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  • Plantronics BB903+ Bluetooth Headset

    June 30th, 2013
    NASA Astronaut Neil Armstrong wearing
    (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

    A few months ago, I bought a set of Plantronics Backbeat Go headphones. At the time, my rationale was that I wanted a set of bluetooth earbuds for cycling, in order to avoid cable snags and make my rides more comfortable. My secondary rationale was that the Backbeat’s in-ear design would be more comfortable than the over-ear design of those like the older BB903+.

    I was quite pleased with the Backbeats, though their ability to cancel external noise was a bit disturbing on bike rides.

    Their lightweight design meant that the battery didn’t last long though, so they needed to go on charge between rides. They were on charge, plugged into a floor socket, when my wife sucked them up with the vacuum cleaner, destroying them completely.

    As upsetting as this was, I was also doubly upset because I couldn’t really afford them to start with, and definitely couldn’t afford to replace them.

    But replace them I did. Because they were now unlucky in my mind, I went for the BB903+, which I was convinced would be more uncomfortable: a heavy weight around my ears that would get in the way of my glasses and cycle helmet.

    I’ve been living with them now since early May and I find I was wrong on most counts. They’re actually more comfortable than the Backbeats. Although they look like they might be heavy, they’re barely detectable. So much so that I actually forget I’ve got them on sometimes. They also manage not to get in the way too much. I wear Oakley prescription glasses, with their patent straight arm, and I find them not too bad in combination. That said, I haven’t tried them on a much longer, much sweatier ride. Also, I haven’t tried them with my Ray Ban prescription sunglasses, which have a more conventional arm design.

    The BB930+ are chunkier, which means they have a much longer-lasting battery: up to 7 hours, which is much better than the Backbeats. They also give you verbal feedback every time you switch them on. They also connect to my iPhone much more reliably.

    They connect better, but they don’t stay connected so well. With my phone on the stem of my handlebars, they’re fine (unless I stand up on the pedals to climb, oddly), but they lose signal almost immediately if you are more than a couple of metres away, and they’re hopeless if you put your phone in a pocket. The pocket thing is probably because of the big sack of water that is the human body. The distance thing is just rubbish. Because I can’t have them in my pocket when mowing the lawn, I tried just putting them on a table in the garden, but you literally have to more or less carry your phone with you.

    You can get an odd effect when you lose connection for a second or so. The data gets backed up and comes through all at once, which makes your music sound like an old cassette with stretched tape getting caught up in the mechanism or something.

    So their use is restricted to on the bike, with the  Quad-Lock mount (which remains excellent). Most rides, I only lose sound for a fraction of a second, now and then, when I get out of the pedals. I’d prefer it if it didn’t happen, but I can live with it.

    In terms of volume and sound quality, I think they’re fine. They don’t fit as snugly into my ear as the Backbeats, and there is wind interference with the music. This is fine with me, though, because I like to be able to hear vehicles approaching from behind, and I can still hear the music.

    They have a lot of buttons to control phone calls and skip tracks etc., but I just switch them on and off and control things from my phone, which is right in front of me on the bike. If I could change anything, it would be to remove all but the on-off button. I don’t need the microphone and I don’t need to take a phone call when I’m out on my bike. I sometimes find I accidentally push a button when putting these on (because I still can’t quite get my head round putting them around and into my ears – I sometimes have to look in the mirror). Nothing is that important, and even if it is, I can stop and answer the phone. I don’t live in some fantasy world where I just touch my ear and talk into thin air like some busy and important person.  I’d rather look like I was on the phone with a, you know, phone in my hand, up to my ear. This isn’t The Apprentice.

    41vHqD42uWL

    There’s a button on one side which is something to do with taking calls, and one on the other side which is something to do with stopping and starting the music. I don’t use either and would never remember which was which when I was out and about in any case. I don’t take enough calls to get used to where the call button is. Both of them are prone to accidental pushing when you’re adjusting the headset in your ear.

    Anyway, nothing is perfect. I know I’m making them sound like they’re terrible, but they’re not really. Of course, they are terrible in the sense that all technology is a bit shit, lest we forget, but they’re adequate for the task of playing music that is being controlled from a touch screen before I set out on a bike ride and then switched off when I get back. I’d like a set of these specifically designed for cyclists (most of whom wear some kind of eye wear, even if it’s just to protect from wind/flies), with some kind of approaching engine warning cut off (there’s already an app that does something like that) and just an on-off-connect button. Maybe something you could actually attach to a pair of glasses (or a cycle helmet), as opposed to having to work around them.

    Make it so, designer nerds.

  • Sinatra: Reprisals and Cultural Capitol

    June 23rd, 2013
    Cover of "The Capitol Years"
    Cover of The Capitol Years

    Further to yesterday’s post, I spent most of the morning listening to my suddenly-expanded Sinatra collection. I previously had a triple-disc set of his Capitol recordings and previously previously had a number of vinyls and cassettes. But, you know, a few house moves and computer changes down the line, I was down to a couple of MP3 files. Then my Dad died, and I picked up a few CDs that he had lying around. These include the aforementioned Songs for Swingin’ Lovers, and Come Fly With Me and Come Dance With Me, a couple of Greatest Hits compilations with Capitol recordings and yet another Greatest Hits collection from Reprise.

    Ah, the Reprise years.

    For some reason, there are reviews on Amazon which claim his Reprise re-recordings of some of the songs he first did at Capitol are superior. His voice is better, they claim, and the arrangements are “enhanced”, and the recordings better quality.

    Wrong on all three counts, I think.

    To paraphrase Bill Clinton, it’s the Capitol years, stupid.

    In his first incarnation, Sinatra recorded for Columbia, and I’ve never found anything to love on those recordings. In his second, after a 3–4 year hiatus, he recorded for Capitol, putting out a couple of albums a year, on average, until the early 60s, when he set up Reprise.

    Give or take a couple of outings with Count Basie, the Reprise stuff is pretty disappointing. Doobie doobie do…

    It may well be the case that Sinatras 1960s voice had a superior tone or timbre. It may even be the case that the quality of sound on those records is technically superior (though I don’t hear this supposed superiority). What is true, however, is that his timing and phrasing is not better than his Capitol recordings, and the orchestral arrangements (pace Count Basie with Quincy Jones) are not enhanced. It’s like comparing Aretha’s records for Columbia with the later stuff she did for Atlantic.

    Sinatra on Reprise doesn’t swing. Specifically, his re-recordings of numbers like “I Get a Kick Out of You”, “All the Way” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” don’t swing. It sounds to me like he’s snatching at the vocal, phoning it in. The Reprise arrangements are too schmaltzy, too lush with cheesy strings, and when he attempts something contemporary (“Yesterday,” “Mrs Robinson,” “Something”), he either drags the melody or grabs at it too eagerly. I know some will say that I’m referring to the legendary Sinatra phrasing, but I know the legendary Sinatra phrasing, and it’s not on Reprise, it’s on Capitol.

    My Way: The Best of Frank Sinatra
    My Way: The Best of Frank Sinatra (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

    This is important, because if you were a younger person wanting to check out Sinatra, you might be seduced by the My Way: The Best of Frank Sinatra double CD set on Reprise, with its seductively youthful-looking (and possibly pre-Reprise) Frank on the cover art. It’s got all the tracks that you might have heard of, but a lot of them are inferior re-recordings. Yeah, it’s got “My Way,” which is horrible, and “New York, New York,” which is almost self-parody, and some other horrors, such as “Strangers in the Night,” but none of those tracks actually, you know, swings.

    What you should be looking for is the 75-track The Capitol Years (£9.99 on iTunes), or the 96-track Capitol Singles Collection (£9.99 on iTunes). I wouldn’t get both, though, as there’s a lorra duplication. For only £2 less you can get 55 fewer tracks on The Best of the Capitol Years. Bargain! Wait, what? Also there are a lot of confusing, out-of-mechanical-copyright re-issues, if you can be arsed to trawl through and see what it is you’re buying. Yeah, there are 1,546 “albums” to trawl through, which is why your motto should be, it’s the Capitol years, stupid.

    All of this copyright-free madness is a waste of everybody’s time, of course, like those apps on the app store that look like the thing you’re after, but aren’t it. There’s a lot to be said for sticking with canonical releases and avoiding compilations altogether. If you choose to go this route, be aware that the Capitol discography follows a pattern of torch songs on one record, followed by swing on the next. So In the Wee Small Hours followed by Songs for Swingin’ Lovers; Close to You followed by A Swingin’ Affair! It’s not always so exact, but the swing records (helpfully) often have the word “swing” in the title. There are some odd exceptions. Come Fly With Me is mostly croony love songs, bar the title track and one or two others (a concept album, is what it is). The title track of Nice ‘n’ Easy is superb (possibly, quintessentially, the one song you should buy if you were only going to buy one), but the rest of the album is ballads.

    Finally, be very aware that Sinatra was very cynical and not above knocking out a couple of contractual obligation records when he wanted to hurry things along. He’d just turn up at the studio for a day and belt or croon out a few favourites: job done.

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  • Great Sounding Records of our Time

    June 22nd, 2013
    Songs-for-swingin-lovers
    Songs-for-swingin-lovers (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

    Pulled out some Frank Sinatra CDs that came my way after my dad died this morning, to provide the kind of non-demanding background music that helps me to concentrate when marking exams.

    It’s many years since I listened to some of this stuff. I had a copy of Songs For Swingin’ Lovers on vinyl many years ago, and Come Dance/Fly With Me on cassette. This would have been in the mid-1980s, and hearing Come Fly With Me again after all these years took me back to the early days in my first car, pootling along the back roads in the orange Beetle with its noisy aircooled engine and (usually) blown exhaust. I put more exhausts on that car than I have ever put on all my subsequent cars.

    Songs for Swingin’ Lovers, which dates from 1956 is a superbly produced record, sounding as fresh and as clean today as it did back then – and, crucially, fresher and cleaner than many more recent records. I’ve got a taste for a nice-sounding record. Here are some other favourites:

    Beatles for Sale

    No such list would be complete without this. The Beatles’ first two albums sound thin to my ears. A Hard Day’s Night is a great leap forward, and then, a few months later, came this, with its beautiful mix of electric and acoustic guitars, piano, hammond organ, and vocal harmonies. It sounds plumper and more rounded, pleasing to the ears, and never grates. Help! sounded great, too, of course, but this was the beginning of an extraordinary run of wonderfully produced sounds.

    Alan Jackson – Like Red on a Rose

    I actually don’t like many of the songs on this, but it’s a great example of why Alan Jackson’s records are the best-sounding recordings coming out of Nashville. They’re considerably quieter-sounding than almost everything else, for a start. No loudness wars here, just beautiful sound separation and fine musicianship.

    Kelly Willis – Easy

    I’ve written about this record before. For a few years it always surprised me when it came on in the car, because I rarely recognised the songs immediately, but always thought it (whatever song it was) sounded great. Mostly acoustic, and a great production job on a voice that can sound awkwardly nasal on other records.

    Connor Christian and Southern Gothic – New Hometown

    Still getting a lot of plays around here, and still my recommendation for anyone looking for something new that is absolutely brilliant (forget the Silver Seas, this is where it’s at). It also has the capacity to make you sit up in the car when a track comes on, because it sounds lush.

    Deana Carter – I’m Just a Girl

    I hate it when an artist hits a peak like this and then wanders off track. This 2003 collection was such a high point, and nothing she did afterwards (and there hasn’t been much of it) was any good. Her husky voice is well balanced here with a gentle country rock production job.

    Lou Reed – Coney Island Baby

    Another nicely understated production, quieter than most you hear, and everything in the best possible taste. Unless you listen to the words.

    Tift Merritt – Tambourine

    Mr Drakoulis’ production on this makes it sound unlike any other Tift Merritt record. I love her music, but often yearn for more like this. Mike Campbell on guitar, and a sense of energy and urgency in the room.

    Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers – Damn the Torpedoes

    Speaking of Mike Campbell.

    Wynonna Judd – The Other Side

    Smooth: a strong voice and a strong collection of songs produced within an inch of its life.

    Cry – Faith Hill

    My guilty pleasure. About 9,000 instruments on each track, and not remotely country, but I still think it sounds great.

  • It’s been a bummer the whole damn summer

    June 15th, 2013
    English: A Snickers candy bar, broken in half.
    Marathon – yeah, you heard me

    Having established that the prevailing wind would be behind me on the way in, I finally did that thing and cycled to work last Friday. It was never the distance that bothered me. My normal drive to work is 16 miles, but to avoid the busiest roads (with the most fatalities), I had to go three miles in the wrong direction, so that made it 19 miles on the day. So I was bothered a bit by the extra three miles, which shouldn’t be necessary in a civilised country.

    I also had concerns about getting stranded with a puncture, or being knocked into a ditch by an Audi driver. Then there were the clothes, my Rapha gear, which I’d been accumulating in hopes of looking reasonably smart at work after a 19-mile ride.

    Ironically, the three miles in the wrong direction was along the A422 with the wind against me and very fast cars and the odd lorry thundering past me. You can’t hug the left hand side too much because of the horrible state of the road, so you just have to hope. I set off at 6 am, not because I thought I needed 2 1/2 hours to get to work, but because I was hoping 6 am would be a lot quieter than 7 am. It more or less was. I was allowing 90 minutes to get to work, meaning I’d arrive an hour early. We usually get there at least 30 minutes early, so it wouldn’t be too shocking,

    (Yeah, Wilshaw, all this talk of teachers going home at three o’clock: no mention of what time we arrive in the morning, eh? Not a morning person, obviously.)

    The odd dead hare avoided, I covered the three miles and finally turned off onto the back road to Thornton. On a map, it almost looks like a straight line to Wing from there.

    The next half an hour was hard and hilly. It was cold, and although I’d got up at 5 to eat breakfast, I’d not digested it, and my legs wanted to be in bed.ImageLooking at the route profile (above), you can see that the lowest point of the ride is fairly early on, and then you start climbing until about the half way point. That little dip right at the beginning is the bit from my front door to the bottom of my street, which is followed by a sharp left and a steep climb up Page Hill.

    Once I hit the roundabout on the A421 between Whaddon and Mursley, things got better. My legs suddenly felt better, and I fairly flew along. The Mursley/Whaddon road is in a shocking state of repair: there are bits of it where 100% of the width of the surface is potholed and there is nowhere for a cyclist to go, apart from up and down as you bounce and rattle. It’s like there’s been a war and the road was strategic and has been shelled. When you read post-apocalyptic science fiction, and it’s a hundred years or so after a disaster, and the few remnants of humanity are living in what’s left of the infrastructure: like that. You can see that there was once a road there, but nature is taking over.

    Anyway, once I survived that, and as you can see from the route profile above, it was dead easy. So easy, in fact, that I arrived at work not at 7:30, but at 7:15, having averaged around 15 mph. This is a fairly respectable speed, and fast for me.

    I wasn’t very sweaty, and frankly didn’t need the Snickers bar I had in my lunch bag (I actually started typing Marathon, then, if you can believe it).

    I wasn’t teaching that day, but got a lot of comments about my clothes. I looked very casual. Probably it was the DZR shoes, which look like, you know, plimsoles, but apparently the grey Rapha trousers and the blue Rapha polo neck were fooling nobody.

    I’ll do it again, though, if the weather picks up. But here we are in the middle of June and I can say with all honesty that I still have not been out on my bike on a day when it wasn’t cold, windy, or both. There have been no calm, sunny days at all. The wind has been at at least 15 mph all year, I reckon. 15 mph, as you might guess, is enough wind to make you feel like there’s something pushing against you. It’s what you start to feel even on a calm day when you’re cycling at a decent speed. 15 mph feels like you’re pushing against something, so even on a flat road you feel like you’re going up hill.

    I can hear the wind blowing through the trees outside this morning. Forecast says 21 kph, rising to 31 kph by lunchtime. Here’s hoping for some decent weather in France this summer holiday. A faint hope. It’s Auxelles Bas: of course it’s going to rain.

  • Why Stargate Universe was under-rated

    June 3rd, 2013
    Air (Stargate Universe)
    Air (Stargate Universe) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

    Over the years, I’ve grown all-too-used to my various Freeview boxes and PVRs choosing to fuck up scheduled recordings while I’m away in France, so I wasn’t surprised to discover on my return this time that a forced retune had buggered all my stuff from about Wednesday onwards, meaning that I missed the last few episodes of season 2 of Stargate Universe (SGU).

    I also lost a Nashville and a Good Wife, but those are available online via catchup. I was gutted about SGU, because I’ve been gorging on it for several weeks as it enjoyed a re-run on Sky’s PickTV.

    So I hadn’t seen it before. The original Stargate was all right, I suppose, but it suffered from the usual TV Sci Fi silliness, threats to earth and so on. It was occasionally watchable, but I wouldn’t have sought it out, and it and its spinoff shows were never really on my radar.

    But I was intrigued enough to learn (via his promotion of Redshirts) that John Scalzi was a creative consultant on SGU to give it a go when I saw it appear on the free-to-air PickTV. If you like proper science fiction, you should watch out for another run of it (they just started showing Enterprise again, so it might well appear).

    Like the superb Battlestar Galactica  of days gone by, SGU used edgy camera work, anti-hero character conflicts, and gigantic plot twists. There were also some very bold movies, doing things that the likes of Star Trek would never dare, like stranding main characters on planets, having everybody apparently die, and refusing to offer neat explanations.

    We’re used to seeing excellent shows cancelled, and there’s no point dwelling too much on it, getting up a petition or blaming the suits. Often the fans of these shows are also their worst enemies, choosing to download instead of watching broadcasts, and then wondering why the network decides to cancel something that doesn’t have an audience and doesn’t attract advertising. If you love a show, then you need to see the big, commercial picture and understand that if you don’t pay for it by watching official broadcasts or paying for a download or boxed set, it’s going to die.

    What I loved about SGU was its use of proper science fiction ideas and its setting in a universe with rules. So faster-than-light travel is possible, but the ship needs power, and chemicals for scrubbing carbon dioxide out of the air, and the people need to be fed, supplies need to be replenished. All of these ideas conveniently skated over in a show like Star Trek. Planets can be hostile environments, and remnants of long-ago civilisations refuse to give up their secrets easily, or offer “human” explanations for their motives.

    The crew get to the ship entirely accidentally (they’re the “wrong crew” at the “wrong time”) and the show never loses sight of that, never forgets that these are people struggling and improvising a long way beyond their level of competency. Nobody trusts Rush (played by Robert Carlisle) and the ship’s commander-by-default is always fallible. And I don’t know who was really responsible for the storylines and scripts (or how much influence a creative consultant like Scalzi might have), but it was fairly obvious that the show was being run by people who knew science fiction and knew what was wrong with all the other Sci Fi shows.

    It was cut short after just two seasons and didn’t have a proper ending, but maybe that’s better than going on for too long. Battlestar lasted a season too long, as did Lost, and having 40 episodes is better than the 13 or so that Firefly gave us. Give or take Battlestar or the early X Files, SGU may have been the best SF show that television has ever seen.

    Blockade (Stargate Universe)
    Blockade (Stargate Universe) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
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  • The Hills Have Pies and Headbanging

    June 2nd, 2013

    photo

    Just got back from France, where we had a week of mostly rain interspersed with hints of the Spring weather we’ve all been missing. I took my bike and forgot my sunglasses. I hoped the latter forgetfulness would encourage the fates to give us some sunshine, but not much.

    The two travelling days were fairly sunny, though there was a moment on the trip down there, where we climbed a steep incline on the road and found ourselves on the other side of a natural geographical boundary. On one side of the pass: bright sunshine; on the other: pissing down.

    Such is life in Plancher Bas and now Auxelles Bas, where we have the use of a 200-year-old house left to my mother-in-law by a recently departed aunt. My wife and I, but mainly my wife, have spent the last few holidays (the old lady died last summer) chucking out junk and sprucing the place up. We painted the walls white, in the main. My in-laws installed new windows and shutters and fixed the worst of the dodgy floors, covering the repairs with wood-effect lino. They’ve just ordered a wood-burning stove, too, to be installed in September. This is expensive and a luxury, given that there’s a fairly recent (and noisy) central heating system in the place, but there’s a barn full of 30-year-old oak logs just begging to be burned, so what the hell.

    We threw away the straw bedding and got new mattresses. I have the say, the place is really nice now. I’d wish for a couple of additions – things I’d add if I won the lotto – but it is now a fairly decent holiday home, and the sort of place you wouldn’t complain too much about if you rented it. No dishwasher (domage), and a kitchen sink that is both too low and too shallow to be much use, and the bathroom suite is brown: ’nuff said.

    Also, and I promise not to complain about this too much: I kept banging my head. 200-year-old French houses were not built with people as tall as 1.85 metres in mind. I do wonder how the German soldiers who occupied the place in the 1939–45 war got on. Perhaps they kept their helmets on. I banged my head every morning on the bedroom door on the way down the stairs. And I banged my head on the stairway overhang at least once a day, on average. The stairs are narrow and the steps are narrow too, so you’re gingerly making your way down and can miss the overhang in your eyeline. In the middle of one night, I was so concerned with avoiding the headbang in the dark that I slipped and slid down the last four steps, wrenching my left shoulder and bruising/scraping my right elbow.

    I also banged my head frequently on the living room light fitting, which was donated by my brother-in-law, who previously had it in his living room where, natch, I used to bang my head on it on a regular basis. My wife (1.5 metres tall) positioned the (new) living room couch so that I (1.85 m) would crack my head on it more or less every time I stood up, even if I tried to sit at the end not directly beneath it. So it turns out I don’t stand up in a straight line.

    Every time you crack your head, you get a surge of what I suppose is adrenaline in response to the moment of intense pain. You swear (because it helps deal with the pain), but then as the adrenaline fades you get a kind of come-down. After several days of this several times a day I got quite depressed. I think it was chemical, but I was pissed off, especially as my wife didn’t seem to understand how upsetting all this head banging was. The day she cracked her own head under the stairs (while painting a chair) I had to bite my tongue and not say, see? The way you feel right now, I’ve been feeling two or three times a day, every day this week.

    Français : Profil de la 7ème étape du Tour de ...
    Français : Profil de la 7ème étape du Tour de France 2012 Tomblaine – La Planche des Belles Filles Samedi 7 juillet 2012 199 km (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

    So I took the bike. There’s been a psychological black wall in my mind for several years about the hills around Plancher/Auxelles. The Tour de France does pass through occasionally (and did last year). We’re not talking Alps or Pyrenées, but we have got the Ballon d’Alsace, the Planche des Belles Filles, and the foothills (or ballons) of the Vosges mountains. Basically, if you want to go anywhere, you climb. Given that I am 1.85 m tall and a little overweight (still), I have always hated climbing. On my local rides, I go on a 20km loop which involves about 115 metres of climbing in total. To put that in perspective, the 4 km between Plancher Bas and Auxelles Bas involves a 104 metre climb.

    IMG_3719

    Above, you can see the profile of my ride from the house in Auxelles up to the Cascade de St. Antoine in Plancher Les Mines and back again. Below, there’s my usual profile in a ride around the lanes near Buckingham. There’s a bit of a difference, and it’s daunting to one who has a fear of the climbs.

    IMG_3720

    It’s not as if it’s that high or impossible, but it is also about 300-400 metres higher above sea level than I’m used to, and if I want to go anywhere else, I’ve got to climb out of the valley, which means more, and bigger, climbs. Cycling from Plancher Bas up to Plancher Les Mines takes you up 120 metres or so. That’s a ride I’ve managed in the past on a town bike – though I did have to walk up the steep bits a couple of times.

    Coming back from the Cascade, 10km all downhill, was stupendously good fun. Not so much of a gradient that you worried about falling off, but enough to give you some assistance in getting up speed. The great thing about the valley of the river Rahin is that you could go on like that all the way to Lure – around 30 km of downhill racing. But then you’d have to go back up again, which would be a bit of a grind.

    I worried that I wouldn’t have enough gears on my compact to do much, but that turned out to be okay. I’m still not sure about going further than the valley of the Rahin river. Going up the Planche des Belles Filles, for example, involves some fairly vertical walls, so I wouldn’t try that. My legs were okay, and I could keep up a fairly decent cadence, but I did have trouble getting enough air into my lungs the first time I tried the hill. As you can see from the picture above, it doesn’t even look that steep: it’s just long and straight. On a proper mountain road, you’d be switching back and forth, but on the climb to Auxelles, you’re just looking at a long stretch of tarmac. So, head down, don’t think about it.

    The worst bit is the final few metres, when your legs are rubbery and there’s a final really steep few metres up a narrow lane. The first time, I had to get off and walk the last ten metres, but the second time I managed it.

    I’ll be taking the bike back in the summer, hoping for better weather, and steeling myself to actually ride up out of the valley.

  • “Pay some road tax” – a modest proposal

    May 21st, 2013

    Christ. This shameful incident, if true, should at least lead to a driving ban for someone who shouldn’t be allowed near a vehicle. I’d like to see motorists who hit cyclists forced to cycle for a year or two as part of their re-education. Snip:

    I’ve been told to “pay road tax” more times than I can remember, though sadly explaining the intricacies of road taxation – deftly explained by the excellent site I Pay Road Tax – takes longer than the few seconds you get on the road. And when this entitlement dehumanises cyclists to the extent someone is happy to excuse hitting a cyclist by explaining they don’t believe they should be on the road at all, it becomes more than an annoyance – it’s an active danger.

    via Twitter hit-and-run boast shows dangers of ‘road tax’ entitlement | Dawn Foster | Environment | guardian.co.uk.

    You can’t actually win an argument with someone who is fundamentally irrational in their hatred and ignorant of the facts. This is the problem the teaching profession has with Michael Gove. My own modest proposal re “road tax” would be that road tax (which hasn’t existed for 70 years) should actually be re-introduced, and should be paid by all road users, including cyclists. And it shouldn’t be a flat rate, nor based on carbon emissions as the VED is now. It should be based on the amount of damage a vehicle is likely to do to the road.

    I propose a simple formula based on kerb weight (in metric tonnes, as reported by manufacturers) and tyre width. This would mean that lighter vehicles with skinny tyres would pay less than heavy vehicles with fat tyres. It would make road tax really quite expensive, but the surplus over what is raised now could actually be used to repair and maintain roads, which is something that hasn’t been happening for about 25 years.

    Example: My VW Touran, which has a kerb weight of 1.5 metric tonnes and has 205 mm tyres, would cost £307 per year to use on the public roads. A lot more than I currently pay, but a reasonable measure of the impact the vehicle has on the road. The amount of miles you drive and your driving style would determine the amount of additional (fuel) tax you pay for motoring.

    A Volvo XC90 (2.1 tonnes, approx) with 255 mm tyres would cost £535 per year.

    A Honda Jazz (1 tonne, approx) with 185 mm tyres would cost £185 per year.

    My bicycle, which weighs about 0.013 tonnes and has 23 mm tyres, would cost about 30 pence per year to use on the road. Which I would, of course, be happy to pay, just so I could wave my tax disc in the face of shit-for-brains motorist fuckwits.

    I’ve got no time, by the way, for those who complain about the cost of motoring, and whine about fuel tax etc. Motoring is still too cheap compared to its actual cost to society and the planet.

  • Country albums: new release roundup

    May 19th, 2013

    Here’s a selection of virtual platters that have been virtually spinning on my virtual turntable in the past couple of months.

    Music Review Kacey Musgraves

    Connor Christian & Southern Gothic – New Hometown

    This virtual double album offers 19 tracks for the bargain price of £6.99. Buy it now! Seriously, if you like a bit of Southern rock, this will be your cup of meat and it’s worth £7 of anyone’s money. Sounding not unlike a passionate young Elton John in his slightly countrified early 70s pomp, this is a pleasant listen and a lot of fun. Standout tracks are “Sheets Down”, “(She’s) My Salvation”, “16 Bars” and the bonus track “Be Alright”. It’s a corker.

    Ashley Monroe – Like a Rose

    For some reason this is on iTunes twice, once at £5.99 and once at £7.99. Rose is one of the Pistol Annies, and this is a traditional-sounding country album with a little bit of an edge (“Weed Instead of Roses” is the marker for this). Produced by Vince Gill, his involvement is probably all you should need to know about the quality of Monroe’s singing and songwriting. Standout tracks include the title number, “She’s Driving Me Out of Your Mind”, “Two Weeks Late”, and the duet with Blake Shelton, “You Ain’t Dolly (And You Ain’t Porter)”.

    Blake Shelton – Based on a True Story

    Talking of Shelton, his new one is also worth a listen. I’m a little uncomfortable with Shelton’s celebrations of Red State attitudes (he can take a hike with “Granddaddy’s Gun” for a start), but away from all that shit, he’s got a strong, passionate voice and the production is the kind of top-drawer commercial fare I love, with a song selection to match.

    Gretchen Wilson – Right on Time

    Also just out, Gretchen Wilson’s long-awaited new record is strong on the grit and the blues, infused with country and rock and has enough variety to keep surprising you. There’s a little weed in the air on this one, too (“Grandma”) and some redneck attitudes (“Get Outta My Yard”, “My Truck”), but this strong set veers between hard rock (“Crazy”) and night club jazz/blues (title track) with Wilson’s great voice proving her versatility. A little bit Janice Joplin and a little bit herself, you have to wonder at the music industry when Sony would drop an artist like this.

    Kacey Musgraves – Same Trailer Different Park

    Her name was on everyone’s lips this year (no pressure, then), especially following the great single “Merry Go Round”, and the full album was worth waiting for. Just because there was so much buzz, the iTunes version is £8.99 instead of the more usual £7.99 or cheaper, which feels a bit cynical and exploitative. Still, this is a strong set, from the opener “Silver Lining” through numbers like “Blowin’ Smoke”, “Back on the Map”, “Keep it to Yourself” and “Follow Your Arrow”. Musgraves has a great voice, an ear for melody and a witty way with a lyric. It’s an instantly likeable album. Hate those shorts she’s wearing on the cover, though.

    Related articles
    • Kacey Musgraves Breaks into Country Music (illinois.uloop.com)
    • Kacey Musgraves: Same Trailer Different Park (Review) (popmatters.com)
  • The Domane of dreams in the domain of nightmares

    May 17th, 2013

    80488

    Buckinghamshire has, without doubt, the lowest standard of roads in the civilised world. This perennially Tory heartland has had its infrastructure systematically starved of cash (*by zombies) while at the same time fostering a multiple-car-owning community that habitually chooses to drive 2-tonne vehicles with fat, grippy tyres: tractors, trucks, 4x4s, all of which pound and rip the road surfaces leaving potholes, cracks, subsidence, patches and repairs done on the cheap.

    Even when stretches are properly resurfaced, the roads are soon torn up and damaged by farm machinery and other heavy vehicles, which ripple and pull the still-warm tarmac before it even gets a chance to properly set. I remember my uncle, who lives in the States, years ago justifying the popular American use of 4×4 trucks on the grounds that the American roads were in such poor condition that you “had to” drive a truck with big fat tyres. So the worse the roads get, the more people drive heavy cars, and the worse the roads get.

    Cycling these roads is a nightmare.

    I’ve hit stones and got a puncture. I’ve dropped the front wheel into cracks and holes and got a puncture. I’ve felt the back wheel spinning without grip on a bumpy surface as I tried to dig in to get up a hill. I’ve exited a village and found – on that stretch of road where motorists depress the accelerator when leaving a 30 mph zone and the surface tears up where the tyres grip – that there was literally nowhere on the road, not on the edge and not in the middle, where it was safe for a skinny road bike tyre.

    Cyclists pay their taxes, too, you know. There’s VAT on the bike and all its accessories and the fancy clothes, the shoes, the pedals, the inner tubes. And I pay income tax and I pay the emissions tax on my car and fuel tax on the fuel I put in it. And I would like there to be somewhere safe to put a bike on these roads.

    There are some stretches, in a car you’d think the surface was in pretty good nick, but it’s not. It’s rippled, and as you bounce across the ripples, your bike starts to shake and resonate, just out of phase or something, and you can’t put any speed down.

    On my old bike, riding around Silverstone one time, I noticed how I was fully 2 mph faster on a smooth bit of dual carriageway than I was on the rough and rippled country back road that fed into it. This was on the flat. So I’m pretty sure that the poor road surface drains the energy from my legs.

    Which is why I’m now yearning for a Trek Domane. These bikes are built for the classics, those cycle races on cobbled roads and other primitive surfaces. They have specially designed front forks and a clever frame that offers the benefit of a floating suspension without sapping power. I’ve read enough about the pro version to know that the technology works, and it would seem to be perfect for a 50-something male who needs a bit more comfort, a bit less back and hip pain, on fitness rides.

    The Domane 2.3 has an aluminium frame (less flexible than carbon, so they say) but has the IsoSpeed decoupler and front fork as well as some Shimano 105 components which are several orders of magnitude better than the Shimano Sora components on my fairly entry-level (£700-750) Trek 1.2. The Domane costs £1200, which is a lot of money for me.

    Then again, the Domane 4.3 has more or less everything the same as the 2.3 but it has a carbon frame. It costs £600 more. £1800 takes me into dream bike territory, but I do wonder. If you were to spend the £600 on the aluminium model, by upgrading the wheels and saddle, say, I wonder if it wouldn’t then be the better bike for the money? I don’t know this of course, because I’m well outside my zone of competency. What I will say is, I prefer the look of the aluminium one. The black and grey paint job of the carbon one is depressing. Ideally, I’d like something in Bianchi green, but you can’t get that with a Trek built for men.

    But I’m dreaming. Because the idea of having a bike that would smooth out the bumps and holes, and glide over the ripples, and give me back some of that energy I’m losing to the road surface? That seems like it would be something worth having.

    80495
    *I inserted “by zombies” to indicate my awareness of my use of the passive voice there.
    Related articles
    • Trek Domane: Product Review (cyclecentre.wordpress.com)
    • Trek Domane- Your King of the Classics (thebikelane.wordpress.com)
    • The bike that won Flanders (escapethedesk.wordpress.com)
    • Trek Domane & Cancellara Are A Win Win! (dedhambike.wordpress.com)
    • Cycling in Suffolk: Britain’s most beautiful ride? (frequentlyarsed.wordpress.com)
  • The pizza

    May 9th, 2013

    20130509-104647.jpg

    Summer’s here* and the time is right for barbecuing pizza.

    In my greedy dreams of lottery winning extravagance, I have a proper wood-burning pizza oven in the back yard, maybe six or seven of them, but in reality I’ll never be able to justify the expense or afford one.

    And in reality, nobody who isn’t running an actual restaurant really needs one.

    I’ve got a Weber gas barbecue. I like a gas barbecue because you can light it and be cooking within 10 minutes and so you use it more often. It’s great for cooking things like salmon and other smelly foods without stinking out the kitchen. And if you want smoke, there are loads of solutions, like the wood wrappings or even a grilling plank. A gas barbecue is not a thing that you’ll only use on the very occasional sunny day.

    For pizza, you just need a stone. The Weber stone I have is a 1cm thick circle of granite. It just fits onto my rectangular grill. After the dough has proved, you light it up, lower the lid, and let it warm up while you prepare the pizza.

    I use Caputo pizza flour, which is available in red and blue varieties. The blue makes for a crispier crust; the red makes a crust that is still crispy, but also has enough softness for a satisfying chew. For three family-sized pizzas, I use 450g of this flour, which needs water to the tune of 65% the weight of the flour. That’s about 293 ml or 293g of water. For pizza, I just use warm tap water, or filtered water slightly warmed in the microwave. You need a sachet of instant yeast (or 2 teaspoons), 1.5 teaspoons of salt, and a teaspoon of sugar.

    I put the salt and sugar on one side of the flour and the yeast on the other. I add the water and then mix the dough with a dough hook on my mixer for 5-10 minutes. When it’s nice and stretchy, I pour in a little olive oil, just to stop it sticking to the sides of the bowl. I then cover it in cling film and put the dough in a warm place for about an hour, though 45 minutes is usually long enough on a warm day.

    When the dough has risen, it’s time to light the barbecue and let the stone warm up.

    Now you gently knock back the sough, divide it into three balls, and set two aside. They will continue to rise a bit. If you have the time, it’s a good idea to wait 15 minutes at this stage to let some air pockets appear in the first dough ball.

    Now, sprinkle flour on the side and roll it out. Have a pizza peel ready. I sprinkle flour and/or semolina and/or cornmeal on the peel, which helps the pizza to slide off. Flatten your dough ball with a rolling pin and stretch it out into a circle that’s as big as your peel or just smaller than your pizza stone. You can also stretch it by hand.

    Put the stretched dough circle on the peel. Now spread on about 2 generous spoonfulls of tomato sauce. I generally do either one of the following: use unadulterated sundried tomato paste, or a mixture of passata and sundried tomato paste. You don’t want anything too watery. Some people swear by fresh basil: I don’t. I don’t even like it. I think the best herb to sprinkle on at this stage is dried marjoram. Dried, because it has a better flavour.

    Now comes the cheese. Yes, you can get expensive little balls of buffalo mozzarella, but for a more reasonable price, a packet of grated mozzarella. 250g for three pizzas: don’t go overboard. Mozzarella is a satisfyingly melty cheese, but has no real flavour. For flavour, mix with a little grated gruyere. Waitrose sell it already grated; nobody else does. You don’t need much, but it really improves the overall flavour.

    Now top the cheese with your choice of toppings. I use thin slices of pepper, (sometimes) fresh tomato, pineapple (wife and kids insist), (sometimes) sliced shallot or onion, sliced black olives ( half the pizza only because kids don’t like them), slices of bacon, ham, chorizo, pepperoni, anchovies (fresh from the deli counter is less salty than from a jar), etc. Bacon is better than ham, unless the ham has a really strong flavour. The trick is: not too much of anything, and vary as much as you can within your budget.

    You might consider a drizzle of olive oil, but it’s not compulsory.

    By now, the pizza stone is hot and the barbecue should be around 200 degrees C. It can get hotter, but doesn’t really need to. Slide the first pizza onto the stone and close the lid. While it’s cooking, get the second pizza ready.

    To ring the changes, the middle pizza is a tarte flambée, with (half fat) creme fraiche and more gruyere than mozzarella. Bacon and onion/shallots is all you really need, though you can add other toppings. Slices or dices of (pre-cooked) potato is good, and leave off the pineapple.

    The first pizza should be done within ten minutes. The second and third should take less time, as the barbecue gets hotter. Be careful with the third, because the base can burn if you leave it as long as ten minutes.

    As you slice it, you’ll get a satisfying crunchy sound. The top will be perfectly cooked, the bottom crispy and (especially with the red Caputo) each slice will be good and chewy.

    20130509-104551.jpg

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