Last night I had to do a late(ish) night drive – a delivery from Herself to some friends who are testing out some of her cake recipes. (Don’t ask) They’re in a village the other side of Dereham from us, and a drive of about 20-ish miles. Not much, but enough. Because the roads are seriously winding, the AA route finder estimates that the journey takes 57 minutes. For 20 miles. No idea how they work that one out, it as it’d mean (hey, no shit Sherlock) an average speed of 20mph. Suffice to say, I wasn’t driving at 20mph…
Running late, Herself had said she’d be there by 10pm, and I didn’t leave the house ’til 9.45pm. I volunteered to do the drive/delivery, as I knew I’d be faster than Herself, but also that if Herself came with me I’d knock her sick, as she doesn’t travel well…
In the end the delivery was made at 10.10pm. 25 minutes to do 20miles. That’s quite a lot faster than the AA’s expectation then.
I love night-driving – in fact it’s probably one of my favourite aspects of driving. There are bits that are dodgy about it for sure- and night-driving in snow or fog is no fucking fun whatsoever. Well it is, just in different, and not entirely positive ways – it certainly highlights both how stupid other people are, and how easy it is to zomb out in those situations. But anyway, night-driving in general is just fun – in my opinion, anyway.
Strangely I tend to drive faster at night where possible – I think it’s because you can effectively see round corners a bit, in that you can see approaching headlights a significant time before you can see a car. In daylight you’re reliant on line-of-sight a lot more, but at night there’s a bit of advance warning. Of course, I could still come a cropper with animals in the road, or some twerd driving without lights, or a stopped car by the side of the road round a blind corner. Or something.
All told, I made it both ways in one hour dead – including conversation time at the delivery point. And thoroughly enjoyed the drive – particularly with it being soundtracked by the new Massive Attack album, “Heligoland”. Excellent stuff.
A few days ago I noticed that a certain hate-filled hypocritical shitrag had a big story about how shocking the latest Lady Gaga video is. And then goes on to have screenshots in the story of all the pieces of the video for Telephone that people should be shocked or offended by.
Anyway, now it’s time to make your own mind up, as the video for Telephone is available online. Choose for yourself, not based on what the hate-rag says.
The bowling night on Thursday was actually quite a lot of fun – helped by the fact our team won, but still, quite a laugh all round. I know, you lot never expected me to say something like that about a work-based social event. Truth be told, neither did I.
I do find bowling fascinating though. Any time I go, there’s always at least one lane of people with absolutely no fucking clue whatsoever about throwing a ball down the lane. Pretty much all the time, they’re in the lane next to one with at least one decent person playing – by which I mean someone who knows what they’re doing, and scores over about 125 or so in a game. Not perfect, but a damn sight better than the people next to them.
And yet those people with no clue never (and I do mean bloody never) take a look at the person next to them, and see if they can figure what they’re doing wrong/differently. It’s bizarre.
When I first went to bowling – admittedly, many moons ago now – I did exactly that. I watched some decent people and figured out most of it from there. It’s not difficult, just watch and learn. As a result, I’m not bad now, (I tend to average around 110 – 120 per game) pretty consistent in how I bowl, and if I went more regularly I’d probably be a lot better. (Which might be something to think about doing, I don’t know yet) There were other people on Thursday a lot better than me – and others a lot worse. So I’m probably somewhere in the midle.
But even there, the people who were really bad at it didn’t seem to want to figure out anything about how to improve it.
For me, I always want to learn, want to improve on what I’m doing if/when there’s someone around who’s far better at [activity X] than I am. Maybe that’s where I differ with a lot of people, I don’t know.
Two stories in the same day… [UPDATED : OK, as Andy C points out in the comments, they weren't on the same day, just one linked from the other, and I can't read...]
Number One : Jon Venables, one of the two who killed James Bulger, is taken back to prison “for breaching the terms of his licence”. People are surprised, one quote being
“He could have been recalled on licence if he committed an offence, it could be that he returned to Merseyside, it could be he might have approached the family. There is no evidence so far that he did any of these things.”
Number Two : Denise Fergus, the mother of James Bulger, tells how she found Robert Thompson, the other one who killed James Bulger, and stood within twenty feet of him, although she couldn’t confront him.
Mrs Fergus said it was now her aim to find Venables and track him down in the same way.
I wonder if there’s a connection? Particularly if the News of the World is in on the act/witchhunt…
Am I the only one that thinks both John Terry and Wayne Bridge need to grow the hell up?
To me – and I’ll be the first to admit I’m not a great team-player, and don’t give a tin shit about football in general – Bridge’s stepping down from the England team (and thus international football) is a self-destructive dummy-chuck of weapons-grade proportions.
And besides, why on earth does Bridge (and/or the media in general) think Bridge has got any fucking right whatsoever to throw a strop about who his ex-girlfriend decided to be with once they’d split up? Let alone do the full petted-lip and “taking my ball in” strop about it. In the same perspective, what right has Bridge got to throw a strop about who John Terry decides to shag?
I must have missed something relevant in this entire farce, because it seems to me that this is all the kind of thing that most people got over in secondary school.
Via Margo and Phiala I came across this story about literacy in Americans, which says that in America someone reading 4-9 books a year is classified as an ‘avid’ reader, and that 1 in 4 [American] people read no books at all. As Margo says, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen similar figures for reading / book buying habits here, too although I can’t currently find a link or evidence of it.
As with Margo, I can’t really recall a time in my life that didn’t have books. My parents read stories to me every night, and that’s where I started learning to read, by learning the patterns the words made and linking them to the sounds they made as my parents read them. I was more than able to read by the time I started school, and I’ve been reading ever since.
I don’t have anywhere near as many books as I used to – if I’d kept all of them over the years, I could probably stock a decent-sized library. Even so, I’ve probably got around four to five hundred books all told, and they’re all the ones I’ll go back to and read more than once. Additionally I’m a regular visitor to the local library – on Herself’s persuasion, admitterdly – but normally get through about 10-20 books a month just through that. If I see books I want to read now – particularly new ones or new authors – I try to get them through the library rather than buying them outright as an experiment, which is what I used to do.
I can hardly even imagine only reading even 9 books a year. I mean really? One book every six weeks? Jesus.
Just as a current example, this week I’ve read (or am currently reading)
And that’s a quiet/slow week where I’ve been doing a ton of work as well. Even so, that puts me near the top end of the American average book level for the year within a week. I don’t honestly know how many books I read a year – on that level, it must be a couple of hundred per year.
But more to the point, if that’s my reading level, and the average number of books read per year in the UK is (hey, let’s be charitable) 20 then that still means there’s a whole bundle of people at the other end of the scale who are reading maybe one book a year, or less. And to me that’s really quite scary.
Another month, another episode of Crimewatch.
What I don’t get with Crimewatch is how it gets away with
I dunno, maybe I’m just too cynical.
Amazingly, D4D™ now contains no less than 848,392 words.
D4D™ started on 9th August 2002, so it's been going 2781 days or roughly 7.61 years.
In that time, I've not posted on 186 days all told. Not bad.
