The Oxford English Dictionary came out with some interesting statistics this week. In English you have many more ways of insulting someone than praising them, and if you are a man you have more word choices for describing an attractive woman, than a woman has for describing a handsome man. There are apparently some 350 words in the dictionary that are insulting while there are only 40 words that could be considered complimentary. There are 50 words to describe an attractive woman and only 20 ways to describe a good looking man.
In the latter situation, I don’t think it is because there are so few good looking men around, I think it is that men are just more imaginative (out of desperation) when describing the female of the species, whilst women just couldn’t care less.
By the way, if you don't know what a chav is (I didn't but likely every UK resident does) , it is a "young lower-class person typified by brash and loutish behaviour and the wearing of [real or imitation] designer clothes".
Friday, August 12, 2005
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
Guy Fawkes' 400th Anniversary
There was an interesting article in The Guardian the other day – pointing out the similarities between Guy Fawkes and his 17th Century religious terrorists and the present day London bombers. A few details might have been stretched or omited to make a good story but the basic premise was that the Catholics were the Muslims of 1605.
So for example:
• Guy Fawkes (a Catholic) represented an extreme and minority fringe of the Catholic Church
• King James (a Church of England man) was proud of his tolerance of Catholicism (he was a multi-culturalist)
• Guy Fawkes like the present day bombers was British born, but went overseas for training.
• After the failed attack, King James authorized a bit of a crack down on the poor old Catholics and they were persecuted and shut out for quite a long time. In fact, the Catholics didn’t gain acceptance again until the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829. That's 200 years!
There are certainly some interesting comparisons here. Are there lessons to be learned? Surely we do not want to go down the same path towards isolation of the Muslims as we did with the Catholics in 1605.
What is also interesting is that this year is the 400 year anniversary of Guy Fawkes and his failed attack on the British Parliament. We seem to celebrate anniversaries at the drop of a hat these days, yet, this core part of every English child’s upbringing is hardly getting a mention on its 400th birthday. (For those Americans who don't know about this, on November 5th every year, the English celebrate Bonfire night with fireworks, a bonfire and the burning of an effigy of Guy Fawkes on top of the fire.)
I suppose it would be a little odd to make a big deal about this sort of event these days and I suppose, in a way, we do celebrate it every year on November 5th.
So for example:
• Guy Fawkes (a Catholic) represented an extreme and minority fringe of the Catholic Church
• King James (a Church of England man) was proud of his tolerance of Catholicism (he was a multi-culturalist)
• Guy Fawkes like the present day bombers was British born, but went overseas for training.
• After the failed attack, King James authorized a bit of a crack down on the poor old Catholics and they were persecuted and shut out for quite a long time. In fact, the Catholics didn’t gain acceptance again until the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829. That's 200 years!
There are certainly some interesting comparisons here. Are there lessons to be learned? Surely we do not want to go down the same path towards isolation of the Muslims as we did with the Catholics in 1605.
What is also interesting is that this year is the 400 year anniversary of Guy Fawkes and his failed attack on the British Parliament. We seem to celebrate anniversaries at the drop of a hat these days, yet, this core part of every English child’s upbringing is hardly getting a mention on its 400th birthday. (For those Americans who don't know about this, on November 5th every year, the English celebrate Bonfire night with fireworks, a bonfire and the burning of an effigy of Guy Fawkes on top of the fire.)
I suppose it would be a little odd to make a big deal about this sort of event these days and I suppose, in a way, we do celebrate it every year on November 5th.
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
An update from England...
I have been over in the UK for almost a week now and I am sort of settling in to the time change and the routine now. It has been a week of hospital visits and nothing much else really. Mum was and still is pretty weak – at the ripe old age of 86 you don’t quite bounce back to health very easily. The doctors think they have found the reason for all her problems – nothing to do with the fall she had – they discovered a liver infection that had likely been causing all sorts of problems for her in the last few weeks.
A drain in her side and a cocktail of antibiotics and pain killers appear to be doing the trick - although it all appears to be happening very slowly.
On the positive side, it is good for me (and for anyone really) to be around the hospital environment for a while. It helps remind me of what, most likely, we all have to look forward to if we live beyond our 70’s. Medical science has done wonderful things for curing so many problems, but there are still so many chronic diseases that cannot be cured but only ameliorated with pain killers, anti-coagulants, insulin, etc. The quality of life just does not look that great for so many of these patients. The lucky ones are those that still have their mental facilities, I guess.
A drain in her side and a cocktail of antibiotics and pain killers appear to be doing the trick - although it all appears to be happening very slowly.
On the positive side, it is good for me (and for anyone really) to be around the hospital environment for a while. It helps remind me of what, most likely, we all have to look forward to if we live beyond our 70’s. Medical science has done wonderful things for curing so many problems, but there are still so many chronic diseases that cannot be cured but only ameliorated with pain killers, anti-coagulants, insulin, etc. The quality of life just does not look that great for so many of these patients. The lucky ones are those that still have their mental facilities, I guess.
Tuesday, August 02, 2005
UK Bound
I am off to the UK again – my mum is in hospital after a fall - hopefully she will be alright, nothing is broken but at the present time she is just not recovering very well.
So here I am in SFO waiting for the Virgin flight to Heathrow – 10 hours of blissfully comfortable travel I am sure!
It is peak travel time and I had to buy a ticket on short notice. It took a fair bit of digging around on the internet but I finally found something reasonable – by reasonable I mean less that $1,000 (actually $990) – that’s probable very reasonable for short notice at this time of year.
It is surprising how all the various multi-site searches like Expedia or SideStep or Priceline or CheapTickets all give different pricing answers to the same flights. You would thing they are all searching similar databases, but all the results are different. Priceline turned out to be the cheapest this time (last time it was the British Airways home site). There just doesn’t seem to be one place to go for the best deal, you have to try them all and see what anomalies pop out.
So here I am in SFO waiting for the Virgin flight to Heathrow – 10 hours of blissfully comfortable travel I am sure!
It is peak travel time and I had to buy a ticket on short notice. It took a fair bit of digging around on the internet but I finally found something reasonable – by reasonable I mean less that $1,000 (actually $990) – that’s probable very reasonable for short notice at this time of year.
It is surprising how all the various multi-site searches like Expedia or SideStep or Priceline or CheapTickets all give different pricing answers to the same flights. You would thing they are all searching similar databases, but all the results are different. Priceline turned out to be the cheapest this time (last time it was the British Airways home site). There just doesn’t seem to be one place to go for the best deal, you have to try them all and see what anomalies pop out.
Monday, July 25, 2005
Mt Shasta
This weekend we (George, Brian, Paul and I) went up to Northern California to climb Mt Shasta. Shasta is a beautiful mountain, one of the southerly volcanoes in the Cascade range. At 14,162 ft it is also one of the higher mountains in the lower 48.
We were climbing the Avalanche Gulch route and there are two common ways of doing this – one is to pack in quite a long way up to Helen’s Lake at 10,000 ft and overnight there before going up to the summit. The other is to pack in a short way to the Sierra Club hut at Horse Camp at 7,800 ft and then do a lengthier ascent to the summit from there. So the trade off is the distance you have to carry a heavy pack up the hill to camp at Helen’s Lake, versus the length of your ascent on the summit. Acclimatization also comes into it to as you have a longer time to adjust to altitude if you stay overnight at Helen’s Lake. We were divided - Brian and Paul started out Thursday and went up to Helen’s Lake, while George and I went in to Horse Camp on Friday (the thought of carrying a heavy pack all the way up the hill was too much hard work for me).
There is another of advantage of taking the Horse Camp route in that it makes for a shorter overall trip and when you have to pack out everything from the mountain, and I mean absolutely everything, then shorter is better. If you want to know just how you pack out everything then check out this link.
So it was an early start on Saturday morning - a very early start. We were on the trail by 1:00 am under the light of a full moon. The idea was to get up the hill before the sun turned the snow to mush making it too hard to climb and before it loosened too many rocks to come tumbling down on our heads. The going was pretty good, though going uphill at that altitude is never really very easy. We arrived at Helen’s Lake around 5:00 am, joined Brian and Paul and started out on the hardest bit of the climb – up from Helen’s Lake to a band of rocks called Red Banks – Red Banks because they are… brown, well at least a reddish brown anyway.
The sun had just risen by the time we poked our heads out of Red Banks and I was pretty exhausted. Still once past Red Banks the worst is over and it was on up to the summit up something called Misery Hill. Misery Hill is very aptly named, it’s a slog up to a false summit through very loose scree, and it is nothing other than shear misery. Once you reach the top you can then see the real summit and that gives you the inspiration to carry on that little bit further. We reached the top around 10:30 after 9 ½ hours of uphill grind.
The way down is of course much easier and when the snow conditions are right, as they were, you can just sit down and slide down the hill. When a few people do it over the same course, tubes form in the snow and it is like shooting down a giant slide. Allegedly you stay in control using your ice axe but sometimes I was going so fast, I wonder how in control I was. Whatever it was certainly a fun way down.
For me I was then afflicted by some nausea, fatigue, headache thing that I can only attribute to the altitude. I just felt really bad for a while and just wanted to curly up and sleep (which I did when I got to Helen’s Lake) but then it disappeared when I went further down the hill. Everything except the fatigue that is – I was pretty exhausted after what turned out to be a total of 17 hours out on the trail.
It was fun, but it was really hard work. For the second time in my life, I resolved to never ever do that again. I have been up the summit of Shasta three times now, I think that’s enough.
We were climbing the Avalanche Gulch route and there are two common ways of doing this – one is to pack in quite a long way up to Helen’s Lake at 10,000 ft and overnight there before going up to the summit. The other is to pack in a short way to the Sierra Club hut at Horse Camp at 7,800 ft and then do a lengthier ascent to the summit from there. So the trade off is the distance you have to carry a heavy pack up the hill to camp at Helen’s Lake, versus the length of your ascent on the summit. Acclimatization also comes into it to as you have a longer time to adjust to altitude if you stay overnight at Helen’s Lake. We were divided - Brian and Paul started out Thursday and went up to Helen’s Lake, while George and I went in to Horse Camp on Friday (the thought of carrying a heavy pack all the way up the hill was too much hard work for me).
There is another of advantage of taking the Horse Camp route in that it makes for a shorter overall trip and when you have to pack out everything from the mountain, and I mean absolutely everything, then shorter is better. If you want to know just how you pack out everything then check out this link.
So it was an early start on Saturday morning - a very early start. We were on the trail by 1:00 am under the light of a full moon. The idea was to get up the hill before the sun turned the snow to mush making it too hard to climb and before it loosened too many rocks to come tumbling down on our heads. The going was pretty good, though going uphill at that altitude is never really very easy. We arrived at Helen’s Lake around 5:00 am, joined Brian and Paul and started out on the hardest bit of the climb – up from Helen’s Lake to a band of rocks called Red Banks – Red Banks because they are… brown, well at least a reddish brown anyway.
The full moon and the view down the hill just as the sun was rising.
Approaching the bottom of Red Banks as the sun was rising.
Looking down towards Helen's Lake and from where we came from the top of Red Banks.
The sun had just risen by the time we poked our heads out of Red Banks and I was pretty exhausted. Still once past Red Banks the worst is over and it was on up to the summit up something called Misery Hill. Misery Hill is very aptly named, it’s a slog up to a false summit through very loose scree, and it is nothing other than shear misery. Once you reach the top you can then see the real summit and that gives you the inspiration to carry on that little bit further. We reached the top around 10:30 after 9 ½ hours of uphill grind.
On the summit!
The way down is of course much easier and when the snow conditions are right, as they were, you can just sit down and slide down the hill. When a few people do it over the same course, tubes form in the snow and it is like shooting down a giant slide. Allegedly you stay in control using your ice axe but sometimes I was going so fast, I wonder how in control I was. Whatever it was certainly a fun way down.
For me I was then afflicted by some nausea, fatigue, headache thing that I can only attribute to the altitude. I just felt really bad for a while and just wanted to curly up and sleep (which I did when I got to Helen’s Lake) but then it disappeared when I went further down the hill. Everything except the fatigue that is – I was pretty exhausted after what turned out to be a total of 17 hours out on the trail.
Yours truly after it was all over.
It was fun, but it was really hard work. For the second time in my life, I resolved to never ever do that again. I have been up the summit of Shasta three times now, I think that’s enough.
Sunday, July 17, 2005
The March of the Penguins
I went to see a very nice film this weekend – The March of the Penguins - it is a wonderful film about Emperor Penguins and their long treks over the Antarctic ice to procreate. The story of these wonderful animals is amazing and it is told with equally amazing photography.
The penguin’s story is so heroic - the long trek across the ice in single file to the place they were born, the finding of a mate, the protection of the egg and then the chick from the cold, and the long treks back to the sea to get food. The really amazing bit is the male’s role in keeping the eggs protected from the cold by huddling together in a group with the eggs balanced on their feet while storms rage around them. They keep this up without food for much of the Antarctic winter while the females go off to find food.
You cannot help but anthropomorphize these animals; they suffer all kinds of hardships and deprivations in one of the most hostile environments. They struggle through all this with great resolve, a little humor (at least it appears so to us humans), a lot of love and often some sadness and at the end of it all there is a cute little penguin covered in downy feathers.
Highly recommended to anyone.
The penguin’s story is so heroic - the long trek across the ice in single file to the place they were born, the finding of a mate, the protection of the egg and then the chick from the cold, and the long treks back to the sea to get food. The really amazing bit is the male’s role in keeping the eggs protected from the cold by huddling together in a group with the eggs balanced on their feet while storms rage around them. They keep this up without food for much of the Antarctic winter while the females go off to find food.
You cannot help but anthropomorphize these animals; they suffer all kinds of hardships and deprivations in one of the most hostile environments. They struggle through all this with great resolve, a little humor (at least it appears so to us humans), a lot of love and often some sadness and at the end of it all there is a cute little penguin covered in downy feathers.
Highly recommended to anyone.
Friday, July 15, 2005
Who makes these lists...
I was dismayed to learn that yet again another moderate Muslim was refused entry to the U.S. yesterday. His name was on a list of inadmissible persons. Sheikh Dr. Zaki Badawi, who has a honorary knighthood in the U.K., who was even invited to a State dinner for George Bush by Queen Elizabeth, who just last week stood up and condemned terrorism, was yesterday prevented from entering the U.S.
Last year it was Cat Stevens, or Yusuf Islam as he is now known, who was refused entry, now Dr. Badawi. What message does this send to Muslims everywhere, when their moderate leaders are being denied access.
Last year it was Cat Stevens, or Yusuf Islam as he is now known, who was refused entry, now Dr. Badawi. What message does this send to Muslims everywhere, when their moderate leaders are being denied access.
Monday, July 11, 2005
A little motorcycle ride...
Some great motorcycle roads this weekend – Highway 128 from Winters over to the Napa Valley, Skaggs Spring Road from Geyserville on 101 over to the Coast, Highway 1 south on the Coast to Bodega and finally the Oakville Grade Road from Sonoma Valley over to the Napa Valley. Some of the best scenery in California and really good fun to ride. My favorite bit was the Skaggs Spring Road which I had never been on before.
Again I was struck with how nice the area around Sebastopol is – a great climate, none of Sacramento’s heat, quite rural and yet still close enough to San Francisco and all the city things. And, unfortunately, I was again struck with how unremarkable Sacramento is. I never seem to come back to Sacramento and think – what a beautiful place Sacramento is. Certainly it has it’s good points and certainly it is my home but it is not scenic, it is not spectacular in any way, and it pales at the side of the country I saw at the weekend, and, above everything else, way above everything else, at this time of year, it is too damed hot (way over 100 degrees today).
Again I was struck with how nice the area around Sebastopol is – a great climate, none of Sacramento’s heat, quite rural and yet still close enough to San Francisco and all the city things. And, unfortunately, I was again struck with how unremarkable Sacramento is. I never seem to come back to Sacramento and think – what a beautiful place Sacramento is. Certainly it has it’s good points and certainly it is my home but it is not scenic, it is not spectacular in any way, and it pales at the side of the country I saw at the weekend, and, above everything else, way above everything else, at this time of year, it is too damed hot (way over 100 degrees today).
Sunday, July 10, 2005
Oh the shame...
Last Friday, I happened upon the chance to ride in a Hummer Limo. I had been invited to a friend’s (actually more a friend of a friend’s) art gallery opening. We met at the artist’s house in Sacramento and then to everyone’s surprise this huge Hummer Limo arrived to take everyone to the gallery (it was a surprise gift for the artist). This thing had to be seen to be believed – a stretched version of a Hummer, that most tasteful and economical of all vehicles (and most despised too) with an interior décor right out of a third-rate Reno Casino.
So we all rode to Davis in this machine and it emptied us out into the streets of downtown Davis – now Davis to those who don’t know is the most liberal and “green” community in the area and this is saying something. So it is decidedly un-cool to arrive in Davis in such a vehicle. Whatever – it was a pretty fun ride, and something worth doing just once. Oh and the art was pretty good too.
So we all rode to Davis in this machine and it emptied us out into the streets of downtown Davis – now Davis to those who don’t know is the most liberal and “green” community in the area and this is saying something. So it is decidedly un-cool to arrive in Davis in such a vehicle. Whatever – it was a pretty fun ride, and something worth doing just once. Oh and the art was pretty good too.
Monday, July 04, 2005
The Entente Cordiale suffers another blow...
French President Jacques Chirac dealt another blow to Anglo-French cooperation today when he was overheard saying to Gerhard Schroeder and Vladimir Putin a couple of humourous things about the British.
"One cannot trust people whose cuisine is so bad..."
"The only thing they have ever done for European agriculture is mad cow disease..."
"After Finland, it is the country with the worst food..."
Pretty funny for a President, apparently Vladimir and Gerhard were rolling with laughter. I think if I were Finnish I would be really upset.
"One cannot trust people whose cuisine is so bad..."
"The only thing they have ever done for European agriculture is mad cow disease..."
"After Finland, it is the country with the worst food..."
Pretty funny for a President, apparently Vladimir and Gerhard were rolling with laughter. I think if I were Finnish I would be really upset.
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