Hugos there

For no other reason than that I've seen several other bloggers do this; for public information; and for the education and enlightenment of those who look to me for the same:

The complete list of Hugo Award-winning best novels to date, with the ones I've read marked in bold.

• 2005, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke
• 2004, Paladin of Souls, Lois McMaster Bujold
• 2003, Hominids, Robert J. Sawyer
• 2002, American Gods, Neil Gaiman
• 2001, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J. K. Rowling (see what happens if you let fanboys vote?)
  
• 2000, A Deepness in the Sky, Vernor Vinge
• 1999, To Say Nothing of the Dog, Connie Willis
• 1998, Forever Peace, Joe Haldeman
• 1997, Blue Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson
• 1996, The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson
• 1995, Mirror Dance, Lois McMaster Bujold
• 1994, Green Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson
• 1993, Doomsday Book, Connie Willis
• 1993, A Fire Upon the Deep, Vernor Vinge
• 1992, Barrayar, Lois McMaster Bujold
• 1991, The Vor Game, Lois McMaster Bujold
• 1990, Hyperion, Dan Simmons
• 1989, Cyteen, C. J. Cherryh
• 1988, The Uplift War, David Brin
• 1987, Speaker for the Dead, Orson Scott Card
• 1986, Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
• 1985, Neuromancer, William Gibson
• 1984, Startide Rising, David Brin
• 1983, Foundation's Edge, Isaac Asimov (unfortunately)
• 1982, Downbelow Station, C. J. Cherryh (I think)
  
• 1981, The Snow Queen, Joan D. Vinge
• 1980, The Fountains of Paradise, Arthur C. Clarke
• 1979, Dreamsnake, Vonda N. McIntyre (another I think)
• 1978, Gateway, Frederik Pohl
• 1977, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, Kate Wilhelm
• 1976, The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
• 1975, The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin
• 1974, Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
• 1973, The Gods Themselves, Isaac Asimov
• 1972, To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip José Farmer
• 1971, Ringworld, Larry Niven
• 1970, The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
• 1969, Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
• 1968, Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
• 1967, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Robert A. Heinlein (sorta - gave up halfway through, if that)
• 1966, Dune, Frank Herbert
• 1966, "...And Call Me Conrad" (This Immortal), Roger Zelazny
• 1965, The Wanderer, Fritz Leiber
• 1964, "Here Gather the Stars" (Way Station), Clifford D. Simak
• 1963, The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
• 1962, Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
• 1961, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M., Miller Jr
• 1960, Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
• 1959, A Case of Conscience, James Blish
• 1958, The Big Time, Fritz Leiber
• 1956, Double Star, Robert A. Heinlein
• 1955, They'd Rather Be Right (The Forever Machine), Mark Clifton & Frank Riley
• 1953, The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester

Actually, that's a quite respectable turn-out. And many I still have. I'll carefully not rate them by enjoyability: even suggesting that 'Foundation's Edge' wasn't great could get me blacklisted in some quarters.

Pizza Stopping Service

Just tried to book a table at Pizza Express.

"Yeah, if I can make the pen work ... Hang on ..." [Muffled, to someone else at other end.] "I can't make this work ..." [Back to me] "Can you call back? I don't have a pen that works."

NOT hugely impressed.

Weekend ramblings

By the standards of some of my friends, this isn't a book collection. This is a sample, and not a particularly representative one either. But this is my SF collection, post pruning* and proudly installed on its new shelves. Just. The ones lying flat at the ends are surplus copies of The Xenocide Mission and The New World Order.

[*I had to be ruthless. Was I likely to read it again? Was it a classic? Would Best Beloved want to read it? Should the Boy want to read it? If it couldn't score a yes in at least one of the above, out it went.]

So, my books have a home at last: not just these, but the non-SF titles, the reference library etc, all safely ensconced. Just a small little tweak but suddenly this flat became much more like a normal home again over the weekend.

Meanwhile, as OneTel efficiently disconnected Best Beloved's phone a week before they were meant to, the Boy decided he no longer had any reason at all to keep his computer at home, so it has moved in here, a week ahead of the rest of the furniture. And been linked to this computer via a wireless network. Which, thanks to a passing Teenage Whiz Kid, has been encrypted. Now, I know I work for a company that by the end of this year will have launched a nationwide 10 Gbit/s fibre optic multiplexing bandwidth channelled network that links the nation's universities, research councils, schools etc ... but I'm still impressed, mostly because I set up the wireless bit. We're making progress.

An interesting discovery was that a book in my reference library has a photo of the grave of Teenage Whiz Kid's great great uncle. This was a man called Herbert Cave, who was a steward on the Titanic and died when the ship went down. He's buried in Halifax. On his body was found a list of the first class cabins and their passengers. This is the only known record of which passengers went where, which was very useful for James Cameron on his Titanic dives and other researchers.

TWK decided to show off by finding a proxy server in Australia that could generate a hit on my web site. He was a little deflated to find that there were three other hits from Aus too, presumably genuine. (Did I mention I'm finally on Google Analytics, six months after applying?) His next challenge is to get me a hit from Antarctica. Watch this space.

Alfred of Abingdon

Not everything gastronomic in this household is an unqualified success, though the odds are improved when the cook doesn't leave the naan bread unattended to demonstrate proudly to his elders that he's got a spark out of the gas lighter.

Sorting my life out

Ever since February, when the Magician Electrician rudely demanded access to the floorboards beneath where my books were stored - and then to the floorboards beneath the place to which I had thoughtfully moved them in advance - my book collection has been shunted from pillar to post around the flat. Recently it suffered the final indignity of having about 300 titles weeded out of it as I face up to the realisation there's not enough room for them plus three humans here.

This is what's left ... of the science fiction. Sorted, as you can see, on the Boy's bedroom floor into alphabetical order by author. Now to be sorted into alphabetical order within author name and put on their new, final home - the shelves that went up in the living room last week.

Then the remaining books - about the same number again - are to be sorted into fiction, non-fiction, reference, comic, religion etc and have the same treatment. All ultimately to be blended with Best Beloved's own collection, of course.

Obsessive? Me?

Foxy

For lunch at the end of my first week working in Oxford, I was taken to the Fox Inn on Boars Hill. A week beforehand, on my last day working in London, I had been sitting at my desk looking through a street grimed window at the traffic ten feet away, queuing at the lights at the top of Pentonville Road. My desk vibrated with the engines of the big puff-wagons. Now I was looking out across the Vale of the White Horse on a lovely sunny day.

The Fox has been special to me ever since.

So it was good to be there last night with friends David and Tom. The garden has been improved since my initiation; decking has been installed to take the edge off the sharp slope and tall trees surround it, buffeting in the wind but not letting much through (though it was still bloody cold). We could chat and catch up and be astonished at the annual miracle of being able to see each other clearly at 10 o'clock in the evening.

Happy solstice!

If it hurts, take drugs

I have a bite on my foot, about an inch back from the big toe, right over the bone. Two Sundays ago I was wearing sandals and walking over recently cut grass; when my foot started to itch beneath a sandal strap I assumed a blade of grass had got inside and the end had dug in. When I had a chance to inspect it, there was a perfectly round little red mound, and a perfectly round blob of blood on top of it. Probably not grass, I thought.

Some little six legged brute must have got in and taken the chance to inject its poison into my metatarsals because it's spread. There is now a mound the size of a typical mosquito bite; a bruised area around it, about the size of a 10p piece, covered by a thin ridge of hardened skin; and a reddened area beyond that, about the size of a 50p piece. Photos can be provided if enough people ask.

You can tell this is serious, because last night I put the American Cream on it.

The American Cream, according to the tube, is Hydrocortisone Cream USP 0.5%. I like American pharmaceuticals. I like the way it doesn't try to sweettalk you into buying New Improved HealySkin(tm) Lotion. It's quite open about the fact that you are about to rub chemicals into your epidermis. A couple of years ago I was in Boston for Worldcon, and I slightly overdid the exploring, History Trail etc., on foot, on a warm, humid day. I got a small but very intense heat rash, so I went into a chemist on Huntingdon Avenue, near the YMCA where I was staying. I bought the American Cream, applied it, and the rash was gone the next day.

Since then the cream has been carefully preserved, and only brought out for really serious occasions.

Likewise the American Pills that I bought at the same establishment, when I pulled my back. These do have a name - Aleve. Small, blue tablets (hmm ...) in a little triangular plastic bottle that take your pain, screw it up into a little ball and toss it away with contempt. Also for serious occasions. For normal aches and pains I just make do with Tesco brand paracetemol.

And the American Earplugs. I bought these on a whim, unlike the other items, but I had perceived the need because the Y wasn't air conditioned, I had to sleep with the window open, and the room backed onto the air conditioning equipment of a big building belonging to Northeastern University. I've used earplugs before but those were just little foam plugs that simply don't work. These, though, are little waxy balls that stop up your ear hermetically. Nothing gets in or out. Perfect for sleeping in the Y; also perfect for sleeping on the flight back, for recent summery mornings when the bloody birds start cheeping at 5a.m. right outside your window, and for when my former neighbour from hell, the double glazing salesman, was screaming his idiosyncratic terms of endearment ("you f---ing c--t, you f---ing f---ing c--t") at his partner at 3 in the morning.

I was, possibly, a little rude about Americans a couple of days ago. So let me apologise, and just say there are many more plus points to the US of A.

RTD, WTF?

Saturday's Dr Who managed to straddle two time zones which, like the fate of the monster, pulled it apart into an incoherent mess.

Half of it was set in the here and now, the post-modern era of smart, intelligent Dr Who that has been with us since Christopher Ecclestone blew up the department store last year. A touching and well acted story about loneliness and friendship - about a sense of community and human worth evolving from a handful of very different people thrown together by circumstance. Really quite charming.

The other half was set twenty years ago, as the original series assumed the vertical position immediately prior to its final nosedive into the depths. We had a monster that was quite clearly a man in a rubber suit, played by a man in a rubber suit, with no effort on the part of the actor or the producers to disguise the fact that it was a man in a rubber suit, or the identity of said man, and (the cardinal sin) not even trying to take it seriously. Dr Who can be pretty preposterous at times. Everyone knows that. But even at the heights of zaniness it has kept one foot on the ground. The evil that the Doctor has always fought has always been evil. It has torn innocent lives apart. Stopping it has been a moral imperative, and the Doctor has known it.

By playing it for laughs, they gave the evil all the threat and menace of a strand of overcooked spaghetti. Bringing back Bonnie Langford would be an improvement.

And I never thought I would be saying that.

Drool

Take a good look because it's the closest you're ever getting.

These are orange pancakes with chocolate sauce. You can find the recipe here. We ate them last night courtesy of the Boy's cooking. Yum.

Never mind looking for a wife who can cook (though I'm getting one of those too). Look for a stepson.

And now that I've actually watched it ...

Well, it passed the time while I was doing the ironing. I watched the Horizon programme about the sperm bank.

The bank was started by Robert Graham to collect the germinal material of Nobel prize winners, scientists, artists ... all kinds of intelligent and successful people. He suffered a setback when the frankly barking and objectionable eugenicist (and inventor of the transistor) William Shockley came out in support of him, but otherwise did pretty well.

Ben says: it follows that if a successful, wealthy, white collar AB couple are unable to have children on their own, so resort to outsourcing, then they will want kids that are as close to what their own children would have been as possible - hence, will want the sperm of a successful, wealthy, white collar AB male. So, no argument there. (First parenthesis: I couldn't help noticing there were no black donors shown ... but that might be more a reflection on the US in the 70s and 80s when the sperm was collected. I honestly don't know if there were black American Nobel prize winners then, or have been since. A topic for later research.) (Second parenthesis: I can understand the parents' motivation, I can't understand the donors'. I can't see how anyone would want to let complete strangers have their kids without their knowledge.)

However, Graham's basic concept was surely flawed. Someone once suggested to Einstein that he should always carry a notebook so he could record his good ideas. He replied: "oh, I very rarely have any good ideas." Yes, the good ideas that he had changed the entire face of science and the world around him, but they were few and far between. So, chances of a kid from the bank coming up with a revolutionary theory about the time/space continuum ... quite slim.

Every one of the bank's children spoken to - four or five out of over 200, so, okay, not representative - agreed that even though they've done pretty well in life so far, and their DNA will have played a part in that, they owe just as much to the fact that they were raised in a loving and nurturing environment by stable, level headed parents. And indeed, Graham only ever sold the goods to couples from a well to do, secure and steady background. Which might raise the question - could he have done just as much good, if not more, by pouring his money and his considerable enthusiasm and energy into more socially useful programmes aimed at bettering conditions generally?

Funniest bit: the aforementioned Professor Jim Bidlack demonstrating the best way to masturbate in a motel bathroom ... at least, if you want to preserve the product for future use. Quite a big if. It reminded me of when US Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders was forced to resign after suggesting that the subject should be covered in the school curriculum, and some wag remarked that only Americans would need lessons.

Open to abuse

Has sperm ever come up at a dinner party you've attended? Personally I haven’t ticked that particular box in the great checklist of life. One Professor Jim Bidlack, however, must have found the small talk rather dull at one such party because he was asked there and then if he would provide a sample for the Repository for Germinal Choice. And did. To judge by his picture on the BBC site there was a photographer standing by to record the moment.

This blog doesn't talk much about sperm – well, maybe once – so let’s splash out. Horizon’s "The Genius Sperm Bank" will be broadcast tonight (15 June) at 9pm on BBC1, safely after the watershed. Apparently it spills the story of Robert Klark Graham, millionaire inventor of the shatterproof spectacle lense. Worried about the state of the world, he decided to take matters into his own hands and created the world’s first catalogue-based sperm bank, which only took – indeed, actively solicited – deposits from very clever people. Such was its success, and the demand for its product, that it could hold its own against the plethora of lesser institutions that handled the accounts of hard-up students and other impoverished types who wanted to take a load off their worries. Funding was pulled in the late 90s after Graham’s death and it closed – account cleaned out, assets flogged off, inventory liquidated. But it single-handedly changed the face of the sperm bank industry and its legacy lives on.

"There was so little sperm, never enough sperm," says former staff member Julianna McKillop. Perhaps they were doing it wrong, but it’s really quite easy to whip up several million of the little blighters for quite modest outlay. Get a grip. Be your own best friend. No need to stew in your own juices.

And so on.

Better late than never

Back in 2000 I was one of the 6.5 million visitors to the Millennium Dome. Senior Godson was approaching his fifth birthday and we wanted to give him something to remember 2000 by. It was either that or the divorce of his parents. As it was he got both, but at least the Dome was slightly – and I say slightly – more positive.

The Millennium Dome should have been a terrible warning for us all about New Labour – magnificent promises that you can tell just by looking simply won’t work, but Tony insists loudly that they will and so they follow them through anyway. The exhibits were like a primary school’s science fair, only more rubbish. The much vaunted Body Zone was a hot, over crowded, rubber lined cave where you shuffled through a series of papier mache fistulae between organs with as much relevance to the layout of the human body as a mid-period Picasso. You emerged feeling almost as depressed as a dead suicide bomber who has just discovered that actually the promise was for 72 Virginians.

But, all things told, it wasn’t a bad day out. Blackadder Back & Forth was fun, not least for its French-bashing, and the central stage show was impressive. The brand new all-original Peter Gabriel composition seemed to be mostly offcuts from his fourth album but he was probably down to his last couple of million and needed the money.

I’m 90% certain I didn’t return home with a millennium time capsule, yet somehow in the intervening six years I have acquired one. It has a raffle ticket stuck on it, which is a clue as to how I might have got it, though I have no memory of the event. I thought nothing of it until the Boy discovered (a) the capsule and (b) the loose floorboard in his room, which today will be covered up by carpet; and if this one lasts as long as its predecessor, the board won't be seeing daylight again for a long, long time. So we are having an emergency, six-years-too-late millennium inhumation. Let’s see, what to put in it. A photo of the three of us. Maybe a newspaper – possibly a TV guide for this week, but on the other hand, why depress the people of the future? I thought of the Collected Works of Ben, but the capsule is too small for a CD (bad foresight there, guys), the floppy is almost extinct as a medium, and there’s no way I’m sacrificing an expensive memory stick for the task. Anyway, the thought of the future being Windows compatible is even sadder than the thought of the future seeing what our TV listings were like. So posterity might get a print out of the home page, and of this blog. Maybe some hair cuttings so we can all be cloned in the future.

Civilisation could be rebuilt from the contents of this small little tube. That's quite a responsibility.

Escalation

First, there was the sound so high pitched that only teenagers could hear it. It was put into a device that could be played in places where the tribes like to gather - shopping malls etc. - to disperse them without even realising it.

A few days ago, m'friend Simon reported that the teens have struck back by adopting it as a ringtone so that only they can hear their phones go off in class.

The Today programme this morning now reports that Sydney shopkeepers have resorted to playing Barry Manilow to move the herd on. I can pretty well guarantee this will never be used as a teenager's ringtone, but I await the next development with interest. Sooner or later it will cross that indefinable line into cruel & unusual; in fact I'd say it's nudging the line already.

Scrofulee, scrofula

It was once believed that the touch of the King (or Queen) could cure scrofula. Scrofula (which I had always assumed to be vaguely venereal) is a disfiguring form of tuberculosis that affects the lymph nodes of the neck, leading to unsightly swellings. King George I put an end to the practice as "too catholic".

Now, whatever your issues with the Church of Rome, "too catholic" (or "zu katholisch" - he didn't speak English) hardly sounds like a scientifically rigorous reason for discarding the practice without some kind of test. I'll bet good money, at least a fiver, that no one has ever conducted a double blind medical trial on the subject. For all we know, it still works. With the NHS in the state it is, and TB figures slightly on the rise, I say that if we have this useful resource then it badly needs to be researched.

• Does it only apply to the reigning sovereign, or to anyone in the line of succession too?
• Do other members of the family have it in diluted form - for instance, could the touch of three or four lesser royals be the same as one touch by Her Majesty?
• Does it immunise in advance, or do you have to have the disease to be cured of it?
• Can it also be passed on by waving, or is physical contact the key thing?
• Will Charles get the power the moment his mother dies, or will he need to be formally crowned? (Now, there's a man who will appreciate the non-traditional approach to disease management.)
• Could Charles act preventatively by touching people now, but the cure only takes effect when he becomes king?
• What is the active agent in the process? Is it the Queen's DNA? Pheromones? Is it something that could be isolated and mass produced in a lab? Could it be transmitted more efficiently by tablets, injections or sprays?

I'm sending in my grant application now.

Happy devil's birthday

Yes, it's the sixth of the sixth (in 06), the alleged birthday of the antichrist (ever since The Omen raised the idea as long ago as, what, 1976?), and pregnant women who were scheduled for inducements or caesarians today are asking if they can be rescheduled, I hear.

Believe it or not, I did know a D. Thorne born on this day at school (he was born before he went to school but you know what I mean) - however, the D didn't stand for Damien.

Ansible Information have a very handy little freebie download (see http://www.ansible.co.uk/ai/freebies.html) called BEAST.ZIP, "written to spoof mystic numerological connections like the awesome discovery that, using a cipher table in which A=100, B=101, C=102 (etc), the letters of HITLER add to 666". You can enter ANY text string and get 666 out of it. Amaze your friends!

The Number of the Beast is, of course, an unbelievably crap novel by Robert Heinlein that should not be read by anyone, least of all anyone who has ever read anything good by Robert Heinlein and who wants their memories preserved intact. As a public service, and just in case you haven't seen the countless versions doing the rounds on the internet, I reproduce here the following variations on the dread Number (with thanks to Molly):

• 666 Biblical Number of the Beast
• 660 Approximate Number of the Beast
• DCLXVI Roman Numeral of the Beast
• 665 Number of the Beast's Older Brother
• 667 Number of the Beast's Younger Sister
• 668 Number of the Beast's Neighbour
• 999 Number of the Australian Beast
• 333 Number of the Semi-Beast
• 66 Number of the Downsized Beast
• 6, uh..., I forget Number of the Blond Beast
• 666.0000 Number of the High Precision Beast
• 665.9997856 Number of the Beast on a Pentium
• 0.666 Number of the Millibeast
• X / 666 Beast Common Denominator
• 0.00150150... Reciprocal of the Beast
• -666 Opposite of the Beast
• 666i Imaginary Number of the Beast
• 6.66 x 102 Scientific Notation of the Beast
• 25.8069758... Square Root of the Beast
• 443556 Square of the Beast
• 1010011010 Binary Number of the Beast
• 1232 Octal of the Beast
• 29A Hexidecimal of the Beast
• 2.8235 Log of the Beast
• 6.5913 Ln of the Beast
• 1.738 x 10289 Anti-Log of the Beast
• 66.6% Tax Rate of the Beast
• $665.95 Retail Price of the Beast
• $710.36 Price of the Beast plus 6.66% Sales Tax
• $55.50 Monthly Payments for Beast, in 12 easy installments
• 666 F Oven Temperature for Cooking "Roast Beast"
• Lotus 6-6-6 Spreadsheet of the Beast
• Word 6.66 Word Processor of the Beast
• Windows 666 Bill Gates' Personal Beast Operating System
• #666666 Font Color of the Beast
• i66686 CPU of the Beast
• WD-666 Spray Lubricant of the Beast

And finally, apparently Hollywood is working on a sequel to the Da Vinci Code - I Know What You Had Last Supper.

A fitting end

I'm working from home, it's my lunchbreak and I can't get into the kitchen, which is very frustrating.

But I don't mind because - freude schöner götterfunken and let fireworks soar majestically into the sky - the vinyl fitters are here. Fitting, appropriately enough, vinyl. And not just to the kitchen floor but to the living room and bathroom too. Having been stood up without even an apology from not one but two vinyl fitters already (all from the list of recommended bods supplied by Mays World of Carpets) it's worth celebrating.

The first guy on the list, who fitted the bedroom carpet, was a star and we would gladly use him again - except that he doesn't do vinyl. Completely different skillset, apparently. So we worked our way down the list, ploughing bravely through the ones who don't answer, or respond to voicemails, or (q.v.) show up ... and finally we seem to have arrived.

And I get to sit at my computer on a glorious day in shorts and t-shirt, which I don't really feel comfortable with at work. So everyone's a winner, except that I go hungry until they're finished in there. Or pop out to McD's. I think I'll go hungry until they're finished in there.

Names and contact details of the ones who showed up will gladly be shared with anyone who asks; likewise details of those who didn't. It's usually nice to think that you can just vote with your feet and not use the services of someone who lets you down ... except that they presumably have so much work on they won't even notice. Which is nice for them.

So, again, everyone a winner, and I'm slightly hungrier than when I started.

Not X-cellent

X-Men 3 is okay, not brilliant, mostly because of what it does with Magneto. In previous films he and Xavier were opposite sides of the same coin - you could see where he was coming from, even if you didn't necessarily agree with him, and that made him interesting. But here he just goes for all-out bonkers and ends up no different from the "normals" that he despises so much.

Still, the movie has a higher body count than previous entries, the identity of some of those bodies comes as a surprise, and there are few sights more inspiring than a squad of six angry X-Men leaping into action to defend the innocent. I also have a friend in San Francisco who, given the city's propensity for earthquakes, refuses to take the tunnel under the bay; after seeing this he might also think twice about taking the bridge.

But, children, there are two lines that no character in a film should ever, ever speak, and Magneto utters one of them. It is: "what have I done?", as the full impact of the error of his ways finally blasts into his frontal lobe. Any script writer who perpetrates that authorial abomination should be hung upside down in a scorpion pit next to whoever thought it was a good idea in Episode 3 for Darth to go "No-o-o-o-o-!"

Which is the other one.

So that's a stag night

So I managed not to end up chained naked to a lamp post, or put on the sleeper train to Aberdeen (difficult, from Oxford), or lap danced by a stripper. But with the superior intelligence and moral endowment of my friends (though possibly not my relatives), I would have been surprised if I had.

My stag do was a thoroughly pleasant meal at thoroughly pleasant Browns, followed by "Buddy" at the New Theatre and retirement to the Grapes thereafter. And if you can think of a better way to get a seller of kidnap insurance, an unemployed actory type, and a pair of PhDs in respectively nuclear fusion and lasers all chatting together at one end of a table, you're welcome to suggest it.

"Buddy" starts as a no-great-surprises run-through of Buddy Holly's career from first recording contract to the first buds of real fame, including the obligatory bust-ups over creative differences and a reminder that even the sweet, preppy boy from Texas could be a right git for his art. That's Act 1, whose purpose is essentially to make him famous enough that most of Act 2 can just be a recreation of the gig (complete with souvenir programmes handed out to the audience) on the fateful night of February 2nd, 1959, led by Buddy with the able support of the Big Bopper, Ritchie Valens, and Ritchie's very tight trousers and amazing performing roll of socks. (Bringing to mind Edmund Blackadder's critique of the Prince of Wales's stance: "Here are my genitals, please kick them.") Never wise to have the support steal the show from the lead, but the highlight had to be the Big Bopper doing "Chantilly Lace"; still, the rest was pretty neat too. Odd to think that Buddy was just a year younger than my dad.

So, thanks to Andy 1, Andy 2, Dal, David, Derek, George, Jonathan, Marcus, Richard, Rupert and Steve for a time that could only have been improved by slightly more - some! - legroom in the New Theatre. See you on the day if not before.

Whatsa matter?

Someone recently came to this site via a search for "Joe Dolce Scientologist".

Oh come on, you are surely KIDDING!

Though come to think of it, it would make a ghastly kind of sense.

Whatsa matter you? Hey!
Joined a strange new cult.
Auditing my engrams, Hey!
Get a great result.
Soon I will be clear, lord of time and space
Ah, shuttuppa your face.

Oh, hang on. Wrong Joe Dolce.

I think.

Three shades of blue weekend

Let's see, a bank holiday weekend; three days off work; that must mean ... ooh, I remember, decorating.

And we decorated good.

• Three rolls of vinyl purchased for the floors of three various rooms (thank you, Vampire Plagues royalty cheque).
• The Boy's bedroom-to-be done out in different shades of blue, as per the specifications of the future occupant, which combine when you're cleaning the brushes into a tint that gives your fingernails a fascinating cyanotic hue.
• Carpet removed from the Boy's bedroom and taken to the dump, on the grounds of, why not? We're on a roll!
• Hoover motor burned out siphoning up the resulting dust.
• Everything, and I mean everything, yes EVERYTHING, from the three rooms to be vinyled moved into said Boy's bedroom-to-be.

Him: "Why do we have to use my room?
Me: "Because it's empty."
Him: "Why not your room?"
Me: "Because I'm sleeping in it."
Him: "Why didn't we decorate my room first?" [Pause] "Oh, because then you'd have nowhere to sleep ..."

He generally gets there if you give him time.

• And finally, the bathroom floor taken up: "It's the happiest day of my life", the Boy quavered with a tear in his eye, as he set to with a crowbar. The floor was fairly tatty cork tiles, glued to a plywood underlay which had previously been nailed down - probably with a nail gun of the Kalashnikov variety set to "fully automatic and then some". The plywood came up, the approx. half a billion nails stayed down and had to be removed one by one by one by one by ... and so on.

So, three days well spent.

On the way to the dump, I was told "you should definitely blog that." Unfortunately that's all I remember of the conversation. But I'm sure it was good, whatever it was.

In his own words

Should it be of interest to anyone (and I like to think it might to some), there's an interview with yours truly here ... (Conducted back in January, but delayed (I gather) due to the cat wiping the interviewer's hard drive.)

I know, I'm never satisfied

I have long cringed at the fact that one of the country's oldest Christian youth organisations is called Crusaders. There have to be better role models for the King of Kings than a bunch of bigoted genocidal medieval thugs. If there was an Islamic youth organisation called Jihad, how good would that look? But Crusaders has just celebrated its centenary, and it was named in an age of different sensibilities.

But no more! Because it has celebrated its centenary by changing its name to -- Urban Saints.

Whether they still sound like a gangsta-rap girlband in another 100 years remains to be seen ...

http://www.crusaders.org.uk/urbansaints.html

Erotic exoticism

For reasons that let's not go into, I did a Google search on "exotic punishments". And yes, I spelt it right. Even so, I got a lot of hits not just for "exotic punishments" but also "erotic punishments". The "erotic" was highlighted, showing that Google must have treated it as a search term.

I'm a little disturbed by this. Does Google equate exotic and erotic? Or does it just know from bitter experience that a lot of people who type one word mean the other, so it proactively caters for their need?

Either way, if you search for exotic holiday destinations then you're presumably in for a surprise.

Hello peopulll

Michael Howard, the Today programme reports, has written an open letter to John Reid to advise him in his new job as Home Secretary. The letter draws on Howard's four-year experience in the same job.

To save Mr Reid from having to run out and buy the papers, here's the gist of said experience.

1. Read the Daily Mail each day. Tailor your policies accordingly.
2. If it has two legs, a heartbeat and moves, sack it. A slim department is an efficient department.
   
3. It's not your fault. Accept no blame.
4. If asked a direct question by Jeremy Paxman, on no account give a direct answer. No one will notice you squirm.

You're welcome.

Things that make us British

For no apparent reason that I could gather, Saturday morning saw a Punch & Judy show and a display of Scottish dancing by ladies and gentlemen of, um, a certain age in Abingdon marketplace. Followed by the band of the Abingdon Sea Scouts playing tunes on those dinky little xylophone-on-a-pole things they have, accompanied by rattetty-tattetty drums and a couple of basses. Tunes I recognised were the Blue Peter hornpipe, Highland Cathedral, and - the piece de resistance - The Surfaris' Wipe Out.

Bless.

Meanwhile, Cybermen Part 2 was considerably better with several surprises I didn't see coming. Just busy trying not to hate the guy who wrote it, for being 26.

Transports of delight

Now face it, watching the A380 land at Heathrow was cool. Seeing something the size of a flying airscraper always will be. I found it strangely disappointing at first, though, watching on the TV, because proportionately it seems to be the same shape as a much smaller plane. It's not exactly the Fireflash or even something interestingly distinct like a 747. It was the undercarriage that finally did it - a similar arrangement to the 747, designed to take its massive weight when it plonks down on the runway. Once I'd made that mental adjustment, I looked at the rest of it with fresh eyes and thought, bloody hell, it's big.

That's Ben the boy technophile. Ben the wishy washy greeny type also admits that it's basically a bigger and better injector of water vapour and CO2 into our planet's atmosphere. Okay, it's engines are greener and more efficient than much of the competition - say, Concorde on full afterburn - but it's all relative. I'm forced to concede that fleets of these things blocking out the sun won't be great. So we can fly to Australia in one take - why are we in such a hurry to get there? (Sorry, Aussies.)

Ben the Would Be Planetary Dictator (because he concedes that's the only way any of this will happen) says: bring back airships. Look, they don't all have to explode (use helium) or break in two (use modern construction materials). And if watching a flying skyscraper is cool, how much cooler is it to see one drift gently past instead, politely ignoring the outraged yells of gravity? So a transatlantic crossing takes days instead of hours. So what? With modern IT, your physical separation from the office wouldn't be a problem either. You could put in all the work you needed and relax, stretch your legs, get a good night's sleep and everything else.

But there are some people who will always be in a hurry, so let me unveil the second prong of my transport strategy. Ekranoplanes. The Caspian Sea Monster could only possibly be out-cooled if someone invented a real-life Thunderbird 2. Okay, so it doesn't work in rough weather, making it currently a very expensive way of getting across a millpond. But that's why we need to spend money on research, perfecting the design and ironing out the creases. It would be like the old days of the steamships, except that now we would get fleets of these things cruising between Southampton and New York. And they could fly over the icebergs.

You know it makes sense.

UPDATE: The KM Ekranoplan pictured above, I learn, is 30 metres longer than a Boeing 747. That's 100m, as opposed to a piddling 70. Those things were BIG - and as we all know, boys, a big machine = a cool machine. Size matters..

Gor blimey

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4996410.stm

"A sex slavery cult based on a series of 1960s science fiction novels has been uncovered by police in Darlington ..."

Which is actually grossly inaccurate reporting, as the most recent Gor novel was published in 2001.

I bet Skynet never had this problem

The Calvin & Hobbes site has suddenly decided it requires Flash Player 8 to display an inanimate cartoon strip. I don't have the required administrator privileges to install it, so I either have to sacrifice a virgin chicken to IT Support at the next full moon or read it at home. Read cartoons during my hours off work? What's this outlandish concept?

Meanwhile, the ordering facility at allofmp3 has been temporarily unavailable for a quite unreasonable definition of "temporary".

So all in all, current mood: technosceptic.

Cyber sore eyes

The original cybermen were just plain silly. They sounded like Charles Hawtrey speaking into a vocoder and looked about as menacing. During the 60s, they got more menacing and their greatest moment was bursting out of the London sewers and taking on a terrified London. All this was only known to me through the novelisations, of course, and so the televised Tom Baker era "Revenge of ..." was one of my most eagerly awaited Who adventures ever. And I was feeling much the same way in the run-up to Saturday's outing.

It's a very sad feeling to have eager anticipation drain away out of the soles of your feet, when you so badly want to like it ..

I have a suspicion they're trying to do a "Genesis of the Daleks" for the cybes, giving us a good creation story that (somewhat) supplants established canon. But what made "Genesis of the Daleks" effective was Davros - endlessly malevolent, hideous, deformed, yet able to charm, play off one side against the other, and all the while be the loathsome xenocidal maniac who created the pepperpots.

Saturday gave us the metal jugheads' equivalent - Trigger's evil twin, chewing up the scenery but not remotely threatening.

I hope for better next week. If the cybermen discover their own independence and turn on their creator, I shall be ... well, not disappointed because that's exactly what I expect them to do. Meanwhile, Rose's parents have become a subplot, like those episodes of Friends where everyone plays themselves but slightly different just because they can. And are we honestly expected to believe those earpods will ever be fashionable?

But the cybermen themselves ... now, they were good. Emotionless, ruthless, single-minded - just what the doctor ordered, as it were. That stomping march was reminiscent of the good old days when actors dressed in silver-sprayed wetsuits terrorised the tourist trail. All that was needed was the marching theme that we haven't heard properly since the Troughton days.

I wonder how many of today's young generation of viewers think they were inspired by the Borg?

The air that I breathe

There's a certain smell I associate with primary schools. It's quite high powered, sickly and sweet. I always think of it as vomit and colouring paint combined, which in the case of primary schools is probably exactly what it is.

Over the weekend it found its way into my office and I have no idea how. Irritating.

Sounds like young people want to go to the Far East

The assisted dying bill has reached the House of Lords, which probably isn't the best place for an objective discussion on bumping off people who are past it.

There's a very fine line drawn between actively helping people die, and just not keeping them alive any longer. You can spot the extremes, not necessarily the bits in the middle.

Still, it occurs to me that places like Switzerland's Dignitas clinic don't come cheap, and assisted dying is extremely unlikely to be available on the NHS, if only because the queues would be so long that people would have died naturally anyway by the time their ticket came up. Therefore it's going to be a private procedure, and as it will be relatively rare, it will be an expensive private procedure. (Can you see the fund raising drives being a success? Terminally ill patients jingling their money boxes outside Waitrose or in the shopping precinct, saying "help me die now!"?) In other words, it will only really be available to very rich people.

Must resist temptation to say bring it on, now ...

Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog

If you have the right mindset and a sound enough Eng Lit education, you will find this site absolutely hilarious.

If not, you won't.

End public service announcement.

Trust me, I'm an Aquarian

"When a man stops believing in God he doesn't then believe in nothing, he believes anything."

G.K. Chesterton, right? Well, sort of.

Despite this having been quoted in countless sermons and homilies, G.K. never actually said that. A rather interesting Quotemeister page gives the history of this particular maxim. The closest Chesterton seems to have come to it is this, from Father Brown, as part of a longer speech:

"The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything."

Pretty much the same meaning, definitely not the same words. And it's not even true - at least, not in the sense that I have heard the more famous paraphrase used, over and over again. It's quite possible, maybe even more common, to not believe in God AND not believe in anything else of a supernatural nature either - horoscopes, souls, spirits, deities, afterlife, magic etc. It doesn't stop you from being a generally moral being, for a given value of 'moral'. Likewise, you can not believe in God because you do have a very clearly defined alternative supernatural belief - maybe you're a Hindu, maybe you're a Wiccan - that doesn't include him in it. The effect is still the same - you do not then start to believe anything, you simply close down on alternative beliefs.

Chesterton, I have no doubt, was bright enough to know it.

What he meant by 'God' wasn't just Him Upstairs but the whole belief package that goes with subscribing to a particular theological position. For him, that could be described as 'God'. But if you just say "yeah, I believe in God" in a vague, tolerant, nice-guy sort of way, that doesn't narrow down anything at all. Your mind is open to all comers. So, for 'believing in God' in the quotes above, substitute 'thinking through the implications of what I believe'. This brings you much closer to the Chestertonian meaning.

All this was sufficiently obvious to Chesterton, and to Father Brown, that the accompanying thought processes would have taken a micro-second and not required further elucidation. Sadly it isn't sufficiently obvious to preachers who misuse the quote to show why everyone should become Christian NOW. It's bad logic. It's telling people that black is white, when they can plainly see it isn't. And if your argument can only be supported by bad logic - well, what does that say about your argument?

It's only a short step to hey nonny, nonny, and then I shall have to call the police

Cue gentle twangy renaissancy music. Soft female voice, probably Emma Thompson, reads:

"Sigh no more, ladies, sigh nor more;
Men were deceivers ever;
One foot in sea and one on shore,
To one thing constant never ..."

Cue angry scratching noise of music being abruptly disconnected.

Excuse me - men? Men?? As Exhibit A for the Defence of the Y Chromosome, may I introduce the most inconstant, deceitful, flirtatious little minx ever to stand with one foot in my lap and the other on my dinner plate. All 24 inches, 14 months and 4.5 teeth of her. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you my niece.

Her Aunt Elect, a.k.a. Best Beloved, got a brief cuddle. It was the shiny buttons on her coat that did it. Thereafter it was made quite clear that only adult men need apply. You select your target with a calculating eye cleverly disguised as an innocent blue eyed stare. You crawl over to him, pull yourself up on his leg, look winsome and cute ... and then someone else - your father, your uncle, your granddad - comes into the room and abruptly the previous male object of your affections is history. Off you go across the floor at 90 m.p.h, only occasionally crawling up inside your skirt, to the leg of his replacement and repeat the process. Then you beam coyly back at the man you have just deserted, as if to say "this is your competition - fight him for me!"

All that saves hearts from being broken is that she doesn't yet have the social and life skills to be subtle about it. But give her time.

'Men', the Bard says. Huh!

Actually I was expecting Giles

Yes, it's the Buffy the Vampire Slayer personality test ...

Glorificus 72% amorality, 54% passion, 81% spirituality, 45% selflessness

You probably have a complicated, multi-faceted personality. Kind of like Glory-Ben-Glorificus. Passionate and driven with a spiritual side that comes out at times, a healthy taste for the finer things in life and a willingness to do what's necessary to achieve your ends. You're assertive and have no problems standing up for yourself. And, push come to shove, you're the closest anyone's ever come to straight-up beating the Slayer and her gang. Congratulations! If you enjoyed this test, I would love the feedback! Also, you might want to check out some of my other tests if you're interested in the following: Nerds, Geeks & Dorks Professional Wrestling Love & Sexuality America/Politics Thanks Again! -- THE 4-VARIABLE BUFFY PERSONALITY TEST

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 78% on morality You scored higher than 18% on repose You scored higher than 87% on spirituality You scored higher than 41% on selflessness

Link: The 4-Variable Buffy Personality Test written by donathos on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

Random news

Came home to an excited letter from Random House, who have signed a deal with a company called iCue to sell selected RH titles for distribution to mobile phones. They have selected a list of launch titles which should appeal to iCue's demographic and New World Order is one of those.

So for anyone who likes deathless prose on a tiny little screen rather than in a comfortably handheld treeware volume, this is your chance.

I'm intrigued by that demographic. NWO's protags are a middle-aged neanderthal and a half-human teenage boy. If iCue has achieved market penetration in these traditionally overlooked sectors, then I say good for them.

Must respectfully decline

A work colleague can't - read, would really rather not - make it to the wedding for what I strongly suspect are reasons of faith. I won't name his church, but it's not big on the Trinity and Bob Dylan wrote / Jimi Hendrix made famous a song about their literature.

And fair enough, to some extent, since I gather his non-trinitarian lot view us the way we would view someone who stood up in the 10 a.m. morning service and started chanting "Jupiter Optimus Maximus". I wouldn't want anyone to be squirming with suppressed conscience on our happy day. But if he had come, he would have had to put up with the congregation singing the mighty "In Christ Alone", containing the lines:

"No power of Hell, no scheme of Man
Can ever pluck me from his hands ..."

I like to think my trinitarian faith means I could attend a satanic black mass or an Aztec blood sacrifice and still emerge unscathed at the other end. (I also like to think I will never be asked to, as it could be pushing ecumenism too far.) It's an access-all-areas, go-anywhere pass. It's spiritual Thomas Cook travellers cheques. It's life in all its fullness. Christ rules and Christ rocks.

That's my faith, anyway.

But he likes the readings.

Grumpy Old Ben

Many thanks to m'good friend Simon for putting his GCSE revision on hold and tidying up my Wikipedia entry. He may be destined for a life of serving burgers and fries rather than designing mighty engineering projects as a result, but it will have been for a good cause and I'm sure my friendship with his parents won't be strained in any way.

And if the worst comes to the worst, he has a younger brother so the next generation needn't be a complete write-off.

The question has arisen, though: couldn't I have done it myself? To which I reply, of course I could. You are speaking to the proud creator of Wikipedia's article on SkyDiver (and I don't mean people who jump out of planes) and tweaker of too many articles to mention. But dammit, that's not what Wikipedia is for.

I'm old fashioned. I believe in the spirit of things, and that isn't necessarily making money, even though that is one of the three potential applications for which any new technology is immediately considered. (The other two being killing people, and porn.) I'd often considered starting up a self-promoting Wikipedia article. I never did because I reckoned if I got famous enough to need one, one would come up. There's nothing wrong with using web technology to self-promote, of course. I have a site and a blog for that. But not Wikipedia - it's meant to be a neutral, objective reference source in the best academic tradition.

Likewise, the reviews section of Amazon is meant to be a forum for sharing genuine opinions of books, not hijacking by authors to push themselves. (See Ansibles 181, 219 and here.) eBay is another nice idea, inappropriately used. If you can shift something for more than you paid for it, and make a small profit, then bully for you - but by and large and generally speaking, eBay is there for getting rid of items you no longer need or want or require and it shouldn't be a primary point of sale. I have no objection to books of mine being sold there, even signed ones. I've signed books in bookshops before. But I dislike signing books that turn out to be earmarked for eBay flogging - in fact, having now twigged the scam, I won't. (Especially when I see them pushed as "rare, signed copies". Believe me, it's the unsigned ones that are the rarities.) You want to sell books on the web, set up your own web site.

End audition for "Grumpy Old Men". And why do newspaper boys never whistle nowadays?

Name and shame

Green Peugeot 106, reg. L806LRC. A car not apparently fitted with ashtrays as the driver blatantly dropped at least two clear plastic wrappers out of his window this evening, as I drove home behind him, before he turned left in Steventon.

If I'd remembered to top up the hidden machine guns, he would be a burning wreck right now.

Plan B from time and space

Our plan for the weekend: travel down to parents on Saturday and be uncly at my nephew and niece; do the Sarsen Walk Sunday; visit grandmother for lunch on Monday and collect mystery wedding present. What could go wrong?

Plan A started to show cracks on Friday evening when the Boy was in bed, fast asleep, with a vile cold, at 6pm. Not something to risk exposing nephews and nieces to, and we could probably wipe out a large proportion of Salisbury's geriatric population if we introduced it to 97 year old grandmother and the fellow inmates of her retirement home. But Plan B wasn't half bad. Saturday, the day of really quite nice weather, saw a visit to the Heritage Motor Museum at Gaydon, with gokarts and the 4x4 experience, then the scenic route home via the Fosse Way in the sunshine and icecreams in Burford. Sunday was basically taken off. Monday we commenced our assault on the second last room to require decorating, and the just-about-recovered Boy composed an article for Wikipedia on his soon-to-be stepdad. (Which I carefully haven't tampered with because the spirit of Wikipedia is not self-promotion ... though I did change the title of the piece, where he had put my surname in all lowercase. Prepositions at the end of sentences I don't mind but bad capitalisation is something I will not put up with.)

Of course, if anyone reasonably au fait with my career to date wants to have a go at tidying it up, be my guest ...

So there are worse ways to spend a weekend.

Of course, Plans A and B, and any other plans we may have had to draft from Plan C through to Z then A1 and beyond, all included Dr Who on Saturday night. Ah, Sarah Jane! The first woman I ever fancied still looks pretty darn good. A touch more wrinkly round the eyes, but apart from that. She's probably someone's gran. I don't care. Look, I was at an all boys boarding school when the hormones started to kick in, at the same time as this woman was on screen on a weekly basis introducing feminism to the Middle Ages, being possessed by giant spiders, fighting Daleks, kicking cyber-ass, and blowing up robotic mummies while looking absolutely stunning in a flowing white dress. Not to mention being duplicated by androids in the evil twin of East Hagbourne, grappling with giant homicidal vegetables in Dorset with Boycie from Only Fools and Horses, and evading human sacrifice in Renaissance Italy.

I owe this woman a HUGE debt. Best Beloved understands.

Of mercy dashes and illegal avians

"Hi, I'm at the Minor Injuries Unit ..."

Just what every mother wants to hear. The Boy was with his grandmother while Best Beloved did her evening course. He had to feed the neighbour's cats. He managed to break some glass (apparently containing the cat food) and possibly get some inside him. Gran doesn't drive. This was a job for Ben the Vectra Driver! All very stepson/stepfather-bonding. As it was, he was in and out of the Minor Injuries Unit in 10 minutes, a little disappointed (I suspect) that he didn't have a bit of glass in his arm after all. And then off to Scouts - life must go on ...

But this was only my secondary act of mercy yesterday, for earlier Ben the Feather Duster Wielder had taken on a distant descendant of dinosaurs.

It was a bird and it flew in while the front door was open. Don't know what type because I'm not good in that department. It wasn't a robin, blackbird, pigeon, pheasant, chicken, turkey, swan, goose, peacock or penguin - those I would have been able to tell. It was small and brown, and flew up to the top landing and sat there, occasionally cheeping at me.

Pointedly leaving the front door open didn't do the trick, possibly because there were two floors between them. And so I reluctantly went to work with said feather duster (for prodding) and an umbrella (for poo defence). I managed to get it down to my landing, whereupon 60 million years of evolution told it that hiding under the wardrobe that is stacked there during the decorating phase with a lot of other furniture would be a good move. It had cunningly found that you can only get under the wardrobe from behind.

I moved the wardrobe, having first moved all the other furniture to get at it. It then flew back up to the top landing.

We repeated, with variations, for a while. I began to hope it might go under the wardrobe again so I could seal it in and leave it there. The average intelligence of the species would go up slightly. But righteousness finally prevailed and I got it under a laundry basket. Then I could slide a document folder in beneath that, and voila! I had a cage with a bird inside. I took it downstairs and released it, while all the time I could tell it was glaring at me and thinking "if I was still a velociraptor, you would be in such trouble."

On the whole, I prefer mercy dashes to Minor Injuries Units. You get a kiss and a cup of tea after those.

Cute dreams are made of these

The new bedroom has been activated and it's a bit like being in a hotel. A nice hotel, I should add, not a Novotel or the ghastly place in the Frankfurt red light district I was once booked into by a cost-saving secretary, where to use the facilities I had to open the shower door in the bathroom so there was room for my knees to stick out, and to dry off after said shower I had to stand in the middle of the room to give myself some towelling space. No, definitely a nice hotel, but everything subtly different and considerably more road noise than before. Which will change when/if the double glazing arrives.

It's made for some interesting dreams. Last night's was about a toddler - a cute little blond boy of 3 or 4, I would say, though not one I know or recognise, not even my nephew who really is 3 and blond. But in the dream I obviously knew him and was fond of him, because he was sitting on my lap and playing with a toy and chatting as toddlers do, and I was talking to him in the sing-song tell-you-a-secret way grown-ups do, and he was -um - asking where babies came from. My exact reply in the dream was "a boy and girl get together and do something very special and private, and that makes a baby." He then asked what this process was called, whereupon I pleaded the Fifth.

The strange thing - apart from the fact that I can remember this in any detail, which is itself unusual - is that I probably would give an answer like that to a toddler in real life, if one actually asked me that question and for some reason I couldn't just refer them up the line to Mummy and Daddy. This dream was weird but made sense. Which is even weirder.

Moving on to slightly older male children, the Boy yesterday took it upon himself to watch Harry Potter: Witchcraft Repackaged. I bought this a few years ago for reasons of personal education - you can't refute someone's arguments, let alone despise and pity them as wilfully ignorant paranoid fools, if you don't know exactly what they're saying. In Harry Potter: Witchcraft Repackaged, a group of (guess what! American) evangelicals feel so moved by the need to save a generation from the fires of Hell that they make up their minds that Harry Potter is evil, and then with malice aforethought proceed to throw out the Ninth Commandment* and do as thorough a hatchet job on him as they possibly can. Into the melée they throw Harry's pointy hat (phallic symbol), the sacrifice of his mother (goddess worship) , even his very name (Potter = maker of pots = cups and bowls used in pagan rituals). At one point the Boy came into the room tearing his hair out - or maybe that's just how he wears it nowadays - shouting "they're saying his scar is like the symbols used by the SS!" Yes, unfortunately they do. They are silly people. I was pleased to see that at the tender age of 13 he can spot the flaws in it without undue coaching from myself.

I've ranted about this subject on my more regular site: www.sff.net/people/ben-jeapes/potter.htm. The one thing they don't throw at him in the video - probably because theywouldn't get the joke - is that if you change one letter of the word "wand" then you get a whole new story. See http://www.bash.org/?111338 if you doubt me.

[* False witness, of course.]

Ups and downs

Up: new carpet finally in front room. I know, not a fascinating picture but it's there for the sake of completeness. This paves the way for re- attachment of curtains, installation of furniture and final activation of new bedroom status. Also, for reasons which make perfect sense, the likely installation of a wireless network.

Down: it would be nice to say with confidence that this room will shortly be double glazed. This requires the installers to be satisfied that removing the present frames won't bring the front of the house tumbling down. Seems like a trifling little concern but I suppose it ought to be addressed for form's sake. (Lord knows how old the present frames are. For all I know they're original, and this house appears on maps of Abingdon from 1850 ...)

Up: shower finally installed, and very nice it is too. No picture for reasons which I will come to. It's enclosed by a double-curtained booth as opposed to the more normal single curtain along the bath. Don't know why, but there's something about being able to throw back two curtains, one on either side, that makes you want to shout at the same time, "here I am Abingdon, behold me!", though so far I've managed not to.

Down: said curtains are ... um. Beware of catalogue shopping. The star lady plumber installed some rather nice shiny chrome pipes, so I thought I would pick the "silver" option to go with them. "Silver" is of course catalogue speak for "early Pertwee era metallic grey". I really should have gone for white, which goes with most things, at least in bathrooms.

Up: star lady plumber also installed new pipes to connect washing machine direct to the flat's water supply. No more squeezing hoses onto the basin tapes, wrapping flannels round them to catch the drips and running an extension lead down the hall from my bedroom.

Down: can't use the thing, because she instructed that we first acquire connecting hoses with a right angled plug at both ends. If she'd said "a right angled plug at one end and a flat one at the other" then I'd be laughing, because you can't walk into B&Q or Homebase without them leaping off the shelves like the python in that particularly rubbish Jon Voigt movie. But a pushmepullyou arrangement of right angled plugs seems to be about as rare as ... well, pushmepullyous.

Up: she has offered to come back and change the angle of the pipes instead.

And, just to show life is actually on average pretty good at present, here are some ups without downs.

Up: had to saw some wood into a particular shape (long story) which I did without any injury beyond a splinter that soon came out. Contrasts nicely with the Boy's recent lesson, which can be summarised as IF sawing AND the blade jumps across your fingers THEN stop.

And finally, up: we have a week and a half to pay £320 for a wedding, that being the 12-week-beforehand deadline for same. Now, it could be argued that parting with £320 is a down by anyone's standards, but how much more do we get out of it? Eh? Eh? Some things are beyond rubies.

Anthony Blair is an anagram of Holy Ant Brain

A conclusion I have reached about our Prime Minister: he is a Lib Dem mind trapped in a New Labour body. He has none of the Lib Dems’ wishiwashiness of course, but he does share a conviction in the inherent sensibility of his policies. Everything he does is, to him, so obviously the right thing to do, of benefit to everyone.

This is nothing new. Thatcher had the same outlook, but then, Thatcher had added malice with it, at least towards certain sections of the population. Our Divine Helmsman bears malice to no one. He views his enemies with sorrow. And love, mingled. If only everyone could see how right he is. It must keep him awake at nights.

And therefore he has no qualms at all about the little bit of stealth legislation known as the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill. Okay, so it grants ministers rights that could almost be dictatorial in the wrong hands. But his hands so obviously aren’t the wrong ones. Why do people get upset? The fact that it effectively makes Parliament redundant ... well, who needs debate when any right minded person can see he is so clearly correct?

If, on the other hand, you really don’t think that ministers of any size, shape or party should be entrusted with powers to pass their own undebated legislation, or sack judges, or abolish jury trial, then go to http://www.saveparliament.org.uk/problem.html, which says it all much more clearly than I can. Read it, but don’t weep. Just act.

We, the people

The latest Locus reports that Salman Rushdie has joined a group of writers in putting his name to a statement against fundamentalist Islam. It says, inter alia: "We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism ..."

Well yes, fair enough, a worthy cause. But I wish it had been phrased differently.

"We, writers ..." Well, yes, he is undoubtedly a writer - even the Ayatollah would have granted him that. "... journalists ..." And he's done that too. "... intellectuals ..."

Now, hold on a minute. I'll gladly admit that Mr Rushdie has an intellect that puts me down amongst the termites by comparison, but writer and journalist are jobs. They are something you work hard at, you produce something, you create something where previously there was nothing, and in exchange you get paid your daily crust. But intellectual ... that's an opinion, and a pretty self-inflated one at that.

"So what do you do?" / "I'm a writer" / "Oh, how interesting." It's a perfectly fair exchange that reflects nothing on either party. But, imagine the answer was "I'm an intellectual." It's just one syllable longer than saying, "me clever, you thick."

Of course, you might still answer "Oh, how interesting," but your thought processes will be more "must control urge to make loose circle of thumb and fingers and move wrist back and forth."

Green dust of death

Do not be alarmed. The green dust of death now drifting across Oxfordshire is not an alien invasion.

All this week we have been using a very handy dust sheet to catch the detritus of our decorating. This dust sheet has had many previous identities and for the last 14 years has more commonly been known as my living room carpet. Not to say that it is 14 years old -- no, no, it is much older. MUCH older. MUCH older.

And now it too has made its way to the great graveyard of all -- well, far too many -- of Ben's possessions (Drayton dump). The faint miasma of green that marked our passage should have dispersed by now and anyone living along Drayton Road can breathe safely.

This has also led to the discovery of a red tile fireplace in the living room. Fancy that.

Terracotta firma

Finally, the painting begins. All that must be stripped has been stripped; all that must be plastered and sanded has been plastered and sanded; all that must be filled with anti-meteorite emergency sealant has been filled with anti-meteorite emergency sealant. Nothing now stands in our way.

Houses are very robust systems. If we applied our brand of cheerful make-it-up-as-you-go-along optimistic common-sense workmanship to, say, a computer network or to brain surgery then there would be all sorts of trouble. But houses are built to last. Just do it, they say with a stoic sigh. Go on. We can take it. And they do.

This house is looking forward to becoming a family home. I feels it in me watter. An added bonus is that, by tracing this feeling, I can finally work out where me watter is located. It's bothered me for years.

How to steal from B&Q

1. get a trolley with a large transparent plastic bag already in it.
2. put the item you desire to nick under the transparent plastic bag.
3. check out.

Easy, eh? The cashier won't see what is under the transparent plastic bag and won't ring it up. The alarm barriers won't go off, either, when you pass through them. But for the sake of legality, boys and girls, I must urge you to do what we did and notice that you hadn't actually paid for it before leaving the store, which probably would make it an actual felony. Then return to the cashier and fess up. Try not to make comments to the effect of how difficult it is to see through transparent plastic bags.

All this, in case you hadn't guessed, was to buy further decorating tools. Most fun discovery: you know the emergency sealant foam that you get in all good space opera, when a disposable character is making his way down the ship's double hull towards the computer centre, to take control of the ship, and there's a space battle or a meteorite storm, and the hull is pierced, and the foam comes squirting in and tragically kills him? This stuff exists. It's made by Polyfilla and it comes in cans. Whee!

Changing rooms

Once, and not so long ago, this scene of bare plaster and tatty scraps of wallpaper was a comfortable living room (though the wallpaper was still pretty tatty). Here you see it in the equivalent of just-entering-the-chysalis stage - you know, the bit where the caterpillar starts to poo silk but hasn't quite made a house out of it. One day, and that day soon, this will be the master bedroom.

The transformation has begun ... more doubtless to follow.

You get what you ask for

A big hello to the reader who came to this blog via a search on google.com for "lesbian threesome", and got my report on the Boy's parent-teacher evening. I so hope you weren't too disappointed.

A load of balls

The Today programme this morning played a sound clip of the only castrato known to have made phonograph recordings. It's a voice that combines the sweetness of a boy's treble with the belting-out power of a man's lungs. An eerie experience - a bit like watching footage of a Tasmanian Tiger or other extinct creature, something that was around in (just) living memory but is now forever out of our reach. The voice belonged to one Alessandro Moreschi, who sadly is more famous for being the only castrato known etc. rather than his actual singing, which apparently wasn't very good. A shame, because you can't help feeling that if someone does that to you, you ought to get at least something out of it.

Castrati, apparently, arose out of a seventeenth century ban by the Catholic Church (there's a certain world-weary "who else" attached to that, isn't there?) on women singing in the theatre. Why? Well, who knows. It probably relates to the well known fact that men are driven into uncontrollable passions of sin at the slightest sign of a woman in public and it's all her fault. ANYWAY the way around this was to start, um, creating castrati, i.e. gelding young boys, which of course is so much more the moral course.

This somehow reminds me of a comment I once heard - from a member of guess which organisation, but I believe it's not their official position - that in vitro fertilisation must ipso facto be wrong because you need sperm for it, and the only way you can get the sperm is by masturbation, which ... and so on.

Some people really were just born to miss the point.

Makes a good effort

So I carved the next notch on the bedboard of my stepfatherhood yesterday by accompanying Best Beloved to the Boy's parent-teacher evening (not parent-STUDENT-teacher evening, the Boy said pointedly, before managing to come down with a debilitating illness that actually seemed to be genuine - anyway, he stayed at home). It was the first of these events I can remember going to since I was 13, when my parents were abroad and I had to escort my grandmother instead, who was proudly wearing her name badge upside down. That's all I remember.

WhenI was the Boy's age it was probably the unhappiest time of my adolescence. And here he is, secure and happy and discussing GCSE options. Wow, how things change.

A surprisingly interesting time. All the meetings were carefully scheduled and we were handed out a grid map of the school hall showing where each teacher was sitting. Unfortunately the teachers didn't appear to have the same map ... And as the evening drew on, the schedule slipped more and more, and by the end there were some teachers sitting in lonely isolation while others had parents stacked up in holding patterns like Heathrow on a particularly bad day. I could pass my time-

• trying to decipher the cunning algorithm by which the teachers had repositioned themselves.
  
• trying to work out if the odd threesome who seemed to trail us were (a) daughter, mother and mother's lesbian partner or (b) daughter, mother and daughter's quite a bit older butch-looking sister.
  
• counting the visible piercings sported by Mrs A, who doesn't teach the Boy but whom the Boy thinks is "cool". I got up to 8. The sad thing is, the lady is ... ahem ... probably nearer retirement than I am.
  

But let's not quibble. The teachers all seem to genuinely care about the Boy, they give praise where praise is due (and there's quite a bit of it), they are dedicated to their jobs, and they provide a secure environment that nurtures him through his adolesence. It's something that will stay with him long after he's forgotten their faces. I am pleased and I praise them.

Nick? Mike? Philip?

Whoever you are, welcome, unknown pupil of Abingdon School who read this blog at 11.05 a.m. yesterday. And may I say I am shocked, shocked! at your cavalier disregard for the sacrifices that your parents make on your behalf, given that you seem happy to pour their hard-earned school fees down the drain with such frivolous activity. You’re there to learn how to run the British Empire, boy, not enjoy yourself. You should be busy practicing rabid Tory homoeroticism and growing cannabis behind the bike sheds. Yes, I know, it’s difficult but someone has to do it.

But you’re probably a friend too, so I forgive you. Just don’t let it happen again.

Vonderful Veaving but no Vicious Cabaret

V for Vendetta was never going to be like the original comic because the original comic is sui generis. So it doesn’t seem that much of a travesty that they take the basic set-up and characters, keep the key iconic moments like prisoner no. 5 emerging from the blazing ruins of Larkhill, and tell a completely different story. In fact, if it is a travesty at all, it’s a bloody good one. This is no Constantine and emphatically no League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

This is the thinking man’s The Matrix, concentrating on story rather than the (plentiful) effects and leaving the big moral questions hanging in the air. What is a terrorist and what is a freedom fighter? What right does V have to impose his version of rightness on an entire country? It seems incredible, but the Wachowski Brothers have somehow created a British film, with mostly Brit actors (plus one Australian, one American and a couple of Irish), set and filmed in Britain, in a British context, with (mostly) British dialogue ... and, rather daringly for a movie that needs to make it big in the US, they lay the blame for the world as it now is squarely at the foot of America. Go guys!

Most of the items that get blown up in the comic get blown up here, though not necessarily in the same order. A couple of the subplots have gone, which is a shame, but keeping them would have led to a much longer movie. And V’s wonderful Vicious Cabaret musical interlude is completely missing. (How does a comic have a musical interlude? Read it and see.)

The character of V is exactly as it should be. Hugo Weaving, most known for the menace of his glassy stare, does an amazing job behind a mask, and – praise be! – they avoid what must have been a powerful temptation for a routine unmasking. Evey’s job has changed beyond recognition but she is still the same character who goes through much the same changes. The dictator of Britain, Adam Susan, is now called Adam Sutler, possibly because the brothers correctly concluded that a dictator called Susan was silly.

The set-up for the movie, and the comic, and the whole Thatcher era in which Alan Moore wrote the original, is that an entirely unpalatable government took power because it was allowed to by a populace that wanted security more than it wanted freedom, preaching the mantra that “there is no alternative but us”. (Strangely this is V's attitude as well.) I forget if movie-V’s line is in the comic, but it should be: “People should not fear their governments. Governments should fear their people.” (Though Roger Ebert points out that ideally neither should fear the other but work together ...) A government may contain the seeds for going bad within itself, and that is its fault. But if those seeds are allowed to flower, that’s the people’s fault. That works just as much today, in the era of the Divine Helmsman of Downing Street, as it did in the days of Iron Margaret.

Alan Moore has performed his ritual disavowal and is quoted as saying “To see a line of dialogue or a character that I have poured that much emotional involvement into, to see them casually travestied and watered down and distorted... it's kind of painful. It's much better just to avoid them altogether.” Yeah, well, I can see his point. But movies and comics are two completely different artforms. His name and reputation are unassailable; he could easily afford to be acknowledged as the inspiration of this work of someone else's hands, and not suffer in the least for it. It’s his decision. But if you saw The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, go and see this too for some badly needed therapy.

My only quibbles are all with the last five minutes. Watch out, spoilers ahead:

• there have been mass insurrections before and will be again, but this one was a little too convenient.
• it doesn't make much sense to rally thousands of your supporters and make them stand close to something you are about to blow up.
• that wasn't the District & Circle line, which bearing in mind what happens next, it really should have been.

Doctor Wow

Went to the doctor to arrange various checks which I instinctively associate with middle age.

First of all, I was told emphatically, you are not middle aged - medically speaking you've got at least another ten years before you can consider yourself such. So scratch the need for one of the checks, unless pressing symptoms arise in the meantime.

Second, his scales say I'm a stone lighter than I thought I was. Question: industrial looking scales found in a doctor's surgery or the bathroom scales I got for a tenner in Boots ... which do I trust?

Third: my blood pressure is pretty good.

So all in all, current mood: chipper.

Hustle fuss'll end in tussle

Watched 'Hustle' last night, for the first time in a long while. A good retro 70s title sequence, then straight into an entertaining but pop videoish reminder of why I took a dislike to it when it was first on.

"You can't con an honest man" - they didn't say this last night but I remember the philosophy being espoused in episode 1. I'm still not sure if it's correct. What you can do with an honest man, as they showed in episode 1 and last night and on many occasions in between, is steal from one. The philosophy of this show is that every honest citizen carries a small amount of disposable wealth around with them, which is fair game for these parasites who can' t be arsed to get a proper job and who need it to keep them in the sybaritic lifestyle to which they feel entitled because they are Cule.

During the show's first season I was about this > < far from personal bankruptcy and even the loss of a tenner from a cashpoint would have been drastic. And that's why I don't watch it.

So why watch it last night? Well, the Boy did a 24 hour fast and was about 14 hours into it at the time, and he needed something to keep his mind off the hunger. So we watched the show, and then he went to bed and slept the rest of it off. No one made him do it, it was sponsored for some charity or other and we're all very proud of him. We even showed a modicum of support by having only rolls and bouillon for dinner ourselves.

The characters of 'Hustle' are able to make small sacrifices for a long term gain of several thousand unearned quid. Somehow it's much more impressive to go without and stay without, your only reward being the faith that complete strangers who you will never meet in this life may be benefiting.

And tonight we dine well.

You've got an Ology!

Many years ago, when I was a callow and innocent young recent graduate working in London, a pleasant young Irish lady accosted me as I walked along Tottenham Court Road towards the tube. "We're doing free personality tests. Would you be interested?"

At this stage of my life I was still determined to be nice to salespeople, my memories as a Kleeneze door-to-doorer and steam cleaning salesman still uncomfortably fresh in my mind. So I said yes thanks, and was ushered in to a pleasant little office, and sat down with a multiple choice questionnaire with posers like "you are walking along and see a dropped five pound note, what do you do?" sort of thing. I got busy ticking the answers ...

... and, as time passed by, my peripheral vision kept being snagged by the catchy yellow-orange spines of the books on the shelf next to me. They were all copies of Dianetics, by L. Ron Hubbard.

I had fallen into the hands of the Scientologists.

Mr Hubbard's disciples had, unusually for them, made one fatal error. The space on the questionnaire where you put your name and address was at the end, not at the beginning. So when I got to the end, finally clued up as to my situation, I put down the impenetrable pseudonym "J. Benn" and left out the flat number of my address.

I was assessed, and I still have the results somewhere. I recall that it was headed "The Oxford Personality Test". Oxford what? University? Stadium? Apollo? It didn't say, but it was a "big" word, designed to impress without too much thought. Anyway, the results came back on a graph, divided into zones of "basically okay" and "dodgy" and "needs urgent attention". Unsurprisingly, my assessment indicated a screamingly urgent need to become a Scientologist right now and spend lots of money on a weekend away so as to facilitate the process.

I managed to duck that. I did buy a copy of Dianetics, which I also still have somewhere. I had to spend my last fiver on it since, obviously, I didn't have any cheques or a card with the right name on ...

I said I was innocent and callow. Well, I was 22 and not so innocent or callow that I hadn't read Russell Miller's fascinating and entirely unauthorised biography of L. Ron, Bare-Faced Messiah. The book the Scientologists tried and failed to ban - failed because he could inconveniently prove every single one of his assertions, and they could prove not one of theirs. The book that tells entertaining tales of how LRH dabbled in black magic with a disciple of Aleister Crowley, just long enough to steal all the guy's money and run off with his woman and his yacht. That's my favourite, anyway, but there's much, much more. It's also interesting to count how many witnesses, independently interviewed, all heard the man say something along the lines of "if you want to make lots of money, start a religion."

In short, the book that shows his one unmistakable talent lay in making lots of money by spinning tall yarns.

On the way out, I saw that on the way in I had passed a massive bronze bust of the same gent, without noticing. From then on, I walked to the tube on the other side of the road.

All this reminiscing is sparked off by a friend sending me a news link - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4804334.stm. Thanks, Alex. Scientologist Isaac Hayes, the voice of Chef in South Park, has quit the show because of a story line poking fun at his religion's founder. Apparently Stan does so well in a Scientology test that church followers hail him as the next L Ron Hubbard.

"There is a place in this world for satire but there is a time when satire ends and intolerance and bigotry toward religious beliefs begins," says Mr Hayes, laying down his apron after 10 years of working on a show that has lampooned Christians, Muslims, Mormons, Jews and - um, I suppose, to be balanced - Satan. Indeed.

Believe it or not, I concede from the evidence that elements of Scientology do actually work. The nice Irish lady who failed to convert me told me how it had helped her reconcile with her mother. Her face shone, I had no reason to doubt it, and was very happy for her. No doubt Isaac has found it equally so. A whole raft of Hollywood celebrities seem to have genuinely found it useful in keeping afloat. How many of the above have also been able to get emotive readings off tomatoes, or recall past lives in galaxies far, far away, I do not know, but the elements of Scientology that work seem to be the ones that strangely resemble basic counselling skills in the real world. In other words, the bits that anyone with a bit of gumption can do without having to buy an e-meter, or read Dianetics, or even worse buy and read Battlefield Earth.

A "clear" in Scientology is allegedly able to overcome all the little quirks that go with having a reactive mind. Operating Thetans, the next stage up, can do clever things with matter, energy, space and time. (Don't take my words for it - take theirs.) But the one thing they can't apparently do is take it as well as dish it out.

Interesting.

Palais au Portacabins

Well, this is exciting. Long term readers (how you both doing?) may remember the accommodation block being built on our back lawn, and the building site that preceded it. The hostel is there for the great and the good of one of Europe's most prestigious high-energy research projects. Surely at least a couple of big bucks were going to be spent. Springfield Power Station's executive washroom would be but a shadow of the glory that would unfurl before out eyes. So we could barely contain ourselves as a pleasant patch of green grass was transformed into a war zone and the tree that was the habitat of a cute little woodpecker was cruelly torn down. What next, we asked ourselves, what next?

What next was something guaranteed to please anyone who OD'd on Lego and Gerry Anderson in their youth. Along comes a huge great crane, like something that has rolled out of Thunderbird 2, and it starts swinging these prefab modules into place. Each one, apparently, already furnished and decorated inside. And there we were, thinking it might be swanky or something. It's going up to three floors, we're told. Fancy!

But, children, can you see what they're doing wrong? Of course you can. Everyone knows that when you build a wall out of blocks you make them overlap. Otherwise the wall just falls over. Honestly, what kind of cowboys are they? I think I'll go and have a word.