I've just about caught up with my planned year to date cycling. I was a long way behind at the start of the year as a result of the spluttery bug.
I'm also pretty sure that there will be other times this year when the cycling has to take a pause, so I'd better make progress whilst the sun don't shine.
The graph shows it was only part way through January before my first ride and as a result I was 80 to 108 miles behind my 'pace' target right from the start.
I know it is only a bit of fun but it still feels good to be getting 'ahead', even if it is only against a self-imposed target.
More fun at the moment is looking at my 'Blue' target (that's my easy one), which is already 45% complete.
There are some TV places where, if you lived there, you'd probably leave. Why would anyone stay in Midsomer? or Albert Square? Or that sunny island in the one about paradise. The problem with them all is that there's a high chance you'll be bumped off, swindled, trapped in a burning building, poisoned or similar.
It's the same with Fortitude, which is in its second series now. Actually, I think it would be fascinating to visit the real place, with its majestic scenery, wild climate and so on.
There's even a promotional video saying 'come visit'.
Of course, nothing can be what it seems. The first season has a high body count, including some of the original stars of the show. Now we get series 1 survivors like the island's governor Sofie Gråbøl as Hildur Odegard as well as newbies like fisherman Michael Lennox robustly played by Dennis Quaid.
I won't allude to the series 1 plot premise, although it is fair to say that there's new danger right from the opening sprockets of this second series. Even some items of closure from Series 1 can have an unexpected twist that makes the viewer slightly uncertain about possible recurrences.
I'm in mid series at the moment and have recently passed one of the more significant 'Nooo!' points where something so shocking happens that you wonder how the rest of the series can play out.
That's not to say there aren't plenty of other freaky moments in the show. I've only watched this one late at night, with the ambient speakers switched on to provide extra wind and snow effects. Anyone who has watched Alien in the dark during the sequences crawling around the darkened space ship will be familiar with the feeling.
Scenically, a Scandinavian science research lab can make a perfectly good substitute for the well-lit area of a space ship and there's still plenty of excuses to walk around in science-fiction type protective clothing.
That's a clever aspect of Fortitude. The setting gives such a vast range of textures. The stark whiteouts of blizzards. The sun kissed peaks on a fine day. Darkness with blood auroras overhead. Brown pub interiors at least until the power fails. Scan-wegian architect designed town halls. Guest houses with plenty of doors, hiding secrets. It's all there.
I can understand why the police in the town seem to pull their guns so frequently. There's scarcely a shed to be examined or run down mine shaft that won't be a likely source of big trouble.
Add a few wild animals into the mix, stir gently and let the mayhem commence.
And I've realised I will need altered states of consciousness to get through the last part of this series.
I know the Super Bowl is supposed to be about American football. However, the NFL kind of football has sections of play that last about 5 seconds and then everyone has to get in a huddle again for a restart.
It makes the game very stop-start, which I suppose is good for the advertisers. It seems to be about the advert breaks rather than the game, with everyone building special adverts just for the show.
I just knew the 'Advocados from Mexico' one would be good.
That's a problem watching Super Bowl on UK telly. The adverts are removed and we get men in suits in a studio demonstrating blocking moves instead. The studio time is almost as long as the game time.
Okay here's the other bit of the Advocados from Mexico. Subliminal.
So UK TV would have missed this Budweiser advert about two immigrants inventing the all American beers Bud and Busch. It doesn't seem to have gone down too well with certain folk.
We did get the coin toss on regular telly.
Cut from studio to ex President Bush rolling onto the field. He flips the coin and it falls under a cameraman's monopod. They announce the result.
Annnddd its another advert break - or in the UK back to the studio again whilst the Americans get 90 seconds on the latest Ford car initiatives and look at a cat with a box over its head.
Not a bad advert actually, with Nina Simone 'I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free' (gasp...but it is also that UK Film Night theme tune) and Bryan Cranston doing the voiceover.
Ford are promoting their Westfield World Trade Centre hub, which is like their version of the long-established L'Atelier Renault in the Champs Élysées.
Then back to the action. In fairness the Americans have found a way to speed up some parts of the game. It's legal in some situations to pass the ball forward.
A touchdown doesn't actually require to be touched down on the ground, like rugby try would. But then, the Americans don't seem to like kicking the ball. They even get someone else to hold it for the equivalent of a drop-kick.
Hold on. Time for another car adverts. The Merc AMG one is directed by the Coen brothers.
It also requires some skill to decide which is the best UK coverage.
The BBC went for a more realistic colouring than Sky Sport Mix HD which seemed to turn up the saturation.
I did prefer the latter, although both of them seemed to have quite pokey studios, with BBC actually getting one that looked as if it could directly see the game.
Okay here's another advert break.
This one is for...Cars.
Audi this time, but there's an edge. If Mercedes went for an all-American theme - Born to be wild, Peter Fonda etc., then Audi went for equal pay for women.
Yep a bit of politics for the Super Bowl.
And back in the game there's some scoring, with different pundits selecting each of the teams.
I can't help thinking that there's a quiet sporting agenda though. If you don't come from Atlanta or New England then it seems to be about wanting the New England Patriots to lose.
Advert time.
A bit more politics with this one.
The dark Handmaid's Tale which is set in the military dictatorship of the Republic of Gilead (formerly the United States of America), ruled over by Old Testament religious fanaticism. 'kay.
By now the scores are clicking up. But you know what? It must be time for a longer commercial break.
How about this one for Pepsi, which lights up the sky with branding?
Intel supplied the 500 drones used to make an American flag and Pepsi logo, although that part of the show was like the Chinese Olympics section, where it had to be recorded and was therefore 'Run VT'.
However, the spectacular Lady Gaga performance during which she managed to pull off singing Woody Guthrie's 'This Land was made for you and me', as well as her own diversity anthem 'Born This Way'.
I was impressed that she snuck some messaging in without it really showing too overtly. A well deserved mike drop and body drop at the end.
I guess after that it's best to just record the rest and watch it later on 30x.
Maybe hunt out some more of the adverts? I've even learned that the Big Mac now comes in three sizes. It had to happen.
I suddenly realised that this version of 2017 is probably an accidental parallel world. I must have stumbled when I walked past that worm hole along Whitehall and the flash of light wasn't a cluster of brightly lit cyclists, it was that moment of passing across the gap.
Luckily I've read that Philip K Dick novel as well as watching the TV show, so I know there will be another blinding flash as things return to the old kind of normal.
Come to think of it, our friends across the pond are still largely in favour of what is happening there, with apparently more people supporting recent actions than the vociferous ones opposing.
But that's where alternative facts make it so difficult to keep up. In that TV show they had to add a whole significant Obergruppenführer John Smith character just to represent the new normalised viewpoint.
The Rufus Sewell character was written in to help us viewers keep track of the popular viewpoint. I can't really spot an equivalent character amongst the Kuschner, Miller, Bannon, Conway, Spicer, Priebus, Punch and Judy of the new gang.
In the Philip K Dick alternative world, sometimes the characters used the I Ching to try to figure things out. Hexagram 29 popped out.
In our so-called reality, the so-called president maybe isn't heeding this hexagram's words about the abyss.
"By growing used to what is dangerous, a man can easily allow it to become part of him. He is familiar with it and grows used to evil. With this he has lost the right way, and misfortune is the natural result."
The hexagram's warning is supposed to be to keep a level head during a difficult situation that has caused anger, frustration, and despair. And below is this week's Economist cover, by the way, not a Photoshopped remake.
Another source of alternative reality truth comes from 'The Grasshopper Lies Heavy' which is the inner novel/film, used within High Castle to illustrate the link back to the other world.
Philip K Dick used Ecclesiastes 12:5 as the source for the grasshopper reference : "the grasshopper shall be a burden" - the full King James version is somewhat bleak as it describes the peoples' fear of the one on high.
As I look to the 'United' States, I can't help think that there's probably another section from Ecclesiastes (10:12), which may set the alternative reality tone: The words of a wise man's mouth are gracious; but the lips of a fool will swallow up himself.
Back to the man in the golden tower. He thinks he can fly above the so-called law. He and his close followers are protected by the iconography of the little yellow and red triangle (surrounded by gold, of course). A new kind of symbol to fear, maybe? It's not as cool as my Man from UNCLE badge though.
He's changing the language. The meaning of words. Of facts. Facts. The use of repetition. Repetition. His acolytes do it too. They all do it. Use repetition.
That old marketing adage. Tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em. Tell 'em. And then tell 'em what you told 'em. It's okay, I won't repeat it.
But it might be interesting to see the marketing in tonight's Super Bowl. How about Margaret Atwood's story of male authoritarianism The Handmaid's Tale, anyone? I somehow doubt whether Dove soap will be allowed to advertise? My favourite may well be the swirliness of Advocados from Mexico? It could even be the return worm hole portal.
In the mean time, I got to thinking. In the alternative America shown in High Castle, wouldn't the language also get changed to German? Aber warten. Hier ist es. Auf Deutsch.
I had a quick look at that new White Paper. All 76 pages of it. Yes, I did notice the 14 weeks holiday for UK folk. Oops. Maybe that Steve Bell cartoon last week was right?
I was expecting the Exit and Partnership White Paper to contain something akin to a plan. Nothing too detailed but maybe a few key steps or something that would move the ball along. If the Article 50 trigger is pulled sometime in March (31st anyone?) then there had jolly well better be a plan of the next steps and their allocated budget of time.
Does David Davis provide this? Why no.
He reframes the 12 points that Theresa May issued a week or so ago at Lancaster House. Admittedly there's more verbiage behind everything, but it does slightly smack of a re-purposed ONS report which has had some EU exit commentary added. In consultant speak it's 'the thickening' but not the main report.
I'd have liked to have seen the timetable and maybe a sense of the priorities. I decided to apply a very coarse lens to the various topics. I've called it 'Actionable?' and it's to determine whether the things listed are directly actionable by the UK Government, and to a degree how much they are within the power of the government.
A few conceivably are actionable, but there's a whole bunch that still need the acceptance or indulgence of the parties with whom we would need to negotiate. I can understand that there was a need to provide something substantive to support the thin 50 word exit Bill, but I'm not sure that a snow job of verbiage without determined actionable topics really cuts it. Our Mr Brexit is a little bit too blurry for this stage in the game.
Some might say that this White Paper amounts to the Playbook for the negotiations. I'm less convinced. It feels to me more like an Appendix to a Playbook, which has pulled together some useful statistics. Maybe it is a holding position, but the team behind this have had a lot longer than the last week to get their act together. It is kind of frightening.
Theresa May needs to be banging on the doors of the people supposed to be running this to demand the actual Playbook. The Plan. The options. The leverage. The Budget. The one-off cost. The ongoing annualised run-rate post exit. You get my drift.
Perhaps the press and media will see it differently? They could spend ages poring over the minutiae of the stuff included, but I'm not sure how this really drives the position much further forward.
Playing board games last month, one facet was to get a "golden card".
Game dependent, it might be 'Get out of Jail, Free', 'Take half of the other players profit', 'Immunity from the thing they ask you to do' and so on.
The thing was, you'd be hard pressed to collect even two or three of these wonder cards in an average game, let alone the ability to use them all.
Some might say that the board games are not realistic because of this, and that people don't get that many carte blanche moments where they can write their own fortunes.
Although, if you get elected to the highest office in America, this seems to an available form of wish fulfilment. I can't quite fathom how the man with the pen can just keep writing new orders for the way the whole country will run.
It doesn't seem necessary to go through any sort of governing process, just a kind of Leto II Atreides God Emperor approach where it is just made so.
Now Leto II was a character from Frank Herbert's Dune series. Leto II became part man and part worm, and had sole control of a valuable melange/spice which gave humans various powers. His world-view derived from a range of other controlling cultures, using their worst crossovers as his way of working. It made him a despotic and ruthless ruler of everything. He kept humanity as a prisoner for 3,500 years.
The original book cover depicted the God Emperor, before it was replaced with the modern graphics, which in true Douglas Adams style blended the 'trilogy' of Dune books together. Yes, this was book four of six.
But there is something about that face. The hairstyle. I don't know...
Anyway, Frank Herbert's novels were science fiction, but without the gadgets. So called 'soft' science fiction. A future galaxy with parallels in the earth. Herbert explored the psychology and philosophies more than the way that flip-up communicators would work.
He wrote that governments suffer a recurring problem because power attracts pathological personalities. That power can be magnetic to the corruptible. That a drunkenness and addiction can occur.
Perhaps only the truly [insert your own word here] get to use as many wonder cards as they like. We shall see.
So what happened to Leto II? Let's just say it didn't end well.
Pre ESTA days, I used to have one of those long-term USA visas. Come to think of it, I suppose its time limit was described as 'indefinite'. So true.
One day I was travelling alone, re-entering the US through somewhere like JFK and was stopped by the border official.
He called to another person who escorted me over into a small side room, like in a Jason Bourne movie. I was asked a few questions by one person whilst another one hovered in the background. They explained they were revoking my visa. Its full page glory was unceremoniously cancelled and I was given a new mini stamp in the passport with a time limit.
In its own small way, this was quite unnerving, yet the actual process was probably only 15 minutes, admittedly at the end of a six hour flight.
Because of my frequent travelling, in those days I used to keep a couple of passports running, one which I called my 'clean' passport and the other one which has a few more stamps in it. Even that process changed as the various authorities started to move over to those whole page stickers with photographs on them. And there was a certain country which I visited that would put their stamps onto paper to be kept with the passport for the duration of the visit (wink wink).
Even now I order the extra pages version of the passport.
But with new border controls being created, I'm wondering about the whole passport thing again. Aside from the shhh! fake camouflage 'passports' which anyone can get (like British Honduras or Western Sahara), there's the places that have lesser rules.
I'm guessing that the US will once again rein in the H-1/H-1B and similar visas, as another part of the buy American thing. I wonder which nationalities possessing such documents will still, like me, get into the country with an replacement alternative stamp?
(Update: I wrote this before it happened, but yes, it's now in the news)
The other part of this is the way that dual nationalities get sold. There's a list of special companies and particular countries that provide -er- services to help people get around. In at least one place you can simple hand over dosh to become a citizen. It's about the same amount as needed to buy a new Bentley, if you know what I mean.
It'd be daft to try to get, say, a U.N. Special Services Diplomatic passport, but there's other jus sanguinis (right of bloodline) countries like Italy or Ireland, where in the right circumstances, it is more about filling in the right forms. These three are quite useful
Consultancies like that one close to the US Embassy in London are now running free seminars in certain areas like the Middle East, to help guide people through the options. I expect it is still tricky to get a pretty pink Singapore passport (2 years residence) or a Belgian E.U. passport (that's the one the Eurocrats are lining up for). Of course, typing in 'fake passports' to the internet wouldn't work, would it?
Sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee, listening to a laid back acoustic playlist, I found the sound from the Alexa Echo a little bit boomy, so I tried "Alexa, turn down the bass." It seemed to work although the volume also seemed to go down. Then I tried "Alexa, turn up the treble." No volume increase but more treble. Then "Alexa, louder."
"Alexa turn living room up/down" seems to work the side lights in that room. "Alexa, Add three degrees to the temperature" works, although it is doing it in Fahrenheit whilst everything is set to Celsius here.
And Alexa hasn't gone rogue yet and ordered something on-line, because a TV programme told it to. "Alexa, buy [my product] with one-click". Only a matter of time before it happens.
Mainly good. Then to ask "Alexa, What is the Prime Directive?"
The other box-set I've been watching, albeit in a half-hearted way, is called "Startup". It's on Sparkle, which is the Sony streaming service also available in the UK via Amazon. It's about a group of people trying to start a Bitcoin style cyber-currency, largely built upon the proceeds of crime.
Compared with the stylisation of LA/Santa Monica-based Goliath, this one fails to hold real interest. There's a Miami-based plot that includes gangsters, guns, the dynamics of successful Cubans, less-well-off Haitians and the alternative Wall Street in the form of Miami's money laundering capital around Brickell Street.
It should make up a pretty good plotline, but somehow in amongst the sexed up scenes they have dropped Martin (Dr Watson) Freeman. He plays an implausible American cop who drinks fashionable coffee, cooks English-style sausage and bacon breakfast and wears his gun on a hip holster like a cowboy. They make him run about a bit but his role (like his American accent) seems to have a weird style over substance for much of the narrative. It's almost as if the writers are having a bit of snide fun with his character.
It feels like there was an awkward plot point that needed to be included and then the producers decide to do some stunt casting to appeal to the Brits. It is shame, because I thought Freeman did a decent job playing that out-of-control character in the Fargo I series a while back.
And unlike True Detective, Goliath or even Mr Robot, the Miami sense of place is far less evident. Sure they signpost a few locations from a rooftop and clip in some iffy over-saturated postcard style film, but it doesn't have that intimacy of place of a really good American crime series.
I won't give away plot points except to say that even some of the more dramatic events feel as if they have been filmed after rote-learning some camera angles. A decent Coen Brothers or similar would have found more twists.
Even the other central plot around computer software is left indistinct (compared with the precision in Mr Robot). Kind of "Here comes the science part".
And, I know, Freeman is not being Dr Watson, but some of the things he does as a cop wouldn't stand up very well to modern policing detection methods.
To my analysis, the main storyline almost stands up without the whole Freeman line, except for the need of an obvious point to create the tension in the story driven by the other three very complementary actors. There's large chunks with them doing their startup fundraising and playing off against other recognisable American actors who actually do hold attention. Indeed the pacing of the three American lead actors is completely different from the slowed down moodiness and long gazes of Freeman's scenes. Kind of we've paid for him, let's give him screen time.
I'm about half way through this and will watch the rest, but I can't help thinking that with a potentially strong premise this could have been so much better.
I took a look at that UK Supreme Court Judgment when it was produced a couple of days ago.
To be honest, I found its 96 pages of legalese pretty hard to decipher, what with it lacking an executive summary, bottom line or similar section. Buried in clause 124 on page 36 of 96 was the bit that said that Parliament must take a vote on the triggering of Article 50. Roughly what the House of Lords report said last September in a third of the pages.
I found the whole Supreme Court thing couched in CYA-speak, so that it was difficult to pin anything directly on anyone, and it took a separate Press Release to explain the outcome to the mortals of the real world.
Then today, I noticed the 67 words of preamble and 50 words of the today's hastily assembled Article 50 trigger Bill and then 16 words describing a short title for the Bill. 133 words for the entire trigger. It's not the shortest bill ever (that is the Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act 1918)
Like those recent Executive Orders in the USA, we seem to be able to dispense a particularly "lite" form of bureaucracy when it suits.
The 50 main words of the Bill affect legislation from at least 1993-2017. Whilst numbers are not available for that whole period, up to 2014 there were 945 Acts of Parliament of which 231 implemented EU obligations, plus a further 33,160 statutory instruments including 4,283 EU obligations. Quite a bundle to begin to repurpose with those 50 words.
I wonder if we will see the stages of First Reading, Second Reading, Committee Stage and Third Reading in the Commons and then input by the Lords? and then a Royal Assent? All before the end of March and with Parliament due for a recess in a few days.
After the Trump administration told the US Environment Protection Agency to shut up, I thought it was time to have a peek at what they are doing. It appears to be quite fascinating long term research which provides all manner of indicators about climate change.
There's a superb climate change report available from their web-site, at least until the on-boarding of their new digital strategist decrees whether or not it will still be available.
In the shorter term they have been forbidden from press releases, no blogging, reduction of webinars, no new content to be released and more. I suppose they need to be consistent with Trump's viewpoint on climate change, which may require some further adjustments somewhere.
I decided to take a look at the section about bird migration. Birds are supposed to be descendants of dinosaurs, which learned how to survive by small size and use of flight. It has seen them do pretty well for the last two hundred million years or so, as they scaled back from the velociraptor and adapted to the use of feathers. This little Scientific American graphic illustrates the story.
So when the centre of abundance for multiple species of birds moves northward over 40 miles during the last 50 years, it suggests that things must be getting warmer. And some of the species (about 48) have moved northwards by around 200 miles. Here's a little graphic from the EPA report.
Of course, if the birds are among nature's survivors then another interesting chart would be one that covered the effect of whatever is happening on human health. That gets covered in the report as well, along with one of those cause effect graphics, to show some of the main interdependencies.
But I'm wondering if this well-produced report, reviewed by plenty of industry experts, is about to be given the heave-ho? It doesn't seem to support the direction of some of the new administration's executive orders, so perhaps the new digital strategist will be making some adjustments?
Perhaps we will be told?
Update: I was going to post this tomorrow, but have brought it forward because the Trump Administration has now asked the EPA to remove its climate change section.
I've been watching that Goliath series on box-set over the last few days whilst I try to get my cycling legs working again.
I suppose the show would be classed as a legal procedural and is about a big business doing something that may not be entirely law-abiding. I suspect they used the entire effects budget in the first scene.
The neo-noir show has Billy Bob Thornton as the lead character playing a broken hotshot lawyer who now lives in a motel in Santa Monica. There's several plot points that many of these legally derived shows have in common. In Better Call Saul, (the Bob Odenkirk show) there's an ex partner lawyer who has had a breakdown and now lives in a darkened room with an annoying aversion to electricity.
Check. In this show we get Thornton as the busted ex-partner and remarkably William Hurt as the melodramatic still-in-place partner with a sooo annoying habit who, yes, lives in a darkened office at the top of his tower block.
There's the Grisham/Badalucci-esque spirited female assistants on hand to help Thornton with the case, most of whom seem to work for nothing. Then there's Thornton's broken marriage, savvy teen daughter and ex-wife with a new lover who works for the opposing council.
The thing is, formulaic as it may be, I'm enjoying the show. Thornton's switches from slightly drunk to razor-sharp in the courtroom. The stealth of the big business trying to quash investigations. The brown lighting of Thornton's world to the sterile glass cubes within glass cubes where the Goliath action plays out.
And behind it all is a very good sense of coastal Los Angeles. It was genius to give Thornton a beaten up convertible (red Mustang, of course), because when he drives around you see so much more of the neighbourhood. Even I could recognise real streets and areas from my own experience so there was that quiet 'been there' thought through some parts of it.
I've still about three episodes left to watch, but with Thornton's understated play of the dialogue and great ensemble casting, this is really quite entertaining. I'd even watch another series, if they ever made it.
