Tuesday, January 30, 2007

First Aid Training

I'm a member of the Emergency Response Team (ERT) at CoCE, which means that if there's an emergency, I have to respond, with my team. It means that when there's a fire, I have to put on a helmet, and a special backpack, and get to shout at people through a loud hailer. It also means that if someone needs first aid of some sort, and there's absolutely no one more competent than me around, I'm supposed to do something. It also means that I was too new to realise you are supposed to say no, when they ask.

So that I don't stand there and say 'Fetch someone more competent', I have to have training of various kinds. Today I had first aid training. Now I know to shout "Dial 911 and then fetch someone more competent!"

We learned about about bandages (try to stop them bleeding, call an ambulance if it doesn't), burns (run under cold water, call an ambulance), broken limbs (call an ambulance), poisoning (there's a special number for that - you don't call an ambulance). But mostly we learned about CPR.

There was a film, we had to watch, with extraodinarily wooden actors, who showed us what to do, and then we did it. It was all very exciting. The instructor said that I pumped on the dummy's chest with a great deal of enthusiasm, and that if she needed that doing, she'd like me to do it. You need to push on someone's sternum to push their chest down one and a half to two inches, which seems to me to be rather a long way. She also said that it's normal to break a few ribs while you're doing it - that's OK, and if you hear or feel crunching or cracking just keep going. (There are laws that say that they can't sue you for breaking their ribs whilst keeping them alive.)

The one thing that troubled me was when you were supposed to stop. "Until you're too tired to continue", are the official rules. Well, it's quite hard work pumping away on people's chests, but one imagines that knowing that someone's going to die if you stop would probably keep you going for quite some time - but they wouldn't commit to how long.

We got a little keyring kit, which has a pair of latex gloves (for wearing whilst you scrape vomit from their mouths) and a special mask thing, which you put on the victim, it's plastic, with a gauze for the mouth, so you don't have to actually exhange body fluids with the person you're trying to resuscitate.

One hour on the sofa

Andy Warhol's first film (made in 1963) was call 'Blow Job', and consisted of a shot of Tom Baker's face (not the Tom Baker who played Dr Who) while he was being, errrmmm, let's say fellated, for 43 minutes. In 1964 he made a film called Empire, which is a continuous shot of the Empire state building, which runs for 8 hours. In the last reel of the film, the lights are all turned off, and it's just black.

So, because I fancy myself as a bit of a pop artist at times I made a film called "One hour on the sofa with D and A". But, because I can't be bothered to sit and watch a film for one hour, which would be dull, and I suspect you wouldn't either, it's speeded up, to take 2 minutes (or so).

Sunday, January 28, 2007

The Clock

I put the clock that we bought from Ikea up in the boys room. They went to bed, we read a story, I turned off the light.

Three seconds later, they shouted "I can't sleep because of the clock". It does have, I have to admit, quite a loud tick. Obviously, in a $2.99 clock, you don't get a battery, so you can't hear it in the shop.

I've put it in the kitchen. S says I might have to take the battery out, because she won't be able to sleep.

Discovery Science Centre

We went to a place called the Discovery Science Center, in Santa Ana. It's got science stuff, and was quite fun. Here's a video:

Saturday, January 27, 2007

Shøp

We went to Ikea today. I've now been to Ikea's in 3 different countries, and they're all remarkably similar. The machine pushing away at a chair to prove how robust it was gave me a spooky feeling, it was so like Birmingham, Leeds, Nottingham and Bielefeld.

One difference was the restaurant. There was the bistro at the end, which sold hot dogs (but no vegetarian ones) and meatballs and lingonberry juice (or whatever it's called) but the restaurant in the shop was very small - there were about 8 tables, and I bought a very unpleasant sandwich, because the menu consisted of three kinds of sandwich ' vegetarian', and two others that I didn't bother to take in. Drinks were cheap though, cans of Pepsi were 75c.

One similarity was the fact that when you got to the end you couldn't find anything, and there was no one around to ask. So that felt like home too.

There was a car hire place next door, where you could hire a van by the hour, which I though rather cunning. And it was on three floors, you started at the top, and worked down (I think that I've seen that before, being an international ikea veteran). There were lifts and escalators between floors, and a special excalator for trolleys, which was supposed to hold the trolley, but occasionally didn't quite manage, causing the trolley to skeeter down, scattering crockery and light furnishings until it crashed into the trolley in front. The boys thought that was very exciting.

[Update: I found a picture of it on flickr.]

We bought a thing I've forgotten the name of, but it wouldn't mean anything to you anyway (Trafort, or Rotfart, or something like that) and tried to buy another thing but the shelves were out of stock. (As in the shelves that go in the thing, you could buy the outside, just not the inside. Is this making any sense?)

We bought a clock (for $2.99), a big kitchen style one, to go in the boys room, so they don't have to ask if it's time to get up, they can just stay in bed. And a non-stick frying pan.

And I took another one of those panoramic photo things, because I could. One day I'll find something to take a panoramic photo that's worth taking a panoramic photo of. To make things worse, it's the side, not the front - when we'd finished I was going to drive around to the front to try again, but when you've been to Ikea you barely have enough energy to get home, so I didn't bother. To attempt to make it more interesting, I've done a perspective correction thing. You can see the escalator on the right that you use to get to the top. The people look a bit chopped in half, because they weren't considerate enough to stay still while I took multiple shots.

(Click on the picture for a larger view, click it again for even larger.)



While we were in Ikea it started raining. It doesn't rain often (as I mention whenever I can), and it seems that drivers don't remember that wehen water falls from the sky, the roads get more slippery - it must have been too long ago that it last happened. We passed three minor accidents within about 10 miles. (Reminds me of that joke about what accident and emergency, errrmmm, I mean ER, doctors call motorcyclists when it starts to rain: "organ donors".)

On the way home, we went to Trader Joe's on the way, and bought some 'Avocado's Number' Guacamole. Which I imagine is a joke about Avogadro's number. I'm impressed that a supermarket make a joke about something that obscure that very few people are actually going to get it.

(I just typed 'Avogadro's number into Google, and found that (a) it knows it, and (b) it can do calculations on it. Don't you just love Google? I mean, if you ever wanted to know the square root of Avogadro's number to the power of pi ...)

Monday, January 22, 2007

Panoramas

I found a program called hugin which lets you create quite cool pictures, like this one:


Actually, it's not that cool, 'cos it wasn't very interesting. But if I took some more interesting pictures, it would be cool. It stitches all the photos together and stretches them appropriately, and averages the bits where they don't match so it looks smooth.
If you click on the picture, you get a bigger version, and then if you click on it again, it gets bigger again, and you can scroll left and right. (At least that's true in FireFox. If you use IE then it's your own fault.)

Sunday, January 21, 2007

I'd always thought that scenes from films and the places they were shot were based on criteria like 'interesting' or 'authentic'. But now, having lived near places that make films, I've got a theory that an important criterion for the selection of film sets is 'near'.

I'll illustrate my theory with two examples. (Because two examples is enough to prove anyone right.)

One iconic film is the lovers driving out to a layby at night, and parking so that the city is beneath and behind them, and lit up. In any city I've lived in or known especially well, there's about a total of one place where you get such a view. I'd therefore thought that there must be a queue of film-makers and couples trying to propose all waiting to get to that one spot. Buy now I've realised it's not.

The two photos below are taken from a hill to the South West of downtown Los Angeles. It was a sunny Sunday afternoon, and there was no one around. And if I'd wanted to park a car there at night, well, the gate would have been closed, but presumably if I'd wanted to make a film, they would have let me in.

The first picture looks towards downtown - the little mushroom of skyscrapers is downtown LA. The second photo I'm not so sure about, I think it's looking towards Hollywood and Beverly Hills - somewhere like that, anyway.





There were a huge number of places near to me that would have been suitable vantage points for making my iconic scene. And you can also see, that on the other side of the city, there are some more mountains which also provide a plethora of opportunities for trading hostages.

Second example. Whenever they want to show gritty industrial stuff, they show those nodding donkey oil pumps, out in the desert. I'd always imagined that they had spent hours searching for something to represent slight dereliction and abandonment, with a hint of machismo (like the beginning of day 5 in 24). But, after taking the other photos, walk 100 yards, turn around (actually, maybe do that the other way around - turn first, then walk) and you can take these photos.



Saturday, January 20, 2007

Whole Words

I can never remember the arguments about whole word versus phonics approaches to reading. I know what whole word approaches are forced upon children by well meaning, but fluffy minded liberals, and that phonics are beaten into children by well-meaning but stuffy traditionalists. Or something like that.

However, watching D and A learn to read, both are happening. They can recognize every letter of the alphabet, and know how a lot of them sound.

But they can also read some whole words:
  • Yes
  • No
  • Cancel
  • OK
  • Print
  • Save
  • Play
You'll notice that those are all words that appear on buttons on computers.

Thursday, January 18, 2007

What would you say ...

There was a talk today at work, by a chap who has been a professor (not emeritus) in the same institution, for 56 years. (That means that when I was born, he had already been doing research for longer than I've been doing research now.) Anyway, that's not the point of this entry, but I thought it was interesting, so I popped it in.

He did research on predictors of behavioral problems in teenagers, and looked at risk factors (like having friends who smoked or living in an area where there were gangs) and protective factors (like having supportive parents and friends who disapproved of taking drugs). His conclusions were (very approximately) that not all people turn out bad, even if bad stuff happens, because the protective factors can protect them. But that's not what I wanted to write about.

The thing that I found most interesting was the end of the talk, when someone asked what the policy implications were - if he had the ear of the president, what would he tell the president should be done? The speaker replied, and said that while George Bush was president, there was no point telling him anything, because he didn't listen and he always believed he was right.

I'm surprised that people feel that they can express such strong political opinions in an open arena like this - I never heard anyone say this sort of thing at University of Prior Employment (or any other university), at least not so completely unsubtley. And this is, don't forget, at CoCE, not a university, a place that originally grew out of the military.

Shane's Inspiration

We went to a park called Shane's Inspiration. Shane, I read, was a little boy who was born prematurely and who would have been confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his days, but he died when he was two weeks old. However, his parents discovered that had he lived, he wouldn't have been able to play in a playground, so they built one.

(This spirit of philanthropy that Americans have surprises me - I wonder where it comes from, and why other places don't have it, but anyway ...)

There are some pictures below. Notice the wheelchair accessible ramp to the climbing frame. (The pictures aren't very good. The boys were a bit nervous about the size of the playground - it was big, and were determined that Daddy stay in one place, where they told him to.)




Trapped

Remember that episode of South Park where all the townsfolk get trapped in the town hall, and after about 10 minutes someone says "Well, I'm feeling mighty peckish, we'd better eat someone", and so they eat the minor celebrity (the minor celebrity was part of the plot - I forget why). Then a few minutes later they select another person to eat, and when they are released after four hours, all the people left inside are fat and bloated, and surrounded by bones?

Well, I've just looked for it on the South Park Episode Guide, and it doesn't seem to exist. But it's there in my memory, all nice and clear.

Well, never mind. That was a bit like what happened today. Except no one got eaten.
The cat walked into the cupboard in the kitchen where we keep food and stuff, when the door had been inadvertently left open (notice the passive voice there). Then someone shut the door. The cat was trapped in the cupboard for about 10 minutes.

Something like this went through it's head, after 4 minutes. "Hmm... I'm trapped. Might be here for a long time. Might as well piss on this food now."

Then, after about 4 minutes "Hmmm... I'm still trapped. Might be here a long time. If I'm going to have to rip open these packets, and then shit on them, now's as good a time as any."

Saturday, January 13, 2007

Earthquake Kit

For the nursery, we needed to prepare an earthquake kit. In case there's an earthquake, it's not a science project that involves making them or anything like that.
The earthquake kit contains very detailed instructions, but because we don't know what details are important, we don't know which ones we can ignore. We needed, for each boy, a 12 oz can of fruit juice, with a pop-top. Now fruit juice doesn't normally come in a can with a pop-top, that's for fizzy pop and stuff like that. Was it OK to have cartons of fruit juice, or was it better to have cans of something that looked a bit like fruit juice, but wasn't exactly fruit juice? We didn't know. After much trawling around different shops, we found 12 oz cans of fizzy apple juice in WholeFoods Market, and they would have to do.
We also needed three cans of meat, again with a pop top. Now, if you're vegetarian, getting cans of meat at all is a bit tricky, and if they have to have a pop top, that really narrows it down. We didn't really know why they had to have cans of meat, and didn't know what it could be substituted with. Beans? Carrots? So, we tied to get some sort of meat substitute, which the boys were never going to eat, and we'd just have to hope that any earthquakes could wait until they boys were at school. Wholefoods Market couldn't help - the assistant tried really hard, but was confused. "We've got soya mince over here." "Is it in a can?" "Errmmm no." No good then.
Eventually we tracked down a selection of things like meatballs, which weren't in pop tops, so we bought two can openers to put in the earthquake kit bag, with the cans of meat. We bought a third can opener to keep at home, and every time we open a can, we try to get the boys to help. (They don't.)
We also needed crackers. The nursery is very, very strict on allergies, so these crackers must not contain nuts, peanuts or shellfish, and must be in a packet that says that they are made in a factory that does not process nuts, peanuts or shellfish. Our first attempt at this failed, and the crackers were returned to us with a note. (It wasn't a production line, it was a factory, that must avoid it. The nursery single out Trader Joe's as a shop that you can't buy stuff from. If you ever send your children with something that looks like peanut butter, but isn't (for example soy butter) you have to make sure the teacher knows, so that your children isn't physically removed from the school. The children are also not allowed to share any food.
Sorry, got off the point there. Where were we? Oh yes, the earthquake kit. It also had to have a family photo, and a comforting letter. What were we supposed to write in a comforting letter after an earthquake.
"Mummy and Daddy will be there, just as soon as the sniffer dogs find them under the kitchen table in the ruins of what was our house."
"Mummy and Daddy will come and take you to the Red Cross Evacuation Centre as soon as the competent people at FEMA say that the risk of aftershocks has gone down."
"Mummy and Daddy probably weren't washed away by that tidal wave because our house is on a hill, and although Daddy rides his bike along the beach he knows that if the water goes away a long way you shouldn't go and look but should ride your bike in the other direction. And he can ride quite fast."

The Nursery

That last post (which might be the next post, if you read down the screen in the conventional manner) reminds me that at the nursery, there is a special folder into which one can place pieces of paper that you have written the cute things that children said at the nursery.
"And why might you hear what the children say" you all ask, as one. (All four of you - I check the access logs and know how many people read this.) Well, the nursery is a parent's cooperative, which means it is owned and run by the parents. (I wonder if the parents could decide to sell the nursery and keep the money - in the current housing price climate we could then afford a full time nanny, at least until they went to school.) But what this also means is that the parents work at the nursery (along with some people who actually know what they are doing.)
We were on standby last week, but were called in. The powers that be (i.e. S) decided that I should go and do the first shift, so along I dutifully went. There are 4 parent helpers each day, and each wears an apron, with a label on it that tells you what you are supposed to do. I asked the boys what I should do, from the choices of Art, Dressing Up, or Bikes. Obviously there's only one choice that any red blooded male can make there, and luckily the boys did choose bikes for me.
After I had donned my apron, I discovered that there were two bikes aprons - one is Bikes and Gates, and the second is Bikes and Toilets. By a stroke of luck, I'd chosen Bikes and Gates.
The apron has a laminated sheet on it describing, almost minute by minute, what one should do. I had to rake the sand, looking for cat poop (as they say), litter and PEANUT SHELLS. (There's a big thing about peanuts - I'll come back to that.) Then I had to hose down the sand (this stops it getting too dusty), fetch the tissues and first aid kits (the first aid kits say 'Contains Epi Pens' on them - where I come from Epi is epidemiology, but I didn't really know what an epidemiology pen might be, then I realised it's an Epinephrine pen - which, as regular viewers of ER will know is American for adrenaline (which I can accept, but I have always had a problem with noradrenaline being norepinephrine).
I just looked up EpiPen on Wikipedia, and it's got an entry.
Anyway, I had to hang around while the children did stuff, then get the bikes ready, and supervise the riding of bikes. Sit with them while they had their snack, and then supervise the block room. Or that's what it said on the card. And all that sounds relatively straightforward, but it almost killed me. Partly it almost killed me because there were a lot of children involved, and partly it almost killed me because A (especially A) wanted Daddy to be at his beck and call, like normal, and didn't understand that Daddy wasn't allowed to leave the block room / leave the bikes / get a different sort of paintbrush / play dinosaurs outside ....
When we left I had to hose some more things down, replace the tissues and first aid kits, take the signs off the toilet doors (it wasn't my job to put them on though - seems strange that) go home and lie down. For the rest of the day.
I forgot to sign out the boys, which is apparently a heinous sin, and didn't bring their lunch bags home. S tried to make me go back to redeem these failings, but I couldn't bear to go near the place. It's lucky my route to work doesn't involve cycling past it, or I'd have to take a longer route. Just thinking about it still makes me tired.
Currently, the boys are going 2 mornings a week - soon, it will become 5 mornings a week, and someone will have to go every week.

Cute things that children say

I've tried to avoid writing in this post about cute things children say, because to me they are cute and fascinating, to you they are a bit dull. It's like when parents get together and chat about the cute things that their offspring do, and while any one parent is talking the other parents are thinking "Shut up and finish. My offspring is much cuter than yours and my stories about the cute things that they do are cuter. And therefore better." Is that just me? Ours are cuter though. And they are twins, which you can trump a lot of stories with. (S used to go to the twin and multiple birth association outings in City of Previous Residence - someone there had triplets and trumped everyone's stories).

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, I was going to tell you about the cute things they said. We read a story called "Room on the Broom", pretty much every night. Sometimes we get to read another story, but then we have to read Room on the Broom as well. Anyway, there's a bit in Room on the Broom (I'll try not to give any of the ploy away) where a dragon tries to eat a witch, but fails because the animals that they witch had with her (for whom there was Room on the Broom) frighten the dragon away. The dragon flies off through the sky, looking a bit sad. "Why the dragon sad Daddy?" They ask.
I explain that the dragon was hungry, and wanted to eat the witch, but now he can't and he's still hungry, so he's sad.
"Oh. The dragon can go and eat some dead children, then he won't be hungry." They say.
Fine advice.

My First Computer

I got my first computer aged 22 (or maybe 21) when I bought it. It had a 286 CPU, and 1 MB of RAM (that was more than the standard 640 of the day, and you had to fiddle so that programs could use it - memory above 640k had to be decreed as extended or expanded, and not all programs could use both), it ran at 16 MHz, and had a 40 MB hard disk.
Today, we bought computers for the boys. None of this VTech business. We got a Panasonic Toughbook, and an IBM Thinkpad. Although we paid $300 for the pair, from an ad on CraigsList. Partly this is because it's good for their development and stuff, but mostly because it means that when we want to (say) check our email: (a) We'll be able to find the Firefox icon - it won't have been moved, deleted, renamed, or disappeared off the screen because it's been changed into a resolution that my first computer would have been able to run, and (b) there won't be a little voice next to us saying "I want 'puter games".
Photo on the left shows the new (to us) 'puters. Notice that a toy mobile cell phone has been sellotaped scotch taped to the screen of one of them. Maybe that's (c) - there won't be grubby fingers all over the screens of our 'puters.

Sunday, January 07, 2007

German Shop

I forgot to say that the reason we were near the sand dune was because we'd been to a German shop. One of S's friends had told her about his place, and so we made an expedition there. It was full of German people, wandering about wide-eyed and open mouthed, and saying "Och! Jaegermeister!" and "Och! Kloese" (which is pronounced Klurzer), and "Och! Dr Oetker" (which is headquartered in Bielefeld, where S comes from). Their non-German spouses looked on and tried to feign interest. We bought $177 worth of Knoedel and Schwarzbier and Kinder Surprise (you didn't know that was German did you? Well, maybe you did, but I didn't - and it wasn't even Easter) and Pumpernickel - actually that doesn't sound like it comes to $177.

Then we went to the German cafe next door, where S had a coffee, that was served in a china mug, was small, and was strong. The boys had a chocolate pudding to share - the server took pity on us ("I know what it's like having children"), and gave us another for free. I wanted to explain that we only bought one, because they weren't going to manage to eat even that, but kept quiet.

There were signs up asking people not to throw away the plates, cutlery ('flatware', as they call it) and mugs.

There was a little beer garden outside, which was playing German music, and was authentically full of old people drinking beer and smoking. S said that it was enough German for one day, so we left.

Sand Dune



We went to a park today, that is (mostly) a massive sand dune. One climbs up it (or goes on the steps) and then runs, slides, rolls, tumbles, stumbles or just falls down it. I've pinched a picture from Google Maps, which shows it, although doesn't really show it's glory, so the following two pictures try to do that better. Some people try to slide down - there are rules, which say you can only do that on cardboard, and the occasional person that tries to slide down on cardboard ends up sitting on a piece of cardboard on a sand dune, and not moving.



The sign at the bottom says "Children on the left, adults on the right".

Here's a video of J, running (with considerable elegance, if I may say so) down the hill.




At the risk of being somewhat obsessed, if anyone can name the band/singer of that song that plays in the video - well, there won't be a prize, but I'll be impressed at your knowledge of (only slightly) obscure bands from LA.

Saturday, January 06, 2007

The free paper

I was going to write about the free paper last week, but I thought it might be unrepresentative, because it was a Christmas-new year issue. The free paper is one o the things that reminds me I'm in a different country - while I'm riding my bike, apart from being on the other side of the road, which is a pretty small thing really, it feels the same as riding my bike anywhere. But the free paper - that's a different matter.

Actually, there are several free papers which cover different areas of the city - there are three that cover our area (we seem to be in a sort of overlap zone - we're not big enough or interesting enough to warrant our own, but the nearby ones spread to here. You can also get The Onion for free in some places). The one I'm talking about is the one that covers the whole city, and comes out weekly.

One possibly important difference about the free paper is it's not delivered to houses (at least, it's not delivered to our house), you have to pick it up somewhere. There's a pile of them in the club house, there are dispensers on street corners, I picked one up today from next to the ticket booth at the cinema.

Anyway, the first thing you notice about the paper is its bulk. It's 156 pages long (last week's was the same length, so that might be a rule). For something free, that's pretty hefty. If we had a fire, and if it was cold, and if we had one of those machines that they used to sell in the innovations catalogue for turning newspapers into logs, we'd never need to send out for coal deliveries.

The second thing you notice when you open the paper is the ads. It's got a lot of ads - it's a free paper, after all. The first ad on page 2 is for cosmetic surgery - you can have Botox for $10 per unit (I've no idea what a unit of Botox is, but you have to buy at least 30), you can have Restylane (no idea what that is) for $399 per cc, and a lunch time face lift for $1100 (per session). The 3rd advert is also for plastic surgery ("The New Lipo - have it done on Thursday, back to work on Monday" none of this lunchtime nonsense here), page 6 is for Laser surgery ("monthly payments as low as $31") page 8 has a full page plastic surgery advert ("Breast augmentation $2999"). Page 11 is another full page one ("Botox $100 per area, (2 area min)" - what's an area? that's a bit vague, it's like saying "Bananas, 12p per unit weight. But I digress.) P 13 is cosmetic dentistry. Later on in the paper are slightly more disturbing (and only slightly smaller) ads for "Laser Vaginal Rejuvenation", one can be rejuvenated in two ways, it appears, the first way is "for the enhancement of sexual gratification", and the second "for the aesthetic [sic: UK spelling there] enhancement of the vulvar structures". I'm sorry, but my genitalia are insufficiently beautiful, can you fix that for me doctor?

The next most common type of advert (at least in the front of the paper) is other medical stuff. These adverts tend to be smaller, usually quarter page: "Unhappy? Manic? Moody? Call for an evaluation". "Headache and migraine sufferers - could this muscle be the cause of your pain?". An impressive number of these are for 'medicinal cannabis' - "First 420 patients will receive a gram of Cannabis"

At the back of the paper, there's a new kind of advert - for "gentleman's' clubs". (There are a lot of other adverts for other stuff too, of course). "Almost naked go go girls", "Showgirls - totally nude", "Full alcohol bar, topless dancers, watch all major sporting events!", and several pages of "adult massage".

After that's finished surprising you, the next thing is the writing. First, it's quite, errmm..., I can't think of a good word, maybe risque is it. There's a regular column called "Ask a Mexican", where you can write in (under a pseudonym) and ask a Mexican (obviously) the kind of question you wouldn't want to ask a Mexican that you knew. Last week, the question was about whether second generation Mexican's didn't like recent Mexican arrivals - the answer was that they don't, and they have names for them, but the names differ between areas ('wab' was one of them). This week, the questions are "How did the patron saint of Mexico get a name derived from Arabic", and "Can the Dec 12th roundups be construed as just your everyday harassment and discrimination against Mexicans by a corrupt government and corporate slave masters hellbent on intimidation?" (The answer to the second was no, not really but that it wasn't nice to do it on a religious feast day "even the Nazis had the decency not to stage the Kristallnacht during the Sabbath.")

The problem page makes the problem page from Playboy read something like Beatrix Potter. (Actually, if you've not read it, it's remarkably dull in places. It's called the Playboy Advisor, and here's a link to one of their frequently asked questions "What are the duties of the best man at a wedding?") One question this week is from a gay man whose new (ish) boyfriend won't allow the writer to penetrate him. Part of the answer is "... maybe your dick is so big so absolutely ginormous, so ass-splittingly huge that you've scared his gay butt shut". But it concludes "the only way to find out ... is to promise not to dump [him] if he tells you the truth." There had, it seems, been a recent story about a lady whose boyfriend turned out to have something of a foot fetish. Someone wrote in and said that this wasn't so bad, and their boyfriend was the same, and now they are getting married. The response is that this is a nice happy ending, and that more letters like this might make a nice Valentine's issue, so "I'm putting a call out for letters from vanilla types who took a chance on a kinky motherfucker ...and they took home to meet mum and dad."

However, the most surprising thing about the paper is the quality of the writing. It's very, very well written. Not in the way that The Sun is well written (which it is - it's hard to write crap like that), I mean in it's sophistication. There's a large feature every week, and this week is about Muslims in California. Here's a quote, from the beginning of one article "Iran is a society based on a dichotomy, a place where people live separate and sometimes clashing public and private lives, and where duality of identity has become a major social issue for youth".

There's also an article discussing assaults by black people on white people, and whether these can be considered 'hate crimes' because power is the root of the issue, and whether the media generally were not taking notice of a story, because it was difficult to present (in, I very approximately estimate, 3000 words).

There's a cartoon of George Bush holding a skull in Hamlet and Yorick mode, with the caption "George W Bush looking at the 599,999th Iraqi skull created by his lover of peace, freedom and democracy and deciding that the world will finally be safer now that Saddam Hussein is dead". Now apart from the political extremism of that cartoon, which one would imagine in The Guardian, but not the Burton and District Promoter (that was the first free paper we had - there was a rabbit called 'Promoter Percy' that you had to try to find). Where were we, yes, apart from that, there can't be many papers in the world that run a cartoon which need to know about Hamlet to really get.

There are restaurant listings, with elaborate descriptions "a monument of conspicuous consumption, bottles of champagne and expensive sake ornamenting the tables, the most exquisite tuna tartare ..."; " a chef with a wobbly idiosyncratic style that couldn't be further from the finish-fetish crowd pleasers"; "only in the 21st century could you find a restaurant quite so mid century modern, with sleek love seat sofas and machine polished wood and a quantity of prefabricated design that probably would have amused Ray and Charles Eames back in the days when their aesthetic was found more in your kindergarten classroom than in a fashionable cafe". (I've no idea what that last one means - which might prove my point, or might refute it). Anyway, the restaurant reviews go on for two full pages, in small print).

I was going to write about the film reviews as well, but I can't be bothered, so I'm just going to cut the first paragraph:
As a child, I couldn’t stand Beatrix Potter, and not just because her cute jacketed critters bored me senseless. I loved tough children’s tales, but Potter’s stories were manipulative and twisted, filled with punitive authority figures — Mrs. Rabbit is a prissy scold, Farmer McGregor an evil-tempered lout — visiting tightlipped moral justice on insipid mice, bunnies, and the truly insufferable Jemima Puddleduck. Small wonder that poor Peter Rabbit cowers under the bedclothes while Mrs. R. looms menacingly over him like some demented Nurse Ratched on all those quaint plates and mugs that fuel the multimillion-dollar Potter industry.
The free paper almost summarizes America for me. It's crap and cheap and nasty and superficial. And at the same time it's sophisticated and intelligent and cultured.

Critical Mass

Last night I went on the Critical Mass bike ride, it started very near CoCe, and ended near home, so really there was no excuse. It was surprisingly good fun - there were a lot of people despite the fact that it was pretty windy, and not very warm - some said there were 175 bikes - I don't know how they counted them, but it looked vaguely correct. There were people on lightweight racers, and tandems, and what they call 'beach cruisers' here (they're very common - designed for comfort, not speed or hills) - here's a Wikipedia link , and a couple of people had children in trailers. Two people had trailers, which carried amplifiers powered by car batteries, which played music and added to the generally party-ish atmosphere. It was very empowering, to be surrounded by bikes, because one felt very protected and safe -there's no way a car wasn't going to see you.

We rode a pre-planned route, which included a roundabout - there's only one roundabout for miles around, at the route usually takes it in. When 175 bikes go around a roundabout the front and back join together and so it goes around about 4 times before peeling off - makes a good picture.

I guess we covered about 12 miles, in almost 2 hours, it was pretty slow - so slow that I wasn't wearing enough to keep warm. We stopped a few times, to regroup, and people handed out biscuits and fruit that they had brought. I chatted to a few people - mostly to a chap called Dave, who was doing a PhD in pure maths (something about differential geometry), but wasn't actually dull; a bloke called Ted, who was a substitute teacher and never wore long trousers, and a woman whose name I forget, and I wouldn't recognise anyway because I was looking forwards.

At the end, there was a brief gathering where people hung around and then they split off into vaguely organised groups. People who were going home in similar directions went together, some went to a bar where a band was playing that someone knew, and the largest contingent (with me in it) went to a bar nearby which sold burgers (which we all needed after riding in the cold). If they were surprised that 50 cyclists turned up wearing fluorescent jackets, trying to find somewhere to lock their bikes, and wanting burgers and fries and onion rings and beer they didn't show it.

It was karaoke night, and the quality was surprisingly high (Bicycle Race, by Queen, was the second song - this was kind of obligatory). The high quality isn't unusual for this area, what with showbiz being the thing it is. We were pretty off the beaten track, so it wasn't too bad, but Dave told me he went to a bar downtown (like we say here) and someone who sounded exactly like Stevie Wonder sand a Stevie Wonder song, and then, at the appropriate moment, whipped out a trumpet for the solo.

Shopping

Today I went into a shop called REI (and I've forgotten what that stands for - I've looked it up Recreational Equipment Inc.), which sells outdoors stuff - I was there 'cos I wanted a new backpack. Anyway, this shop was interesting for a number of reasons. One of them is that it's a members co-op, and one can become a member by paying $15, which gives you a discount, and a dividend at the end of the year (which is based on what you spent).

But the most immediately striking thing was that the chap who helped me out by pointing at the different sorts of rucksacks (and then 'cos I got overexcited, looking at head lights, and bar extenders and bike servicing and cycling shorts (because they were in the sale)) used a wheelchair. "Ooh, that's surprising", I thought "he's in a wheelchair" as I ran after him in the shop, in the direction of bicycle lights that attach to your helmet. Then I thought "Ooh, that's surprising that that's surprising". There's no reason that people in wheelchairs shouldn't work in shops.

The Quiz: The Answer

The quiz was here.

It's a Litter Robot. For the cat to crap in. Instead of trying to explain, I'll direct you here.