The Ode Not Taken

"I'd like to work upon a Farm"

Sighed Oz, and Lily too,

"Those Farm Dogs have such lovely times

Knee deep in Cattle Poo!"

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"They Spend all day just roaming free

And sitting up on Tractors

They bark and bark at 5 bar gates

Regardless of Risk Factors!"

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But wait a mo, what of the night?

They're chained up to a post

They don't have snuggles in the house

And don't get bits of Toast.

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So don't aspire to be someone else

It's not really that clever

Just make the most of who you are

You won't be here forever!

Warwick & Peace

We're having a few days R&R away from the fixed weekly grind of auctions and carboots to relax in a little farm cottage near Warwick. Yes I know we're in the middle of a recession but by definition that means we're about to be on our way out of it.

Oz & Lil have spent most of the time with their noses pressed up against the window looking longingly at the pack of farm dogs who are ranging freely amongst the barns, cattle and sheep. Oz was telling Lily that he intends to run away and become leader of this pack one day after he had given her the benefit of his scathing views on anthropomorphism.

I bought a broadband dongle last year which has never worked until today (once I discovered that the £10 prepaid voucher I bought with it self-destructs if not used within 3 months and had to buy another - they have made them like Steak & Kidney Pies). Now that I'm back in touch I can give you the benefit of my experience so far with this web 2.0 thingy.

Rather like the codicil to Parkinson's Law whereby everyone in an organization gets promoted to one level above their competence, I feel like I've found that level in Web 2.0 terms and moved one stage further than I was meant to. And that level was Twitter.

I've found Blogging to be a great way of getting things of my chest, showing off, making new imaginary friends and generally passing free time. That has lately been augmented by Facebook which is an excellent way of keeping up with the comings and goings of real and imaginary people but most importantly a brilliant way to play Scrabble. Scrabble used to be a good game ruined by the tedium of sitting scratching and frustrated whilst your opponent deliberated for hours over their tiles then spending 20 minutes arguing over the validity of their words. Facebook takes away the waiting as you can play your turn whenever you feel like it and the built in Dictionary is the arbiter which preempts all that fighting over particular words. You can even chat alongside the game.

However, I jumped into Twitter a couple of weeks ago and have just decided to jump out of it. It seems to be mini blogging by text with the "excitement" of including Stephen Bloody Fry and Jonathan Blinking Ross in your crew and knowing when they have been to the toilet or what they've had for dinner. There are some very clever and funny people reeling out lots of short punchy epigrams and also a lot of dross. I felt that I'd turned up at a sophisticated party where everyone had known each other for years and I just wanted to have a quick few swigs from the Party 7 in the kitchen before sneaking back to my bedsit.

No offence to all Twitterers but I just don't get it - each to their own and all that. Anyone fancy a 3 month long game of Scrabble?

The Science of Society

The other day I was thumbing through some quadratic equations as I mulled over some alluvial deposits from a Roche Moutonee to illustrate latter stage glaciation when it occured to me how little of the mass of facts and theories I crammed at school all those years ago have seen the light of day since.

So I had an idea.

What about recycling all that book learning for the modern World? What about applying some of that hard earned scientific knowledge to current day social situations? There's a best selling book here so I baggsy this idea first, although if you want to contribute ideas they will be extensively acknowledged in 7pt Times Footnotes at the back.

OK, here's my first application of old Science to New Society. Newton's Law of Cooling.

Newton's Law of Cooling states that the rate of change of the temperature of an object is proportional to the difference between its own temperature and the ambient temperature (i.e. the temperature of its surroundings). That is to say the higher the differential, the faster the rate of cooling.

Imagine you are Brad Pitt, one of the coolest people on the planet, attending a convention of Red Dwarf devotees in Droitwich one December, one of the least cool situations he could find himself in. The rate at which he will lose his credibility and "cool" will be extremely fast due to the vast discrepancy between himself and his surroundings. Leonard Cohen being interviewed by Steve Wright's Posse would be a similar sharp gradient of cooling.

Next week - Boyles Law applied to Jeremy Clarkson.

Sick as a Parrot

John Cleese once gave his three rules of writing successful comedy:

1. No Puns

2. No Puns

and

3. No Puns

Now I would like to take issue with this. What's the problem with the odd pun or two?

I must admit that I've never felt totally comfortable with John Cleese's comedy with the exception of the shining nugget of comedy classic gold that is Fawlty Towers. The Python stuff always seemed a bit laboured and mannered and I never quite took to the posh chartered accountant persona which Cleese adopted for so much of his career. I absolutely hated Clockwise which made me feel stressed out for weeks and a Fish Called Wanda still makes me terribly uncomfortable about Michael Palin having chips stuck up his nose.

I suppose even brilliant comedy exponents have their off days (see "Horne & Corden" and "Sunshine" for details). However, Fawlty Towers was, and still is, brilliant - a terrific ensemble cast and highly original and inventive writing by Cleese and his first wife Connie Booth.

One has to feel a bit sorry for Cleese now that he has been taken to the cleaners in Heather Mills fashion by his third wife Alyce Faye, a psychotherapist. Connie Booth keeps a commendably low profile and if Wikipedia is to be believed is also working as a psychotherapist in London and married to John Larr ( son of Bert Larr who played the Cowardly Lion in the Wizard of Oz.

New research may be proving John Cleese's comedy rules are correct. The University of New Dworkin in Southern California has recently completed an experiment in which 10,000 students were measured for laughter responses against a standard set of 10 pun based jokes to see, on average, how many from the list provided a laugh.

No pun in ten did.

Green Shoots of Recovery

The splendid display from the Snowdrops this year is waning but they have handed the Spring 4x400 baton cleanly over to the Daffs who are freshly bulbed up and ready to put on a turn of speed in the second leg.

We didn't get much done in the garden last year due to having left work and having less time on our hands (there's no sterner taskmaster than the self-employed) so as we are closing off the year and Mrs Rine's up North on Nana duties I've been toiling arduously in the garden. I've built a raised bed to try our hand at some vegetables, beaten back the wall of undergrowth which has accumulated elsewhere and relaid a gravel drive (which has also "beaten back").

As you can see, this sweat and toil was overseen by two not-very-helpful canines who sat and watched, Lil with wonder and Oz with suspicion. He keeps giving knowing looks towards the vegetable plot and then suspicious glances towards Mrs Rine's empty chair - I just imagine he's been filling Lily's head with dark theories. "You just wait - if he's on a tearful Police TV appeal urging anyone with knowledge of Mrs Rine's whereabouts to get in touch, I shall be queueing up to point them at that new vegetable patch".

He's sometimes too clever for his own good that Tibetan.

Cold Snap

How do you take photographs when foreground , mid-ground and distance are all a mass of unremarkable white?

Throw in a few technical problems like an ambient temperature of -40C and a camera system of cumbersome glass plates requiring exposure times in minutes (when "exposure" is not a popular concept), and you have a bit of a problem.

Which makes the photographs of Herbert Ponting all the more remarkable. They are amongst the 20,000 stunning images just launched on the new photographic website of the Scott Polar Institute in Cambridge entitled Freeze Frame.

Ponting seemed to have a particular genius for spotting a memorable image and it is difficult to believe that these wonderful photographs were taken with large format glass plate cameras in 1911. I particularly like the first two images above and this last one which features a sled-dog called Chris listening to a phonograph.

Terminal Case

I was feeling a little negative yesterday but I'm feeling positive today.

Yes it's true.... I've turned into a battery licker.

Allergy in a Country Churchyard

The other day the Lilster was happily padding along through rainwater:


It reminded me of the famous Cartier-Bresson picture which is supposed to have brought respectability to photography in the art world. If he'd used a faster shutter speed the bloke would have been in focus.

We walked on to the farm pond which is looking quite nice at this time of year, although what you don't see is the ramshackle farm sheds alongside with the whiff of farmyard materials filling one's nostrils.

We walked on to Wibbly Church where the surrounding graveyard is being tended by a small herd of black furry sheep. Oz was keen to join them, being a small black furry sheep himself, but was restrained. He did charge through this graveyard last week but as luck would have it he had a 12lb rabbit in his mouth so the sheep weren't bothered at all. It's nature red in tooth and claw round here, although Oz gets very nervous near Butchers' Shops for some reason. Perhaps he's worried whether the apostrophe is in the right place.

The dappled Churchyard Yew.

Finally heading back across the bit we call "Watership Down" because of the number of rabbits I noticed the latest generation of cyberman scarecrows appearing in the fields like Gormley installations to entertain the birdlife. Who says our industries aren't cutting edge?

A Cowboy Joke for the Weekend

It was a tense morning at the Cavalry Outpost. Word was rife that the Comanche Indians were on the Warpath and looking for a scrap.

Suddenly the faithful Indian Cavalry Scout rushed over to General Custer and said "Braves come this way Kemo Sabby!". (He'd heard this form of address from watching the Lone Ranger).

"How distant are they?", enquired the General laconically.

"Braves are this big!", he replied.

"Then hold your positions men!", commanded the General.

An hour or so elapsed before the Scout rushed back to the General to advise that the Indians were getting nearer.

"How distant are they now, man?", said the General, slightly less relaxed.

"Braves are now this big", came the reply.

"Hold your positions men!", barked the General.

Just 10 minutes later, the Scout returned. "Braves getting very near!", he said.

"How near, man? How near?!", asked the General agitatedly.

"Braves are this big", said the Scout.

"Right, fire at will! Shoot to kill", barked the General at the top of his voice.

The Indian scout grabbed his shoulder and said "Kemo Sabby! You cannot do that!".

"Oh!? And why not?", asked the General.

The Scout replied," I've known these braves since they were this big".

Private Eye

I've been a subscriber to Private Eye for nearly 30 years and a reader for longer. Their latest cover is so good I post it here in case anyone misses it!

Sir Fred: "It's OK - it's not loaded"

Shotgun: "Unlike you, you bastard".

A good spot if I am correct...

It's not often that you can read a blog post and feel anything other than spiritually and intellectually enriched. In fact even that is extremely unlikely within these meagre portals. However, if you keep reading this particular post I promise to make you several hundred, if not thousand, pounds better off. Honestly!.

Like most Baby Boomers my teenage years were spent developing an acute awareness of the value of music. A single 45rpm disc cost 6 shillings and eight pence and a vinyl LP £1-17-6d, which for modern readers equates to around 33p and £1.75 respectively. That probably doesn't sound much to you but in terms of the number of weeks delivering meat for the butcher on a Saturday morning to the cost of a lovely, shiny, cellophane smelling gorgeously beautiful Shadows' album it was an extremely highly-geared ratio at which even Sir Fred Goodwin would baulk.

Because of this relatively high real cost, music was something one was conditioned to want to possess, to own exclusively. It wasn't as readily available on the Radio (unless you could take it heavily watered down by Danny Kaye and Burl Ives) and to buy a lovely new LP was a rare and gratifying experience.

The music industry played the same trick on my generation in the 80's when we were all persuaded to gradually re-buy our entire music collections at £12.95 per album in the form of Compact Discs - some people even re-purchased them in Compact Cassettes in the 1970's for their cars. We didn't really mind that we were paying for Mickie Most's second private aircraft of Mike Oldfield's home in Ibetha, we had shelf loads of physical music with iconic outer covers that were imbued in the national consciousness.

Then along came the Internet.

Current generations see music as a small file name on their computer or phone with a maximum value of 79 pence but very often as a resource that one simply downloads free (they would say "for free") from file sharing sites. They think nothing of spending £40 a throw to go and see Coldplay but have the album on their Ipod for virtually zilch.

It has taken me a while to overcome my nurtured desire to possess physical albums of music and I have always steered well clear of "free" music downloads - probably more to do with my historic inflated sense of music's inherent "cost" than any particular adverseness to the slightly illegal aspect. But now all my old CD's are stacked in the back of an upstairs cupboard and I'm beginning to treat it in a much more free and easy fashion.

The latest step in this path is the one which will save you a small fortune and which has occupied far too much of my time for the last couple of days. It's the web site http://www.spotify.com/ which is basically a "streaming" music service - you fill in a form to create a free account, download their small player software and suddenly have access to just about every track you ever wanted for nothing. Yes, that's right, nothing. The only "cost" is that you have to listen to a music ad every half hour but that's hardly a trial.

I'm currently digging into deep and long-lost corners of Richard Thompson's back catalogue whilst snapping up single tracks of this and that which I've always fancied but never enough to buy whole albums for a tenner or so. I'm building the most eclectic of playlists with Laura Marling rubbing shoulders with The Lovin' Spoonful and Justin Timberlake and Primal Scream proving serendipitous bedfellows. This is cloud computing at its most Cumulo Nimbus, so get yourself over their and start building your own crazy playlists pronto!

If you jumped straight to this sentence to save the money without reading my blog post - tough titty! There's no such thing as a free lunch.

Venn Day Begin

Blogging's a bit like Big School isn't it? I'm thinking of "Big School" in the olden times when inkwells were filled with Quink by an Ink Monitor and 11 year olds were allowed to fiddle with Gas Taps and electric shock machines.

Being a relative newcomer to the blogosphere I feel like the New Boy who has just moved into the area and has to join 2B halfway through the second term by which time most of the social hierarchy has been set in stone. Most school friendships always seemed to jiggle into place like one of those coin sorting machines in those brief first few weeks of term when everyone is on the same footing. It must be true that even proximity to other pupils by alphabetical surname will affect those early friendships - "Arse stop playing with Armpitt!". Once the sporty types and the intellectual groups have all "picked up teams" anyone coming in as a newcomer will feel like Jeremy Clarkson at a Cycling convention.

Which is the fascinating thing about blogging. Every blog has a little list of blog chums and they all interlace in a complex three dimensional network of Venn bubbles, no two being the same and each network branch linking off into infinity. We're all merely 6 degrees of blog link separation from each other.

I've been at a car boot sale all morning standing in a muddy misty field talking bollocks about a load of rubbish. Can you tell?