If you’re in charge of the military, it’s clear that you would want to know about anything in the skies. For this reason, NORAD track Santa every year and make the data available online. You can also follow his progress using Google Earth.

I was out at a christmas party last night. Towards the end of the evening I was passed a note by somebody who shall remain nameless¹:

I can see her wishing me this on palm sunday, but christmas? Or maybe she just wanted to subtly call me a wanker I should frame it!

Later, as we were leaving, I decided it would be a good idea to draw pictures in the condensation on Ben’s car window. On seeing this, he did the same to mine.

Now, this is me. You would expect nothing more than some pictures of fish, a monkey that looks like a cat, and perhaps ‘doggingmobile’ written on the back window. Ben, though, is high class. Ben is a physics graduate at Oxford. Surely our scribblings would be dissimilar? No:

At midnight, this was very funny indeed. I’m 22, he’s 23. Do you think we should have grown up by now? After giggling over this for a while, we moved onto a nearby vehicle².

1. it was Lynsey [↩]
2. Nod’s [↩]

Spot the out-of-place headline:

It’s not like they’re even an item any more - she apparently finally saw sense. It’s a little bit Heat for the BBC News front page, isn’t it? Maybe they were trying to find non-depressing headlines…it is christmas, after all.

Greed:	Medium
Gluttony:	Medium
Wrath:	Low
Sloth:	Medium
Envy:	Very Low
Lust:	Medium
Pride:	Medium

Take the Seven Deadly Sins Quiz

How dull!

The housing association finally got back to me and recommended I have a satellite system installed if I want to get any more than four tv channels, so I’m waiting inside for the freesat engineer to arrive and install one. I’d previously been told he/she would arrive some time between 0900 and 1800, and I didn’t receive the promised phone call this morning with more detail. Ho hum.

Rather than use this time in a useful fashion, I’ve just written a rather long rant. I think I’d better have some lunch and read it over this afternoon before posting in case I’ve been too vociferous at any point - I do tend to lapse into ‘the whole world is against me’-mode at those times

Did everybody in the world but me know that Jack Black is the singer in Tenacious D? How have I managed to miss that?

Next you’ll be telling me that Gandalf and Magneto are actually the same guy.

There’s a interesting thing I’ve noticed when sitting in a packed cinema. The audience are happy to laugh and they’re happy to be scared. But any kind of emotional scene and there’ll be many whispers¹ between couples or groups of friends. Sad or romantic scenes are the favourites for this - a large number of people want to make it clear to their companions that they’re separating themselves from the events on screen. Why’s that, do you think? Do they think that they’ll appear weak if they appear to empathise with the emotions on screen?

I’m just back from King Kong, where the above was very noticeable. Until the ending, that is. Chances are you know what happens, but if not I won’t spoil it. In the final scene, there were a few seconds where the main characters faced each other in which the entire cinema was silent. As soon as the camera angle changed, people realised that what they were doing and made comments to each other, but for those moments the entire screen was enraptured.

Just want to say a couple of things. It won’t actually spoil anything, but don’t read any further if you don’t know the story already.

Continue reading ‘King Kong’

1. and not-so-whispers, but don’t get me started on that [↩]

The Wordpress blogging software that powers this site is very, very close to reaching version 2.0. Apparently release candidate 3 was released yesterday, and they’re looking at today or tomorrow for the final build. It’s looking very swish, with advanced caching features as well as WYSIWYG post creation and viewing. Not much difference for readers, other than the inevitable b0rkage as some plugins get scared and flee the server, but it’s exciting for geeks like me

My personal hero today is Judge John Jules, who said:

We find that the secular purposes claimed by the board amount to a pretext for the board’s real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom

in a 139 page document ruling that intelligent design cannot be taught in US schools in Dover, Pennsylvania.

I’m only just back home and am haven’t had a chance to read up on it yet, but it made the front page of BBC News. Although I don’t like to see intelligent design getting exposure, I think that ignoring the issue hasn’t been very successful in preventing its spread.

The BBC does commit the classic media mistake of bending over backwards for impartiality by including a comment from a reader saying ‘both sides of the debate should be taught.’ Would such a quote be placed alongside an article about the flat-earth society? Of course not. The whole point of the article is that the notion has been judged to be religion in disguise - including such a quote is missing the point entirely, and gives credibility where none is due. It’s science, not politics, and public opinion has no bearing on scientific findings. I suppose it’s the classic question: is the point of journalism to present the arguments, or to expose the truth?

Damn, I always digress when talking about ID. Must get a grip on that.

Dashed out this morning and left my mobile phone behind, which is most unlike me. I’ve been out all day and am currently having tea with my parents, so if anyone’s been trying to contact me…sorry!

Megan scared the hell out of me when I took her for a walk this evening. We reached the corner of a road opposite the park, next to a busy road, and she did a pooh on the grass. I picked it up with a small bag, and she was pulling away from me as I did so. I don’t know whether it was the lure of the park or not wanting to be near her mess, but she was backing away as hard as she could. I started to stand up, at which point something came loose and I was left with the lead in my hand as she ran into the road.

I knew there were cars coming, but not how close they were. She stopped 2/3 of the way across and I yelled for her, but she didn’t move. I could see headlights, and looked up to see whether there was time to grab her. The car on the left-hand side was approaching but was far enough away to see what was going on, I hoped. I looked back down and saw Meg slowly trotting towards me. I have no clue what was approaching on that side of the road, but I stepped into it and reached for her collar, which wasn’t there. I realised that she’d actually slipped the whole collar over her head. It’s surprisingly difficult to get a grip on a dog with no collar, but I manhandled her onto the pavement as the car went past. She kept struggling so I half-carried half-pulled her across the road, onto the grass at the edge of the park. I made it to a safe distance before shoving the collar back over her head.

At this point I became aware of two sensations. Firstly, there was massive relief that she hadn’t killed herself. Secondly, my right hand was gripped around something rather warm and squishy. I looked down with trepidation, but happily, despite me gripping it fairly hard, the bag hadn’t split. I must have knotted it just before she pulled away. We walked back with the collar a notch tighter.

It lasted maybe three seconds total, but scared the crap out of me. She ran into the road without a moment’s hesitation, and it’s sheer chance nothing was coming. I’ll have to talk to Jane about more training for her. I wonder whether Meg’s losing weight, or if the collar’s been adjusted recently. Strange. I’ll certainly be double-checking the collar tightness before walks from now on!

Had a pleasant walk around Stratford this afternoon. It was a proper winter’s day with bright blue skies, and really great light from the low-in-the-sky sun. Normally such conditions are accompanied by below-zero temperatures, but the wind wasn’t too bad today, which made a nice change for taking photographs

I walked along the river and back through the main streets. It wasn’t actually too busy, surprisingly.

I like the idea of somebody in Portugal deciding to donate a lamp post to Stratford.

I like making the site all jolly¹. I had falling snow for a while, until I found it was crashing Firefox. For a festive desktop, I recommend TwinkleBulbs, which is quite remarkable in its ability to polarise opinion - you’ll either love it or completely despise it.

1. Don’t like the decorations? There’s an option to turn them off here. [↩]

It’s nearly christmas, and you know what that means. I have a cold. Weirdly it disappeared on Sunday, but is back this morning. Uck. Am dosing up on Lemsip so I can hit the shops this afternoon to pick up all the christmas presents I hadn’t even thought about until yesterday.

Anybody else play test the nation this evening? It was on the year’s events, and I thought there were some tough questions in there! I got 55…You can play online, although it differs from the show in various ways, so personally I’d say the results aren’t comparable.

Well. What a complete muppetry thing to do! I should explain.

The three finalists in Strictly Come Dancing were Zoe Ball, Colin Jackson and Darren Gough. Of the three, the first two were definitely the superior dancers. Darren’s very good, but has consistently ranked lower with the judges. He has the advantage of being extremely likeable, however. Unlike the last couple of years, the winner was completely up for grabs - nobody wanted to risk a prediction.

The first part of the show had each couple performing two dances - one latin and one ballroom. As you may have gathered by my previous post, it was almost impossible to tell them apart. No judge scored less than a 9 at any point. I decided to wait until the freestyle in the second part. As it turned out, the couples were all to first perform a Viennese Waltz, then one couple would be eliminated from the competition based on viewer votes so far. The waltz was equally difficult to decide upon, but I phoned through my vote for Zoe in the end. There was hardly anything in it, but to me she seemed to have the most elegance.

Then, Zoe was eliminated from the competition. Damn. She and her partner performed their spectacular freestyle dance and left the floor. Colin and Darren remained. I decided to wait for their respective dances, although strongly suspected that I would have to go with Colin due to his superior technical skill. At this point, the presenter announced that there had been 3 million votes cast.

Then came the massive mistake. Colin and Erin’s freestyle routine was introduced, and they walked out onto the floor each attached to dummies. Lifesize dolls, dressed to look like a presenter and one of the judges, attached to their feet. They danced a dull routine with these dolls for 90 seconds, and it was stupid. After Zoe’s amazing routine, this was a complete letdown. The judges hated it, although they were no longer scoring. The idea, I imagine, was to show that Colin could dance without her help. This is probably very difficult, but I don’t think this was the time to prove it.

My vote was suddenly up for grabs again. At this level the dancing is as much about performance as technique, and Colin scored no points at all for the former. Then Darren and Lilia came out, and were stunning. With amazing lifts and extremely fast footwork it was one of the best dances I’d seen them do. There was no question. I voted three times!

After the final dance, the vote total was up to four million, and after the finale involving all the competitors, they announced a total of over five million. The judges gave their opinions, and they were split down the middle. Then came the announcement of the winner.

Darren and Lilia took it, and I punched the air. On tonight’s performances, they were without doubt the worthy winners.

I think it’s very likely that Colin’s freestyle lost the competition for him. Two million people voted between then and the lines closing, and I’d bet most of them were doing exactly the same thing as me. What were they thinking?

Incidentally, I saw Lilia and her husband Darren (a different one - he was Gloria Hunniford’s partner this series) perform live a few months ago. Last year he won SCD with Jill Halfpenny, and inbetween they were crowned the Latin World Champions in Blackpool. So they’ve had rather a good twelve months!

I really enjoyed that.