Le Weekend

I'm writing this on 27 April at work, but I'm guessing that it won't get published until at least Sunday (29th) because I'm going to drive to Devon tonight and I won't get time. This means I am free to tell you about Dumpy's first steps. I've been resisting mentioning this because I wanted to take him to see his grandparents without them knowing he had started walking. I thought the surprise would be a great photo opportunity. They are occasional readers of this page you see, and that's why I didn't mention it. He's actually been walking for about 10 days now and can walk the length of the house from the kitchen, through the dining room, to the front of the living room. We don't live in a mansion, but it's a good way for a 1 year old. This is the first exciting advancement in development for ages.

Somehow, and I really have to take personal responsibility for this, my flash disk managed to get washed with one of my shirts this week. I must have left it in the pocket. I was quite sure it would die, but so far it seems to have survived the experience very well. I've backed everything up in case of future disaster, and I should buy a new one anyway, but I was quite surprised to see it working as usual last night after the ordeal. If you're reading this, it probably means that I've managed to save this entry on it also.

Today's stupid environmental story concerns a musical drama about climate change, inspired by Hurricane Katrina, which will be performed at this year's BBC Proms concerts. I bet that will be riveting.

***

Update on 30 April. Weekend was good. Dumpy did a lot of walking. Even my brother managed to make an appearance.

Two in One

The big interest news story this week is the cash for honours row. In simple terms, the labour party has been accused of giving people peerages for cash. The CPS has been handed the results of the police inquiry, and it is up to the CPS to make a decision about who, if anyone, to prosecute. In fact, it isn't quite that simple. The CPS decision ultimately rests with Lord Goldsmith, Tony Blair's friend and tennis partner, and peer. In fact he was made a peer by Tony Blair. Tony Blair was never arrested during the inquiry, but he tried to blackmail the police into not questioning him under oath. He never was questioned under oath, which could mean he was successful. The long and the short is, Tony Blair is deeply involved, and his friend, tennis partner, and peer, Lord Goldsmith gets to decide who needs prosecuting.

Of course, the dream scenario for me would be Tony Blair in court just as the local elections are about to kick off. It's not going to happen. There will be fall out, but Tony will not be prosecuted. I'd say Levy would be lucky to escape court, and Ruth Turner is also likely to be dragged in. It has been alleged that Levy asked Turner to lie to the inquiry. Whether she did or not remains to be seen.

It seems that every day sees a new stupid news story on the subject of global warming. Today it appears that Cheryl Crow has contributed the story. She claims we can all help save the world by using less lavatory paper. You couldn't make it up could you? Cheryl says we should all limit ourselves to one square per visit. I say we could do even better than that by using leaves from the garden.

*** Above written 23 April, continued today, 24 April ***

I came to work this morning on the train as usual. I decided to travel in the "quiet" carriage. Loud conversation, personal stereos, and mobile phones are banned. There was however a loud Scottish woman having an animated conversation with the person opposite her. It was all terribly British though. No one wanted to be the one to tell her to shut up. The more one travels on trains, the more one despises them.

Today's important news story concerns a loony who cut his penis off in front of staff and customers at a restaurant in London. The report claims that doctors were unable to reattach the severed appendage. I think the headline should be, "Meat Slicer in London Restaurant".

I said yesterday that every day seems to bring a new global warming story. I'm going to modify that statement to, "every day seems to bring a new environmental story". Today I found this story. A group of GM crop protesters have planted organic potatoes in a field to ruin the GM trial taking place there. Except, there was no GM trial taking place there. They got the wrong field. They actually planted potatoes in a field of cattle feed, thinking it was a GM potato crop trial. I think the interesting point here is the fact that 200, yes 200, "environmentalists" were unable to correctly identify a potato crop. one has to ask the question, are they really interested in the environment, or just the protest?

Former Spice Girl Mel B has named her child after Eddie Murphy because she claims he is the father. Murphy says he is not the father. I feel sorry for the poor child. It appears she is being used as a chess piece in a very unpleasant game.

Dim, so very dim

Everywhere one looks this morning there are huge pictures of Cho Seung-hui. Newspapers, television screens, the internet. He's everywhere. I suppose that going berserk with a gun warrants this kind of media attention, but I find it disturbing. I notice that no one wants to take any responsibility for the incident. Students are blaming the university because there was no information given. The university is blaming the police because they didn't close down the campus after the initial incident. At least one university lecturer has claimed that she referred Cho for counciling after seeing his disturbing creative writing.

There are plenty of lighter stories in the media today. Apparently crematoriums (crematoria?) are having to spend huge amounts of money upgrading to accomodate fat people. I think this is odd. You'd think crems would always have had to deal with the odd huge person, even if there are more now. Why is it only suddenly becoming an issue?

According to the Woodland Trust, "Spring is the new Summer". This meaningless comment is actually just a dramatic way of explaining the apparent early onset of Summer. This conclusion is based on research which clearly shows that hawthorn bushes are blooming several weeks early, and that migrating birds have been spotted back in the UK before May.

I'm going to take this slowly because I may have some Woodland Trust people reading this, and they are clearly very dim indeed. Global warming is by no means a foregone conclusion, and even those meathead scientists on politicians' payrolls who do make apocalyptic claims about temperature rises, are only claiming rises of fractions of a degree per decade. In simple terms, even if you believe all the BS in the media about global warming, we're talking about a rise in temperature so small that it's barely detectable over the space of a human lifetime. We can therefore disregard anecdotal evidence of bird sightings and hawthorn blossom in April, because it means precisely nothing. A Spring temperature 1 or even 2 degrees above average isn't going to move summer forward. Springs have varied by far more than that quite naturally, before we started belching greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, for centuries.

Fatness

OK, I need to talk about the new "fat" gene being reported all over the media. I'm seeing headlines like, Clear Obesity Gene Link "Found". Technically this is an acurate statement. It would appear that a genetic trait has been discovered that is far more common in obese people than non-obese. That constitutes a link. The media has however leaped upon this story and reached entirely illogical conclusions. Just because fat people have a specific gene, it doesn't mean the gene made them fat. That's like saying there are a disproportionate number of fat opera singers, therefore singing classical opera makes you fat.

This gene could be doing nothing more than making people hungry, or giving them a liking for beer and doughnuts. Or it could be completely unrelated, simply coincidence. It is well known that certain geographic areas are fatter than others. It's a cultural thing. It's also quite true to say that certain genetic traits are far more common in certain geographic areas than others. This is down to people breeding with people living in the same general areas. These two phenomena combined could certainly produce the kind of results seen here, but have nothing to do with obesity.

I didn't post Friday's entry until today. You will notice that my horse did not with the Grand Natioanl. It did however finish, and came in 6th. Only 13 horses finished the race, so I think my nag did quite well. There were 40 starters.

Kate Middleton and Prince William appear to have split up. I found myself feeling slightly sorry for William over this. He was obviously under some pressure to either anounce an engagement or break it off. He really should have had the courage to tell them all to bugger off. After the mess his parents made of their marriage, you'd think the royal family would be less anxious for him to rush into anything. The poor bloke's only 24.

It appears that a new world record has been set for simultaneous spacehopper hopping. The event was organised by UKTV Gold, to celebrate the new look to the channel. My God, they must have been short of ideas. It's difficult to imagine a more pathetic attempt at publicity.

We went down to Devon for the weekend. We tried a new travelling arrangement. I came straight home from work, bathed the little chap, and then threw him in the car. He'd already had his dinner so the theory was that he would drift off to sleep and not wake up for the entire journey. It worked quite well, but he didn't go to sleep very quickly. It was maybe 8.30 before he finally closed his eyes, but we didn't have to stop. We started back home at 10 am on Sunday and again managed to make the whole journey without stopping. It's all in the timing you see.

Lat night I went to see Loudon Wainwright III at Bristol. He was pretty good and was supported by his daughter Lucy. Lucy is strange. Not showbiz glam at all, but she has a great voice. I thought she sounded like the Cowboy Junkies.

Firday 13th

If you're British you will be well aware that brown envelopes bearing the message "HM Revenue and Customs, Private", rarely contain anything one really wants to read. In fact, if I find one of these envelopes lying on the doormat in the morning, I invariably avoid opening it until bedtime for fear of it ruining my day. This tactic doesn't work well. Opening such envelopes late at night generally results in a sleepless night followed by a ruined day. It's also worth noting that an unopened envelope can also ruin a day, simply through fear of the unknown.

The discovery of just such an envelope when I arrived home from work yesterday, therefore induced no small amount of fear in me. However, these things are not always as they seem. Well prepared for a sleepless night, and corresponding day of anxiety to follow, I opened the envelope to discover...

I've overpaid. The thieving rat-bastards owe me money. Quite a bit of money actually. Clearly Leo is ascendant in the fourth house or something, because I also splashed out £2 for a horse in the Grand National Sweepstake at work, and picked last year's winner. I'm thinking of buying a lottery ticket on the way home.

All this, and it's Friday 13th.

I just looked at the form guide. My horse seems to be at around 14:1, which is good for the Grand National. There appear to be about 40 runners this year. That's a cavalry charge.

In the news today Tony Blair seems to have made an embarrassing begging speech to the Scottish, asking them not to give him a "kicking" in the coming elections. I would personally of course like to see the corrupt scum bag soundly trounced in the coming election, and urge all Scots to do so. There are local elections coming next month in England also. I intend to put the boot in.

A vet in Taiwan has managed to have his arm bitten off by a crocodile. It's been reattached now. There's a great picture here. What amused me about this story was the part that explains how zoo staff fired at the crocodile, but the bullets bounced off him. He did drop the arm he was about to eat however.

A man from Cheshire has been charged after 540,000 pornographic images of children were found in his possession. To put that in perspective, if 1 image was displayed every second, it would take 6 days, and 6 hours to see all of them if you watched 24 hours a day. He's clearly just collecting images, and not looking at them. No one has that amount of time to spare do they? Come to think of it, no one has the time required to find and download these images do they? He must have spent his entire life at it.

Unfinished

I actually wrote an entry for yesterday, but couldn't get the embedded movie to work, which is why I posted it only just before this entry. I rather like the movie, but it probably means much more to me than it does to anyone else out there watching it. It should work now, but it's about 8MB, so it isn't exactly instant.

There seems to be a new move afoot to prevent doctors and nurses from dating former patients. I've never been able to understand this idea that doctors shouldn't date patients. Reading the BBC report, it seems that the move is an effort to kerb sexual abuse of patients. But how can a ban on relationships help? One doesn't have to be in a relationship to sexually abuse someone. And why is it just medical staff? Why are bus drivers allowed to ask their passengers out for a drink, but doctors can't ask a patient? I once got a coffee date from a wrong number at work. I dialed someone in another department by mistake. Is that wrong? It's not so much the fact that the whole concept is beyond ridiculous that gets me worked up. It's the fact that some unqualified, petty-minded dick-head from a personel department is actually in a position to control staff in this way.

Yesterday a woman from UK lost her legal fight to have her frozen embryos implanted. The woman in question had fertilized embryos frozen before having cancer treatment. The problem arose when she split from the father of the embryos and he withdrew his permission to use them. I feel sorry for the woman, but I think I'd feel more sorry for the man if the decision had gone the other way. In reality, she could not possibly have won. It seems to me that the law is very clear. It's an odd case though. If she had been allowed to have the babies, then the father is put in a very difficult position. He clearly didn't want to have children with the woman. He'd have some very serious thining to do if the children came anyway. It would be unfair on the child to be an absent father. But if he tried to be a good father, everyone would know that his heart wasn't really in it.

Pictures and Movies

We had a good Easter break. Friday was a public holiday in UK. I thought it was a holiday everywhere, but infact I found out that the French still had to work. We spent Friday stocking up on provisions for the weekend. The weather stayed really fine all weekend.

On Saturday we went to Butterfly World. I was a bit concerned that BUtterfly World might be a bit crap, but in fact, we had a pretty good time. Just £4 buys a ticket to the butterfly sanctuary, which is a big tropical greenhouse full of butterflies, unsurprisingly. They also have carp ponds and reptiles. Dumpy wasn't keen on the heat and humidity, but he did have a good time trying to catch butterflies.





On Sunday we went to the Swindon to Cricklade Railway and took a ride on the steam train. This was a really good day out. They only have about 2 miles of track, but £4 buys a ticket to ride backwards and forwards as many times as you like. They also have a workshop where they restore equipment, and somewhere to eat. We had lots of fun. The thing I liked most about it, was the fact that it wasn't over-restored. There were bits of old train lying all over the car park, and the odd window was missing from the carriages. It's entirely run by volunteers and funded by donations. You can get married there as well if you want.





Yesterday we went to see a real working windmill, at Wilton. Sadly, it wasn't actually making flour while we were there, but on June 9th we will go back and then they should be actually grinding. It was still great to visit the mill and we had a tour which started at the very top and finished on the gallery at the bottom. There were four floors with steep steps between each. I managed to navigate these steps with a child strapped to me. There were several gasps from onlookers, but it wasn't too difficult.





Finally, I present to you a short movie I have made in celebration of Dumpy's first birthday.



*Edit - I just discovered that my embeddign doesn't work with the Firefox browser. So, until I get around to ficxing that, click here to load the movie manually.

Oh, and one other thing, happy birthday to my brother.

Coincidence

You know, I love being a father. That's not sarcasm or even exaggeration, I really do. But there are times when one really misses that hassle free life that becomes only a faint speck in the rear view mirror when offspring arrive. We were all fixed to go and spend a day with friends next weekend. Alas, it all fell to pieces when one of our party, also a father, announced that he had to call it all off for family reasons. Instead, he suggested, we should all meet for dinner at Sweeny Todd's pie shop in Reading on Friday evening. All my bachelor friends signed up for it right away of course.

Then there was me. I have to get from work in Oxford, to home in Swindon, to pie shop in Reading. That's a two hour ordeal. Then at some point during the evening I have to deal with Dumpy's dinner, bath, and bed time. Bed time is usually 8pm. I haven't quite given up on this idea yet, but it doesn't look likely. And it was something I really did want to do. I haven't seen the boys in ages.

There isn't much in the news today that I find very interesting. The big story is the release of 15 British military men and women captured by Iran. I'm glad they were released and I think it was hilarious that Iran accused them of being in Iranian waters, then gave their position as in Iraqi waters, then changed their mind about the position and released new coordinates in Iranian waters. But I can't say I find the story interesting as such, but it is clearly important.

At the other end of the scale, I found a story that was not important, but was much more interesting. An Italian film which features a marketing executive meeting a man who appears to be Jesus, has had its release date postponed because the Jesus character is seen drinking a can of Coke, and the Coca-cola company don't think it "appropriate". There's an irony here isn't there. I never drink any coke or other canned drinks, and I have no time at all for religion, and here I am reporting on both, after the drinks company complained about the advertising of their product. That's really effective advertising on both the part of the film and the drinks company, and the film is about a marketing executive. Coincidence - well it could be.

Countable Nouns

I was struck with a problem this morning because my season ticket for the train expired. Do I purchase a new season ticket even though there are two bank holidays over the next seven days, or do I just buy daily tickets. I had to do some quick mental arithmetic at the ticket booth. In fact it wasn't difficult. Daily tickets cost £13 each way for the 15 minute journey, making it about the same price as hiring a private jet. A weekly season ticket is £52 and will cover three journeys, making it just mildly extortionate.

I would normally have purchased a ticket last night on the way home, but due to the fact that I left my bank card at the petrol station on Saturday, I had to do it this morning. Last week I tried to buy a weekly season ticket on Friday to start on the following Tuesday, because I was working from home on Monday. I couldn't do it however, because their system won't let me buy a season ticket starting on a Tuesday until after 12 pm on Monday. I find this astounding. First Great Western must have actually paid some developer to add that function to the system. I could understand it if it was a bug, but they actually paid to add a function that serves no purpose other than to piss passengers off and make them late.

A survey on the religious habits of the British people has been conducted by Tearfund. One should always be wary I think of any survey conducted by an organisation with an obvious bias, and Tearfund is a Christian organisation. Nonetheless, I'm interested in such things and I downloaded a copy of the report. The report throws out a plethora of statistics including:

53% of Britain is Christian
15% of UK adults attend a church monthly
22% of Londoners are regular church goers

I find some of these figures difficult to believe, but they apparently have data to back up their claims. So I thought I'd flick through their report and see if I could find out anything about the survey they conducted. And there it was, tucked away in the small print in Appendix 2:

After coding and editing the data, weighting was applied to correct for any minor imbalances in the achieved sample profile. The weighting matrix incorporated sex, age, social grade, and region. Cross tabulations were produced for each question against key demographic variables. These data remain confidential to Tearfund.

In other words, they tampered with the data and they aren't telling us how. I suppose we should be grateful that they do at least give us enough information to assure us that the figures are meaningless. Incidentally, what is this new fashion for for treating "data" as a countable noun? "Data" is like "Water", it's uncountable. You can't say "these water", it has to be "this water". Likeweise, you can't have "a water", or "a data", because they are uncountable. I hate these jumped-up, pretentious little shits messing with my language.

They do say on the report that the survey questions are available on request, so I may try and get hold of a copy.

OK, this week it restarts

All last week I tried and failed to write anything for these pages. Tihs is due to workload in the office and workload of being a father. We do have Easter weekend coming up howevre and that means I should get a few things done.

I did actually write something at work today but, fool that I am, I managed to leave it there, and now I am at home.

The weekend was fairly ordianry. We went up to Devon, or is that down to Devon. It was the first long car journey with Dumpy's new seat. It was fine. He seems to have gallons of snot currently. I got fed up with the length of his hair and the fact that everyone thought he was a girl, so I cut it. It turns out I wasn't meant to bea barber. The hair is shorter, but not exactly stylish now. He doesn't care of course, which is the main thing.

I managed ot leave my cash card at the petrol station on Saturday after using it for petrol. I called them a couple of hours later and they told me they had it. But I couldn't pick it up again until today. I hate when I do that. I do it often.

Tomorrow I will make an effort to write a proper entry, and for the rest of the week. I really don't like to neglect this place.