Cherry Hinton at War: brilliant!

31 Oct 2006: This is fantastic. Apparently the greatest war of prehistory, the Trojan War, didn’t take place in Turkey, but in Cherry Hinton. No, really. According to Where Troy Once Stood, it all happened on the hills over by the golf club (it must have spoiled the greens a bit). Then apparently, the survivors drifted away and ended up in Turkey, and the memory of their original home (although not the War) was lost over time. When the Greeks who documented the events came along, they just assumed it all happened locally. Brilliant.

The Man from the Council he say …no.

30 Oct 2006: Well it looked pretty substantial to me, but the building inspector measured the trench for our foundations, whistled through his teeth slightly, looked at the nearby growth and said: “Oh dear no, those are cherry trees. You’ll need to dig 1.4m deep, not 1.2m”. The builders were most polite (“You have to treat him like God, because, basically, he is”) and promised to get it done straight away. Well, straight away in builders’ terms, which is tomorrow. Then we can get the cement in, so long as The Man doesn’t find anything else wrong. One week into the build and we’re already half a week late. It’s a whole new world for me.

We’re having the house extended.

28 Oct 2006: I knew it was asking for trouble: I said if I could have my new big telly, then Alex could have his trip to Disneyland and Mrs R could have something nice too. Oops. She opted for the new kitchen. And not just the new kitchen; the new extended kitchen. So here’s the house, before it all kicked off. Nice bog-standard Bryant “Victoria” design, although three years ago we knocked right through downstairs and built into the garage too. It didn’t fall down. Or at least it hasn’t yet. If you want to see the floorplan, I won’t reproduce it on this page, but click through to see it here. And here come Cambridge’s finest builders, John Fox-Teece and family, [...]

Anderson and Wakeman: an odd couple

21 Oct 2006: The eBay effect on ticket prices is well established (the artists may as well charge double what they used to, because if they sell the tickets more affordably, scumbags will hoover them up and sell them on eBay), so thanks to that, we have to pay over thirty quid (face value) now to see a low-key, every-expense-spared stage show at a provincial theatre by artists who are trading on former glories, however amicably. It’s ridiculous, but hey, we paid, so don’t blame the artists. That said, the Cambridge Corn Exchange was disappointingly only two-thirds full for prog rock legends Jon Anderson and Rick Wakeman, even if they were performing with just acoustic guitar, piano and a couple of banners draped [...]

You have reached the end of iTunes.

16 Oct 2006: I have a “smart playlist” in iTunes which only includes tracks I’ve never played before. So the playlist slowly gets smaller (do you see what I did here?). Today it stopped. Looks like I’ve reached the end. Twenty days’ worth of music. Now I’ve had to re-set it to “tracks I’ve only played once before”. The last track, by the way, was Cortez The Killer by Neil Young. While we’re on the subject of iTunes, you’re probably aware of the old LTBSD (Length of Time Before Steely Dan) Factor in iTunes’ shuffle mode. Anyway, in earnest discussion with the good Dr Bragg about this the other day, he mentioned that there is a flaw in this well-known phenomenon, which is that [...]

Spamalot London Review*

14 Oct 2006: Whatever Eric Idle did with this show, he was going to be in for some easy criticism: too many lifts from the Python catalogue, too few, shouldn’t have done it at all, etc. Well, all I can say is, Spamalot was one of the most memorably funny evenings out I’ve had for years. I think they got it just right: not a straight run-through of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but not an incessant stream of nudge-nudge wink-wink references to other Python material either, just a bunch of in-yer-face addons to keep everyone happy (Finland, Bright Side of Life, etc). And let’s face it, whilst I can understand the show having been a hit on Broadway, the West End [...]

Wow. A quote from my publication by Charlotte Green.

11 Oct 2006: I can probably go to heaven happily now. Anyway, thanks to “Steve Yates” (whoever he is) for sending in one our stories to BBC Radio 4′s The News Quiz because of its innuendo-laden content, and if you’ve got your speakers on, off you go and listen to Charlotte Green reading out words from Engineeringtalk (above). Sorry about the low-quality, B3ta-styleee video wot I made for it, but the pizza was coming out of the oven in 15 minutes. I’d also like to thank my agent, the blokes who developed iMovie, the BBC’s “listen again” feature, Roger from Adept who dropped his bacon sarnie when hearing this clip on air, God, anyone else who knows me (continues until closedown…)