claret

In the City, the week before the Christmas holidays and it is extremely noticeable that many folk are extending their lunch times. My rendezvous before a meeting was difficult to reach because of the sheer number of people walking along the street, all intent on shopping or lunchtime revelry.

Our purpose was more sober although afterwards we pitched out into the busy streets and headed for a nearby wine-bar. Most areas of the city are well provided often with large subterranean bars, like the numerous Balls Brothers (described as a Wicked Club in one guide to London) and Davy's with sawdust floors and "Wallop" served in large metal jugs.

In London tradition, we wanted the finest wines available to humanity, we wanted them here, and we wanted them now. In the end we settled for a simple claret in the Lime Street Balls Bros still thoroughly in keeping with the ambiance of the area. Later, and suitably lubricated we wandered the few steps back to Bank station before heading our separate ways home.

pogued

As a footnote to my recent post about the song "Fairy Tale of New York", which is the well known (in Britain) Christmas song about (amongst other things) the 'drunk tank' featuring a few choice words, it seems that a mere two or three days later the original song has been back in the news because of BBC censorship.

For politically correct reasons the BBC decided to fade down a few of the words in the lyrics but it all seems to have backfired and consequently the song has now been featured on the News, Newsnight and various other programmes intacto.

Considering only a couple of years ago, the BBC actually used it as a charity item sung by the cast of EastEnders (part of my previous post), then it does all seem somewhat volte-face to remonstrate about the lyrics.

L Plate Government?

Oops. After the recent loss of 23 million names and addresses by one government department, we seem to have another slightly similar situation. This is 'only' three million missing UK records which have been lost on a hard drive in Iowa in the mid-West of the USA.

Hmm. So we put the disaster recovery for UK driving test records near des Moines so that if something goes wrong with the system in the UK we still have a backup of everyone's names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses. Lucky the British main system is still working, so the 'safety copy' isn't needed at the moment. Iowa is the Hawkeye State so with a bit of luck someone will spot the missing records and return them.

Its easy enough to fix though, just pop another copy in the post.

Technorati Tags: rashbre, missing, driving, test, records, Iowa, Des+Moines, Hawkeye

corny holiday movies

I just have to watch a couple of 'holiday movies' during the season. This is probably the prime week. They are great in the build up but somehow don't seem as good after Christmas Day.

So 'scuse me tonight, I'm watching something with snow in it.

Santa Claus, North Pole and NORAD tracking

Looking for Santa info...Here's the 2010 link

A family occasion yesterday and amongst other topics we touched briefly upon Santa Claus and I was explaining about the NORAD Santa tracking system. I'll be honest, not everyone believed me and I had to spend some time explaining that both Santa and Rudolph are real and that the North Pole is quite a cool place to hang out at this time of year.

An ideal gift this year is, of course, this.

NORAD uses 47 radar installations to track Santa once he has lifted off and then uses geo-synchronous satellites with infra-red sensors to detect Rudolph's nose's unique I/R signature. Santa Cams were added a few years ago and capture images of Santa and the Reindeer as they make their journey around the world. And a particularly fast plane takes off out of Newfoundland to escorts Santa. Of course the reindeer Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, Blitzen and Rudolph are pretty used to all of this nowadays.

Check out how things are shaping up via the 2009 post here.

Technorati Tags: rashbre, santa, santa+claus, NORAD, North+Pole, Rudolph, Reindeer, Dancer, Prancer, Dasher

tree time

To my slight surprise, rashbre central is gradually becoming ready for the festive season. No great day of decorating, but rather more small movements which add together to create the effect.

The little red christmas trees along the top of the fireplace (and in the blog header) started the process and a couple of nights ago I threw a bundle of lights across the outdoor foliage to start the illuminations. I did forget to check them before I threw them into position and had to retrieve one set which was somehow multi coloured and looked a little out of place with the rest.

I've even managed to get the tree which is still wrapped in that netting at the moment (took me two attempts though because the normal place has somehow closed down without me noticing) and the boxes of decorations have been waiting to be opened for a couple of weeks.

I have a feeling that the full effect will be in place by the end of the weekend after I've gathered together some presents and maybe wrapped the wine flavoured Kit-Kats.

fun with Qlympic trademarks

I noticed diamond geezer is trying to get some folk to help raise a bid about the upgrade of the area leading to the Olympic&trade site for 2012&trade. Unfortunately, the name for the road was to be Olympic&trade something but it can't be because the Olympic&trade Committee have Trademarked the word Olympic&trade and the use of London 2012&trade.

I thought it would be fun to trademark the common mis-spellings so we now have a selection of rashbre central&trade reserved words too...

Qlympic&trade Oljmpic&trade Olympjc&trade Qlympjc&trade Olympac&trade Olymp.c&trade Olimpic&trade Olimpjc&trade and a couple more which I'll keep secret until I see if anyone uses them.

Some of this legal stuff is all greek to me.

xmas tunes

We're approaching the period when all of the XMAS singles get promoted into the pop charts (whats left of them). The X-Factor machine is doing its very best to get a number one for Christmas, having already seen the Spice Girls tune slip quietly into charity record oblivion.

Keeping with yesterday's 'Waterloo' train station theme, I was musing on seasonal tunes reflecting the late evening scenes around popular London train termini in the week leading to the start of the Christmas holidays.

After the shoppers have left by around nine thirty pm, its best to stay away, unless you wish to become involved in the mini dramatic scenes that play out as a result of too much celebration in the earlier part of the evening.

So as wel as the original well sung and well filmed 'Fairy Tale of New York', about Christmas in the drunk tank I've added the Eastenders' soap opera version set in a betting shop and then rounded off with the 2007 anti X factor Xmas song entry about a drunken Santa in Oxford Street entitled 'We're all going to die'.

I must really try to find something more upbeat. Perhaps thats why Simon Cowell's tunesters get to number one.

Fairy Tale of New York

Fairy Tale of Walford Betting Shop

London Shopping with Drunken Santa

truth beauty freedom love

I borrowed the Baz Luhrman Moulin Rouge video a few days ago and decided I'd spend part of the evening to watch it again. Its quite evocative of the Masque of the Red Death party I attended last week, with red curtains, tragedy, drama and so forth along with that surprisingly good musical soundtrack.

Still an entertaining one to watch, bursting with colour and 'hope' despite the sadness of the main storyline.

bourne (again)

I'm probably the last person in England to see this film, but I vegged out tonight on the sofa to watch it. Great fun with a cut every 1-2 seconds for the first 35 minutes then one 'plot explanation scene' and then back into the action. Interesting approach to the direction with clever editing. Even unlocking a door has about four camera angles and if there's a hint of fumbling a key then theres another jump cut in the scene.

The CIA or whoever they are keep talking about 'Assets' and have impossibly reliable satellite links and GSM tapping systems. It would be good if American cellular was as reliable as the interception systems portrayed.

Naturally I enjoyed all the running about around Waterloo (which got its own caption like Tangier), yet I notice some of the aerial vistas of New York were without titles. Slight sign of American production values. Formula is similar to the other films and there are various homage moments such as the hair dying scene with the girl.

I expect I will watch it again, which is a good sign.

blue christmas

Visitor Pat (PI) commented about the blue lighting of this year's Christmas and I have to agree. Around Sloane Square (previously featured here) its blue, but has been for prior years and that somehow looks magical and right. The blue lights outside the Queen's residence at Windsor Castle just look plain wrong and whoever put them there was having a laugh.

But I also noticed today that getting lights in a particular colour varies from year to year. This year, the yellow-white of normal tree bulbs has been replaces by a halogen style of white and the only way to use yellow bulbs is if there's still a set working from last year. Here at rashbre central we can't even locate last year's bulbs and if we find them then 'dollar to a dime' they won't work.

I suppose I'll be braving the weekend shopping lines to try to get some the right colour. Judging from the busy state of the shopping areas over the last few days, everyone will have already 'thrown a sickie' to go to do their shopping in the theoretically less busy mid-week period. I noticed the 'XMAS Park and Rides' are already working today and town centre car parks are full.

one for pat

blurry santa

Its absolutely true that I was overtaken by Santa's sleigh on the way home last night. I'd been out with some friends at a restaurant and had to leave to take a late evening telephone conference call. I'd stopped the car and then suddenly a santa sleigh sped past.

I assumed it was one of those prototypes like you see with cars sometimes where they have black tape to hide the shape of new models. Santa disappeared off along a side road a few moments later so perhaps was also on a practice run around some wiggly roads.

Lots of people have previously calculated Santa's speed to cover the world, famously Joel Potischman and Bruce Handy who did the physics of the speed and payload performance criteria for Santa's sleigh. Like most, I'm respectful of this but also know about some of the assumption errors in the original sums.

The most notable corrections to be applied are:

- Santa delivers no gifts to naughty children (not even coal)
- Naughty to nice ration is 1:9
- As confirmed by NORAD, one Santa distributes all of the gifts.
- There is only one family per household.
- Santa bypasses non Santa belief system houses.

Calculation Assumptions:

- World population = 6 billion
- Children under 18 = 2 billion
- Global Santa based belief systems: 33%
- Max children requiring delivery therefore 667 million
- Children per household: 3.5 (may seem high?)
- Number of households requiring distribution 189 million
- Eastern orthodox using Jan 5 instead of Dec 25 = 16 Million
- Target Households = 173 million on Dec 25
- Target Households after naughty to nice = 156 million
- Estimated child bed time 21:00 (9pm) with 7 hours sleep.

Gives circa 31 hours (24+7) for all deliveries
Time is 1860 mins or 111,600 seconds

Average number of homes to visit per second = circa 1400.
So average delivery per household is 715 microseconds, which is why Santa normally appears a bit blurry (I previously thought it was the sherry)

Land surface minus Antarctica is around 79 million square miles. Distribute destinations evenly = 0.7 miles between households creating a total distance of circa 110 million miles.

So 110 million miles in 31 hours = 3.6 million miles an hour or circa 1000 miles per second or Mach 4770 at a linear speed.

This explains Rudolph's red nose because of air resistance creating around 20 quintillion Joules of energy per second, which would convert a non reindeer nose to charcoal at such energy levels.

Luckily Santa has lots of special powers so these mere physics facts are no problem to such a superhero.

And ps. my list is in the chimney awaiting collection.