Sistine Chapel of the Ice Age

I was browsing around the BBC News site yesterday and came across an article about Creswell Crags, a place just a few miles from where I grew up in England. The Crags is a relatively small limestone gorge with caves that were inhabited back in the last ice age and they contain the only examples of Palaeolithic cave art in the UK. The drawings have been dated at around 12,800 years old and while they are not as impressive as the ones to be found in France and Spain, they are the most northerly examples of this kind of thing. One of the researchers refers to a particular cave as the “Sistine Chapel of the Ice Age”. I like that. As I was growing up, I always thought that my local area was relatively unimpressive, but, as time went by, I discovered that it contains all sorts of wonderful things. We even have a crooked spire.

Life with Mum - Part 3

Today we, that’s mum and me, were reminiscing over one of our many cups of tea. She was talking about life back home in Staveley, particularly when she was a child. She was born in 1919, just after World War I, when things were just a little bit different. There were no cars then and she could still count the number of cars (four) and their owners that were in the town in her teenage years. Interestingly one of the earliest motorized vehicles was a mobile shop from the local Coop. This would come by their home every week and they would buy their groceries. Home delivery of groceries what a concept - kind of like WebVan over here during the dot Com boom days.
Mum lived in a thatched cottage, and while it had a water supply there was no electricity. Mum still has a pretty good memory and she remembers that the cottage was hooked up to electricity on the day that Edward VIII abdicated as king and went off to marry Mrs. Simpson. I guess both the electric power and the abdication were pretty big things in those days.

The bees have swarmed...

I suspect that my bees have swarmed and I have lost half the hive. A couple of weeks ago there was a lot of activity outside the hive. Now, there is activity, but just not as much as there was earlier.

That’s how the bee colonies multiply, while the queen keeps laying eggs and new workers and drones keep hatching out there is still just one colony. So every now and again, when the fancy takes them, the queen decides to swarm and off she goes out of the hive taking about half the colony with her. The other half stay behind and, this is the amazing thing, they realize that the queen has gone so they raise a new queen. Just by tending to one of the existing eggs a little differently, what would normally hatch to be a worker bee develops into a queen bee and the colony can continue. Quite amazing really – what was once a single colony becomes two.

So, by the reduced number of bees around my hive, I think that means that the bees have swarmed. While it is a good thing for the bees because they go forth and multiply, it is something that beekeepers do not like because honey production is slowed until the old colony’s numbers are built up again. I guess the professionals go to the extent of actually killing the queen before she can lead the swarm – they go into the hive, find the queen, pinch her head off (ouch) and then the remaining bees create a new queen and off they go again, but this time they have not lost half their members in a swarm.

I highly recommend bee-keeping, it’s a great little hobby, it doesn’t take much effort, and they are amazing creatures. It’s animal husbandry on a very small scale.

Cingular Wireless Woes

Not that I have too much to complain about, but one thing in my life that is annoying me lately is the poor treatment and poor service from my cell phone carrier, Cingular Wireless. Its not that I was quite happy with my old service with ATT; its not that Cingular bought out ATT Wireless; its not that I was thoughtless enough to get my old phone wet; its not that Cingular would not sell any new phones for the old ATT network thereby forcing me to buy a new phone for their network; its not that I had 14 months to run on my old ATT account and Cingular would only sell me a new 2 year contract; its not that the new service appears to be poorer voice quality; its mainly the fact that the new phone I purchased does not have the ability to save a telephone credit card. So whereas with my old phone, I could call England with about 2 button presses, now I have to resort to dialing an Access Number, an Account Number, a PIN number, the UK country code, and finally the UK telephone number. Could this be Cingular removing this functionality so that people would be more likely to use their more expensive service?

Anyway, that’s how miserable my life is right now. Cell phone calls to the UK are requiring too many key presses.

Walmart is No 8

I caught a brief snippet of Terri Gross’s interview with Tom Friedman the other day and they were talking about Walmart. Apparently Walmart is now so big and buys so much stuff from China that if it were to be a country it would be the eighth ranked trading partner of China. That’s pretty amazing for a little old company from Bentonville, Arkansas.

Life with Mum - Part 2

So we have reached the end of our first week together and all is going well, though mum has been a bit jet-lagged and sleeping a lot. Her mantra these days is a saying of her father’s – once a man and twice a child. Translated to the feminine gender that would be once a woman twice a child – but she never says that. She is well into that second childhood stage of her life now ands she is increasingly frustrated by how little she can actually do for herself.

We went out to eat tonight at Espanol – an age old restaurant in Sacramento. Despite the name, it is an Italian restaurant. It is way over the top with the quantity of food, but quality is perhaps not their strong suite. Looking around the restaurant, I saw so many tables like ours – an elderly parent, usually just one of them, with a 50 something son/daughter - or at least that is my interpretation. It’s the place to take your parents when the hip California cuisine doesn’t appeal anymore. The great thing about it is that there is so much food you come away with enough to feed you for the next day.

Tax Day - April 15

For all you non-American residents, today is April 15, a day know to every American as the deadline for filing their Income Tax returns and making good with the Government for all that they owe them. The Tax filing process is just way too complicated and the government should be ashamed of putting their residents through this – you should not need to hire an Accountant or be an Accountant or buy Software to do the job. It just doesn’t seem right to have to pay money to figure out how much you have to pay the Government. Here in California we also have a State Income Tax, so we have the privilege of filling out two sets of forms. I have long since stopped filling the forms out by hand (I took pride in doing this for so long), and I have been using tax software for the last few years.

I finished my forms on Thursday but waited until this evening to mail them. Since I owed the Government some money this was just fine – no point in giving it to them too early. Mum and I drove out to the main Post Office this evening to mail in the forms. I was not the only one who left it so late – the Post Office was quite the popular place – the police were out in force controlling traffic, the Post Office had people collecting envelopes from you as you drove by, the local TV stations were there, and cars were in line for a quarter mile or so.

Life with Mum - Part 1

I am back in Sacramento now, having brought my mother over with me for what will be an 8 week vacation for her. She is doing remarkably well for a now 86 year old woman. It is her birthday today and tonight we are celebrating with frozen Lasagne and Lemonade – it doesn’t get any better than that – not chez Steve anyway. This morning we had a birthday breakfast with a muffin with a candle in it.

I am a little paranoid about mum having an accident while she is over here. Over the past few years we have managed to make my mum’s house a safer place – changed the bath for a shower, got rid of all the superfluous mats and rugs that she could trip over, screwed handles to the walls to help her in and out of the doors, jacked up the sofa and chairs so she doesn’t have to bend down so low, provided her with an alarm system to wear around her neck, etc. Now she is in my “unsafe” house and I have to try and limit the dangers. We are going to raise the sofa on wooden blocks, we have taken away some of the rugs, but still this is not as safe a house as the one she left. It is kind of scary because there is plenty of opportunity for something to go wrong. However, on the whole I think she would sooner be here than at home, whatever the risks. We will just have to be very careful that’s all.

Prince Charles and Mugabe

The officials at the Vatican apparently sat HRH Prince Charles a couple of seats away from President Mugabe at the Pope’s funeral the other day. The world leader everyone loves to hate (even the Catholic Archbishop from Zimbabwe was against Mugabe attending) gets to sit a few seats away from Charles. Then at some point in the ceremony everyone gets to shake hands and Mugabe sticks his hand out to Charles and Charles accepts it.. So on the eve of his wedding, Charles handed Mugabe a bit of a public relations bonus and left everyone in the UK thinking that Charles shouldn’t be allowed out alone. Not to worry, he had a lot on his mind, what with the wedding and all. The seating plan was probably laid out by someone in the Vatican who still bears a grudge from Henry the Eighth's days and wanted to lead Charlie into a trap.

All this fuss about the Pope

So the Pope has been laid to rest today. It was quite a world event, wasn’t it? It was the “must attend” event of the year for world leaders – everybody from Hamid Kharzai to Tony Blair to a pair of Bushes and even the ostracized Robert Mugabe, who cannot visit the rest of Europe but can visit the independent Vatican City – apparently they are not so discriminating.

I must say it was refreshing to see the Guardian today with a Polly Toynbee article titled “The Vatican is a force for cruelty and hypocrisy”. At least one voice standing up to point out that the Catholic Church and the Pope have a less than perfect score on many concerns of the present day from the Church’s strict reaffirmation of abstinence versus contraception with all its consequences in a poverty stricken and AIDS-ridden Africa, to a serious failure to fully recognize the sexual conduct issues against priests in the USA. Ms Toynbee compares those paying homage to John Paul to those paying respects to Lenin – another leader that placed extreme ideology before human life and happiness. While I am sure the Pope was a nice fellow, even an exceptionally nice fellow, there’s probably something worth considering in all this, but it is something that is lost in this love-fest for the Pope.

The demise of the Smith's Arms

Last night I went out for a drink in what has always been the closest local pub to my home – The Smith’s Arms. It’s a sad place these days, but it has managed to hold on while the number of pubs in the UK has dramatically fallen. It is now being run by Bob Jacques, someone of my own age who I have known since I was quite young.

But I fear that the Smith’s Arms is not long for this world. Last night when we went in, we were the first customers in the Lounge bar and they had to turn the lights on for us. There were only 3 or 4 people in the other side, the Public Bar (for those Americans who don’t appreciate the difference - many English pubs have two areas – a Public Bar that is pretty basic and is definitely the workingman’s domain and a Lounge Bar that is slightly more salubrious and a more comfortable environment). One thing that doesn’t help with the Smith's Arms' business is the fact that Bob consistently serves pints that are short of the full measure. All glasses are marked with a pint mark and the metered pumps seem to serve up just a little less than a pint. That can’t be a wise move for a business that relies on repeat business from the local community.

The good news about the pubs in Staveley is that one of them, The Speedwell Inn, has been taken over by someone who brews his own beer on the premises and he does a good job of it. His business, Townes Brewery, seems to be doing well and he consistently wins awards for his beer from CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ale) folks.

Public Transportation

In California, I do not travel on public transport. I ride the few miles to work in my car each morning and I ride back home in the evening. It’s my own little environment heated or air conditioned to a pleasant temperature, with NPR on the radio, a cup of coffee in the cup holder – all is well in my private little world. However, every time I come to England I get to travel on public transport - the London Underground, the train to Chesterfield - and every time I do this, I realize what I am missing in my cocooned little life in Sacramento. It is good for us to brush up against the throngs of humanity from time to time and Public Transport allows us to do this.

I am not sure how I would feel about this if I were a regular public transport commuter. I would probably have a longing to get away from the seething masses. I am certain I would be desperate to get away from that annoying, and in my view, impolite intrusion of mobile phone calls into our communal public life. We just do not that affront on our senses and we just do not need to be privy to so much information about the personal lives of our fellow passengers.

I wonder what will happen when we get cell phone usage permitted on airlines. Will we have cell free seating zones on the plane – if so where will they be at the back or at the front? An argument for noise canceling headphones, which I have and which isolates me even more from my fellow travelers.

United Kingdom Bound

I am writing this in San Francisco airport on the way to the UK to pick up my mum. San Francisco International Terminal is a great terminal, quite spacious, very quiet at least whenever I go through it.

The wireless access is great though its only 802.11b, but it would be nice if there was one service you could sign up for and it would work in all situations. Here it is T Mobile, a few weeks ago in Denver it was ATT, you end up signing up for so many different services. What we need is multiple systems that are just ubiquitous and why on earth don't we have 802.11g.

It will be a very short trip and I will be back on Sunday, along with my mum - 86 and still traveling internationally, how about that!

Music Lessons

I have been taking guitar lessons for almost 2 years now. Half an hour, every week with Doug Pauly, a fine musician and an all around good guy. It would be fine but the playing is not getting a lot better, I am not naturally gifted in this area and everything comes very, very slowly and goes away very, very quickly. If a song doesn’t get practiced for a while then it’s gone.

So I was thinking of throwing it all in, stopping the lessons and just staying with what I have got up to this point. But then I decided to give it another try. I think there is evidence that playing a musical instrument might help stave off the ravages of senile dementia. Its just like my mum doing crosswords, it keeps the mind active. So for the foreseeable future or until I become too absent minded to remember anything I will stick with it.

The first post at Blogger

I have been playing around with a Blog hosted by Blogsome, who I think are an Irish company or group. It works well, but the performance sometimes is not so good and their support forums are very weak. So I thought I would try the big guys on the block, Blogger - now owned by Google, as they will no doubt be around for some time to come and they seem to have a feature rich environment.

I wonder if I can migrate my previous content to Blogger - I will have to look into that.

"Dead Wrong" Intelligence

It seems to me like there was this huge news story this week when the committee established to look into intelligence failure around WMDs and the Iraq war published their findings and - lo and behold - they found that the intelligence on Iraq and WMDs was “dead wrong”. So shouldn’t there be some sort of apology made, doesn’t this mean that we went to war for the “dead wrong” reason. Instead George W. welcomed the findings saying it was time to revamp the intelligence system. People have died and a significant amount of money has been frittered away for the wrong reason and no one says a thing.

It has all got buried in the news by the Terry Schiavo case and now the death of the Pope. Shame on us!

American River 50 Miler

Saturday was the American River 50 mile run from Sacramento to Auburn. It was the run that I was training for before I got sick with my extended cold/flu thing. So I bailed on the run some time ago, I just could not get back into shape in time. However, I did get to pace my buddy Chuck over that last 10 miles of the run from Rattlesnake Bar up to the finish in Auburn. This is a beautiful trail to run, along the North Fork of the American River and at this time of year, in the Spring, the wildflowers were out in all there splendor. The magazine Runners World has a rave run in each edition of their magazine, and this bit of trail upstream from Rattlesnake Bar has to be a candidate, it is spectacular, particularly this time of year.

So Chuck and Diane and Leslie and all the gang were doing very well and still running by mile 39 when I met them. They didn’t slow down too much either in the section up to Auburn, except for that last, oh so cruel, 3 miles uphill to the top of the canyon. The designers of this race certainly had a sense of humor when they made a 50 mile run go uphill – wouldn’t it be quite hard enough if it went in the downhill direction?

It was kind of bittersweet to be out there running only the last part of a run that I had worked so hard for. I guess there will always be next year – but the conditions were just perfect this year! Anyway congratulations to all - Chuck, Diane, Leslie, Marie, Karyn B, Karen T.

Downfall

I went to see the film Downfall this week. It's the German film about the last days of Hitler. It has been receiving some criticism for presenting Hitler in a too human and sympathetic light. He is seen in casual settings with his secretary, or sitting surrounded by the Goebbel's children, or petting his Alsatian dog, etc. I guess there was a feeling that showing him this way might strengthen the cause of current day Nazi sympathisers. I don’t think so. While it does show him at times in normal almost familial settings, for the most of the time he is delusional marshalling non-existent armies to rescue him in Berlin and ranting about the failures of his Generals and the German People. There is a chilling scene where Frau Goebbels methodically poisons each of her 5 children just so they don’t grow up in a world without National Socialism.

Interestingly when you Google Hitler and Downfall you get a lot of stuff about this film and then you also get Hitler, My Part in his Downfall by Spike Milligan. A very funny book about Spike Milligan’s escapades in the Second World War which I bought when I was in my teens and which I still have on my bookshelf. Spike Milligan was one of the Goons, and in my view one of the funniest people in British Comedy (and you know we have a lot of funny people in British Comedy). I had forgotten that he died back in 2002. He is responsible for such lines as:

- Money can't buy friends, but it can get you a better class of enemy.
- Chopsticks are one of the reasons the Chinese never invented custard.
- Contraceptives should be used on every conceivable occasion.
- All I ask is the chance to prove that money can't make me happy