November 2003 Archives

A number of other bloggers have links to an Amazon Wish List or similar. This seems wildly optimistic to me. I can't believe a stranger would ever actually buy them anything off these lists. However, I suppose it is a handy place for your Mom to find out what you want for Christmas. If anyone has actually had anyone buy them anything off one of these lists, please let me know.

That said, I do buy lottery tickets from time to time even though I know that winning the lottery is impossible from any rational point of view. I suppose my thinking is that winning the lottery would probably change my life. And so, if any mathematically impossible event is going to happen to me, I would rather it was winning several million quid compared with a complete stranger buying me an O'Reilly book. And it is Christmas, the season of greed and goodwill to all, so I'm going to share with you, my anonymous and hopefully hideously rich reader, what I want for Christmas: A box at the Royal Albert Hall.

Apparently, one is up for grabs right now. This doesn't happen very often.. It's box number 70 and seats 5. It's actually a lease for 863 years. The price is £250,000. I'm not sure how you'd wrap it, but I would like it delivered by Christmas because Cirque du Soleil is coming to the Royal Albert Hall in early January and I'd like to take some friends to it.

Actually, when it comes down to it, the box would be nice, but I'd be content with just the use of someone else's box for any night the Cirque is performing. I'm a bit of a circus acrobatics junkie. It's something I've always meant to pick up as a career. Admittedly, it's getting a bit late in the day for me. I suspect many of the really good acrobats start training sometime before they turn 40 (which only gives me about four months).

So, for now, at least until I start training in earnest, I suppose I have to be content with watching from the sidelines. Surely, there's an upper-class twit somewhere who must have room for me in their box.

I mean, if, as seems to be the case, some of those boxes are owned by actual people and not just corporations, they must be empty a good portion of the time. How often would you need to go see the same show? Surely, one of you out there is going to have a box that would otherwise be empty in early January. Even if you have just a couple of seats free (it would be rude to go without my missus), that would be fine. We'd be very quiet and not drink all the champagne. I promise.

Anyway, that's what I want. I can always get work to buy any O'Reilly books I might need. But there is no way I could get my boss to splurge a quarter of a million pounds on five not particularly comfortable chairs and some red drapery. So, if you can help, if you're Earl Spencer say, (I happen to know he has quite a nice box) please contact me and let me know how I can pick up my gift. A card might be nice as well.

Thank you in anticipation.

A while ago I wrote about Dancing with a Supermodel. Today, I received the following email:

Hi !

We are making a light hearted documentary on how to get the partner of your dreams, be they a millionaire, a celebrity, 20 years younger than you or just staggeringly better looking than yourself.

We want to hear from people who've actually managed to acheive these seemingly impossible feats and hear how they managed to do it.

This would be accompanied by various experiments by everday singles of trying out typical chat up lines/techniques to see how they go down.

The aim is to break down what makes people attractive to the opposite sex and hopefully concluding that winning anyone you want is all about personalities and saying the right thing at the right time.

Having read your account of dancing etc with supermodels having gate crashed a fashion event, we are deeply impressed and would love to interview you about it. How did you do it ?

We would be very grateful if you would let us interview you about that episode in your life, and feature it as a heroic tale.

The show will be part of a series of four programmes and will appear on prime time XXXXXXX

Please feel free to call me, with any queries you may have and I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Yours Sincerely

XXXXX XXXXX
Researcher XXXXX

And now I'm faced with a conundrum. What should I do? I confess a certain flush of excitement about being interviewed for a tv programme. Maybe they'll make me a star! Fame and fortune could be mine!

But maybe that's what all those other idiots on daytime tv thought when they signed up for shows like "People who Love Their Pets Too Much - Bestiality in Burbs of Blackburn".

Would I appear as an erudite, well-adjusted, witty charmer? Or as a pathetic middle-aged geek chasing young girls behind his wife's back? It's a close call, really.

And why would I want to appear on tv in the first place? Would I still feel comfortable heaping scorn on the heads of reality tv show contestants? Wouldn't I be the same as them? For that matter, why do I write this blog? I must crave fame. It's an obvious and oh so small step to the depths of reality tv hell.

I talked to a colleague of mine last night who recently divorced her famous husband. They'd gone to college together and got married and then he slipped into tvland and became a bit of a prat. "Do you realise I could sleep with any woman in London?" he once told her.

I suspect that was the moment the relationship began to go downhill.

What if that happens to me? I already get a kick from dancing with supermodels. What if I become famous and start having affairs with Cameron Diaz or Posh and Becks? I think my wife is willing to let me get away with the odd boogie with a pretty girl. However, I suspect a full-on, coke-crazed homosexual encounter with David Beckham might not meet with the same tolerance.

What to do... What to do...

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I’m back from ApacheCon in Vegas now. The dude in the star trek uniform is Ken Coar, one of the directors of the Apache Software Foundation. I noticed when I looked at his site today that he has a link to the National Rifle Association on it. It’s a bit disconcerting that he’s aiming a phaser at my head.

You know, thinking about the whole American 2nd amendment Right-to-Bear-Arms thing, maybe the reason the U.S. spends so much on its military (6 times more than any other nation on earth) is that its citizens are so well-armed. The whole point of the 2nd amendment, as I understand it, is so that U.S.citizens can take up arms against their own central government if they find themselves as oppressed as they were under the British. Naturally, if you were a central government, you’d be a bit paranoid about making sure you can protect yourself when and if the peasants storm the gates of the castle.

I can’t say I’m a big fan of Vegas. I think it’s the biggest little mini-mall in the world. I hate mini-malls. The entire place is designed to suck money out of the pockets of the foolish and gullible. It’s evil.

That said, I did manage to have some fun while I was there, probably not as much as I should have. I think I disappointed a few friends who were expecting me to lose every dime I had on the tables, get married to a showgirl, stay in Vegas and get a job as an Elvis impersonator.

There was, of course, the officially sanctioned fun. I.e. various hosted drinks at ApacheCon with the other apache geeks, some dressed as Star Trek characters, some not. I failed in my one big mission as far as these occasions were concerned. A friend from work had insisted I track down Nat Torkington and have a drink with him. Apparently he’s a hilarious foul-mouthed kiwi. Unfortunately, we only had one very brief conversation, the night of the Star Trek madness. It wasn’t enough for me to categorically identify him as a Kiwi and he used no foul language that I noticed. We made very tentative plans to go for a drink the next night but that didn’t happen. My fault mostly, I suspect. I let myself get sucked into going to the Stratosphere.

The Stratosphere is a 1000 foot tower that resembles the Seattle Space needle or Calgary’s Husky tower. What’s special about it is that there are amusement rides at the top. We went on two of them. The X-Scream which is scary, but not particularly fun; it just dangles you off the edge of the tower and jerks you around a bit – nice view though. And the Big Shot which is one of those rides that shoots you straight up a tower, stops suddenly and plunges so you get kind of a free-fall effect. That one was fun and also a bit scary. You can’t really see the tower beneath you on this ride so it feels like you’ve just shot up the side of the tower and the ride has broken away and you’re falling towards the IHOP a thousand feet below. Very cool.

Afterwards we went to a bar for a couple of drinks and some abuse by a hairy bartender. I bailed early due to residual jet-lag.

I did spot the mysterious Torkington the next night but I sensed some kind of weird Alpha-male tension between us and couldn’t bring myself to approach him. I suppose at heart I’ll always be the pathetic shy loser I was in high school.

I felt a little uncomfortable the whole trip, to be honest. If only I had managed to befriend someone who knew the town early on in the week. I noticed a billboard for Shania Twain by the MGM Grand. I should have given her a call. I figure we’d have an instant bond. After all, we both planted trees roughly the same time in roughly the same area (near Timmons, Ontario). It’s possible we were on the same crew. Hell, I bet we’d actually had long conversations around the campfire late at night. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to discover that we actually slept together and I just can’t remember it now. Surely such a virtual past would be good enough for a bit of a tour around Vegas and a couple of backstage passes.

Oh well, next time, perhaps. Now I feel guilty that I didn’t even go to her show.

Mark and I did make it to one Vegas show: Mystere which is one of three shows Cirque du Soleil had in Vegas. The one I really wanted to see, O, was sold out. The other was an intriguing kinky adults only show called Zumanity but I talked to some people who had seen all three and they didn’t like it much.

It was the first time I’d seen a Cirque du Soleil show. It was fantastic. I love acrobatic performance stuff. It’s probably one of the reasons I’m a dance groupie. I’d been meaning to see a Cirque show for years. There was a guy on one of my treeplanting crews who was going to train with them back then (early nineties, I think). His name was Alvin Tan. I recall that he planted with his shirt off a lot. Man, he was fit. I remember I had a female foreman who seemed to spend a lot of time delivering trees to him and checking his land. He was a great guy. I wonder what happened to him. My wife still has a caricature he drew of me back then.

I checked the credits to see if he was in Mystere but no luck. He might be in one of the other shows. If I ever have to go back to Vegas, I’ll have to check it out.

Geoffrey Young did a couple of tests on "Writing Tests with Apache-test" and "Why mod_perl 2.0 Sucks, Why mod_perl 2.0 rocks" which should eventually be linked from http://www.modperlcookbook.org/~geoff/. There's a version of the Apache-test talk from an early conference up there already. Geoff is a great speaker -- very enthusiastic, knowledgeable, funny. Go see him. He's a star.

Stas Bekman did a tutorial on mod_perl 2 which was much more in-depth and has links to his slides and handouts. Nice handouts, but he's not quite as easy to listen to as Geoff.

Doc Searls Talk (might take a few hours before this gets up there). He basically said that the Apache community should keep on the way they are, which is basically to ignore the vendors and just keep building what they think they should. And he points out that this is worked quite well so far. In particular, that Apache is by far the most popular web server in the world, used far more than any other, including Microsoft.

I'll add more about the other speakers later once I get some coffee.

Nick's posted some pics from the first couple of days. Hate to say it, Nick, but they're kind of crap so far. I'm sure they'll get better once we get Mark drunk.

Okay. He's posted some more pics now and there are a few good ones.

Hee! Hee! I'm in Las Vegas. And it all counts as work. I'm here for ApacheCon. I've just finished a marathon session learning all about mod_perl 2.0 from the Stas-meister himself. I'd heard he tends to get a bit overenthusiastic about these things and today supported the legend. The tutorial was supposed to run from 1pm 'til 4. It finished at quarter to six. That's dedication, not to mention value for money.

I certainly learned a lot. This whole conference is looking just too damn useful. Not much of an excuse to duck out and sit mindlessly in front of a slot machine or whatever it is you're supposed to do here.

I'm not going to go on too much about the techy stuff here. So far, this blog has been about almost nothing involving work or anything particularly useful. No point in starting now. It's a place for rants and stories of debauchery. Discussions of PerlPostConfig handlers have no place here.

Unfortunately, that means I don't have much to say right now as that is pretty much all Vegas has meant to me so far: a big in-depth discussion of PerlPostConfig handlers and the like.

I and three of my colleagues did wander up and down the Strip for an hour or so last night, but we were so jet-lagged we just kind of staggered in slack-jawed wonder at all the pretty lights.

The fountains in front of the Bellagio were pretty cool. That's about all I can tell you about the place so far.

I learned an important life lesson last night. Never ever ever make friends with the bartender. This is known as the parable of the aching head.

Now that I think about it (some details about the evening are a bit shaky), I didn't actually befriend the bartender. That grievous error was committed by a couple of friends of mine. We were all there for another friend’s 30th birthday party / leaving the UK party. As I approached the bar for the last time that evening, they were chatting to the bartender.

The man in question was a nice young Dutch lad who had come to the sprawling metropolis of London to learn to make cocktails. Sadly, his job mainly consisted of just pulling pint after pint. He dreamed of being asked to mix complicated cocktails but all anyone ordered in this particular pub were pints. He went on rapturously about one cocktail in particular, which he insisted he make for me.

It consisted of a bottle of very alcoholic Belgian trappist beer, mixed with port, grand marnier, and cognac. Some have told me the concoction sounds vile but those who have done so have not tasted this elixir. It is, in fact, delicious.

It is also very deadly. In fact, now that I think about it, perhaps my error was not in making friends with the bartender, but in somehow becoming his enemy. No matter. The upshot is that I was poisoned.

The next morning I awoke feeling not just like shit, but like dogshit. And not like a healthy solid canine turd on some bright green grass in a park somewhere, but like diuretic Dalston dogshit that has been scuffed into the pavement by so many busy uncaring feet that it is now just another stain on the pavement of an unfeeling city.

Oh my goodness, but I felt very unwell this morning.

I had left my bike at work the night before and so had to take the bus this morning. Standing at the bus stop, the prospect of riding in a swaying, lurching double-decker bus in London traffic was distinctly unappealing. I decided to walk for a bit and get some fresh air. I walked all the way to Hoxton before I felt strong enough to get on the bus.

I slumped in my seat on the bus, pressing my head against the glass. I hadn't shaved. I was pale and sweating. My coat reeked of cigarette smoke. I felt about as unattractive as I have felt I a very long time.

At the next stop a woman got on the bus who looked the complete anti-thesis of how I felt. She was gorgeous and well-groomed. Short flouncey posh skirt, high heels, perfect makeup, perfect hair. About 22, 23 years old. She looked like a model who had just fled a shampoo commercial without getting changed. She was completely out of place on the number 243 bus.

She sat down next to me and started talking to me. In my experience, this doesn’t happen on London buses. Crazy people might talk to you; drunks might talk to you – basically, people who look like I did. Well-groomed people keep to themselves or cower in fear.

“Is this bus going to Holborn?” she asked. She had an American accent.

It took about 20 seconds or so for this to register as a question directed at me. I slowly, carefully, lifted my head from the window. “Yes,” I said. Then I put my forehead back on the window.

“Where are you from?” she asked.

This time I just rolled my head so that I could look at her without actually losing contact with the nice cool glass. “Edmonton,” I said.

“I’m from Georgia,” she said. She was unrelentingly bright and cheerful. I couldn’t understand why she was talking to me. It should have been obvious I was some kind of derelict, probably a serial killer. Certainly not the kind of person a posh young Georgia Peach should be chatting up on a Friday morning.

“In the States,” she added. “But I was living in New York for a couple of years before I came here. I used to work as a gossip columnist.”

“Oh,” I said, temporarily stuck for anything else to say. “Um, I’m going to Las Vegas tomorrow.”

“The last time I was in Vegas was for Hugh Hefner’s 75th birthday party.” She leaned towards me and whispered, “it was exactly like you’d expect, except even more so.”

I just blinked and cleared my throat.

“I apologise in advance for this,” she said and pulled out her mobile phone. She then proceeded to make a series of phone calls to various friends and acquaintances. Towards the end of the last call, I heard her say, “I’m on my way to Bush House, but I have no idea where I am.”

I sighed. Obviously this was a test of my character from some higher power. I sat up properly and said, “I couldn’t help overhearing that you’re heading for Bush House. That’s where I’m headed. I can point you in the right direction if you’d like”.

“That would be great,” she said. “Thank you so much.” Then she asked me my name and told me more of her exploits as a gossip columnist in New York.

I asked if she was hoping to work as a gossip here.

“No. I mean, I’ve been to the Oscars, so I’ve done that and everything. It’s time to do something else.”

It was a surprising conversation with an unexpectedly pleasant companion and I have to admit it distracted me from my hangover. By the time we arrived at Bush House, I was almost feeling human again.

Today was pencil-thin moustache day. As a gradual depressurization from the goatee I wore to the Vampire party on Saturday, I've been slowing removing bits of my facial hair. Sadly, I have no pictures of this most recent look. Just imagine me as Errol Flynn or David Niven. In particular, imagine me with the looks of Errol Flynn and the charm of David Niven.

It's quite a unique look these days. I didn't see a single other man with a pencil-thin moustache all day. It's a look that seems to bring joy to many people. I'm surprised it's not more popular. My wife, for instance, thought it was very amusing, and such an attractive look she insisted I shave it off tomorrow morning so I wouldn't be quite so gorgeous to all the young ladies who were smiling at me today.

Yesterday was droopy moustache down the sides day. Think Mexican bandit in spaghetti western or Derek Smalls from Spinal Tap. It wasn't a very cultured look which is too bad as yesterday evening was a day of great culture.

First, the spouse and I went to a reading of Helen Fielding's new book. Okay, maybe we're not talking high culture here, but still, book reading: kind of cultural. She was talking with some intellectual dude from BBC Four about here latest book which is basically about a 30ish PR woman in the States who falls in love with a guy who may or may not be Osama Bin Laden. It's a black comedy and some reviewers have said it is in incredibly bad taste. Me, I don't know. She was funny at the reading and charmed me a bit but I couldn't get past the first dozen pages of her first novel which was a black comedy about an African refugee camp and the London fashion scene. I suspect I'll have a similar reaction to this one.

Actually, I'm not a huge Helen Fielding fan, I just like going to readings every now and then. They're cheap and entertaining and I get to dream I might actually write something other than a blog some day.

After that we had a tasty dinner at perhaps my favourite restaurant in London, the Pollo Bar which has a great variety of incredibly cheap Italian food and is right in the heart of Soho. It's one of those anomalies that remind you that the universe is a very random place.

And then we went off to the cool bit: a performance piece by the Merce Cunningham dance group.

It was fantabuliferous and held in the turbine room of the Tate Modern. The turbine room is the enormous entry hall at the Tate. It's as high as about two dozen elephants all balanced on one foot on top of each other. Actually, I have no idea how high it is. Damn high, that's all.

The ceiling was covered in mirrors and there was a big sun like thing at one end. This is apparently an installation art piece which was just serendipitous to the dance performance but it's what made the whole thing work so well. The dancers wore bright fluorescent leotards and danced on three spaces along the floor of the room. You could wander around at will throughout the show. I spent most of the show lying on my back and watching via the mirror which made the performances look a bit like a human kaleidoscope.

You can see a review here.

But, even if you don't go for the dance you should check out the big mirror installation thing. That bit's free and the Tate is just down the road.

As always with these things, the crowd was another bonus to the performance. And because of the free roaming nature of the venue, it somehow felt more permissible to just hang back and watch the people watching rather than the performers from time to time. Artsy people tend to look like freaks sometimes. I looked a bit freakish myself due to the Derek Smalls effect, but I wish I'd had the pencil-thin thing going on. And soon it will be scraped from my face by a razor sharp wafer of metal. Oh well, hair today, gone tomorrow.

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The Halloween spirt yet lives. We went to another party last night, a vampire theme party. The hosts had done a suitably spooky job with decorations. Everything was draped in dark blue velvet or black wall paper. There was a jack-o-lantern, black cobwebs hanging from the ceiling, loads of candles, and, the piece de resistance, a smoke machine.

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We went to a Halloween party last night held on a boat called the Queen Mary which is permanently moored near Thames Embankment. It was organised for a charity called Raleigh International by the sister of a friend of ours. Apparently the party raised about £1600. We didn't really know all that many people there but it didn't matter as we went en masse in a group of seven.

I easily had the most boring costume out of all of us. I just put on a bloody apron and called myself Hannibal Lector. Still, it was a better effort than most at the event.

Vicki was Emma Peel. My Crazy Landlord was a doctor. This enabled him to go up to young women throughout the evening and offer them a free breast exam. The amazing thing is that several women took the charming little bastard up on his offer. Another couple of friends came as red-faced devils, and then we had a couple of just plain freakers.

It was fun. I took lots of pictures. There was no apple-bobbing.

And, for a limited time only, there are some other pictures available.