Category: Uncategorized

Oh, and just a quickie addendum: it seems that some kind of newspaper distribution war has broken out on the streets of London as of today: as I came out of Baker Street tonight, there was a guy handing out the Standard Lite standing right next to a very bored looking Evening Standard guy not selling any papers. I’m not sure how smart a business move that is.

Then, around the corner–presumably at whatever designated distance away from the tube they are required to remain–were swarms of thelondonpaper people (at least five different stands on the way back to our flat alone–have they gone for blanket coverage of the whole of central London?) I picked one up, you know, just to have a look, and actually had a guy slightly further down the street try to give me another copy of the same paper…

I mean, I’d love to see the Evening Standard go under as much as the next guy, but does it have to be Murdoch that does it? And with the resources he has to do so, it doesn’t really seem like a fair contest, does it?

Update: (05/09/2006) And today, walking home, I noticed that the Evening Standard guy hadn’t even bothered to turn up–driven out of business after one day by his sister paper. Slightly further down the street I saw a thelondonpaper guy standing on the corner with a stack of papers… and he was clearly so desperate to get rid of them that he’d taken to posting them through the open windows of the passing buses as they waited in traffic next to him.

…and as if to prove my own point, to myself: on Saturday morning Sal and I flew up to Edinburgh for a weekend at the fringe. Rather fortunately, we’d decided to fly from tiny toy airport London City, which meant that we could simply wander up to the security point and head straight through without any of that silly queueing nonsense we might have had to do at Heathrow. Of course we’d already conscientiously checked our explosive hair gel and deodorant into the hold, and we obediently removed our shoes so that they could pass through the X-Ray machine.

On the other side of security at City, as in most airports around the world, you are immediately confronted with the world of tat, cheap perfume, fags, and booze that is the duty free shop. There, anyone who wants them can find row upon row of glass bottles of alcohol, each with a little tag around the neck bearing the legend: “wherever you are flying today, you can take me on board”.

It’s slightly reassuring to note, I suppose, that in age when, as we are continually being reminded, we must all make compromises, capitalism bends for no man.

It’s a flawless system, obviously. I can’t think of anything dangerous that you could possibly do on a plane with a collection of glass bottles. Can you?

It’s been interesting following the reactions to Thursday’s “foiled” “terrorist attacks”. Of course, it’s easy to be cynical about all this: this, after all is the same police force that previously foiled a plot by a Brazilian electrician to use the tube to get to work (and then lied about it afterwards), as well as a couple of chaps in Forest Gate who plotted to spend the night sleeping in their homes. This, also, is brought to us by a government that’s previously told us, on the basis of some evidence they copied off of the internets, that Saddam Hussein was 45 minutes away from launching attacks, and that’s happy to roll a couple of tanks into Heathrow if it’s politically expedient to do so. I don’t want to be sceptical, but when faced with the government that cried terrorists, it’s hard not to be, just a little.

I’m curious about the new carry on baggage restrictions. It all seems, well, rather flawed. There’s a common reaction to terrorist atrocities, or attempted ones, that says that you shouldn’t change your plans or your life, otherwise (to use a crass, overused term) the terrorists have won. Sal and I certainly have no plans to cancel our trip to the US next month, assuming that our (BA) flight actually leaves and that we can physically be on it. I wonder, though, if by implementing the new carry on restrictions, and making travel that bit more of a hassle for all involved, we are, in effect, letting the terrorists win. After all, it’s not as if it would be difficult for anyone determined enough to find ways around the new restrictions. The only real losers are ordinary travellers (and light-fingered baggage handlers, the big winners…)

For a start, the carry on restrictions only apply to flights originating from the UK. So what’s to stop a potential terrorist from simply purchasing a return ticket and exploding their fizzy drinks on the way back? Do we plan to ban hand luggage on flights everywhere in the world? I can’t see that happening, somehow, especially considering that there are already glaring inconsistencies in the existing rules: on our flight from London to Australia in February this year, for example, we ate our in-flight meals between London and Singapore with plastic cutlery; on the Singapore to Melbourne leg, you get a metal fork. Both the concept that someone might instigate an attack with cutlery, and the idea that they are only likely to do so in certain parts of the world, make no sense whatsoever.

Another gaping hole in the new rules is that, once you are through security, you can buy whatever you like from the air-side shops. Although you still can’t take toothpaste and liquids on flights to America, everything else is fair game. So what’s to stop our terrorist groups from simply planting a few staff members in key positions at the airport and getting whatever they want to get onto the plane that way. Should we attempt to eliminate risk further by stopping serving food and drinks on planes? Should we close all the airport shops at Heathrow? Somehow I can’t see BAA agreeing to that one.

Maybe you can think of some loopholes of your own; I’m sure there are many. If this incident (which was apparently an attempt to circumvent the existing security procedures simply by using materials they couldn’t detect) proves anything, it’s that for any security system one person cares to devise, there will always be another person prepared to go to whatever lengths it takes to defeat it. Perhaps rather than introducing ever more restrictive rules on what you can and cannot take on a plane, we should try to address the root cause, by looking at what drives people to want to indiscriminately murder people by blowing up a commercial airliner.

I’ll close with some figures I found on the interwebs.

– Approximate seating capacity of 10 jumbo jets: 3,000 – 4,000
– Approximate civilian deaths in Afghanistan, October – December 2001: 3,800 (source: BBC News)
– Approximate civilian casualties in the Iraq war to date: 40,000 (source: Iraq Body Count)
– Approximate civilian casualties in Lebanon – Israel conflict: 1,120 (source BBC News)

See, there I was, just innocently trying to pay off my credit card, when I entered a bizarre world of circular logic:

So I try to email them to let them know that there may be a teeny weeny bug in the error-checking logic here. The web form that they give you for typing messages to them is about 1 inch square, but I write a detailed summary of the problem anyway, knowing this will more than likely be read by an idiot somewhere who won’t actually understand me (and/or care). I click send. Gah! For some ridiculous reason they are limiting the number of characters your are allowed to type in the message to 255. (Why? How can you say anything in 255 characters?) At this point I have already written 4 times as much as this, and consequently end up spending the next 10 minutes editing this down into increasingly incomprehensible txt spk. I click send again and despair. I’m still waiting for them to respond with a form response addressing some entirely different issue. I dunno why I bother.

Just a quick one (again): so I’m reading Metro on the train this morning (yeah, I know) and there’s an article in there about some power cuts in the West End yesterday: after I’d finished cringing about their use of the words “Dunkirk Spirit”, I was intrigued to read about the chefs at Aldo Zilli’s restaurant, who apparently had to walk out after “temperatures in the kitchen reached 150 degrees C”. Er, surely shome mistake, Metro? Maybe the temperatures in the ovens had reached 150C, but in the whole kitchen? Really? 50 degrees above the boiling point of water? Perhaps they meant Fahrenheit…

Elsewhere, Amazon have emailed me with some helpful recommendations:

“As you’ve bought similar books from us in the past, you might be interested in one of these great titles–available with fantastic discounts for one week only:
Marley and Me
Billie Piper: A Biography

Wayne Rooney: My Story So Far”

Er, what? Sorry? What books could I possibly have bought that led your computer to believe that I might be interested in this tosh? I mean, honestly…

Elsewhere, I see that TV Hypnotist Paul McKenna has won his libel case. Now, I’m slightly confused by this, but if I understand correctly, the crux of the case was that the Daily Mirror’s Victor Lewis-Smith had insinuated on a number of occasions that McKenna, like “Dr” Gillian McKeith before him, had bought a fake degree off the Internet. McKenna sued for libel claiming that he had been the victim of a con. So presumably he thought that he was buying a genuine degree off the Internet, then?

Just a quickie, but hey, isn’t gambling great! On Wednesday I joined several of my colleagues on a work social trip to the evening races at Kempton Park.

It was all rather good fun, although the tiny grandstand and all-weather course (the going, apparently was “standard”; you don’t say…) couldn’t quite match up to my previous trip to the races (to Flemington, back in November). By the time the penultimate race came round, my betting activities weren’t exactly looking too great–one of the other chaps from work was about £60 up by this point, but I had only lost money. Nevertheless, as promised, I phoned Sal back in London and read out the names of the horses so that I could place a bet for her. She picked Dancing Guest, purely on the basis of its name. I plumped for Best Guess, which seemed a rather appropriate reflection of my choices up to that point. Sure enough, Sal’s horse came home in first place, giving her a whopping £8 profit even though she hadn’t set foot on the course, and leaving me with even greater losses than before.

So, with the last race approaching it was all to play for. Someone in our group mentioned this horse called Finsbury, and it seemed rather appropriate. You know, because it’s a bit like Finsbury Park. Not that I’ve even been there or anything, except to change trains on my way to Enfield all those years ago when I worked up there, but you know…

Throwing caution to the wind, I recklessly backed this 14-1 shot at £5 each way, and wandered down to join the rest of the group on the grass by the finish line. As the horses came round the final bend, the announcer’s commentary was drowned out by the shouts of the people around me. Unable to hear the name of the leader, I tried to pick it out from the pack, but couldn’t see Finsbury anywhere. As they all crossed the line I scanned through the numbers on the trailing horses, just to see where mine had finished, but still couldn’t see it anywhere.

Ah well, another £10 down the drain then.

Then someone in our group said that Finsbury had won, and I initially assumed that they were merely joking, as most of us seemed to have had some money riding on this particular horse.

But no, hang on! There it was on the TV screen, with a caption reading “Winner: 7. Finsbury”

Fantastic. I danced all the way back to the bookie and collected my £97.50 winnings, grinning like an idiot. When you convert it, that actually beats the AU$200 I won for my part in that trifecta syndicate back in November. It also in one fell swoop wiped out my earlier loss and left me £82 up on the night, which to my immense satisfaction was better than everyone else from work.

Now, surely this, and our upcoming trip to Vegas in September, can be nothing more than the start of my slippery descent into addiction. Ah well, you heard it here first…

Who’s that Walking Past?
On the street outside our house?
Hey! Cheeky Cheeky!

Ah, so now my life is complete: I have finally seen The Cheeky Girls wandering the streets near our house. Sal had seen them several times before, of course–always together, always heading past our place towards St John’s Wood–but last night I finally got my chance, as we rounded off a highly pleasant weekend at Mumtaz, our surprisingly quiet local curry house.

“Look! There they are!” said Sal, pointing out of the window. “It’s the Cheeky Girls”

And sure enough there they were, walking down the street together in their identical outfits. Out in the street, some of the post-cricket crowd driving past, who had clearly just had a very similar conversation, honked their horn, causing one of the cheeky girls to turn round and wave at them.

“What are they doing with themselves these days?” I wondered aloud to Sal. “What does an ex cheeky do for work once the record deal has gone? It’s not like you can go and work in McDonald’s, is it?”

I opted not to run after them and ask. Instead, we just finished our curry and left.

It had been a lovely weekend. Earlier, we’d risen hungover early in the morning and inadvertently ended up watching Michael Palin travel the pacific rim in a ten year old travel series that UK History, in its infinite wisdom, had chosen to show continuously for the whole day, with Palin doomed to repeat himself until 1AM, each time just failing to reach his destination and complete his full circle (although bizarrely they were only showing the second half of the series, as if perhaps they’d only been able to rent the second disc in the box set; perhaps next week they’ll show the first half). By the time he’d reached the end of his journey, and was about to begin it again from the half way point, I managed to drag myself away and into the park, where I sought refuge from the tourists by heading for the secret garden, where I sat in the shade and finished off Douglas Coupland’s deeply disappointing jPod while listening to the sound of Paul Kelly wafting over from the Toast Australia festival on the other side of the trees.

A while back, I mentioned that I’d started uploading all my old photos onto Flickr. Now, I really like some things about Flickr, like the fact that the storage space is effectively unlimited, but I’ve never been entirely happy with some other aspects of the site.

For example, I really don’t like the way everything is ordered by the date it was uploaded (which means absolutely nothing to me) and not the date when it was taken (and in the recent redesign, one of my favourite navigational tools, the calendar, was hidden away behind several layers of menu item). I’ve also never been keen on the fact that, despite storing several different sizes of each shot, the only practical way they allow you to browse your photos is with the default, tiny sized ones (which is fine if you have a rubbish dial-up connection, but in the age of broadband, I’d be much happier if they at least gave you the option of easily looking through the pictures at a larger size).

Luckily, none of that actually matters, because one of the best things about Flickr is that they provide this cracking API that exposes just about every bit of information about your photos that you could need.

And that means, that I can do this: www.mattarmstrong.co.uk/photos

All the photo files are the very same ones that are hosted on Flickr, but the navigation is much more aligned with the way I’d like to show our photos off to the world.

– The photos in the photostream are in the order they were taken.
– The calendar is nice and easy to get to.
– When you look at the individual photos, it’s the “large” size (and there’s a handy “Download Original” button at the bottom if you want to save a copy of the full size version).
– You can navigate through through the images by clicking on the left or right side of a photo.

I still have a few more things to add, but it’s mostly there. So it’s up to you. Stick with the Flickr version, or look at my version. Whatever you prefer, I guess…

Sorry if you’re totally bored by the football by now, but I’m afraid I’ve been continuing to enjoy this year’s competition. Last Thursday, I joined a bunch of Aussies in a central London pub to watch their final group game. With a somewhat depressing predictability, the beeb had chosen to show Brazil as their main BBC1 game (which offered only the remotest of outside chances of Japan qualifying), instead of the one remaining group F match that actually meant something, relegating Australia v Croatia to BBC3. After gently assisting the bar staff in locating said digital channel on their Sky system, we settled in for the match. I hate to admit it, but I was rather caught up in the atmosphere, and I actually wanted the Aussies to win (and that’s not something you’ll hear me saying very often): they were far the better team on the night, for one, and they seemed to come off rather worse from Graham Poll’s erratic decisions (even before the revelation that he can’t count to 2). Rugby tackling Mark Viduka to the ground, for example, apparently doesn’t warrant a penalty (nor, for that matter, does a blatant handball). When Australia equalised for the second time, I actually found myself unconsciously leaping into the air and cheering (before I was able to check myself and revert to polite clapping). Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear: I feel like I’ve cheated on England.

On arriving at work the next morning, I was amused to see that the Wikipedia monkeys had already been busy cataloguing Poll’s misfortunes. It’s been removed since then, but when I first looked at it, the Croatia v Australia section of that page ended simply with the following final paragraph: “He will be too old for the 2010 world cup.” Clearly he’s a man with many fans around the world.

On Sunday, we joined our friends in South London to catch the England game near their house. Their local, otherwise a quiet gastropub populated by young professionals, had unfortunately been taken over by lairy, En-ger-land-shirted drunks, who were climbing on the bar and filling the room with very loud terrace-style chanting. It gave the pub a deeply unpleasant atmosphere and precipitated 45 of the most unpleasant minutes of my life as we struggled to concentrate on the game. I considered leaving after about 10 minutes, but somehow we lasted for a full half before fleeing to the much more pleasant place round the corner. It didn’t help that the pathetic volume levels on the pub’s TVs struggled to compete with the localised chanting (and, I suppose, the woeful England performance didn’t help matters much either). Suffice to say, we won’t be heading back to that pub for any of their future games.

There’s a sizeable Portuguese community in the Stockwell/Vauxhall area, so we hung around for the other game, Portugal v Holland. In the hours leading up to the kick-off, we barely saw a single individual not wearing some item of clothing proclaiming their support for the red and green team. Most cars that passed us seemed to be engaging in a special one-upmanship contest to see who could fit the most Portuguese flags on their vehicle. We watched most of the bad-tempered clash from a comfy sofa in the pub, but we wandered down to the street to join the crowds for the last 20 minutes: we joined a few hundred people crowded outside the tapas restaurants down the road, chants of “POR-TU-GAL, POR-TU-GAL” ringing out. As we pushed through the crowd to find a spot to settle, a bloke shouted to me:

“Oi, it’s Peter Crouch! Hey Peter Crouch…” (Well, I was wearing a red t-shirt and white shorts).
I did my best attempt at a robot dance as we passed.

When the final whistle finally went, after they held on for some 6 minutes of added time (a testament to the type of game it was), the crowds went predictably crazy. There was much cheering. People climbed up onto lampposts to wave their giant flags around. Car horns were very much tooted. We almost forgot we were in a corner of South London, and not wandering the streets of Lisbon. All that, and they’d only won their second round match. I can only imagine how crazy they’d be if they made it past England and went on to win the thing…

Today I arrived at work at the crack of dawn in an attempt to reach the pub in time for the 4pm kick off in the Australia v Italy game. Surely they can’t do it again, can they?

EDIT: Er, no. They can’t. But pretty close, and if wasn’t for a cynical dive and an unjustified penalty at the death, who knows what might have happened…

Many, many months ago I half considered buying tickets to go to this year’s wireless festival. Not the James Gray/David Blunt/KT Thingie nonsense that happened over the weekend, of course, but just the first day of the event, the “indie” day: I’m very much enjoying The Raconteurs’ album, for one, the Dirty Pretty Things remind me of The Libertines when they were good, and it’s always worth seeing the likes of The Strokes or Belle and Sebastian as a bonus.

In the end I decided that by the time you’d paid 40 quid for tickets, and added on some ridiculous postage charges and ten or so quid worth of various fees, it was all a bit much for a few hours of music, and I didn’t bother. I think too that I half remembered that last year (when this all clashed with Glasto and thus wasn’t an option) they hadn’t sold it out, and ended up selling off tickets cheaply at the last minute on, appropriately enough, Lastminute.com. I guess I was hoping that the same thing might happen this year.

But then, as luck would have it, I didn’t have to actually pay for tickets, because a few weeks ago an email turned up offering free tickets, in exchange for signing up for some mailing list. I suppose that they must have really failed to flog the tickets this year–they even had to resort to doing the lastminute.com cheap sell off thing as well (and nice to see that so few people wanted to see James Blunt that they were reduced to flogging tickets off for just twenty quid).

Although I’m not sure if I’d have felt it was value for money if I’d had to pay to get in, considering that we all got there for nothing, I actually rather enjoyed it. After a ridiculously early start at work, I’d managed to join Sal in time to have already got inside and to the bar just as the Dirty Pretty Things took to the stage.

For a while it felt like we weren’t in London, having just dashed there from work, but more like perhaps the Saturday afternoon at Glastonbury, when maybe we’d wandered over to the Other Stage.

I particularly enjoyed seeing The Raconteurs, although I couldn’t help thinking that their thing would work a lot better in a Brixton Academy, rather than a big festival area. Later, we wandered into the XFM tent in time to catch the end of the Super Furries (they played Man Don’t Give a Fuck. Yay!) Oh, and the Strokes were a lot better than I thought they were going to be, but maybe that was just because they played so much stuff from their first album, the only one I actually like…