Flying The Flag

A couple of months ago, a lamp-post appeared outside our house. But one with nothing on the top.

I asked the guy working on it - he came from Thames Water, and was putting in a smart water-meter to monitor the new water main on our street. the meter is in the plastic bollard next to the pole.

The meter is supposed to signal back to Thames Water HQ any leaks or problems - but we have poor mobile phone signal in my street.

So they put up a tall antenna, using a normal lamp-post stem.

It looked sort of unfinished, so I put a flower-pot on the top sith a hook in it, and now we're flying a flag (it's the Cornish flag).

We'd like to fly different flags - any suggestions or offers?

Raise The Roof Singers, Horniman Museum

Raise The Roof practices at the Horniman Museum in South London. This is from their public concert, which we stumbled on, on Sunday (5 April 2009).

From the balcony, I couldn't see the choir well, but I had a good view of the energetic leader and conductor, Melanie Harrold, and couldn't resist taking a video.  

The video isn't here or on Youtube any more. Melanie got in touch to say that a film of her conducting an invisible choir didn't really get the event across properly. 

Comics: Ex Machina, Fables and Promethea....

I've been reading some comics lately. I have missed so many, and Lambeth Libraries has such a good selection - at Brixton, Streatham and West Norwood at the very least.

So, what's good?

Ex Machina, written by Brian K Vaughn, and drawn by Tony Harris, is very nice.

Like Paul Chadwick did with Concrete, Vaughn leaves the details of where Mitchell Hundred's powers come from a mystery. The main story is the politics, but the super-stuff is central to what happens.

"How would it be if you had that power?" it asks. The answer is, if this particular man could talk to machines, he'd be a rather average superhero, and then a much more interesting mayor of New York - one who says "Up and away" to lifts, and "Jam" to guns.

There is more than a nod to Paul Chadwick - Vaughn names Hundred's friend Bradbury after a science fiction writer, just as Chadwick's Concrete has a friend called Vonnegut. The drawings lose by comparison with Chadwick's style - Harris is determined to be real, making Hundred's outfit lame, and basing everyone on photos (the models get credits in volume 1). I'm three volumes into this, and want more.

Fables is a winning concept: Fairy tale beings live in exile in the Mundane world - mostly, as tends to be the way, in New York.

The good here is the way Bill Willingham plays with the characters. Prince Charming is (as we should have realised) a serial charmer, divorced from Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, but still working his charm. Beauty and the Beast live happily ever after - except he is only human when she loves him, and tends to revert when she's cross. That's not convenient after hundreds of years, when you are living in hiding...

There are at least 11 volumes of this saga apparently (and I only just heard of it!). The two I've read are pretty good.

Finally, Promethea is Alan Moore's take on myth. The other two series are comics for entertainment's sake. This one has ambitions and Moore's mighty writing mojo pulls it off.

Promethea is a story - she's from the realm of story, the Immateria. In our world, she is embodied by writers and artists. Literally embodied. Student Sophie Bangs "becomes" Promethea by writing a poem.

When people say comics are mythic, they are saying what they wish was true. In fact they are normally debased, broken myths. This one is the real thing. Moore plays the metaphors brilliantly, nodding to all the misguided pretension about images and ideas in comics, but doing the only thing that should be done: telling a story.

On one level, Promethea is as fatuously simple as Billy Batson shouting Shazam to invoke Captain Marvel, or Diana Prince turning into Wonder Woman. But in Moore's hands it's way better, with multiple threads of woven with the complexity of his Watchmen, and a contrast between reality and the unreal that owes something to Joss Whedon's Buffy. Characters dance in and out, from fairy tales and comics - to take one example, "celebrity omnipath" the Painted Doll is a better, scarier Joker.

And, magically, by taking this story so very seriously, Moore turns it into something far, far more. In volume two a goddess has sex with a magician. For a whole chapter (a whole issue of the original comic series). Before our very eyes. For me, that is a high point in comics - and fairly unusual in any sort of literature. What follows reminds me of the psychedelic comics Marvel tried to do for the whole of the 1970s (Steve Gerber and Jim Starlin, from memory), only done right.

Watchmen is a great comic from more than 20 years ago. It may also be a worthwhile movie (but Alan Moore doesn't want his name on it). Now's a good moment to see what else Alan Moore has done since. We're amphibious creatures, living in the worlds of mind and body, he says. In Promethea (up to ten years old), we're swimming in the deep end.

What are my friends like?

A bit stereotyped from the look of this...

I won't be at MWC

I'm starting full time on eWeek Europe, there's a soft launch happening, and it's half term. Have a lovely time, everyone who is in Barcelona for MWC09. I just cancelled my hostel booking.

A water rail in Brockwell Park

How rural was this? I needed to read Lark Rise to Candleford. Why? Well the series is delicious, and I love to drool over the hats and late Victorian ladies. But there is actually more to Candleford. The book is a living breathing social history. Every so often a spark of the real thing livens up the TV series, but the mother lode is essential reading - or so I've been told many times.

Lambeth Libraries has a copy, and it's in the Carnegie Library. Like so many of Lambeth's libraries, this is a beautiful Grade II building, built with late 19th century charity, generosity and style. It has a calm light atmosphere and a reading garden out the back.

On my way home through Brockwell Park, our local bird watcher is transfixed, peering with her binoculars at the lower frozen pond. "It's a water rail," she says. "You won't see one in London again." She shows me a picture on her camera and I wait.

Soon enough, a dainty little bird (like a moorhen but more sophisticated looking) emerges and shily potters about, pecking seeds from the ice.

Back home after that, to enjoy the rural rememberances in the book.

Recipe: Slacker Chicken Soup

I don't really do recipes, but I often make this very easy soup on a Monday morning, the day after we've had a roast chicken meal. It's thick, juicy and spicy.

Ingredients:
- remains of a roast chicken
- a large onion
- two large potatoes
- frozen sweetcorn
- cumin, ginger, chilli powder, pepper and salt



Dismantle the chicken. Tip the juice from the chicken's roasting dish into a pot, take all the remaining meat off the chicken, and boil the bones and skin in a couple of pints of water.

This is the one bit where it pays not to be lazy. The meat comes off best when it's still warm, so do it right after the meal, before you wash up. Put a bay leaf in the pan if you've got one, put a lid on the saucepan, shut the kitchen door and simmer for maybe an hour. don't overdo it or the whole house will smell of chicken stock.

Leave the chicken meat and the pot of juice in the fridge. Drain the stock through a seive and bin the bones. Do this before you go to bed, if you remember. Again, it works best while the stock is warm, otherwise it sets and seiving it is messy.

Next day, you have all the components of a soup. They are on the counter next to the cooker in the photo.

The juice you poured off has turned into jelly, with fat on top. Free range chickens have better jelly and a lot less fat. Chop the onion up small, and sweat it in some of this fat.

Scoop off the rest of the fat, and save it for other jobs. I'm told chicken fat makes a good skin moisturiser, but I think it smells a bit odd for that.

While the onion is starting to cook, chop up the potatoes into little cubes. Add them to the saucepan, and when they have cooked a bit, add spice. I use a teaspoon of cumin, half a teaspoon of ginger, and a quarter of a teaspoon of chili. Use more, or less, as you like.

Then add the chicken. Chop it up into smallish bits. I save the best bits of chicken for people in the family who don't like soup, to have in sandwiches.

Pour the stock in, and add the jelly. Turn the gas up till it boils, then turn down, and simmer. You've now got enough time to do today's washing up, have a coffee and put a loaf in the bread-machine.

When the potatoes are cooked, turn the gas off and pour in a good big handful of frozen sweet corn. The hot soup will thaw it out, and it won't overcook when you heat the soup up later. Add pepper and salt as needed.

Playing (Jenga) with my food

After three days in China, my chopstick skills were good enough to take part in a game of Turnip Jenga.







It came to the table in a stack that was so suggestive of the game, it was the only thing we could do, really.

The big rubber band ball

It's approaching 4lb in weight, and contains more than 4000 ordinary post office rubber bands.

We've been collecting for a few weeks, including some donated by a postman (yes, even above the ones they drop, they gather some up and re-use them) and some from Freecycle (thanks Krissy, Sara Jane, Barbara and anyone else).

This is an obviously pointless exercise. It's not even heroically pointless, as there are bigger and more destructive rubber band balls out there. '

But I believe that bending down to pick them up is good exercise, and twanging them on the ball keeps the fingers supple. I'm moderately interested to see how many bands can be got on one ball, before it's too large to stretch them on. It's already taken more bands than I would have expected, and we've reached a stage where it takes a lot of thinly stretched bands to increase the dimensions of the ball even slightly.

Some people are outraged at the number of these bands dropped on the streets - particularly since the Post Office changed to red ones, supposedly to help the posties see them and pick them up, but actually making the number more obvious.

I can't muster outrage. In my sad little way, I'm enjoying picking them, and the feeling of weight and energy in the ball. I'm toying with the idea of getting more creative: why not make rubber people, or rubber octopi, or rubber dogs to befriend the postmen?

The Post Office won't discuss how much it spends on them, but two years ago owned up to buying 342 million a year, and "re-using the vast majority".

The Post Office has also suggested that the bands might be bio-degradable, which is a pointless thought. The bands are organic, so I guess they must eventually decompose, but I can't see it happening very quickly. And would it help? Dog droppings and chewing gum are also biodegradable, but we don't like to have them biodegrading on the pavement.

There are also a couple of older pictures here (though none of these are as old as my faulty camera date suggests). And a cat for scale...






(the date on the camera has gone wrong BTW)

Summer Holiday

It was a bit blowy in Mullion this August, but we enjoyed it.

For anyone still looking at this blog, I'm not putting much here. I get paid to blog on open source at ZDNet, and on wireless at Techworld.

I'm also putting stuff on the London Pride blog.