02.28.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 6.48 pm by niltiac
Stories about the health benefits of chocolate roll around every so often. This article in Scientific American cites a study of elderly Dutch men that suggests that high levels of cocoa consumption (from ordinary foods including chocolate bars and spreads) can lower the risk of cardiovascular and other diseases by as much as 50 per cent, despite being associated with higher caloric intake. Woo hoo!
I’ve also blogged before about how coffee is good for you and that ungodly creation, decaffeinated coffee, is bad for you. So now you can have some chocolate with your coffee – what could be better?
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Posted in Uncategorized at 6.19 pm by niltiac
Some time last year, Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, otherwise known as Red Ken, got into a tiff with a reporter from the Evening Standard. The reporter happened to be Jewish, yet Livingstone’s insult of choice was to liken him to a guard in a Nazi concentration camp.
Okay, so that’s bad. Its an arrogant and insensitive thing to say and Livingstone deserves to cop a hiding for it. He deserves some shtick in the press and possibly a voter backlash at the next election. He should apologise for what he said and certainly my personal respect for him and likelihood to vote for him is badly tarnished.
But last week, three civil servants decided it was so bad that Livingstone should be suspended from office for four weeks and pay £80,000 in legal costs. What the f***? Ken Livingstone is an elected official – these civil servants certainly are not. He should only be removed at the behest of voters or for breaking the law. And if a week’s a long time in politics, a month is a lifetime.
Now a judge has frozen the suspension as Livingstone appeals the decision. Hopefully the judiciary will impose some sense on the whole situation – it’s bureaucracy gone mad.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 5.57 pm by niltiac
Iraq is on the verge of civil war and no one seems to care – the Chelsea game makes bigger news. There has been some reporting of this and if you type ‘Iraq’ and ‘civil war’ into a search engine there’s certainly plenty of info out there but it doesn’t seem to be getting the attention it probably deserves, given our involvement in the situation. Why is this? Is it because we’re bored with the war? Is it because we’re bored with the region, particularly after the spate of embassy burnings over the cartoons crisis?
The other day I passed a guy on the corner of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street who was trying to get people to sign his petition to pull the soldiers out of Iraq. That made me mad – it’s such a typical kneejerk reaction that fails to take into account all sorts of shades of grey. I was against the war but I think it would be wrong to abandon them now.
We got them into this mess and we shouldn’t just leave them in it. We need to stick by them and give their newly elected democratic government a chance to govern. In the absence of UN peacekeepers (who arguably wouldn’t come because there’s no peace to keep), that means the Coalition partners: the US, the UK and Australia. (Although I think Australia has already withdrawn its forces and had sent special forces rather than regular soldiers anyway in order to claim credit for being there but also to leave at the earliest opportunity – very clever).
I don’t think we should have gone to war in the first place – it always seemed more about oil and Bush’s evangelistic approach to governing. I believe we needed proof and a UN mandate before an invasion, at the very least. It was also quite clear that an invasion would involve huge civilian casualties and a guerrilla backlash, although that’s come from Islamists rather than Saddam loyalists. I didn’t know this at the time but it’s also quite sickening that the US uses depleted uranium in its tanks, sickening its own soldiers as well as Iraqis. But I never saw it in black and white – I thought it was a difficult decision with a lot of factors to weigh up. Crucially I believed that if we did invade, we needed to make the commitment to rebuild Iraq and nurture democracy there – kind of like the Marshall Plan did for West Germany.
Saddam was a tyrant but if we leave them now another tyrant will follow and this time he will rule without any national infrastructure now. It might be tiresome but I do think invading Iraq makes us responsible for its national security for the forseeable future. We’ve made our bed, now we have to lie in it.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 8.13 am by niltiac
I haven’t checked this out yet so apologies if any of it is based on wrong information. Boing Boing is carrying a story that the Australian Copyright Agency wants to collect money from schools for use of the web. Boing Boing has already described some of the reasons why this is wrong and unworkable. Firstly, there is an implied licence to read stuff published on the web (if you want money for it, you generally put it behind a pay wall). Secondly, a lot of the stuff on the web is not collected by professional authors.
I would add a few other reasons. Firstly, why single out schools? Why not put the tax on corporations (maybe because they won’t pay and they’ve got the power to fight back!). Secondly, what about pages from overseas? The more you start to look at this the sillier it gets.
But the main reason why I – as a professional author (I’m talking here about my journalism not my blog!) – think it’s ridiculous is that I won’t see any money from it anyway. I am a member of the Australian Copyright Agency. It’s free to join and they collect photocopy licence money on my behalf, mainly for articles I had published in The Australian before leaving in 2004. Depending on what I’d been writing about, it sometimes boosted my annual income by $AUS1000 per year, which was quite a nice thing. (Mainly when I’d been writing about government as the public service employs people to photocopy clippings AND actually pay their licence fee, neither of which are commonplace in the corporate world). But while print journalists in Australia who are staff at a newspaper or magazine (freelancing is a different matter) own residual rights for print reproduction of their work (including photocopy licence fees), they own NO COPYRIGHT over work published on the web.
Put bluntly, if schools started paying a fee to view my work online, it would go straight into Rupert Murdoch’s pocket, not mine.
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02.27.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 4.31 pm by niltiac
I recently wrote a review of Resurrection Blues, an Arthur Miller play staged at the Old Vic. One of my chief criticisms was that the main character fluffed his lines several times. A friend has just informed me that the play was in preview at the time, which may partly explain this. I have since tried to verify this. I can’t find any mention of this on the Old Vic website, which lists the play dates as 14 February to 22 April. However, some third-party ticket sites do refer to the play as opening on 22 February.
I still think my criticisms are valid. There was no obvious warning that what we were seeing was in preview, the tickets were full price and a preview is not the same as a dress rehearsal, where you expect a few rough edges.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 9.15 am by niltiac
I am so proud of myself right now! Yesterday I skated 8.1 miles around Kensington and Chelsea (see the route here). I didn’t bail out at the half way point like I thought I might – I actually made it all the way to the end. My legs were like jelly when I was done but I was so happy!
I know the Sunday roller stroll (2pm-4pm every Sunday departing from Hyde Park Corner) is easy in the street skate stakes but it was tough for me. I was feeling confident beforehand but terrified once I started – but I was concentrating too hard to really think about it. I had to really work hard not to get left behind or asked to leave, not to mention deal with bumpy streets and curbs. I only fell once and it was a clean fall with my pads taking the impact – it didn’t hurt at all. The route took us around four fire stations and they were playing fire-themed music (like The Doors’ Light my Fire, Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire and Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire). I met a few of the other skaters and they were really nice.
I am planning to go back – if I do this every week, it will quickly become easy and it’s an awesome cardio workout. I do have to work on speed and confidence on hills though. It’s fairly safe – I’m skating in a big pack and they have marshalls who hold back the traffic. My aim is to become good enough to go to the street skates in Paris this summer.
Caitlin with Alan, the rear marshall. I would never have finished without his help! 
Official skate photos here.
After the skate I went and met Dominique for coffee in Notting Hill and treated myself to hot chocolate and passion fruit meringue tart – completely guilt free!
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Posted in Uncategorized at 9.07 am by niltiac
It might appear that I’ve been ignoring my blog for a few days but that’s not true. I’ve been hard at work generating raw material for the blog so I can write about my life rather than relying on snippets from the newspaper. Okay, so the reality is I didn’t feel inspired to blog but I had a full and fun weekend so there’s lots to write about now.
On Saturday, I did my weekly pilgrimage to Borough Market for food and coffee. It was a nice day so rather than going straight home, I wandered along the river to the Tate Modern. It was freezing in the shade (it’s been cold lately and even snowed and hailed last week) but the sun was lovely and warm so I luxuriated in that for a while and admired the view across the river to St Pauls. I intended to check out the main exhibits as the Tate as I’ve only ever been there for special exhibitions, such as Frida Kahlo and August Strindberg. (I have been to the main exhibits at the Tate Britain just not the Tate Modern). Unfortunately it was really crowded so I gave up, vowing to return on a week day, and went to see the Martin Kippenberger exhibition instead.
Kippenberger is my dad’s age but he died in 1997. He is a German artist who was into creating his own exhibitions and supplementary exhibition material just as much as the actual art itself. He challenged a lot of my preconceptions about art – in the first room I was admiring his painting style – it was light brush strokes and a kind of finished pop art type feel. Then I read the exhibition notes and discovered he’d actually hired a signwriter to paint the paintings so it wasn’t his own painting style that I’d been admiring. Then I felt silly for liking it and then I felt silly for feeling silly about liking it since they were still the same paintings!
Most of the work was his own work – as in executed by his own hand not just to his design – and had a quite different style, which I also quite liked. However, there was one other room where he had got his assistants to paint some canvases but decided he didn’t like the result and destroyed the paintings. Before he did, he photographed the paintings and then displayed the photographs with the actual paintings in a skip in the middle of the room. Did he have the right to do that? It’s an interesting question I think.
In the evening, we went to the Little Bay restaurant in Battersea to farewell Natalie who is going to work in Copenhagen for a few months (though she’ll be back on weekends, I’m sure. I’d heard about the restaurant before – it’s decked out with velvet and candles and there are roaming opera singers. The food is very good, especially for the price. The only downside was the wine – £12 bought vinegary white and inky red.
As you can see Natalie (top) and Nata (below) got the royal treatment from the opera singer.
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02.24.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 1.09 pm by niltiac
Do chickens have teeth? Well according to Scientific American some of them do – alligator teeth specifically.
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02.23.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 6.09 pm by niltiac
I blogged recently about the discovery of long-lost minutes from the Royal Society from the days of Isaac Newtown and Robert Hooke but the minutes were expected to fetch £1m at auction and the Royal Society was trying to raise last-minute funds to buy them. I said at the time that I couldn’t figure out why the Royal Society had to buy its own minutes since they already owned them even if they were not in possession of them. It seems they agree with me because The Times is reporting today that the Royal Society has commenced legal proceedings to halt the auction and is claiming they were unlawfully removed in the first place and should be returned. Good luck to them, I say, although there should be some sort of modest reward for the people who found them too.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 5.41 pm by niltiac
Britain started converting to metric in 1965 and never finished. Road signs were meant to be converted to metric by 1973 but never were. Everything is a weird hybrid system: temperature is celcius but windspeed is miles per hour; you can choose whether to buy your milk in litres or pints but you buy your vegetables in pounds; people know their weight in stone and pounds but don’t know how much a gallon is. It’s all weird.
The level of numeracy in this respect is awful. I went into a green grocer’s shop that had a handwritten sign on the wall providing the conversion from pounds to kilograms. The problem is the chart said 10 pounds equalled 22 kilograms when in fact 10 kilograms equals 22 pounds. D’oh! A friend of mine went to a weight loss meeting and asked to keep track of her weight in kilograms, which they agreed to do but they then referred to a chart to work out 10 per cent of 70kg.
A new report suggests that Britain should finish what it started 46 years ago and convert all road signs to metric before the Olympics in order to avoid being seen as a backward country in the eyes of the world. (I think that’s a little spurious since the US still uses the imperial system – the difference is it doesn’t use a half-baked mish-mash of both systems). But I do agree that they should do it – metric is so simple and it’s relatively painless to make the transition if you just stick to your guns and do it. Australia did it before I was born and Ireland went through it recently. The sky didn’t fall.
But the Department for Transport says absolutely not – they’ve got better things to spend taxpayers’ money on and it might increase the incidence of car crashes.
It reminds me of Queensland farmers protesting about daylight savings on the grounds that it confuses the cows and makes the curtains fade.
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