On Saturday we went to Hebden Bridge to celebrate Sally's birthday. It is a nice place and has the distinction of having move lesbians per square foot than any other town in the UK.
While there I asked Sally to marry me, and thankfully she said yes.
Also thankfully, this took her mind off the fact that I hadn't got round to buying her a birthday present.
Residents of the Swedish village of Fjuckby are campaigning for their community to be given a new name.
They complain globalisation has led to rude English-language associations making them an international laughing stock.
But they are also embarrassed that the Swedish word 'juck' means the same thing, reports The Local.
"There should not be any doubt at all that, as a result of relatively new associations, the pronunciation and spelling of the place name 'Fjuckby', today arouses ridicule, teasing and hilarity in the general public," wrote inhabitant Katriina Flensburg on behalf of her fellow villagers.
"This regrettable fact engenders feelings of weariness, embarrassment and conditioned shame among villagers, who are often forced against their will to take a tiresome 'defensive stance' with regard to the name of their home town."
The villagers add that the name Fjuckby makes it difficult to sell property or run a successful business, and call for an immediate name change.
The delegation requests that the name Fjukeby be reinstated. Until as late as the 1930s this was the accepted spelling .
The Local speculates that if Fjuckby gets its way, similar campaigns may be launched in Anusviken, Arslet and Dicken.
[from ananova]
NEW YORK: By day Sandra Martinez works at a New York law firm, but by night she throws off her conservative image and becomes "Sandra Claws" – an amateur female Jell-O wrestler.
At a grungy live music bar on New York's Lower East Side, she joined 11 other women to do battle – several for the first time – in a blue, blow-up kiddie pool decorated with orange fish and filled with warm, clear clumps of an unflavoured version of the gelatin dessert.
"It (lets us do) things we probably want to do to women sometimes that we dislike, but we have a forum where we can express it in a fun and safe way," said Martinez, a 27-year-old business development specialist.
Her competitors, with day jobs including nanny and marketing manager, introduce each other by stage names – Tinsel the Bohemian Christmas Fairy, Parcel of Power, Chocolate Thunder and Backhand Betty.
"The show is done for the girls, put together by girls, as something that's a fun, friendly competition," said Dana Sterling, 31, who has organised the "Amateur Female Jello Wrestling" competition once a month for the last three years.
"It's really hard to explain to my mother," said Sterling, who by day works as a lighting designer. "It really is a sport, it's a satire sport."
Wearing a glittering gold swimsuit, black satin ruffle skirt and white curly wig, Herricane – who by day is 33-year-old marketing manager Mickie King – takes to the stage punching the air, shouting: "I'm ready, I have got wind, I'm ready."
The crowd gathers around the pool, which sits on top of four old mattresses roped together. Jell-O flecks the audience as the fighters roll around, attempting to pin each other to the ground for three seconds.
Several competing women said the concept of female Jell-O wrestling conjured an image of sleazy men watching naked women roll around, but that Sterling's event was far from that.
"We work hard to promote it as a feminist thing and the night is really like a community night in that it is really what the women make of it," said Annie Rock, 26, one of the organisers.
"It's definitely aggression release. It's sexy as well, throwing women around in Jell-O," King said.
To get male fans into what she called the "silly" mood of the evening, Sterling gets a few men up on stage for a hoola hoop competition. She also skews the door price so that women pay $US3 entry, men accompanied by women pay $US7 ($NZ10.30) and men on their own pay $US15.
[snarfed from stuff.co.nz]
I have finally got around to sorting out my safari photos, and they can be found over here at flickr.
The Gomo Gomo Lodge is in the private Timbavati reserve which borders the Kruger National Park. There is no fence between the two so they share the same population of animals.
We were there two nights and one day and the daily routine was:
- Up at 5.30
- Game drive 6.15 (3 hrs)
- Breakfast 9.30
- Bush walk 11.00
- Lunch 13.00
- Game drive 15.30 (3hrs)
- Dinner 19.30
Which was pretty exhausting and didn't leave much time for anything else. You wouldn't want to spend you entire holiday there - three days and nights would be plenty, and our stay there was a little too short.
The game drives are what it was all about - up to nine people in a Land Rover on raised seating with a Ranger (Arend) and a tracker (Oscar). The drives either started in dark and ended in daylight or vice versa and the ranger did his best to find the animals we requested and threw in a few surprises.
What I wasn't expecting was how the animals totally ignored the vehicles. My photos are with a regular 3x zoom digital camera and are mostly uncropped, so you get the idea how close we got.
The highlights were the lions, more on which in another post, and the elephants.
I was desperate to see a leopard and we spend almost all of our last 3 hour drive tracking one, never to actually see it. At least they said they were tracking one - all those footprints look the same to me.
As a first safari experience Gomo Gomo was ideal, and now I am hooked and can't wait to return to Kruger.
My second stop in Swaziland - the Phophonyane Falls.
The rocks here are amongst the old ever recorded at 3.5 billion years. If you are a creationist please replace the last sentence with 'The rocks here are 10,000 years old just like every other rock on the planet.'
My first ever safari - self-driven around the Mlilwane Nature Reserve in Swaziland.
I'm not sure what I was expecting, but I certainly wasn't expecting the wildlife completely be so unafraid of people.
No elephants or lions on this reserve, but plenty of Warthogs, 20 flavours of antelope, and the ever popular disco donkey.
We also saw a massive crocodile sleeping on an island which was bad in terms of getting a usable photo, but good in terms of not being terrified.
How you arrive in a place has a significant impact on your first impressions.
I have never visited New York, but when I do I want to arrive by boat, just like the immigrants did. It would give a true sense of arrival.
As an aside, whenever I mention to an American that I have never visited New York, they look at me like I have just shat on the floor. What is the big deal? Just another city full of Americans, like Vegas and Baghdad.
Anyway, we arrived in Swaziland by road from Johannesburg - a five hour drive. Intially flat plains with brown savannah grass and a truly enormous sky. Later on it gave way to the spectacular Drakensberg mountains, and with the sun struggling to stay above the peaks, we crossed into Swaziland. It was something about that climb to a mountain pass border post that gave a sense of effort and reward.
Swaziland is both poor and impoverished. It has the world's lowest life expectancy, at 32.6 years, unemployment is 40% and the adult HIV infection rate is 38%. And yet it doesn't seem like that - the welcome was very friendly everywhere, and there was a sense of optimism, of people trying to make the best of a bum deal. Of course, we only saw the more commercial elements - Mantenga Lodge, Mlilwane Nature Reserve and Phophonyane Falls Lodge - but all were delightful and our road trips were picturesque as any I have taken.
It also has more jaywalking cows than you will see anywhere outside of India. Even the motorway had cows wandering along it looking for a particularly choice piece of grass.
Swaziland is a tiny country (the smallest in Africa and only a little bigger than Connecticutt), and we were there two nights and one day, which is probably 24 hours less than would have been ideal. I will definitely visit again next time I am in eastern South Africa.
More on the nature reserve once I have sorted through my photos.
I spent the weekend in Exeter, which is an interesting town.
The hotel I stayed in is a converted eye infirmary dating back to Victorian times. There are a couple of other eye clinics in the town, and I am wondering if Exeter is the blind person's equivalent of the elephants' graveyard.
"Dragged ever onward by a loyal labrador, the occularly dysfunctional can find refuge in the ancient City of Exeter, and allow their blind gaze to fall on the beautiful cathedral which was founded in 1050."
After two exceptionally strong cocktails on Saturday night I concluded that it wasn't that the blind came to Exeter but that the perfectly sighted came here then lost their sight. Not that I am perfectly sighted, but I don't usually need guiding to the dinner table.
We also visited Bickleigh to see the bridge that was supposedly the inspiration for Simon & Garfunkel to write 'Bridge Over Troubled Water'. The water wasn't too troubled, but maybe it is carrying its worries well.
The next three days are going to be ugly with much number crunching and business modelling to be done ahead of a presentation on Wednesday evening.
But before the deluge, a tour of New College, Oxford. It isn't all that new, being established in 1379, and it looks stunning.
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned in a post that Bourton-on-the-Water did not have their Christmas lights turned on by a celebrity.
I have learned that this was incorrect.
Last Friday, in heavy rain, and in front of a crowd of literally dozens, the Bourton Christmas lights were turned on by Elton Wellesby. Don't bother asking - even Elton's mother doesn't know he is a celebrity. Had I been there I am sure I could have overheard Mrs Wellesby saying, "Elton, get down from there, the celebrity will be along in a minute."
Credit to Bourton for trying though. And credit to Bourton for describing itself as 'the Venice of the Cotswolds.' I very very nearly wet myself when I learned this. Gondolas is what I am thinking. Canals, boat traffic jams, handsome men, sexy women is what I am thinking. Art that captures the breath, conspicuous wealth and conspicuous poverty, Shakespeare and Shylock is what I am thinking. Architecture, pigeons, pizzas, piazzas, decent coffee, James Bond and Dudley Moore is what I am thinking.
I am not thinking Bourton. But what the hell, the glass is always half full, so bring on the gondolas and a frozen pizza and lets make a go of this thing!
I will try to make a daylight trip to Bourton next week to get some photos, and you can judge the likeness for yourselves.
Every country has a place like Norfolk, and wherever your Norfolk is, the directions to get there are the same:
Welcome to Norfolk.
The name derives from the Norse words Nar Fokk, meaning 'you have now entered a coma'.
What makes Norfork the nothing that it is, is the absense of landscape. As you head north from London the land levels out, until it reaches a point of perfect flatness - a point at which you enter Norfolk. It is as if a mighty God swept his hand across the land and pushed everything into the sea.
It takes hours to get to Norfolk, and when you get there you discover nothing. Their tourism slogan is 'Come to Norfolk. It's flat here.'
The top 10 industries are farming, the main language is yokel, the currency is pigs. Schoolchildren want to grow up to be farm labourers. The intelligent ones want to be vets.
As the landscape loses its features, so life loses its pace. No-one is in a hurry to get anywhere. Admittedly there is nowhere to go, but even the birds can't be bothered. There is no dawn chorus here. The birds wake up, and if they can't see a worm within a beak's reach they go back to sleep again.
There are many thousands of birds in Norfolk, and every single one of them is a crow. Humans all look the same too - average age, average height, a ruddy complexion and a slight stoop. The standard clothing of choice is a boiler suit and a pair of sturdy boots. And that's just the women.
All of which means that Norfolk is a truly wonderful place to be. Our very own Tranquility Base.
What Norfolk lacks are all the things that make London a suppurating boil on the face of England - traffic, greed, noise, selfishness, johnny-foreigner, dinner parties, pollution, balsamic vinegar and the permanent smell of piss.
In Norfolk's case, to have nothing is to have everything.
Last Sunday (and a very sunny Sunday it was) I visited the Sci-fi Museum in Seattle. It is near that space needle thing.
The museum is rounded off by some educational stuff about what sci-fi is all about and a hall of fame. Halls of fame are always good talking points, but I happy am those currently inducted and couldn't see any crimes of omission.
There was, naturally, an awful lot of Star Trek stuff there. While I have never been remotely interested in Star Trek it has been the bedrock of sci-fi for 40 years and it is hard to imagine that a sci-fi museum on such a scale would exist today had Kirk never set off on his five year mission.
I was somewhat surprised then, when reading this post, to discover that Star Trek is no longer running. I thought there were two or three current shows, a bit like the CSI franchise.
I don't really do TV and cinema. I will occasionally go to see a sci-fi movie if it is a book I particularly enjoyed, but otherwise my sci-fi enjoyment is solely through the printed page. Books give more scope for ideas, both in terms of social change and the hard science, and it is not easy to present such ideas in film form. Blade Runner would be a wonderful exception to that.
I ought to figure out my top 10 sci-fi novels sometime. There probably won't be many surprises in there - Asimov, Clark, Banks, Bester, Morgan, Reynolds, Simmons - the usual suspects plus a couple of newcomers.
I think this is my twelfth trip to Seattle and it is very likely my last ever. It is certainly my last free trip there and if I am paying to fly to the US I am not likely to choose Seattle as a destination. Not that there is much wrong with it, but I have a very long list of other places to visit first, plus my regular visits to Sunny Isles, Florida.
I will arrive back early on Friday morning, and after a nap will head into Slough for my last day at Amazon.co.uk.
It is a week of lasts.
I will be flying out via Vancouver and back via Toronto, both on the lovely Air Canada, which has always been quite kind to me with upgrades, so fingers crossed for a comfy seat. And I am armed with some quality reading - Roddy Doyle, Kate Atkinson, Howard Jacobson and Zadie Smith.
More on Seattle as the week unfolds.
I have been in Munich all week and it has not been pleasant. Although this is not entirely the fault of the city.
Jetlag was my initial malaise. Having coasted through the weekend, and thinking I had got off lightly, I have been waking up at irregular times all week.
That it is now five nights since I arrived back from Seattle leads me to think it might not be just jetlag. My reserve culprit is a haunted hotel room, albeit with a lack of direct evidence.
Whatever the cause of fatigue, my mood was worsened by horrendous weather on the first morning. It was just spotting with rain at the point where I decided to use a combination of public transport and Shanks' ponies to get to the office. How Zeus must have laughed heartily as the deluge, er, luged. My shoes are no longer squelching, but the bitterness remains.
And finally, my work this week is duller than a school assembly.
Still, I have a three day weekend to recover, and to reacquaint myself with the garden. Hacking and slashing will be in order methinks.
"Have you just flown in from Australia?"
No, I flew in from Miami, and I'm English anyway
This happens more often than it should, but the hotel dude then redeemed himself by apologising for the whole George Bush thing.
"Y'know we're sorry about that. Really sorry. I worked on the John Kerry campaign here in Seattle and we got 87% of the vote"
Well fuck dude, you shoulda been in Ohio or Florida.
87% though. If it's true, I'm impressed. Even in an enlightened city like Seattle there are going to be people who vote for Bush accidentally, or through mental illness.
It did occur to me that the floppy-haired hotel dude was a little too apologetic. Like he was hiding a dirty secret. Maybe he is the child of one of those toxic right-wing vixens that seem to be everywhere on television here. Or he has been blowing Rush Limbaugh.
*Shudder*
Denver, the mile-high city. I wonder whether living in a city that is a mile above sea-level automatically qualifies you for the mile-high club. If it does then thats 2.1 million people with something to smile about. Or most of them anyway. Add 8.6 million people in Mexico City too.
This is not a completely random musing, it is merely semi-random. I spent 30 minutes in Denver today, or 4 minutes if you exclude time spent inside aircraft. Not long, but long enough to run a mile.
I have now stepped on the soil (or polished floors) of six states - Florida, California, Washington, Illinois, Virginia and now Colorado. The latter three were in transit only, and I have not included them on my official list :-)
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