The View from the Spaghetti Factory

However you choose to celebrate/ignore/abhor this “Pagan Festival Adopted by Christians and Now Largely Used as an Excuse For Mass Consumption and Crap TV, in Both Secular and Christian Communities”, please do it nicely, okay?

Back soon…

Having occasionally been known to post “Have Your Say” comments on news websites, often with tongue planted firmly in cheek, I guffawed heartily at the reader responses to this story from the Surrey Comet…

Marksman called in to kill Kingston’s pigeons

What tickled me in particular was the genuine response from (presumably) an old lady, standing like a flimsy barrier of normality against the oncoming surreal flood. We’re a witty bunch down here in SW London, y’know.

Spy death linked to nuclear thefts (Observer)

Why are they wasting their time investigating Russian nuclear sites? Get out there and search the roadside verges of Springfield!

This afternoon, temperatures are set to be hotter than at any time since yesterday afternoon. Even at 5:00 this morning, the sun strength was greater than at any time in the previous eight hours. This is likely to be the hottest and driest 19 July 2006 on record. We live in remarkable times, boys and girls.

Like all work-shy, not-enough-to-worry-about, Guardian-reading liberals, I’m incredibly concerned by the implications of global warming, not least the distinct possibility that it may have been caused largely by our own misuse of the planet. But can’t we just have some of this for a couple of months every year, without the nasty side-effects of global famine, floods and mass species extinction? If we promise to be well-behaved and put up with several weeks of slate-grey skies and sleet in the winter? Please, Mr Weather Deity, sir?

(Hang on… it hasn’t rained here in south-east England since 1937. If there’s any melted polar ice-caps going spare, we could make use of them.)

What is it about this country and the weather? We have a temperate maritime climate, and although our weather is changeable, it’s always polite and unassuming, never reaching extremes. Yet when it snows, our schools close, our motorways close and our public transport system grinds to a halt. When it’s unusually hot, our office air-conditioners fail, our roads melt and our public transport system grinds to a halt. When the leaves fall in autumn, our public transport system grinds to a halt.

I suspect it’s because we’re all too aware of the mild, non-threatening reputation of our weather. When building roads, railways or offices, it’s all too easy to quote our national winter and summer averages of 5 and 15 degrees and plan accordingly.

We also seem to suffer from an inability to make individual choices based on comfort. Now that’s partly down to meaningless social pressures (why anyone would allow their employer to dictate that they wear a collar and tie at all, never mind in summer, baffles me completely) but there’s also an inbuilt conservatism and lack of self-determination. I’ve boarded trains on hot summer days, to find a carriage full of sweaty people, none of whom has taken the initiative to open the windows. And the converse… cocooned by our ever-growing car culture and over-heated houses, people seem quite offended to find that a t-shirt and trackie bottoms just aren’t suitable for ambling down the High Street in January.

One of the recent memes doing the rounds of LiveJournal and other blog networks involved listing the births, deaths and events which share your birthday. I forget the exact rules, but never mind. Here (sourced from Wikipedia) is a selection of famous people who share my birthdate, although none were born in the same year…

Pietro Mascagni (composer - 1863)
Eli Wallach (actor - 1915)
Noam Chomsky (political commentator, linguistics pioneer - 1928)
Ellen Burstyn (actor - 1932)
Tom Waits (singer, songwriter, actor - 1949)
Jamie Clapham (footballer - 1975)
John Terry (footballer - 1980)

Now Jamie Clapham might not be as celebrated in his specialist field than the others in the list, but I’ve included him for the simple fact that, like me, he was born on 7 December in Lincoln.

Historical events? Well, the bombing of Pearl Harbour in 1941 is pretty notable, but laughably insignificant in comparison to the 1971 blaze at the Montreux Casino. Caused by a flare fired by an audience member at a Frank Zappa concert, the event inspired the song “Smoke on the Water”. However, all of this triviality is eclipsed by the events of 7 December 2003, when the Conservative Party of Canada was officially recognized after the merger of the Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservative Party of Canada (okay, which jumped up little political brown-noser thought it was worth adding *that* to Wikipedia?)

Deaths? Well, nothing particularly exciting… the biggest name is William Bligh (1817), inventor of the two-section chocolate-coated coconut confectionary (and hapless sea captain). You probably haven’t heard of composer Adrian Willaert (1562) but he was pretty important in the development of the Italian Renaissance madrigal. Lovely hands, too.

You know what? I’m going to do something to change history on my birthday and then kill myself exactly a year later. The 7 December page on Wikipedia is going to look pretty damned impressive, I can tell you…

From the BBC… “… British agents retrieving data from a fake rock planted on a Moscow street”

Now, I can’t claim to be an expert on espionage, but doesn’t this seem to be rather an unreliable approach to learning state secrets and all that stuff? Some hapless foreign office translator is going to be working through pages and pages of transcriptions of the sort of drivel most of us speak when walking down the street.

And of course, somewhere in the middle of all those recordings, there’ll be that needle in the haystack: “Well, as I heard when I went to the meeting at Gazprom last week, their stake in RosUkrEnergo… oh look, there’s that new pizza place. Let’s go for lunch…” [sound of hastily departing footsteps]

Merry Christmas! And if you don’t do Christmas, just do whatever makes you happy.

I have a drink in my hand, I’ve just watched Disney’s version of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ (I can rarely stand to watch Disney animations, but that one is a real cracker… I’m assuming LSD was legal at the time) and olfactory evidence of dinner is wafting through from Mum’s kitchen…

Still in pre-Christmas lazy mode, so I’m just offering a few links for your amusement until I have something original to say. This chain letter parody (via Jamie Zawinski) made me laugh like a donkey.

MAKE PENIS FAST

The parent site, complete with more serious information about chain letters both online and offline, is also worth a browse.

For some reason, the standard spam filter in my email program has been fooled on several occasions today. First, there were around 20 instances of a Viagra/Cialis advert, poorly disguised as an undelivered mail. Then came 25 instances of the W32/Sober-Z worm, purportedly from the Home Office. Blunkett’s last revenge, perhaps?

And now, I’ve just received what appeared to be one of the lamest phishing attempts I’ve seen…

Now, this probably indicates that I’m the most horrendous pedant, but the first thing I noticed was the grammatical error… “The list of questions are attached”.

The attachment, in case you wondered, is just the old W32/Sober-Z worm again. Send as many as you like… can’t hurt my Mac one bit!

We switched our central heating on yesterday.

It’s one of those inevitable things you have to do as summer changes into winter, the next step after closing most of the windows and putting on a jumper, but I still don’t like it. I prefer the house to be cool and airy, rather than cosy and stuffy, but there’s such a thing as too cold, so I have to put up with the stuffy nose I always get when the heating’s on.

Still, at least we’ve been able to hold out longer this year… I’m sure we switched it on sometime in late October last year. This autumn has been late and slow in coming, and despite the predictions of impressive leaf displays to rival even New England, it all seems a bit half-hearted even now. I’ve taken the camera out on two occasions just recently, but have only managed to take pictures that were predominantly… GREEN!