The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by John Hawkes-Reed:

Andrew M @ 135:

There was a mob called 'Morris Minor and the Majors' who had a novelty hit with, um, something or other. (It's dreadful how the malign influence of Google has denied a chap the simple pleasure of pretending not to know a fact for the purposes of dramatic wossname. As Oscar Wilde once said, 'Those search-engine people can be right tossers sometimes.' Um. Probably.)

There's also a rugger player called Austin Healey, which is endlessly confusing.

Oh, this is strange. I think I'm having one of those anti-validation moments: ("Is it just me who...?" "Yes, it's just you. Freak.")

So. On listening to the talking-type steam radio as a thirteen-year-old when Hitch-Hiker's was first broadcast, I knew what a Ford Prefect was and laughed appropriately. I can't claim some unlikely and pre-Internet worldliness, because I was a singularly unaware sort of child.

Perhaps the things I was aware of were mostly mechanical.

dcb@322:

Yes. I was working my way towards a similar hypothesis. It certainly covers most of my experience.

That is to say: English, didn't have much fun at school, really can't be doing with Office-style 'comedy' (Milligan/Izzard, on the other hand...) and will not have anything to do with the Usenet any more because that style of alleged debate drives me far enough up the wall that I'm usually left hanging from the ceiling rose.

Similarly, my favoured response to trolls/spammers/griefers tends to involve the lamentations of their women, so the further away I stay from that sort of behaviour, the happier everyone remains.

Heather Rose Jones@47: It seems that all LJ syndication has been hosed since the 12th.

Is there a Spider Baby?

Kirilaw@8: I was that middle-aged chap with chest pains.

Ring GP at half-eight after sleepless night, mention chest pain. Receptionist goes 'Come in NOW'. I duly beetle to the surgery where they wire me to the ECG kit, squint at the readouts for thirty seconds and say 'There's nothing wrong with you but a seriously raised heartrate. What's up?'

It takes a while to tell the nice GP how b0rked things are, but I eventually leave with a cheery grin and a vast box of beta-blockers (to be taken as and when, as anti-anxiety meds). Cost to me: seven quid.

If you pay attention to the likes of the Daily Mail (and there's no help for you if you do) then you'd be under the impression that the NHS was a terrible communist edifice dedicated to sawing the wrong legs off pensioners and bumping 'asylum seekers' (aka filthy foreign undesirables who push down property prices) to the front of various queues.

My own dealings with the NHS have for the most part been splendid (their adventures in computing less so, but then I did that for a living and came away with the firm opinion that many NHS IT consultants need a good shoeing) and I really can't understand why anyone might think that socialised medicine is a bad idea.

Raphael@144: The doner pizza is one of the finest junk foods available to mankind. Preferably from Bits & Pizzas of Flowergate, Whitby.

Lighthill@72: I fear I can't. I spent a merry several minutes grovelling across the BBC4 documentary index to little avail. It was ostensibly about how the BBC presented the UK to Johnny Foreigner; mostly mutated Tomorrow's World items that looked an awful lot like 'Look around you'. Thus earnest BBC reporters explaining that the future of English 'haute cuisine' would be microwave-in-the-bag everything.

So not much change there, then.

As a wee oik, I recall the 'prawn cocktail, burned steak, black forest gateau' -style menu being foisted on my parents as the height of sophistication by a parade of surly waiters. (Which you can still find at Harvester-brand places, I believe. Were you into culinary archaeology)

Unless you have the Time Out cheap eating guide to hand, eating out in London can be an unfortunate experience.

That's the sort of thing that makes me happy to live somewhere moderately multicultural. Even more so after viewing some recent telly programme that detailed the grim filth that passed for 'English posh' food in the sixties and seventies.

Joann@65: I went for sushi in New Orleans with a mob of other EuroGoths. Yes. Exactly that.

Stefan @60: Eels! (S'alright, boy. I won't 'urt yer...)

The various Mighty Boosh series are works of twisted genius that are either the best thing on telly ever ever or utterly impenetrable and I'm sorry I can't see why that's funny.

JH-R in former camp, obv.

anthony@104: Pornographer? I have read Ballard obsessively (is there any other way of reading JGB?) since I was a teenager, and I have to say that both hands remained on the books at all times.

(Whatever I'll end up writing about JGB will make me sound like a right tosspot, so I think I'd better just say that he was/is as much of an influence on my life as John Peel and Tony Wilson, and then shut the hell up.)

There's this, of course. Genius.

punkrockhockeymom @#1: Just Apply.

I applied with no clear idea about how I'd get there, how I'd pay for any of it, how plots were constructed or, um, much of anything.

It's a life-altering adventure.

Constance @527, yes. Exactly that.

Thus far it all seems somewhat 'Death of LJ predicted. Film at 11.' so I'm not planning on flouncing off to one of the clones or any of the myriad lesser webloggy-things.

I have taken a backup, mind.

I'm trying to recall a Belgian beer that I didn't like, other than the grim Stellar Tortoise (aka Wifebeater), and nothing's springing to mind.

Leffe (both blonde and brown) is jolly nice. Hoegaarden is lovely by the bottle, somewhat better by the larger bottle and startlingly good fun by the tureen that the Belgians will serve it in if you ask nicely.

White beer in general is a fine thing to explore if you're lucky enough to live handy for an open-minded off-licence. When we lived in Highgate, the offy just down the road had an entire wall of German/Belgian/Dutch/Whatever beer. I would generally grab a random armload and was rarely disappointed. As it happened, the pizza place a few doors further on kept an extensive (and indeed expensive) Belgian beer menu. That was a right old laugh.

Blast. Too late.

Still, I was going to buy it anyway, so It's All Good.

I trust that it'll have the same effect on several larval-stage hackers that going to 'Hacking at the end of the universe' (1993? Something like that) did on me.

Emily @ 125: Yikes. No wonder US bikers think us Euros have it easy.

Here (the UK) drivers are supposed to give a cyclist as much room as a small car.

Personally, I tend to ride about a third of the way out into the
carriageway. Then the driver has to make a positive decision to avoid
me when overtaking. If you ride tucked into the side of the road, yon
car-driver won't get over and you'll feel a wing-mirror brushing your
elbow.

Long hair, riding w/o a helmet and throwing in the odd wobble will also make the average car-pilot carefully avoid you.

I'm aware that such (Highway Code mandated) behaviour will get me killed in short order in the US.

Abi @ 107: Absolutely. Thirded.

It seems to me that a lot of this stuff is sold in some quarters as
a quasi-religion: Consume less and smell more! Sackcloth and ashes are
good for the skin! Your car kills kittens!

On the other hand, keeping your kit working for longer than it
should can be fine fun and a route into finding out how it all works.
My own excuse is growing up on a farm with parents/grandparents for
whom 'make do and mend' and 'dig for victory' were still maxims to live
by.

(Which doesn't quite explain how I got into the toxic and ephemeral
computing industry, but there you go. Or maybe it does. Anyway.)

Heresiarch @ 99: I think what has happened is that the tech used for
designing objects has got a lot better. There was the old Colin Chapman
line 'If it doesn't break it wasn't light enough, if it breaks it was
too light'. Which is fine for Lotus drivers but NBG for the rest of us.


If some careful simulation and/or finite element analysis can make a
VW Golf lighter and stiffer, then it'll use less fuel and less steel.
At the expense of any road accident worth the name wrecking the car,
but rather that than it all going a bit pea-in-a-bucket for the poor
passengers. Old Land-Rovers are tough, but you wouldn't want to shunt
one properly.

I can't help thinking 'Foundation and Empire' here.

I think I remember watching one of the Apollo landings while at nursery school. Since I was born in 1965, it must have been one of the early ones. After that, it's a bit of a jumble: the three-day week, Princess Anne & Mark Phillips, decimalisation and going metric (more of a hassle for farmers than the general public), Jeremy Thorpe.

Being a junior space-geek (seems to be a generational thing) I was glued to the telly whenever James Burke and Reg Turnbull would jabber over footage of Skylab, Apollo-Soyuz and the first Shuttle launch.

We were on holiday in Wales when a (the? There was the sense that there was only one) Concorde went supersonic as it flew over. I like to think that the sonic boom knocked me to the sand, but I probably just tripped because I was watching the amazing aeroplane rather than where I was going.

I also have a vivid memory of coming back home from the pub and turning on Newsnight to find Jon Snow waving a lump of Berlin Wall.

... And here's another M96

(One should always have a test motorway)

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