:48:00.000Z

Waay coool...

Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab (1950-1951): "The set came with four types of uranium ore,"

Sci Fi science errors

2009-03-24T13:44:00.000Z

Quite right too, but they missed the worst one: spaceships making a noise in a vacuum. Man, that bugs me!

SFX: the leading science fiction, fantasy and horror magazine

Analogue blogging

2009-03-17T13:59:00.000Z

"Alfred Sirleaf is an analog blogger. He take runs the “Daily News”, a news hut by the side of a major road in the middle of Monrovia. He started it a number of years ago, stating that he wanted to get news into the hands of those who couldn’t afford newspapers, in the language that they could understand."

AfriGadget � Blog Archive � Liberia’s Blackboard Blogger

Create Your Own Original Star Trek Story

2009-03-02T16:31:00.000Z

An indispensable and wonderfully accurate guide!

Chart Porn: Create Your Own Original Star Trek Story

Facebook infantalising

2009-02-25T09:01:00.000Z

Normally the sort of thing I'd avoid as Luddite scaremongering, but this is Susan Greenfield talking and she does tend to know what she's talking about...

"She said she found it strange we are 'enthusiastically embracing' the possible erosion of our identity through social networking sites, since those that use such sites can lose a sense of where they themselves 'finish and the outside world begins'.

She claimed that sense of identity can be eroded by 'fast-paced, instant screen reactions, perhaps the next generation will define themselves by the responses of others'."

Facebook et al risk 'infantilising' the human mind | Media | guardian.co.uk

Now, here's a book title you don't see every day

2009-02-24T15:52:00.002Z

God Emperor of Didcot - Chronicles of Isambard Smith

How are you coping with collapse-anxiety? - Boing Boing

2009-02-18T14:12:00.000Z

How are you coping with collapse-anxiety? - Boing Boing: "I lived through the dotcom boom and bust in San Francisco, arriving in 1999 and departing in 2003, and the two things that stand out for me were 1) how fast it fell and how deep the bottom turned out to be and 2) how quickly the unthinkable became normal and people started to have fun and do cool stuff even without the stupid amounts of money sloshing around the city,"

The joys of social networking

2008-10-29T07:51:00.001Z

Says a BBC news story:

"Companies should not dismiss staff who use social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo at work as merely time-wasters, a Demos study suggests.

Attempts to control employees' use of such software could damage firms in the long run by limiting the way staff communicate, the think tank said."

More ici: BBC NEWS | Business | Bosses 'should embrace Facebook'

Stout & Large Do...Istanbul - Days Three & Four

2008-10-19T13:38:00.004+01:00

I’m running these two days into each other as diary entries such as ‘had long, leisurely breakfast’ or ‘read book on terrace overlooking Bospherous’ do not for exciting reading make, even if the book is the new Neal Stephenson novel ‘Anathem’ and a perplexing, wrist-snappingly heavy delight...So, here’s how to experience time-space compression and have a great and fabulous day in Istanbul.

Morning – The Grand Bazaar. Less of the lawless frontier of the shopping experience that it perhaps likes to bill itself as (that honour has to go to the souq in Marrakesh) , and more of a well-behaved mall with a few more carpets than usual, nevertheless it’s a good place to nose around and get lost in. With something like 4000 shops and 30,000 people working in the place, it’s a network of alleyways and streets that has accreted since the 17th century and had a roof thrown over it to keep the elements out and the shoppers in. It’s divided into districts, so one area is full of goldsmiths and jewellers, another of carpets, another of musical instruments, another (by the looks of it) full of knock-off Prada handbags and so on and so forth. Shoppers and goods and tourists and locals all intermingle under its roof and the only thing it’s really missing – from our point of view – was a camel or two.

We didn’t buy much but got plenty of enjoyment out of the bargaining process. One guy said that he was offering us as a special price as it was his birthday, we said that we’d still only pay him x lira, but we’d sing Happy Birthday to him afterwards. All good fun.

Lunch – In a word, Gozleme. It’s pretty much the Turkish version of a pasty, thought without the industrial quantities of gristle, turnip and various other un-named substances floating around in a brown gravy gloop which has made Cornwall’s finest both revered and feared (by sober people) throughout the land. Wikipedia defines golzeme as ‘a savoury traditional Turkish hand made and hand rolled pastry. Fresh pastry is rolled out, filled and sealed, then cooked over a griddle. Traditionally, this is done on a saç’. What that doesn’t get across is how moorish the whole thing is (and yes, that was a joke – apologies), nor how thin, light and generally delicious it is too. Add in a glass or two of the wonderfully sweet apple tea, add in a bit of traditional Turkish folk music, top it off with some freshly made baklava at the end, and you have a meal fit for a sultan (or at least the residents of his harem).

Afternoon – Hamam. Apparently recovering from a slipped disc means that lying on a slab of marble while a fat Turkish bloke beats you up legitimately, folds you in half, half-drowns you and then pointedly asks for a tip afterwards isn’t good for you, so Kate went off to do no doubt decorous things while I went for a Turkish Bath.

It wasn’t the best I’ve ever had and it was a bit of a tourist trap too, but even a so-so hamam is a rather fine experience. You change in your own private cubicle, don a towel around yourself, and head to the hot room where you lie on a large, heated marble slab with a load of other people, think of a large steam room but without too there were about a dozen men flopped out on the marble looking up at the dome above them while hot water cascaded out of the taps and into basins all round the outside of the room. You just lie there for a bit, occasionally dousing yourself with warm water, until a masseur comes over, taps you on the foot, then starts soaping you up and squeezing the blood to the end of your limbs/gouging your muscles depending on what mood he’s in. Then he folds you in half like a moustachioed, half-naked and crazed chiropractic while the others around you lounging on the marble chortle at your discomfort, jumps on top of you, cracks your spine, slaps you a bit, holds your head down as he slooshes you with bucket after bucket of warm water, hands you some hot towels, whacks you on the arse and you’re out of there.

Amazingly enough, after all that you feel great...

Evening – Whirling Dervishes. As far as slightly unusual experiences go, attending a concert in the old entrance hall of a train station where the Orient Express used to arrive after its 1700 mile long odyssey across Europe is a bit on the unique side. Add in the fact that it’s a performance of the Whirling Dervishes of the Sufi Mevlevi order, and you’re beyond unique and into something memorable.

The Dervishes are everywhere in Istanbul, their whirling form – long white robe, high brown felt hat, arms outstretched with the right hand pointing up towards heaven and the left down towards humanity – is on fridge magnets, book covers, tea towels and – inevitably – woven into the odd carpet or two as well. All of which is a bit ironic given that Ataturk banned them and the Sufi orders outright when he came to power in the 1920s, with the dervishes primarily tolerated as a form of tourist-friendly folk entertainment for most of the years since.

Sufism is the mystical branch of Islam, and the whirling ceremony – where the dervishes seek to attain a trancelike, meditative state that brings them closer to the divine – is suitably mystical too. After a 20 minute or so musical introduction (which largely serves as a lesson in teaching the several hundred perched on plastic chairs present to turn the flash off on their cameras) five dervishes come out and with infinite slowness shuffle and nod and bow into the start of their dance.

It takes four acts, which represent the dervish growing through love, deserting the ego, finding the truth and finally arriving at the divine and the perfect. In each they start whirling in circles, arms stretching out as the speed increases; fast circles around their own axis, much slower ones around each other, the weighted hem of their robes forming standing waves that flow around them as they spin and spin on their journey to God. There’s a grace to the dance that, together with the music, transcends the environment you’re in and, as some of them whirl faster and faster and the music gets more and more insistent, you find yourself treading some of the same path as their flashing, pirouetting feet whatever your own personal beliefs. At the end the music stops apart from the mournful notes coming from a single stringed instrument, and all there is in the entire world is the sound of that and the slap of the dervishes’ feet on the tiles as they slowly spin down from their excited state and become all too human once more, as do the rest of us.

And that’s it, that’s your day in Istanbul – starting with a bit of light shopping and finishing in the company of an 800 year old mystical sect, with no doubt a bit of a Feeding of the Stray Cats and drinking of Turkish beer (not bad) or wine (not good) to top it all off at the end. Now all I’ve got to do after the end of six years of OU study is try and find a hobby. Hmmm...Then and again they do do these short three month courses on things like Introducing Astronomy or Play Writing or the Geological History of the British Isles which could be fun. I mean, I can give up the OU any time, it’s not like crack. I’ve just got a mild cold at the moment, that’s all...

Stout & Large Do...Istanbul - Day Two

2008-10-19T13:26:00.004+01:00

By now, rested and relaxed [2] we were feeling a bit cultural and in the mood to stop pointing and laughing at the drain mirkin and head off exploring. The only problem was that so was everyone else...

Basically, what happens in Istanbul is that first thing in the morning or overnight is when the Mediterranean cruise ships arrive. These are true leviathans of the sea, and disgorge thousands of blinking tourists in one almighty disembarkation into the Istanbul tourist system where they’re route marched round everything worth seeing by a small army of harassed looking tour guides. This pretty much means that on any given morning there is a tour party of several hundred glum Germans, surly Swedes, belligerent Brits or simply Alzheimer’d Americans in front of you and the place you want to visit, with another wave coming up rapidly behind.

The solution? Letting them have the run of the place in the morning and lounging around in bed until they’d all been bussed back to their floating monstrosities seemed to work well for us. Not too much of a hardship when you’ve got a reclining view across the rooftops of the end of Europe, the glittering sea, and then Asia rearing up in front of you. Plus, when you see the thirtieth party of miserable looking people trailing after a sign saying ‘Carnival Cruises – the *fun* ships’ you tend to go into irony overload, not to mention swearing pacts that you’d smother each other if the other one ever piped up with ‘You know what? A cruise seems like a jolly fine idea’...

Anyway, to the stuff. The Aga Sofia is one of the most impressive religious buildings in the world. Built by the Emperor Justinian as a Christian church and then later converted to a mosque, even the guidebooks mention that its outside can seem squat and unattractive (they’re not wrong either – whereas the 11th century on cathedrals of Europe seem to be reaching up to the heavens, the Aga Sofia sits there toad-like, like an extra building left over from the end of Akira. You almost expect it to grow tentacles and start rampaging round the city any moment). The interior though is spectacular, a huge domed vaulting space which, TARDIS-like, seems to reach to the sky in ways that the exterior doesn’t. There’s lots of restoration work going on at the moment which means that its dominated by one of the most impressive scaffolding constructions I’ve ever seen, but it’s still an awesome place.

The Blue Mosque opposite it is the reverse – an amazing exterior with a slightly unimpressive interior. Or so the guidebooks allege, we never actually got round to seeing it. We were baulked several times by vast queues of ratty cruise ship passengers and, the few other times we got back in the vicinity, it was closed for prayers and we both make very unconvincing muslims. Still, it looked good from the outside. And on one of the evenings we were between the two of them when the Call to Prayer rang out and it sounded like the buildings were singing to each other as the sun set and dusk crept over the city.

Much less prepossessing but really rather jaw-dropping was the Basilica Cistern. Yes, yes, I know it doesn’t sound like much- Romans dig underground reservoir, a couple of millennia later daft tourists fork out to walk round it – but it’s incredibly atmospheric. You pass over wooden walkways suspended and threaded between spotlit soaring columns over a couple of feet of crystal clear water looking down at the fish cavorting beneath you (I never knew fish could cavort - these Istanbul ones certainly can) while a sort of sepulchral Enya-like soundscape trickles out of the speakers. Find yourself a spot away from the cruiseship cruisers, lean back against the cold, hard stone, and you’re suddenly someplace else entirely.

It’s also one of the few spots in Istanbul that is free of cats, which is a shame as they’re missing out on lots of fishy treats. The little buggers are absolutely everywhere, and it’s hard to eat a meal of any sort without a couple of the blighters suddenly appearing underneath your table and doing that insufferable cute cat thing that momentarily blinds you to the fact that they’re little furry bundles of death from above to the world’s small mammal and bird populations. In fact, pretty much the only place we didn’t eat without unwarranted feline attention was the restaurant that night, and that was only because it was in the glass topped roof of a rather posh hotel. In one direction we could see the Blue Mosque towering over the Sultanahmet part of the city, in the other the giant cruise ships lit up like exceedingly bling Xmas trees steaming off back towards the Med. If we’d stayed there long enough no doubt we’d have seen a couple more coming back the other way. Man, them seas is crowded...

[2] Well, I was, having slept through the Call to Prayer at four am played at a volume that would have had Lemmy walking off stage in a huff. Kate was a bit less lucky...

Stout & Large Do...Istanbul - Day One

2008-10-19T13:07:00.003+01:00

On October 3 I handed in my last ever Open University essay after six years slog – a 4000 word epic on the causes of spatial segregation in the modern urban environment and what can be done about it. I finished it close enough to the deadline that we had to jump in the car and drive to Milton Keynes to physically hand it over. The receptionist smiled when I asked her how many she’d had in so far that day, and pointed to a tottering pile of brown envelopes. “See all them?” she said. “That’s the third pile so far today...”

The question then was, where to go to celebrate? An original plan of flying to Seattle and heading up to mooch around Vancouver and Vancouver Island for a bit had had to be shelved due to Kate having a slipped disc in her back back in August (which she memorably characterises as being now composed of a series of cream filled meringue nests – great for dessert, not quite so brilliant for structural integrity and horse-riding). So short haul, long weekend...in the end Istanbul was the answer. Enough Islamic heritage to be exotic, sill in Europe (just) so it wasn’t a madly long flight, and it had also cropped up on pretty much every OU course I’d done: from world religion to cities and technology, from globalisation and notions of Islamic identity to modern problems of – ulp – spatial segregation and concepts of order and disorder...

So, what was it that stuck in our minds most about our first night in Istanbul. Was it the fabulous architecture and the Aga Sofia and Blue Mosque? Was it gazing out of our hotel window and seeing the lights of the ships move lazily along the Bosphorous? Was it the Call to Prayer ululating gently on the breeze [1]? Nope, it was the drain mirkin. We got back to our hotel after a beer or several and noticed that covering a small drain in the bathroom was a nylon square of fake grass with a few equally plastic daisies sticking out of it. It could only really ever be christened a a drain mirkin and here’s a photo to prove it.

[1] This is a lie. It’s less of a gentle ululate and more of a full throated roar – the sort that would drown out your average Motorhead concert. Our hotel was only 100 metres or so away from the Blue Mosque and the Imams there obviously liked their volume.

If the bomb drops...

2008-10-03T09:21:00.002+01:00

BBC TRANSCRIPT TO BE USED IN WAKE OF NUCLEAR ATTACK - circa 73 - 75

This is the Wartime Broadcasting Service. This country has been attacked with
nuclear weapons. Communications have been severely disrupted, and the number of
casualties and the extent of the damage are not yet known. We shall bring you
further information as soon as possible. Meanwhile, stay tuned to this
wavelength, stay calm and stay in your own homes.
Remember there is nothing to be gained by trying to get away. By leaving your
homes you could be exposing yourselves to greater danger.
If you leave, you may find yourself without food, without water, without accommodation and
without protection. Radioactive fall-out, which followed a nuclear explosion, is many
times more dangerous if you are directly exposed to it in the open. Roofs and
walls offer substantial protection. The safest place is indoors.
Make sure gas and other fuel supplies are turned off and that all fires are
extinguished. If mains water is available, this can be used for fire-fighting.
You should also refill all your containers for drinking water after the fires
have been put out, because the mains water supply may not be available for very
long.
Water must not be used for flushing lavatories: until you are told that
lavatories may be used again, other toilet arrangements must be made. Use your
water only for essential drinking and cooking purposes. Water means life. Don't
waste it.
Make your food stocks last: ration your supply, because it may have to last for
14 days or more. If you have fresh food in the house, use this first to avoid
wasting it: food in tins will keep.
If you live in an area where a fall-out warning has been given, stay in your
fall-out room until you are told it is safe to come out. When the immediate
danger has passed the sirens will sound a steady note. The "all clear" message
will also be given on this wavelength. If you leave the fall-out room to go to
the lavatory or replenish food or water supplies, do not remain outside the room
for a minute longer than is necessary.
Do not, in any circumstances, go outside the house. Radioactive fall-out can kill. You cannot
see it or fell it, but it is there. If you go outside, you will bring danger to your family and you
may die. Stay in your fall-out room until you are told it is safe to come out or you
hear the "all clear" on the sirens.
Here are the main points again:
Stay in your own homes, and if you live in an area where a fall-out warning has
been given stay in your fall-out room, until you are told it is safe to come
out. The message that the immediate danger has passed will be given by the
sirens and repeated on this wavelength. Make sure that the gas and all fuel
supplies are turned off and that all fires are extinguished.
Water must be rationed, and used only for essential drinking and cooking
purposes. It must not be used for flushing lavatories. Ration your food supply:
it may have to last for 14 days or more.
We shall repeat this broadcast in two hours' time. Stay tuned to this
wavelength, but switch your radios off now to save your batteries until we come
on the air again. That is the end of this broadcast.

Incoming

2008-09-06T10:34:00.001+01:00

One of the fun things about the weather in the autumn in the UK is that most of those big storms that come barrelling in off the Atlantic are ex-hurricanes. Course, the forecasters can never say as such ('Expect heavy rain tonight as the remnants of that hurricane that killed all those people in the Caribbean and caused the US to evacuate a few major cities and even remember to take the poor people along with them this time' is not a forecast calculated to keep blood pressures low amongst viewers).

But 'tis so. Next Wednesday there's a good chance it will precipitate mightily in Belfast and it's all down to ex Hurricane Hanna...

Tropical Storm HANNA

Of Intelligent Design and SF

2008-08-28T20:26:00.000+01:00

From the excellent io9 In Recent Scifi, Intelligent Design Is Truth.

Quick excerpt:

Consider Jay Lake's novels Mainspring and Escapement, which are about a kind of alternate Earth where it's obvious somebody (whom they call "God") has created their universe. After all, the sky is filled with gears and their world is run literally by a massive clockwork mechanism. When I talked to Lake about his novels recently, he said that they were explicitly a response to Intelligent Design. He thinks of them as a critique of the belief that our world was built rather than evolved. "By making ID into something that was clearly fiction, I wanted to show that the idea itself was fictional," Lake said.

The monetary density of things

2008-08-28T14:03:00.001+01:00

From the rather wonderful Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories...The monetary density of things

Now, we have a peacock that leaves feathers in our back garden, so I naturally assumed we were richer than Creosote for a brief moment (see graph 3).

However, while they might pound for pound (as it were) be worth more than dollar bills, I've just weighed one and it was a mere 3 grams. So at roughly 453g to the single imperial pound and feathers at $410/lb, I make that one worth about £1.50.

Hey, not bad...Just another 150 to go and we've got a lb and £225 or thereabouts. Anyone got any spare peacocks?

Canada seeks historic shipwrecks

2008-08-16T11:04:00.000+01:00

Having read Dan Simmons' excellent 'Terror', I can tell you they're not going to find much...

BBC NEWS | World | Americas | Canada seeks historic shipwrecks

A shuttle launch from a passing plane

2008-08-14T16:54:00.000+01:00

Two things:

a) That would be very cool indeed to see.

b) I devoutly hope that, if confronted with an opportunity to commentate on something truly amazing for the denizens of the interweb, I manage to come out with something substantially better than just repeating 'Holy Smokes' time and time again (though I suspect that 'fuuuucking heeeeell' or some derivative might be at the forefront of things).

Space Shuttle Launch: Guy Films Space Shuttle Launch from Passing Airliner

Rush fail Rock Band

2008-08-09T10:12:00.001+01:00

Take one Rock Band system, set to Tom Sawyer, add Rush, watch them score a meagre 31% on their own track. Good to know that Neil Peart sounds just like the rest of us when he's playing one o' them crappy kits.

Rush Plays Rock Band Backstage at Colbert

Stout & Large do Rome - Four

2008-08-01T17:04:00.002+01:00

While the Pantheon was spared the indignities of lapsing into irrelevance, the next day’s first location, the Forum, had no such luck. Once the centre of power of the largest empire the world would see for nigh on two millennia, by the Middle Ages it was known simply as Campo Vaccino – Cow Field. The cows have gone now, but it is still difficult to map the bones of the temples and arches that clutter the brown grass in the centre of the city with the gleaming marble edifices that would have once dominated the area. Even more so given that what does dominate the area now is the massive lump of white marble called Il Vittoriano; a nineteenth century monument to the glories of Italian nationalism that the Third Reich would have turned its nose up at as being a bit too over the top.

We mooch about the ruins and the Palotino – the Palatine Hill on which the Emperor’s Palace once stood – trying to imagine what it was like and, in all honesty, fail as our northern European brains start short-circuiting in the heat. It afflicts the locals too. One of the many men dressed as centurions who loiter in the vicinity tries to attract out attention by shouting out after us whether we’re brother and sister. We think about stopping and snogging right there and then and giving him a Luke n’ Leia moment, but it’s too hot. Much better was the restaurant the night before when we watched the whole ‘his surname is Stout and mine is Large’ schtik being translated into gestures by the owner of the place much to the assembled guffaws of the Italians there.

So, we amble along to the Colosseum as our giant, blonde ancestors probably did in slightly less salubrious circumstances (ie chains) and have a right old goggle.

It is seriously impressive – a decaying but still grand amphitheatre that would seat 50,000 baying people – and one of those sort of places that you are glad is in Rome and not London where it’d probably be renamed the Carling Colosseum or something. You can’t wander out into the middle – the flooring is gone, and instead you have the ruined walls of all the corridors, chambers, cells and pens that would have stored men, armour and beasts before their allotted date with fate – which at least leaves the locals spared the thousands of ‘I’m Spartacus. No, I’m Spartacus’ or even ‘Wotcher Julius, old boy’ lines. So, instead you climb the sides and marvel at the tales of naval battles, beast hunts and bloodshed that are the dark heart underpinning the whole spectacle of Roman civilisation and achievement.

And that is where it ends. Dinner and lunch follow: one quite posh and featuring one of the best steaks I have ever had and only marred by a gratuitous outbreak of Celine Dion that had to be firmly quashed; one of the paper tablecloths and chipped glasses variety, but which did things with truffles and pasta that would qualify as indecent in most countries. And that was the heart of Rome for me: not the Vatican, not the Forum, not the Colosseum, but sitting across a table from the person you love, eating, drinking and laughing, and just marinading lightly in three millennia of history as the modern city buzzes and bustles around you.

And that is that: Touristi ite Domum. Write it out one hundred times.

And, oh yes, I almost left my bag in the taxi on the way back to the airport too...

Stout & Large do Rome - Three

2008-08-01T17:00:00.002+01:00

The evening’s a quiet one – camped out at the edge of the Piazza Navona with a bottle of something chilled and watching the tourists, fire-jugglers, hawkers, artists and the simply rather deranged mingle and jostle around.

The next day dawns, of course, with the knowledge that it’s Geddy Lee’s birthday. So it’s a quick toast of orange juice to the Rush bassist and colossus of music and out the door to the...

Oh wait, of course, it’s also Kate’s birthday too...

Out the door slightly later then, we wend our way through the sweltering streets by way of the Trevi Fountain to the Keats/Shelley House. This is in many ways the reason we are here, Kate having had a thing about the poet since she was but a young lass playing in the meadowy pastures outside Belfast (note to self: check with K that that bit’s correct). It’s a sad place in many ways. Keats was only 26 when he died of TB in this house by the Spanish Steps, unrecognised as even a good poet by all but a few in his day, never mind one of the greatest poets to have ever written in the English language. That all came later. But it’s quiet and it’s cool, is a good insight into the lives and works of the Romantics, and in its own small way provides a sense of perspective on things that no amount of tourist-thronged marble can quite manage.

Lunch is at the top of the Spanish Steps and features a Spaghetti Carbonara that redefines the meaning of the words and will have me hunched obsessively over bowls of egg yolks and parmesan cheese for months to come while I try and get anywhere near it. As for the fresh pasta, don’t even start...

Rome is seriously hot. Back in the Ancient days, the great and the good in their purple togas would perch themselves in their villas on the hills overlooking the city to try and get a waft of breeze in the hot, dry summer months. It’s relentlessly in the mid-30s and, while the anvil heads of cumulonimbus mass on the horizon and promise a delicious thundery breakdown to come, it never quite materialises. So a long lunch leads to a lessening of the mad tourist pointing and seeing plans, and more of a desire for seeing the Pantheon on the way back to the hotel followed by a serious amount of air con.

The Pantheon is stunning. A temple originally built by Hadrian to the Roman Gods featuring what its still the largest masonry vault ever constructed, it got consecrated as a Christian church at the start of the 7th century and thus was spared the city-wide meh that saw most Roman buildings crumbling into ruin and/or being quarried for building material. Indeed, by medieval times the city had shrunk from an Imperial capital of over a million souls to just a large town nestled by the banks of the Tiber with barely 40,000 people in it. Then the Pope moved back in just down the road...

Beers by the square, pizzas so thin you could cut your finger on the edge of one if you weren’t careful, and, by this point, the restaurant next to the hotel beams happily at us as we saunter back around midnight (it’s called Rust, and no it never sleeps ;-) ), knowing that they can probably flog us a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc as a nightcap if previous behaviour is anything to go by. They’re jolly well right too.

Stout & Large do Rome - Two

2008-08-01T16:09:00.002+01:00

The next morning, all is very much not well with the world. Fragmented memory throws up the following facts:

a) Another bottle of wine then followed

b) It then apparently made perfect sense to go find an Irish bar and drink Guinness in copious amounts

c) We were watching showjumping loudly in said bar with the sort of fervour people normally reserve for rugby matches. Go on my son, etcetera

d) Something or other involving a spilled pint involves us linking up with two excellent Irish lads, one of whom is a bit of a Rush fan and a drummer to boot, which obviously means we are now blood brothers and inseparable

e) I then got refused entry to a club for being drunk which, considering I was in the company of three ratarsed Irish people, means I was probably approaching Olympic levels of inebriation

f) That will explain the headache, and

g) Wracked with feelings of hungover remorsefulness, it therefore makes perfect sense to go to the Vatican

The Wailing Wall might cram in more guilt per metre, but the Catholics really know how to make you feel insignificant: not so much compared to the glory of God, but more to the glory of the Catholic Church itself. The giant Piazza San Pietro with its 240 columns and 140 saints is a stunning public space hundreds of metres across, one side of which is reserved for a mini theme park stylee recreation of purgatory. Lines of tourists stand in the baking heat (mid 30s since you ask) while they queue to go through the metal detectors and bag scanners and decorum police at the entrance. The scanners seem to close on a fairly random basis, meaning you get shuffled from one to another in a sweaty mass of increasingly disgruntled peoples from all countries in the world. ‘Think this is bad?’ goes the subtext, ‘you really, really don’t want to go to the place with the pointy sticks and the brimstone down below. Have you been to confession recently?’.

As a lapsed Catholic of long-standing, Kate daren’t in case the priest she talks to spontaneously combusts and, as bit of a wishy-washy semi-Buddhist, I’m disqualified on theological grounds and smelling of the wrong sort of incense, so we make do with wandering round St Peter’s Basilica. It’s giant and it’s impressive, full of some of the most monumental works of religious art I’ve ever seen. The strange thing is it never feels holy. Some of the South American cathedrals – where I wandered round without forgetting my bag anywhere I would just like to point out – for all their sumptuous ornateness felt like churches – felt like places where people worshipped. This just felt all about power and prestige rather than piety.

More tortured religious similes are available next door at the Vatican Museum where, to get to the motherlode of the Sistine Chapel, you have to walk past pretty much every other exhibit there. See? This ascending to join the choir immortal ain’t easy, you know. But the journey is worthwhile as it takes you past some fascinating Roman statuary, a couple of pieces of really nice modern art and, of course, more bling than you can shake a good-sized stick at. The Chapel itself is crowded and fairly stupendous, the biggest hazard being walking into other people with their heads craned back and gawping at the ceiling and the frescoes that cover every square centimetre of the wall. Strangest thing is the waves of shushing that break out and flow across the space. Big signs say Silencio! This is a holy spot, but every five minutes the background murmur rises to a conversation level and one of the officials makes a loud shushing sound that is taken on by everybody around them and silence reigns for about as long as it says someone to say ‘Cor, will you look at that’. Which, as you’re standing within one of the greatest works of art in the Western world, isn’t long at all...

Stout & Large do Rome - One

2008-08-01T15:58:00.002+01:00

You would think that after navigating the hostile environs of South America for a month and a half last year, that Stanstead Airport would be a breeze. Mountains, jungles, all sorts of shady characters, urban areas dodgier than a Tour de France rider’s EPO sample...but no, standing in the queue for the CattleAir plane the following thoughts occurred in this order:

Tickets? Check. In messenger bag.

Passport? Check. In messenger bag.

Messenger bag? Hmmm...that’ll be the one still on the transfer bus from the long-term parking area.

Shit.

A quick hotfoot out of the terminal which probably only resulted in minor contusions for the families I barged past and I managed to throw myself bodily in front of the bus before he drove away, said bag sitting smugly in the front window. I point and pant, driver laughs and opens the door. “There’s always one,” he laughs.

“Yeah,” I think, “but it’s usually some numpty on the way to Lanzarote not a hard-bitten, world-weary globetrotter like me.”

I resist the urge to take my passport out and show him all the stamps that prove that I have been to places unaided and without my mother, and slink back to the terminal.

“Ahem,” I say to Kate, “I don’t think we’ll mention this one in dispatches.”

“Ho ho, if you don’t then I will,” she replies considerately.

Curses.

The flight’s one of those modern transport experiences which is at least brief (when Keats died in Rome, it took the news of his death over three weeks to make it back to England – and even RyanAir manages to be quicker than that). The highlight is undoubtedly flying over Rome itself on the edges of a thunderstorm: looking down and seeing the Colosseum from the viewpoint of the Gods and the Vatican from the viewpoint of, well, God I suppose. Maybe the bolts of lightning flying round the heavens indicates that He thinks it’s all got a little bling for His tastes. Anyway, we arrive in possibly the only country in the world where the phrase ‘three nuns get into a Fiat and drive off at a rate of knots’ describes what actually happens rather than being the start of a long and involved joke with the punchline ‘taking the dogma for a walk’ and that is that.

The hotel’s fantastic (www.hotelteatropace.com) situated right in the heart of the Centro Storico and surrounded by enough bars and restaurants of both the tourist and local variety to keep everyone happy. Its website does a nice line in irony too. Why don’t we have an elevator? See that lovely stone staircase you’ve just said how much you like? Well, we’d have to rip it out to put one in. The Parthenon? Sorry, can’t help you. That’s in Athens...

So, we shower, change, and head out to dine al fresco in a restaurant down a narrow Roman alleyway, eating pizza on a base so thin you could use it to replace a cracked window pane if you had to. A bottle of wine follows another bottle of wine in the sultry summer evening air and all is very much well with the world.

Warner Bros. nabs 'Hyperion Cantos' adaptation

2008-04-03T10:08:00.001+01:00

Not sure I like the sound of this.

" King acquired the rights to the series several years ago, but its structure, inspired by Boccaccio's "Decameron" and Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," and its multiple timelines made the task of adapting it into a feature unwieldy and challenging."

So cut this, cut that, big up the fight sequences, make the cruciform into a more church friendly shape ('Gee, how about a crescent?'), butcher, maim and generally fuck about with one of the best sci-fi novels of the late 20th century.

Or, alternatively, it could be brilliant. Hmmmm....Bets?

Warner Bros. nabs 'Hyperion Cantos' adaptation

Private Eye kills writer

2008-02-29T12:46:00.002Z

Death by drowning in the bath, I'm afraid. Well, very, very nearly...

Arming the world

2008-02-02T10:06:00.000Z

Map of global arms trade movements, 1950 to present.

It's a big, old, slow, browser-crashing applet though so you might be better off just looking at the picture above...

ARMSFLOW

What do you mean you don't know who Led Zeppelin is?

2008-02-02T10:01:00.000Z

A US College publishes a very useful orientation primer for teachers explaining how different the world and its cultural reference points are for students starting college every year. It's a bit US-centric in places, but interesting to measure how the references for those born in 1989 diverge from us what are a bit older. This link takes you to the list for the Class of 2011.

For them, a Russia with multiple political parties and a China with multiple business enterprises seems quite normal...They’ve grown up having been taught by an equal number of women and men in the classroom, and with women having been hired as police chiefs of major cities...Food has always been a health concern. Consumer awareness about ingredients and fats has always been energized. They’ve never “rolled down” a car window, and to them Jack Nicholson is mainly known as the guy who played The Joker and Nelson Mandela has always been free. As for the Berlin Wall, what’s that?

Beloit College Public Affairs

[via BoingBoing]

3D or not 3D

2008-01-29T09:56:00.000Z

Nice consumer 3D cinema story from the big green Q - kudos to them for getting it out and about - only marred by the horrible sight of a blurred 3D Steve Shaw ;-)

BBC NEWS | Technology | Why 3D is about to break through

A Torchwood fan writes...

2008-01-24T19:35:00.000Z

Okay, not a fan in any proper sense of the word. As I09 has pointed out though, this damning indictment of Russell The T's offspring is actually describing a show I'd want to see. And hell, I'd forgotten all about Lexx.

"It's also necessary because of Torchwood's single redeeming feature, which is that it's efficient television for the sexually frustrated sci fi addict. It's basically the investigating team from Angel, in the universe of Doctor Who, operating off of stolen alien technology like some renegade Welsh Stargate team, solving cases lifted from shows like The X-Files if not from Doctor Who itself, with the juvenile hyperssexuality of Lexx (though without the benefit of cruising around in a planet-destroying phallus, I'm sorry to say), all mixed together with the gender-bending intricacies of The L Word (admittedly, not sci fi, but at least there are lots of exposed breasts, which must count for something)."

More of the rant at Jesus Drives an SUV: Why Russell T. Davies Sucks

Why Lolcats Control Your Mind

2008-01-22T20:03:00.000Z

Ah ha, so that's why I just spent 10 minutes looking at the Dunecat picture above while nigh on asphyxiating...

[via i09]

Mad Science: Evolution Explains Why Lolcats Control Your Mind

Her Light Materials, Volume I

2008-01-20T11:40:00.000Z

Unhinged skit on Philip Pullman involving the universe being coded in Pascal.

" The next time the Supreme Being chooses to take a compile, the whole of the universe will disappear into a syntax error."

Very geeky and very funny. Well, the non-coding bits I could understand were anyway....

Her Light Materials, Volume I | Reg Developer

Nature As Amusement Park

2008-01-18T08:32:00.000Z

Finnish artist Ilkka Halso believes that, once we're done thoroughly trashing the planet we'll only stumble across nature in amusement parks. And once that's where we've corralled it, hell we might as well stick a rollercoaster through the middle.

Dystopian and sad idea, glorious image...

[via io9]
Coming Soon: Nature As Amusement Park

Hacking trams

2008-01-12T09:50:00.000Z

From El Reg:

A Polish teenager allegedly turned the tram system in the city of Lodz into his own personal train set, triggering chaos and derailing four vehicles in the process. Twelve people were injured in one of the incidents.

The 14-year-old modified a TV remote control so that it could be used to change track points, The Telegraph reports.

"He studied the trams and the tracks for a long time and then built a device that looked like a TV remote control and used it to manoeuvre the trams and the tracks," said Miroslaw Micor, a spokesman for Lodz police.

Roll on IBC...

Polish teen derails tram after hacking train network | The Register

BSG's Last Supper

2008-01-05T11:00:00.000Z

Well, it's one way of guerilla marketing your show in the teeth of the ongoing writer's strike: a recreation of the Last Supper which hints at some of the tensions and plotlines that will play out in the final season of BSG.

And is that two Sixes? By golly, I think it is...

Battlestar Galactica: Secrets Of Battlestar Season Four Betrayed In New Photo

Privacy and where not to find it

2007-12-31T09:25:00.000Z

Now this is depressing: the 2007 Privacy International survey on Leading surveillance societies in the EU and the World 2007

Okay, so the usual qualifiers have to be noted - who is undertaking the survey chief amongst them - and yes, there are worse human rights abuses than an invasion of citizen's privacy. But all the same, when much of the world is classed as being 'Endemic surveillance societies', it's not good.

Here's what it says about the UK

World leading surveillance schemes
Lack of accountability and data breach disclosure law
Commissioner has few powers
Interception of communications is authorised by politician, evidence not used in court, and oversight is by commissioner who reports only once a year upon reviewing a subset of applications
Hundreds of thousands of requests from government agencies to telecommunications providers for traffic data
Data retention scheme took a significant step forward with the quiet changes based on EU law
Plans are emerging regarding surveillance of communications networks for the protection of copyrighted content
Despite data breaches, 'joined-up government' initiatives continue
Identity scheme still planned to be the most invasive in the world, highly centralised and biometrics-driven; plan to issue all foreigners with cards in 2008 are continuing
E-borders plans include increased data collection on travellers

Heinlein: The Descent of a Sci-Fi Guru

2007-12-28T16:09:00.000Z

Interesting little piece that reflects political currents in post-war SF. Oddly enough, it seems that Heinlein's mainstream, adult SF is considered largely discredited, while his juvenile books are standing the test of time a lot more successfully.

Heinlein: The Descent of a Sci-Fi Guru : Top Stories : Kitsap Sun

It seems I have a price

2007-12-20T08:44:00.000Z

Not a price for being bribed by PR companies to feature their guff in features and articles or anything like that (that's always been fixed at a good lunch and is a standard rate throughout the industry), but a price I'm not prepared to pay for going to a gig. And that price is:

Neil Young - Hammersmith Apollo - £75

Move over Xmas - it's Festivus time

2007-12-18T10:06:00.000Z

Enough of all this Christian-derived, pagan-subverted consumer armageddon. Let's have a winter festival introduced by a proper route to civilisation: ie via an American sitcom. Yes, it can only be the Seinfeld-inspired Festivus.

The holiday is celebrated each year on, but many people celebrate it at other times, often to avoid the Christmas rush. The holiday includes novel practices such as the "Airing of Grievances", in which each person tells everyone else all the ways they have disappointed him/her over the past year. Also, after the Festivus meal, the "Feats of Strength" are performed, involving wrestling the head of the household to the floor, the holiday only ending if the head of the household is actually pinned.

More here. It just makes so much sense...

Festivus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Man caught anthrax from drum kit

2007-12-13T16:17:00.000Z

A most unwelcome development. Not only does drumming harm your mental development (and I should know), but it can positively kill you too.

BBC NEWS | Scotland | South of Scotland | Man caught anthrax from drum kit

Damn, and indeed, blast

2007-12-12T19:07:00.000Z

[via www.paulkidby.com]

Writes Terry Pratchett:

AN EMBUGGERANCE

Folks,

I would have liked to keep this one quiet for a little while, but because of upcoming conventions and of course the need to keep my publishers informed, it seems to me unfair to withhold the news. I have been diagnosed with a very rare form of early
onset Alzheimer's, which lay behind this year's phantom "stroke".

We are taking it fairly philosophically down here and possibly with a mild optimism. For now work is continuing on the completion of Nation and the basic notes are already being laid down for Unseen Academicals. All other things being equal, I
expect to meet most current and, as far as possible, future commitments but will discuss things with the various organisers. Frankly, I would prefer it if people kept things cheerful, because I think there's time for at least a few more books yet :o)

PS I would just like to draw attention to everyone reading the above that this should be interpreted as 'I am not dead'. I will, of course, be dead at some future point, as will everybody else. For me, this maybe further off than you think - it's too soon to tell.
I know it's a very human thing to say "Is there anything I can do", but in this case I would only entertain offers from very high-end experts in brain chemistry.

Is that all there is? | Review | Guardian Unlimited Books

2007-12-08T10:13:00.000Z

Is that all there is? | Review | Guardian Unlimited Books

Last year, Dawkins and The God Delusion. This year God gets to fight back, albeit in a half-hearted way that suggests there is a God-shaped hole gaping in the breast of every atheist. Looks like it could be annoyingly parochial in that it sticks to Western society and equates religious belief solely with Christianity, but an interesting thesis nevertheless. Here's a snippet from the review:

Let's stay with the thinkable. What's especially compelling about Taylor's, admittedly sometimes long-winded, book is his charge that cracks in Christianity provided places where secularism's weeds flourished. In this he's not just talking about the reformation, but, for example, the movement called deism, prominent in 17th- and 18th-century Britain, France and America, which rejected the theistic position (common in Judaism, Islam and much Christianity) that relied on revelation in sacred scriptures or the testimony of others. Instead, deism drew the existence and nature of God from reason and personal experience. Deism, of course, for some became a way-station from theism to atheism, but not for all.

From deism, Taylor shifts focus to what he calls the west's current age of authenticity. By this he means an individualistic era in which people are encouraged to find their own way or do their own thing. The idea that one had to use one's own reason and experience to find God instilled a sense of intellectual autonomy that led some to abandon God altogether. "As a result," writes Taylor, "the nova effect has been intensified. We are now living in a spiritual super-nova, a kind of galloping pluralism on the spiritual plane."

QotSA - Reading Rivermead

2007-12-04T23:54:00.000Z

Bit of a damp squib of a gig to be honest, mostly enlivened by running into my (eventually to be ex) brother-in-law and having a good catch up after far too long. Having wanted to see Eighties Matchbox B-line Disaster for a couple of years now, they somehow contrived to be less than the sum of their parts. Their sound needs the space studio production gives them, otherwise it’s just stirring noise soup. Entertaining sepulchral howls notwithstanding, live it’s a bit all over the place.

Two tracks into the QotSA set and when Josh Homme starts climbing the rig and rubbing his guitar against the scaffold on Feel Good Hit of the Summer, you suspect it’s going to be mighty. Then they start playing lots of stuff from the last release, Era Vulgaris, which is a disappointingly weak album in the same way that England’s Euro 2008 qualification run was a tad mistimed, and all the momentum goes. Undeniably slick, it’s QotSA by numbers and almost – heresy! - verging on the bland till the end and some classic stoner rock wig-outs and incendiary encores.

Nowhere near as good as the last time (Laura's birthday, Brixton 2005). Still, reports from the CSS tour are good so far, so high hopes for that gig this time next week.

Here comes the rain

2007-11-22T19:36:00.000Z

It had to happen in the end. After over a month of little or no rain, the heavens above Lake Titicaca opened and decided to dump it all on our heads in one evening. First lighting decided to strike a bit too closely for comfort while we were up an island mountain on a - failed - geocache expedition, then the floodgates opened, the winds picked up and the deluge started.

We were staying with local families at the time, which meant a tin roofed room in their house typically, and at 2 in the morning it was tempestuous to say the least. In pitch blackness with the rain hammering down like a thousand mad drummers above our heads, it felt like we were suspended in an iron box in the sky and the gods were trying to hurl us down to the ground. Maybe, I thought in a sleep-addled fug, I really should not have walked round that pagan temple widdershins three times and made a whole-hearted wish without appeasing someone or other first. This continent is fairly crowded with gods...

We woke to mild drizzle (which still sounds like the end of the world under a tin roof) and a Lake that was the subdued grey of the Atlantic. After so much of Peru had delivered big time on the scenic impressiveness front, Titicaca let the rest of the country down badly by being like Cleethorpes on a wet November weekend. Still, the homestay had been fun if a bit cheesy (you haven´t lived till you´ve been dressed in a poncho and whirled breathlessly round a dancefloor by a tiny, cackling Peruvian woman) and it was good to pump some tourist dollars into the bottom of the local economy rather than simply turning it over to the purveyors of Guinness and other beers; the happy look on the face of the three kids Rob and I were staying with when I gave them a Kit Kat after a simple dinner will linger long in my mind. We, as in the Exodus group, stayed with the poorest community on the island and even with our input and dollars they often only manage to make the three hour boat trip to the mainland twice a year. It´s one of those times when yes, tourism is probably destroying local cultures and traditions, but when those local cultures and traditions include grinding poverty, back-breaking work and low life expectancy, then sod it. If you´d seen those three kids huddled on the floor round the fire, you´d want more for their future too.

Happily though, I managed to climb three peaks over 4000m on the lake which means I don´t have to hang up my walking boots for ever and retire to my sofa and look at my Wii as a dangerous amount of exercise over coming months.

Talking of poverty, the Bolivian president, Evo Morales, is trying to wipe it out of Bolivia by a programme of nationalisation and redistribution of wealth that´s seen a state pension introduced, incentives for kids to stay in education, and all the large multinationals crying foul. So far he´s doing well though and Freddie, our guide round La Paz today, certainly thinks he´s doing a good job of it and, like a good socialist, I nodded along vigorously. Morales needs to do well though. If the poor everywhere are in chains, those on the outskirts of La Paz are bound and gagged too, while elsewhere in the city the paranoid rich dwell in sumptuous houses behind iron gates. The inequality of wealth here, as in too many other places in South America, can take your breath away.

And that´s quite literally. La Paz, at 3600m, is the highest administrative capital in the world and the Bolivian national football team keeps trying to host tournaments here so it can run rings round the opposition (unusually, the richer suburbs are at lower altitudes, mainly because it´s a couple of degrees warmer down there). Perhaps if England had played Croatia here we´d have had a chance, but we arrived to the news that England had lost that match and were out of Euro 2008, which was a nice synchronous closing of the loop of sporting disaster considering we left Quito 5 weeks ago after losing the RWC final. Anyway, La Paz is a cool city: very bustling, very Asian in some ways (Kathmandu seems to be the favourite comparison), and for some reason I haven´t done my usual freak at the sight of more than 10 people and a goat in one place and instead have really dialled into it and enjoyed the place. In fact, it´s a shame that I´m leaving tomorrow because I get the feeling I´d very much like to see more of the city and the country around it, llama foetuses in the Witches´Market and all.

But, a cab´s picking me up at 5am tomorrow morning and then American Airlines are taking me to Miami before I mount a Virgin for Heathrow. 10.25am on Saturday morning I´ll be back in England (though sadly with not enough energy or time to get down to Bath to watch us demolish Bristol that afternoon). After nearly six weeks, I´m ready to come back too. I´ve had a great time here, made some great friends, laughed like a loon on more occasions than I can recall and seen some unforgettable sights. But John Urry´s concept of Tourist Gaze turns into Tourist Glaze with me after a while, and I´m ready to get home, see all the people I miss, revel in the space, have a pint, stomp around the countryside, ride the mountain bike and relax in a good hot bath.

It might not be as romantic as disappearing over the horizon with a pack on your back and a paranoid guidebook in your hand, but truly one of the best things about travel is the bit where it´s over and you come home.

Cuzco, the Inca Trail and Machu Picchu

2007-11-18T19:03:00.000Z

According to most of the guidebooks, Cuzco, nestled 3310metres up in the Andes, is a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah but without the fun bits. If you don´t get mugged you´ll get stabbed, if you don´t get stabbed you´ll get mugged and at weekends you can take advantage of a special local two for one offer and get both stabbed and mugged, which would be unfortunate.

The reality is very different. It´s a charming city with some superb architecture in a stunning location which the Incas originally laid out in the shape of a puma. Sure, there´s some tourist hassle to contend with, but you just shake your head, say ´No gracias´and walk on. Its bad reputation probably comes from the fact that there are a lot of gringos fresh off the metaphorical banana boat and on their way to Machu Picchu strolling about with gaping bags and wads of dollars in their back pockets. The biggest danger we found was that the local Irish bar (the highest Irish bar in the World allegedly) actually had cans of Guinness in its fridge, which led to a very long and expensive night when we first got here, not to mention bodily injuries caused to two of our number in the infamous Yorkshire Terrier versus Wiltshire Warrior fight-dancing contest.

It´s a great city to nose around with some fabulous Inca ruins in and around it and some great post-Colombian religious art too, including a highly impressive local rendition of the Last Supper with Jesús et al tucking into a roast guinea pig in the main Cathedral, and some archangels painted as if they were modern street kids in Santo Dominigo. The last in particular were strangely haunting, which probably explains why I started hallucinating them halfway up the first murderous climb of the Inca Trail a couple of days later.

We looked round the city, we looked round the various ruins dotted around the Sacred Valley in which Cuzco nestles, and then we donned our walking boots, got a coach to Km 82, and passed through the control gate and onto the four day long Inca Trail.

Whether it was the heat, the humidity, the altitude, or whether I´m just a lot less fit than I like to think I am, the first day was hell, pure and simple. The 12km along the valley floor was okay, but after lunch we started the 700m climb to our campsite and only about 50 metres up I died the first of what seemed like a thousand deaths. I dropped off the back of the group and first my head went, then my body and it all started getting a bit strange. Demons of past failures flayed me and tried to push me back down the mountain at every step as they reared out of the rock, before I then started seeing all my friends standing at the hairpins and cheering me on while the Santo Domingo archangels swooped overhead. When that got too emotional to deal with and I was on the verge of weeping, all of a sudden I started imagining my fellow overlanders as characters out of Á Midsummer Night´s Dream´ for some reason with Rob as Oberon, Shannon as Titania, and Leader Tubbs as a very Puckish Puck. Weird…

It was three of the worst hours of my life to be honest: every step a painful, sweat-soaked exercise in agony and near despair. By the time I eventually got to the campsite I was white as a sheet and utterly exhausted, and all I could think of as we ate the excellent food provided by our team of porters (the average ratio of porters to trekkers on the trail is a little more than 1:1) was that next day we still had 500m to go to get to the top of the 4200m high Dead Woman´s Pass and it might have to be renamed the Dead Stout´s Pass at this rate.

Thankfully, a night of rest and altitude adjustment got me mentally back on track if nothing else and, with the aid of an iPod full of righteous tunes as motivation, the two hour drag to the top was just physically knackering and nothing more. I even managed to fill my lungs and let out a fairly impressive ´Come on you Bath´ before it spluttered to a wheezing end when I got to the top, which startled at least two porters and could apparently be heard echoing off the mountains a good half hour back along the trail.

None of the rest of the trail was as bad, though it´s still probably the toughest physical thing I´ve ever done. The rocks the Inca used to build the path are uneven and treacherous so you have to watch every step closely, meaning that everytime you looked up at the view it seemed your ankle was in danger of turning over. So, you get into a rhythm of watching your feet with only the occasional snatched glance at your surroundings, which kind of misses the point a bit if you ask me. Still, I managed to catch a glimpse of a condor soaring on the thermals and the occasional humming bird snaffling nectar from the plants of the cloud forest crowding the path, and the views of mountain tops and valley bottoms when the clouds and mist parted were of a Hollywood special effects budget standard.

Cloud cover took the sting out of the heat and we were lucky that when it rained it rained at night, so it was good walking weather. Nevertheless, when we were up at 03.30 on the final day to get to Machu Picchu I´d had more then enough of walking in the mountains to last what (at the moment anyway) feels like a lifetime and my legs felt like half-set jelly. Next time, I might just get the bus. From the station at Km 82 where we started you can actually walk along the valley to Aguas Calientes, the village at the bottom of Machu Picchu. It takes about 10 hours and was the way that the Incas kept the site supplied. The Inca Trail which we followed over three Andean passes was a religious pilgrimage and only fit for the noble classes, which will teach me to get ideas above my station…

And so to Machu Picchu (pronounced ´pickchu´ - it means Old Mountain. Don´t pronounce it with a single ´c´, as that apparently makes it mean Óld Penis´). Make me walk over endless mountains to an NCP car park for four days and I´ll be glad to see it when I get there to be honest, but arriving at the Sun Gate just after dawn and seeing Machu Picchu laid out like a living thing in the saddle between two mountains was a stunning sight and one that will long live with me.

We got to wander round for a good couple of hours before the tourist hordes arrived from Cuzco too, which made the aching calves and quads well worth it. The ruins, the mountains and the cauldron of cloud surrounding us that morning all combined to create a scene of awesome beauty, but I have to admit I didn´t get the spiritual kick out of the experience that others did. Maybe it´s because it´s not my land. Take me to Avebury or to the White Horse and I can almost feel the earth alive beneath my feet, but for all it´s grace and photogenic allure, Machu Picchu failed to speak to me. Perhaps – along with the aching legs – that´s why I decided not to spend another 45 minutes climbing the perilous steps up to the nearby Huanta Picchu site, but instead disgraced myself by going down to Aguas Calientes and taking pictures of trains :-)

I´m writing this back in Cuzco on a Sunday afternoon, sipping fresh limonada in a café overlooking the Plaza and the Cathedral, with the pueblos of the city stretching up the hillside behind. It´s odd to think that in under a week I´ll be thousands of miles away in another hemisphere back in England (when I promise to upload the photos finally) and looking out of my windows across the paddocks and the Oxfordshire countryside to the Ridgeway beyond. But before that happens and life snaps back to normal tomorrow we head up to Lake Titicaca where, amongst other things, apparently we have a football match organised against the locals at 4000m. We´re fighting over who goes in goal already…

Interlude

2007-11-11T21:41:00.000Z

Not a huge amount to report. We’ve spent the past couple of days journeying through the Andes to Cusco, the ancient capital of the Incas. We’ve got a day here sorting ourselves out before we head out on the four day trek up to Machu Pichu but, in the meantime, some random observations:

Alpacas look cute but taste of liver. Best avoided IMHO.

Guinea pigs don’t look cute without their fur on and roasted on a spit, but I still haven’t quite managed to bring myself to have a nibble.

Camping at 4000m in sub-zero temperatures is not fun in any accepted definition of the word. Especially after drinking five litres of water the previous day.

Peruvians have extended the game of pool to cricket-like lengths by shrinking the pockets and increasing the size of the balls. Or maybe it’s just the altitude playing tricks…

Coke’s native rival, Inca Cola, is essentially liquefied bubblegum. We’re thinking of introducing a Malibu & Inca Cola forfeit for anyone that does something really annoying on the truck.

Condors make red kites look like sparrows.

Truck + big rock = slight mishap.

Irish Bars are even more prevalent than internet cafes, but you have little to no chance of getting a Guinness in either of them.

Peru is large and varied enough that it looks like most other countries at some point or another. Today was Scottish Highlands segueing into the Alps with a hint of high altitude desert and a touch of Chinese terracing.

21 people do not always manage to travel harmoniously together. Best make that a case of Inca Cola thinking about it…

Coca leaves are great at mitigating the effects of altitude sickness, but only because you’re spending the entire time wondering what that ruddy awful taste in your mouth is.

The Immodium Express

2007-11-07T22:21:00.000Z

It is one of those immutable laws of nature that the English, whenever they congregate in foreign climes, will inevitably talk about their bowels at some point in proceedings. For our mixed crew of English, Welsh, Irish, American, Dutch and German brethren and sistren though, this has become almost the sole topic of conversation because of an outbreak of extreme gastric nastiness that has poleaxed about 75% of us. No sooner has one come back from the loos whistling “Solid as a rock” in a smug fashion, than another´s eyes start gently revolving and a Stygian gurgling is heard from their belt region. Not pleasant at all.

It´s made the trip down from Lima a bit arduous in places to be honest, especially the night in the rough camp where people were disappearing over the horizon clutching a trowel and a wad of loo roll with alarming frequency. Oddly enough though, after several days of feeling like death (including a day shivering in a hotel bed in Lima with a daft temperature), it took getting in a light aeroplane and indulging in some light aerobatics over the Nazca Lines for me to feel better. Others went green, but set me in the sky wheeling and turning over a desert and, it seems, I feel remarkably chipper.

The lines look like scuff marks from the ground to be honest – which perhaps explains why they built the Pan-American highway right through the middle of one of the figures in the early 20th century. But they are fairly spectacular from the air and cover a hostile area of barren wilderness area verging on 500 square km. The current favourite theory is that they were generated as part of a water cult, though I still prefer Erich von Daniken´s entertainingly crackpot notion that they were runways for alien spaceships. von Daniken gets the last laugh too, with one of the main glyphs being dubbed ´The Astronaut´.

Everything – lines, bowels and all - was thrown into very sharp context by the devastation of the area surrounding Pisco after the summer´s earthquake, with toppled buildings, many people still living in tents and piles of rubble everywhere. In places Peru is a grindingly poor country, and to see people with nothing actually lose even more is more than sobering.

We´ve since worked our way up from the coast (on a fairly monotonous diet of mainly boiled rice and dried bread, since you ask) to Arequipa, Peru´s second city, set at 2400m under the massive perfect cone of the Misti volcano. It´s cosmopolitan, chilled, and a nice welcome to the high country.

It´s also home to the Monasterio de Santa Catalina, which is a definite highlight of the trip so far. A monastery that encompasses an entire city block, it was closed to visitors for nigh on 400 years and boasts an entertainingly chequered history until Pope Pius IX decided to stop the partying and kick the nuns´ servants out in the latter part of the 19th century. It was just one of those days when the ambience of a place hit the perfect light for photographs and dovetailed with a mellow mood and we wandered round in a happy daze taking pictures of geometrical designs and goggling at some of the imagery in the religious paintings (okay, that last bit was mostly me).

Beyond the city limits, it´s canyon country out there, but we´ve not done much in the way of adrenalin fuelled nuttiness yet due to the aforementioned stomach lurgy. I don´t know about you, but after 48 hours of not eating anything and then two days on boiled rice (I fell off the wagon once and the consequences were, shall we say, explosive), the energy for white water rafting or volcano climbing just ain´t there. Still, someone mentioned the possibility of mountain biking down from about 5000m up the slopes of Misti tomorrow, so provided I can get a vegetable or two to take their normal course through my digestive tract over the next 12 hours, I might be well up for that. After all, it´s downhill and thus not really exercise.

Anyway, hope this finds all of you who read it safe and well. Let me know what´s going on in your lives and I´ll try to write more as we head towards Cuzco and the start of the four-day hike along the Inca Trail to Machu Pichu next week. Will try to get some more pics up soon too.

Deepest, darkest Peru

2007-11-02T14:09:00.001Z

Heading up the Amazon from Iquitos in a speedboat is one hell of a thrill. Even though it´s firmly on the gringo trail nowadays, Iquitos still has the feel of a wild west frontier town about it and, well… it´s the Amazon. And boy is it mighty. Over 3500km from the sea still, in places it´s well over a kilometre wide and reaches 20m deep in some channels. That´s a lot of water. I booted up the GPS to see how fast we were going and saw that home was 9081km away to the north east. At 50kph in the speedboat we could have made it in 7 days.

Arriving at Muyuna Lodge 140km away on one of its tributaries, the Rio Yamayura, was also a thrill due to it being a decent slice of luxury for a group of increasingly raggedy arsed overlanders. Welcomed with cold towels and fresh juice, with a cooked meal and a cold beer round every corner, the rooms are open but enclosed with netting so you can lie in bed speculating about exactly what just met it´s grisly end in the jungle outside your room. And, while you´re at it, what the hell is that flapping sound too…

Half the time, most of the carnage was, in fact, being caused by the Lodge´s cat a close encounter with which has probably knocked more years of the lifespan of the region´s tourists than the surrounding 1000 square kilometers of wildlife combined. I managed to commute my girly scream at finding something large and furry on my feet into a ´Christ on a bike´ just in time but it was a close run thing.

Sadly, for me anyway, the jungle itself was not quite as much of a thrill. Trekking through it was like walking through dense English woodland with a steambath in attendance and some mad scientist’s Giganto Ray turned on the wildlife. There was not much wildlife about either, probably all having been scared off by Tiddles the homicidal jungle cat. Still, we saw some pygmy marmosets and numerous other monkies, others saw some three-toed sloths and caymen, but biodiversity of an interesting nature was a bit lacking to be honest.

So, I sat about half the trips out, preferring to chill and ruminate in a hammock with a cold beer or two while trying to avoid activities that made me sweat like blinking too often. All that said though, I have now seen pink dolphins (shiny), swum in the Amazon (freaky), fished for pirhana (bitey) and eaten the things too (fishy) so it´s been worthwhile. Even so, bring on the mountains…

(Coda – the pressure release from being back out of the jungle led to one of those Great Lost Nights out in Iquitos which is now a succession of somewhat blurred images including a bunch of us encouraging tuk-tuk racing, drinking a bar dry of rum, throwing shapes in the church of dance, rescuing one of our number from a stick situation, and all in all ending up a sweaty, sticky, sleep deprived mess. Needless to say, my body is now a temple… ruined and of archeological interest only.)

Off to the Amazon

2007-10-29T01:14:00.000Z

It's 20.00 here in Lima and we're just whiling the time away before we leave for the airport at 02.00 to fly to Iquitos (02.00 - Exodus tu est assassins). From there it's then a three hour boat trip along the river to our jungle lodge for two nights and more creepy crawlies than you can shake an extremely shitty stick at.

Talking of which... the first dose of Montezuma's revenge has struck, so rather than going out for a meal with everyone else, I'm sticking within a 60 second dash radius of my own khazi and hoping that I'll be all nice and purged before I get on the aeroplane. I'm not even indulging in a quick pisco sour, which is a cocktail I have very rapidly fallen head over heels in love with. Gorgeous stuff.

Lima takes a while to relax into, especially for a lad from Baulking (pop. 51, some of which are probably livestock). Nine million people live here, many in extreme poverty in the peublos that have washed up along the local hillsides, and there's also an atmosphere of slight paranoia amongst the gringos. Keep your thumb over your drink, don't carry anything valuable, walk purposefully at all times...that sort of thing. I blame the Footprint South American Handbook which, as well as being the weight of a small brick, tends to go straight for Defcon 3 alert status at the drop of the hat. This is a book that should be twinned with Crimewatch ('Oh, don't forget... having scared you witless for the last 60 minutes, there's not really anyone lurking outside your back door...honest'), or at least ship with the words 'PANIC' emblazoned non-comfortingly on the front cover. Mine is sliced and diced with the aid of a Swiss Army knife now, and at least is proving good and absorbent when camping...

A wander round the city then today, down into the rich Miraflores area and looking at museums and some mightily impressive colonial architecture. Though we all drive each other slightly insane at times, this trip is turning out to be frequently hilarious and I can't remember when I cried with laughter quite so consistently. It started with my roommate Rob (El Diablo) sitting next to an American girl on the tour coach to a chorus of 'Smooth Operator' and continued up to just now when I found that Bath beat Leicester today. Not Wildean levels of wit admittedly, but this is definitely a fun way to travel. Unfortunately, as with cricket and rugby tours, what happens on the truck stays on the truck and most of it is unrepeatable even for a journo with well developed immoral principles like myself. Well, until I get home and out of reach of El Diablo's dirty washing bag at least.

Anyway, enough wittering. Remind me to go through and give all this blog stuff a damn good edit when I get home. Some photos are up now, and I'll put more online after Iquitos.

Chan Chan

2007-10-26T21:37:00.000+01:00

What a stunning place. Chan Chan is the largest adobe-built city in the world stretched out over about 26 square miles and nine separate palaces (when one ruler died, the nobles closed it off and all moved into another one) just north of Trujillo on the Peruvian coast. Rescued from the sand about 35 years ago, only one palace is open now, but at 300 x 400m it’s plenty big enough: 10 metre high mud walls stretch off into the distance, enclosing everything from administrative offices and religious spaces, to sacrificial chambers. Some areas have survived the centuries quite well, and motifs of fish and pelicans can be made out amidst a riot of geometrical art that would do many mosques proud.

We’d have looked at it in a bit more detail, but one of our number, Shannon, got mobbed by schoolkids (either because she’s a gringo and speaks a bit of Spanish or she can look a bit like Posh from certain angles) who then proceeded to follow us about for a bit grinning and practicing the word ‘Hello’ over and over again. Quite sweet really, though it made getting a decent photo a bit tricky.

Over the road (well, -ish) is the Huaca de la Luna, a religious site built by the Moche people. Here, warriors got sacrificed after an orgy of sex and drugs if they lost in battle to their god Ai Apaec, and seeing as how they were warring with people all up and down the coast, Ai Apaec did quite well on that front. For all their bravery though, the Moche were killed off by an El Nino event, and their gold was later looted by the Spanish. Ai Apaec’s powers obviously didn’t run to control of the ocean currents…

It’s been nice to do some proper cultural-like stuff after what’s seemed like a fairly solid mix of boozy behavior in the evenings and 12 hour days in the truck. Rewinding a couple of days, the truck full of nubile Australian virgins or whatever they were meant to be did in fact turn out to be full of Gap-year kids and a fairly harassed-looking tour leader. Scenic but dumb about sums it up, and at one point it looked like it was going to kick-off a bit after someone kicked sand into our mild-mannered accountant’s face after several sherberts, a dance-off of all things, and some heroic failures on the chatting up front, all of which we watched with great amusement from the sidelines (he looks mild-mannered, but is in fact single-handedly redefining the image of accountancy into that of a far more psycho like nature).

Calm was restored fairly quickly and our errant accountant returned to the fold, but it did illustrate the tribal nature of this sort of thing. With Shannon also looking uncannily like Davina McCall sometimes (she has got a great future in the two-for-one lookalike industry), it can occasionally feel like Big Brother gone mobile. Without outside events and objects to wander round, we all turn in on ourselves and the trip can seem to become as much about the friendships and conflicts that break out between a group of 20 people driving round in a truck than it is about the places we’re driving through. Last night we had the ritual first Argument About a Restaurant Bill, which officially marked the end of the honeymoon period, and paved the way perhaps for some interesting times ahead.

Luckily, a) we’re a bit more psychologically stable than the average BB contestant and b) distraction is on the way, big time. This sector used to be 3 weeks long once upon a time but has been cut down to 14 days, 12 if you include the wandering round Quito at the start. That’s what’s led to the long days on the road and whizzing through the landscape at 100kph for hours on end, which in Northern Peru seems to have consisted mainly of a barren and blasted landscape, coupled with whitewashed brick walls covered in political slogans. We had lunch under a pylon in the middle of feck all anywhere yesterday, proving that overlanding is nothing if not glamorous.

We have another of those horrible, long days tomorrow, but then we’re in Lima, and after a day or two there we’re flying into Iquitos and the Amazon. And if that doesn’t concentrate the mind and give you something else to think about as a wee beastie with too many legs crawls up your trouser leg and perilously close to your nethers, what does?

More after then. Oh, and I’ll try and buy a lead in Lima to get some pics up from the camera too.

[nb None of them smell. They’re all very nice…and can read, use computers and navigate their way to websites too worst luck ;-) ]

Into Peru

2007-10-24T17:33:00.000+01:00

They closed the Pan-American highway for a fiesta. This would not have been a problem but for the fact that we were trying to negotiate a town stuck in no- man´s land in the 7km zone between the Ecuadorian and Peruvian borders, so it was the equivalent of closing the M4 for a spot of morris dancing. Tankers were backed up, traffic was snarled, tempers were rising, we were parked over a trickle of a river that was more sewage than water, and there was a brass band happily marching up and down the street while the police smiled and said it was impossible to open the road for another 6 hours. And that was even after money had been applied to the situation.

Banos was so much more chilled. The canyoning was good fun, though there was a bit of concern when the rain started falling. “Six months ago it started raining and the water level rose one metre in one minute,” said our guide as we prepared to abseil down a 25 metre waterfall. “But since then we’ve learned and we’ve put escape ropes up now.”

Comforting…

Not surprisingly – and very handily all things considered - miracles are popular in the town. The local church boasts a series of fantastic murals inside, which depict local incidences of Madre de Dios appearing and saving the day. Also unsurprisingly, most revolve round the eruption of the giant Tungurahua volcano a mere 8km away and God appearing on a rainbow to save the day (after only lightly dusting the locals with volcanic death from above first – nice one God).

All in all we spent 14 hours on the truck yesterday, which was a bit on the brutal side (“Oh, me grapes,” as Leader Andy put it). Along the way though we did learn that insect repellent and sun cream applied at the same time makes your face and skin fizz in a manner which is personally alarming but rather amusing for the rest of the vehicle. Also one of our number, Charlotte, who had admitted an aversion to weeing in public finally cracked and thus lost her nickname of Corkie. I won the sweepstake at 4 hours…

Anyway, we dropped out of the mountains on glorious sweeping hairpins amidst the sort of scenery that would make the Lake District give up the ghost, twin itself with Swindon and have done with it. Then it was down through endless banana plantations to the coast and the border, the open sewer and the parade blocking the street.

Eventually some money was obviously applied to the right person and we turned off down a side street, which would have been fine if there hadn´t been a market in full swing at the time. However, Leader Andy and three suitably lubricated coppers marched in front of the truck pushing the stalls out of the way while Leader Tubbs engaged in some complicated n-dimensional folding of space that somehow managed to get our truck through the gaps. Not sure how, but it did, and we got a bigger crowd than the brass band in doing it.

Today is a rest, chill and (if you’re me) get over the hangover day due to Personages of Bad Influence at Punto Sol about two hours along the coast into Peru. There are a load of trucks from different companies travelling on roughly the same itinerary as ours with a week either side as all the tour companies try to overland to Rio to make it for carnival. So the Dragoman truck left this morning and there are three groups of us at the campsite tonight, all of whom have bought a 20 kilo pig for a pig roast. It’s not going to be like that too often, which is probably good for my liver, though Leader Tubbs reckons that at least one of the new arrivals is composed solely of 22-year old Australian girls. We’re kind of hoping they make it across the border smoothly…,-)

Quito - Banos

2007-10-21T23:49:00.000+01:00

Greetings from Banos, a small town of about 12,000 people nestled under two socking great volcanoes, one of which is still occasionally on the geologically feisty side. The lava goes past two sides of the town, there´s a gorge and a river on the third, and an entire escape bridge for the populous if it all goes nasty. That´s alright then…

The locals are going to have a hard time making it over though as the place is stuffed full of gringos. It reminds me a bit of Queenstown in New Zealand , and the streets are full of quad bikes and garish pictures of people throwing themselves off bridges on pieces of elastic or abseiling down gorges as the waters of the Andes thunder over their heads.

Which is exactly what we´re going to be doing tomorrow if the weather holds :-)

Quito was a bit of a blur of beer and rugby to be honest, though we did get out to see the Equator. A couple of them actually – the official, monolithic and monumental one being 150 metres out, which is a tad on the careless side. A far more informal but far more fun one is 100 metres up the road and loudly proclaims itself as being on the equator, though it´s not quite equipped to deal with troublesome tourists with handheld GPS units. I made it another 50m north, but I don´t think they can be arsed to build another one. How many red-painted lines with tourists gurning madly with one leg in either hemisphere does the world need after all?

The truck is basic but there´s a really good crowd of people onboard, with the rough ages ranging from 30 to 60+. About half of us are single, about most of us like a beer, and I have fortuitously been roomed in with Rob, who has been declared head barman, which could come in handy. I´ve yet to be assigned a job, but am developing a nasty suspicion that all the good ones have already been taken. Still, I´m hoping it can´t be as bad as Steve´s, who now rejoices in the nickname Slops. A Dutchwoman on board, meanwhile, has resulted in me once more rejoicing in the monicker Mr Naughty…(stout apparently being Dutch for ´naughty´, but only when there´s finger wagging involved).

I´m probably onboard for the shortest period of time, with most travelling round to Buenos Aries at least and a couple bailing out to head to the Antarctic in January (a thought, of course, which is driving me slightly insane with jealousy). Others have stitched this trip into a tapestry of round the world travelling which has gone on for a year or so and has months and months left to run still. Thus I´m being talked of as the weekend-tourist of the group, which tends to lead to a certain amount of banter shall we say. Ah well, I can always come back next year (though not with Exodus, their truck fleet needs upgrading and their new owners don´t want to fund it, so this is the last trip that´s being done).

Anyway, after a couple of days here we head down to the coast and wend our way southwards to Lima via Chan Chan and a few other places. That´s where the camping starts in earnest, so this is probably it from me until Lima or Iquitos. Stay warm, stay safe, and while I still don´t think I´m ready to talk about the rugby, damn but I wish I´d seen that Grand Prix.

Chicago interlude

2007-10-21T00:14:00.000+01:00

Okay, I know I said I was off to South America, but I had a brief couple of days in Chicago on the way with my friends Mike n´Jax first. It´s a railroad city first and foremost, where trains the length of entire English towns snake through the landscape, and is also home of the first modern skyscraper in the world. Thus, after an entertainingly jetlagged night of beer, mexican food and discussions of third wave feminism and post-structuralism (incorporating a blast on Halo 3 on a TV the size of a small cinema screen) I got the train into the centre of town and went up the 103 floors of the Sears Tower to its skydeck. For most of the end of the last century this was the tallest building in the world, which certainly helps when you´re looking at clouds rolling in from the grain belt to the south and thinking uh-ho.

Chicago is not a city inclined to muck about with its weather warnings. None of that ´severe´ namby pamby stuff here...nope, in Chicago the warnings are éxtreme´, which concentrates the mind rather wonderfully. So, the first night we had tornado alerts and alarms blaring off in the distance, the next day hailstones the size of grapes were slamming into the pavements of the downtown areas. Luckily I managed to miss it all, and just wondered round oblivious to imminent metorological armaggedon and death from above, looking at some mightily impressive architecture while the overhead trains rattled past like the echo of a thousand Tom Waits songs.

Nice place. Will have to go back there and have a longer look around one day.

One story in the papers at the time was that O´Hare airport security had failed to find 60% of the fake bomb parts smuggled past them by inspectors, which is a) a bit crap and b) meant when I arrived in a sweaty breathless mess for my flight 5 minutes late, they weren´t inclined to let me on. Arse. Luckily, I also had a flight ticket for a plane five hours later (long story) so sat back, waited for that one and practised my Spanish on mystified airport staff.

All was going smoothly till we were 15 minutes late leaving for Miami due to a malfunctioning lavatory (that was fixed quickly, but the paperwork took ages) and with a genius eye on the law of sod, we also managed to land at exactly the other end of the aiport from my flight to Quito which left in half an hour. Yikes. Óh, it´s okay,´said the steward. ´It´s an old Airbus on that route and it´s always breaking down. You´ll make it.´

So, reassured and panicked at the same time (Like, how badly does it break down? Engines out of the sky sort of badly?)I commenced another mad dash to a departure gate, and arrived in my second sweaty mess of the day only to be told that yes, indeed, there was a small problem with the plane, and it was going to be leaving half an hour late. Hurrah. By this time I was rubbing dodarant on the outside of my clothes...

In this slightly smelly way I left North America in a plane full of middle aged Canadians heading for the Galapagos. I like to think the turbulence over Cuba was Castro cocking a snook at our decadent Imperialist presence passing over his head, but the engines stayed on all the same. Which was nice...

And that for the moment is that. Sorry for the sheer volume of wordage but these things get more terse as time passes, don´t worry, Give me a month and it´ll be ´Machu Pichu. V nice.´

Oh, and I won´t talk about the rugby if you don´t...

South America: T minus One day

2007-10-16T15:19:00.000+01:00

Shameful confession time: I really don’t know much about South America and much that I do is a bit on the wayward side and been absorbed by some strange form of pub-quiz osmosis along the way. So, I try to imagine a whole continent in all it’s incredible length, rich breadth and stunning diversity, and end up with the equivalent of mid-western Yanks thinking that everyone in Britain eats crumpets at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, has innumerable servants all called Jeeves, knows the Queen personally and goes fox hunting at the weekend.

Here’s the catalogue of shame:

They all speak Spanish over there apart from the people who don’t who’ve gone for Portuguese instead, which seeing as how I don’t speak either isn’t really very helpful

It used to be full of tin-pot military dictatorships but is now full of oil-rich socialist republics intent on sticking it to Dubya

They eat guinea pigs and wear strange hats

The CIA like to have wars there

Cocaine comes from there

So does chocolate, which is apparently more addictive though makes your nostrils look a lot more untidy

The only country that plays rugby is Argentina (which is bugger all good when I’m in Ecuador on Saturday for the RWC final)

That’s where the Amazon is, which is like the New Forest only bigger

Che Guevara rode round it on a motorcycle (and Che means ‘mate’, so don’t call your kids that because Argentinians will point and laugh at them)

Er...

...that’s it

So, the usual Stout pre-holiday research process can widely consider to have imploded big time. Not quite as bad as trying to land in Nepal on the 10th Anniversary of the People’s Uprising a few years ago (cancelled on FO advice), but pretty lackadaisical all the same. Hey, I’ve been busy, you know...

Still, one other rather salient fact: that’s also where Machu Pichu is, which is what drew me there in the first place – walking the Inca Trail for four days over the 4215m Dead Woman’s Pass and dropping down onto the World Heritage Site to end all World Heritage Sites. Should be fun, but as we land in Quito in Ecuador, and then travel the 2000 miles or so to La Paz in Bolivia overland, there’s plenty more to see and do along the way too. The Moche Pyramids, Chan Chan, Lima, Iquitos (the only city in the world with no road connection), the Amazon, the Nazca Lines, Lake Titicaca, Cuzco...the list kind of goes on and on. Damnit, I’m almost feeling educated about the place already.

I fly home from La Paz near the end of November, while the trip itself, run by Exodus carries on circumnavigating the continent. http://www.exodus.co.uk/activities/overlandjourneyssouthamerica.html for details if anyone’s interested. Guess there’s always next year for the rest. Company always welcome ;-)

Anyway, must dash. Time for a crumpet. And judging by the dismembered remains of a rabbit I found outside my front door this morning, the foxes are getting feisty already. More (hopefully) from the mountains overlooking the Pacific coastline.

Rush @ The NEC

2007-10-13T08:55:00.001+01:00

Oh they were good. Perhaps not quite up at the stupefying heights they reached on the R30 tour a couple of years ago, but still as good a live act as anything you'll see touring the arenas of the world. If Muse had a slightly eccentric uncle that read books on quantum physics, Rush would be him.

If there was a highlight amidst the dancing lighting rigs, dizzying time signatures and fiendish Impossible Drumming, it was the three song triptych that started with Subdivisions and went into Natural Science and then Witch Hunt: both band and audience hitting their straps and transcending their surroundings in a welter of sculpted noise. Ruddy terrific. 'Art as expression/Not as market campaigns/Will still capture our imagination' as Geddy sung it. Quite right too.

Oh, and then there was this: South Park performing as 'Lil Rush to introduce Tom Sawyer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTYXMSrS82w

Close to as good as it gets.

Talk about immortality...

2007-10-12T12:12:00.000+01:00

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Comic Pegg set for Star Trek film

A footie fan writes

2007-10-10T15:48:00.000+01:00

And I quote:

"Everything about rugby union seems better than football - the drama, pace and one-twos, the passion, skill and muscle, the deadly grace and savage beauty of it all. Even when the countries sing their respective national anthems they do so with more verve."

Quite right too...

Rugby uncovers the awful truth of my wasted life | Columnists | Guardian Unlimited Sport

Windscale: 50 Years On

2007-10-06T09:50:00.000+01:00

Hard to believe that the Windscale disaster was 50 years ago. I mean, that's before Al Gore invented the internet, right?

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Windscale: A nuclear disaster

Serenity 2 rumours surface

2007-10-05T09:03:00.000+01:00

Geekdom goes into a frenzy...

Are Plans for 'Serenity 2' in the Works? - Cinematical

McDonald's Videogame

2007-10-02T12:24:00.000+01:00

A subversive work of genius. To win you have to devastate continents, add ground up animals to the animal feed, mistreat workers, mislead the public in the pursuit of rapacious profits and so on.

I smell lawyers. Play it while you can...

McDonald's Videogame

Men are from Mars...

2007-10-01T13:41:00.000+01:00

Women are from Venus. This Book is From Cobblers

Some nice myth busting here: Do men and women speak the same language? | The Guardian | Guardian Unlimited

Retroactive update alert...

2007-09-30T14:04:00.001+01:00

Having tired of the bright lights and big city that is Wantage, I've
decided to really move to the boonies this time.

New place is a rented dairy conversion in Baulking, a tiny hamlet about a
mile from Uffington where the famous White Horse is, not to mention the
nearest shop and pub. Surrounded by fields (some of which are even not
under water at the moment) it's also full of wildlife. Saw my first
live badger in years on the way back there last night - and thanks to
a quick high-speed tweak of the steering wheel I might even see him again
too.

Nearest Starbucks is 11.35 miles away. Is this a record?

FaceBook ruins blogging

2007-07-24T17:42:00.000+01:00

It does too. Need to find a way to replicate all that activity over here in Blogger...

'al-Qaeda' puts on big shoes, red nose, takes custard pie

2007-07-03T15:43:00.000+01:00

A disgruntled ex bomb disposal squad member writes:

We used to be constantly disappointed, on the bomb teams, at the consistently rubbish efforts of the ordinary bomber. Many people seem to think that any kind of fire or loud noise will become deadly if you add nails. Your correspondent was once called out to a scene where a teenage cretin, finding that batteries would go pop if heated in a fire, taped nails around D-cells and put them on a camping cooker. Terrifyingly, some of the nails flew as much as two or three feet when this infernal device reaped its deadly harvest.

More at: El Reg

Farming for Gold in China

2007-06-19T07:01:00.000+01:00

Quote from the piece:

It was an hour before midnight, three hours into the night shift with nine more to go. At his workstation in a small, fluorescent-lighted office space in Nanjing, China, Li Qiwen sat shirtless and chain-smoking, gazing purposefully at the online computer game in front of him. The screen showed a lightly wooded mountain terrain, studded with castle ruins and grazing deer, in which warrior monks milled about. Li, or rather his staff-wielding wizard character, had been slaying the enemy monks since 8 p.m., mouse-clicking on one corpse after another, each time gathering a few dozen virtual coins — and maybe a magic weapon or two — into an increasingly laden backpack.

Twelve hours a night, seven nights a week, with only two or three nights off per month, this is what Li does — for a living. On this summer night in 2006, the game on his screen was, as always, World of Warcraft, an online fantasy title in which players, in the guise of self-created avatars — night-elf wizards, warrior orcs and other Tolkienesque characters — battle their way through the mythical realm of Azeroth, earning points for every monster slain and rising, over many months, from the game’s lowest level of death-dealing power (1) to the highest (70). More than eight million people around the world play World of Warcraft — approximately one in every thousand on the planet — and whenever Li is logged on, thousands of other players are, too. They share the game’s vast, virtual world with him, converging in its towns to trade their loot or turning up from time to time in Li’s own wooded corner of it, looking for enemies to kill and coins to gather. Every World of Warcraft player needs those coins, and mostly for one reason: to pay for the virtual gear to fight the monsters to earn the points to reach the next level. And there are only two ways players can get as much of this virtual money as the game requires: they can spend hours collecting it or they can pay someone real money to do it for them.

At the end of each shift, Li reports the night’s haul to his supervisor, and at the end of the week, he, like his nine co-workers, will be paid in full. For every 100 gold coins he gathers, Li makes 10 yuan, or about $1.25, earning an effective wage of 30 cents an hour, more or less. The boss, in turn, receives $3 or more when he sells those same coins to an online retailer, who will sell them to the final customer (an American or European player) for as much as $20.

Video Games - China - Money - Online Games - New York Times

Twenty-First Century Urban Man

2007-06-12T08:34:00.000+01:00

Interesting clutch of articles at Forbes.com on patterns of urbanisation in the next century.
Twenty-First Century Cities - Forbes.com

Derren Brown Messed with my Melon

2007-06-08T23:21:00.000+01:00

So, there we were in the New Theatre in Oxford and, having caught a frisbee Derren had whanged out into the audience (no remarks please from my cricketing brethren) I found myself on stage with five other blokes playing 20 Questions. We all saw each other write down an object – I chose a cricket bat – and then Derren guessed what it was with phenomenal speed.

Except he didn’t with me. First I got shuffled from number 4 to number 6 then he came to me and said “I’m not sure I can do this with you. What do you do?”

“I’m a journalist,” I replied.

(Someone in the audience booed – thanks for that)

“No, I can’t use you, hope you don’t mind.”

And off I toddled to sit down again enjoying a brief 30 seconds of notoriety which at least got me a space at the urinals during the interval.

That wasn’t the end of it though. First, we pieced together that I might have been a distraction for something going on on the other side of the stage at the same time (a man in a gorilla suit stealing a banana if you must know), and then there was the finale.

Here, Derren unveiled a banner of his predictions for the show that had been kept in a sealed box in full view suspended from the ceiling. “Then we did 20 questions,” he said as the banner was unfurled, “and I got it wrong as there was a football but I’d written down ‘cricket’. Hang on, I sent that journalist back...”

At which point I shouted out that yes, I had written down cricket bat and Lo!, a little bit more unfurling, and there the exact words were on the banner.

No idea how he did that or indeed any of the other stuff in a fairly spectacular two hours. As Stephen Fry says, the man is indeed a witch. A bloody entertaining one though. Go see if you get the chance.

Steam Punk Star Trek

2007-06-06T16:48:00.000+01:00

Some genuinely funny moments as the crew run out of coal for their ship...

Killer Wi-Fi panics London's chattering classes | The Register

2007-06-05T08:34:00.000+01:00

"Recent revelations that Wi-Fi may provoke spontaneous abortions in cattle, raise storms and tempests, curdle milk and fry children's brains have had the desired effect among London's chattering classes, with panicked parents mobilising to contain the wireless menace."

You can normally rely on El Reg to have a suitably sarcastic take on things, and it doesn't disappoint.

Killer Wi-Fi panics London's chattering classes | The Register: