We all went off to the National Space Centre at Leicester yesterday and a very impressive attraction it is, if you have an interest in such things. Let’s be crystal clear here though, despite the grandiose title this is no Cape Canaveral or JPL, whilst it has a few large scale displays of space craft, a 1st stage Blue Streak, a Thor-Abel and a Soyuz the majority are educational installations about the history of space travel, the Solar System, Astrophysics and a little Cosmology with good, hands on and AV, activities, but some eye-watering prices for food. At £42 for a family ticket, 2 adults + up to 3 children it’s not cheap but decent value for money particularly if you ‘Giftaid’ the admission price as it then entitles you to return free of charge for the next 12 months, which I will certainly do.

do I need to be reminded of my advancing years? Even something as banal as buying a new calculator shoves it in your face, reminding me of the first ‘scientific’ calculator I had, before that I used a slide rule, I’m not old enough to have used an abacus in case anyone is wondering, a Sinclair Scientific from about 1974, even though it was a milestone in ‘cheap’ electronics it worked out at about the equivalent of two weeks rental for the council house I was brought up in. And whilst the Casio fx-991 ES I bought today has more computing power than that used in the vehicle which put the Yanks on the moon, they would not have wanted to rely on Sir Clive’s little gadget, with the quirky Reverse Polish Notation input method and the fact that you could only rely on about three digits of the 5+2 display with any degree of confidence. But it’s not just the way the capabilities of such hand held devices have moved on, from costing a King’s ransom for four arithmetic functions plus tangent, sine and logs via 19 single function buttons, albeit via a wonderfully clicky keypad which rose to a crescendo resembling a swarm of over stimulated crickets in the classroom when the whole class of students were bashing away at them, to the 400+ functions available via the 46 +1 4 way, multi function buttons on the Casio for a cost of £15, or less than 5% of the real terms cost of the Sinclair. No, it’s not just this that’s reminding me of my age, it’s also that Casio have for some inexplicable reason chosen to put the instructions on a single, 32 panel fan fold sheet that is like a broadsheet newspaper printed in something less than 4 point type. And I can’t fucking read it!!

I suppose that it’s no coincidence that the BBC has chosen the start of the World Athletics Championships to give the oxygen of publicity to Conte, the man at the centre of the BALCO operation and as such was responsible for screwing with this, and many other sporting events, through the agency of supplying juice to more athletes than you can shake a very shitty stick at. Having fucked with sport on a global scale, and made himself a very nice living in the process, he now seems to want to position himself as some sort of messiah and help to clean up the shitstorm he was responsible, in part at least, for creating. And, as the juice business for him is not so great at the moment, he is presumably expecting to be paid for doing so. But as he’s not going to trouble his arse to pick up the phone to WADA (World Anti Doping Agency) or USADA (US Anti Doping Agency) as he admitted in the BBC interview, you have to wonder if his heart’s really in it? He claims he wants to help with the testing process which he says is inadequate; a magnificent piece of sophistry, millions upon millions of pounds could be spent trying to anticipate where the suppliers might go next in the doping pharmacy but budgets for the overall anti doping authorities are already stretched and the regime can only ever be reactive otherwise the budget would not be there to carry out the existing testing program which continues to catch users of HGH, nandrilone, testosterone etc.

If Conte wants to have any credibility in the campaign against drug use in sport then he needs to come up with the names of everyone who he has supplied, not just the handful of high profile names that have come to light so far but the less successful athletes who may now have taken their user philosophy into coaching, medical professionals, managers and trainers. Even more useful would be for him to finger his competition, as someone who ran a business he will have been aware who his competitors were and what they could supply. So come up with some useful names and then fuck off and die, you’re not going to be any sort of saviour the best you achieve is just a little redemption. The need for anti doping regimes across virtually all sport costs millions and it’s the fans that suffer from this funding being sucked out due to the activities of parasites such as Conte.

Well we learnt that, stop me when you come across one that you weren’t aware of; the FA likes to line it’s pockets from lucrative friendly matches, McLaren remains tactically challenged, Beckham’s carrying an injury, Richards has a lot of promise, Owen’s not match fit, Carrack still looks out of his depth at international level, Cole’s flashes of brilliance can’t cement him a regular starting spot whilst he continues to squander possession, the return of Hargreaves can’t come quick enough, Smith is the least talented player to wear the England No. 9 shirt, Ray Clements is probably the best goalkeeper in the England setup and Lampard’s place still looks in jeopardy.

The return of a fully match fit Owen Hargreaves would lessen the impact of many of these woes but will he be back to full fitness by the time the real money matches come around? I’ve always been a big fan of Hargreaves back to the time when he came on time after time as a substitute without a murmur of complaint, Mr Carragher please take note, and always injected energy and pushed the tempo of the game towards the sort of level where we should be playing. Whilst he was always fulfilling this substitute role I assumed it was because he was unable to sustain his performance at this level for 90 minutes but he has now shown he can and his return is essential.

McLaren indicated that this was a below par England performance, but was it? Surely after a period of time ‘below par’ actually becomes ‘par’, we have been below par for the whole of this century. In F1 terms, did we ever believe we were getting a McLaren, I don’t think so, but surely we were entitled to expect more than a 1994 Minardi?

Minardi watch remains at 180 minutes.

Over the weekend I had tried to register for a course at the Open University via their website but without success.
This evening i tried to register for a course at the Open University via the telephone once again without success. I spoke to their helpdesk and the transpires that they already have created A Personal Identifier for me after I requested a prospectus by mail earlier in the year, which was never received, and this now means that I cannot register online. I discovered this after my first telephone call to the Open University helpdesk, when they gave me my personal identifier and I tried to enter this into the web site, still without success. So I now make the second call of the day and explain to the helpdesk that they have given me is not accepted by their web site. I am now asked if I wish to be transferred to their computer helpdesk but during the process of transferring the call i get cut off. So I am now on to call number three, this time I get through to the computer helpdesk only to be informed that “they don’t really get involved with this sort of query” and there advise me to ring the main helpdesk again where they should be able to delete the existing personal identifier and I will then be free to start again from scratch. It is now time for phone call number four, where I learn that the helpdesk cannot delete the personal identify contrary to the computer help desks assurance. Getting fairly hacked off with the whole process by now, i agreed to register for the course by telephone and I go through the details of the course I’m interested in and my personal details, by then get to the screen where they take the payment for the course only to find that this part of their systems is not working today!

Everything above here I have done via the Speech Recognition in Vista, with just a little editing on the keyboard; I guess it’s improving but still took me at least three times as long as keyboard input and it’s still less than perfect. This is mainly due to Speech Recognition struggling to recognise the sounds of ‘i’ and ‘e’ which causes problems when spelling words it has input incorrectly as ‘i’ and ‘e’ occur fairly frequently. Clearly it does not refer to a dictionary when accepting words for spelling as it always seems ready to accept consonants such as ‘v’, ‘b’, and ‘d’ in preference to the vowels ‘i’ and ‘e’ which occur far more frequently. Unless I can find a way to get around this I will be back to relying on the keyboard.

Back to the Open University; the course I’m looking to do is small beer by their standards and will be supported by email and via their web site and it doesn’t fill me with confidence that this support will be all I would expect when they can’t get their technological act together to the point where they can take money off me at the first, or even second, time of asking.

The-half shims over the CFL The-half shims over the CFL well this is terribly interesting though it doesn’t seem to were left well feel if all the for Mer this was, get up and have shown more than this is a higher at the, have no idea what I’m trying to say found on one to the signal that three has any value. Iord have now ord sent it to train computer to recognise my voice would as you can see from the above text, there is still some little way to go before dictating documents into W four news that a practical possibility. Obviously there is still plenty of work to be done in order to make of the software useful for real world. Trying to make this application were satisfactorily does have and entertainment value in addition to its practical value for writing documents, as anyone can see from the text above it also has a certain frustration value as well as the giggle factor. So far the time spent making corrections to the states in the latter half of this small document will have taken far longer than typing it. Looking at the top of the document is still can’t remember what it was that it was attempting to write, I’ll keep working with it the number of typos to be seen in any posts I do in the near future might be even higher than previously, which is saying something!

So the police, through the person of Peter Fahy, are now setting social policy in this country are they? Will we be regaled with their proposals on the tax structure and overseas development policy of this country in the Mail on Sunday? As with Sir Richard Dannett a little while ago, Fahy has well defined areas of responsibility and expectations conferred upon him by society, for which he is paid a handsome salary, part of which is recompense for keeping his gob shut on matters that do not relate to the task of feeling collars. At a stretch I can accept that comments on the legal age for purchasing alcohol might fall within his remit but he’s well over the line when talking about children being put in care if, presumably in the view of the boys in blue, parents are not taking adequate responsibility for the underage drinking of their offspring. If this is the sort of knee jerk reaction that can be expected from his force then I hope I am not around anytime his armed response squad is off the leash.

If you want to express your opinions Mr Fahy, resign your present position and seek a political platform, I’m sure the BNP will be in touch before the door has hit you on the way out.

Not talking about Elvis but the genius though, inevitably, flawed Bill Hicks. I won’t eulogise Hicks here, I haven’t the time or the talent, but suffice to say that space he left in the world of satire, comedy, abuse of non-smokers and a slew of other off the wall genres hasn’t come close to being filled. For what it’s worth, I believe that his continued popularity, aside from the body of work he left behind on his death in 1994, is that anyone who saw his act will be able to imagine, albeit dimly, that the current political and physical world we find ourselves in would prove a fertile landscape for Hicks’ humour. So sad that he is not here to weave it into his material, note that I purposely avoided the word ‘act’, maybe sadder still that we are still in a world so at odds with his outlook.

For anyone wanting to learn a little more about Hicks or just be reminded of his genius, Radio 2 have an hour long program on him 22.30, 21st August.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/musicclub/doc_bhick.shtml

I was in the pub, specifically The Elms Hotel in Retford, a friend of a friend said, ‘did you know Elvis died yesterday?’ and my friend said ‘Elvis Costello?’. Which was just what I was thinking. I never really got the Elvis thing and still don’t, his music was from a time before I had any real musical knowledge or tastes (and, yes, I know there’ll be those who say I still don’t) and I have no more affection for it than, say, something by Glen Miller or Nat King Cole, and that is very little. Everything I hear seem to be zeitgeist pieces and for my money Buddy Holly and others seemed to do it much better, so Presley’s continuing appeal is inexplicable to me. There are always people wishing themselves back to a certain point in the past, and all the artists above have their own aficionados but nothing resembling the army of fans that get all gooey eyed at the mention of Elvis. I understand that many of the artists whose music I do like would acknowledge Presley as an influence, but be that as it may I cannot extrapolate, or interpolate, their output back to their influences, I enjoy their music for what it is, not it’s, to me, obscure heritage. The enjoyment of music is not so rigorously logical that the formula; ‘if you like A then you simply have to like B, or F or L’ can be applied.

That I can remember where I was when I heard of Presley’s death marks the event out as one of some significance, the only other event I recall geographically was 1966 and England winning the World Cup (on a train, going on holiday to Ryde on the Isle of Wight). The reality is that the ‘King’ is dead, long live the…..no hang on, that’s it, the ‘King’ is dead.

Whilst out on the road yesterday I called into a branch of a well known supermarket chain in order to pick up something to eat. I opted for something the packaging confidently proclaimed to be ‘prawns with mayonnaise on oatmeal bread’, or as I like to call it in my quaint, old fashioned way, a prawn sandwich. And on most levels it qualified as such, oatmeal bread was present, it was dry, mayo put in a brief appearance, it was wet and there was no absence of prawns, they were cold. So no recourse to Trading Standards then. Which is a bit of a shame because the whole concoction tasted of absolutely fuck all. It was wet, it was dry, it was cold, it was utterly lacking in anything that could be described as flavour. Back to the Ginsters pasties then? Noooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!

And more pertinently, where is it? Must first congratulate India on the series win and getting the spotlight back where it belongs, on competitive Test Match cricket, after the earlier, one sided series with the West Indies.

But back to home field advantage; is there something that’s ‘just not British’ about this concept because it can’t be argued that ‘it’s just not cricket’ because it is exactly that all over the rest of the cricket playing world, and long may it continue because the last thing I’m looking for is for anodyne drop-in strips to be flown in from ICC HQ in Dubai to ensure ‘uniformity’ or some similar crack-pot idea cooked up by a cricket administrator with too much time on his hands. Even if the series had been tied up at 1-1, I would rather have seen something at The Oval which was more likely to produce a result than what was on show over the last five days. A pitch that gives up 1550 runs and offers substantially the same performance on day 5 as on day 1 is unlikely to produce a result and became even less likely to do so following the loss of Sidebottom’s services. Oval Test Match strips have generally been a batsman’s playground for many years and the groundsman’s scope to substantially change this must be limited, however there is usually a bit of bounce and if this aspect could have been emphasised then Anderson and Tremlett, in particular, may have benefitted more than the Indian seam attack and if this was not feasible then something that started to be more receptive to spin towards the middle of the five days would have been likely to offer more of an advantage to England, by way of Panesar, than India, in the form of Kumble (how often in the last 30 years could that have been said??).

I don’t believe this approach gamesmanship, far less cheating, but a practice commonplace in every other test playing country and needs to be the case over here also. It is something which requires a great deal of thought and expertise on the part of the ground staff, as no one is looking for a test match to be done and dusted before the end of day three, but let’s make the attempt to produce a favourable result for the home side because that’s what is happening whenever England are on their travels.

It could well be a function of my age but why is it that when I hear something on the radio and endeavour to tick the mental checkbox labelled ‘Download when next in iTunes’ within minutes it’s been consigned to the Recycle Bin? Is the hard drive reaching capacity? Got to stop with this PC analogy. Now reduced to trawling these ‘celebrity’ playlists in an attempt to jog the memory; seems to work, in a random sort of fashion. Someone had the B52’s ‘Love Shack’ listed which started me off and I downloaded ‘Roam’ after which it started a chaotic path through The Kinks’, ‘Lola’, Clouts’ ‘Substitute’, The Allman Brothers’ ‘Jessica’, Will Powers ‘Kissing with Confidence’ and ended with various Kate Bush tracks even though I’ve never thought of myself as a fan of her’s.

I see that it’s the time of year that will allow the removal of Sky Sports 1 from my programmed favourites with the return of the prancing pompadours of the Premiership.

A good night for looking at the sky (not Sky but the sky), the Persiads meteor shower is reaching it’s peak, the moon isn’t a problem and with the weather as it is, just a little thin cloud in places, one ‘shooting star’ per minute should be seen. Somewhat less frequent are the Cygnids, but can be spectacular.

Further to my last post on Rick Ankiel I see that he went 3 for 4 today, with two home runs, to add to the two hits and a homer in the previous two games since he came up. I hope he can continue to show this form and repay the faith the Cards have shown in him and reward the effort he had put in over what must have been some very dark years. I think the Redbirds are one of the classier organisations in baseball and whilst Ankiel’s signing bonus was a significant wedge of change it was beans in the total budget and many teams would have cut bait on him long ago.

Well I think that may be overegging the pudding but it is a nice little story. During 2000 season a much touted left handed pitching prospect made it to the Majors. This kid had been hugely lauded, some had dubbed him the best left handed prospect of all time, which was another bit of overegging, but was an indication of the level of expectation surrounding this 20 year old. He had a pretty good rookie season before, somewhat unexpectedly, finding himself pitching Game 1 of the post season NLDS, where things when completely Pete Tong. He became almost completely unable to throw the ball for a strike, he wasn’t being squeezed by the Umps, he was feet and sometimes yards outside or above the strike zone. I don’t recall exactly what happened but I don’t think he got out of the third innings, started Game 3 of the NLCS and didn’t make it out of the first innings. The nature of sport being what it is, he got ripped eight ways from Sunday but handled it extraordinarily well, clearly upset at the meltdown and the threat this represented to everything that he had been hailed as and had been expecting to be for the next twenty years, he came out to face the assembled media and took his lumps with a great deal of dignity and maturity. At the start of the next season he was once again in the starting rotation for St Louis but had exactly the same control problems and went down to the minors, where things got worse, not only with the control but injuries, one resulting in Tommy John surgery, which took huge chunks out of the next couple of seasons until he climbed back to the Majors at the end of the 2004 season, doing OK out of the bullpen. This proved to be a false dawn as his control problem resurfaced during winter ball and after this set back he decided he was done with pitching and would go to play the outfield. And that’s what he’s done and looks like he will be back in the Majors, possibly before the end of the month. Fans who have watched C5 coverage for the last 7 seasons may remember his name; Rick Ankiel.

He’s currently tearing up the Minors, with the St Louis affiliate Memphis Redbirds, 32 home runs (2nd in the whole of the minors) and slugging .568. He doesn’t walk enough and strikes out too often to be the real deal right now but the Cards are expected to take time to have a good long look at him, in fact he came up today according to the Cards website. With an outfield consisting of Edmonds, Taguchi, and Encarnacion, there has to be some room for optimism that he will have a place next season and if he is paired with Chris Duncan then the Redbird’s outfield is already looking to have more potential than this year’s version. I wish him a great deal of success.

Further to my previous post on Barry Bonds’ pursuit of the All Time home run record, it has been impossible to watch or listen to baseball over the past few days without coverage being interrupted to go over to Bonds’ at bats, the only redeeming feature of these frequent interruptions was that the games in the middle of last week were at the Los Angeles Dodgers with the play by play being done by the remarkable Vin Scully, as he has been doing for the last 57 years, stretching back to the time when the Dodgers resided in Brooklyn. Such games as the 79 year old calls, he calls by himself where the norm is now for a play by play commentator plus one or more colour commentators and/or analysts. Clearly, if you were a hack you wouldn’t hold down the job for 57 years but Scully’s style and content are an absolute joy to listen to. If the rumours of Bonds crossing the bay to Oakland to DH for a couple of seasons pan out I may have to suspend my support for the A’s and follow the Dodgers for a while.

The important element to the number above is the asterisk. What’s in a punctuation mark? For those not familiar with baseball lore, when Roger Maris broke the single season home run record in 1961, a mark that had previously been held by Babe Ruth at 60, the baseball season had been extended from 154 games, during the time of Ruth, to 162 in Maris’ day and where it still stands today. Roger Maris hit home run 61 for the season in the 162nd game, the last day of the season. Previously during the season the Commissioner of Baseball at the time, Ford Frick, had made it known that should Ruth’s record be broken after the 154th game then such a record would be qualified and the urban legend is that this would be denoted by an asterisk against the improved mark.

Fast forward to 2007 where Barry Bonds hit home run 755* over the past weekend, tying the career mark of Henry Aaron, the All Time MLB home run leader (Sadaharu Oh of the Japanese League has the most career home runs at 868, a mark conveniently forgotten or disregarded on occasions in the U.S.). Crowds away from Bonds’ home park in San Francisco, whilst acknowledging the inevitability of him breaking the record of Aaron, have been waving placards at him with just an asterisk on, suggesting that Bonds’ new mark should also be qualified due to the alleged steroid use associated with him. 755 is the only measure by which Bonds’ can be considered Aarons equal, Hank ‘The Hammer’ Aaron is a man of class and deference, Bonds is an arsehole of biblical proportions. There is no doubting Bonds’ ability, there was a time, a couple of seasons back, when it seemed impossible to get a pitch past Bonds from the middle of the plate in, it seemed any pitcher, throwing any pitch, mid-nineties fastball, slider, change or curve, it mattered not, the fate suffered would be the same, not merely hit but crushed into right field or out the park. And this all started at an age when Bonds’ physical capability ought to be on the wane, yet his power and bat speed appeared to increase and shortly after this he appeared close to the centre of the BALCO scandal. Whilst nothing has been proved or admitted, rumours of steroid use attach themselves to Bonds with all the tenacity of shit to a blanket. The best thing to come out of Bonds’ of the 755 mark is a review of the career of Aaron, most will be aware of the home run record but maybe not the other categories in which Aaron leads the Major Leagues, All Time RBI leader, All Time Total Bases leader, All Time Extra Base Hits leader, 3rd All Time in hits and runs scored. A body of work that Bonds’ will not be approaching.

Perhaps someone could help me out a little here, it’s now 6 minutes into Monday morning and I haven’t posted all weekend. Does this mean I’ve had a weekend filled with many interesting things which have kept me from posting or has it been a dreary affair that hasn’t contained anything worthy of comment? Spent a fair amount of time going back and forth between Tom Tom and Three trying to find out why I can’t access Tom Tom’s live traffic data as Tom Tom tell me I should be able to, and Three tell me I can’t. Three seem to be right on this one as I still can’t, which is pants. Watched Toseland’s double at Brands, which was not pants, but still won’t stop him struggling in Moto GP unless Yamaha make huge improvements before next season. Watched about 15-20 laps of the F1 GP, didn’t see a single overtaking manoeuvre, don’t recall even seeing an attempt. Hungaroring is notoriously difficult for overtaking, so surely this is the last place F1 should be plying it’s trade? There I go again, ascribing sporting and entertainment standards to the purely cash generating enterprise that is F1.

Roll on next weekend.

So, as we all knew I guess, anything with the ‘Virgin’ moniker attached to it is squeaky clean, sugar and spice and all things nice etc. and British Airways are a festering corporate sore. How could 300 million (approx) of the best reasons be wrong?

Hmmm. Let me just write this down so I can fight my way towards comprehension. Employees of both companies, no board members or other well known names involved let me make clear just in case some of their corporate lawyers Google the word ‘parasite’ and come up with this entry, have a chin wag and decide they have a wizard scheme for fleecing the flying sheep. Both implement this scam equally, but then one party to the stitch up gets cold feet and lobs the other under the bus thereby, with this selfless act, achieving absolution. But even more than this it puts their main rival, and previous co-conspirator, in the hole for 300m. How is this equitable, how is it that the public coffers are not to be swollen by at least tens of millions from Virgin? I understand that there needs to be substantial benefit to the corporate parasite to get them to grass their fellow parasites but walking away scott free? If the individuals concerned do not end up doing porridge at the end of the criminal invstigation, then those on the Virgin side will probably end up with huge bonuses for dumping a gargantuan bucket of shit on the opposition.

Some cack mouth spokesman for Virgin also intoned on the radio that they would not be compensating passengers because they weren’t overcharged. Judging by the statement from the U.S. DoJ they don’t agree, so I look forward to hearing about the class action to brought in the U.S. courts.