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  • Non-news update news update

    April 28th, 2013
    BBC iPlayer
    BBC iPlayer (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

    I’m a fortnight into my news holiday. I deleted the folder of bookmarks I have in my browser that took me to the front pages of three of the broadsheets, the BBC, and other news sites. I haven’t switched on the Today programme in the morning, nor the PM programme in the afternoon. I haven’t listened to Richard Bacon or Drive on the drive home from work.

    I removed Tweetbot from the home screen of my iPhone and iPad, and relegated it to the last screen, along with all the Apple shit you can’t delete, like Stocks and Game Centre.

    I have been on the Twitter, but mainly reading things from people I’ve known the longest. I flick through the updates rapidly, no longer spending the time to read each one. I haven’t followed any links to news stories, opinion columns, or newsy blogs.

    I’ve been aware of things happening. Bombs, earthquakes, collapsing buildings. I know about these things, but they seem distant and abstract, like all the other bombings, earthquakes and collapsing buildings there have been in my life. Have I ever been able to do anything about these events, which seem tailor-made for news? Does knowing about an earthquake stop the earth shaking?

    It’s odd to see the snarky comments sometimes before being aware of what they relate to. People make jokes about boycotting Primark, and you know it must relate to something in the news, but the connection doesn’t come immediately. You realise how pointless it is to listen to The News Quiz, or watch Have I Got News For You.

    Two weeks in, and I don’t think I’ll be putting the browser bookmarks back any time soon. I’ve enjoyed finding things on the Radio iPlayer and listening to them instead of the news. I won’t go back to the Today programme, with its dreadful agenda-setting drivel-driven manufactured debates.

    I do miss Eddie Mair. I don’t miss Kermode and Mayo. I tried to listen to their podcast, which edits out the news, but Kermode is so fucking irritating, isn’t he? Labouring and repeating every point like a sledgehammer smashing into a carpet tack.

    When the month is up, I will allow myself to listen to Eddie Mair on PM, and I will continue to skim across the surface of the Twitter, but that will be all.

  • Irritating Country Songs: Truck No

    April 27th, 2013
    Austin (song)
    Nice mullet, Blake (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

    Older readers will be aware that I love country music, but every now and then an artist I like will include a song that is truly irritating, horrible, and even nasty.

    Step forward Blake Shelton, who panders to the kind of right-wing ignoramus who dismisses environmental concerns whilst spouting the kind of self-delusional twaddle exemplified by the song “Green” on his album Startin’ Fires.

    Sheets on the clothes line drying
    Red Tail hawks a flying
    A couple of deer on the timber line
    And I know a lot more about cane pole fishing
    then I ever will know about carbon emission
    And my little corner of the world is doing just fine

    I’ve got a hundred acre farm
    I’ve got a john deere in my barn
    I’ve got a garden in my yard, full of corn, peas and beans
    I’ve got a guitar I play unplugged
    I’ve got a home-grown girl I love,
    And when the summer time hits, we skinny dip in the stream
    I was green before green was a thing

    The line that really grates (apart from the refrain, to which the response is, no, you’re not green, you twat), is the “my little corner of the world is doing just fine,” which causes the red mist to descend. Yeah, so people are getting flooded out all over, and starving in famine zones and spring doesn’t seem to exist any more, but I’m doing all right.

    Fuck off.

    Next exhibit, “Real Man” by Kristina Cornell, from her album It’s a Girl Thing

    I ain’t looking for no one night stand
    A bar fly slipping his ring off his hand
    A metrosexual
    Intellectual
    Sensitive new aged guy

    I’m looking for a real man
    Looking for a rock
    I can hold on to
    Someone with a strong hand
    And I ain’t gonna stop
    ‘Til I find him

    Yeah, thanks for setting back the 100-year struggle for women’s equality, and the notion that men should be anything other than lumbering hairy troglodytes. Intellectual men not required? Fuck you.

    Now we turn to a hideous glorification of pointless binge drinking in Lee Bryce’s “Parking Lot Party”, on his album Hard 2 Love, which also features a hideous titling substitution of the number 2 for the word to, which is indeed hard to love.

    At the parking lot party
    A tailgate buzz just a sipping’ on suds
    Ain’t never too early
    To light one up, fill up your cup
    Cause there ain’t no party like the pre-party
    and after the party is the after-party
    At the parking lot party

    First of all, just imagine the scene. You’re in a fucking car park with a crowd of sports fans or something, and you’re getting drunk before you go in, so you can get more drunk inside and then even more drunk afterwards. And then drive home? Since most human beings don’t need more than an hour to get completely shit-faced, I just can’t imagine the horror that would ensue from this level of bingeing. Vomit-strewn parking bays and a really bad headache are a certainty, but misery for anyone within earshot is also probable. Jesus wept.

    There are more, but the final entry for today has to be Tim McGraw‘s “Truck Yeah”, from his recent release Two Lanes of Freedom.

    Let me hear you say, Truck Yeah
    Wanna get it jacked up yeah
    Let’s crank it on up yeah
    With a little bit of luck I can find me a girl with a Truck Yeah
    We can love it on up yeah
    ‘Til the sun comes up yeah
    And if you think this life I love is a little too country
    Truck Yeah

    For fuck’s sake. First of all, the notion of a truck: fuck off with that. Nobody needs one of those who isn’t an actual farmer with actual livestock. Nobody wants to hear your music either, so turn it down. And it appears to me that we’re either at a monster truck rally or at some kind of sporting event where we are, once again, drinking too much and making a nuisance of ourselves.

    See, people found Brad Paisley’s “Accidental Racist” offensive for some reason, but this is the kind of stuff that gives me the rage.

  • Cycling shoe news

    April 22nd, 2013

    photo

    Here’s an update about the DZR shoes and my new SPD (Touring) pedals.

    Older readers will remember that, last entry, I gave up on the 3-bolt type cleats/pedals/shoes and decided to revert to my DZR hipster shoes and change the pedals on my bike for SPD pedals. I thought I’d got the best of both worlds, because I got touring-type pedals, with a bigger platform. It turned out, however, that the recess in the DZR shoes isn’t big enough for the bigger pedal platform.

    Option 1 was to return the pedals and get some with a smaller platform. Option 2 was to get out the old craft knife and viciously hack out a bigger recess, which is what I did. You can see the result above, in the recreation of the marketing photo on the previous post.

    Well, it’s not pretty, but it kind of works. I went out this weekend for a couple of rides. Apart from not knowing quite yet where to set the foot so the cleats engage first time (which I will get used to eventually), the cleats engage with the pedals, don’t feel as tight on my feet as my previous two pairs of shoes (Specialized and Shimano, respectively), and they don’t slip out of the pedals. I even managed to disengage without falling off.

    I’m getting a little bit of a hot spot on the ball of my right foot, but the right foot has always been more of a problem than the left (think it’s a bit bigger/wider/higher).

    I’d buy the DZR shoes again. I don’t like that I’ve had to hack into the soles so much, so I might one day have to opt for yet another set of pedals, but hopefully that decision is at least a year away.

    By the way, you may be wondering about the laces, and how to avoid getting them caught in the chain set. There’s a little grey elastic tab which you can tuck them under. It’s easy to forget to do this, though, so my laces do have blackened ends. The tab works, but you can also buy DZRs with velcro fastening.
    Update: since a number of people reach this blog searching for information about cycling shoes and why they hurt their feet, I should point out that, while the DZRs were fine-ish for shorter rides (an hour), they became desperately painful on any ride over two hours. So I gave up on them and bought some Bontrager multisport shoes, which are much better. I went for one size bigger than my normal shoe size, and have suffered much less with my feet.

    Related articles
    • my problem with cycling shoes (frequentlyarsed.wordpress.com)
  • my problem with cycling shoes

    April 17th, 2013

    bcf178e696ae41bcb1cc7be49b6d6677.image.420x420

    I used to make a joke about Sony when I was in the business of selling digital video systems: you can never have too many standards.

    Hollow laughter. When it comes to cycling shoes, it’s the same thing. I’m just not the kind of person who wants to give headspace to a whole bunch of acronyms and variations. I managed to go almost my entire life without any awareness of the world of cycling pedals, cleats, and shoes, but lately I’ve been mired in it and I’ve been confused, bewildered, and more than a bit irritated.

    Most of my life, I used standard flat pedals and toe clips, and a pair of just, you know, normal sneakers to ride in. So I wasn’t very efficient or very fast, but I wasn’t confused. The other thing, I was generally quite comfortable. I may not have converted 100% of my efforts into forward motion, but my feet didn’t hurt.

    Then, like a fool, I started looking into specialist shoes and the brain-rot set in. The first problem I had was that – almost without exception – all cycling shoes are fugly. Most sports shoes are ugly, but a special kind of hideosity is reserved for cycling shoes. Bicycle Touring Pro, for example, offers its list of “23 Stylish SPD Touring Shoes”. I look down the list, and I say, ugly, ugly, ugly, horrible, ugly, hideous, and so on, up to 23 times.

    Horrible colours, horrible shapes, horrible motifs and go-faster stripes, horrible materials, all for a horrible price.

    If there’s something I hate, it’s paying through the nose for something that I basically hate.

    The other problem I have is with that descriptor, SPD. Wha? SPD, SPD-SL, Look, egg beater, dirty cheater? Too many standards. Road people tend to use a 3-bolt design (SPD-SL or Look, I don’t know why there are two different names) and mountain bike people tend to use 2-bolt SPD clips. There’s confusing for a start. Which is before we get to the confusing issue of town bikes, triathlon bikes, touring bikes, and so on.

    I didn’t understand any of this when I ordered my first shoes. Having declared a pox on all the other shoes, the only ones I thought worth having were the hipster-trendy DZR shoes, like the District, as sold by alwaysriding (see above). These look like ordinary sneakers.

    (What I should have done of course was have a conversation in my local bike shop, but the same problem afflicts them as afflicts book shops: they don’t stock anything I’d be interested in buying, like the DZR.)

    So they arrived and they were a bit on the snug side (perils of buying shoes on the internet), and of course were completely incompatible with the SPD-SL pedals I’d bought. Duh. So I bought another pair of shoes, ugly ones, and they were uncomfortable and hurt my feet. So I bought another pair of shoes, two sizes too big (went to a shop for those). And they were uncomfortable and hurt my feet.

    Gah!

    So I took another look at the DZRs and bought some new pedals. Thought I was being clever, buying SPD touring pedals, which have a bigger platform and should be more comfortable than the mountain bike pedals.

    Except of course the clever bigger platform makes them too big for the recessed cleat in the DZR shoes. The cut-out (refer to the image above) is too small.

    So I was left with this. Get yet more shoes, or yet another set of pedals. So what did I do?

    I got my craft knife and gouged out the recess on the sole of the DZRs to make it big enough. This may prove to be disastrous, but the first ride will tell. I thought I was going to slash an artery, but I somehow managed to get the shoes to engage with the pedals – tried them briefly on the rollers, but too windy to try a proper ride today.
    UPDATE: I gave up on the DZRs eventually, as they were still too painful on longer rides (2+ hours). I bought instead a pair of Bontrager multisports, and they work well. They’re compatible with the touring pedals, stiffer in the sole, and more comfortable on longer rides. I bought one size larger than my shoe size. You can also get a mouldable insole for them, for an extra £25 or so.

    UPDATE UPDATE: I gave up on the Bontrager Mulisports, too, eventually, when the foot pain returned with a vengeance. I’ve ended up with TIME pedals and cleats (they have the biggest platform), and a pair of wide-fit Shimano shoes in the right size. In the end, it turned out, there was a need for the wider fitting shoe. Duh. Also, the foot pain is a result of a fallen metatarsal arch, and I added some insoles with gel inserts to support the ball of my foot. The pain/numbness hasn’t entirely gone away, but it’s much better than it was.

    Related articles
    • Choosing Pedals for Cycle-Touring (alexscycle.wordpress.com)
  • Taking a news holiday

    April 13th, 2013

    After the past week, during which millions of words which will change nothing were written about a former prime minister, this article brought me up short. So much so that I blogged it twice.

    News is irrelevant. Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that – because you consumed it – allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life, your career or your business. The point is: the consumption of news is irrelevant to you. But people find it very difficult to recognise what’s relevant. It’s much easier to recognise what’s new. The relevant versus the new is the fundamental battle of the current age. Media organisations want you to believe that news offers you some sort of a competitive advantage. Many fall for that. We get anxious when we’re cut off from the flow of news. In reality, news consumption is a competitive disadvantage. The less news you consume, the bigger the advantage you have.

    via News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier | Media | The Guardian.

    I decided, with immediate effect, to try living without news for a month. After that, I’ll see how it goes. This morning, for the first time in a long time, I didn’t switch on Radio 4 as soon as I woke up. Well, I did in another way: deciding to listen to an interesting programme about Expressive Writing I heard yesterday for a second time.

    Going without news means I’ll have to also avoid most of the Twitter. I won’t commit Twittercide (yet), but I won’t keep up with it, and I won’t follow links to news stories or even news commentary. Please don’t be offended.

    Call it a mid-life crisis.

  • Tim McGraw’s Two Lanes of Freedom and Brad Paisley’s Wheelhouse: what’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding?

    April 11th, 2013

    Two-Lanes-of-FreedomTwo Lanes of Freedom

    Tim McGraw‘s first album was released 20 years ago. It was 30 minutes long and didn’t trouble the charts, either here or in the USA.

    What a difference a year (and a hit single) makes: in 1994, his second album, Not a Moment Too Soon was 32 minutes long and featured the monster hit “Indian Outlaw”. While this song seemed to have the novelty value of something like “Achy Breaky Heart” from 1992, McGraw himself was no novelty act. He released #1 albums in 1995, 1997, 1999, 2001, 2004, 2007, 2009, 2012, and now this. Ironically, one of his best albums, Tim McGraw and the Dancehall Doctors, released in 2002, languished at #2 in the charts.

    While Two Lanes of Freedom continues this run of success, it is nevertheless an incredible contrast to that first #1 in 1994. The iTunes Deluxe version is one hour and three minutes long, with five more tracks than was typical of a country album in the 1980s and 1990s. Is this a good thing? Some people measure the quality, others the width. Personally, I’ll always filter out the likes of “Truck Yeah“, a Southern boogie that appeals to the same constituency as Lee Brice’s “Beer” and “Parking Lot Party”. I’m probably in a minority of McGraw fans in that, however. It has already been a hit single and seemed to go down well with the British public at his recent O2 show.

    What does McGraw bring? Great melodies, a smooth voice with a bit of bite, and a modern production sensibility that includes hints of vocal excitation (even actual autotune?) and lots of collaborations with hip hop artists and others on the pop side of pop. I’ve always felt McGraw’s brand of country was closely related to Southern Rock, and there’s very little not to like for fans of melody and good songwriting. He builds his albums to a formula: party songs, leavin’ songs, dyin’ songs, songs about family, songs about music.

    First four tracks here are excellent: title track, “One of These Nights”, “Friend of a Friend”, and “Southern Girl”, which features a bit of vocoder. Then there’s the horrible “Truck Yeah” (which also appears, live, as an extra track), and “Nashville Without You”, which is about country music in the same way as Brad Paisley‘s “This is Country Music” a year or so back – name-checking a lot of the same songs.

    One of the best songs on the album is “Book of John” which is about looking through someone’s stuff after they have died – tailor made for McGraw, who has a penchant for confronting death in his music (“Live Like You Were Dying”, “I Kill Myself” etc.). The sentimentality continues with “Annie I Owe You a Dance” (an extra on the Deluxe which recalls the tone of “Everywhere” from a few years ago), an then we get a couple of drinkin’ songs.

    “Mexicoma” is yet another in a long line of country songs about going to Mexico to drink too much and forget (see McGraw’s earlier “That’s Why God Invented Mexico”, Brad Paisley’s “Don’t Drink the Water” and Blake Shelton’s “Playboys of the Southwestern World”), but is followed by the cautionary tale of “Number 37405” which is about what happens when you drink and drive.

    The mood lifts again for “It’s Your World”  and then McGraw sounds like himself 10 years ago on “Tinted Windows”, which is the second extra on the Deluxe edition (interesting that both extras so far have sounded like they come from an earlier era).

    Final track proper brings out the big guns: Keith Urban and Taylor Swift, who started her career with a single called “Tim McGraw”. It’s an event song, ideal for performance on television award shows, it has a great groove but unfortunately Urban’s contribution on guitar isn’t very inspiring, and the coda is a bit of a noisy mush.

    Passing swiftly over the extra “Truck Yeah”, we finish with the soulful “Let Me Love it Out of You” which is lovely, and features a gorgeous interlude on Hammond organ and a great guitar solo on the outro.

    Brad PaisleyWheelhouse

    I almost feel there’s a conversation going on here between McGraw and Brad Paisley, whose first album, Who Needs Pictures was a #13 and 47 minutes long in 1999. Paisley’s first #1 was Mud on the Tires in 2003, and subsequent releases have hit #1 in 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2011.

    Whereas McGraw is quite aggressively promoting Southern redneck culture with “Truck Yeah”, Paisley’s approach is more questioning, and is (as of the time of writing) landing him in hot water. In the first single released from Wheelhouse, “Southern Comfort Zone,” Paisley sings, “Not everybody drives a truck, not everybody drinks sweet tea, not everybody owns a gun and wears a ball cap, boots, and jeans…”

    Of course, the real conversation Paisley is having (or trying to have) is with the Red State heartland of Country music, which have been more or less apoplectic since the selection of Barack Obama as Democratic Presidential candidate in 2008. Paisley is more “country” than McGraw but has also more of a track record in looking beyond the shores of the USA for his audience. He has always openly discussed gender issues (sometimes for laughs, sometimes in a more serious way), and in “Welcome to the Future” on American Saturday Night, he actually dared to celebrate the election of a black President.

    Paisley’s albums are always full of light and shade: proper sentimentality about home, family, childhood etc. side by side with traditional country hoots and songs about goin’ fishin’, drinkin’ and fightin’ and comedy numbers featuring a line-up of special guests which have in the past included William Shatner and here include Eric Idle. All of this is accompanied by Paisley’s quite incredible guitar playing. He’s also got a taste for the sneaky clever song, such as one about taking out fire insurance for a box of expensive cigars and (on Wheelhouse) for getting out of a marriage on the grounds of having technically died for five minutes.

    I suspect that he’s been wondering if his core audience even noticed this light and shade and his slightly Hollywood-liberal tendency, because he is being much more explicit on Wheelhouse, duetting with LL Cool J on the controversial “Accidental Racist”, in which he apologises for giving offence by wearing a t-shirt bearing the Confederate flag, explaining that it’s because he’s a Skynyrd fan.

    This of course has opened a real can of worms, not least because Skynyrd themselves were often accused of racism, but also because people on the interwebs have decided that Paisley has no right to be saying stuff like this. He’s just now feeling the growing storm and must be wondering if the Twitter mob bearing their pitchforks are going to tar and feather him. It’s a wonder of the Twitter that freedom of speech seems to be such a problem for some people.

    I’m pretty sure part of the rage is the same rage that has been directed at Obama since 2008, at the Dixie Chicks since 2003, a simply irrational hatred of anybody who dares to suggest that America might have a problem. As to the song, well, I’m never keen on rap on a country song, whoever is doing it, but I do think that Paisley not only has a right to start this conversation but that his heart is completely in the right place.

    Light and shade, as I said, and I think this album needs to be taken as a whole, not isolated down to one track. The Deluxe version is 1.2 hours long and features 21 tracks, including short interludes like the funny Eric Idle piece. There’s a lot going on here, from traditional love songs, to a trendy duet with Mat Kearney (“Pressing on a Bruise”) and a song about an abused woman who fights back. There’s a funny song about a friend getting married, delivered like a eulogy, and as well as “Accidental Racist” there’s a song (“Those Crazy Christians”) which attempts to give a perspective on Christianity to non-believers. If you ask me, I’m more surprised that this one hasn’t caused more of a furore – especially from those who don’t understand irony. Paisley’s very zeitgeisty, too, and includes a song – full of heart – called “Facebook Friends”, which is in the tradition of his songs, “Celebrity” and “Online”.

    The fundamental thing about Brad Paisley is that he has no hate inside him. He’s not pounding on the redneck button and trying to appeal to a lowest common denominator. He genuinely wants to reach out to people and spread a little peace, love, and understanding. And what’s wrong with that?

  • Some bits about biking

    April 10th, 2013

    Screen Shot 2013-04-10 at 17.15.44

    Now the weather is finally warming up a bit (my car reported 13.5°C this afternoon), I’ve managed to get out on the bike a few times. Today I dropped a layer, broke out the 3/4 bib shorts instead of the winter tights and dropped the full-finger gloves. Feeling lighter, I managed a circuit in weak spring sunshine. With just a degree or two more, it would have been perfect. As it was, the wind blowing across the exposed fields (usually displaying rape flowers by this time, I think) was a bit chilly.

    Before this last weekend, my previous outing on the bike had been back in March, before I had a minor operation that would have prevented me trying to cycle for at least a fortnight. As it was, the day of the operation was the last sunny day before the winter sneaked back for an extra month. In the meantime, I’ve been preparing for what I’m planning to be my most ambitious season yet with a few bits and pieces.

    First up, I got a new water bottle. I’ve been worried for a while that pulling up the stopper on my bidon with my teeth was risky, given the amount of bridgework/crowns I’ve got in my mouth. They made a lot of fuss about this at the hospital, too. Just as I will never, ever, eat Carambar again, I’m thinking pulling up a stopper with my teeth, especially when I’m breathing hard and clumsy, is a recipe for disaster. So I picked up a Camelback bidon with a self-sealing valve, which can be left always-open and which you just squeeze to squirt (careful) on a ride. It’s pretty good, I think. Slightly more than the cheapest plastic bottles, but worth the extra for the teeth peace of mind.

    Moving on, I’ve been in the market for a new phone carrier since I “upgraded” to the iPhone 5. So after reading around, I decided to wait for the Quad-Lock Mounting system, and ordered one as soon as they became available in the middle of March. It arrived promptly, but I didn’t get to use it till last weekend. I’m impressed. First of all, the supplied protective case is actually quite attractive and useful. I hadn’t bothered with a case for my iPhone 5, because with the 4 it turned into a spiral of pointless spending – every case I bought left me dissatisfied in some way. But this one is plain, tough, and feels nice to the touch. It also locks onto the bike quickly and securely with a simple quarter turn, and holds the phone without rattles, which is more than can be said of my previous solution.

    If you use this referral link, you’ll get 10% discount on a Quad-Lock Mount.

    ip5_kit_1024x1024

    As you can see, the weak link is likely to the be the elastic. The top bit is a splashproof covering which I doubt I’ll ever use since I am the very definition of a fair weather cyclist.

    Next up, an item of clothing that I’ve had for a while but only worn more recently. We all know that Rapha cycling gear is over-priced hipster-bait, but it’s also a lot more stylish than standard cycling gear, and well-made. Planning to cycle into work (one of these days, a pipe dream), I want to be able to turn up wearing clothes that will look acceptable to wear for work. As previously discussed, there’s a whole market for this, which suits urban commuters more than it does the likes of me, but still. Maps and dreams, and all that. Two things stopping me from trying to cycle to work. The first is the distance (which for a cycle safe-ish route will be about 20 miles – 40 miles for the day) divided by my fitness. I struggle with achy legs, especially since being on the statins, so I just don’t know about that – considering I’d have to teach a full day in between rather than just collapse on a bed. The second is a more serious concern about safety. The roads in Buckinghamshire are scandalously bad, and the aggression and ignorance of the local drivers is also second to none. People are horribly rude around here – just try visiting Buckingham Tesco -, and on the road there is too much of the mythological, bigoted belief that vehicle excise duty based on emissions is actually called “road tax” and that cyclists – most of whom are car owners too – don’t pay it.

    2796-101

    Anyway, I wore my Rapha merino wool roll neck today on the ride, and it was very comfortable. I’ve been rocking the roll neck look all winter, and a lot of them are merino. The material is light and non-itchy, whilst at the same time providing protection against the wind and helping to manage homeostasis quite well.

    Finally (yes, there’s more), one of the things that has been bugging me a while is the headphone/earbud problem and cycling. My cheap Sennheiser “sports” earbuds were too uncomfortable. They were an over-ear design, which clashed with my glasses, in combination with cycle helmet. So I was looking for an in-ear solution, and making do with the crappy Apple ones that came with my iPhone 5. I find these are okay, but the cable tends to (a) get tangled and (b) pull down rather uncomfortably on my ears. I mitigated the latter problem with a little clip that I took off the Sennheisers, but I’ve been considering a Bluetooth option.

    Now, I bought a cheap set of Bluetooth speakers (in France) in December, and while they are acceptable for the price, the audio quality is not the greatest. There’s a certain amount of squishy distortion, and the Bluetooth connection drops arbitrarily. So I’ve been looking for a while at various Bluetooth earbuds with a jaundiced eye, but finally took the plunge and went for a set of Plantronics BackBeat Go. They’re an in-ear design, connected by a short, flat, cable, which features volume and call controls and a microphone. I almost never take or make phone calls, so that feature is neither here or there. As for the volume control, one of the benefits of having the phone locked on the handlebar stem and wearing cycling gloves is that I can control the phone on its screen.

    So it was all about the reliability of the connection and the sound quality. The BackBeat Go buds come with three sizes of eartips (I stuck with the installed medium) which form a good seal with the ear. Pairing was instant and easy. I’d read someone on Amazon complaining that they were too quiet, but I dread to think what that person considered loud enough. The Plantronics are loud enough. In fact I turned the volume on the phone down a bit.

    Plantronics_BackBeatGO_EXL

    Now, wearing headphones while you cycle is foolish and dangerous. On my riding circuit I meet two or three cars per ride, and I’ve always been wary about drowning out the sound of approaching engines. I’ve adopted a paranoid style, with frequent looks over my shoulder, but still end up jumping out of my skin occasionally. These earbuds form such a good seal that they almost completely cut out the outside world. I’m really not sure I should be riding my bike wearing these. I’ll certainly turn the volume much lower if I ever try to ride to work with them. Apart from anything else, the rush of adrenaline I get every time a vehicle scares the life out of me gives me the Jimmy legs.

    Apart from that concern, sound quality is very good. Much better than the Apple earbuds, and certainly much better than I expected, given that they’re wireless. The low end is nicely rounded without being woolly, and the response across the audio spectrum is well balanced. A single charge is supposed to last a few hours – I basically need an hour or two at a time – and they recharge quite quickly via the supplied USB cable – which is pleasingly short and unlikely to get tangled. They’re also comfortable to wear and don’t clash with my glasses.

  • Thatcher was my Vietnam

    April 9th, 2013
    Flag of former North Vietnam (from 1955 until ...
    Flag of former North Vietnam (from 1955 until reunification with South Vietnam in 1976) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

    Well, they blew up the Chicken Man in Philly last night, they blew up his house too…

    Springsteen used to do one of his talks, on the Born in the USA tour, about what it was like to grow up in the 60s, with the Vietnam war on TV every night. America’s defeat in Vietnam was a deep psychic scar, a shattering of the illusion of American invincibility, and it led directly to the election of Reagan and thence the slow but steady erosion of middle class incomes which culminated in the financial collapse of 2008: the shattering of another illusion.

    Thatcher and her government blighted my youth. You shouldn’t have to pay forever because you had an unhappy childhood, but I have. Leaving home at 18 because I had to, I experienced 18 months of unemployment – the summer of the 1981 riots – and, right then, my life chances were blighted.

    The voodoo economics of the neo-liberals destroyed our industries, our fuel security, but also sucked the life out of whole regions of the country. I live in Buckingham now, a small market town which is steadily expanding as more and more housing estates are built around it. Why do we need all these houses? Because too many people want to live down here in the South, because that’s where (they think) all the jobs are. But there aren’t any real jobs in Buckingham, bar a few anonymous warehouses on the so-called industrial estate and a couple of supermarkets. There are a lot of charity shops staffed by volunteers and Britain’s first private university, fact that makes me feel physically sick. So all these people have to own cars so they can drive somewhere else to work. And why do they have to drive? Because Thatcher and her minions destroyed our public transport system in their rush to privatise anything that wasn’t nailed down.

    We live with it every day, the consequences of all that privatisation. Public services being provided by people who are motivated by profit. What do we get? We get mis-selling of gas and electricity, we get continual flooding and water shortages because the infrastructure is so poorly maintained. We get people making profits from the infrastructure we built and paid for. You build all those extra houses and funnel all that waste water into the same sewers: work it out, genius.

    I could go on, and have, for ten years on this and other blogs.

    When she died I smiled a little because I really did hate the old witch. But I hated Hestleslime and Poortillo and the rest of them, too, and I’m insulted every time I see Poortillo on a train on the television. And I hated Blegh and his Thatcher-lite policies, and I hate Govegrind and the Bullington bully boys. And the spineless so-called Labour party under Milibland. That’s her legacy, and a continual reminder of everything I lost.

    When she died, I spent a lot of time avoiding the media chatter, because I didn’t want to hear the tributes, and I don’t need, in the manner of preaching to the choir, to have my own views reinforced. And I muted a lot of stuff on the Twitter, mainly because I don’t want a diet of the same thing over and over again. But also because I wanted time to think about this. It wasn’t that I wanted to censor other people as I wanted the space and silence to think. Because Thatcher was my Vietnam.

    Every day, I’m reminded of all that I lost. I won’t say “we” because that’s the point, isn’t it. There is no “we”. We’re all lonely monads, who wait until after the fact to defend have a little moan about the rights of those who have them taken away. I’m surrounded by colleagues who take so much shit so much of the time but feel they have no power, even though they have a union. Thatcher did that, by the simple expedience of introducing compulsory postal ballots. Seventy-five percent of those white envelopes with the ballots inside end up in recycling bins. So the unions lost their power to oppose, and the bankers opened their big fat mouths under the money taps and started to slurp it up. And everybody got worse off, and because they didn’t like thinking about that, they kept extending lines of credit in order to keep funding their illusory lifestyles. Barbecue Britain, with all the little Nigels and Nigellas.

    We should all be poorer. We should have fewer cars, we should have slightly crap but publicly owned utilities, and we shouldn’t have companies with shareholders sniffing around our hospitals and schools. I live in an occupied country. I see them everywhere: Tories. White haired Telegraph readers, sharp-elbowed Daily Mail readers, young people drowning in trivia, because Thatcher was my Vietnam, and I live with that defeat every day.

  • What’s good on TV?

    April 8th, 2013
    Connie Britton at the 2006 Toronto Internation...
    Connie Britton at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

    The Guardian, unwavering in its ability to find and focus upon the over-rated, never does weekly blogs about any of the TV shows I really enjoy.

    I look in from time to time on their blogs. They did one for Dancing on the Edge, for example, which became an embarrassment when even the poor sap who was tasked to write it couldn’t muster any enthusiasm. They did one for The Killing, even though The Killing, give or take a few subtitles and a Fairisles sweater, was barely distinguishable from any other maverick cop show.

    They even blog Doctor Who, which it pains me to say has turned from overblown kidstuff under Russell T Davies into utter drivel under Stephen Moffatt. The new assistant is lovely, but the storylines, dialogue, background music etc. are bilge. How the Guardian thinks that shit warrants the attention, I don’t know. You might as well do a weekly blog for Tracy Beaker.

    So what’s any good on Freeview?

    You have to hunt around, but there are some watchable shows, which are reliable and can get under your skin.

    Notwithstanding its charisma-lite leading man, Person of Interest has a lot going for it. It takes the idea of data generated by our surveillance society and introduces a controlling angel (Michael Emerson from Lost) and a vengeful one (Jim Caviezel). Not every episode is a hit, but sometimes the show has a heart. And it’s something different from the usual cop thing.

    Cop shows that were worth watching when they were on include Southland, which is a beat cop character drama in the vein of Hill Street Blues, and of course Justified, which focuses on US Marshall Raylan Givens in Lexington, Kentucky. I’d add to that list The Closer, which has finished now (to be succeeded by Major Crimes?) and Saving Grace, which I think is also done.

    I always like a good law show, and there are a couple of decent ones at the moment. The Good Wife  on More4 is pure quality, produced by the Scott Brothers (until Tony’s death) and starring the classy Julianna Margulies with occasional guest appearances from Michael J Fox. I love it because it’s so zeitgeisty, ripping its plots from the headlines. Hiding over on Dave, meanwhile, is Suits, which features a couple of morally questionable corporate lawyers and their efforts to win at all costs – until the cost is too high. It’s a show that manages to create heroes out of the kind of people you’d hate if you met them.

    Pick TV has been teasing us with a few episodes of this and that (Smash, Touch), but one show they showed all the way through was the sadly cancelled Terra Nova.

    Based on the premise that the future becomes so horrible to live in that people flee into the distant past to start a new colony on a different time line, the fate of Terra Nova makes you wonder why the TV industry bothers with science fiction at all. Of course, it ended up (as they almost all do) being cancelled after just one short season, so there’s no chance of anything interesting growing out of what was an interesting premise badly handled. Like all utopian texts, the problem for the people in Terra Nova was that they were unable to leave their problems behind. Apart from that, I don’t know how the producers believed that dinosaurs would ever be anything other than (a) an expensive CGI backdrop and (b) a nuisance to the colonists.

    Far more plotworthy than the dinosaurs was the eventual thread about the so-called Sixers and their attempts to exploit the past in order to profit in the bad-old future. And the producers clearly hoped for a second season in the way that they created a cliffhanging ending for Season 1: the Lost-like revelation in the final ten minutes was a brilliant jaw-dropper. It was a good-looking cast, and the whole thing was better than the BBC’s terrible Outcasts, but suffered from a similar lack of imagination in terms of storylines.

    Thing is, you can’t really judge a science fiction show by whether it was cancelled. The naffer fare (like Warehouse 13, which is stoopid fun) tends to survive because it appeals to a younger demographic that sticks with the show. Anything decent, the downloaders kill its ratings so the network cuts the chord, and you can’t blame them really.

    Thursday is More4 night, because as well as The Good Wife, they offer Nashville, the superb drama set around the music industry with slightly naff autotuned music performed by the cast. It features another graduate from Spin City, Connie Britton, who I am very pleased to see back on my screen. Then there’s Boss, the showcase drama about the mayor of Chicago starring Kelsey Grammer, but also that bloke from Trust and Weeds. Martin Donovan, that’s him. Believe it or not, the Guardian, with their heads firmly up their arses, produce weekly blogs for none of those excellent shows.

    And with that, your TV critic must leave you.

    Related articles
    • Why We All Should Have Been Nicer to Terra Nova (tor.com)
    • Anonymous Featured in Season 4, Episode 20 of “The Good Wife” (news.softpedia.com)
    • TV: Justified: “Outlaw” (avclub.com)
  • Sourdough: not a recipe, more of a way of life

    April 2nd, 2013

    IMG_3518

    Day One

    I started with a sourdough I’ve been keeping dormant in the fridge for quite a few months. There was only a very small quantity of it in the bottom of a jar, and most of it was that liquid alcohol known as hooch. Hooch doesn’t look terribly appetising (it’s grey like old dishwater), but the aroma of it will blow the back of your head off. You just stir it and its flavour back into the dough.

    I retrieved it from the fridge and stirred in 100g of light rye flour (sourced from flourbin.com) and a similar quantity of filtered water. This was left for a day at room temperature in order to revive the starter.

    Day Two

    The following day, I added a further 100g of light rye, but about half the quantity of water, in order to stiffen the batter. Again, this was left for the whole day.

    By bed time, the starter had risen well and was full of air pockets. I had almost forgotten it, but it was now demanding attention. I split the mixture, reserving half of it in a jar to return to the fridge. I fed this with 50g of light rye. The other half was fed with another 100g of light rye and some water, and again left overnight.

    Day three (!)

    After another overnight rise, the starter is ready for use. I was up around 7 a.m. and now added around 225g of the flourbin’s French Bread flour (the same Type 55 I used previously) and a little water – about 50 ml, but this is where you watch the dough as it mixes and adjust the water till you’re happy. As usual, you’re looking for a dough wet enough to stick to the bottom of the bowl, but not to the sides.

    Once the dough was starting to look stretchy, I added 1 1/2 tsp of salt. Cheat’s charter: I also added 1/2 tsp of dried yeast, just to give the mixture a boost – to slightly speed up the rising process. It’s not necessary, but doesn’t affect the sourdough flavour.

    I then left the dough to prove at room temperature. When I say this: my house is never particularly warm, unless we keep the heating on all day, which is rare. So my “room temperature” is more like it was 50 years ago. I’ve always got the option of using the warming feature of my oven at around 35–40° C, but the longer the dough proves, the better the flavour. So I left it, prepared to wait all day.

    The sun came out. The conservatory got warm, so I put the dough out there. By lunch time, after around 5 hours proving time, the dough had doubled in size. I knocked it gently back and then shaped it into two small loaves, which I again left in the conservatory.

    It was so warm in there by now that within a couple of hours the loaves were ready for the oven, which I heated to 240°C and steamed. I slashed the tops and brushed with salted water, sprinkling them with flour before putting the loaves into the hot steamy oven.

    Ten minutes later I reduced the temperature to 205°C and opened the door to let out the steam. These loaves had been proving so long that the outside of them was quite dry: they split in the oven in interesting ways, especially along the base. This created some interesting crusty textures.

    After another 20 minutes I got the loaves out and let them cool. They were cracking and hissing, sitting on the cooling rack. I Just had a slice: this is a light rye bread made with around 50/50 light rye flour and French bread flour. It has an intense flavour and an open texture, though the colour (being Rye) is on the grey side. It’s as close as I’ve got to my favourite variety of French bakery bread: the Banette 1900.

    Related articles
    • French bread recipe (frequentlyarsed.wordpress.com)
    • Pane Pugliese recipe (frequentlyarsed.wordpress.com)
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