i am sparticus: Words

Lights

Chelsea - Bolton

There was a chance earlier this week I could have picked up a spare ticket for the Chelsea - Bolton match and while I didn't go, because my friend with the ticket did the math and made the right decision and sold it for large amounts of profit, but it still made me deliberate the following point; in aforementioned football match, who do you support?

On the one hand, one team is Chelsea and run by José Mourinho, on the other hand one team is Bolton and run by Sam Allardyce. Neither the nicest men, or the most wonderful teams. And then if Chelsea won, they might win the premiership, but then if Bolton won they might knock Arsenal off fourth position.

In the end, I decided to hope for a draw, preferably one that ended with a very bad dive by a Bolton player, a penalty and a drawing level. That way you could get to see Sam Allardyce try to defend his team's actions and Mourinho throwing a hissy fit. Alas, no penalties, but it did end in a draw, and so the Premiership is safe for another weekend.

In other good news, Ipswich have to draw to beat Norwich in the Championship, making them the best team ever.

And that's enough mention of football on this website to last until this time next year, where I shall be regaling everyone with the tale of how Ipswich have been promoted by a guaranteed 10 points. As I look forward to doing every year.

Saturday the 28th

• Busy busy week this week, what with being out every night and still having to prepare for Ofsted and going back to Ipswich to pick stuff up. But that's cool. I got all my CDs back and now I'm not sure what to do with them, but I did get my old Fujica SLR back which is very exciting.

• In the grand "ask Mark a question", Phil Brown won with "why, why, why, delilah?". Which is as tricky a question as I've ever had posed. Expect me to make some up an answer soon.

• I went to a pub / restaurant yesterday in Hackney (Hackney? Where's Hackney? Don't worry, I have a hand drawn map) where they had a beer list that spanned six pages. I was impressed. Slightly less impressed with their lack of British Ale. But six pages? That's not bad.

• I also got back a box of Clipper Tea I'd packed away. Do you know how good Clipper Tea is? It's very good.

The Hills Are Alive

So I saw the Sound of Music on stage yesterday, for the first time in any format, and before this descends into a commentary about how I have given up all rights to be a man, I'd like to point out that the Sound of Music has Nazis in it. Surprising amounts of Nazis too. With guns and threats. I thought they hung around in the background a bit, but actually they're quite a threatening presence during the entire thing. Which brings me too my point, outside the theatre there is a bunch of signage, including one which has a wonderful quote upon it saying something like "restores my faith in human nature". I wonder if the reviewer quoted left the theatre before the closing scenes, where, in case you don't know, Nazi's take over Austria and try to kidnap or kill the family and where friends of theirs almost betray them. I'd like to draw your attention to something Mark Meynell quoted on Tuesday (and it's worth reading the whole thing as well as the quote because it's all a good read).

In 1939, W H Auden emigrated to the US. In November, 2 months after the outbreak of the 2WW, he went to a cinema in the Yorkville district of Manhattan. The area was largely German speaking, and the film he saw was a Nazi account of their conquest of Poland. When Poles appeared on the screen, he was startled to hear people in the audience shout, ‘Kill Them! Kill Them!’

Auden was stunned. Amid all the changes of heart and mind he had passed through in his life, one thing had remained constant: he believed in the essential goodness of humanity. Now suddenly, in a flash, he realised two things with the force of an epiphany. On the one hand, he knew beyond any argument that ‘human nature was not and never could be good’; the reaction of the audience was a ‘denial of every humanistic value’. On the other hand, he realised that if … such things were absolutely evil, he had to have some absolute standard by which he could judge them.

Here Auden realized, was the fatal flaw of his liberalism: ‘The whole trend of liberal thought has been to undermine faith in the absolute.’ Or as he remarked to a friend, ‘The English intellectuals who now cry to Heaven against the evil incarnated in Hitler have no Heaven to cry to.'
Time for Truth, Os Guinness.

The London Marathon

As a charity we've got five people running in the London Marathon to raise money for us this year, so after church we went down to Embankment and stood around to cheer on. There are around 40,000 people who run the marathon each year. We could recognise three of our five runners by sight. So it was much to our surprise that we saw one of them pretty much immediately. And then we waited around for a bit. Alright, for a long long while.

Two observations regarding watching people run the marathon. First, it's not the most interesting thing in the world to be doing, secondly, it's really hard to keep up without your eyes going all squiffy and when you do finally give up looking everything looks like it's still moving for a few moments (you think running the marathon is hard, try watching it!). I find it odd then that people actually seemed to be there observing it as an event, even though they didn't seem to know anyone. Especially when they yelled out "COME ON TERRANCE, YOU'RE DOING ALRIGHT" at some poor guy with Terrance written on his t-shirt. If I was called Terrance and had just run 24 miles, I'd feel bad enough about myself without women I'd never seen before yelling out what they thought of my marathon performance.

Er

So I started using some other endlessly diverting and lacking in point web 2.0 site the other day and before you knew it, I was texting it to tell it exactly what I was doing at every moment ever. Combined this with my already existing Flickr habit, and I felt something needed to change on the front page. So it did. Long tired story short, now, if I've thought of any witty (ha!) one-liner things to put down or I've put any new photographs up then they'll appear on this site under "recent interruptions" and "recent photos" respectively, they'll appear before or after the first main website entry depending on timings. The newer the content is, the higher it'll appear. I'm tired, so I'm going to assume this makes sense, and also isn't going to break and kill us all. Jolly good.

Pride and Prejudice With An Axe

Due to my ongoing serialisation of Pride and Prejudice in my status field on Facebook, certain truths have been drawn to my attention. The first opening two paragraphs while perhaps no longer true due to the breakdown of the typical neighbourhood, they remain firmly true of another institution. I (mis-)quote:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in
possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.¹

However little known the feelings or views of such a man may
be on his first entering a church, this truth is so well
fixed in the minds of the church family, that he is considered
the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.

Hundreds of years on and still relevant is certainly the sign of a good book.

¹ For obvious reasons, when it came to this sentence (which being the first sentence of the book was pretty much immediately) I only left it as my status for three minutes.

Ask Mark A Question In April

Because it's Tuesday, and on Tuesday I haven't had a chance to write anything for a whole few days. Because it's sunny. Because I'm happy. Because you c/should be happy. Etcetera, Ecetera, Ecetera...

The winner is the real Phil Brown and how many mickles make a muckle? with 2 votes. The poll is now over, stay tuned for the answer.

Shorts

I apologise for my legs, I really do, also I apologise for the slight motion blur in that photo, but that's not the point. It's April 14th and that time of year again, the time of year for shorts, or rather, it's unseasonably early for that time of year again. From last years report into the ongoing it's getting warmer crisis;

Today, May fourth, is the first day of the year 2006 that I will spend wearing shorts. In 2004 it was May the 16th, in 2003 it was the 7th of June and in 2002 it was the 17th of July. Hooray for global warming! (Also note how I forgot to make note of it in 2005 because I'm a fool).

I couldn't agree more with myself, if it wasn't for updating this website right now I'd be out buying fridges to throw straight onto landfills¹.

¹ I stole that joke (if you could call it that) from PC Zone about 8 years ago. The old ones are indeed the best.

Moving

I'm genuinely thankful to God today for the glorious weather. If there is one thing guaranteed to make a bad day worse it's bad weather, and a day spent moving house is traumatic enough as it is. Good news for the sunshine to keep me going. It's actually surprised me how hard moving in actually is, there's all the packing, then carting, then emotional grief with having to leave one place, then you're trying to work out what you need to do to move into your new place, and what you need to get, and the shopping and then you start to walk the wrong way home, and finally as you lie on your new bed you realise it's not long enough and you'd better unpack at least a bit before tomorrow or otherwise you've got no clothes and no towel for the shower (which you don't know how to work). I'm glad I've had a good week this week to build up to this.

(I should have e-mailed you my new address if you desperately need it, but at the end of the day, still post stuff to work as then I'm more likely not to have to travel five hundred miles to go pick it up from the post-office when nobody is in to collect it. Facebook's got my work address or just Google where I work and I'll get it (web 3.0 has arrived!))

Cow

This is humorous, look up the Wikipedia article on the common cow and note the first photograph and caption. Then go to the Wikipedia article on cow tipping and note the first photograph and caption.

Excellent.

Beetroot

Today I discovered that you can buy beetroot crisps. If Heat magazine is sure evidence of the terrible moral condition of the office-working class then Beetroot crisps does it for the organic coffee-shop drinking class.

Sunday

What new mystery is this?
what blessed backwardness?
the Immeasurable One is held and does not resist!
struck by wicked words and foolish fists of senseless men
the Almighty One does not defend!

'A Glass Can Only Spill What It Contains', Mewithoutyou (iTunes)

"But what does it all mean?" asked Susan when they were somewhat calmer. — "It means," said Aslan, "that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of Time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards."

"The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe", C.S. Lewis

On The Tube (With Bells and Whistles)

Yesterday, on the way to see The Cooper Temple Clause¹ play the Shepherd's Bush Empire I took the tube to Shepherd's Bush Empire. So far, so incredibly mundane. Sitting down on the tube though and I catch the eyes of a girl opposite me two seats down. Bother I think to myself, as I realise I now will have to spend the next six stops avoiding looking up around the carriage again in case I catch her eyes and have to then worry about whether she thinks I'm so odd person for staring at her. After about two minutes of reading the London Lite I look up without thinking (the London Lite does that to you) and accidentally catch her eye again. Alas, I sigh inwardly, I have been branded a strange staring person and now I shall live with it till I leave this carriage in all of four minutes, but then I realise that she has taken a Moleskine notepad out of her bag and is writing something down in it. Being branded by a stranger as a person who stares at other people is one thing, being written about in a notepad to be put up on a Myspace² blog is another thing. So I waited till the next stop, grabbed her notepad and threw it out of the door onto the underground tracks, whereupon I took a photograph of it and yelled "FLICKRED" really loudly.

No, not really. I just got on with reading about Lindsey Lohan's new rehab fling, got off the tube where I was meant to and forgot all about it till just now. But still.

¹ Have seen that the money is in scratchy-alternative-dance-house-rock music and are going there with aplomb. Actually, scratch that, they already are there and they're now just letting everyone know. Loudly.

² / livejournal / facebook / whateverishipthesedays

Back In My Day

A few years back now, while stilling living in the Ipswich, I happened to be in a church service listening to a man appropriate Peter Kay's digestive biscuit sketch as an illustration. I remember looking at the folk next to me in horror, as we all realised that this man had no real sense of humour and was just stealing other people's jokes. I imagine we probably went to the pub afterwards¹ and did exactly the same with jokes from the Simpsons, or Malcolm in the Middle, or that bit about the Superman having a kid with Lois Lane that's in one of those Kevin Smith films.

The reason I say this is because it has recently dawned on me that people have probably always done this, so folk back in the days of Shakespeare would be found in pubs and taverns doing impressions of Bottom or Trinculo and Stephano, and before then people probably hung around bath houses and tavernas repeating jokes Caesar² made. So shortly after Moses came down from mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments you'd find people kicking around their tents going "have you ever thought about what your top ten commandments would be, only if I had to do it, I'd so be putting coveting at the end." And then people would say LOL, only it wouldn't have been invented yet, so they might actually laugh. And then they might get stoned³.

Of course, I say all this knowing full well that I made this observation in a pub with someone else, and he probably heard it from someone else in a pub too, and it probably turns out it's originally a famous sketch, but constant chinese-whispering has diluted it of all humour.

¹ Actually, I'm certain we did. It was The Black Horse, and we decided to start attending The Royal George's pub quiz regularly; what a fateful night that was.

² Augustus, the rest never really said anything funny, apart from Nero once, but that was unintentionally funny and repeating it in a bath house was probably a sure fire way of being flayed alive by a lobster.

³ Someone's else joke.

Coincidence

Outside our front office is standing a guy I know, holding a CD in his hand. "What's that?" I ask.
"Well, it's a CD by a band called Lowgold that someone just lent me. Have you heard of them."
"Well, coincidentally, I have my iPod on shuffle right now, and it's playing 'Mercury' by Lowgold off that album right now."
"Oh."
"Gosh."

Why We're So Wrong

I'd tell you about the arduous time I had getting my mobile phone to be picked up to be repaired, but really, you don't want to hear about problems with automated call centres, because you know all about them. Isn't this a worrying thing about the 21st century, that a certain sort of mild torture is so normal that people feel they can't tell others about it because they'd get bored having experience itself some many times. In other centuries I don't imagine people standing around saying "got the black death again, but you don't want to hear about that because you all know how it turns out". But then in other centuries people probably didn't compare minor inconveniences to terrible killer plagues. Maybe that's what's worrying about our century.

Or maybe, they were just as bad as us, but didn't have websites to tell their friends about how terrible they were.

From Arthur's Seat