sparrowhawk

Back at home after a week on the road. A passing visitor to the garden this morning gave the usual occupants a run for their lives.

I was making a cup of tea and spotted the initially languid sparrowhawk. I worked out that the only reason the bird would be perched was ahead of hunting.

Sure enough, within seconds it did that sparrowhawk thing of launching towards the bushes and scaring some kind of finch out of cover.

The sparrowhawk has both great speed and incredible manoeuvrability alongside a brilliant 3D eyesight system. Within a couple of seconds the raptor had a different and no doubt equally startled small bird in its talons before itself disappearing into the bushes.

Black Cabs : TX4 and Vito

Most people will recognise the taxi above as a London Black Cab. There's actually more than one shape, but they are similar enough and apart from the mixed colours of maroon, silver and occasionally white, they are still generically referred to as black cabs.

The thing is, it's all changing, and quite significantly.

Mercedes have designed a version of their van-car called the Vito which also meets the London cab specification. That includes the need for bits of high viz interior, ways to carry wheelchairs and other accessibility features and even a turning circle to allow Yuwees (U-Turns). They achieved the last point by adding a button that actually makes the rear wheels steer when turning around at less than 5 mph.

According to my recent taxi driver these replacements are selling well and have comfy driving areas and quiet reliable engines. It's just that they don't look like London taxis. They look more like minicabs or vans. Nothing against that well-known London company that drives corporates to the airport but, well, the London Cab is part of London branding.

I was leaving a meeting last week and needed a taxi. I couldn't help notice that the first two in the rank were both silver versions of the new type. I looked twice for the little white taxi driver number, in order to check that they were not minicabs. Not black and not taxi shaped. Now the small white oblong becomes the frame of reference.

Add that to the other recent night-time phenomenon where we're seeing official looking blue high visibility jacketed minicab touts outside some of the west end venues. I assume its legal, but wonder if its borderline?

It'll be an interesting period to see whether the makers of the more traditional shaped taxis figure out better engines, economy, driver comfort or whether Vito2 will have a more taxi shaped look, to stop the drift away of an iconic part of London.

Sunday morning cycling

Cycling this morning and although I'd wrapped up, the wind was cutting a little too thoroughly through to my head. The aerodynamic cycling helmet's vents are sometimes too efficient. It's partly my own fault though because I did sip some wine yesterday evening and have found myself feeling slightly fragile today.

In truth I don't think its last night's modest drink but perhaps my body resetting after a week on 'the Malaysian project' which has been pretty full-on.

Actually I awoke at around 4am this morning and thought it was already Monday and therefore that I needed to be in Paris, only to realise that I could afford a few more hours sleep and a much more leisurely start.

And then mysteriously during my cycling travels I came across the building illustrated at the top of the post. Its called 'the Triangle' or something similar. What intrigues me is that I've genuinely never noticed it before yet I use a building quite close to it as an inspiration for a setting in the second book - The Square. I guess there's plenty of places called 'The Triangle' around, but weird that one is so close to an actual venue I've selected.

I'm back at home now and the next priority is packing.

A small bag only for this trip. Reminds me of an airport scene.

flutter nanoblog redux

Seen those twitter add-ons for longer messages? Er...misses the point? Remember flutter, the 26 char version of twitter?

(above msg has 20 characters left)

inconspicous corners

It's not part of my normal behaviour, although I do know other people that do it.

Hanging around on corners.

I was trying to be inconspicuous about it.

It was only doing it out of necessity, after all.

Three times in the last couple of weeks. Once, it was the wet forum, then rice and finally moonlighting.

It was because of the problems; drowned computers then drowned phones and finally annoying pop-ups. During my search I was told that Silverlight would give me a better experience, and I actually said 'Yes'. The better experience comprised unexpected screenfuls of invitations to join vacation sites, wine clubs "and more".

I don't think so.

So then to the forums to figure out how to disable everything.

That's where it pays to be inconspicuous.

Wanting to disable certain cherished features seemed to be treated by others like a betrayal of trust. I didn't want to be one of the ones that gets a post saying 'this person seems to have written something negative'. It seems to become an invitation to others to add their stylish critiques

A sort of mob mentality.

Not very silver. And not very light.

water filled iphone recovery

Having just recovered the MacBook Pro that was inadvertently filled with water, it's time to move onto the equivalent iPhone. This one fell into the loo, which apparently is a more common situation than one might imagine.

The rescued dead phone was handed to me to fix. The basics are:

1) Power it off by holding down the power and front buttons for 4 seconds.
2) Remove the SIM, so that more air can get inside.
3) Put it in a ziploc bag of uncooked rice.
4) Place it on a warm to hot radiator.

The 'power it' off step is slightly futile, because if it was on when it hit water any shorting out will have already occurred. The remove SIM is mainly because the space created improves airflow. The rice is something that readily absorbs water, like those little bags of silica gel sometimes in the packaging of electronic devices. The radiator is to heat up the innards and hopefully assist recovery.

Leave 24 hours and it should all be back to normal.

If it doesn't recover, there's still a good chance that the iPhone will be readable in iTunes. That's because the screen is the most likely piece to fail, which doesn't affect the rest of the operation of the device. If so, back it up - it can be recovered to another device.

In this case, normal service has been resumed.

something understood: the disguise

Kudos to Sarah Cuddon this morning for the little early Radio 4 slot usually referenced as religion and ethics, which ran "Something Understood: The Disguise", which is about identity.

It kicked off with the splintery world of Fernando Passoa - an author whose Book of Disquiet I often find within arms' reach. Then Orwell down and out in London and Paris, Bob Dylan, Max Power - the short-lived Homer Simpson alter ego as well as the name on every hairdryer. And onward.

The fascination for me was the creative discoveries from within the assumed identity. Not schizophrenic, more as another way to think about something. David Bowie 'taken over' by Ziggy Stardust. Patrick McGuinness channeling the back-story for an imaginary dissident Romanian poet as Liviu Campanu.

It explored the areas around writing where the characters and aliases start as imagined but rather than being there to hide things are much more there to inform.

This is where it rang bells with my own writing, my attempts at novels and also sometimes with lyrics. It's still interesting to me how the characters can come alive and create their own behaviours. Unlike Passoa's approach, I do park them when I'm not in that writing mode. Passoa was discovered to have 72 alter egos which he'd written about and stashed into a trunk as well as four different and clearly delineated published pseudonyms.

McGuinness explained that sometimes people judging will take more from the idea of the alias than from the thoughts created - with his Campanu character, there became more written about the fiction of it than the ideas within it - which some how missed the point of what he was trying to say through a different voice.

Sarah Cuddon also explored some where the other identity took over - Snake eating Alice Cooper and the agent generated stage persona of Norma Jean Baker. "They crawled out of the woodwork and whispered into your brain, they set you on a treadmill and they made you change your name" - so the Taupin lyrics go.

Then onwards towards award winning Romain Gary writing secretly as Emile Ajar -a madman- but strangely giving Gary the freedom to say what he wanted.

Add in some other music including Gillian Welsh accompanied on a fiddle singing "no-one knows my name" and a sprinkling of Beethoven and there's a thought provoking thirty minutes.

And all before seven a.m.

Here's the iPlayer link

i've got an ap for that

I decided to abandon the February Album Writing Month this year; I'm getting a backlog of half finished toons and novels which could take years to clear. Then a phone call today goaded me to one last entry.

What rhymes with 'anthropomorphic'?
I've got an ap for that
I've got an ap for that

How to hear Lykke Li's new one?
I've got an ap for that
I've got an ap for that

Where's a bar that gives away chestnuts?
I've got an ap for that
I've got an ap for that

Let's make it all kind of fuzzy
Using an ap for that
And a cracked cone speaker

Forget about fingers, fumbs can push it
You don't need books if there's a three-gee signal
If you can't find it, wave that smartphone
Cos there's an ap for that
Yeah there's an ap for that

Breakdown
Bbb-bbb-bbb
Ppp-ppp-ppp
Please press reset.

Siegfried's patients

I wonder what 'The Black Swan' would look like as a black-and-white movie? The light and shade in it was pretty heavily contrasted with a storyline that would fit well as a Grand Guignol piece. Certainly there were some clever scenes, like the 32 fouettés en tournant where the dancer grew a swan's wings. But overall I thought it came across somewhat tongue (and file!) in cheek.

Old French horror theatre would use pseudo realistic blood, gore and sharp implements to entertain and that seemed to be part of this film's premise. I liked the creeping around the darkened and deserted theatre and the clever soundtrack with its off-centre effects.

It matched the off-centre prima-ballerina too, and possibly her similarly distracted rival, if she really existed. And that seemed to be the main plot-line. Like in Swan Lake itself, we'll have two people who significantly overlap and then see what happens.

So there were parallel identities, eating disorders and a descent into a form of madness. And that was just me watching it.

As a piece of melodrama, with some manifestly annoying characters, it pirouetted towards ever building excesses. And then fell awkwardly into an ultimately predictable ending.

Although I realise I'm probably out of line in considering this art-house Oscar candidate as a piece of two dimensional whimsy, stuffing ballet cliches and a borrowed storyline into an exploitation slasher flick.

The pizza afterwards was excellent.

free gifts with every blog post

I was wondering whether I was imagining that the advert breaks on some of the satellite channels seemed to be getting longer.

Not quite at the level of American channels where there can be an ad break in the title sequence at each end of a show, but certainly that there were now sometimes around a dozen adverts in the breaks throughout a programme.

I'd probably missed that the satellite channels can already run 12 minutes of adverts per hour whereas traditional broadcasters have had to make do with around half of this. It turns out that its all to be changed as an experiment and that additionally there can be product placement in certain shows.

It could also explain a strange little sequence I saw in the new Hawaii Five - Oh series, where at the end of the first episode one of the cops gave his buddy a hotel voucher. I thought it was slightly wooden moment, until a few moments later the credits rolled including a 'sponsored by' sequence featuring a well known hotel chain.

I'm not sure about all of this.

low anthem - smart flesh - No. 0057

Another band I enjoy just issued a new record. It's The Low Anthem and the album is called Smart Flesh.

I'll come clean -if you look at the cover picture carefully you'll see the number of the copy is 57. As I open the packaging I can't help but sniff the ink and pressed card smell. No, I don't do that with plastic boxed CDs, but Alec and Dan the letterpress printers deserve a little recognition for their artistry.

And will the album meet my expectations? It's both their recognisable style but with some new twists and a huge array of instruments. This band thrives in an intimate setting and I was a little worried that the pasta factory used for half the tracks would be a large and echoing. No such worry. The acoustics linger and the band has adapted its sound for the space. The other tracks are in a smaller room and the different sound stage shows through. Theres even a slightly longer gap after one of the tracks symbolic of a 'Side 2' moment.

This album has its share of borderless highways, tightropes, fast black angels, humming steel, desert hotels and sad sad eyes. I know I'm going to listen to this one plenty of times.

And savour the inky new smell of a low serial number.

keeping a clean one

My passport number 1 ran out some time ago and I didn't renew it. I'm using passport 2 exclusively now. It's the one I refer to as my 'clean' passport, whereas the other one had a lot of messy visas and stamps in it.

The reason I had two passports together was for when I used to travel around more in the middle east. The double passport meant made it easier to avoid certain complications.

The complexities I remember have been re-inforced over the last few days, both with the heightening tensions in some of the countries and also with a couple of stories I've been following.

One is a short story by Robert Macfarlane which starts with his entry to Tel Aviv and the level of questioning involved. I've had that scrutiny, where I've been convinced that the people asking me relentless questions were not believing anything I said.

And then the television series about Palestine and Israel called "The Promise", which wraps together a post World War II plot-line and a modern day take. An English gap year student projects some of the issues when she arrives in a land where there is so much just under the surface. I'll admit I'm quite gripped with mix of real events with a dramatised and edited overlay. I can spot that there's almost too much happening to some of the characters, but it still evokes some of my own feelings about this intractable situation.