Great news from Vancouver-based photo hosting community Flickr… the long-promised Pro Account is now active! It’s officially only in beta stage at the moment, but when this works out (including the 30% beta discount) at around £46 for two years, I’m not complaining.
A couple of clicks on PayPal “confirm” buttons and there we go… 1GB of monthly uploadage! My Flickr page is about to get a lot bigger…
With travelling still reasonably fresh in my mind, a quick rant about a tangential issue.
I’ve travelled by aeroplane more than ten times since 11 September 2001. The tragedy of that day should have engendered massive changes in the way airline security is viewed. I can’t say I’ve noticed any differences whatsoever.
At check-in desks, we’re told not to pack knives, chemicals or pressurised containers in hand luggage. Now wasn’t that the case before 9/11? And isn’t hand luggage the main area for airline security concerns? By definition, a person’s hand luggage contains items to which they have instant access throughout the flight. Usually that means a book, a pack of cards or one of those inflatable pillows, but it could contain a weapon or explosives.
So it’s reasonable that all of our hand luggage should be carefully checked in those x-ray machines. But look at what constitutes “hand luggage” to some people. I must be over-cautious in my desire not to overstep airline regulations, because my hand luggage only ever contains the few things I actually *need* for a flight, held in a mini-rucksack or a little canvas bag. And yet, looking around at my fellow passengers in the departure lounge queue, I see 50-litre rucksacks, large sports holdalls and the ubiquitous wheeled Samsonite cases. I know I still have something of the student backpacker mentality, but to me, those items are not hand luggage. They’re not even overnight bags… I could fit enough for a *week* in there. Surely bags of such size must make it far more difficult for the people operating the x-ray machines to check properly for concealed explosives, chemicals or weapons?
What’s going on here? Do airlines associate oversized hand baggage with businessmen, who must therefore be appeased at all costs, in return for their overpriced expense account tickets? Or is airport security really so primitive that no one has actually noticed? If aircraft cabins are really to be safeguarded against acts of terrorism, surely the most sensible (and efficient) approach would be to allow open plastic carrier bags only. They’ll hold your book, jumper, iPod and bottle of water, they can be visually checked (in addition to being x-rayed) and you’d have trouble attaching any kind of concealed pockets or false lining to them. Sure, it’d be inconvenient for all of us, but just how badly do we want to feel safe and secure?
As promised, I’ve typed up and html-ified the travel journal we hastily scribbled during our recent holiday. There’s eight pages of it, so don’t feel you have to read it just to be polite ;-)
Adrian and Nicola’s Trans-Siberian Adventure
The photos included represent only a tiny selection (and reduced greatly in size for bandwidth friendliness) of what we took… I’ll be putting larger versions of the best ones on my Flickr page from time to time… if you want full-size versions (most are 1600×1200 or 2048×1536) just let me know.
Well, I intended to add updates here, but time just wasn’t co-operating. The few short blasts of internet cafe time I had just weren’t enough for anything more than email checking and keeping in touch with #ukmg so apologies for three blog-free weeks.
Just in case you didn’t know, we spent the last three weeks travelling from Moscow to Beijing by train (the Trans-Siberian and Trans-Mongolian railways) adding a short stop in St Petersburg at the start and also spending time in Irkutsk and Ulaan Baatar. We wrote a travel journal and took loads of photos, so look out for a full report soon…
For now, though, it’s time to wash some underwear.
Why have I not written anything for a while? Well, I’ve been quite busy with work things over the past week or so. Never mind. I’ll be doing some more exciting things over the next three weeks, though, and intend to add updates here…
For now, though, a look at recent news. As the Olympics gradually draws to a close, I think the British team have a right to feel quite proud. There were some disappointing results and gallant near-misses, but we’ve also seen a few pleasant surprises, so our medal tally isn’t half bad (and Amir Khan is in one of the boxing finals tomorrow, so it could get even better). The Paula Radcliffe drama gave the press plenty of ammunition for all the “plucky British losers” stories, but that has thankfully been eclipsed by Kelly Holmes’ double success.
There’s an important lesson to be learned here. We don’t have the population of the USA, China or Russia. A large proportion of our sport consumption is dedicated to professional football and two non-Olympic team sports, rugby and cricket. Therefore, we have to grab whatever medals we can, nurturing the talent regardless of the sport. Seb Coe and Steve Ovett dominated middle-distance running in the early 80s, but that doesn’t mean we always will do. Ditto Jonathan Edwards and the triple jump or Sally Gunnell and the 400m hurdles. Talent comes and goes, flitting from sport to sport, and we shouldn’t pin our hopes on what we consider our “core” events.
Speaking of Athens, one of last week’s most amusing news stories involved the Official Hyperlink Policy of the Olympics 2004 website. A policy so staggeringly stupid and petty, I’ve already disobeyed it twice in this post. Ha!
And on the subject of website stupidity, the Transport for London site is one of the most clumsy, confusing, counter-intuitive piles of badly organised information I’ve ever seen. If you try to use the site without a reasonable knowledge of London geography, God help you. I’m pretty familiar with the lie of the land round these parts, but was driven to… well, write this.
Jonathan Edwards seems like a nice bloke, but he’s probably not quite ready for top TV sports punditry just yet. Commentating on the men’s high jump in the Olympics, he produced this piece of classic Alan Partridge…
“And here is… er, I don’t know who that is… er… it’s a… Hungarian man”
I must say, though, it makes for a refreshing change from the mind-numbing stat attack of John Motson and Barry Davies.
Time for one of these posts again…
Right now I’m listening to ‘A Lifetime of Temporary Relief’, a new box-set of B-sides, rarities and unreleased stuff by Low. It’s particularly interesting to hear the very first demos; two tracks recorded on a four-track cassette machine in a friend’s apartment. The quality is pretty bad, but through all the hiss, it’s easy to hear how the band’s characteristic sound was so well established even in 1994.
Also on the “new arrivals” pile are Mike Keneally’s ‘Dog’ and the latest Modest Mouse album ‘Good News for People who Love Bad News’.
Mostly, though, my rock/pop listening takes a backseat during the summer, because I get so enthused by the Proms and get to discover loads of new things. No major new discoveries this year (although I’ve made a mental note to explore the music of Benjamin Britten and Charles Ives) but I’ve been listening repeatedly to some of the pieces I’ve heard at the concerts (I like the way live performances often make me appreciate details I’d never heard before)… Mahler’s 1st and 7th symphonies, Stravinsky’s ‘Petrushka’, ‘The Firebird’ and ‘The Rite of Spring’, Messiaen’s ‘Turangalila’ and ‘Des Canyons aux Étoiles’, to name a few.
In film, the only new release I’ve been interested enough to go and see right away (as opposed to waiting a few months for non-feature showings) was Michael Moore’s ‘Fahrenheit 9/11′. I thought it was an excellent piece of work, but then he doesn’t have to convince me, so I can concentrate more on whether the whole thing hangs together as a piece of good cinema (I think it does) rather than trying to see the flaws in his arguments. For what it’s worth, I think his only crimes (as with ‘Bowling for Columbine’) are an occasional overuse of clever editing for comedy effect and a tendency to go for the pathos jugular, but I can live with that. He doesn’t lie, cheat, oppress or wage illegal wars, does he?
Away from the glitzy glare of the big movie circuit, the NFT ran a decent crime season last month. James Cagney’s fimography is heavily biased towards cheesy comedies and musicals, but ‘The Roaring Twenties’ and ‘White Heat’ show how grittily effective he was as psychotic gangsters (with some very Freudian problems). From the other side of the pond, ‘The Third Man’ and ‘Brighton Rock’ are fine examples of British film noir and excellent adaptations of Grahame Greene’s books. And that provides me with a link to another creative medium… I’ve just finished reading ‘Brighton Rock’.
It’s Olympics time again! As usual, I’m taking a fairly casual interest (apart from football and tennis, I tend not to watch all that much sport on TV) just browsing the BBC’s excellent multi-channel online/tv output and watching a little bit of everything.
And as usual, I’m struck by the totally freakish bizarreness of female gymnastics.
In terms of physical and sporting endeavour, what these young girls do is spectacular. I really admire their skill and dedication as they hurl themselves over bars, onto ramps and across the floor. But just look at them! It’s like the twisted retro dream of an Eastern Bloc paedophile… tiny girls, their underfed, rigorously trained bodies apparently barely touched by puberty, dressed in tight lycra leotards and with a quantity of make-up you’d expect to see on a dockside harlot.
Fifteen years ago this didn’t seem so strange… gymnastics was still dominated by communist Eastern Europe, where “fashion” seemed to constitute a loosely caricatured approximation of how Western youth dressed in 1981 and where young girls suffered physical and psychological damage from punishing training regimes. Now, though, accessible global communications are removing the barriers of cross-cultural knowledge and a larger range of countries are competing at the top level. So why do most of the competitors still look like extras from a Human League video? Brazilian Daiane dos Santos is refreshing to watch, both for her obvious enthusiasm and the fact she doesn’t look malnourished, but she’s an exception. Every other competitor reminded me of a cross between a Barbie doll and a Midwich Cuckoo… deathly pale, hollow-cheeked and clumsily daubed with eyeliner, blusher and glitter. Is there a whole fashion sub-culture peculiar to international gymnastics? Or a network of lecherous old male coaches with dim memories of what was trendy last time they set foot in a discotheque?
When I heard the news report yesterday, telling how a prisoner serving time for attempted rape had won £7m in the Lottery, it was all too clear what would happen next. Tabloid headlines of the “Kill this sick pervert!” type (although, surprisingly, not in the Daily Mail) and general mass media coverage of hair being torn out in great outrage.
Yes, that’s right. A man, who did A Bad Thing earlier in his life and who is currently being punished for that Bad Thing, has won the prize in a totally random draw. By purchasing his Lotto Extra ticket while on temporary release, Iorworth Hoare contravened neither the rules of the National Lottery nor the terms of his punishment, and he will not have access to the money until he has served his sentence in full. Fair enough, eh? Unfortunately, that’s just not good enough for a (hypocritically) puritanical element in our society, which is suggesting that High Court judgements be arbitrarily altered to divert such winnings to a criminal’s victims. This scares me.
Exactly how, I wonder, do these people envisage the precise definitions of such a law? If Mr Hoare had bought the ticket prior to being convicted, would his win be viewed differently? Would a convicted fraudster be subject to the same restriction? Or how about yer lovable Cockney gangland scum, so admired by witless soap stars and other minor celebs? Oh, and why is attempted rape suddenly seen as such a heinous crime by newspapers who have regularly belittled accusations of rape whenever the young victims were drunk or wearing revealing clothing?
This will be totally irrelevant to those of you who follow Premiership football (which the broadsheet newspapers seem to assume is just about everyone) but I’m still somewhat bewildered by the latest rebranding of the English professional league hierarchy.
[To recap for younger, non-British or football-indifferent readers... from 1958 to 1992 we had a simple system, with four numbered divisions of full-time professional clubs. In 1992, the First Division became the (separately governed) Premiership and Divisions 2, 3 and 4 were renumbered 1, 2 and 3. This either restored the popularity of English football or created a system of unchecked capitalist greed, depending on your point of view. At the end of last season, Division 1 (previously Division 2) was renamed The Championship, while Divisions 2 and 3 (previously Divisions 3 and 4... are you keeping up?) are now League One and League Two. I've ranted about this before, by the way.]
Anyway… I think it’s stupid. The team who, at the end of the season, are at the top of the Premiership (or Division 1 before 1992) have always been said to have “won the Championship”. That’s what the league is… it’s the championship of English football. To suggest that the team ranked 21st in the country can also have won *the* championship is ludicrous; indeed, they’re champions of their division, but that’s all. And League One and League Two? Of what? Of the teams ranked 45th to 92nd in the country? I mean… HUH?!
As far as I recall, I quickly (despite misgivings) got used to the 1992 rebranding. But the latest changes have reminded me that whenever I think about my team’s fortunes in the (usually) Third Division, my brain is subconsciously inserting the parenthetical “which is really the Fourth Division”. I can’t get used to League Two, because that little voice in my brain is saying “Hang on… *is* it League Two? Or League Three? Or is that what it was before? Oh, no… that was Division Three… so is it now Division Two, then?”
Thankfully, though, sanity arrives in the form of padraig’s blog, particularly a Nottingham Forest article he wrote. I need only remember that my team are somewhere within the English Vaguely Pyramidal Relational Table of Excellence and Confused Branding.
