Tangential Ramblings

I believe she embodies everything that is bad about rural Britain. Little more needs to be said than her quotes below:

- Two sharks were fed up with tuna, so they thought they'd nip over to Morecambe Bay for a Chinese (in reference to the Chinese cockle-pickers who died in high-tide)
- A joke about Pakistanis which can be found here (would rather not quote directly)
- The UK is...thankfully a predominantly white, Christian country.

The saddest thing about her views, which echo those of Prince Philip, is that she doesn't know any better, nor does she learn from her heinous mistakes. Who on earth is still inviting her to do after-dinner-speaking?

I was lacking some imagery at the top of the site, so I decided that I'd do something about it. After some futzing around with GIMP (an open source graphics package as opposed to any other connotations), I finally managed to get the above image together. It has significance for two reasons; let me know if you know either.

Some words in other languages that we should anglify:

- bakku-shan (Japanese): a girl who appears pretty from behind, but not from the front
- Kummerspeck (German, literally meaning grief bacon): the excessive weight gained from emotion-related eating
- uitwaaien (Dutch): walking in windy weather for fun
- plimpplampplettere (Dutch): to skim stones.

And one that we perhaps shouldn't:

- koshatnik (Russian): stolen cat dealer.

A couple of great games of Saturday night football in the last couple of weeks.

Things had reached a bit of a head a few weeks previously, with some overly aggressive participants getting a little feisty. They've now left the field of play, and a new group of people has taken their place, so we have some old timers and some newbies.

Last Saturday saw a great nine-a-side game, with post-match revelries at the Ear. The highlight (from my point of view) was being provided a fantastic long-range assist (thanks, Judith) leaving me to beat the goalie. Also, an outside-of-the-foot shot swerving that bit too much into the right post drew some gasps from the few onlookers. Last night's highlight was an even longer-range assist from Paul the goalie, one touch to control and one more to lob the floundering keeper.

The level of competence is good, and with the addition of a couple of kids, it brings a healthy balance of competition and fun. So, if you're interested and local, pop on by to J. J. Walker Stadium, every Saturday night from 9-11pm. $20 per person for the September through December season can't be bad.

Work has kicked off again, meaning that I've had less time to pontificate on the minutiae of life, and even less time to write about them.

Starbucks has changed its coffee lids of late, opting for a flat plastic lid as opposed to the raised one of old. While this may be environmentally friendly in using less plastic, it has adversely affected the coffee-drinking experience.

The flat lids allows less room for sloshin' about, increasing the risk of spillage. Also, the peel-off spout is not sufficiently well-scored to allow for a clean break. Must try harder.

Hopefully, Michael Owen's arrival at Newcastle will spark something. So far, he's contributed to a 2-1-0 record compared to a 0-1-3 record before his arrival, taking us from a dismal 19th to eleventh.

It seems that Hurricane Rita swinging to the east before hitting the coast was a blessing for Houston, although some reasonably-sized towns on the Texas and Louisiana coastline look like they've been hit quite hard. Nothing in comparison to Katrina, although the levées have been breached once again in New Orleans, courtesy of Rita.

I've been reading with interest the whole subject of hurricane naming. It looks like this will be the first year in which they will get through the entire alphabet (with the exceptions of Q, U, X, Y and Z which are not used) and have to resort to greek letters. Stan, Tammy, Vince and Wilma are next in line. With the hurricane season continuing through November, it looks like Hurricane Alpha is a certainty.

Each region of the world has its own names and rules for naming and retiring, as described here. It looks like Katrina and Rita will be retired from use this year, adding to Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne that were retired last year.

I got a bit bored of the cab and the mustard, so I opted for a change at the weekend. I did quite a bit of futzing around re-skinning an existing template, and here's the result.

The comment link is now above the post rather than below, so please use it to let me have feedback and comments. I'm keen to get something more interesting floating across the top, but I'm largely happy with the spacing and positioning, thanks to some UE help from Elise.

It's interesting to see the Guardian's new look and feel, along with its Germanic size, which was launched on Monday. In the past, broadsheets and tabloids have been able to share printing presses, as the broadsheet (597mm x 375mm) is the same width as the tabloid (375mm x 298mm) is tall. For example, the Telegraph (broadsheet) and the Express (tabloid) used to be printed on the same presses in Westferry.

However, in a market where many of the traditionally broadsheet UK newspapers have downsized to tabloids (with the exception of Sunday editions, the Telegraph and the Financial Times are the only remaining significant broadsheets), the Guardian has bucked the trend by going all European, choosing the Berliner (470mm x 315mm). It's a size somewhere in between the two, shared by France's Le Monde and Italy's La Repubblica, although oddly enough not by Germany's Berliner Zeitung.

It has an area 32% larger than that of its tabloid competitors, 34% smaller than the broadsheets. (I like the fact that contrastingly, tabloids are only 25% smaller than the Berliner and broadsheets a gargantuan 51% larger. I'll let you mull that one over.)

Although I've not seen it firsthand, I like its radical approach. As well as moving to a new size, it's changed significant elements of its look and feel, introducing a new typeface (Guardian Egyptian) designed by Christian Schwartz, a revised masthead, a radically new layout and some neat navigational devices. Even subtleties like having right-ragged (nice name for left-aligned) format for commentary as opposed to justified formatting for news are highlighted in this annotated image on Flickr.

Looking at its online sister offering makes me think it needs a drastic overhaul. It's cluttered, narrow and bitty, with little sense of branding either within pages or across the site. There are about 210 pixels in width dedicated to news articles at the top of their homepage, which strikes me as a heinous crime. Even at the 800 x 600 resolution to which web standards still refer, this allows only 26% of the screen's horizontal real-estate to news. Take it up to my resolution of 1280 x 800, you're down to 16%.

We'll wait to see whether the revised hard-copy format helps to fend off its declining circulation.

After playing a very tough game of soccer last night, I 'bladed home down the Westside Highway, with the two spears of light representing the World Trade Center shooting up further down the street. For a while, the lights were a semi-permanent memorial to the events, but for the last couple of years, they have only been turned on on the night of each anniversary.

So, I decided to grab my camera and head down to Ground Zero for a closer look; only to find that they weren't there. Instead of beaming up from Ground Zero itself, they're positioned atop a multi-storey carpark four blocks south of Ground Zero. Slightly disappointing, but impressive nonetheless.

Bring it on!

It's somewhat lost over here, in a country bereft of cricket. However, the interweb means I've been able to listen, and a fellow British client means I've been able to share the enthusiasm.

I wish I was in London to savour the victory and the post-match euphoria.

I love revelations. Not the chapter in the bible, due to my atheist ways, but finding something out for the first time (is there any other time to find something out?), particularly when the fact is clever, subtle or slightly geeky.

Notable revelations include tapping the 57, the solution to the Locked Lockers problem and the negative arrow in the FedEx logo, in both Latin and Arabic character-sets, to name but a few. The FedEx one has enthralled me, and here is an interesting interview with the brains behind the now eleven-year-old logo, Lindon Leader. My fascination is probably in some part related to my early days at Ogilvy.

What a great weekend of sport! Yesterday was Super Saturday in the US Open from Flushing: the two men's semi-finals in the afternoon followed by the women's final in the evening.

American Express has set up a big screen just next to Ellen MacArthur's boat in North Cove Marina to cover the tennis, so I popped down yesterday, my Corporate Amex allowing me into the front seating. Great atmosphere for the Agassi vs. Ginepri match, with lots of whooping for Agassi from the surrounding Americans. Then Federer disposed of Hewitt, allowing him a rare set in the process. (Hewitt just can't seem to come up with the goods against him, having all of the last nine encounters.)

Then, after some great tacos for dinner, it was great to see Kim Clijsters finally win a major, beating a somewhat lacklustre Mary Pierce, who always looks like she's about to burst into tears.

Up early this morning to watch Raikkonen take the Belgian Grand Prix in an eventful race - Eau Rouge never fails to impress me.

And now, NFL season has started, so I'm watching a feckless Jets side losing 27-0 to the Chiefs early in the fourth. The distressingly ugly Chad Pennington has fumbled six times today, compared to five times throughout the whole of last season. I can't see them coming close to the play-offs this time around.

Meanwhile, despite their convincing lead, Dick Vermeil, the KC head coach looks very much out of place on the sidelines. When the 68-year-old shouts at his players through the Motorola headset, his face seems to merge into his body due to the stretching of his neck. It's a very odd sight.

The sporting weekend will be capped off through participation as opposed to idle watching. I'll be playing my first eleven-a-side game of football since a few such games during my Warwick post-grad., just over ten years ago! Fingers crossed.

I had to pause for 2 minutes 40 seconds during the writing of this post as The Libertines' Time for Heroes came up on my iPod. I've commented on this track before, but it really is fantastic, and for such a short track, it's got a helluva lot of lyrics, the highlight being:

There are fewer more distressing sights than that of an Englishman in a baseball cap.

I'd have to agree in principle, although I'm sure Andy will have something to say in defence (or even defense).

I've heard a couple of theories for the most efficient ways of getting ketchup out of a traditional Heinz glass bottle. The first one I heard was pretty useless, but one I have continued to employ for the last ten or so years since finding it out. It involved tilting the bottle at a shallow angle - around 20° - to the horizontal and tapping the base firmly.

Today's revelation is worth sharing. Tilt the bottle at a more extreme angle, say 60° to the horizontal. Now look on the shoulder of the bottle, where the chamfer (nice word) meets the straight side of the bottle. You'll find a "57" embossed in the glass, representing the number of Heinz varieties. Repeatedly tap the 57, and watch the ketchup spew forth.

Beautiful!

I just watched the film In Memoriam: New York City. The film is a very compelling depiction of the events that took place four years ago this Sunday.

Some of the footage is surreal, and seeing the street names from which atrocious footage was shot brought home to me just how close we now live to the tragic events of that day. The West Side Highway, Chambers Street, North End Avenue, Park Place, Greenwich Street, Murray Street, West Broadway, Church Street were all scenes of horror, yet they're all streets that I now frequent. Seeing footage of the second tower collapsing viewed from the junction of Chambers Street and the West Side Highway was incredible.

People have said that New York is a city that coped well with the adversity, and having lived here for over a year now, I agree. There are few cities big enough to cope with such a disaster, but I think New York and London are two such cities. And I feel that two contrasting characteristics of the two cities probably equip them well for this sort of thing: optimism and stoicism respectively.

I had a business idea some time ago that I've been giving some more serious thought of late. The business would offer services to people immediately after their death. So once notified of a death, the service would send out emails to loved ones, composed by the user. Maybe online payments could be made, again at the request of the user.

The premise behind the idea is that wills are seen as overly officious documents, that don't necessarily address the human nature of death. This offers a way of people communicating with the living after they've gone.

My main sticking point with the idea is obtaining reliable information about someone's death. It's not as if the user could send you an email confirming their own death. And relying on notification from a next of kin compromises the secrecy with which someone could register with the service (not to mention the fact that in certain circumstances, the next of kin may have died simultaneously).

I need to do some delving into how death registrations are recorded, and whether this would offer a reliable means for validating people's death.

There's an amusing sketch on Little Britain in which two police officers go to the wrong Mrs. Jones' house to inform her of her husband's death in a car accident, only to be directed two doors down to that of the other Mrs. Jones. Then there's the ensuing laughter over the confusion. Probably a mistake you don't want to make in real life.

It sounds like a morbid idea, but the whole premise of it is to ease the pain of death for the folks left behind.