inside space mountain

A minor hiccup at Space Mountain, when the ride was stopped.

You don't really ever get to see the inside of this ride normally, what with it being in outer space.

Snacking in Florida

Memo to self: Local snacks are quite large. This was supposed to be for one person. Be very careful.

band of explorers

Fully technological, with our whizzy bands for Access All Areas. Normally I'd say more about the technology, but on this occasion I will just call it magic.

steaming towards the magic

Of course there's only one proper way to enter the Magic Kingdom at the start of a visit.

Although many will favour the monorail, I think the steamboat is the right way to arrive at the start of an expedition.

about not losing the car

Even with the photo of the parking zone, it is helpful to remember the type and colour of the vehicle.

I still can't remember what type it is, and I thought it was grey, but it is officially blue.

leave it till tomorrow to unpack my case

"Flew in to Miami Beach, B O A C"

I know, a reversal of the usual lyric, but we're in Florida for a few days.

Last time we were in Miami Beach was a couple of years ago, on the way to the Keys.

We stayed in the hotel that they used in that episode of The Sopranos, when the New Jersey gang met the Miami gang.

Whenever I see Scarface or one of those Miami movies I have to do the 'been there!' when I recognises certain scenes. The picture shows the hotel next door to the one with the staircase from Scarface. The actual 'apartment block' has been Johnny Rocketed.

This time , for us, it was a quick stopover as we were on route back to a more northern part of Florida.

Joan Armatrading at the Barbican

I haven't written about any music gigs lately. Yesterday we were along to see the great Joan Armatrading in the intricacies of the Barbican. This was the 120th gig of Joan's current tour and the first time she's performed a tour completely solo.

An immediately recognisable singing voice and some rebuilds of well-known songs as well as a few less familiar. Joan plays a tidy lick on the guitar too, weaving acoustic, slide, jazz, blues and stinging rock into the set. She accompanied a few songs by piano and modest loop and synth for a couple of the very familiar tracks from the set.

I'd last seen Joan Armatrading at Glastonbury where she was playing a bluesy set on the Jazz stage. Here, for the Barbican, she mixed it up using a small selection of guitars (including what looked like a blue Variax) and the keyboard.

I realised just how much I'd listened to both of my vinyl copies of her early albums over the years and was treated to several tracks from them, mainly re-worked for the solo performance as well as some full-on dialled-to-eleven guitar work in other numbers.

Joan is clearly very comfortable performing and with around 40 years of touring she's met and played with many well-known folk. About half way into the set she kicked back and gave us a slide show of some of the moments along the way. Elton John, Paul McCartney, her MBE, a one-to-one with Nelson Mandela all featured as well as small stories about being photographed by Annie Leibowitz, Robert Mapplethorpe, Patrick Lichfield. And to round it off - yes - a cartoon strip in the Beano.

It was a fine crowd in the full house too, warm applause when she arrived on stage, singing along when she asked, creating an encore for which she waited patiently on stage.

A great evening of entertainment from a powerful performer. And I just found the Beeb's recording of 'Love and Affection' from Glasto.

don't look back in anger, i hear you say

The BBC really ought to re-screen 'Our Friends in the North' what with that there election coming along.

Maybe it's too complicated, from a contractual standpoint, with so many of the then fresh faces now as big names in their own rights. Christopher Eccleston, Mark Strong, Daniel Craig and Gina McKee in the starring roles. Malcolm McDowell, David Bradley, Peter Vaughn - even Julian Fellowes as a multi-jobbed politician.

And there's the point. The storyline, which spans 1964 to 1996, tells of four main characters and their intertwined lives around Newcastle and partly London's Soho, in situations that start with a story involving inadequate and poorly built housing but which leads to corruption, sleaze, drive-by politicians, tabloid press tactics - the list goes on and on. And although it starts in 1964, the themes still seem very topical today as well as against their original backdrop of Macmillan, Douglas-Home, Wilson, Heath, Callaghan and Thatcher.

The BBC series was originally made in the 1990s, and it's interesting to look back on the older 60s parts and marvel at the access to the locations and the items needed to make it look authentic. Thirty years after the earliest events, most things required were still available, and it adds a kind of haphazard authenticity which is harder to recreate another twenty or so years on. The London scenes are similarly well painted and it's fascinating to see the action on location outside the Old Palace Yard of Parliament in a way that security has long since banned.

I've still a couple more episodes to re-watch. Right now I'm still in the power cuts of Heath's three day working week. Swan Hunter has just closed. Even by the end the rejuvenation of the Quayside won't have occurred. There's no Sage or Hilton looking down from across the river in Gateshead. Of course there's no Gateshead Millennium Bridge. The south side of the Tyne Bridge looks empty. Some things change, whilst the series shows that others remain just the same.

the gnats have started a miniature singles' bar in the back garden...

Another sign of Spring as the gnats have formed a sort of singles' bar in the back garden, doing that spirally dance. Accidentally walking through them and thinking the obvious expletive is probably a pretty accurate description of what is happening.

I know that trick to hum at the gnats to make them change their flight patterns, but I've also noticed that it works a lot better with a guitar. A few chunky chords on an acoustic and bizarrely you can have the gnats responding by dancing up and down in no time.

I think it's something to do with the way they listen to wing beat patterns. Maybe I'll film it some time.

in which i try using the internet to work out 'who should you vote for?'

Instead of just throwing a knife at a target, I thought I'd try the who should you vote for? quiz, to see what it thought my vote should be in the upcoming election.

I expect I'll try it again in a couple of weeks because there were a few questions where I didn't really have a strong opinion, which might dilute the result.

Then I decided to look up the candidates for around here. A curious mix in this curiously 'C' shaped constituency.

The prior MP is standing down, and so we have a new entrant as inevitable successor.

The new person will win simply because they belong to the party which has a huge majority around here. More votes than all of the other candidates' votes combined.

I googled the official party web site where there was a recent picture of the new candidate and a small amount of text, combined with three central party office questions. I suppose this constitutes the nearest thing to a platform for this follower of the line. Not my cup of tea, but my vote won't really affect things.

The candidate from the conventional opposition to the likely winner didn't have a declared email address or picture on theyour next MP web site. I soon found it though, when I looked at this 26 year old's impressive LinkedIn web site entry.

This competitor probably didn't have time to add the information. A still-in-twenties candidate who has already had 29 different job roles, mostly as advisor. It includes supporting the last Obama campaign in the USA. More than a dozen International Awards, and active support for more than 15 causes, including cheering the London Olympics bid to victory in Singapore, supporting Sochi on the ground and planning to visit Rio to support the Olympics there.

I think this candidate still lives in another area around 50-60 miles away and may not have quite such comprehensive knowledge of this constituency's environment. Perhaps scaling back on some of the wide-ranging activities (like being a Managing Director) could help?

A more likely competitor to the one that will actually win gets around a quarter of the votes around here. They don't have a picture on 'your next MP' website nor on their own party web-site. Actually, the whole constituency had been left out of the front page 'meet the faces' section of the Party web-site. Maybe I'll call this candidate's mobile (the number I found easily enough) to let him know his own Party are hiding him.

Next up, and with a picture, is the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, although I notice it's billed as simply 'Loony' on the candidate list. Their Manicfesto is as bonkers as usual and I notice their results don't get listed in the final mix. As they say, they are loonies, not nutters.

That brings me to the final candidate, a local lad and friend of Farage, seen together in chummy and suited photos in grandiose once-tobacco-stained lounges and smiling. This man is clearly a self-starter having set up his own branch of the party before selecting himself as the candidate.

So what to make of it all?

Firstly, I doubt if many people do what I just did and trawl through the candidates. Based upon the paltry information gleaned, I can see why.

Some people I ask don't actually know the name of the incumbent MP for this area. Most probably don't know who the candidates are, where they live or what they represent beyond the big ticket top 2-3 ideas punted onto television.

Presumably we'll still get the slips of paper through the door when it all kicks off properly.

I guess it can still come down to that moment with a pencil in the booth, trying to find something recognisable to put a cross against.

Against my preferences, it seems to be coming down to a 'least worst' over a 'none of the above vote' at the moment.

no eclipse, just a pigeon on a tv aerial

Oh well. I didn't see today's eclipse of the sun.

We had clouds in the sky from first light. Complete coverage. I'd even selected a longer lens for my camera in case I could catch the event, but to no avail.

It brightened up later. Enough for me to have the sunroof on the car open. And the windows down.

Quite different from yesterday, when I took the bike for a quick spin but came back rather chilled. I knew shorts were a bad idea.

Still.

I took this picture of a pigeon sunbathing on a TV aerial. Or perhaps with that lens it's a distant space probe piloted by an alien.

almost time to visit a rockin' roller coaster?

Yesterday, I could hear the budget speech coming through on a distant radio. It was the braying and hee-hawing sounds that gave it away. Parliament in action.

Curious that just a few weeks before the next election we get something like this, with all its political loops. Although, come to think of it, the opposition response was rather basic, resorting to "don't believe it" type phrases.

Ozzy riffed through a barrage of statistics which rock 'n roller coastered from GDP to church roof funds with some penny-off-a-pint assumed crowd pleasers in the middle section.

Has he tried beer in London lately? A penny off a pint of London Pride would take it from, oh, £3.80 to £3.79. A 0.26% reduction. The first third of every pint still goes to the Government.

That's the trouble with the way the budget was presented. It's not just what's said, it's also what gets left out.

Even the Office of Budget Responsibility published some quick spreadsheetery which has that 'then a miracle occurs' look about some of the numbers (as well as a few odd-looking adjustments in 2016?)

Here's a version of the statistics that can build one of those sets of roller coaster graphs. They are on Page 202 of the post budget report along with 'uncertainty ratings'.

It's the OBR's table and below is my quick graph. Note there's plenty of wiggle in there, too and even more if you look at the fan graphs in the OBR report.

The OBR numbers are the surface of a bigger set which lead to the UK budget deficit. It's around £1.4tn (£1,400bn) which is about the same as the UK total GDP. The Public Sector Net Cash Requirement (PSNCR née PSBR Public Sector Borrowing Requirement) to plug the gap in finances each year is around 11%-12% of GDP.

This deficit represents the number that the Chancellor needs to remediate. It's also where the miracle needs to occur. I plotted the figures from Parliament.uk a few weeks ago.

Now we can add a couple of vectors to the graphic, including a tweak of the revised budget figures. I've looked at prior successful remediations, spread over the period starting in 1980.

For simplicity, I've expressed the trend line of the remediation as a gradient in degrees. It's a bit like a dial in Startrek - the further it is yanked, the more chance the engines might explode.

In the 1980s the remedy was around 14°. In the 1990s it reached 32°. The current remedy since the peak in 2009 is around 38°.

Our Chancellor wants to push this up to around 52° (my green arrow) to remove the deficit in 2018.

So where are the big numbers coming from? There must be a lot more happening than the figures highlighted in the OBR analysis of the budget.

Of course, the spreadsheet hides the fact that much can change in the five year forward period.

The graph already has one of those optimistic forward bursts of gain (shown in 2017-2018), where in a trippy Planet Caravan scenario the dial has to move right up to 63° to achieve the required numbers.

It almost certainly relies on there being so many other changes that these figures will get quietly adjusted over the next 18 months.

I also notice that using the already steep 38° line, it shows that the fix won't have occurred by the end of 2020. Oops.

Perhaps I'm being paranoid? Or maybe Ozzy has hidden more in the rat's salad of figures? And perhaps that is really a 'vat' of salad?