Terry Pratchett’s latest sounds good:

Nation is the story of two children: Ermintrude may just be the Queen of England now that a plague has struck down most of the royal family. Mau is the last survivor of the Nation, a tribal people living on a south-seas island that has been destroyed by a tsunami. They are both lost and adrift in the wake of terrible tragedy, flung together on the island of Nation. They both are blessed with doubt about the theologies of their ancestors — and denied its succour. Together, they discover science, and use it to weld together their people and save them from despair and evil external forces.

I’ve never got into the Discworld novels, but his Johnny Maxwell series is still a favourite. He’s also firmly on the side of rationality, and it sounds like the above may have something to say in that regard. I’ll keep an eye out.

Back home, and I had a really good time. The others were great at making sure I didn’t feel isolated, and I almost always had someone to dance with. People are so nice

I have to confess I went to Blackpool in the end. It was…the same. But I was invited, which was kind, and I did get to ride a carousel, which I try to do whenever possible. I also walked past the Doctor Who museum, outside of which hangs this:

Go figure.

Off shortly. To sustain you through the weekend, have a lolcat:

Or two:

I am properly weird this week. Two extremes:

Yesterday I went into H&M and failed to find the Menswear department. Everything else had a sign, but Menswear? Nope. It was probably upstairs, but there was a big Womenswear sign pointing in that direction, and the assistants seemed to be watching, and I felt conspicuous and silly, so left. 

Then this evening I went to my sixth and final week of Ceroc dancing. It works on a six-week loop, so I knew that by the end of today I’d have learnt all the beginners’ steps. I’ve been determined to complete the six weeks, but by today my enthusiasm was waning. I can’t continue the classes beyond this week, plus it’s not like I know anyone else who can dance ceroc anyway. Learning had been fun, but it couldn’t go anywhere. I still wanted to complete my goal, but I figured I’d leave after the initial lessons. I hadn’t been practicing enough to hold my own during the freestyle practice sessions, and was fed up of sitting at the edge feeling like a tit.

Except I stayed the entire evening - which I’ve never done before - and danced with half the women in the room. Including really good people - I even asked Teacher Lady. I have no idea how this happened. Well, it was at least partly to do with a very nice lady called Karen telling me off and dragging me onto the dancefloor. But I hung about after that, inexplicably full of confidence, and had a great time. This is as far from H&M Andrew as you can get.

I’m worried about social awkwardness this weekend, and now I have no idea what to expect. I feel like S4 West Wing staffers, wondering which President Bartlet is going to turn up at the debate. 

Ho hum. Like I said: properly weird.

Quick Chrome tip:

Control-V will paste from your clipboard and preserve formatting. If you use Control-Shift-V, only the text will be pasted.

That’ll save me time. I regularly have to use Notepad as a proxy.

I have a TV station in my head that runs new episodes of Firefly, Sports Night, Quantum Leap and The West Wing. I’m now going to have to add Studio 60 to the lineup. Sigh. That show had a lot left to give. I want more of Jack Rudolph. He was cool.

Still, onwards. Up next: 30 Rock.

I’m going to St. Annes this weekend. It’s with my dancing group, and I’ve been twice before, but this time it’ll be without any of my regular partners. I wasn’t planning on going, but a couple of other people in the group talked me into it at the last minute¹. Which was actually really flattering, and I was quite touched.

But while it’s lovely that they asked me, I’m still going to stand out like a priapic Beefeater. I’m, um, a fair bit below the average age, and the only person not in a couple. I’m also hardly the life of the party at the best of times, what with my tendency to go quiet when nervous, and I don’t want to be the dude who hangs about making everyone feel slightly awkward. This could all be in my head, but I’m worried nonetheless.

There’ll be dances on the Friday and Saturday evenings, and I reckon they’ll be ok. At least, if the Friday is terribly awkward I’ll bow out of Saturday and go take photos of the seafront or something. But during the day on Saturday / Sunday I’ll feel bad about latching onto someone, so I figure I’ll disappear off somewhere else. I might try and talk someone into riding The Big One. And then maybe go to Blackpool Pleasure Beach.

Actually, no. I just wanted to write that. Blackpool is, um, not my favourite place in the world. In fact, twenty minutes on the promenade and I’ll happily lobotomise myself with a spade. If there is a hell, Blackpool has a franchise. Lots of people find its apparent isolation from the last fifty years quaint and charming, and I’m glad, but one visit was almost enough to turn me Catholic² and that’ll do, thank you³.

So I don’t really want to go there. So, erm, to anybody I haven’t offended: any recommendations for interesting things in west Lancashire? I haven’t had a proper look around as yet. I could head up to Kendal or thereabouts, but that seems a bit OTT. Plus I’ve been there before. Hmmm.

After five minutes of googling:

Oh, no. There’s a Doctor Who Museum. In Blackpool. Oh god.

1. everyone else booked six months ago, I booked three weeks ago [↩]
2. I’m not sure if they believe in Limbo this week, but it’s as good an explanation as any [↩]
3. I was going to say ‘life is too short’, but ironically another Blackpool visit would rid me of that particular trope [↩]

I quite enjoyed that. The adverts suggested it could go either way, but I thought it was nicely made, and certainly full of potential.  

I used to have a decent collection of child-friendly Arthurian legends - second only to my Robin Hood shelf, I think - and I could recite them backwards. Merlin wasn’t usually in them, but the show has obviously built upon the basic Arthurian structure. I like the modernisation so far, with all the characters starting out young and away from their usual roles: Guinevere as a servant was particularly surprising. The setup certainly gives a few hints as to future plot developments, but I don’t think the characters are so culturally ingrained as Robin Hood, so the twists should be new to lots of people. I thought it was well-structured, too. Magic’s always a tricky plot element as it’s a bit all-problem-solving, but they balanced it well in this first episode - it’ll be interesting to see how they handle it in future.

Yeah, I’d have loved this when I was a kid.

You may think the news has been somewhat depressing of late. I would agree. You may think this will not change, and little can be done to restore optimism. I would disagree. For in Little Rock, Arkansas, USA, something wonderful has occurred. 

Possibly you’ve heard of Fred Phelps. He can be described, without fear of recrimination, as a scumbag. He’s the guy who pickets funerals because homosexuality is a sin against God. Last Wednesday he was protesting the National Conference of Editorial Writers - nobody really knows why - with his usual hateful spiel. This happens so often that it’s barely newsworthy, but it’s still upsetting to anybody involved. But wait.

Last Friday, you say? Wasn’t there something else going on last Friday? Some kind of worldwide celebration of…Hey, wouldn’t it be great if…

Fred Phelps and his gang of nutters were driven away by a gang of pirates. I am not joking.

Arkansas Pastafarian Pirates staged a counter-protest across the road, dressed in full nautical gear and holding signs indicating Leviticus’ objections to shrimp and cotton-polyester blends, and the Phelps gang gave up.

This is the best thing I have heard in ages. The relevant Pastafarians deserve touchings from His Noodly Appendage asap.

A year ago today I was woken by a phone call to say my sister had gone into labour. I was in Nottingham at the time, and a fair distance from the hospital, but I wasn’t worried - after all, labour takes a long time. So I got up, had a shower and some breakfast, and headed down the…hell, I don’t know, I just followed the satnav to Warwick Hospital.

An hour and a half later I pulled into the car park and tried to find the maternity ward. It was a bizarre experience. I kept wandering around deserted hospital corridors, following signs that kept leading to locked doors, then deciding I must have made a mistake and looping the whole thing. I somehow did this for twenty-five minutes, before finally heading over to the main building and asking at main reception. They sent me right back, but said I should use the intercoms, if and when I found any. I was moving fairly quickly, but wasn’t too anxious - there was still plenty of time.

I finally talked a nurse into buzzing me into the maternity ward, and took a seat in the waiting area. I’d figured my Dad and I would be sitting around for quite a while, so I had books, food and general entertainments to last at least the morning.

At which point Dad appeared, said “It’s all kicking off in there. Jane invited you in, but the midwife said no. Back in a bit…” and vanished. Fifteen minutes later, I met my niece.

I am the only person in my family who can happily believe it’s been a year. Happy birthday Aimee.

I’m after a decent voice recorder for this year’s uni lectures. We recorded them for a podcast last year, and this generally worked ok, but we could do with an extra recorder to cover illness / breakdown. 

I like the look of the Olympus WS-110, which comes in at ~£40. That’s the most the most I’m willing to pay, really, but I’m happy to as long as the audio quality is up to scratch. Its features seem pretty good: it saves directly to WMA and works as a generic usb-drive (with a whole 256mb!), so doesn’t need proprietary software. BoingBoing likes it, but (as ever) the Amazon reviewers flitter between omgitrocks and this-is-a-piece-of-junk. It’s “only” 28-bit - do you think that’s a problem? It’s only voice, after all.

Anybody have any particular thoughts / recommendations?

(I’ve just seen that Amazon’s Mechanical Turk apparently works as a decent low-cost transcription service, which could be handy.)

As written by Aaron Sorkin:

OBAMA I’m interested in your advice.

BARTLET I can’t give it to you.

OBAMA Why not?

BARTLET I’m supporting McCain.

OBAMA Why?

BARTLET He’s promised to eradicate evil and that was always on my “to do” list.

Although the argument may be moot:

In the wake of an epic financial meltdown that threatens to derail the U.S. economy for years, Barack Obama announced he was ending his run for President of the United States, declaring to a stunned nation, “Man, this is bullshit.”

…

The new de facto leader of the Presidential race, Sen. John McCain, was unaware of the development until told about it by a reporter. When asked how he felt about Obama quitting, McCain replied: “Senator Obama would like to fool the American people that he is the quitter in this race. He’s not. I already quit in 2005, well before Obama even thought of quitting. That’s quitting you can believe in.”

Both via undoubtedly wonderful websites that I’ve completely forgotten.

The ball was due to start at 20:00. I picked up the keys at 19:00, and I wasn’t anticipating any problems. We had plenty of time to set up the hall, which means plugging in the music system and laying out 8 tables/40 chairs, and I honestly thought we’d be sitting around for half an hour. Oh man, was this naive.

The first hitch came when a group of kids were hanging around outside the doors of the village hall. They weren’t at all threatening, but I had a car full of equipment parked around the corner, and I couldn’t get it all inside without leaving things unattended and out of sight, which made me nervous. Thankfully a very kind friend arrived early and at just the right moment, so we were able to transport it all without a problem. And at this point we entered some kind of time warp.

I initially thought we were doing fine, but things that took two minutes in my head actually took ten. I kept throwing disbelieving glances at the clock. We rushed to lay out the tables, then connected all the equipment. We switched it all on and…it didn’t work, causing utter panic calm analysis until I changed plug socket. Another friend arrived and we worked at full tilt laying out chairs and dressing the tables - candles take far longer than they should - until the first guests started arriving. And even then we weren’t ready for eight o’clock: the first song started at a quarter past.

My teachers do this on a monthly basis. I’m sure they’re into a routine by now, but I’d certainly never realised how much work it involves, in such a short time. There’s no way I’d have been able to do it without help, and I certainly got lucky there. Once everything was plugged in, arranged and working, we turned out the lights and started the music.

I took a bit of a risk with the music setup. My teacher’s setup uses a cd-player with two drives, and he switches CDs many times throughout the evening. But I decided, on Saturday morning, that I’d instead copy everything to a laptop and use an iTunes playlist to control the music. A playlist would be far less work, but also allow pleasing touches like cross-fading between tracks, and allow me to chop-and-change the running order without having to manage dozens of CDs. So, did this work better than the original system? Oh god yes.

It Just Worked. We went from manic work to sitting back and letting the laptop do its thing, occasionally bumping up the volume as more sound-wave-absorbing bodies entered the hall. Much more civilised than switching CDs, and far less stressful - I’d have been a nervous wreck by the end of the evening otherwise. The problems - and there were a few - only came when I took over from iTunes.

I had to take control about halfway through the evening, when we traditionally play a few sequence dances. These range from fun - the Sally-Ann cha-cha - to soporific - the Rumba One. Unfortunately, the cd collection from my teacher was inexplicably missing the sequence dances, so I hadn’t included any on the playlist. But somebody had the whole selection on an MP3 player, and asked if I could play from it. No problem, I said. Its audio connection was the same as the laptop’s, so I only needed to switch the cable.

So in future I’ll turn down the amplifier before ripping a 3.5mm cable out of its socket. Pretty inelegant. But the MP3 player worked fine, and once we were done with the sequence stuff I announced we’d switch back to regular dances, starting with two waltzes. I pressed play in iTunes, at which point my friend Nod noted that the cable was still in the MP3 player. Crap. Not thinking properly, I put the microphone down without turning it off, sending quite the jolt through the speakers, then (again) switched the 3.5mm cable without turning the amp down. This was later memorably described as the DONK URKK moment.

Then, later, I was asked for an argentine tango. As cool as that dance is, it’s generally a special request, and I didn’t have one on the laptop. So I pulled out an appropriate CD, announced the song, and hit play. Nothing happened, and I spotted an input toggle that needed to be switched. So I did. Here’s the thing: the volume of the laptop signal is very, very different from the CD player itself. The song had been playing for a few seconds before I hit the switch, so I’d missed the quiet start. I blasted the room with an extremely loud half-second of trumpets. Everyone jumped out of their skins, and I hit the volume and quickly apologised. As I said yesterday, I expect this is a rite of passage. Switching between the CD player and the laptop is something I would have practiced given a little more time, but I never quite got to it. Or, in hindsight, I could have just played the CD via the laptop (this has genuinely only just occurred to me). If there’s ever a next time, I’m doing that!

I didn’t have to play any more CDs, but I went back to the MP3 player later and managed to mute the cable-change noise. So at least there was a learning curve.

The microphone was difficult. I expect there are better ways to hold and speak into it, as I struggled to make myself understood. I announced a Rumba One sequence dance to little effect, so announced it again, but still had people shout questions about which dance it was. Having said that, nobody at my end of the room knew quite what to make of this, as they’d heard me perfectly clearly. So I’m not sure what was going on there.

The strangest moment of the evening came when six couples got up to dance the samba. Nobody dances the samba. Ok - people do, but it’s a difficult dance, and the only people willing to dance without hesitation are usually very good - and this puts off everybody else. As such I’d pulled one from the playlist earlier in the evening due to lack of interest; then, inexplicably, popularity! To make things even more surreal, later there were five couples Viennese Waltzing. That’s Just Weird. I put it down to awesome music

I was very nervous about some of my music choices. I wanted to modernise it a little, and I’d put in a few tracks I thought should work, but it’s hard to know for certain, without experience. Sure, I can pick up a three-beat waltz in Journey’s Open Arms, but I’ve been dancing for 3.5 years - how would a beginner cope? Actually, Open Arms was the probably the least successful track of the night. Many couples did ok, but a few were off the beat, and I felt bad. I pulled Faith Hill’s Cry and Norah Jones’ Come Away With Me as a result - no point pushing my luck.

But, cha-chas to The Corrs’ Breathless, Girls Aloud’s I Think We’re Alone Now and Kirsty MacColl’s In These Shoes all worked very well. And I obviously played the quickstep version of 9 to 5, which transcends awesome. But my favourite track was probably the samba to the Mamma Mia version of Dancing Queen. That’s just fun.

I really wanted to play the Roxanne tango from Moulin Rouge, but sadly it doesn’t work on its own: it has 90 seconds of the most dramatic (and therefore the best) tango I know, but then loses the tango beat, and 90 seconds just isn’t enough. I had the opposite problem with Cell Block Tango from Chicago, which is much too long, although I did play a mediocre three-minute cover.

A couple of songs had weird acoustics: the Sugababes’ Hole in the Head¹ seemed to bounce its bass notes off the far wall, which did very strange things to the beat. This didn’t seem to cause problems, happily.

At 23:00 I played the last waltzes and we packed up. The crowd were very helpful, and the tables and chairs were away in no time. Around 40 people arrived over the evening, which was actually a good number. It’s not the 60-80 that sometimes come, but I was happy with it: the hall had been full enough not to be sparse, without being too crowded. Most people vanished into the night, but everybody from my dancing group said they’d had a good time, which was reassuring. Hopefully everyone else had a reasonable time too - I guess I’ll see whether they say anything to my teacher come next month…

I’m rather relieved it’s all over, as it was a large mountain on my horizon. But I’d be perfectly happy to do it again, should the need arise. I also have much more respect for the amount of effort my teachers put in. But mainly I’m grateful to all the people who helped, when they had no reason to other than general decency. Without them it simply wouldn’t have worked.

—

PS. My clothes shopping trip with my sister worked out well. She didn’t take any of my usual nonsense, and found me some decent stuff to wear for last night. Form-fitting and smart is quite a different look for me - at least one person was quite taken aback. At least I now know what size I am at Next, too.

1. the specially downloaded radio edit, which inelegantly chops out the word ’shit’. I don’t know why this worried me, given that I later played Christina Aguilera’s Candyman uncensored. [↩]

Proper write-up tomorrow, but just popping in to say things went well. Admittedly I sent a burst of mega-decibels into the room at one point (presumably this is a rite of passage for anybody doing anything with audio). And my microphone technique needs, um, technique. But on the whole it was a smooth evening, which is what I wanted. And people liked the music. Home now, and exhausted. I haven’t thought about anything else for the past few days, and it’s like getting back from a holiday.

My dance teachers run a monthly ball at the local village hall. But they’re away this month, so we’re running it ourselves. There are usually 60-80 people - it’s open to the general public - and I’m in charge of music. Terrified.

I collected the equipment and 175 cds on Thursday, and I’ve been playing working on it since. I was originally going to use the supplied 2-bay CD player to control the music, as it has some reasonable features. But I’d effectively be changing CDs 60 times, and there’s no way I wouldn’t mess that up at some point. So I’m using the laptop instead, and spent this afternoon importing all the relevant tracks. For all that iTunes annoys me sometimes, it did a stellar job in this regard. It’s very quick at grabbing cddb data, then I only needed to right-click ‘import’ on the appropriate song, and it copied/encoded it all in 10 seconds flat. I was worried this task would take forever, but it really wasn’t a problem.

I had a brief panic after I plugged the laptop into the speaker system and it buzzed like hell. Research indicated the laptop PSU was probably interfering - a common problem with laptops. I was all ready to go out and buy a USB sound card (if I could find one), but plugging the laptop into a separate socket from the amp/cd-player solved it. Phew.

I’ve been trying to put together a decent playlist. My teacher is occasionally accused of being a little old-fashioned in his music choices, but, having listened to many of the cds, I can see he’s filtering out a lot of awful pieces. Once you remove the pleasure-beach organ stuff (urgh) there’s only so much left (of the ballroom, anyway). There wasn’t really time to make informed choices, so I essentially grabbed random CDs and chose the tracks that appealed. 

I’m trying to update it a little. I don’t want to alienate the regulars, so there are plenty of classic tunes in there, but I’ve interspersed some new stuff too. Most of the cha-cha songs are regular pop music, for example (Girls Aloud ftw). Hopefully this will go down ok. There’s also a waltz by Journey. Everyone likes Journey, right? Yeah.

Getting increasingly nervous. In an ideal world I’d hit Play, iTunes would run down its 3hr playlist, pleasingly crossfading all tracks, and everyone would be happy. Hmmmm. We’ll see