Empty Handed

The location of the Meliá Gaia
Monference centre, relative to
‘My House’.

Well, fortunately for me, the whole christening-in-Porto thing has migrated across denominations, obviating the need for me to "Fetch a Priest" after all. So I’m off to Porto at the end of October to become, weirdly, a Godfather.

I’m not really sure how the thing morphed from being a Catholic christening to being whatever-it’s-going-to-be-now, but I do really hope it wasn’t anything directly to do with me. I mean, it might have been, I suppose, but there must have been other reasons not to do it the Holy Roman way. After all, my friend married a catholic, from a catholic country, in a catholic church, in another catholic country, and now lives in that original catholic country, but his wife (I count her a friend too, you understand) is not now having her first-born christened a catholic.

I won’t pretend to understand it, as I don’t know the imperatives behind it, and I don’t even know what it’s going to be now… But it seems like it will be Anglican, just because in a Google Talk chat my friend (doing his Professer Farnsworth) said

good news. Anglicanism seems promising.

Whatever. Flights booked, time off work booked and a few nights in a hotel pretty near to Pete’s house (see the picture he sent me from Google Earth), also booked. I just need to work out how to get my self there with my christening outfit intact, whilst still keeping my luggage down to a comfortable size. Christ, I hate hauling suitcases around, particularly as I’ll be coming back via Stansted and a train journey from there via Euston to Bare is in the offing. Last time I went over there (Porto, not Bare) I got away with 1 small piece of hand-luggage. This time I’ll also need to carry a suit, a tie, and probably a warm jumper, since it’ll be November in Portugal, and quite possibly in England, too.

Driving into work this morning and listening to the BBC’s Today programme on radio 4, I heard an absolutely stunning quote from Environment Secretary David Miliband. It was so utterly moronic that I couldn’t really believe that a real life actual person would have said it, so I looked it up when I got to work, and it appears that it was a genuine, verbatim, quote (although the BBC don’t reproduce it in their article).

Speaking about climate change (OMG, there’s something funny going on with the weather!), Miliband said:

It’s important not to be alarmist about it but it’s important to be alarmed.

Huh?

Go on, see for yourself! (it appears he said it during an earlier interview on The Today Programme, which I didn’t catch, but, boy, am I going to catch the pod-cast later.)

Out on a whisky hunt and came across a good offer in ASDA, yesterday. The Macallan 10 year old, 15GBP. Bargain. Not quite the bargain they had from a couple of months ago, 18 yo Glenlivet, 18 quid - usually £35 (and on sale at that price in Asda today). Still kicking myself for only buying 2…

It’s never worth paying full price for a single malt in a supermarket - If I “need” some, you can usually find a decent offer on one of the popular singles in one of the supermarkets, particularly Asda, Sainsbury’s and Booths. I tend to keep an eye out and buy them when I see them. Laphroaig, for example, comes up at £17 quite a lot, but at the moment is £24 in all of the supermarket’s I frequent (which are those 3 above, basically). For god’s sake, don’t ever pay £24 for a bottle of standard Laphroaig 10 yo!

Oh dear. Spunky Richard Hammond has had an accident and the nation has gone mental (more mental than usual, anyway). Heartfelt messages of support have been pouring in from all the nutters who think that he is somehow more deserving of their sympathy than the thousands of others who are injured or suffer some other debilitating or calamitous mishap every day, just because he’s on ver telly. The idiots. This is all the more bizarre because he was injured doing something which is obviously extremely stupid - normally people say things like ‘oh, well, the fucker knew what he was doing, he was bound to hurt himself eventually, I’ve no sympathy…’ etc etc, but in this case the fact that the retarded (huh, that may turn out to be literally true) Top Gear presenter’s engage in progressively more dangerous, reckless (but not wreckless) and inane tasks each week has only encouraged more pathetic whining about how unfair and tragic it all is - never mind the fact that each week the stupid programme sets the cause of RoSPA and Greenpeace back 10 years, whilst simultaneously blowing approximately 20% of the TV licence fee Tax payers budget so that Jeremy fucking Clarkson can bolt a bigger engine onto his knob, or something.

Somebody emailed Sky News - I caught this in passing btw - to say that they couldn’t believe how this could have happened to such a good driver! Fucking hell - he was driving a rocket car for fucks sake - that’s how it happened. No doubt Tony’s mob will move quickly to legislate against TV presenter’s being injured in stupid stunts, or something, just in case people think that it must be a perfectly safe activity since there’s no specific law about not crashing your fire-spitting-turbo bitch into a field at three-hundred miles an hour… The health and saftey executive will hold an enquiry - could this have been avoided (um, let’s see now…) - wasting time and money to come up with a set of guidelines to help protect rich idiots who can’t work out that dangerous activities differ from standard activities in one important way…

Somebody else emailed Sky to suggest that “…that Richard Hammond, he’s just like Steve Irwin, he is”. Huh?

Well, let’s hope that Richard Hammond fans take a leaf out the rabid followers of the late Croc botherer, and go out and smash up loads of fast cars in a bizarre vengeance attack on the instrument of their hero’s downfall.

So, it was my cousin Tim’s wedding on Saturday, held at Moreton Morrell Hall, which is in England, as fine a country as any to have such an affair.

This fine dandy, sporting an excellent, and, I suspect, real, beard, was young Timmy’s best man. Tim took the precaution of having two best men, and I can whole-heartedly recommend carrying at least one spare of everything you may need to rely on. In the end, they both got to do a turn, and quite excellent they were too (the er, second best man was Tim’s brother, Steve).

Being a best man is something I have recent experience of, and I may post a few words about it at some point. Not now though, beers and bed await. I’ll probably add a few more notes and stuff about this wedding also, but, right now, I just wanted to share Tony with you.

More pics from the wedding on my Flickr account.

So, the council came round selling various social insects door to door.

Well, you can’t pass up an opportunity like that now, can you?.

At over 30 quid a kilo they’re pricey, but still cheaper than flying monkeys. And they don’t eat so many bananas.

Or, I should probably say, wind turbines.

Somebody has gone and put up some wind turbines in the middle of Morecambe Bay when I wasn’t looking. Was it the other week when I was on holiday?

I can’t understand how I could have missed this. Surely environmentalists would have been up in arms and it would have been in the local papers and all that? Maybe they’re not really there, and it’s an an optical illusion or mirage (although strictly speaking that would just mean they weren’t quite where they seemed.)

I first spotted them through a gap between the houses when I was walking up Heysham Road to the pub with Carl the other week. He didn’t know anything about them either, but that doesn’t necessarily make me feel any better…

I’ve done an internet search, and I can’t find anything recent about it. Some old documents (c.2002) about plans (including an artists’/computer’s impression which looks remarkably like the real thing does today) for shoving 30 in the bay somewhere…

OK, maybe I should have looked harder.

I’m supposed to be becoming a Godfather to a good friend’s baby son later on this year, but there’s a complication - I’m not religious. Well, I suppose that’s not the complication, as such, after all none of the God parents to my two sons are at all religious as far as I can tell, and that wasn’t a problem (leave aside the moral and logical issues here, for a second - I’m not religious and neither is my partner, but we had our kids christened anyway, giving them non-religious God parents whilst swearing blind to the vicar (or whatever) that we were dead into god an’ that and so were the god parents). No, the real complication is that it’s to be a catholic christening. Now, I don’t believe in god, and I think anyone who does is just mis-guided and wasting their time (no, I probably wouldn’t say it to the vicars face), but at least the catholics are taking it seriously and really buying into it, and I really respect that. The local church where we had the boys christened just didn’t care, or at least not enough to bother asking us any hard questions. Whilst this was, shall we say, convenient for our purposes, I think it’s intellectually lazy and on the verge of morally reprehensible that they let us get away with it. Whilst I really only went along with the xenings for an easy life (and because of The Deal), I actually took the job of choosing the God fathers really seriously, on the basis that if you’re going to do something, do it in the spirit in which it is intended, so I picked people who fit the criteria (all bar the actual believing in god thing) - they should be morally upstanding, sensible, likely to take an interest in the boys development (and bring them gifts!) yada yada yada - rather than just picking someone who would be fun to have a drink with afterwards and then fuck off and never see the kid again.

But the catholic thing is a whole new world - it will be a catholic christening in a catholic country (Portugal) and, until today, I just assumed me being a god father just wasn’t going to happen, and that would have been OK, and I’d have gone over anyway and would still take an interest in the child and care about his upbringing and buy him presents at christmas and birthdays and generally look out for him, so actually being a god father officially, like, wouldn’t really matter. I got to assuming all this because it seemed that, to qualify, I must be a catholic and have taken (done? eaten?) my (the?) sacraments and have one of those big gold things with incense billowing out and, you know, believe in God and stuff. Today, though, I’ve found out that I don’t need to be all that (unlike Rachael Leigh Cook) - all I need is a simple letter from my ‘local’ catholic priest to say that I’m a reliable person. And that’s the main point of this post, really:

How am I going to get one of those?

I’m expecting this to go all sitcom on me.

I’ve just bought (yet another) wireless kb and mouse, so this is the third-one I’ve had on my desk this year and the second one I’ve bought. The Packard Bell I’d been using since christmas 3 years ago just stopped working. Disappointing because it was a lovely keyboard, nice and stylish (this is important because of all of the cool and sexy people who are constantly calling in on me in the office - I had a couple of firemen in the other week) and nice to use (which is important because I use it - see?). So many keyboards I come across (not like that, settle down (although… *hmmm, stylish*)) are actually not really well designed for actually typing anything, the keys are often so close together it’s difficult to discern a gap and the keyboards so flat that there’s little or no carry, or the keys are all rubbery like on a spectrum (am I thinking of the zx-80?). But 3 years is pretty good service for such a device, I guess, and anyway, what was I gonna do - send it back as not fit for purpose. No problem, just get a replacement. Well, actually, yes, problem. Couldn’t find even a Packard Bell wireless keyboard at any of the usual outlets I’m familiar with, let alone the same model (how optimistic was I? Yeah, they were bound to be making the same wireless keyboard 3 years later, weren’t they? And, thinking about it, I seem to remember my beloved bought it as a reduced end-of-line deal. Shit, shoulda bought 2).

Right, so what else is out there? Well, nothing. Not one w/l kb in the functional-stylish-and-cheap bracket I was interested in. Loads in the cheap bracket. None in the stylish bracket, to be honest. Couldn’t tell about the functional bracket, really. Christ, there’s a lot in the Logitech bracket though, aren’t there? Bloody hell. They’re all Logitech, except the Microsoft ones. They’re Microsoft, as the name suggests.

So, I bought a Logitech one, for about 20 odd quid. Seemed functional enough, had media keys and all that (except I had to hack them a lot to work with my music player of choice, DBPowerAMP, but that’s another story), mouse had a scroll wheel, the keyboard was ’stylish’ (well, it was black) and had an RSI-busting wrist-rest (plastic and flimsy). So that’s it, then. Forget about it and get on with things. Except that, after about 3 weeks it just stopped working. It got all jittery and started sending key strokes randomly, if at all, and the mouse got all petulant. I tried changing everything - batteries, the position of the receiver and the channel, but the only thing that worked was changing the fucking keyboard. Back to the good old fashioned brandless beige wired job. (I couldn’t be arsed taking the keyboard back to PC World for a refund, think how joyless that excursion would have been).

Eventually, though, the good old fashioned beige wired mouse has driven me mental, and the good old fashioned beige lack-of-media-keys has pissed me right off, so it’s back to the market for a proper (read NOT LOGITECH) keyboard/mouse. So that leaves Microsoft, right. And that means an outlay of at least 50 quid. For a keyboard! Something I’ve already got?! Jesus, OK then, but only because that bloody mouse is driving me round the twist (You’re thinking “so, just buy a w/l mouse then, you tit” aren’t you? - media keys, remember? and w/l mice aren’t cheap on their own either, so stretch a little further and get the kb too, I’m thinking).

So, I’ve gone on about this keyboard more than was strictly necessary, and there’s a beer calling me from the kitchen, so I’ve got to go, but I managed to get one of these Microsoft “comfort” keyboards today. I was planning to buy one like this from PC World for about 50GBP, but when I went in, they had one like this for the same price. Supposedly reduced from 85GBP, but whatever, I’m expecting to meet an old crone giving them away in exchange for pieces of antiquated hemp tomorrow.

And, wait for it, I’m using it to type this entry now. There you go.

I’ll get used to that.Seems very good. Stylish, you know? ‘End’ keys in the wrong place, but