Lilyhammer

When I worked in Norway, the seasons were very definite, compared with the UK. In the summer months there was an outdoor cafe life and in the winter there was reliable snow.

With that in mind, I've been watching the heavily advertised Lilyhammer series. It uses the premise of Steven Van Zandt playing a Soprano-style gangster moving to Lillehammer, Norway on witness protection and the various scrapes that ensure.

Early snowy episodes include a singing policeman, who plays a kind of Norwegian Elvis. It reminded me of a gig I attended in Stavanger, where a Police band called 'Strong arm of the law' played a rock set.

A curious parallel perhaps, but the series is full of observations about differences between US and Nordic sensibilities. Although made in Norway, the American point of view seems to prevail in many of the outcomes (i.e. the ex-mobster generally wins).

Turn the tables when the Elvis cop character visits New York and offers the local detective a donut, but is told 'Sorry I'm on a low cholesterol diet'.

I've watched the whole series 1 now, suspending my disbelief through the dozens of helpful co-incidences that get the hero started on the new lifestyle, which allows him to create a new Lillehammer bar, The Flamingo, which looks remarkably like Silvio Dante's club in the Sopranos.

The series gets American screening too, although I wonder how the spoken Norwegian with American sub-titles will go down? It's clearly a hit show in Norway as evidenced by van Zandt's appearance on chat show Ylvis.

I'll watch series 2, it's already all up on Netflix.

dancing through the days

Usually, December sails along at a fair rate of knots but then after the New Year arrives, the January anchor is thrown overboard preceding a rather slow drift through the month. Not so this year, when I'm already mildly obsessing about whether the indoor tree lights will be down before twelfth night.

I've dismantled the front garden lights today, braving sleety rain and they are now tucked away in the garage for another year.

The speed effect has also affected my blog writing, where I've noticed several incomplete draft entries that will now not now see light of day.

I was going to write about the over-reaction from certain quarters to PJ Harvey's guest editing of the Today Show a couple of days ago. I usually hear the Today show - often only the first half because of schedules. The prior special editions last week were guest-curated by a Barclays banker, the ex head of SI5 and Oxford Python and traveller Michael Palin, with nary a peep from the listeners.

Musician writer PJ Harvey dared to take a slightly less middle road with some controversial inserts whilst discussing ways to challenge power.

I thought it appropriate; it wasn't all about agreeing with the content, more that it created a dynamic basis for thought and debate. I'd place the programme more as an obvious opinion piece rather than fact-driven, but it did shift the approach from the normal format in a provocative way. I don't think it gave answers, but that's another discussion - but one that will be quietly buried, probably.

The Torygraph, Fail and Stannit were quick to use it as a reason to challenge the ongoing role of the BBC and leftishness in general. Usually British politics is about the fight for the presentable middle. Whichever part of the Bullingdon/Eton/Westminster/Oxbridge set are in play will use the middle to help hold their position.

The recent discussions about 11% pay rises for politicians are a case in point. A red herring when most of them are quite well off, thank you very much.

Picking at random, using published figures, defence man Philip Hammond's worth is supposedly around £5m, cyclist party leader Cameron £3.2m + legacies, Labour leader Ed Miliband cagily hides his worth assumed to be north of £2m, wallpaper magnate and chancellor Osborne's at £4.5m, health supervisor Jeremy Hunt around £4.5m.

That's all before any post-political directorships and special advisor roles. Of course that doesn't always work out. Ex MP Michael Mates tried to get one of those police commissioner roles by moving from his ongoing family home in Chichester into rented rooms in Winchester just before the relevant election. Turns out he didn't win, but I'm not sure if that's enough reason to let it drop?

I know there will be MPs without 'other interests', but there's an awful lot with the prime indicator of second homes. 340 of the MPs claim their entirely legitimate energy bills for their second homes on expenses, as a quick example.

The discussions by the likes of Polly J and recently Russell Brand can be flags about a situation rather than providing answers. We enter 2014 with a still broken economy. The UK doesn't print as much quantitive easing money as the Americans, but UK is still sitting on all kinds of hidden debts, underemployment and crashed pension plans.

The stats appear to show improvements, but if one applies the reasonableness tests, it doesn't quite feel right.

Sometimes there's a need for a more useful challenge to status quo, which has to go beyond trying to put a quote into a politicians mouth suitable for a rolling news feed.

So I'm all for a bit of thought provocation from some non-politicians as a way to try to see past the usual moves.

FaceTime picture scrambler

It's many years since the use of personalised video calls started. I had one of those cameras to clip onto a PC before they became embedded in the screens of devices.

It was still mainly an occasional thing to go for a proper video conference though. Usually it would be something important like a major review, or something involving lots of countries, although even then there could be problems with sound out of sync or a mis-dialled office.

Nowadays we all have FaceTime, Lync, Skype and similar facilities. It's made it ubiquitous, although my experience is still that people mainly use telephone conference calls and maybe a shared workspace for some powerpoint or screen control.

I guess it's partly that adding the faces in non-studio conditions can sometimes create unexpected looks.

Challenges include loss of eye-line, big shadows and the unflattering low angles. My inner photographer always want to adjust the image presented.

There's also the dilemma of early morning calls on FaceTime. Will the other person be 'prepared' or is it all going to go a little bit strange? I'm inventing a special screen saver for that purpose.

One that looks as if there is something wrong with the connection, but where the sound still works.

press reset

All kinds of counts are reset to zero for the start of the new year, so I thought I'd cross check my bicycle stats. I've added all of the monthly running totals into a simple table and then compared the last two years.

My original target for each week was 40 miles and for a month was 160 miles, so I'm quite a way ahead of that. My baseline annual target was therefore 1,600 miles. I set braze, slier and gold targets on top at 2000, 3000 and 4000 miles to make it more interesting. Both of the last two years I've done well to pass the targets and this year the 6200 miles seems pretty good.

It's like the salesman problem though, where the targets get harder year on year, and I've not sandbagged any mileage to start the next year, so it could be difficult to increase any further than last time around.

After last evening's bash and a somewhat late start, I've managed to get in a few miles today, but I guess I'll have to ease myself back in after what feels like a quieter period around the festive season.

I've also been told about that dryathalon thing for January, and may well have a go at that as well.

So far, so good, as they say.

elemental start

2014, eh?

By now it's morning and we're rearranging ourselves from last night's various shindigs.

We've already decided that today needs to be a slow one, although I think I've made the coffee a bit too strong.

The rain abated around midnight for the fireworks, but has returned today; one of the crackers had a question about the commonest element. I think we can safely say hydrogen.

Although, after the last few days of celebrations, I'm beginning to wonder if the most common element ought to be cake.

approaching the wire

Instead of a photograph of the siege-like scenes at the local supermarket today, here's a second version of the rashbre central 2013 video. Fractionally slower, slightly edited and this time with a proper 2013 music track added. Haim - The Wire.

My bicycle spin earlier means I've just passed 2k on the silver bike. That will suffice. 6.2k miles total for the year. A tough target to beat for 2014.

Next up it's a movie - a 1957 oldie actually - Barbary Coast dives in San Francisco with Frank Sinatra and Rita Hayworth in Pal Joey.

It'll set the scene for whatever we have planned for the evening.

Happy New Year. Here's to a great 2014.

end of year bike mileage

I've not done much cycling during December, although Sunday saw me clock up around 30 miles. My TSS and other sustained metrics have all nosedived although I'll be starting up again now that the mince pie obstacles have largely passed.

I've kept up with my various targets for the year, and my total mileage is somewhere over 6,000, which seems surprisingly high and will probably be difficult to replicate in 2014.

There's only a couple of days left now, so I'm idly looking at whether I can get the mileage on the reconstituted silver bike over 2,000 before year end. I know I'm close, and that is probably the only remaining vaguely attainable target.

It may well depend upon the amount of frost over the next couple of days.

another form of time machine

Time to sit down for a few minutes to read the once-a-year purchased Radio Times. Yes, The Christmas Double Edition. Already into the second week, like the countdown has started back to normality.

A curious aspect has been a glance at today's viewing. It's like a throwback to another era, at least on the main channels (once referred to as the terrestrial channels).

Unless I missed the memo, we seem to be stuck in a time warp. Some examples of the programming:

BBC2 Porridge : comedy prison series from 1976.
BBC2 Morecambe and Wise : comedy show from a long time ago.
BBC2 Top of The Pops Christmas Special : featuring Slade, Wizzard and various other 1970 acts.
ITV1 Agatha Christie's Miss Marple : Apparently this is new? but the main series is from ages ago.
C5 An Audience with Bruce Forsyth : Star of the 1970s+. New, but surely we have had enough over the last 13 weeks of SCD?
ITV2 The Empire Strikes Back : yes, from 1980.
ITV3 Agatha Christie's Poirot : ...you get the idea.

Around this there's a few quiz shows, a couple of 'behind the scenes' Doctor Who programmes and a couple of more recent light-hearted movies. An altogether strange mix of nostalgia and presumably economy programming.

BBC have been plugging Antiques Roadshow's Van Dyke discovery rather heavily, so maybe that's the main option?

2013 in rashbre vision

Time for one of my speedy looks through the year, using some of (mainly) my snaps that made it to flickr and the blog.

This includes London, Bicycles, Newcastle, Greggs Iced Buns, Majorca, Seattle, Home made guitars, Pacific Highway 101, miscellaneous events and a few pop tarts. No pummel vision so it's all edited together by dumping the pictures into Final Cut X and then setting a suitably brief frame duration.

It's probably sensible to have a paracetamol to hand whilst watching.

Last year below, as a reference:

It's fun going forward.

a state of flux

I've been enjoying the various presents from Christmas, some of which were quite consumable.

There's one item that I know was on a few lists, that seems to have a very long shelf life. I believe it is only half used in 4.5 billion years, so this one is a real keeper.

If I ever get around to completing the flux capacitor, this could be a useful addition.

Along with that book about how to avoid huge ships, it certainly gets interesting reviews on Amazon.

lemon drop pause

We're all taking a few minutes pause at the moment.

The Champagne lemon drop cocktails are in preparation. They've involved heating some kind of home made syrup and then cooling it again before adding to the fizz.

Actually it has just arrived and tastes astonishingly good. I'm hearing background chatter about the amount of vodka that was added, and that brown caster sugar was used as well as more lemon than in the normal mix.

The homemade parmesan and tomato bread has gone down well and there's some kind or surprise unveiling of a dessert soon.

Oops. Time for a few more party games.

unwrap party

Thumbs up from Santa. Job done.

Merry Christmas to all.