Adventure Rocket Ship

Dartmouth, right? It is indeed Whitby with palm trees. Although since it's much further south, the tourists all seem to be wearing various flavours of Musto rather than Tog24.
The car ferry is an Anderson knock-off and the pubs warrant more investigation. There was also a bicycle race. A sweaty man in lycra won.

As is usual post That Sort Of Thing, I feel like I've been stretched out and filled with hot sand. Dunno that the things-in-containers will have survived the first hot and dry week this year, which of course coincided with being in t'north, but there we are.

Spent much of Tuesday writing on the roof-terrace at our accommodations, and thus have a reasonable sunburn. I think I fail at g*th.

also fail at photogenic. Again. Jayzus.

Someone else can collect the set of stupid things that JHR said while drunk or hungover. (Writing tip: ideas are never the problem. It's execution.) Man whose head expanded. Yes.

Right, the other stupid idea (the first stupid idea was 'Tat cricket', since 'Tat shooting' is somewhat last decade and likely without venue) is a thing that will be called 'The WGW ephemera project'. This is largely an excuse to photograph the contents of my LL Bean bag (where all the laminates end up) and the carefully folded pile of official and somewhat-less-so Whitby shirts. You are obviously invited to join in.

The first obvious question/statement is 'I'm going to guess that free (media)wiki hosting is worth exactly what you pay for it and I guess I'd better go cap-in-hand to that nice Mr. Gradwell.' The second one is 'I'll also guess that a MediaWiki install is a complete nightmare and I probably don't want one of those.'

Dad's much better. Quality timing there, as usual.

An opportunity for bar-propping at the tail end of September: http://www.bristolcon.org/

After last week's jabbering about pushbikes, Tuesday was a bit grim and unfortunate. Boo.

[FX: Stares into space. Space stares back.]

Damn. Mind's a blank. There was something I was going to have a pontificate about, but both it and its moment have passed. Not unlike a grim-faced bus driven by a grim-faced geezer and filled with grim-faced passengers who all want to go to different but equally terrible places.

Buses don't go to nice places. Trains do sometimes, ferries usually manage the task, in a car the nastiness can start as soon as you get in the thing.

Oh!

Right. I remember: what's the elemental drama particle? The Angstrom? This is LJ; someone must know.

I'm even less sure than usual that I know what day it is, so much of the following is probably just me making stuff up.

I can be reasonably sure however, that Chevrolet won't be getting any of my money for the rest of my natural. With sitcom timing, the horrible lardmobile expired properly when called upon to transport us back to the airport. I said some jolly rude words, called the help-desk and firmly suggested that Alamo might like to pay for a taxi. Things got worse after that. In the future, if I'm given the choice between an Alamo car and walking, you may rest assured that Shanks' Pony will win.

Or perhaps one of these. I'll leave it to mr_tom to perform the 'Dude. Dope frames.' joke.

See, the thing is that I like to potter through life in a cheery bubble of Dawkinsian altrusim and naivete[1]. People are basically good and only the sort of tiresome right-wing fuckheads who still believe that game theory maps well onto the human experience should be avoided. Thus I've never bothered with traveller's cheques, money belts and getting several quotes from taxi firms before setting out on an important journey.

(Well, ok. There was this one time where I was to be found at silly-AM, haggling very loudly with Nigerian cab drivers. However, I was somewhat drunk and wearing a miniskirt[2])

Anyway. Shitbag cabs of (I dunno. Lake-something?) are big on all that game theory rubbish and can't drive. The Iranian rally-champions that drive for Eurocars in London are much better value and probably much more use should the balloon go up. Better English, too.

It only struck me after I'd taken the 9k for a bit of a thrash just how crap that Moskvitch was. For instance, should I want to go around a corner in the Saab, I point the steering wheel in the relevant direction and the vehicle goes where I want. Should I be going too quickly, the understeer is progressive and there's none of that feeling you get in a wanker-sportscar that unless you prove your manliness by getting your cock out and jamming it in the lighter socket, the sodding car's going to exit the corner arse-first and upside down.

The Moskvitch, by contrast, cornered like you'd a load of cannonballs rattling around in the boot: move the wheel, wait for an indeterminate amount of time, then the car would make a sickening lurch sideways as the alleged suspension reacted to whatever it thought was going on. The linkage between the loud pedal and the (Bloody GM Ecotec, according to wikkidywikkidywack. I hope that's not the same six-pot that's in the bigger 9Ks. That would be shit.) engine-bit was similarly tenuous. I mean, I've driven rubber cars before, and I've driven actually dangerous MOT-failures, but that was easily the least rewarding driving experience I've encountered thus far.

Anyway.

Southern Wisconsin is quite startlingly picturesque when the sun's out. What I'd wanted from this particular trip was a quantity of two-lane blacktop, strange motel archictecture and enough cultural disconnects to make me lie awake at night and wonder how much of anything was real.

Job done, by and large. Met some lovely people, too. It's just...

... Maybe it's because I'm older and/or more self-aware than the last time I did anything like this, but there were one too many times when I wanted to stand up (or stop the car), walk out of shot and berate the scriptwriter for the terrible cliche I was having to deal with. Bleach-blonde single parent waitress, both types of music, you guys are from ing-er-lund, notch in the horizon where the road went, Fox 'news', cheese, Denny's, Applebee's... I know that stereotypes exist for a reason, but...

... On the other hand, our plumbing is much better than yours.


Final jet-lag scores:

Wednesday: Fine.
Thursday: Fine.
Friday: Bugger. Awake at 4AM.
Saturday: Bugger. Akip 'til 1PM.
Sunday: Thrice bugger. Pass out at 6AM.




[1] I seem to have an utter blind-spot regarding the spelling. It still looks wrong.
[2] I think. I was drunk.

Back from that there Londons, which had been rendered splendidly French for the occasion. It was very odd to be standing next to an 'Aquarel' banner and opposite a 'Champion' example while the Gendarmerie trundled past in (very flash) LHD Landies... While standing next to the Serpentine bridge.

Much later, we ended up in a fine boozer round the back of Lancaster Gate. Most of the crowd hanging round outside were jabbering about the cycling, and the staff were at pains to point out that I was far too rock&roll to actually be, y'know, old. Which was very nice of them.

There may have been one or several drunken SMSeses sent.

Most of today has been spent somewhat zombified and staring into space. Even so, we managed to bounce off John & Wendy (WANOLJ) in Paddington station - they'd turned up for the same reason and seemed somewhat startled that I was turning into a roadie.

(Via outerego) Utterly jammy sod.

Long silences are annoying from some people (I'm so angry with you, but you're going to have to work out what terrible sin you've committed yourself), rather pleasant from others (ditto) and cheerfully companionable when they involve nice people that I care about.

(Inasmuch as that notion of 'caring' is a positive thing for both parties. One-sided caring is rubbish and a waste of time. Don't do that. So anyway. Mutually beneficial positive regard. It's a good thing and I believe we can all get behind that statement, right kids?)

Obviously the 'cheerfully companionable' thing only really works in physical proximity. Perhaps while striding purposefully across hill and dale in search of Interesting Industrial Ruins, or while becoming enlightened by a particularly striking work of modern art. (I find purely representational art somewhat posby, to use a H-R internal word. Perhaps even reflective of a hierarchical state apparatus and thus somewhat politically suspect. A place for everything and everyone knowing their place. Plus ungood.) Whatever. I'm sure you've got your own examples.

So anyway. Long silence. I've tried, on and off, to be one of those people who bang out a post daily. However, it quickly descends into second-division observational standup, or 'Being Jimmy Carr' as we say in the trade. (That's the trade of not liking Jimmy Carr overmuch. A sometimes maligned but curiously popular calling.)

The SGI became near-complete yesterday when the monitor and mousemat turned up. Unfortunately, it looks like the boot-disk is toast, (Well, not actually toast. That would be stupid. Though there was this huge optical jukebox that we just threw out. The cartridges were about the size of medium cut sarnie-loaf slices, so it could have been pressed into service as a 120-slice toast archiving tool) so it's on with plan A: shell it, install a PC motherboard and happily irk the purists.

Oddly, or perhaps not, given the lack of writing here, I accidentally got into a state over the weekend that I'll call streaming. See, when you've got some measure of tape backup, it's all going to work best when you can shovel data at it just faster than it can compress that data and write it to tape, because the tape's going to be moving past the r/w head whatever happens, and if the sending kit can't keep up the drive will write zeroes while it's waiting and your backups will take up far more space than they should. And that was more or less what happened, I just got into the groove of putting words on the paper, which made my brain work in a happy way and emit more words to be put on the paper, just slightly faster than I could write. Result: a happy JH-R with a fizzing brain and an aching hand. Now, if I can do that more often...