October 2004 Blog Posts
We're off today to Egypt for two weeks. First week we're on a tour of Cairo, Aswan and Luxor with
The Adventure Company and the second week we fly to
Sharm El Sheik to do some diving in the Red Sea. Tell you about it when I get back!
Finally got around to writing up a
travelogue of my roadtrip around Germany. It has a few pictures. I hope to add some video to it later.
Ok, I confess I'm a bit of a science geek and have a big warm spot for science education. It doesn't take much to convince me to buy anything that can be justified as teaching the kids about science.
I recently discovered the PowerMagenetStore. Magnets are, of coure, one of the coolest things to play with and this place sells N38 Neodymium rare earth magnets. I ordered 18 of them for £13.25 and they quickly arrived in the post.
They are incredibly strong. A 1/2" cube easily holds up Jenny's wok (not that she appreciated it). Let two 1/2" cubes stick to each other and it takes a major effort to seperate them. These magnets can crush fingers and pinch skin very badly. I've let the kids play with them a little but they have to be strictly supervised. These magnets can easily kill credit cards, monitors, watches and other devices.
Next step is to come up with some fun experiments and demonstrations of what these things can do. There are lots of ideas on Dan's Data, WonderMagnet or Bill Beaty's page.
It's coming up to R*'s 9th birthday and she's presented the following wish list to us:
laptop, game boy advanced, portable cd player, geometry set, calculator, money safe, action man, harry potter poster, wand, gallions, knuts, sikles, sewing book, dog (multy po), joey yu-gi-oh deck, £50, suitcase trunk, small gold in-out box, dip pen and ink, sweet maker, very strong magnets, 2 girl gerbils, £100 and a very happy family
Unfortunately, we will be on holiday on her birthday but she's having a big bowling party for all the girls in her class when we get back.
I remember when this first came out and I made a mental note that I gotta see it. It's taken over 10 years but I finally watched it the other day. Simply another fabulous story from the strange mind of Tim Burton and wonderfully executed using stop motion animation. I wasn't too sure whether it would scare the kids but I let them watch it and they enjoyed it too. Great characters. Oogie Boogie is my favourite.
It would be very interesting to try and make it into a broadway musical. I'm sure it could work.
I love short films. They take a simple idea and explore it. They take risks. They push the envelope of the media. They're punchy and out to challenge you. As a format, they're also hard to make since every shot and every word counts. A good short film is a very beautiful thing.
Cinema 16 is a compilation DVD of 16 short and student films by British Directors. Sure, there are some films in the collection I didn't like but quite a few are award winners and are well deserving. The collection includes "Boy on a Bicycle" which was Ridley Scott's first film back in 1965. It's nothing exciting but it clearly demonstrates his early skill with a camera. There's lots of variety in the 203 minutes of film that have been chosen. Give Hollywood dross a break and try something different.
There are three reasons for sacrificing your life: love, friendship and an ideal. This is the premise behind "Hero" and each case gets illustrated. It's a beautiful film although in a rather cliche way. Lovely scenery. I particularly liked the way the story is told as three different flashbacks. Each flashback is a different version of what may have happened. It kept me really involved and guessing what was really going on and how it was going to end. However, as with so many Chinese films, it's a tragic ending. English subtitles. Recommended.
A tidbit worth knowing. In the BBC article
Carbon Reaching Danger Levels, its claimed that when carbon dioxide reaches 500 parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere, we get to irreversible climate change. It recently reached 379 ppm and its increasing by around 2 ppm each year. That gives us about 60 years to fix things or the sea level rises by 7 meters.
Jenny has been making progress with her career in the culinary world. Today she taught her first Malaysian Cookery workshop to five paying students. She covered Malaysian chicken curry, beef rendang, chicken satay, nasi lemak and accompaniments. It went very well and she really enjoyed teaching it.
She's also been baking every week and selling it through the local Women's Institute as a way of perfecting her recipes. She's managed to produce all kinds of cakes and goodies that people with food sensitivities can eat. It's got to the point where she's getting advanced orders for them.
I'm still trying to convince her to start blogging about food.
Over the last couple of weeks, I had my final three motorcycle lessons and today I went for my test in Reading. I was a bit nervous but not too jittery.
I passed!
Whew! Quite a relief since if I had failed, I would have had to wait until mid November for a retest. As it was, the day was rather chilly with some rain. The examiner, Mark, drove around behind me in a car for about 45 minutes giving me directions over a one way radio. I was particularly nervous doing the U turn in the middle of a narrow sloping street. All you have to do is misjudge your balance and put your foot down to get an instant fail.
At the end of test, I received a mild bollocking for10 minor faults I committed while my instructor, Lou, scowled as Mark described each mistake. Luckily, you can get up to 16 minor faults before you fail. All it takes is one major fault for an instant fail.
There was another student with us who did his test after me but unfortunately, he forgot to turn off his indicator. Instant fail.
So now I'm licensed to kill myself. I'm well aware that you're 38 times more likely to die in a motorcycle accident than a car accident. In London, motorcyclists account for 2% of traffic but 18% of road accident fatalities. Still, I'd like to get a motorcycle next year for casual fair weather riding. One day, I'd like to do a motorcycle trip in a country with not too many cars. Maybe Arizona or New Zealand or something like that.
Here's some links for those who think Bush could still possibly deserve their vote. George Soros has a
personal message worth reading. The Guardian has offered a
good speech for John Kerry to make. Better yet, visit the
One Thousand Reasons website which is "relentlessly documenting the failures of the Bush administration." Another fine site is
One Term President which has a good list of other websites to visit. One of those is
525 Reasons to Dump Bush. If you're undecided, start reading soon.
Looks like the
sugar industry got caught buying out and influencing an "impartial" investigation into the link between sugar and health. Just another example of how untrustworthy the food industry is.
I went down to the Egyptian Consulate in London on Thursday to get our visas. It was a bit of a pain in that you have to drop off your application forms and passports in the morning and then hang around to pick them up after 2:30 in the afternoon.
Where to kill time in Knightsbridge? Well, Harrods of course. I hadn't been there for almost ten years. The food hall is as wonderful as it always was. The cheese counter is second to none. I meandered around all five floors for four hours taking in some of the ridiculous opulence. Nice furniture. Great A/V department full of LCD and plasma TV's. Even a CD department with unused listening stations. Brilliant. But I'd never buy anything there as I wouldn't trust the prices to be good value. It's great for the absurd. You can have a children's electric lamborghini for £39,000 or 75 year old whiskey for £12,000. I eventually left starving as I couldn't bear to spend £12 for a sandwich!
Sure glad to read Mr Kerry did well in the first televised presidential debate. The BBC has published the key points made. The best soundbite was the phrase "Wrong War, Wrong Place, Wrong Time" and I hope it sticks to Bush like a bad hangover. Did you notice that Rumsfeld recently got caught telling the truth? He admitted there was no link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida.
Be sure to drop by the BushIn30Seconds website to watch some absolutely great spoof ads for Bush. It's sponsored by MoveOn.org. Some of the more fun things I've found include a calendar from BabesAgainstBush and protest panties from Axis of Eve. Or you can join with BillionairesForBush.
It still surprises me how much support Bush has with RealClearPolitics showing them about equal in the the polls. I recently listened to a BBC radio programme discussing the rife gerrymandering going on in the US so even if Bush does sink in the polls, there's still a good chance he'll win. So much for the US as a shining example of democracy. Not!
This all points to the boring but crucial issue of how elections are run and the need to support groups like The Center for Voting and Democracy. Closer to home, I noticed this page about the electoral reform in Canada.
Skin Two is a fetish style magazine reknown for organising the annuall Rubber Ball in London, a celebration of fetish style. Ok, so you're probably immediately wondering "What on earth is Ian into now?" I think the diversity in what humans do is fascinating and makes life interesting. Certainly, I don't think there's anything out there that surprises me anymore. So Jenny and I went to the Skin Two Cabaret since it didn't have a dress code and definitely sounded unusual.
The cabaret was a bit disappointing. I was expecting more of a fashion show but it was mostly lewd comedy which was fun nonetheless. The audience was the fashion show and some were pretty stunning. The last act was a Messy Girl who's, ummm, climax was spraying the audience with her enema. Nope, hadn't seen that before!
The Pesticide Action Network is offering a fabulously scarey poster entitled Pesticides in Your Food that nicely summarises the current state of affairs in the UK. You can download the PDF for free or buy a print to hang in your kitchen. Honestly, I would buy a print if I could think of a public place I'd be allowed to display it. The download page has a comprehensive list of links to documents backing up their claims. Definitely worth browsing. The truth is that you can often detect pesticides in food samples but they don't usually exceed the Maximum Residue Levels (MRL) set by the government. The key issue is do you trust the MRL's?
Well, personally, I don't trust these MRL's. The food industry lobby is strong and the government panders to business interests. There are plenty of examples where pesticides are later found to be much more harmful than orginally recognised. I'm sure some of the pesticides residues are alright but you are consuming a cumulative cocktail of about 500 of them. Delicious! We're buying much more organic foods these days.