It was just me at dancing tonight, and it wasn’t fun For some reason I reverted to these-people-all-hate-me mode, which hasn’t happened for a good few months now. I ended up leaving early, just wanting to be out of there. Damnation. Now they likely really do think I’m weird, unlike before when it was just in my head¹. Hopefully it was just the late night and early morning meaning I’m much more tired than usual.

1. although “you wouldn’t care what people thought of you if you knew how little they do” keeps popping into my head - where’s that from? [↩]

(plus, just for Ben:

)

It’s two in the morning yet again. I wish I knew why sometimes I just don’t sleep. Whatever the reason, I’m here and checking out the blogs. Late-night blog browsing is always a bad idea, because every single time I write a comment at this hour I look back in the morning and find it doesn’t make sense / doesn’t say what I thought it did / isn’t what I actually think. Right now I really want to write a scathing response to comments #2 and #3 on this post, but I know it’s a bad plan. I think muppetry annoys me more when I’m tired, anyway
That rule can also apply to my own posts. The above seems fine right now…no saying what it’ll be like in the morning, though.

Here’re some monkeys/chimps/apes/etc. that I like:

I was just flicking through photos in Picasa, and it randomly fell on my USA Photos folder - shots from my road trip in 2004. It’s easy for me to forget that I took far more shots than are currently on Flickr. It was fascinating to go through them and be reminded of things I’d completely forgotten. I got as far as New York before deciding that there were many shots I liked - why hadn’t I used them before? Then I remembered my filtering process. I first sorted them in the pre-Flickr days, when I was using gallery software on this website. I had little space so had to take only my very favourite shots, then resize them by 50%. As such, I picked 150 of 1750 shots. Now that I have unlimited space on Flickr, and a much faster upload, I’m putting all but technically-flawed and Just Bad pictures online. It’s great as a full-res backup, if nothing else! I doubt anybody has an RSS feed of my images, but if you do - apologies. I’m working on one city per day, and it’s going to take quite a long time! If anyone’s interested in seeing the new stuff, it’ll all be in this set.

I just went to check how my MP voted on last night’s smoking bill. He’s a conservative, but there’s always hope. Turns out he didn’t vote at all. Great.

When I was growing up, there was a phrase guaranteed to put fear into my heart: the walk. It seemed like every other weekend my parents would take my sister and me on long, long trudges. In hindsight, most of these were fine. We’d walk through a pretty forest, with sun piercing the leaves and spotting the ground with patches of light, and then come out into fields of violets where Jane and I would run and tumble, dancing with the butterflies. All right, maybe that’s slight over-idyllisation, but this is in comparison to the Other Type of walk. The Other Type was far, far different. Most notorious was the Traditional Boxing Day Walk, which involved finding a very high, very exposed hill, walking around in sub-zero winds, slipping on ice and generally trying not to die. We’d see little other than our own shoes, other families with children who must also have done something wrong, the droppings of metallic simians, and perhaps, if we were really lucky, some bits of rock that were apparently part of a stone house that must have been dull even in roman times. Walking was Not Fun. Walking was What Adults Did to Children To Make Them Suffer.

Eventually I became old enough to stay at home, letting my parents go off on character-building excursions by themselves. This worked well for a good number of years. However, the story does not end here. I must now reveal the terrible truth to any children reading. Anybody younger than 16 should look away now.

One day, one lovely summer’s day in your late teens, it happens. You’ll be walking down a country road, with the sun on your back, fields around you and birdsong in your ears. There’ll be no traffic, no worries, nothing to attend to. And you’ll find yourself thinking “this is rather nice, I wonder if there are any footpaths through the woods.” The scientific explanation for this phenomenon is unknown. Perhaps it’s the release of amblus wanderase into the bloodstream, perhaps it’s simply the point at which brain cells begin to die faster than they are created. Whatever the reason, once you have had this thought there is no going back. You will find yourself staring out of the window during work hours, wishing you were strolling by the river. You will look at sunsets and wonder if there are nearby hills from which to obtain a better view.

This doesn’t seem so bad? It’s a slippery slope, my friends. First it’s a quick trip down to the park and back, because fresh air is good for you. Then, before you know it, you’re wandering around stately homes trying to find tapestries interesting. There is little hope for you at this point. You may still have time to rush home and destroy the National Trust membership form you’ve had in a drawer for a few months, but it’ll get you in the end. I personally have not yet reached the above stage, but it draws close. This afternoon I decided to explore the local area by manner of walking, and, to my shame, I enjoyed it.

Mum had given me directions for a walk she’d found in a magazine, so I decided to try it out. Apart from one major error in the first paragraph - the wrong street name sent me in the wrong direction within two minutes of starting out, and I had to double back twice - the odd bizarre statement - “you exit near the Bell Inn” confused me until I found the Bell Inn around a corner, in completely the opposite direction from the next instruction - and weird backwards units of measurement - it worked quite well. About half way around the 6.5km round trip I had a great view of the town, and it was very pretty in today’s clear sunlight.

You see? You see what’s happened to me? Slack off while you still want to, kids.

Update: They’ve voted for the full ban! Woohoo! Brilliant.

MPs will tonight vote on the extent of the smoking ban in England. There’ll be three options:

Option 1: Muppetry
Option 2: w00t!
Option 3: Muppetry

All right, that’s not quite the official line. Here’s the BBC’s take:

Option 1: Essentially this is Labour’s manifesto pledge to introduce a ban on smoking in all enclosed public places in England, except pubs which do not serve food, and private members’ clubs. It was the option agreed last autumn by Cabinet after protracted debate. Championed by ex-health secretary John Reid.

Option 2: A complete ban on smoking in all enclosed public places, including all pubs and private clubs. This was the option the Department of Health, under current Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt, was believed to favour after consultation suggested the Option 1 might be unworkable and make health inequalities worse. Championed by health minister Caroline Flint.

Option 3: A complete ban on smoking in all enclosed public places, except for private clubs. This offers another option to MPs facing anger from private clubs, such as Labour/Conservative clubs, working mens’ and golf clubs at having a ban imposed on them. Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt says she is yet to make up her mind, but is considering voting for this option.

I just cannot see how you can impose a smoking ban on the basis of health, but allow exemptions. Staff would still be exposed to smoke against their will, and if that still happens what’s the point of the bill? I suppose the issue is personal choice, but I don’t see that argument either. If smoking were only harmful to the person making the choice, I’d understand, but the point is that people are harmed through no fault of their own.

Exemptions for private clubs would affect me, since I go dancing at a private club every week, and many of the social functions relating to it take place in similar venues. Given that I’m there for a dance class, and other people are doing something that harms themselves and me, the smokers are the ones being unreasonable and I think it’s up to them to defend their position - the ‘you can feel free to go elsewhere’ argument doesn’t work. I don’t mean to sound like it’s ‘us vs smokers’, though - actually, I’ve been very surprised by the attitudes of many smokers interviewed on the news. I’d say that the majority support a total ban, and many seem to view it as an good opportunity to give up. Which is cool.

Unless something totally weird happens, smoking will definitely be banned in the majority of public places, and this will make a huge difference to me. I just can’t stand smoke, and I’ve been known to leave if people nearby light up. It’s not something I choose to let bother me, it just does - I can’t help it. I’ve seen the statistics for passive smoking, and I resent having to breathe it in. That and having to wash any clothes I was wearing. Bleurgh. I very rarely go to pubs, and choose restaurants carefully, because of smoke. When I was in New York it was great not to have to even think about it when finding somewhere to eat. It just seemed such a reasonable state of affairs.

As far as I can tell from media reports, it was John Reid who demanded exemptions for private clubs. He was health minister at the time of the original proposal, and then moved on after(?) the election. New health secretary Patricia Hewitt was strongly in favour of a complete ban, but with John Reid opposing her the argument came down to the election manifesto. Although I’m very happy that many people kicked up a fuss and forced this free vote, it’s a shame the government couldn’t have taken the responsible line in the first place.

Of course, if it were up to me I might raise the issue of people inflicting cigarette smoke upon children at home. But that’s me Health secretary Patricia Hewitt stated this morning that she intends to vote for option two. I very much hope that the majority of MPs follow her lead.

—–

Having said all that, here’s how Patricia Hewitt opened the debate:

People’s homes, residential care homes, hospitals, prisons and hotel bedrooms should be exempted, she said.

Spot the odd one out! You’d think if there’s one place people definitely shouldn’t be allowed to smoke, outside of petrol stations, it’d be hospitals…

Meet Flickr Monkey Sam.

Monsters fear Flickr Monkey Sam.

We all know Flickr Monkey Sam could take Batman without even smooshing his banana.

Yes, thank you, I actually do have enough to do. For the Flickr Monkey group.

Dilbert. Penny Arcade. Foxtrot. It’s all good.

I wonder what Arsene thinks.

Ahem.

Quote from BBC News this morning:

Meet the most romantic couple in the midlands. They met 77 years ago, age 13…and still make each other go weak at the knees

Cuts back to reporter.

Of course, it could just be arthritis

Made me laugh

There’s a narrowboat in Stratford basin called ‘A Waste of Time’. I can see how naming your boat this might seem like a funny idea for five seconds, but how do you actually get so far as painting it on there? Maybe it was a labour of love that took too long
I’ve been going on narrowboat holidays since the age of five, and when Mum and Dad bought a boat they named it ‘On Reflection’. They asked the painter to paint the name twice - one normally, and one mirrored as if in water. I don’t have any decent shots, but you can see it on the large version of this. Can you imagine being the painter? You’re basically being asked to make every mistake you spend the rest of your time trying to avoid I didn’t envy him/her that job in the slightest.

There’s an advert for a pregnancy test doing the rounds at the moment, and the small print at the bottom of the screen says the test is 70% accurate. Aside from the 3 in 10 chance of it being wrong apparently making it a pointless exercise, I wonder what percentage of people who take a pregnancy test are actually pregnant. Somebody must suspect they are if they’ve even bought the kit, so you’d expect the majority to get a positive result. Could you sell a test that always gave a positive result, and still claim a 70% success rate?

Does anybody know if a screensaver keeps going after XP powers down the monitor? I’ve just installed the rather excellent slickr screensaver, which I’ve set to download a new interestingness photo from Flickr every twenty seconds, but am concerned about my bandwidth limits! In theory it should only run for the twenty minutes before power-saving kicks in, right?

coComment just left a few invite codes in a comment, so anybody who wanted to try out the site but arrived too late to sign up immediately can grab one. Please reply saying you’ve taken it if you do - thanks!