Democracy woo!

Busy couple of weeks, the last fortnight. Lots of cool stuff like CAB homework and Moroccan food and such fun, but nevertheless it has meant it’s been a bit quiet on here for a while. And now I’m on holiday with t’housemates in Dublin (of which, I am sure, more when we return), so you’ll not get much this week either, SO:

Here’s what you’ve been waiting for! Click away, vote for one of the randomised list of names* and be part of the great democratic bicycle naming process. Truly a wonderful thing.

(*Only my favourite name from each commenter, sorry, otherwise it would have got really long.)

Whale Boy Whale!

As a bit of an experiment, I’ve started blogging on the book of Jonah in the Bible. I’ve never written what will effectively be Bible commentary before, so it might be rubbish, but I think I’m going to have fun and there’s the off-chance you might too. I’d love you to have a clicky and see what you think. Even if you don’t have a faith, you might like to go and have a butcher’s. I’m trying to write with non-churchy people in mind so’s not to fall back on hiding behind Christian jargon or stock phrases, so y’never know, it might be fun.

Because WordPress love giving me free blog addresses and I love bad puns, it’s going to be hosted at Whale Boy Whale!

Which, if you’re me, is reward enough in itself.

Ooh, two other things: one is that Fran‘s written her bi-monthly post and it’s a bit of a corker. The other is that Kat(i)e has written a “non-sexy love song to [quirky, filthy, wonderful British comedian] Russell Brand“. It is every bit as bizarre and brilliant as you would expect if you have any awareness of either Russell or Kat(i)e. I play the piano and make a cameo in the video. Woot!

You want to name my bicycle, you want to name my bike

This is my bicycle. I bought him for £20 in September off the colleague of a friend of mine. He’d obviously been sitting in a shed for a while and not being ridden – he was quite dusty and needed oiling, and his brakes were worn down almost to the metal. So I took him home and gave him a wash down and sprayed WD40 on various bits of him till we both smelt like a garage, and I got him new brake pads so he wouldn’t kill me by mistake, and I got him a bell so he could clear his throat at pedestrians (only put that on today, though, so it’s not in the picture), and I got him some wheel reflectors so he would be cool and whizzy and visible in headlights (only put them on today, too – I’m not the quickest), and generally made him all spruced up, and I’ve been riding him around ever since. He’s brilliant. He has a huge cream leatherette saddle the size of your face, viz:

Mmm, leatherette. The Dairylea Slice of upholstery.

and a proper Sturmey-Archer three-speed gearbox, which people think terribly quaint but which I find much easier to use as, if you give me the 18 speeds you get on lots of bikes these days, I just get baffled with the choice and only use three of them anyway. Also, despite being fiendishly complicated, they’re actually more reliable than your normal, garden-variety derailleur gears that you get on most modern bikes. In fact, they’re so reliable that the one on my bicycle (and, as my friend Esther has pointed out, he is a bicycle, not a bike) was made in 1980. Check it out now:

He's older than most of you!

So there you go. He’s wonderful, reliable, comfortable, red, shiny, classic and but a few months younger than me. I simply love him. If that makes me a 12-year-old girl, so be it.

Except he hasn’t got a name. And that’s where you come in. I know there’s at least a dozen people who read this blog fairly regularly (thanks! you make me write; I’m proper grateful for that), and you’re all quite creatively clever types, so there must be some good ideas out there: what I’d like is for you to get your thinking caps on and think of a name for our shiny red friend pictured above. There are a few ground rules:

• He’s a boy. He just is. I mean look at him. Besides, if I rode around on a girl all day what would that make me?
• It has to be a name you could conceivably call a human. Not what you’d necessarily personally call your own baby, but it can’t be the sort of name that only dogs have, like Rex.
• It has to reflect his character. So like, he’s 30, which in bicycle-years is probably just about old enough for him to be described as “sprightly”, and I think he was a bit posh in his day (he’s certainly well made) but he’s now a bit ramshackle, but still good fun – like lovable, probably-a-bit-corrupt eccentric Mayor of London Boris Johnson but probably less Tory and certainly far less probably-a-bit-corrupt. Only he can’t be called Boris because:
• No alliteration.

Then I’ll pick my five or six favourites (assuming anyone responds) and work out how to do one of those clicky poll things you sometimes see on blogs, and then next week you can vote, and That Will Be His Name.

Fancy it? Play my game go on it’ll be fun. =o)

The snow, obviously

When I was a student I spent a year studying and doing cool Christian stuff in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia. One winter afternoon some Russian student friends and I got to talking about how cold it had to be in the various places we came from before they’d close the schools. Sergei was from Dagestan in the Caucasus, as far south and warm and Turkic as you can go and still be in Russia, so he somewhat apologetically kicked us off saying that where he was from they shut the schools when it got to -20C. I think Karina was from Kazan or somewhere like that – somewhere fairly central and continental – and she rather proudly said that where she came from they shut the schools when it reached -30C. Then Tanya suddenly looked as though, if there was ever a time to be proud of coming from Kazakhstan*, it was now, and said that there they didn’t shut the schools until it reached -40C. Her victory was shortlived, though, because pretty quickly Vovchik straightened himself into a more commanding storytelling position, cleared his throat and began:

“I remember one time growing up in Yakutsk, in the far east of Siberia, I was walking to school one morning and it was really weird – there was nobody about. I knew it wasn’t a holiday, and I was pretty sure it was, like, Monday, and not still the weekend, so it was a bit odd really. Anyway I got to school and I couldn’t get in – there was just the security guy on the gate. And I was like, what’s up? And he was like, school’s closed. And I was a bit worried now, so I was like, oh yeah, why’s that? And he said well haven’t you heard the radio? And I said no, and he said well they’ve closed all the schools today ’cause it’s minus fifty-nine!”

We all laughed. Vovchik settled back in his chair - there was no way anyone could beat that unless they’d been brought up on the moon - and then he asked the question I’d been apprehensive of since we’d started the topic:

“So Nathan, how cold does it have to be in England before they close the schools?”

“Um… Well there’s not an actual temperature as such… It’s more… they close the schools… er… when it snows?”

I’m not quite sure how the rest of the conversation went but I seem to remember nobody believing me. I think I must have stammered some explanation about how it never snows so we’re not really used to it, y’know, sold the gritters to China, global warming, trains, very narrow roads in the country…

But now, today, oh goodness me I don’t care IT’S SNOWING AND EVERYTHING’S STOPPED AND IT’S BRILLIANT. Snow in England is like grace in weather form: we didn’t do anything to deserve it, but here it is, covering all the litter and making everything uncommon and new and pretty, and sending us home from work early to throw snowballs and sledge down stuff and make snowmen like kids.

Because I live in Devon, where it really never snows (the rest of Britain had a white Christmas this year but not us), the last ONE DAY of snow has closed every school in the county – no really – so my housemate Christine was home and Fran, who’s learning to be a teacher and therefore spends lots of her time hanging around a college, was free and so we and our friend Iain said yar-boo-sucks to work for an hour and made a cool little snowman on our roof terrace. He’s only four feet tall (not like Karen and Conrad’s seven-foot giant [actually made by Pete]) but he’s smily chap and he’s called Boris. LOOK:

Boris

Anyway, it’s clearly bedtime and more, so I’ll get on with it. Stay safe, stay warm, don’t eat the yellow snow, but mainly have some fun. It’s inconvenient and you’ve got more important things to do but that’s like most of the best stuff really.

(*There are actually lots of times to be proud of coming from Kazakhstan. It’s arguably the most politically and relgiously free of all the central Asian republics and it’s got this gloriously silly shopping centre designed by Norman Foster.)

Les flics, c’est chic.

If you’re anything like me, then if I were to say to you the phrase “French cop show”, the first thing to come into your mind would probably be something like this or, possibly, this. Which is fair enough, bless us, we’re English, we don’t know any better. Except that I’ve stumbled on something wonderful which has rather changed that for me.

It’s a show called Spiral (Engrenages in the original French), it’s on BBC4 on Sunday nights at 10pm British time and it’s great. I found it a few weeks ago just after an episode of Waking the Dead (which, if you’re not from these shores, is our equivalent of Cold Case) had finished on BBC1, and found that, in a little piece of scheduling genius, hidden away on BBC4*, someone had made it so having just got myself in the mood for dark, pensive, detective thriller action with one our of it, I could switch over and get another hour of it in French – which, as we know, makes anything darker, more pensive and generally cooler.

(*By the way, for my non-British readership: the BBC have four main TV channels. BBC1 is the major entertainment channel with the big dramas, soaps, American imports, documentaries and such on. BBC2 is maybe slightly less safe, less ratings-hungry scheduling – a lot of shows start off there and if they do well they get transferred to BBC1. Lots of leftfield comedy, less mainstream documentaries, thoughtful one-off dramas. BBC3 is the yoof channel with music, comedy, imports like Family Guy and such like, and BBC4 is pretty intellectual, a bit like NPR on the telly, and nobody watches it (including me usually), even though much of it’s brilliant – hence it’s where you would find a French cop show in this subtitle-phobic country of ours. We have lots of commercial channels too, but we can deal with them another time. My favourite is one called Dave. Seriously. But back to the story.)

So it’s set in the Criminal Investigation Department of the Paris police, and they’re uncovering an increasingly complex web of drug dealing, gun running and general nastiness in the vast Parisian suburbs. Our heroine is Laure, a detective cut from the traditional hardboiled, troubled cloth except that she’s a lady. She’s played with what I think they call “understated brilliance” – which is to say she can say an awful lot with a very small change of facial expression, which is great for telly – by someone I’ve never heard of but hope to hear of again, called Caroline Proust. She’s helped by various other policy judicially people, none of whom is a weak link in the acting chain, really. There are also a couple of deliciously corrupt, über-French lawyers, as well as layer on layer of greasy underworld types, the absolute star of whom is the electrifyingly horrible Aziz, played by Reta Kateb (also new to me), a swaggering mess of copycat gangsta style and mentalist brute violence, like a slimmed-down cross between Forrest Whittaker’s Idi Amin and Snoop Dogg, only with worse teeth. He’s probably worth your licence fee alone.

Anyway, as always with my TV recommendations, this is no use to you if you live in (a) the future or (b) not the UK. Sorry! The whole series is on iPlayer on the BBC website, but only for another week or two as I think next week’s is the last episode. So quick! Give yourself an hour of Gallic intrigue every day for the next week and a half and you should manage it if you start… well, now. Off you go then. =o)

IOC, FOTC

This morning on the radio I’ve heard the Spanish representative on the International Olympic Committee saying that his father, also a former IOC member, “knows the ropes [of the Committee] inside out”. That’s all.

That, of course, and this:

A very clever man what you have never heard of

Hello.

Today I’m going to tell you about this man:

He is called Vannevar Bush and he is Quite Interesting. I found about him this morning when I was looking up whether you’re still allowed to say “hypertext links” in English (don’t fret, you are). His coolness derives, apart from the fact that his brain is nearly the width of his shoulders and his desk is a near-perfect mirror, from his having invented Wikipedia in 1945. No, really, he did.

Vannevar “The Mannevar”* Bush, you see, was an American scientist who wrote an essay called As We May Think, in which he theorised that wouldn’t it be cool if, through telephone lines and cameras and electromechanical controls, you could have a great big desk somewhere – let’s called it a Memex, just for kicks - which could look at the information stored on any piece of microfilm in any library in the world. And, he thought, wouldn’t it be great if on all of these bits of microfilm there could be references embedded in the text, somehow, that could cross-reference other bits of microfilm in other libraries in the world that might be relevant, so that you could just flit from one interesting document to another, without having to go all the way out to the boring bits like contents or indexes or a great big catalogues or such. He wrote:

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client’s interest. The physician, puzzled by a patient’s reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. … The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it with a skip trail which stops only on the salient items, and can follow at any time contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a particular epoch. There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world’s record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected.

Anyway, obviously it never got beyond the idea, but that essay was what set other weirdy sciency clever types such as Ted Nelson to start thinking about hypertext (hence me finding this stuff out in the first place), and it was their ideas that led Tim Berners-Lee to invent the modern world.

So there you go. An immensely important man that until this morning I had never heard of, and probably neither had you. Unless you are Nayf or Bekki, cos they’ve heard of everyone.

Back to work for me, then. You may, tonight, if you’re very lucky, get a post about a wonderful, weird, balloon-heavy wedding I went to the other week. Meantime, have lovely afternoons.

(*He was never called this.)

He’s a prize and she’s a catch

shouldn’t really be writing at all, should be cleaning the toilet, BUT just a quickie to say:

I’m off to a wedding this weekend. Actually I’m not just off to a wedding, I’m off to have rather a big weekend. Fran and I are off to tick off (in a good way) all the remaining parents we respectively haven’t met yet AND go to a wedding AND see how we do on a 12-hour round trip in a car.

Actually, don’t tell anyone, cos I have a grumpy-old-man image to keep up, but I’m secretly rather excited: not only do I get to have a bit of a break from work and preparing for our church’s amazing kids’ holiday club (which is ace but by ‘eck is there a lot of running around and feeling disorganized involved), I get, like, a whole four days of Fran and Fran-banter. Not to be too smug and couply, but there it is, I consider myself a lucky man, is all. Well. I say “lucky”. I rather suspect it’s actually that the Big Chap has various different ways of throwing grace at us like a bucket of cold water on a hot sticky day and Fran-banter happens to be one of the ones he uses on me, and very glad I am too.

Anyway, before this gets both overly theological and overly soppy, which would be a rubbish combination and you’d all stop reading, on with the Point, which is that this wedding I’m going to on Saturday, it’s one that excites me a lot, cos it’s my good friend Nic, who I’ve known since we bullied each other in the playground when we were seven. She’s brilliant, and funny, and lovely, and has many good CDs (and some Kylie), and she’s met a man who is brilliant, and funny, and lovely, and has many good CDs (and some unironic heavy metal). And they’re a thoroughly successful combination. They’re one of those couples that without making any massive effort just sort of make you feel… at home, and relaxed, and, yeah, that sort of thing. Anyhow, sparing their blushes, Nic and Stew, you rock. God bless yer, now and every day. Now I’ll shut up and play a weird but sweet love song by Pavement in your honour, won’t that be fun?

gushing

I fall for this season every time, I really do… Clearly you’ve all been listening to Eventually Yours on the Changing Tunes MySpace like I told you to and brought the sun out. Well done; give yourselves a pat on the collective cyber-back, because it’s been absolutely gorgeous.

So anyway, today me, Fran, Est, Jo and Iain (you may not know who these last three people are; rest assured they’re cool) decided it was far too sunny not to walk to Topsham, so we did. Just properly gorgeous, it was, today. I love this time of year. All burgeoning and busy and bright with yellow flowers straining at the sky and feisty birds shouting for territory and bees doing whatever it is bees do when they’re not having their honey stolen, buzzing, I suppose, although that’s hardly a job description, is it, and all egged on by the sun, which has come back from wherever the heck it was hiding last week all refreshed and up for a bit of good old-fashioned shining. Brilliant fun.

Previously, when I’ve written on here about rather liking the life I have down in Devon, some eyebrows that are attached to wise people (one wise person, at least) have been raised with the concern that I might be a bit too cozy having a sort of average, don’t-leave-the-house, don’t-take-risks, don’t-make-big-plans, comfortable, freelance translator lifestyle. And they’d have a point, those eyebrows would. That is a risk. After all, people call Exeter the graveyard of ambition, cos no-one ever leaves. But here’s the thing: I know I might not always live somewhere pretty. I know I follow a God for whom my being comfortable and within my depth is dizzyingly far down the ladder of priorities. I know that holding on lightly to cool things (like where and how I live at the moment) is far more fun than grabbing them tight and thinking the world will end if they go. But flippin’ ‘eck it’s fun being here now.

<END gushing>

And he’s got a new trick

He’s back! And not a moment too soon. Look at all the fun stuff that’s happened on teh Intertubes!

So first off, my good friend Dave Pegg has got a really very good podcast (kind of aimed at tha yoof, cos he’s da yoof wrrka at my church, but brilliant for all that).

Secondly, loveable weirdy webcomic genius Nedroid has given us the epic story of Party Cat.

Thirdly, a brilliantly named, and generally brilliant, person called Gabriel Smy has gone and set hisself up a blog, Verbatim Poetry, that asks how much of the stuff we see written down in life is actually poetry. My favourites so far are this one and this one. Have a root around and see what you like. Send in your own ideas if you want. I’m planning to wait until the summer, when hopefully we’ll get briefly becalmed in one of those hot, heavy-hanging, hear-the-church-bells-a-mile-away high pressures, and then send in a shipping forecast.

Also, on a more serious note, you might want to go and spend some time over at Kat(i)e’s Analogise That! blog. She and her mates have recently been through a pretty massively sized dollop of tragedy, and whatever you believe about God an’ that (I like to think that my dear readers, though perillously few in number – because I never flippin’ write anything – are pretty diverse on that subject), you can’t help but be impressed by their reaction to it. I’m not being morbid or owt, it’s just that this stuff’s important, and these people are beautiful.* These four posts are the ones you really want to read, I reckon.

(*They would say that’s because they know a beautiful God. I, unsurprisingly, would agree.)

Ooh, I’ll tell you the other thing I wanted to show you today. So Kat(i)e, in between blogging more each day than I do in a month, sent me a link to this brilliant organisation called Changing Tunes, who do musicky stuff in prisons – I think this is because I do musicky stuff not in prisons and have a fairly blatant admiration for people who do work in prisons, and also she knows I’m trying to live my life following a guy who said being cool to people in prisons was a pretty essential idea, so I have very little excuse. Well I honestly don’t know if there’s anything I can do to help out, though they do do stuff in Exeter, so there might be, BUT ANYWAY, part of what they do is that the prisoners write and record their own songs, and they’ve got a MySpace page, and here’s my point:

So, you know how it’s supposed to be summer now but it’s not, cos (at least here in Devon) it still thinks it’s like March or something and there’s all this filthy sideways rain and stuff and no sun for most of the day? Well here’s your antidote, right here: you go on Changing Tunes’s MySpace and you click on the song “Eventually Yours” and you turn up your speakers and, for 2’49″, it’s gonna be (as my indie-crush Lauren Laverne used to sing) officially summer.

N’night chaps.

[Edit: it's just occurred to me that the Changing Tunes MySpace is one of the least graphically annoying MySpace pages I've seen in a long while. Go prisoners.]