Pig Sty Avenue

I need to blog about this , but I'm busy just now...

Steaks for Dinner , originally uploaded by Dshalock the Libertarian Emperor . Worcestershire Sauce in America?!

This is a great way to stay in touch with, say University Challenge, for the itinerant teacher. Subject to bandwidth.

My son, Alexander, has some of his music on his myspace thingummy . Brilliant. I've downloaded them to put on my MP3 player. I especially like Smile . Mind you, I can't get to like myspace. It feels very cluttered. It's like going into a bar and finding you're the only person there over 21.

I enjoyed reading this article in yesterday's Grauniad. It's interesting that leftwingers like Tariq Ali (and like me) find The Music of Time so enthralling. Powell has that in common with Waugh. I was most interested in what he says about Hearing Secret Harmonies. The fact that Powell was no longer bohemian, he suggests, affected the tone and structure of the novel. Well, I wouldn't be quite so sure about that, but I did feel left down by volume 12. I'd put that down to the sense of bereavement I'd felt at coming to the end of it all. And I hadn't known about the alternative ending planned for Widmerpool, his disappearing (as he had appeared) into the mist. Would that have been better? It feels like it... But I disagree that Widmerpool was "taken out of character" in the last volume. He behaved in a way which could not easily have been predicted, to be sure. But it was not out of keeping with the "slavish" look he had as a schoolb...

Sign by Dealighted - Coupons and Deals And, spookier still... Sign by Dealighted - Coupons and Deals

We're going to have a haggis tonight. With neep and tatties out of the allotment. And whisky. I mustn't forget the whisky... There's an excellent Burns site, here .

I saw Bobby several times when I was a glass collector at the Deneside Club in the mid-70s. The funny thing is, I never realised until just now that he had a Sunderland accent.

You know when you've had some kind of virus, and then you get that magic moment when you say to yourself: oh wow! I'm better!? It's great, isn't it?

I've missed the start of it because I've got this horrible virus that's been going around, and haven't known my arse from my elbow the last few days. Four of Newcastle's players are taking part. Abdoulaye Faye and Habib Beye are both playing for Senegal. Obafemi Martins is playing for Nigeria. Geremi for Cameroon. Fixtures and latest results are here . Nigeria got beaten by Ivory Coast 1-0 last night. Martins was "Nigeria's biggest threat" . Egypt have just beaten Cameroon, 4-2. Senegal play Tunisia tomorrow night - you can get the highlights on BBC3 at 7pm. Inshalla, I'll get to see the finals with an Arabic commentary.

The headline from the Torygraph says it all. Capitalism's fucking great, isn't it? You take risks with other people's money, if it works out, you make millions. And if you fuck up, don't worry, the idiot tax-payer will bail you out! Nationalise the losses and privatise the profits. Fan-fucking-tastic.

Just in case I can't get ready-made mixes, when I'm in Libya perhaps, here are the actual chemicals (I'll need more research to get the proportions). Developer a Developing Agent : Metol or hydroquinine b Accelerator: borax or sodium carbonate or sodium hydroxide c Preservative: sodium sulphate d Restrainer: potassium bromide Fixer sodium thiosulphate potassium alum (hardener) Also, a hypo eliminator, and a wetting agent.

Well, now, I'm not so sure about the need for a dedicated film scanner. I've been scanning (pun intended) through the medium format group's discussions and there's a lot of information. Also in the black and white film group . Here's a lot of technical advice and info . The bottom line would seem to be, with b&w medium format you can get good enough results on a flatbed scanner at 1200 dpi. I've spent £7 on eBay and bought a processing tank, (that's it on the left, there). The man says it went in the post on Saturday, so it should be here soon. I spent a bit of time yesterday reading up my Photography Made Simple book. I need to buy developer, fixer, and a wash. I'll get some in powder form for ease of carrying. I could research the individual chemicals making up the solutions, and buy them even more cheaply... All of this because I'm becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the quality of the pics I'm getting from the d5...

It shouldn't be funny.

People have been developing their own film at home since 1826, long before processing machines, and we’ll keep doing it long after it stops making economic sense for labs to provide the service. In terms of black & white film, we’ve already crossed that threshold. Indeed. Development of a 120 film (12 exposures) costs £5 for colour, £9 for B&W. I'll get a couple of rolls of colour done, but then I'm moving on to B&W, and doing the bugger myself. The link above has the basics, (you can get all the gear, he says, for less than $50, so that's £25). This fella has more detail . There's a film scanner to think of, too...

I got really bored with BBC radio today, as I was working at the laptop. So I googled this radio locator , and found this station from Newark, NJ (you know - where The Sopranos live). It's really cool.

Trying to catch up with as many people as poss afore I head off to foreign shores. Last night I had a pint with Adam , Oli , Kate and Timo . I'd lent Kate my Kodak 66 camera ages ago, and she returned it last night, with a roll of film thrown in. I loaded it this morning - very fiddly, but there's a knack to it, no doubt. I've got a feeling that developing will be a lot cheaper in Tripoli, so I'll take the camera with me. (Film development costs are absurd in the UK - especially black and white, which is a much simpler process. One day, I'll have the space to do my own. Meanwhile, I read somewhere on Flickr that these people are reasonable - I'm waiting to hear from them.) We came up with an idea to have a bit of fun with double exposures: somebody under exposes a roll of 120mm film, posts it out to me, and I do likewise. So we should get ghostly images of Newcastle over camels and palm trees. It'll pass the time....

Keegan! Keegan! Keegan!

I read this article in The Grauniad (Was it really in May '06?), and it's been on my mind ever since. Perhaps it's come to mind now, because I was thinking it'll actually be a good thing if the US writers' strike scuppers this year's Oscars. I know Cannes is a beanfeast for the rich and unspeakable, but it has an artistic integrity which Hollywood only dimly comprehends. Anyhow, I'm blogging this list of winners now as another note-to-self. Being parents, we don't get out much. The flip side is a need to collect interesting things. Here's the list. I don't know whether to start in 1939, or work backwards... 1939 Union Pacific (Cecil B DeMille) (Actually awarded in 2002) 1946 Portrait of Maria (Emilio Fernández), The Turning Point (Fridrikh Markovitch Ermler), La symphonie pastorale (Jean Delannoy), The Last Chance (Leopold Lintberg), Men Without Wings (František Čáp), Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini), Lowly City (Chetan Anand),...

What a peculiar name for a dog, that was.

"...it has been suggested..."

"Coastal towns to the west of Tripoli" ? They must mean Zawiya, and maybe Janzur? (Somebody who's been out to Tripoli lately talked about Janzur as "the place where Europeans have their houses..." It made no sense to me, but times are a changing, and I've been away for two and half years now. Presumably, this is BDP .

don't cry , originally uploaded by i am klaus . Just introduced to i am klaus today. I can't explain why he's so funny: there's a touch of genius. Or something. Thanks to Shhexy for the heads up.

The odds on Gerard Houllier have shortened very quickly, and he' s favourite at the moment. This is an interesting article on the point.

This is horribly funny . Thanks to Stevie B for the link.

I gave a link yesterday to a collection of quotes garnered from fundamentalist Christian chatrooms. It's hilarious, horrifying and ultimately rather depressing. However this quote : The other day while installing some new fiber optics cables for a satellite array I overheard some coworkers talking about quarks. Quarks are supposedly tiny particles that nobody can see and nobody has any use for. So why do we know about them? What good does it possibly do us to know what a quark is? got me thinking about quarks, and about the Hawkwind song released as a single in the late 70s. And also the fact that the etymology of "quark" is an example of the interrelation between Art and Science, the word being an invented dreamlike one from Finnegans Wake , coined by the American Physicist Murray Gell-Mann. The original context is: Three quarks for Muster Mark! Sure he hasn't got much of a bark And sure any he has it's all beside the mark... That song sang seaswans. The wing...

There are a lot of things I have concluded to be wrong, without studying them in-depth. Evolution is one of them. The fact that I don't know that much about it does not bother me in the least.

And here are the odds midday today. I got them here. Strangely, Redknapp is still up there. And Keegan, as favourite? Keegan and Shearer together are being touted as a "dream team" . Keegan had a chequered career as a manager, to say the least. And of course, Shearer's abilities as a manager can only be guessed at, (though an informed guess would be likely to favour him). The two of them together... It's all somewhat story book, but it might work. On the other hand, they might both like their own way a bit too much. Sir Bobby is to the point, here . This morning, I told myself I'd blog no more about this until the new manager was actually appointed. But it's got the addictive qualities now of a soap opera - yesterday's pasting only adds to the drama, the underlying feeling that somehow, someday we'll get the management and results that we deserve, and that yesterday's result was just another score to one day be joyfully settled.

the top of petal's head came off 2 , originally uploaded by /pɪgstaɪævnjuː/ . Herself had hold of Petal, and the Bairn grabbed the doll's hair and... Whoops. I hope she's not having nightmares (and possibly therapy) as a result of this, fifty years from now.

Oh, shit. Look at it this way, though. We've won nowt (apart from the Fairs Cup) in two generations. But, against all reason, we're still a big club with massive support. And none of our players are Oscar-winning pretty boys.

Here's a capture of the odds as they were a few minutes before posting this; (it's more readable if you click on it). Paddy Power has Mourinho as close as 16/1. Redknapp's out of it. Hughes is the front runner.

This looks like good news , sort of, because I didn't like the look of Redknapp. Unfortunately, it means that anyone who is approached now knows that they were the second choice. If, that is, we're hearing round unvarnished tales: I suspect there's a lot of spin and flim-flam. If you deconstruct this statement : BBC sources close to the 37-year-old Shearer, though, say he is extremely unlikely to take the role as he is happy with his pundit work on Match of the Day it's actually quite clever. One can be quite happy in a job, yet still be happier to move on to something better... And, of course, he's being asked these questions by his current colleagues. The link won't make any sense in a few hours, but fwiw, Shearer is now 2nd favourite (after Hughes), at only 7/2 (with Hughes 9/4).

I'm feeling relieved to have the outline of the assignment, (which now bears the snappy title: The Second Language Acquisition Theory Implications of Learners’ Views on Language Testing: A Libyan Case Study) worked out and approved by my tutor. There's a lot of work to do but a job started is half finished, and all that. I'll be a lot more relieved when the bugger's out of the way entirely. SLA is such a vast field, you could spend a lifetime studying it and never really get a handle on it.

I was watching the news today, Dubya talking to the press with first Olmert and then Abbas, and I thought "Has he maybe had a few drinks today?" I've been a drinker and around drinkers all my life, so I can read the signs: a slightly excessive bonhomie, a deliberate way with speech. I'd genuinely not like to see any drunk fall off the wagon. I'm only saying...

The New Year's off to a canny start , then. The big question now is, Who's to get the poisoned chalice? Like most fans, I suspect, I'd want Shearer . I know he's got NO managerial experience, but he's one of the most experienced players in the country. I've been impressed with the degree of tact and diplomacy he's shown in the last few weeks in his dealings with the media when the skids have been under Big Juicy Fruit. And, most of all, he's one of us, who preferred Newcastle over Man Utd. I don't like the look of Redknapp one bit. The fact is, Ashley likes to surprise people . So surprise us with someone who can manage a Premiership side, please.

I've stumbled on another local blog , which looks interesting. Local politics is a thing to avoid. There's only really one party in South Tyneside, the "Labour" party. They've been in charge of local affairs for generations. Nouns like "clique", "cabal", "hubris", "Stalinists" and "shower of bastards" might come to mind. (I wouldn't actually use them, but they might come to mind). Some people might also say that in addition to the elected cabal, many of the council's bureaucracy's employees are an incompetent, lazy, arrogant bunch of twats, too. Again, I wouldn't say that, but the thought might cross my mind whenever I have any dealings with them. Anyhow, The Northern Herald attempts to shine a light on some dark places. And as an American judge said (though I can't find the original source for this), "sunshine is the best disinfectant". Most current is this fandango ,...

Q Lazzarus is on MySpace!

In one of the later Music of Time novels, Nick Jenkins remarked on the pleasure of re-reading, as you got older. He was right about that. I've REALLY enjoyed, during the last few weeks, re-reading Le Carre's Karla trilogy (I refuse to call it "The Quest for Karla", it's too cheesy). Herself likes police series: Morse, Rebus, Frost. George Smiley is a lot like them: a dysfunctional personal life, he's subject to moral qualms, he has a complex relationship with authority, he's adored by subordinates... My head into the spy genre, I read voraciously Agent Zig Zag last week. That was a cracking story - if it had been a novel, one would have thought it too far-fetched. And the astonishing incompetence and sheer weirdness of the Nazi Intelligence service is breath-taking. One of Zig Zag's German minders, a morris-dancing Nazi, allows him to parachute into England with thousands of pounds neatly bundled in paper wrappers with "Reichsbank Berl...

I watched Jackie Brown again on BBC3 the other night. I mention it now as a note to myself to check out the soundtrack , when I've more time. Because NOW I really should be writing up a research project when I'm not curriculum developing...

In the dying moments of the Stoke v Newcastle nil-nil draw tonight, Newcastle's teenaged player Carroll had a kerfuffle with a Stoke player, also apparently a very young man. The commentator said "Overexcited youngsters. We've all seen a few of them in the last two weeks!" Well, he's glad to be back at work, for one. Incidentally, my mate is surnamed Carroll, which means that if he bought a Newcastle shirt he could reasonably get one with his own name on it. See, if I was going to get one, I'd be buggered. No name looks all wrong, a player's name looks a bit like hero worship, (absurd at my age), and getting your own surname... well, it looks a bit deluded; (though your nickname might be ok, if it was a bit self-deprecating, "Fatty", say; and it's ok for kids). But if you shared a surname with a player, that'd be alright.

It was just getting to the point where Clinton's corporate backing was showing through the facade, and one was thinking wearily, cynically, "Ah well, first woman President, and she has all that experience, and Bill's always good for a laugh..." Then POW! Obama really does look like he can do it. The Iowa victory speech was very good. Best of all was his subsequent brushing aside of the Republicans . Notice Hillary's frozen smile. Not even Bill could have come up with that one.

jarrow hebburn , originally uploaded by /pɪgstaɪævnjuː/ . We've lived in Hebburn for a year now and we don't really feel at home here. Herself says that nobody has spoken to her at the St Aloysius playgroup where she takes The Bairn every week over the course of the last year. And in the Iona club, where I go quite a lot, nobody has wished me all-the-best, or even acknowledged that I exist. Whereas, if I go into the Alberta, or the Buffs, in Jarrow I'm immediately at home. Ditto Herself and The Bairn in Jarrow playgroups. There's loads of dog shit on the pavements, too.

...Was brilliant on Jools Holland on New Year's Eve. Here's his website . And someone's uploaded one of the bits from the other night. Magic.

Yams... a cautionary tale. , originally uploaded by sbaracchina . Click on the photo for sbaracchina's story about this. As so often with plants, they seem to thrive on neglect, and pine away with tlc. And, of course, it ISN'T a yam , really.