I’m suffering a lot less than I expected.

Yesterday afternoon, taking advantage of the extraordinarily poor planning that allowed a clear, sunny day to coincide with Bristol Harbour Festival, I went out on my bike further than the farm shop just outside the village for the first time in [mumble] months. If Google is to be believed, an 18-mile round trip to the far end of the nasty riverside housing estate in St Annes and back. Nearly all on the flat, it has to be said (apart from a brief diversion by the floating harbour through the heaving crowds of the festival, I followed the river), but, on the way back, I got my old and creaking bones up the hill from Kennel Lodge Road to the Ashton Court car park without stopping, which quite surprised me.

What else? Before, our new Zywall dual-WAN router and firewall arrived a day late (distie fuckup) to replace the old Sonicwall (dead) and Cyclone (dying). I installed it and ramtops configured it, and it’s working a treat; noticeably quicker than the previous setup even when it was working properly.

After, I read another wodge of HP7 then cooked: improvised Indian-style something to use the last tub of frozen pre-cooked mince+beans+carrots+onions, an experiment in pre-preparation that we won’t repeat as it’s as much work to get the stuff to taste of anything as cooking everything from scratch. In the unlikely event of anyone being interested, I’ve written up what I did on nibblous.

Waiting for the Jekyll finale, we rewatched the pilot of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip now it’s turned up on terrestrial. We weren’t impressed first time round, but thoroughly enjoyed it last night: pure Sorkin, of course, with lots of familiar faces in cast and names in crew; derivative and predictable, but fun.

I won’t say much about Jekyll, out of consideration, like, but Moff has pulled a blinder with this. As full of holes as a thing full of holes, of course, but still some of the best, most stylish and wittiest television I’ve seen for years. ramtops and I both kicked ourselves for not seeing the final twist coming. My hope is that the BBC resists the temptation to make the obvious followup series: some things (many things) are best left, but TV companies are as good at ignoring that as they are at killing series that should continue mid-season.

A quiet weekend, but we managed to drag our exhausted carcasses to Sally’s in Chippenham for her birthday party. The sun shone and a good time was had, with great heaving mounds of food from the barbie, but sadly we left early owing to the aforementioned exhaustedness. [more photos]

Sunday was mostly spent in getting the rejuvenated nibb’lous ready for going live this morning, and in Mac cooking and us eating a truly sumptuous dinner of pan-fried duckbreast with roast spuds, fennel and carrots. Yum.

We heard about this on the news; is it just me who thinks that it’s the thin edge of a very thick wedge indeed? We’ve already had this in the campaign to get people to shop benefit “cheats” and it all helps nicely in propagating an atmosphere of distrust and fear. Does it benefit anyone at all but the government? And who will be the first person snitched out of malice, for being in possession of a dusky complexion, or just for a laugh? E M Forster applies, I think.

The news was followed by possibly the most egregious piece of blatant fearmongering I’ve yet heard from the post-Hutton BBC: File on Four on Iran and export controls. In the entire programme there wasn’t a single attempt to justify their prejudgements: Iran is uniquely evil; US export controls are necessary and correct if possibly a mite liberal; UK and EU controls are entirely inadequate, and as for the Polish courts releasing someone the US wanted (and want) extradited who had broken no EU or Polish law, words nearly failed them.

There was a magnificent example of tabloid “investigative” journalism when we had an extended description of Hampstead property prices leading to a description of a trader who, it was carefully pointed out, had done nothing illegal. His sin was to be of Iranian extraction, to be rich and to have sold on dual use tech to Tehran; his guilt confirmed by his refusal to speak to the odious shit wielding a hatchet at his front door.

Lest I be misunderstood, I hold little truck with the current Iranian regime. They are, however, no worse than many (most?) other governments and their current singling out as the focus of the axis of Teh Eval is mostly a matter of Realpolitik. It was pointed out that they are using whatever means are necessary to buy parts to keep their F-14s flying: it was not pointed out how on Earth else they could keep their air force operational when they’re under blockade.

Still, as long as we’re all kept in a state of fear, eh?

# strip group: syntax (not inside angle brackets!) and trailing semicolon
R$*			$: $1 <@>			mark addresses
R$* < $* > $* <@>	$: $1 < $2 > $3			unmark 
R@ $* <@>		$: @ $1				unmark @host:...
R$* [ IPv6 : $+ ] <@>	$: $1 [ IPv6 : $2 ]		unmark IPv6 addr
R$* :: $* <@>		$: $1 :: $2			unmark node::addr
R:include: $* <@>	$: :include: $1			unmark :include:...
R$* : $* [ $* ]		$: $1 : $2 [ $3 ] <@>		remark if leading colon
R$* : $* <@>		$: $2				strip colon if marked
R$* <@>			$: $1				unmark
R$* ;			   $1				strip trailing semi
R$* < $+ :; > $*	$@ $2 :; <@>			catch <list:;>
R$* < $* ; >		   $1 < $2 >			bogus bracketed semi

[ blame brisingamen for pointing me at this madness; I’d quite like to read “Voicing, Empowering, Transforming: Affliction in Washburn & Evans and the Colonialist Corporeality of Xenophobia in TCP/IP” too, if anyone felt like writing it ]

to ramtops; we were married eight years ago today, and the heavens opened...

(some reading this might remember that rainstorm, and possibly even the afternoon and evening in the Angel, though I confess that my recollection of the latter is a mite hazy)

Even as easterbunny said. Crabs.

( not any real spoilers, but still )

Cup of tea and bed now, I think. I’ll not sleep though, after total sugar overload from all the banged grains I consumed; hopefully the glass of rye I’ve just finished will help.

Yesterday was the first time I’ve been in the children’s clothing section of a conventional retail store (Norwich M&S FWIW) for mumble years. It was a profoundly depressing experience: have we learned nothing as a society? The rigidity of gender stereotyping actually seems to be worse than I remember.

OK, not everything in society is worse. Overall, acceptance of non-heteronormative sexuality seems more widespread (though ghod knows not widespread enough) but, still, the retrenchment of patriarchy proceeds apace. I can hope that it’s a rearguard action - reactionary in the literal sense - but I fear otherwise. That feminism is dismissed, rejected, mocked when its insights are so obviously needed isn’t a good sign.

Oh, and if you’ve got this far, go read Piers Cawley on the continuing and far too rarely challenged sexism in geekdom.

kalunina‘s as yet unnamed baby moose, Harry John, emerged into our world at just after 2am today in Norwich, weighing 7lb 1011oz, according to his grandfather who was there and cut the cord. Mother and son are well, and ramtops and I will be venturing spinward for the weekend to say “hello” and do what we can to help with this start of a new beginning.

Seems appropriate to slightly paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut at this point:

“Hello, $bubbamoose. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, baby, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, baby—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

On Today on the Home Service this morning: “Tory gains in England [ blah blah ...] while the LibDems have lost 155 seats and Labour six councils” - not verbatim, of course, and those are the figures current as I type, but you’ll find the original somewhere in the last hour of the programme on listen again until you don’t.

Might they have considered saying that “the LibDems have gained one council and Labour lost 225 seats”? What do you think? >;)