Welcome.

I fancied a bit of a change and decided to give WordPress a whirl. There wasn’t anything wrong with Moveable Type, it’s a great platform but WordPress has matured into quite a nice little application.

I’ll be tweaking this template a little over the next few days when I get some more time, so don’t despair at the stock header image just yet.

Umberto Eco once said: “I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.”

He makes a good point. A lot that passes as life doesn’t make sense and is rarely fair. We all have to face difficulties and make decisions that we don’t want to make. We somehow get by and face another day.

Life does not define you, it’s the way that you react to it that does.

Imagine, if you will, that you’re happily married with a son. Imagine that you’re hitting a career high. Imagine that you’ve been diagnosed with cancer and have six to twelve months to live. How would you react to that?

For me, that’s not something I have to face and I hope it’s something you never have to face.

I stumbled across Brian’s blog recently and have found it a bittersweet insight into how one copes with an awful and unavoidable truth. Less a depressing liturgy and more a philosophical awakening.

Read it and try to learn from Brian’s experiences.

“He who has a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

Back in 1999 a little known Scottish group called Travis released their second album “The Man Who” (produced by Radiohead’s long term producer Nigel Godrich) and virtually changed the face of Indie music overnight.

I fell in love with the album’s clangy and bittersweet reflection and played it for months. It was such a landmark album that it inspired another fledgling band by the name of Coldplay. It turned Travis into a huge international success.

Their 2001 follow up album “The Invisible Band” was a change of direction. Their melancholy was replaced with bouncy pop and never hit the same high. 2003s “12 Memories” was a dark, politically driven hodgepodge of ideas and concepts which fell a little flat.

There were rumours of them splitting and I figured that was that.

I figured wrong. It’s been four years, but they’re most definitely back and they’re back with a handful of stunning songs with their album “The Boy With No Name”. The titular boy being Fran’s newly born son who he referred to as “The boy with no name” while he and partner Nora deliberated over his name.

Their first single “Closer” was released on Monday and it’s a true return to form. It’s more mature, more confident but it is of the same pedigree as “The Man Who”. Check out the video which features a cameo by long term friend of the band, Ben Stiller.

The album is out on the 7th May and I can’t wait.

I came across this via a topic Rikki posted on our company forums.

Kiva is a website that allows one to invest in companies located in developing parts of the world. In a nutshell, you offer an interest free micro-loan (from $25 upwards) to pre-vetted companies registered with the website. When the company has enough lenders, they are given the money with a view to paying it back.

Personally, I think this is a break-out idea that can have a real impact on poverty in developing countries. Small donations to large organizations can be frittered away and make little impact into helping the cause they support but loaning money directly to people trying to start up or expand their small businesses will really help.

Selfishly, it also makes one feel good knowing that you’ve helped a small business and you may even get your money back to withdraw or re-invest. So far Kiva has a 100% repayment rate although you should accept that you may not get your money back.

I’ve invested in a few business and you can see my profile here.

Registration is quick and easy. All payments are done via PayPal who have generously waived all fees so Kiva can pass on 100% of the loan.

Brilliant.

In no particular order:

Six Days at the Bottom of the Ocean – from The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place by Explosions in the Sky.
Antichrist Television Blues – from Neon Bible by The Arcade Fire
I Can’t Feel My Hand Any More, It’s Alright, Sleep Tight – from Finally We Are One by Múm
A Wolf At The Door – from Hail to the Thief by Radiohead
Brick – from Whatever and Ever Amen by Ben Folds Five
We Haven’t Turned Around – from Liquid Skin by Gomez
Section 17 (Suitcase Calling) – from Together We’re Heavy by The Polyphonic Spree
Andvari – from Takk… by Sigur Ros
Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels) – from Funeral by The Arcade Fire
Ágætis byrjun – from Ágætis byrjun by Sigur Ros
Grace Under Pressure – from Cast Of Thousands by Elbow
Take Me Somewhere Nice – from Rock Action by Mogwai
Fjarskanistan – from Animamina – EP by Amina
In Church – from Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts by M83
Scattered Black And Whites – from Cast Of Thousands by Elbow

We (Debbie, Debbie’s sister Jacqueline and I) decided to take a trip to the cinema to watch “Premonition“. Although I’m not adverse to Sandra Bullocks admittedly aging ‘girl/woman/OAP-next-door’ charms, I wished we’d had a premonition and stayed at home.

Firstly, two things really stood out. Sandra Bullock’s nipples. Yes, her nipples were easily the best thing in the entire film. They stole every scene they were in. I wouldn’t be surprised if the DVD has an entire extra feature dedicated to them where veteran special effects guru Stan Winston goes into detail how he created them and the technical wizardry that went into remote controlling them. It should be noted that both nipples were never on show at the same time. Sometimes it was the left, sometimes the right. This may have been due to budget constraints. I guess we’ll learn more when the DVD comes out.

The rest of the budget may have been blown on Julian McMahon’s eye-brows. His overly plucked brows looked like two perfectly formed caterpillars sleeping snugly on his brow. It is as bizarre as his constant vest wearing in the film like some overly manicured lothario poncing for business.

Anyway. The film is based on the titular premonition Linda (Sandra Bullock) has which involves a one-on-one fight pitting her husband Jim (Julian McMahon) against a 400 tonne truck. He loses. She loses her mind. The end.

Well, not quite. You see, she appears to bounce around in time like an over-inflated space hopper in a plot that gets thinner by the minute and contains a few plot holes. We’re not talking about niggly little things your Star Trek obsessed friend would be too embarrassed to bring up at a convention, we’re talking huge cavernous holes that the entire story falls into and can’t climb out of.

Here goes nothing…

WEDNESDAY
It’s Wednesday. She takes her two girls to school. She’s putting cute bee stickers on the huge glass plated french doors in her house. She notices a message on her answer-phone. She plays it. It’s her husband. He blathers on about “meaning what he said in front of the girls”. She’s confused. ‘What could he possibly mean?’, she muses as she does her laundry.

There’s a knock at the door. The state trooper doesn’t ask to come in. Doesn’t offer to make her a cup of tea and doesn’t ask her to sit down. No sirree! He blurts out that her husband has DIED in a TERRIBLE CAR ACCIDENT. He then leaves her at the door as he whistles a nice tune on the way back to his squad car. OK. He wasn’t whistling but he clearly didn’t give a shit that Sandra Bullock has just been told that her old man has just bought, and moved into the farm.

It’s still Wednesday. She’s shocked. Who wouldn’t be. The policeman was plain rude. Her mother turns up. She takes a photo of their wedding day and curls up on the sofa for a nice little sleep.

SOME OTHER DAY THAT’S BEFORE WEDNESDAY
Linda wakes up and goes downstairs. Jim is downstairs eating Cheerios. Linda is confused. Is it a ghost? Has she gone mad? So relieved is she that her husband is still alive she barely mutters two words to him. The day continues. She puts out some washing on the line and falls into a dead bird. Honestly, don’t try and make sense of that – it’s pointless. She goes to bed and stares, like a crazy person, at her still-breathing husband.

SOME OTHER DAY THAT’S AFTER WEDNESDAY
Linda wakes up. There are blankets over all the mirrors. She notices crushed up lithium in the sink. She goes downstairs. It’s her husbands pre-funeral breakfast! He’s dead again! She’s confused. One of her children has horrific stitches over her face! Apparently the doctors decided to use black sutures and no dressings for amazing comical effect! How did she get those horrific injuries? I don’t know and neither does old Sandra who by now is flipping through the rest of the script in her trailer thinking why on EARTH did I sign up for this?

They go bravely to the funeral. Unfortunately for her, she chose the Chuckle-Brothers Funeral Home. She’s outside the church. The coffin is still in the car. She demands to see the body. The nice funeral-director lady tells her she can’t because her husband’s body isn’t too purdy. The Chuckle-Brothers unload the coffin and drop it! Yes, they drop it! In a hilarious black comedic moment the casket comes open and HIS UNATTACHED HEAD ROLLS OUT FOR NO REASON WHAT-SO-BLOODY-EVER! Sandra almost pukes, someone throws a coat over the head (boy, that’s gonna stain).
At the burial, she notices a blond woman half peering out from behind a tree like some kind of weird sexual pervert. She walks over and confronts her. Blond woman says they met the day before. ONLY SANDRA HASN’T. Yet. Possibly!

SOME OTHER DAY THAT’S BEFORE WEDNESDAY BUT AFTER THAT OTHER DAY I TALKED ABOUT
She wakes up. Jim is in the shower! He’s not dead again!
She goes to see the doctor who prescribed her the lithium. It’s whats-his-name-the-Russian-from-Armageddon. He blabs on a for a bit and tells her he’s never seen her before in his life.
Later in the day it starts to rain and Sandra tells her kids to help her get the washing in. One of the kids is too lazy to open the french doors and hurls herself through them cutting up her face on the smashed glass. AHA THAT’S HOW SHE GOT THE CUTS.
Jim meets her at the hospital and .. HANG ON A MOMENT. Jim is alive. Their daughter got all cut up. HEY! When Sandra told her kids that daddy has gone to play with the angels SHE DIDN’T HAVE ANY SCARS ON HER FACE! Didn’t anyone notice this when they read the script?

AUDIENCE STARTS LOSING THE WILL TO LIVE
This is where it gets really crazy. See, good films like “Memento” keep you guessing right up to the end. You’re there with the characters trying to figure out what’s going on. With this film it’s all I can do to stop myself from standing up shouting “Oh, what bullshit” before flouncing majestically from the cinema as I’m cheered by the rest of the audience for vocalizing their feelings.

Anyway. Sandra is now taken away by the men in white coats and sent packing to the looney bin where she’s held down and beaten repeatedly for allowing this travesty of a motion picture to be funded. The audience are miming every blow for wasting their money on this trite pile of crap.

This is never explained, by the way. She bounces around in time some more after this event but is NEVER AGAIN in the looney bin. It’s not justified anywhere in the rest of the film. The writer probably assumes most would have left the cinema by now and wouldn’t care.

Back to the film: Linda wakes up and Jim’s still alive. And quite honestly I can’t wait for him to die because I need to pee and I’m bored rigid. I’ve run out of Strawberry Starbursts and the lady next to me is eying up my pile of wrappers with disgust.

Sandra decides that the film is confusing everyone and makes a nice little chart of the week and completes all the events that have happened in an attempt to consolidate a plot which has totally crumbled into farce.

Apparently old Jim-boy was going to have an affair with the blond woman perving at the funeral. She’s his boss, we learn. It must be noted that he was only THINKING about it. They hadn’t actually done the horizontal mumbo at this point.
Sandra is now thinking “Hmm. If he did have the affair then perhaps it’s better that he died”. Her reasoning – and this was actually in the script “Well, imagine the pain it would have caused the girls!”.
Holy sweet Gingerbread-Jesus. Sandra Bullock’s character would rather have her daughters suffer the tragic pain of having their father BEHEADED IN A FATAL CAR ACCIDENT than learn that their daddy MAY have had an affair. What kind of sick bastard is she?

Anyway. She goes to see her Father. Not the man who helped conceive her, no – her priest. Father O’Stereotype. She explains that she needs help. I need to pee and get my money back. The lady next to me really needs to stop staring at my wrappers. Yes I really ate all of those – get over it.
Father O’Whatever has this book with all the pages he’s about to flick through marked with yellow post-it-notes. Why? Who cares. He goes on about people in the past having Premonitions – some were right, some were wrong. He injects some quasi-religious bullshit about “having to fight for what’s worth fighting for” whatever that’s supposed to mean. He says, and I quote this verbatim: “History is filled with unexplained phenomenon”, he then adds, helpfully “No one knows why”. BECAUSE THEY’RE UNEXPLAINED YOU IDIOT. Talk about over-egging the god-awful pudding.

Anyhoo. Sandra decides that allowing her husband to die really is a bit mean and decides to stop it from happening. She’s fighting for what is worth fighting for. Great. Just die already or I’m going to pee myself.

Jim is in his car. A rather sad looking Ford compact. He’s making a call. He gets his own answer-phone at home. He leaves a message. Aha! It’s the message that we hear at the beginning of the film – like anyone actually cares at this point. Linda is now behind him in her car. A huge 4×4 no-less. She probably has a bigger trailer than him too.
She gets him on the phone and tells him that she loves him. She gets him to pull over so they can “sort things out”. He does. She notices that he’s parked at the “220 Mile” marker which is where the accident happened.

Jesus. The audience didn’t need a premonition to see what’s going to happen next.

She looks scared. She tells Jim to turn the car around NOW DAMNIT. He does. He stalls it IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD. A panicked Linda tells him TO MOVE IT DAMNIT. He can’t start the car!
In the distance we see a 400 mega-tonne truck coming!
Cut to Linda “Get out of the car!”
Cut to Jim attempting to remember how the door handle works.
Cut to the truck, still some way off.
Cut to Linda screaming.
Cut to Jim attempting to open the door still.
Cut to the truck. Still quite far away it has to be said.
Cut to Linda screaming.
Cut to camcorder style footage of their wedding day.
Cut to the truck.
Cut to Jim.
Cut to Linda.
Cut to montage elements from the film showing Jim as a good dad.
Cut to the truck still miles away.
Cut to…
You know, this is THE longest car accident I’ve ever witnessed.
Cut to Linda crying.
Cut to Jim still struggling with the door.
Cut to the truck which now starts to jack-knife for no good reason.
Cut to Linda screaming.
Cut to Jim frantically scrabbling at the door handle.
Seriously, just hit the damned car already.
It does. There’s an explosion. Bits of Jim fly in all directions. I made that last bit up.

Linda looks shocked and confused and hurt. She caused this! Oh the irony. Oh, we didn’t see that twist coming.

She wakes up. She’s pregnant with Jim’s child. As if that makes it all better. The end. Thank god.

Have you seen the Red Nose Day t-shirts?

Am I the only one who wonders why the owner loves randomizing? Does that make me a geek?

After the Action4MensHealth 5k race on Sunday I spoke with a reporter with the local paper on the phone who were covering the event as they were interested in the connection between me, my father-in-law and his surgeon who is also involved in the Action4MensHealth charity.

They asked a few questions, I said a few things and they took my race number as they had a photographer at the race taking snaps. They said that if it was going to be used, it’d be in Tuesday’s edition.

So we go into the local supermarket and grab a copy today and flip it open to be greeted with my ugly mug on page 11.

Here’s a scan of the article.

I like the fact that my name and photograph is now synonymous with having cold genitals.

Yesterday was race day.

First off, I want to thank everyone who donated money and those who wished me luck.

I’ve been running for a few years now but nothing really prepares you for your first race – even one that is designed to raise money for charity and raise awareness of men’s health issues over ultra-competitiveness.

As Debbie and I pulled into the car park I suddenly wished that I’ve trained harder, ran more miles on the road as opposed to sticking to a treadmill. I surveyed the competition warming up and picked out the lycra-clad beanpole thin experienced runners, the over-branded tracksuit posers and the recreational runners.

I pinned my race number (10) to my t-shirt after signing in and went for a quick jog to warm up. Thankfully it was a really clear and crisp day in Peterborough’s picturesque Ferry Meadows with very little wind.

It wasn’t long before we were asked to move to the start line. I was a little further away that most of the runners and ended up near the back of the field. After some brief instruction on the course that I didn’t really catch the starter pistol went and we started moving forward slowly.

It took a little while to really get going by the time the field thinned out and I finally managed to start my heart rate monitor’s lap timer which was on one wrist with my Nike+ equipped iPod on the other to measure my pace.

I had to slow myself down a few times as I was well ahead of the 5:00min/km pace that I’d set myself. I found myself running quite happily at around 4:30min/km but I didn’t want to get half way round and collapse.

In retrospect I would have done a lot more road running. I do 6km four times a week (two sessions being 7.5/10mph HIIT) on a treadmill but it’s not really the same as running outdoors. I would actually say that I found it much easier to run outside if only because you’re not staring at a wall trying not to think about the fact that you’re putting one foot in front of the other for a long and relatively painful duration.

I moved through the field quite quickly. I found myself passing a few of those over-branded tracksuit posers with beanie hats and iPod arm bands panting hard and struggling by the 2km mark.

Passing confused dog walkers was quite fun. “Chilly Willy?” seemed to be their only statement on surveying our race numbers. Thankfully they kept out of the way as I didn’t fancy tumbling over an errant Spaniel.

I had settled into a nice comfortable pace with my heart pounding away at a reasonable 175bpm and I felt I could do it all day which was probably because I was coming up to the 4km marker.

With the finish line in sight I picked up the pace and sprinted past it. I was handed my race medal and ‘goody bag’ which contained a bottle of water which I opened immediately.

I felt that I could have definitely done it a lot faster as I didn’t feel that I’d pushed myself hard enough even though I was happy to have finished in one piece and able to stand. The race times are going to be posted on the charity’s website in a few days but I glanced at the official’s clipboard and saw my time at 26 minutes which wasn’t too bad as it took a few minutes to hit my stride. The fastest runner on the day completed it in just over 16 minutes which is amazing. Apparently the pace cyclist had trouble keeping up with him.

I was greeted at the finish line by Debbie, her sister Jacqueline complete with her three boys and Jacqueline and Debbie’s dad, Ken, who came with his partner Yvonne. They had all given me fantastic support and encouragement before the race which really set me up and I can’t thank them enough.

I won a prize for raising the most money so thank you once again everyone who donated.

Life has a neat way of connecting disparate elements into a single whole. The charity, Action4Mens Health which organized the race is led by Janine Nethercliffe and Chris Dawson both of whom are consultant urologists at a local hospital. Chris Dawson was the surgeon that operated on Ken and Yvonne now works with him at the hospital.

The race was very well organized and the marshals did a great job of cheering on the runners. Hopefully the race will grow and we’ll see more and more runners attend.

They are holding another race later in the year and I’ll definitely do it again. I can’t describe what a buzz you get from completing a race no matter how slow or how short the distance. If you don’t already run, get a pair of decent running shoes and sign up for a 5k – you really won’t regret it.

Teutonic Catherine Tate look-alike gives birth to brother’s children. When asked about the legal and moral implications, she merely replied with “Am I brothered?”.

“This couple are not harming anyone. It is discrimination. And besides, we must not forget that every child is so valuable,” said Dr Wilhelm.

Dr. Wilhelm is obviously thinking about the medical research possibilities.

Read the full article on the BBC website.

Thanks to Tom for the link and the pun.