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p. [Thursday 20th March]

p. This is my third trip to the States, and every time I come it reinforces the impression that ‘The Simpsons’ is a documentary rather than a comedy. To be fair, this is an impression mainly garnered from infomercials. I have to say that I’m fascinated by them.

bq. “Do you want to be able to upgrade the software used by your brain?” Yes, Pam — tell me more immediately about how I can speed-read up to 2,000 words per minute! “So, Chef Tony — how sharp are these knives?”. “Well, I’m glad you asked me that Tom!”

p. Why do infomercials selling knives always show them cutting up shoes? I don’t know about you, but I’ve never thought, “Man, I really wish I had a knife to cut this pair of shoes up.” How do people end up doing infomercials anyway? My guess is that they are washed-up actors who have either had their day, or never really made it in the first place. It’s pretty tragic really, but infomercials are the most entertaining bit of US TV.

p. This is likely to be my last regular post for a couple of weeks. On Monday I’m off to Florida — the land of Disney and “spam barons (40% of spammers live here, apparently)”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,903312,00.html for a conference and then a little bit of R&R&SWM*. I’ll be writing about my experiences as usual offline, and if I do get a chance to connect I’ll upload a load of posts at one time. I’ve applied for a T-Mobile wireless account, so if I find a hotspot Starbucks, I’ll be a happy little geek bunny. In the meantime, have fun without me and keep commenting…

p. *Snorkelling With Manatees

p. I’ve just watched the last of “‘Grand Designs’”:http://www.channel4.com/granddesigns/buckinghamshire.html . To be honest, I’m not sure why I’ve been watching it: we can’t afford to buy any kind of of house in Oxford, let alone build some state-of-the-art, luxury design statement, so watching this program is somewhat masochistic. Anyhoo, this week’s build didn’t go entirely according to plan, to put it rather mildly. But the chaos prompted Tom, the owner, to come out with the most perfect expression I think I’ve ever heard.

bq. It’s a five-star, fur-lined, ocean-going balls up.

p. Oh, I like that a lot. Actually, I like Tom a lot, and not just because he laughs like Harry Secombe in “‘The Goons’”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc7/comedy/progpages/goons.shtml — I can think of few people who would maintain their sense of humour in the face of such construction related adversity.

p. On my very long and very dull drive today on work-related matters (I won’t bore you with the details), I saw the best place name ever — Ansty Cowfold. When I looked it up on Multimap, I found out — disappointingly — that it’s actually two villages which just happen to share the same road sign. Still, never one to let the facts get in the way of a good story, I have decided that if I ever write a novel (like that’s ever going to happen), the main character will be called Ansty Cowfold.

p. Ansty is a rough-hewn straight-talking man, who — in a bid to avoid “nominative determinism (Say what?)”:http://www.science-frontiers.com/sf108/sf108p14.htm — takes up accountancy instead of a life as a man of the soil. But somehow he feels empty. In the wee hours of the morning when he lies sleepless, gazing at his tie draped over the “Corby trouser press”:http://www.corbypress.com/howtouse.asp , he listens to “Farming Today”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/news/farmingtoday/index.shtml on the radio, and longs to be looking instead at a prize herd of Herefordshire heifers, grazing placidly in the dawn mist. Instead, he sighs, puts on his grey pinstripe suit and prepares himself for another day of compound interest rates and deductible expenses.

What with all the excitement of donning my deerstalker earlier (what a sad life I lead), I forgot to mention my strange waking-up experience earlier today. I reached consciousness this morning already singing The Bare Necessities from ‘The Jungle Book’ in my head. It’s quite a jolly way to wake up to be sure, but suggests to me that I must be under a good deal more strain than I had previously suspected. Either that or I had some pretty freaky dreams that I don’t remember at all.

p. Today seemed to be one of those days when everything broke down. The University’s network connection with the rest of the world was down for most of the day, which meant disaster — now we had no displacement activity to put off the awful business of work itself. It’s amazing how much you miss just being able to do a quick Google. I kept saying things like, “Hang on, I’ll just look it up…”, and getting to the point of having hands poised over the keyboard before I realized that I wasn’t actually going to get anywhere. Bah.

p. Then I got home to find that the burst water main in our road — which I noticed on the way to work — had still not been fixed, and we had no water. So after a sweaty bike ride back from work, I had to mop myself down with a cupful of water we had in a bottle somewhere. We’re trying to decide what we can cook for dinner that doesn’t require water. Now would probably be a good time to go out and get a pizza to eat from the box.

p. Update — Just to reinforce the bad karma flying around today, I had to reconstruct this post from memory. Of course, this was one of the very rare occasions that I had decided to type directly into the web interface, rather than editing in Tinderbox. I posted it then something weird and random happened and the post just disappeared after actually being published to the static site. So if you briefly saw an earlier version, I hope that I’ve more or less got the content right. Lesson number 1: always enter posts via Tinderbox, then you have a backup if the gremlins strike.

I’ve put up a few pictures from my jaunt around the University Botanical Gardens over on wings open wide. There weren’t a lot of flowers in bloom in the main garden (understandably, given the season), so most of the images were taken in the glasshouses. I discovered some technical difficulties with taking photographs in a glasshouse: the lens kept steaming up, so I was wiping it every few minutes, and the light was rather subdued, so some of the pictures have a rather limited depth of field. Anyway, take a look and tell me what you think.

We’ve started buying the Radio Times as The Guardian guide doesn’t cover digital radio very well, or have detailed information about the programmes on the Freeview channels. It does the job, but the thing that amuses us every week is the catalogue of ‘reader offers’ which comes with it. Last week, we had the tempting offer of a dog ramp: a specially constructed wooden plank to facilitate your dog’s access to the car boot. Here are this week’s highlights:

Where do I start with this one? Quite apart from the fact that it’s totally hideous, they clearly spent about 75% of the £170 purchase price on the timber alone. I really don’t hold out a great deal of hope for the sound quality.

Do you wish that Britain had never lost her Empire? Do you miss all that pretty pink on the atlas? Well now you can pretend that the last century never happened! Simply conceal your nasty new-fangled red EC passport within this sumptuous British Empire Blue wallet.

As a general rule, I detest using a microphone when giving a lecture. For a small person, I have a reasonably big voice when required, and I can project to the back of the lecture theatres we have at work without much problem. I hate the fading in and out of the volume when you turn your head, and the general ‘tinny’ timbre of a badly amplified voice.

However, I’ve got a filthy cold at the moment – my voice has become a whispery, scratchy thing – so I decided that I’d better give in and use the mic. We have an unwieldy thing which hangs around the neck on a stethoscope-like arrangement, attached to the front desk by a long wire in which I was constantly entangling myself. The only good thing that came of the whole sorry business was my accidental discovery a fail-safe method of rousing sleepy undergraduates in a 9am lecture: simply cough explosively into the microphone without muting the sound. I must say that I was gratified by the response. About half of the lecture theatre instantaneously rose about half a metre off their seats. That’ll learn ‘em.

For some reason (nostalgia is a funny thing) I’ve been remembering how I spent my weekends when I was a child. I had a Best Friend, Susie, and we were virtually inseparable. We spent almost every weekend together, either at her house or mine (we lived in the same street). I’m going to sound like I’m having a bit of a Monty Python moment, but when I was a kid, we spent most of our time outside if it wasn’t raining too hard. I feel a bit sorry for children today who seem to be imprisoned by their parents’ fears of paedophiles, violence and car accidents. We were fairly free-range children: we had to be back by tea-time, but other than that we could roam around without having to be in constant mobile phone contact with our parents – imagine that!

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Slipping smoothly from something very serious to something utterly trivial, I’ve been tinkering with my templates again. First, I’ve SmartyPant-ized the comments and trackback listings, so quotes (double and single), apostrophes, ellipses, en-dashes and em-dashes should all be properly encoded for your commenting pleasure. Second, I’ve reversed the display order of comments, so that they appear with the oldest first. This is much more logical to read if people are following a thread of a discussion down the page. Actually, this is the default in a new installation of Moveabletype, and I can’t for the life of me remember what possessed me to change it.

I’ve just put up some pictures from my trip last week to Bristol on Wings Open Wide. I’ve even made a new gallery category for them, which will encourage me to go back soon and take some more. Feel free to go and take a look.

The sequence in this week’s Life of Mammals where David is obviously exhilarated by watching dolphins bow-riding brought back the memory of that experience for me. I’ve mentioned before that I worked for a summer on whale-watching tours off the coast of the Isle of Mull. I saw plenty of minke whales, harbour porpoises and even a lone Risso’s dolphin, but I always managed to miss the huge pods of common dolphins bow-riding, much to my disappointment.

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You know, when I wrote my post about partworks I made up all of the titles except the ‘Understanding Your PC’ one. Shocking, I know, but call it creativity. Then I got a shock. We were watching something we’d videoed last night and fast-forwading through the adverts as is our custom, when what should flash by in a swirl of materialism but an advert for a partwork on miniature teapots! My gast was well and truly flabbered. I’m beginning to think that I might have a promising future in partwork publishing. Now, to go and pitch that ‘Worming Your Opposum’ idea to someone…

It’s been a rather damp start to the New Year here. As if it wasn’t bad enough going back to work after Christmas, I had to get there through a biblical deluge. The Isis (the Thames, for normal people¹) has grown enormously. I might curse the fact that I live on a hill when I have to cycle back up it, but it does mean that I don’t get soggy carpets three times a year.

¹ Oxford people are a funny lot: the river has a perfectly serviceable name, but they have to go and give it another one with Classical pretentions so that the plebs won’t get the reference.