Month: May 2003

Far more interesting than the BBC’s nauseatingly pompous ‘Big Read’ best 100 books (I’m not even going to link to it, so there!): The Independent’s 100 Worst Books. Spectacularly funny, with some searing condemnation and not a few surprises. I’m particularly fond of Jah Wobble slamming Mein Kampf on the grounds that it’s simply a rubbish read.

My vote, however, still goes to (Mitterand’s love-child) Mazarine Pingeot’s first novel, ‘wittily’ titled ‘First Novel.’ Utter, utter bilge, as I should have suspected from as early as the catalogue data page: ‘This edition translated with the financial assistance of the French Ministry of Culture.’

Anything that requires government aid to reach translation will henceforth ring alarm bells.

So… the folks I’m going to see in Aspen have just come down with a particularly whacky and exciting form of pneumonia. Not actually threatening, just enough to (a.) make them feel really bloody awful, and (b.) render them horribly infectious, for about a fortnight. Plan A sees me arriving in… about a fortnight.

Ah.

Plan B… hasn’t had chance to form, as yet. But hey, I’m sure we’ll think of something. Maybe we’ll meet up in a bar, where we’ll sit at opposite ends with a tin-can telephone, bellowing a decade’s-worth of catching up to each other. D’you think that’d work?

John is off to the Royal Academy for the opening of the Summer Exhibition – ‘varnishing day,’ or ‘vernissage,’ as he informs me. Specifically, they’re hanging this slice of magnificence; John’s not planning to do a Turner.

Painting link updated 29/5/2003; it’s called ‘head and text II.’

Oh, come on Media Guardian. It’s not as if, when you note:

The advert, part of a £2m campaign, is filmed in the style of a children’s TV programme from the 70s.

…we don’t know to which series you’re referring. And it’s still being made, thanks very much. Though it doesn’t quite play out as cheesily as the Lil-lets pastiche, thankfully.

My take: rather amused by it all.

For some reason, it’s nigh-on impossible to find home office chairs that aren’t either rubbish or ugly. Even Ikea’s current range is poor – uncomfortable, unsightly, or both.

Hurrah, then, for SeatingVFM.com. Sure, they sell ugly and doubtless uncomfortable stuff too, but they also have a sensible range of stuff that’s just a little funkier-looking. Of course, it’s rather hard to sit on your monitor to try them out…

If you followed this week’s heavily-blog-linked (elsewhere), heavily-praised, heavily-considered essay by Edward Tufte about how crap Powerpoint techniques are, you’ll love Aaron Swartz’s send-up of the whole affair. Inspired.

Incidentally, I’m relieved to say that the one time I had occasion to use Powerpoint, my slides genuinely supported/reinforced what I was saying, and not the other way around. I most certainly didn’t read every bullet point.

While I’m on the subject, every recent public-speaking engagement I’ve had has involved the previous speaker over-running dramatically, and the chair utterly failing to guillotine them. As a result, I’ve sat on stage trying to guess how much less time I’m going to have than I’d expected, and hacking my talk down to suit. Now, as luck would have it, I’m pretty darn good at doing this, since it’s essentially what I do professionally. That is, I know the difference between 4:15 and 3:30, and I’m quite capable of hacking the former down to the latter, almost on-the-fly if I have to. Or, indeed, going from twenty minutes to more like five.

But it’s not polite to make me. Particularly when I speak in public rather rarely, and get horribly nervous (until I start, at which point I remember that I used to do this rather a lot, and that I actually enjoy it). So please, people, let’s talk for as long as we need – and no longer.

Inspired by the sunny weather (uh… what happened to the forecast thunderstorms, chaps? I could have gone walking in Cumbria with Olly & co…), I spent some quality time with my bicycle. That’s with, and not – sadly – on.

I’d forgotten what it feels like to have all your skin oils removed and replaced with the cloyingly orange-esque scent of citrus degreaser. Unfortunately, beneath the grime, the bike is worse than I first thought. All the sealed/heavily guarded bearings are fine – the headset, bottom bracket, hubs – but everything else is pretty wrecked, frankly. It really needs stripping and cleaning from scratch.

The chainrings are even more eaten down than I remembered; BiopaceHP rings were never high-quality, and these have done something like 8,000 miles. But they’d do, for a short while. The tyres are perished, and I wouldn’t vouch for the inner tubes either. More worrying, the stem appears to be essentially rotten. Well, it’s always been rubbish, but no, it now looks pretty much rotten – there’s significant corrosion around the handlebar clamp. Ouch. That’s a big job to replace.

So… I don’t have a bike that’s trivially rideable – something like a day’s work to fix it, and not inconsiderable component costs if I do it properly.

Dang. And now the forecast, which had yesterday been crock for next week, is suddenly promising. So I should have bought the Ridgeback after all.

Heigh-ho.

My flight tickets arrived in this morning’s post. Crumbs, I’m actually going.

I need to call the hotel in New York – booking system failure and they’ve lost my credit card details – and the whole car hire thing is a dreadful mess that I need to sort out. But otherwise, I’m as good as there.

Oh, I still need to track down my passport.

Philip Greenspun asks if high-school students should kick the whole science/maths thing, and scratch-build bicycles instead.

It’s a surprisingly compelling argument, and ties in with the sort of stuff I was trying to do on The Big Bang this year. Rather than show how to make the rocket planes from scratch, for example, we focussed on the bit that isn’t obvious (optimised bicarb/vinegar reaction – surprisingly hard to do well). Pretty much any kid is ingenious enough to make a cardboard tube run down a washing line, I reckoned – particularly if they have a strong enough motivation to do so.

And a bicycle is an interesting choice – John, care to comment?

I’ve seen rainbows below the horizon before – from aircraft they can be complete circles – but until last weekend I’d not seen one below the horizon while sitting in a car.

Driving up the M1, afternoon rain was easing but hanging in the air, being stirred up by the traffic. As the fine droplets swirled behind the cars sweeping past in the fast lane, brilliant rainbows swept across my field of view, apparently intersecting my car at opposite wheels.

The effect persisted every time a car passed, for about ten miles. Beautiful.