Pig Sty Avenue

...is the working title .  Though, mind, it's still at the foundation digging stage of being under construction.  The template wants tweaked, but the main thing is to get contributors, and I'm going to start on the tefl contacts tomorrow. Posts should be approximately 1000 - 2000 words, and they should be about the game itself, the context of the teams and their histories and places in their leagues, together with observations on the ground, talks with the fans and others, how you got there, how much to get in, what there is to eat and drink in the vicinity, any adventures...  Plus photos and other multimedia, if available.  I've opened a gmail account for it: asianfootballreports@gmail.com . I'll get the contributors to send me their text and multimedia there, and I'll edit it into the blog.

...Said the President of Montpellier when it was suggested that his club were top of Ligue 1 only because the rest of the league were crap.  It's a cracker.

Here's another article for the day when I get my Athens back.

Many thanks to Dolphin Hotel for blogging about his own contribution to European Football Weekends .  What a splendid idea.  It got me thinking that it might be a lot of fun to do something similar in Asia.

The last couple of mornings, at the same point on the High Road, Saltcoats, there's been a flock of Siskins, a dozen or more birds, feeding it looks like on the rosehips on the dog-roses planted by the council at the edge of the road.

During the last one , I was apparently craving all aspects of British culture, good and bad.  This time, I'm developing a worrying interest in afternoon TV, especially Doctors, and beginning to plan a sub-tropical monsoon climate balcony. Plans for the zero maintenance wildlife garden having now been abandoned, I can take the borage, evening primrose and tobacco plant seeds.  Teasel won't work in containers, I'm guessing, so I'll give them to The Old Man for the allotment.  I've also found a packet of lavender seeds.  I'll want culinary herbs, the Scarborough Four, plus basil, oregano and coriander. These seeds may all be available on the other side of Visa Limbo, I don't know.  There's a garden centre not far away, and here's a map:

SPSS v19 may indeed have better "functionality", (wtf?) and I'll bet that its graphics are indeed better, (PSPP's histograms and pie-charts are somewhat basic).   But for the moment it can do everything I need, which is crunching lists of test scores and establishing mean, mode, median, skewness, kurtosis, range, standard deviations, etc., and, most importantly, correlation co-efficients. But it's not perfect.  There is an occasional bug, the cause of which I haven't isolated yet, (though I probably can when I get time), and the basic graphics might be disadvantageous in non-academic, commercial situations.  The bottom line though, it's open source, free, and easy to use.  The latest version of SPSS can do more.  But it can't do enough to justify the cost - which is £200 for a student edition.

Because I'm planning to do a lot of on-the-balcony Chinese herbalism in the near future, I went this morning to PFAF and found that it's had a makeover.  Which is nice.

Nearly a year since the onset of serious photographic dysfunction, I waited until everyone was asleep tonight and got into the lobby press darkroom and put an exposed roll of HP5 into the dev tank.  It was a roll which had been sitting in the Holga since, I suppose, last Christmas or thereabouts.  I'll dev it in Beutler A+B tomorrow, (for 12mins, apparently ). The Holga and the dev tank will be the only photographic equipment being taken to the next level .  Because they're very light, and, anyway, a Holga, in China , what a rush.

Level 1 would actually be quite challenging, as you attempted to get through your Cert. course, (which I recall as like cramming a degree into four weeks, in Barcelona, with after-school refreshments in a bar called Antibiotica).  As you progressed through the levels you'd meet a whole range of bad guys, such as the chiselling school owners who'd do their damnedest each month to lighten your meagre wage packet of a few Euros or Turkish Lira.  There were the drunken DoSs.  And there'd be a whole level devoted to the residential school in Great Malvern owned and "run" by a family of psychopaths. I found that as I reached the 10th level it had all got a bit dull, the actual teaching had become like falling off a log, and the best amusement was found in the games additional features, academic research and teaching management.  But then I found a hidden level.  If, as you progress, you pick up enough materials and test writing skills, qualifications, and abilities ...

Looks like we were out-manoeuvred .  Buggeration.  Despite this, in the great scheme of things, who would you rather have as a manager, wor Chris or that whale-jawed loudmouth gum-chewing twat?

In a few weeks I'm going to have access to more language testing data that you can shake a whole copse full of sticks at, so I'm sharpening the number crunching skills with Bachman (2004) and its companion workbook .  The latter relies on SPSS, so I went in search and downloaded a 21 day version of PASW v18.  When the 21 days ran out, I thought, well, it's a fair cop, and prepared to put my hand in my pocket.  FFS.  I spent an entire morning in a vicious IBM loop, credit card in hand, looking for an licence authorization code.  Forget about it.  It was like trying to find a shop located 1000 feet underground, with no access from the surface. Fortunately, an old chum  had put me in the direction of comparable open-source software.  This morning I've downloaded and installed (in about 2 minutes) PSPP  .  I haven't worked with it yet, but it looks like it does everything that PASW v18 does - everything that a language tester wants of it, ...

This looks like as good a place as any.

Maybe it won't last, and we'll become becalmed in mid-table, or even have to fight for survival.  But this looks nice just now.  

With a whole new definition of the word "unlucky" .

These four exercises are all good, even though they appear to have child-learners in mind, they still work.   Stretches is a good one to warm up with, especially if you do it two hands.

Whereby I mean a re-established relationship with the keyboard, and the absent boxers being those pesky wee note letters, which I've covered over with a strip of electricians' tape.  And that seems to be a good thing.  I had a good hour's practice tonight with the right hand bit of that waltz, and it worked out as thought , inasmuch as I had to work on the pattern relationship between the staff and the keyboard, using the C as a reference point.  For example, there's B, right down the middle of the staff, and there it is, tucked in below C on the keyboard. Incidentally, I also learned that evening piano practice is utterly fucking futile after the 2nd glass of wine, though blogging is more forgiving vis-a-vis alcohol consumption.  Or something.

I am ashamed to say that I abandoned Maria back in September .  I'll catch up with her later as bass clef practice.  I literally dusted off the keyboard yesterday and got back to working through the PSP software, picking up on the theory lessons, and working with 3/4 time, practising a waltz.  It was gratifying to see that there was, after two months, an intuitive connexion between the note values and their places on the staff - some of them, anyway.  It is like riding a bike, forsooth. There's a whole load of mental processing involved here. There's the note's position on the staff, which relates to its position on the keyboard. That note has its letter-value, within its octave.  And then there's the length.  And the wee number to signify a finger.   The keyboard has the letter-values for each note, and I've been getting my head into cross-referencing them with the notes on the staff.  And I'm getting quite good at finding the notes whils...

The deconstruction of Whistle Down The Wind continues: this is the junction of Mercy Drive, a small-ish cul-de-sac, which you can see heading off to the right there, and Rte 31.  "Mercy" as a thoroughfare name isn't all that common in the US, and as this is in McHenry, it's almost certainly the place, on some level. And Mercy and Grand was also the title of a show involving covers of 12 Tom Waits songs, which appears to have toured provincial venues in 2007.   Gavin Bryars was on bass.

Tom Waits'  Whistle Down The Wind has been one of those songs today, lodged in the brain, singing odd lines from it at inappropriate moments, irritating those in the vicinity.  Like a lot of Tom, it would work as poetry.  And I'm jolly grateful to this blogger who explains in some detail the meaning of "Marylebone coach ".   The best guess on "Mercy and Grand" is that it might be a real street corner , somewhere.  There's a Mercy Drive, which adjoins Illinois 31 , (which I suppose might be called Grand, locally), in McHenry, Illinois, which of course features in the lyrics of Johnsburg Illinois.  

...Going to the neo-liberal scam party?