So the wife and I have been watching Lost on Channel 4, leading to much speculation as to what exactly is going on. One possible urban-legend doing the rounds is that every characters back story incidently features one of the other characters from the crash – so in the background, or on the TV, or something.
This got me thinking about what all the characters have in common, and of those whose back-story we’ve seen so far on UK terrestrial (Jack, Kate, Sun and Jin, Charlie, Locke), they all have two things in common; namely (1) they were on the flight under ‘negative’ circumstances or to put it another way wished they weren’t on the flight in some sense, and (2) that they all were nearly not on the flight at all (which is not unrelated).
Jack – (1) Was on the flight going home with his Dad’s body – obviously he’d had rather have found his Dad alive and well. (2) He was very nearly refused the flight because he was transporting a body.
Kate – (1) Had been arrested. (2) If she’d have left at night instead of waiting ’til morning for a lift with the farmer, or indeed had not stopped to pull him from the car crash, she wouldn’t have been on the flight.
Sun and Jin – (1) Clearly Sun is very unhappy in her marriage, and Jin appeared to be in Oz on a “job”, so I guess neither really wanted to be there at all (2) Sun very nearly ran away just before getting on the flight, which of course would have stopped Jin getting on too.
Charlie – (1) He wanted his brother with him to reform the band, but his brother refused, so Charlie left “in anger”. (2) He had the opportunity to stay with his brother and get clean, but chose instead to go back to LA.
Locke – (1) Was refused from the “walkabout”, and so forced just to fly home. (2) He equally well might have been allowed on the trip, hence obviously not on the flight.
The flaws in this thesis are the Sky Marshall, who was clearly delighted to be on the flight (but arguably wasn’t a survivor of the crash, and who nearly wasn’t on the flight for the same reasons as Kate), and the reasoning for Jin is a little ropey, as he probably somewhere between indifferent and glad to be going on the flight to wherever they were going; unless it was to another job, I suppose. On the other hand, we know that Michael and his son were on the flight under sad circumstances, with the death of Michael’s ex-wife, even though we haven’t had his back-story yet.
There’s been a “piece of research” recently that says that we all lots of gadget appliances lying around our kitchens that either never have come out of the box, or have only been used once or twice. Things like toasted-sandwich makers, food processors, coffee makers, bread machines, ice-cream makers, etc.
In one sense I’m not too surprised, but we actually don’t have too much of this sort of stuff just lying around. The only complete diaster was a yoghurt maker, which never worked reliably, and even when it did left you with litres of yoghurt to eat within two days. We’ve got a toasted sandwich maker, which admittedly doesn’t get used very often (a few times a year), but when it does it’s because a toasted cheese sandwich is exactly what you want. To be fair, its crown is in danger from croque-monsieurs, which I discovered you can make by dry-frying a cheese and ham sandwich, and ends up absolutely delicious.
On the other hand, our bread maker has been a huge success; I make a loaf somewhere between once a week and once a fortnight, and it’s great. You can experiment with all sorts of stuff too – we’ve banana bread, chilli bread, rosemary bread, potato bread, carrot and coriander bread… all lovely! And the smell is just heaven… waking up to the smell of freshly baked bread. The only disaster I had is when I got the sugar and salt the wrong way round, and ended up with a salty brick! 🙂
The food processor and blender get plenty of use, although I would concede the latter was mainly used for a certain young man of the house, and now he has “grown-up” food it doesn’t get used nearly as much. It’s still great for smoothies and milkshakes, however. The food processor tends to only be used for soup now, although we did make parsley pesto a couple of weeks ago.
The coffee maker – H’mm, now that has had a lot of use in it’s time, but these days does just live in the cupboard. Its problem is two-fold; (1) It’s a pain to clean, and (2) cafetierres make equally nice coffee IMO. If you want to the whole frothy milk cappuccino thing, or indeed the expresso thing, then it’s top – but we hardly ever do. Maybe if we had room on the worktop for it, it would be used more?
And, I would admit, I’m sorely tempted by the prospect of an ice-cream maker… I’ve made ice-cream once or twice, and I’m a huge ice cream fan in any case. I got my sister one for Christmas, so I might have to see if was a good idea, or is just a white elephant…
Going out to a Barn Dance this evening!! A couple at church are both celebrating their 40th birthdays this year, and so decided to have a big party – should be fun. Feel like we’ve earned an evening off as well, after another bout of painting today (ceiling finished, tester colours up and under consideration) and I even mowed the lawn. In amongst all this was a trip into town to buy Ben an outfit for the wedding on Saturday (A’s cousin in Bristol is tieing the knot).
Other news is fairly thin on the ground, although I’ve added a new friend to my links (Yay!). Andrew is a PhD student in my department who is about to go off to the states for a month, and has decided to keep a blog thing of his adventures. Who knows; perhaps he’s the next Bill Bryson, and I can say I was there when it all started.
So the Sony PSP was released today. I had to come home a bit early for reasons that I won’t go in to – but ended up wandering through town; past Dixons, Woolies, Game and the like. It must be said that all of these retailers appeared to have stock (they certainly had the empty boxes out) – but they had a few on display, and they just look lurvely. Seem plenty of pics and vids online, but not the same as actually seeing one doing it stuff. Didn’t actually get to play with one (felt a bit naughty when there’s zero chance of me buying one), but just drooled over the display case.
With a small-but-definite toy budget deficit, a PSP is not on the cards for many moons yet – which is a shame as I’ve got several long train journeys coming up (oh well). On the plus side, it may well be cheaper by then?
One of the nice things about working for a uni is that the university closes for two days on most of the bank holidays – so yesterday was another painting day. I discovered that it takes me about 2 hours do a single coat on the walls and ceiling of our spare room – plus obviously another bit either side preparing and then cleaning up. So I managed to get two coats on yesterday, which was fab – but sadly it looks like it will need another. And we’ve still got to do the wood too.
We’re going for an off-white blue for this room – blue is a colour that’s very under-represented in our house, and the spare room has drawn the lucky straw. Got 5 tester pots on standby, but we’re going to wait for the white to be finished.
Incidently, one of the disadvantages of working for a uni is that everyone assumes that you get huge summer holidays when all the students are away, and it gets a bit boring having to respond “Oh no, I just get 5 weeks annual leave like most people.” Actually it is probably about 6 weeks when you add the times the university is closed (around bank holidays and over Christmas).
Well, another day of decorating; a-painting, a-sanding, a-papering, a-caulking, and a-sawing, although not in that order. Got the replacement wallpaper up very quickly and easily (far more so then we were expecting). Got the new skirting-board bits on, and got all the bare wood primed. I had hoped to get a coat on the walls and ceilings, but it was not to vbe. Tommorow’s job.
We had loads of fun yesterday – went to the York Maze, which is a maze carved out of a field of maize (aka sweetcorn). It was great, although we did get lost and so decided to cheat and use the map (boo!). But I would highly recommend it.
We’ve started The Decorating of Our Spare Room – first task was to strip the manky old bit of wallpaper by the door (which got trashed by the electrician doing the re-wiring), and then put a new strip of wallpaper in it’s place. Inevitably the bit we’ve removed is an inch wider than the strip we have to replace it. Ah well.
It actually went quite well today; almost all the prep work is done (little bit more sanding to do, and the walls need washing down), plus I got the clever trick with the radiator to work – the one where you don’t have to take it off the wall and drain it, you just loosen the valves enough to rotate the radiator through 90 degrees and lie on the floor. Groovy. We’ve also got to stick down some new beading strip (or whatever you call the wood that goes at the bottom of skirting boards), but I’ve got that so shouldn’t take long.
Got this evening off, as a friend is coming round for food (Cheesy Marrow(!)) + video (Napolean Dynamite). Oh yes, the story behind the Cheesy Marrow is that we’ve started getting a fruit and veg box one a fortnight, that’s jam packed full of all sorts of things we’d never usually buy, such as marrow, artichoke, pineapple – so we’re having lots of fun dreaming up meals to use up all the veg! Think we’re going to use a Jamie Oliver recipe for the artichokes, which involved roasting them with potatoes. Oh yes, and loads of fresh parsley arrived too, so we made parsely pesto (yes, that’s really true), but have ended up freezing most of it as we weren’t sure we’d get through it in time.
Sunday is a day off, of course (although we might do some cooking), then Monday and Tuesday are full on DIY days (double bank holidays are one of the perks or working for a university!)
I feel very unoriginal, but I’ve taken a shine to another new artist that R2 have been heavily playlisting, this time KT Tunstall, who did Black Horse and the Cherry Tree, but also the more engaging (in my opinion) Suddenly I see, which was enough to make me visit iTunes and part with another hard earned 79p. 🙂
Anyway, it turns out that she does “Cherry Tree” live using a looping sampler pedal, specifically the Akai E2 Headrush, and lays down a loop one part at a time, starting with a guitar body ‘thump-splat’ as basic rhythm, then a muted strum, then a tambo bash, and finally a couple of ‘woo-hoo’s in a harmony type fashion. This is apparantly called overdubbing a looped sample, but it looks and sounds fab and very clever. Anyway, I found this out from a video of her playing live that you can find on her website, via the albums link, or go straight to the ‘hi’ video stream. I had to freeze the video on her pressing the pedal to work out which make it was!! Sad man.
You can see where this is going…
.. Yup – I want one of those!. Comes in at 120 squid, sadly – but on the positive side my Toy Budget is sprinting towards credit, after a burst of selling on eBay and a book review for Wiley (although the cheque hasn’t appeared from the latter yet…). The PSP is a definite fixture on my shopping list, but I’m wondering if the E2 might be more fun than a new GPS?
The game of the title is Jamie Kane, which is an interactive online game based on the fictional character of the same name. Basic premise is that he’s been killed in a ‘copter crash, but then turns up alive in Thailand. The interaction is all initiated via the fansite jamierules, with a message board you can read, and then launch an Instant Messanger client with a chatbot on the other end, pretending to be one of the other members of the fansite.
But the attention to detail is lovely – you get send to all sorts of fictional websites that have been setup by the Beeb but look like real websites. You get e-mails every day that initiate that days activity, and when it’s complete that’s it for another day. But it’s very clever how it inserts your name into the message-board, etc – the other members talk about you, that sort of thing. Probably best not to register as “Jamie”, as that woudl get very confusing (bad enough being “James” on there). The chatbot is well written too – ok so I didn’t try to break it, but the suspension of belief wasn’t hard at all. I even went scurrying off to ‘whois’ at one point, just to make sure a website was a BBC creation. 🙂
Going out tonight to the Starbeck Tandoori, in our opinion one of the best curry houses in Harrogate. No time to say anymore as the baby sitter’s here! 🙂
A sad (but possibly understandable) habit of (computing) folks is to search for their own name in search engines – primarily Google these days. The main point is to see how far down the list one appears, but also because it’s interesting to see exactly what pages there are. Guess where this is going…
So WAAAAAYYYYY down the Google list (like page 18), there’s a page or two from the Your Sinclair archives. I was a religious reader of Your Sinclair every month, as I played various games on my ZX81 and subsequent Spectrum +2 (with a whole 128k of memory), indeed I wrote in to YS Adventures from time to time – well, twice to be exact; May 1989,
Ah, a tender 15 year old, back in the days when I had time to write to magazines!
Nearly all the results are nothing to do with me – I’m hardly the only “James Handley” in the world after all, but the YS stuff was a shock, as I’d forgotten all about it, and was hardly expecting it to be online! There’s loads of genealogy stuff, and one or two hits from processings and the like. It’s a little disappointing how far down eutony comes, but nevermind.
A far more rewarding venture, at least in turns of number of hits, is to do the same in the Google Groups archive. I was a significant user of usenet in my college years, indeed I just found a post where I gave my full home address and phone number in my signature! Those were more innocent days, I guess. Before usenet (at least in my personal history) was fidonet which was fab too, and I regularly posted on there, but I’m not sure if Google groups also grabs fidonet. I’ll link if I find any particularly interesting or amusing usenet posts…
