Yesterday, I finally finished first-order processing and uploading of the photos I took of last Sunday’s railway path celebration.

Apart from well dodgy blokes in shades, there were Police posing on pushbikes, vegetables, badgers, drummers, a pink souzaphone, a knight in shining armour, and childrins. The weather was perfect, and a wonderful time was had by all. Sadly, and predictably, on Tuesday the Labour group on First Bristol Council, abetted by the Tories, fucked up the Green-amended-by-LibDem motion to protect the path from the ravages of the arsewipes on the WOEP, by proposing and forcing through a wrecking amendment.

Still, if the thing does get stopped, it just gives WOEP more time to consider destroying the Malago Greenway instead. Or as well.

Guided BRT is the wrong answer to the wrong question in pretty much any existing urban area, which presumably explains why the government and its tame quangos are so excited by the things. That and their being bus, and not (still strongly Unionised) rail.

Today, I want shopping. First, to Asda - no, not to support Wall*Wart by buying anything, but to offer the knee of the cargo trousers I wtore on Sunday for repair at Johnsons, who rent a pitch in their market strip. Thence in search of new wholefood/deli experiences South of the river: the deli on Oxford Road was shut (permanently?) and I couldn’t find the one I thought was on Wells Road at all. Ho hum. I returned to North Street and got the bits we needed from the Southville deli and greengrocer, but still no concentrated blackcurrant juice.

There seems to be a terminal shortage of the stuff in Bristol ATM: all that I can find is the Crazy Jack (or whatever its called) stuff that only contains blackcurrant in homeopathic concentrations and is of no use whatsoever. The bog-standard Suma and Meridian juices might still be around on Gloucester Road, but I haven’t seen my holy grail, the little bottles of organic mega-concentrated Meridian juice, since I snaffled the last bottle the Sweet Mart on St Marks Road had over a month ago.

I’d bike up to Gloucester Road now if we weren’t waiting for purple_peril, who we’re ferrying up to CostCo this afternoon; she’s late, damnit. Hopefully she’ll arrive in an intact state soon after I post this.

ETA and here she is :)

Yay! fafblog!

Too long have we all been denied the wisdom of the Medium Lobster,

fafblog!

It just occurred to me how deeply sad it is that I’ve spent most of this afternoon refactoring and testing library Javascript, because it’s something I can’t justify the time for on werk days. OK, that’s not all I’ve done today - ramtops and I went shopping this morning, and I’ve changed our bed - but still…

Oh well.

The code needed (and still needs) cleaning up, honest: some of this stuff goes back twelve years, but at least I’ve got the namespace pollution pretty much under control now. I blame myself for writing a specialised codebase grep in Perl that lets me easily find all the places in our entire collection of Perl and ColdFusion libraries and client web code any given function or method is used; couldn’t do this else.

For no particular reason other than bizarre juxtapositions, this is what we’ve last scrobbled with the Roku on random play:

• Eat Static – Pupae (The Locust Song)
• Maria Callas – Bizet - Carmen - L’amour est un oiseau rebelle
• Mousse T. & Tom Jones – Sexbomb
• Maria Callas – Charpentier - Louise - Depuis le jour
• The James Taylor Quartet – Lausanne revisited
• Sting – Rock Steady
• Mary Black – The Crow in the Cradle
• Steve Hackett – Please Don’t Touch
• Suicide – Cheree
• Bill Nelson – Bill Nelson - The Strangest Things, The Strangest Times

An anonymous commenter posted the following in response to niemandsrose in the comments to a post on generational changes, gender and language by ozarque; this is primarily for my own reference, but it’s very much worth repeating in any case:

“We now live in a world that still believes such things, and now *also* believes that to mention them, to talk about them, to dialogue, is caving in to sexism. Examining the bedrock assumptions, especially our own, is taken as an admission of having ever had a sexist thought, and *that* is simply Not Done.”

This is the “No-Talk Rule”. It is the foundation upon which all abusive structures are built. You will find it in alcoholic families, in the families of battered spouses and children, in abusive churches, in sweatshops [including many, many white collar corporate ones]. And in totalitarian states, oh my yes.

No-Talk is a place where psychology and linguistics are so closely intertwined that I can’t see a way to separate them. The idea - simple and brilliant - is that as long as people are prohibited from talking about X, their ability to think about X, define it, understand it is severely curtailed. Their ability to actually do anything productive about X, of course, is completely pre-empted, since they can neither think nor talk about it effectively if at all.

And the attitude you describe, that to mention the abusive circumstances is to tacitly consent to them, or to be in some way a supporter of them? Magical thinking [ignore it and it will vanish - if you just do enough affirmations and mean them sincerely] combined with pernicious thought control [if you see it you must be it]. Again, these thought patterns are pushed in unhealthy groups of all shapes and sizes, from abusive families to worldwide cults. You will notice how beautifully [in the same sense a coral snake or lionfish is beautiful] these patterns push all responsibility for the abusiveness directly onto the person who perceives and articulates the abuse [usually because they are experiencing it].

Meg Umans comments:

Yes, well put. Thank you. There’s probably about as much sexism now as thirty years ago. As long as we don’t talk about it, though, it doesn’t really exist, right? And we can always blame the victims for speaking truth to power.

Last night I dreamed that Java code was leaking from my computer through some sort of quantum tunnelling effect, making it impossible to be sure that a program, let alone the machine itself, was really shut down.

This morning, I discovered (via bradhicks) the following:

Link: The Deep and Meaningful Winnie-The-Pooh Character Test written by wolfcaroling on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test View My Profile(wolfcaroling)

We’ve just returned from Norwich and Harry‘s naming ceremony. And wonderful it (and he) was too; my pictures are on that Facebook thing (that’s where many of the day’s participants prolapse hang out); you’ll need an account there to see them. If you aren’t on Facebook and have no intention to be so, or indeed even if you are, ramtops’ excellent photos are on flickr.

Usual please prod if you’ve said or seen anything on LJ I should read applies.

Bak to werk nao chiz chiz (to mix my metaphors)

Transforming a linear park joining communities across the city into a linear wall splitting them apart.

The Bristol Cycling Campaign meeting next Tuesday, to start a campaign group protesting the routing of a new guided bus route along the Bristol-Bath cycle path, has outgrown its initial venue and will now be in Easton Community Centre, Kilburn Street. Starts at 7:30, and you don’t have to be a cyclist to attend (plenty of Ordinary Non-Lycra-Wearing People use the cycle path and are as threatened by its desecration).

Be there or be somewhere else, but if you’re in the Bristol area (or Bath; the same sort of thing is threatened at the other end of the line), come along if you can. And sign the petition if you haven’t already.

Bus lanes and guided buses, yes, but not at the expense of cycle and pedestrian access, or with the destruction of community space.

<rhetorical>Why can’t I invoice Microsoft for what cumulatively must be hundreds of hours of time working around (or, occasionally, ultimately failing to work around) the failings of the heap of unutterable shite that is their browser?</rhetorical>

I’m off now, to waste several hours writing an onload event handler to restructure the DOM tree of any arbitrary page using the code I’m writing, because that z-index context base bug in IE - like so many other DOM bugs - is still there in IE7.

Why can't I find a supplier of depleted uranium shot to use for mass-loading speaker stands?