Paris in a Day (1): Getting there...

Je pense que l'Eurostar est assez vieux, battu et sale maintenant, mais il a traversé la Manche avec succès. Nous sommes arrivés à Paris à 11.47 (heure locale) et avons pris la métro jusqu'à la Tour Eiffel.



(Don't worry. I shall be writing in English from now on...)

Telling the truth about the world...

I'm pleased the Snakes on a Plane school of naming has extended its reach.

They have started putting the stupid little biscuits you get with a cup of coffee in this.

Which I applaud.

78 Days and counting...

Now, either Boots is displaying the chemical structure of its shower gel as some manner of educational device...



...or it's quickest off the mark with Christmas! (Again!)

Just "one" thing...

The BBC has spent my licence fee (and 9,125 other people's) on these, so I think I have purchased the right of reply. And that of judgement. Here goes...

Surfers	The best one...	9/10
Bikes	The noisiest one...	8/10
Hippos	The funny CGI one...	8/10
Kites	The far too new age one...	6/10
Windows	The flashy, but still dull one...	5/10
Footballers	The too techno one...	4/10
Petals	The not actually a circle one...	3/10
Moon	The News and Queen dying one...	2/10

...actually, just one more thing...



...wasn't Robin Hood good?!

(although not as good as Robin of Sherwood...)

Always there... *

Now we might not be in the Premiership any more and we haven't got the Spinnaker Tower. Vosper Thorneycroft has gone, leaving Portsmouth doing ships better than us too. The Titanic and Craig David both sunk. But Southampton still Shows good Boat.

Although you have to approach it all very subversively and with a good dollop of cynicism it's still a good day out.

Small bits of town - old car parks, bits of dockside, Mayflower Park - seem to be able to host a huge show, including 240 tons of borrowed Weymouth Sand, and you only realise exactly where you are when you get high enough up to see...



You can buy virtually anything nautical including...

...boats:



(Look carefully... the price you pay is in the small font. The big price is the Boat Show discount...)

...really big boats with plasma tv screens, several floors and staff:



(This one is soooo expensive and posh that they make you put bags over your shoes just to be allowed on the carpet...)



...astroturf flipflops:



...and a Teletubbies hat:



(This is Tracy incorrectly modelling some manner of onboard storage receptacle. Available from Solent Plastics...)

There were many pirates. These were better than some and did the voices and everything.



(Although they didn't know they had missed International Talk Like A Pirate Day on 19 September. Shiver me timbers, etc...)

And one more shot of the quite spectacular £2.9 million Sunseeker Predator 82. We're there somewhere if you zoom in. And we're flickred too.



*Avril: “If I go ahead with the Barracuda, Charles, you’ll refuse to support me..?”
Charles: “If you go ahead, Avril, I’ll fire you...."
Ken: "You'll get Relton Marine over my dead body..."
Jack: "I'm building Barracuda and bringing the Mermaid Yard into to 20th century..."
Jan: "I have new stock of the orange jump suit with the shoulder pads...."
Leo:"Clip clop clip clop clip clop..."
Clod: "Qu'est-ce que c'est dans la distance??? Oh Merde!!!!!"
Simon May Orchestra: "Daaaaa-da dahh, daa-daa-daaa, daaaaa-da-dahh..."

Fearsome creatures...

I'm sure I read something about this in the Guardian, but apparently it's something to do with a very warm summer and then some rain and then some more hot weather. Whatever the reason, I thought it was time to get my own back on the pseudo-Australians and their tales of (possibly deadly) fauna.

So I'm letting you know that my house has been invaded thus.

(Don't click that link if you are of a nervous disposition. Oh, too late...)

I've successfully tamed and cleared three in about the past week, but comfort myself with those old wives' tales about them only coming into clean houses. Although not especially phobic, indeed quite at ease, I still prefer not to comfort myself with the urban myths about them crawling into your open mouth as you sleep...

Where's Steve Irwin when you need him, eh?

So much hot air...

Spurred on by others' green credentials and guilt about how much CO₂ my flying to New Zealand (and back) dumped into the atmosphere, I had a go on the Carbon Calculator website. If you put in details of where you've been and how you got there, it will tell you how much pollution you caused. I think even by walking to the kitchen you can destroy a sizeable section of the ozone layer. I'm staying on the sofa.

The upshot is that flying half way round the world and then coming back covers 38 572km and produces 4.2 tonnes (metric with an "...nes" on the end) of carbon dioxide...



...but it's not the end of the world (either literally or metaphorically) because I can buy trees to the value of £31.08, almost a forest, and everything will be OK and I will sleep at night. (If I'd only been to New York I would've got away with a measly £8.88 worth of trees. Which is a small tree in Durham somewhere.)

And I was actually going to do it!

But it seems trees are out of stock at the moment...



You see, this is what you get when you try to be holier-than-thou. If there are no trees left to buy, then there's probably something more wrong with the world than my £31.08 will put right...

Off their trolley's...

Flagrant abuse of the apostrophe!
Flickrd by sebFlyte.

I have now blogged twice about signs with bad grammar and no-excuse spelling but, worryingly, (or perhaps fortunately?) it seems I'm not the only one.

There's a whole "badgrammar" photostream on flickr where other like-minded people can gather and celebrate their pedantry.

So I'll put any future photo's their and shut up going on about it here.

Are Generious Offer...

I know this is my second post on this theme recently and I could be accused of being obsessive, but I thought you should know that Next in Calcot near Reading has the following vacancy for someone to "relenish" stock...



Make sure you speak to Ben. If you write to him, there could be all sorts of problems...

Talk Talk to me while you can...

Have finally dumped BT after paying them £11.99 a month + Caller Display + Call Diversion + Calls (= a lot) for actually not making any calls and then paying Virgin another £17.99 a month for broadband on top of that.

It is something I will undoubtedly regret. Although TalkTalk has a very trendy personalised Welcome Pack...



...and everything is written in very calm and reassuring Plain English, it has an unenviable Customer Service record: "Press 1; your call is important to us; we expect to answer your call at 3.37am" etc.

My switch date is 8 September. Say goodbye now. It's unlikely that you will see or hear from me again after then...

Blog Day 2006...

Apparently it's International BlogDay2006 today and it's all about the sharing...

1. Find 5 new Blogs that you find interesting, preferably different from your own culture, point of view and attitude
2. Notify the 5 bloggers that you are recommending on them on BlogDay 2006
3. Write a short description of the Blogs and place a a link to the recommended Blogs
4. Post the BlogDay Post (on August 31st)... etc etc (Blog Day Website)

Like I've got time to do all that...

For a start, there's the whole "interesting" debate. I find about five blogs interesting, primarily because they are not different to my own culture, point of view and attitude, because they are written by my friends. But this probably makes me insular and short-sighted and monomaniacal, so I shall broaden my horizons and recommend...

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Found this because she was wittering on about mobile phone masts and I thought she was doing so from an "I-don't-use-a-mobile" standpoint. She didn't, but now she does. So she uses a mobile but objects to the masts. Apparently, mobile phones worry her because "common sense tells me that they can't be good for you."

If you use a mobile phone at all, you can't object to the masts. Even if they're near you.

End of.

Well not quite, because you also have to eat nothing but raw food, be open to "infinite possibilities", discover your "soul purpose" and "upgrade your life"....

Blog off.

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Yup, it's well-known right-wing Daily Mail/Moral Maze/Question Time rent-a-gob Melanie Phillips. I disagree with virtually everything she says, particularly when she witters on about how crap education is in this country.

She's got a bit bogged down recently by only slagging off anything she might consider pro-Islamic, mainly, I guess, to publicise her latest book, Londonistan. (Not providing a link, in vain attempt not to publicise it any more..)

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Found by chance, Alice's Rabbit Hole. Great rant about Virgin Mobile customer service with points of agreement on pedantry and an admiration of Lynne Truss.

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Number 4 is Nottinghamshire Notes, which I just happened to find when I was looking for pictures of Mansfield Market Place. I'm from Mansfield and I just spent a week there with my family, walked through the market place twice and didn't notice that they had done anything to it. I must pay greater attention next time.

It's also got links to places I know I ought to have been to again and haven't for ages. For example, the Crich Tramway Museum looks like there's more to it than when my Gran and Grandad took me there 30 years ago...

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This is the badscience.net blog, by Dr Ben Goldacre who writes in the Guardian. It doesn't really follow the recommendation rules, as I agree with most of it. Particularly about Brain Gym and Gillian McKeith... (And about mobile phone masts...)

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Floored...

As seen in Mablethorpe...



I presume you would have to expect...

• two carpets where you only needed one, or
• one where you actually wanted two, or
• a completely different carpet to the one you actually needed...

0° 00' 00"

At 9.21am today, my left foot was in the Western hemisphere and my right foot was in the Eastern hemisphere.

Traditionally, people do this at Greenwich, but there are lots of other places in England you can do it too.

I was officially at (roughly) 53° 22' 3.00"N, (exactly) 0° 0' 0.00", which is Eastgate in Louth between a fish and chip shop and a drycleaners.

Apparently neither my GPS nor Google Earth would have said that's where I was, but as it's only a few metres off, I'm not going to quibble.

My Very Easy Method Just Speeds Up Naming... Damn!!!

This is all very bizarre.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Pluto loses status as a planet

I somehow feel cheated out of a bit of my general knowledge, something I've known since primary school and which isn't right anymore.



It almost seems like science should always be forging ahead and today it unexpectedly lurched back.

Another branch of science leapt forward at the same time though, 'cos the BBC report is timed 13:34 today and it was documented gospel on Wikipedia by 13:36...

Pluto is the ninth and smallest of the traditional planets of the Solar System, though its status as a planet has been disputed in recent years. It qualified as a planet under the draft definition but it failed to qualify under the final draft, voted by the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union on August 24th, 2006. (Wikipedia).

So, there are now only 8 planets in the Solar System and a few irregular lumps of rock. It still keeps its name, but it's now just a pub quiz question for 50 years time and a dog.

And what of the mnemonics?

Earlier in the week when the draft proposed keeping Pluto and a few other newly discovered rocks, they were getting longer...

Most Victorian Euphoniums Make Cats Jump Suddenly Unless Neighbours Play Calming Xylophones. (The Times).

...but now they can be shorter. My favourite is...

Make Vanessa Eat Massive Jam Sandwiches Until November...



I clearly have too much time on my hands...

Walking to the Isle of Wight...

...or at least that what it seems like when you walk to Hurst Castle from Keyhaven.

I shall demonstrate with this rudimentary map...



...and with this photo...



But it's worth it when you get there because, TARDIS-like, it's bigger on the inside than it appears from the outside. For a kick-off, it's very long and has two looping sections...



...to the east and the west of Henry VIII's orginal fort in the middle. The end of Hurst Spit is much bigger than I thought, too, with room for a lighthouse and a couple of cottages. (Briefly considered that it would be nice to live there, but then weighed up nice view against no Tesco home delivery, no broadband and 1½ mile walk to car and decided against it.)

The central fort was completed in 1544 and then it was added to and modernised during the Napoleonic Wars and then used again in the World Wars...



Evidence of all this "Changing Rooms" activity can still be seen and explored and it gives the whole structure a very hotch-potch kind of style...



...but you get a real sense of what it must have been like as a working fort. Not least when you use the toilets, which are the original outisde urinals used by the garrison and even have a plaque telling you about them.

You can see how the fort made this part of the Solent easier to defend. Just over the water on the island are...



...Fort Albert and The Needles, the latter helping to funnel ships into the cannons of the former. Not forgetting, of course, the cannons and guns at Hurst, which were (are still ) big...



And when you've seen enough, there's also a ferry back to Keyhaven...



...which is probably the best £2.50 I've spent all holiday.

Slideshow of all photos on...

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OCD Footnote: This is the second Henry VIII-themed tourist attraction with the initials H.C. I have visited in 48 hours, which beats other attempts at organised tourism hands down...