Happy Father’s day to all fathers reading this!
(I suspect it might just be you daddy, so Happy Father’s Day. Some sterling fathering you’ve done so far, results can’t be argued with, so keep up the good work.)
God bless daddy, god bless his beard. Today I listened to Handbags and Gladrags, The Wichita Linesman, RaRaRasputin and The Circle of Life in tribute to daddy and his musical taste. After all, it did shape mine.
Thursday evening had been just too hectic, I realised walking into work on Friday, feet sinking into the pavement and eyes slits against the light. Now, having found large dark glasses which take up somewhere between 1/2 – 3/4 of my face, I’m feeling much much better.
Thursday’s first party was jolly. Wine, noisy publishers, ruddy cheeked agents dashing about with bottles and writers ‘schmoozing’ away. I only have one small quibble. Canapes should be bite-sized. They should be dainty and delectable. Fist sized artichoke hearts should not play a key role. There should be few tartes and more tartines and tartelets.
The four of us in our mid-twenties located each other very quickly, taking up sentry post by the front door, and sitting happily with a bottle of wine in between us. An editorial assistant at a well-known London house had just completed her first project, an erotic reminiscence of sorts. I.T. had been blocking lots of her emails thinking they were spam because the language content was so explicit!
Then south, to Clapham, where I had perfect timing, arriving at the barbeque as the first burgers were ready. 9pm, and still so mild. Gorgeous start to summer. Back to the question first raised at Imo’s bbq last month, “How many bankers/chartered surveyors does it take to work a barbequeue?” Very school disco with all the girls sitting demurely at the table and all boys semi-circled around the bbq.
It’s the weekend : nuff said.
After work today I skipped down to the South Bank. The English were all out in their summer gear. Not a jacket or a brolly in sight. I scowled at the lot of them, and headed into the giant cement legomonster that is the National Theatre. I collected the tickets and found a nice glass of Sauvignon Blanc at the bar. My mood got even better when the pinstriped one arrived, swinging his red man-brolly, complete with glossy wooden handle.
The play, The Royal Hunt of the Sun, is listed on the National’s site as ‘…the clash between two cultures leaves thousands of unarmed Inca troops slaughteres and sparks and intense battles of wills between the sun-god and his captor…’ You can see this in full at www.nationaltheatre.org.uk. It was like a badly animated cartoon. The ten pounds I’d paid for my (extremely good) seat seemed an exorbitant amount to have to sit through it. Simplistic, unsophisticated, completely cringeworthy dramatisation. The Inca god spoke in a similar style to Ken Brannagh’s Benedict in Much Ado about Nothing, diguising himself from Beatrice at the masque.
The pin-striped one and I made our exit at the interval and wandered up the bank, delighted that we’d escaped safely.
Next time I decide I want culture, am so picking up Jilly Cooper’s ‘Wicked.’ You can find it on amazon.com by searching for Jilly Cooper, legend.
She’s finally back. About ten years ago we started our very own Communist Society, complete with badges. Tonight we sat in oh so trendy Soho. After quite a lot of discussion we went with a dry white that had echoes of both nettles and mangoes. We expressed our doubts with the usual amount of sophisticated cynicism. Pizza and jazz followed.
My darling boyfie keeps reminding me that Marx was buried in Highgate cemetary, with only 11 or 12 people in attendance. Details, details. One of my first crushes was on Trotsky. If that’s wrong, then ice-pick lobotomies have become unfashionable very suddenly indeed.
ON BEAVERS
I wonder if any of my loyal readers have been confused by the repeated mention of The Beavers. Well, here’s a quick explanation. We are a clan of fierce, intelligent, clannish Beavers, extremely anti-otter and anti-duck. Otters and Ducks have Agendas. Beavers have Dreams. Just so you know.
For more detail do click on this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beavers
On Saturday I packed a small bag and headed to visit the CeeBee household. When in London they live on the other side of town, and have a sustained belief that it is the only sensible place to live. (‘I mean why would anyone live anywhere else? Everyone should live here. I mean not EVERYONE obviously.’ NB The CeeBee’s didn’t say this, I overheard it and thought it was funny.)
On Friday, Miss CeeCeeBee, the younger twin by 14 minutes, had emailed an invitation for the weekend – along with the weekend’s menu. So with the perfect weather and the lure of barbeques in the sun, poached salmon and a roast lunch on Sunday, I happily boarded Chiltern Railservice’s arctic carriage and left London behind, heading to MK’s outskirts. A weekend with the CeeBees - woohoo!
CeeCeeBee and I missed England’s goal – getting back from the station a little bit after half one, we decided to put lunch before football and so only heard Mr CeeBee’s roar of delight from the next room. Once we started watching he quickly adopted armchair pessimism, taking great delight in taunting us with how awfully England were playing.
Post football, we moved outside. I lost at all games we played, despite strategic ganging up against smug repeat winner AyCeeBee at croquet, AND losing at a card game I’d just taught CeeCeeBee. Â
Chocolate sustained us until supper. Mrs CeeBee = kitchen goddess. The twins and Gemma call her The Feeder.
To bed, had twelve hours of sleep, yum.
Lunch, and then back to London in the Beavermobile with Buttkiss(AyCeeBee), Boris(GeeCeeBee) and the Alpha(CeeCeeBee).Â
Back to life as usual.
Tarka is Mills’ puppy. I am very fond of him.
A few weeks ago I stepped on his tail. He started crying and hid under Mills’ chair. Guilt and an an overwhelming desire to improve puppy -godmother relations led me to bribery, and I fed him small treats for the rest of the afternoon.
If I was any judge, I know to who all medals would be awarded: they would go to Tarka (“Tarkie”), the most darling of puppies. 5 months old, wet nosed and noisily curious, like all the worst tourists. Maybe I am biased, but he’s my first godson. But with his beauty and sweet temper, he is pretty perfect. God bless Tarka. I would put a piccy up but i think it might fly in the face of privacy laws. Also, Budge has taken the camera with him and my camera phone and I don’t entirely understand each other.
Have been reading the Ali Smith book that’s up for Oh So Many Awards. Initially quite a dizzy-making experience, now loving it as have come to grips with the multiple stream of consciousness that was brutally assaulted with. Smith is quite morbid and that certainly runs across all the characters.
And it’s the start to the end of the working week! Hope my newly loyal readership is well.
So I’m off for a couple of weeks now, and I’ll leave you to Sheila’s cares. And her cool new masthead!
Have a good time – and I’ll be back in a couple of weeks – hopefully fully refreshed and adventured…
Simon B points at an article that reports on new safety guidelines for ‘next generation robots.’ Because he’s on LJ, and I don’t have a LJ login or OpenID (!! – how lazy am I?) I thought I’d comment here…
Simon points out that the three guidelines sound quite similar to Asimov’s three laws of robotics:
The guidelines will require manufacturers to install enough sensors to minimize the risk of the robots running into people and use soft and light materials so they do not cause harm if they do so, the officials said.
They will also be required to install emergency shut-off buttons, they said.
….
There are also efforts under way to create global guidelines. The ministry plans to have its measures reflect the global standards, the officials said.
Asimov’s, for your reference, are:
1. A robot may not harm a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Source: Wikipedia.
First of all, how cool is it that the real world is catching up with science fiction (well, a teensy bit)? And secondly: I’m glad the through inaction subclause hasn’t made it into the safety guidelines. Imagine if we had robots wandering around trying to lower our cholesterol intake or preventing us from drinking alcohol in case we were to ‘come to harm’ inadvertently… Always a flaw in Asimov’s laws, I think :P.
Still, it would be concerning if they came up with the zeroth law independently, as Simon comments… ;)
Sorry; Sheila’s not quite taken over yet and there may be a couple more techy-ish posts (especially as I seem to be coming down with a cold and a good bit of geekness is always good to get me feeling like I’ve achieved something).
Read about OpenID when trying to comment on a Livejournal blog earlier today; its an “actually distributed identity system.” What this means is, when you want to post a comment asserting that you are someone – e.g. on this blog, asserting you have your own blog at iamcool.net (or whatever clever domain name you’ve chosen ;)) — you don’t have to register for each blogging system that has instituted a registration policy (qua Typepad, Livejournal, etc) — you take your identity with you.
The rationale for requiring registration in the firstplace has a few motivations. (1) To prevent spammers and identity fraudsters from getting too excited over your blog, and a cynical (2) to allow the blog software owners to expand their user base / do some nifty data capture.
But will it work? The net is littered with ‘open’ schemes for one thing or another. The Windows Live login is the only one that has been useful to me to date, and let’s face it, not many organisations have MS’s purchasing power. So what’ll make people adopt OpenID?
Well, support from all the cool guys out there who require registration – Typepad etc. And fast; if people lose interest in this… And I guess the second thing it needs: for anti-spam / anti-fraud software not to get too clever. WordPress lets ZERO comment spam through. Of course, I virtually have to approve every legitimate comment at least the first time around… but the point is that, if you aren’t worried about identity fraud or spamming, you won’t bother with a registration firewall.
At the end of the day, most users dislike these registration walls (alongside the ‘click here to read more’ buttons in blogs), and so will avoid them. I think. So we’ll see… Comment spam is less of a problem for me than many people (with my mighty 63 comments since this blog’s inception in early 2004).