mellow yellow

I've been sitting enjoying company with friends in a restaurant in central Milan this evening. Five of us bundled into an impossibly small taxi on the way to the restaurant and then met two more at the venue.

We talked about politics in Italy, and their wish to somehow increase the number of women in Italian political parties. I couldn't help thinking of Ilona Staller (Cicciolina), who made her name in another way before moving into politics.

Then at some point we moved onto James Bond, and like most people I feel as if I've seen the film, although its still on my 'to do' list.

The Saffron risotto and local red wine were both excellent.

Magician

I was in Babylon at the Kensington Roof Gardens today and suitably impressed by a table magician who converted one of my banknotes (A Scottish £20 note) into 100 Euros. Then he moved a ring from a pocket to a packet of cigarettes and then he mind-read correctly the card I was thinking. All great fun and delivered in an amusing way.

Always good to have a little magic.

polonium

So Alexander Litvinenko, ex-KGB agent is alleged to have been poisoned in a London sushi restaurant with ingested powdered radioactive Polonium 210. The former spy blamed Putin in his death-bed statement.

Litvinenko had two meetings in central London on 1 November, in Piccadilly at the sushi bar and also in Mayfair. Scotland Yard is now investigating.

There appear to be several possible trails. It is thought that Litvinenko made an enemy of the Russian security service (FSB), accusing it of many abuses, including the bombing of a block of Chechen flats in 1999, killing 300 people. He also said he was also told to kidnap a prominent Chechen businessman based in Moscow to trade for Russian intelligence officers taken hostage by Chechens.

In 1997, Litvinenko said his FSB department had become responsible for so-called 'extralegal executions' of unsuitable businessmen, politicians and other public figures and there were also blackmail suggestions linked with this.

In 1998, he publicly accused his superiors of ordering him to kill Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky, who was living in exile in London. Litvinenko spent nine months in jail from 1999 on charges of abuse of office. He was later acquitted and moved to Britain, which granted him asylum in 2000.

The most recent connection of Litvinenko is with Anna Politkovskaya who was herself recently killed in the process of searching for murderers within the Russian bank system. There is speculation she had discovered ex KGB people involved in contract killings and told Livinenko what was happening.

This story is top news in Britain at the moment, although the above storylines suggest its a more commonplace situation within Moscow circles.

I wanted to know where one gets hold of the rare alpha particle emitting Polonium-210.

Easy, if you are an American It costs $69 from a store on the internet.

Need corroboration? check this out

Tag: rashbre, polonium, litvinenko, russian spy, KGB, London

Time sink

My remaining PC tower system is behaving erratically. I don't use it so much nowadays and do most of my 'non work' computing on a Mac. So I hevn't been making many (any) software changes to the PC for ages except for the automatic updates, yet it seems to be slowly deteriorating of its own accord. It has all the fancy firewalls, virus checkers and so forth, yet now it seems very slow to do anything, has long periods of disk access for no apparent reason and some of the dialogue boxes are popping up without any messages inside.

I think the technical term is broken.

I do also run Windows on a laptop and also on my iMac. The iMac actually runs Windows Vista, in a 'window' in the main Mac session, much like starting a browser when I want to use Windows. I do this with some software called Parallels, which I mentioned here some months ago.

Anyway I suspect it will take me a whole day if I want to re-install everything, which is, I suppose, the looming task.

UPDATE: Just after I posted this, I visited debra's site and she has posted the Blue Screen of Death Screensaver for Windows, which simulates a disasterous Windows failure of varying types. Its here

orphans

Orphans is described by Tom Waits as a dead end kid driving a coffin with big tires across the Ohio River whilst wearing welding goggles. Wait's unmistakable voice is used to chug, stomp, weep, whisper, moan, wheeze, scat, blurt, rage, whine, and seduce. Ribot's guitar and the clanking, jangling, grooved accompaniment evoke smokey bars and the wrong part of town. The brawling, bawling, bastard words are straining to leave the pages of the accompanying song book.

Waits wanted the record to be like emptying pockets on the table after an evening of gambling, burglary, and cow tipping. A homemade doll with tinsel for hair and seashells for ears stuffed with candy and money. Or a good woman’s purse containing a Swiss army knife and a snake bite kit.

On Orphans there's a mambo about a convict who breaks out of jail with a fishbone, a gospel train song, a delta blues about a disturbing neighbor, a spoken piece about being struck by lightning, a Scottish madrigal about murderous sibling rivalry and an American backwoods a cappella about a hanging.

Thats just a grimy nailed, diesel oil stained handful of the 54 tracks.

I will be singing and dancing to this strange cacophony.

duh bells, duh bells

For reasons I shall not attempt to explain, the doorbell isn't working at the moment. It was, however, slightly irritating to pick up the mail this morning and to also see a little card from a delivery firm who had tiptoed to deliver something but claim didn't get an answer.

Well, what ever it was will be available from the depot 12 miles away from 18:30 this evening. I really need to get the door bell winched back into position.

Thanksgiving Thursday Thirteen at Alice's Restaurant

We don't have Thanksgiving here in the U.K., but best wishes for those who do celebrate today's neighbourly and family occasion. Here's a relevant Thursday Thirteen:

1) We don't get any equivalent time off here in England, except at Christmas, with Christmas Day and Boxing Day.
2) The Macy's Parade is well known here, probably also because of its appearance in several films.
3) The whole Pilgrim celebration also probably originates back to the UK Harvest Festivals, but in England that is back in September
4) Washington seemed to get interested in making Thanksgiving a Holiday after trouncing the Brits at Saratoga.
5) How do they choose which of the three turkeys presented to the President will survive? Thats the one that gets all of the press.
6) Some people like to listen to Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant on Thanksgiving. I kinda know why. Oh okay, here's an interview with Arlo and the whole 18 minute song. Song from 14:30 in the realplayer stream.
7) The native Americans seemed to have a celebration already called Keepunumuk going back many many years.
8 ) Thanksgiving also seems nowadays to be major sporting occasion.
9) The day after Thanksgiving holiday (Black Friday) appears to be the largest shopping day in the American year
10) The original feast was crow. This later changed to turkey. When there wasn't enough turkey the saying was 'let them eat crow'.
11) The USDA say that America consumes around 260 million turkeys per year averaging around 14 lbs, of which a decent ptoportion is consumed during Thanksgiving. That's around one turkey for everyone in the United States.
12) Luckily the Puritans brought a drink to America in the Mayflower. Beer.
13) Every long standing successful American TV series has a Thanksgiving episode.

all i wanna do is have some yams

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Tag: Thursday Thirteen, free link friday, 82ask, Alices Restaurant, thanksgiving

London Town

A new distraction for we Londoners, the new mapmylondon site to add stories and photos of London to a map. I can't resist this one and will find a few snaps and moments to add straight away!

Tag: rashbre, mapmylondon, london, map, england, unitedkingdom

OTA Wordless Wednesday

tonight, waiting for the train

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Tag: Wordless Wednesday

my other car is a pynchon novel

The first Pynchon novel I ever read was Gravity's Rainbow, and I was hooked from the moment it came screaming across the sky. Pynchon had a way to describe a scene from the point of view of the people 'in their time' and to flick between narrative and acquired first person like an internal film camera shooting multiple points of view. This creates a strange other world sense in the reader who at some points is confounded and at other times seems to know much more than the characters about what is going on.

Pynchon's writing style is not for everyone though, using oblique references and distractions as well as a sometimes warped sense of humour. I'll admit that I just let some parts wash over me and don't get too hung up if I don't know exactly the doctrine of a narodnik, or the calculus of a cathedral dome, as long as I can keep the general flow going.

But the sense of place, people, perspective, debate, discourse and psychology in the London wartime novel was intense. I can still visualise the browns, the darkened windows, the nighttime and the sometimes almost claustrophobic interaction of some of the characters juxtaposed with arcs from mainland Europe to England as rockets traced their course through the sky. Yet it is an age since I read the book.

When I read Vineland years later, I had a sense of 'is this the same author?' based upon the different style and genre with set in a surfy hippy America. It seemed difficult to imagine the same person creating both of these works, although the style and clever ways to detach from what is happening seem to occur in both novels.

The tangential points within both novels are in some senses very realistic in the way that people who are very comfortable with one anothers' company will digress into all kinds of conversations or dive into their own subconscious and memories.
So with some delight today I heard that Pynchon has just released a new novel. Now I heard this in a discussion where one person was saying that Pynchon was difficult to read and the other person was saying that people only buy his books for show.

But I don't care, I will be adding the new one "Against the Day" to my Christmas List, and hope that Santa is kind.

rashbreのユーザーページ - last.fm

のためのLast.fm統計ページ Last.fm： あなたの音楽のセンスを調べ尽くして、似たセンスのユーザーを見つけ、おすすめの音楽を提供する無料のサービス。
Yes, rashbre is now also available in Japanese on last.fm here

flash hug

Well the British Flash Hug on Friday at 13:14pm in Trafalgar Square was then followed by the Flash Pillow Fight in Buenos Aires. For the British one you just needed a sheet of A4 paper with 'Free Hugs' written in bold.

For the Argentinian one, you needed to bring a pillow.