wheresrhys

It’s become de-rigeur these days to trundle out the fact that the UK has the highest density of CCTV cameras in the world, and then to follow it with the opinion that it’s all some sort of sinister creep towards a police state. I’m not going to do that, but I did however read today about something similar, particularly close to my heart as if it had been the case a couple of years ago I probably would have found myself repeatedly stopped by the police.

Apparently police have been misusing the new anti-terrorism laws to stop people taking photos of buildings in sensitive areas, eg. ‘Alex Turner, an amateur photographer, was arrested under section 44 after taking images of a fish and chip shop in Kent’. Now, I know that the jihadists are eager to preserve cod stocks, and the IRA want to keep all those lovely potatoes for themselves (just in case), but I can’t help thinking that it may have been an over-reaction.

More usual than that bizarre police intervention is that photographers – tourists, amateurs and journalists (presumably with press passes) – are being stopped from taking photos in the City of London. So if I was still writing my London skyline blog I would have either had to stop or accept being hassled by the police as routine. This is the first time* the police’s sinister side has crossed my path (albeit 2 years too late). I don’t like that they can infringe on my ability to carry out my innocent daily business.

I expect a lot of people in other perfectly innocent walks of life have had far more vivid encounters than this to teach them to be wary of the British police, so I suppose I should count myself lucky.

*Aside from busking, student protests, and a horrible incident where a brute of a copper looked like he was going to arrest an acquaintance for accidentally kicking a football at someone who had foolishly decided to have a picnic behind our goals.

… he listed the successes of his government, which he said had included saving the world economy by persuading the US government to intervene

Towards the end he boasted that he was still “young and on form”, opening his shirt to show that he “wasn’t even wearing a vest”,

“What they did to Berlusconi was an act of terrorism,” said Umberto Bossi, the leader of the Northern League party and the prime minister’s closest ally.

I wonder how long the queue to punch (or throw aminiature metal souvenir of Milan’s cathedral, the Duomo at) him was.

In other news, Bin Laden not here, says Pakistan.

This relates to something I will blog more at length about in the next few days, but I thought I’d ask this question first to see if anyone who reads this might know the answer.

I’m going to try and approximate, using the simplest way possible, an English language sentence. The method I’m going to use is to pick a number, N, and make my selection of words from random strings of at most N letters.

• If N = 2 a sentence would look like this: d fo mh j e l tx df d
• If N = 5 a sentence would look like this: gh e kj jegns tyu dfa o wdu tah ttauo kk

So here’s my question:

If I want to approximate the distribution of word-lengths in the English language, which value of N should I choose?

I know it won’t be a very close approximation, but it’s very quick and easy to generate the words using this set-up.

It’s not every day you hit a refresh button and are faced with what looks like a Daily Mail plot to finally rid the world of sympathy for windfarms.

But quaking in fear aside, You’ll notice that I spelt colonise the British way… but the site still let me in though, which is awfully nice/stupid of stackoverflow. Hip hip…

It can’t be for real, surely. Not even Microsoft is this naff.

On the bright side though, it does mean my wait to get a new laptop is nearly over; no way was i gonna get one with Vista installed.
O

Last week I was in Finland. In south-west Finland, in and around Turku, to be precise. One apparently defining feature of the Finnish life is to spend at least some of the summer months in a summer house in “The Archipelago”*. And a great custom it is too. A few days frolicking among the pine trees, taunting bears and finding inexplicable piles of apples.

The archipelago has quite a lot of water, being an archipelago, which is ideal for fishing (and canoeing, but let’s not digress). I haven’t been fishing since about the age of twelve, and even then I failed to catch anything. This time, after spending ten minutes or so digging up worms (and a solitary beetle grub we christened Harold), iida and me headed of to the jetty armed with nothing but a couple of sticks with a bit of fishing line and a hook tied on the end.

A Bream about 1 2/3 the size of a size 10 shoe

So imagine our surprise when, five minutes in, iida hooked a whopper (Having shown this photo to a fisherman friend of mine, he swears it’s “6 pounds if it’s an ounce” – my words, not his (though the sentiment remains unchanged)). We checked with some locals if it was edible and were told hat it was a Lahna, and was good to eat, but full of bones. It looked like a Bream to me, and a Bream it was, and here’s how we cooked it. (Incidentally, it tasted much better when we had the leftovers the day after, so prepare a day in advance and reheat if possible).

Ingredients

• Some potatoes
• About half a bulb of garlic
• A red pepper or two
• 2 biggish onions
• A thumb of ginger
• A sneeze of garam masala
• Salt as you like it
• Rice
• About 5-6 tomatoes (or a tin of chopped tomatoes)
• Any veg you care to put in
• As much chilli as you think appropriate
• A big white fish (or several fish if your angling skills aren’t as impressive as iida’s)
• A little butter

Cooking

1. Dice the onion, cut the peppers into strips and cut up the ginger, garlic and chilli fairly thinly, though it’s probably best if you don’t dice them into tiny bits. Cut the potatoes into big-toe sized pieces, or maybe a bit smaller.
2. Blanch and chop the tomatos. If you don’t know how to blanch you should have got a tin, but never mind – look it up on the internet.
3. Melt the butter in a saucepan and fry the onions. After they’ve gone pretty soft chuck in the peppers, garlic, ginger, potatoes, garam masala and chilli. A few minutes later, chuck in the chopped tomatoes. Stir and leave to simmer until it’s starts to look like a mixture of soft stuff rather than just bits of different things. No more than 10 minutes.
4. Put the fish in a baking dish and pour the sauce you’ve just prepared over he fish (if it’s a whole fish make sure you stuff some inside too. Cover with foil and put in an oven (preferably a hot one, though how hot is left up to you).
5. Depending on the size of the fish it will take somewhere between not very long at all and quite long to cook. Make sure you start checking on it after about half an hour. And remember to cook the rice!

It’s rare I can say something I’ve cooked is one of the nicest things I’ve ever eaten. It’s even rarer I can say that something I caught then cooked is one of the nicest things I’ve ever eaten, but the meal described above is the bees knees. Even though some of the preparation (gutting and killing the fish (which clung to life more stubbornly than you’d think)) wasn’t exactly pleasant, the difference putting in your own freshly caught fish makes to the taste and satisfied feeling in your stomach is astounding.

*The collective noun for the many unconnected archipelagos of Finland is “The Archipelago”

I don’t want to end up like the giraffe in the picture: a crick-necked invalid with blotchy skin. As I grow older the blotchy skin is probably inevitable, but the crooked neck/back is avoidable I hope.

The trouble is that for a living I do a mixture of two things:

1. Bent double over a laptop, twisting my fingers at unreasonable angles in order to reach a keyboard shortcut
2. Bent double over a guitar, twisting my fingers at unreasonable angles in order to reach a wicked chord

Both these activities lead to my back muscles being tensed in an uncomfortable position, with little movement to get blood flowing to the muscles. As an added bonus, my finger muscles are also generally making the same kind of not particularly relaxed movements every day.

So what’s the antidote to all this physical self-abuse?

The idea I’m trying at the moment is juggling.

I’ve been able to juggle for a little over a year, and several of my friends are fanatical about it (working for little while in a backpackers hostel in Amsterdam is a surefire way to get people to help/force you to pick up the basics), but I hadn’t done very much since the first months when I first picked it up.

Recently, however, I realised that juggling is the antithesis of the activities that are determined to wreck my spine:

• Rather than crouching forward, to juggle you really need to stand quite upright; if you lean forward you end up throwing the balls forward, which eventually leads to either dropping them or running after them into traffic or something.
• More related to guitar playing this, but juggling requires very relaxed, fluid movements of the arms and shoulders. While fluidity is essential to playing rhythm guitar well, it’s impossible to avoid tensing up somewhat during the pacy irish reels we play – there simply isn’t enough time between beats to led your arm lollop along. So juggling should hopefully help counteract the stiffness I’ve been getting in my upper back.
• Despite the fact that you’re constantly grasping in the air to catch a ball, juggling requires you to relax your hand muscles too. Catching a ball when you juggle isn’t about holding it tightly; if anything, it’s closer to forming a cup shape for the ball to nestle into.

So, that’s the summary of why I think juggling might help. I’ll keep you posted on whether or not it is the miracle cure I’ve been looking for.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article6836257.ece

Cluttered disco world
Dance moves painted on the road
Please, where’s the exit?