Astronomy In England

Some of you may have noticed (though most of you probably have not) that I've not posted any astrophotography shots since February (here's one).

Well, there's a reason for that and that reason is this:
I live in England.

Friday night is Observatory Night.
It has been cloudy, foggy or pissing down with rain every single Friday since February.
It's been raining here solidly for two weeks now.
It is the stinkiest pisser of an alleged spring on record.

Shakespeare, probably our greatest Englishman and one who - staging his plays in an open air theatre - would have had occasion to glance up at the English sky from time to time, wrote "For the rain it raineth every day."

Bill Bryson, who, for reasons best known to himself, has settled down just across the river from me, says that looking up at the sky here is "like living in Tupperware."

Except it's a lot wetter.

 This year the rain it raineth every bloody Friday night, and in particular it raineth on the heads of astronomers, forcing us to sit, night after night in the lecture theatre, drinking endless cups of bad coffee and talking rubbish.
Last night I glumly took these photographs before grumbling my way indoors, brewing up a stinking brown mess in the kitchen and then moaning about the weather to the soundtrack of the clickety clack of a bunch of miserable old codgers in the "telescope mirror grinding room" (which contains … er … a pool table) and wondering if there will ever be another clear Friday night.

The past week and a half has seen our Spring Star Party, where a whole bunch of us (though luckily not me) had a thoroughly dispiriting  time sitting, shivering in soaking, freezing tents in the middle of nowhere up in North Norfolk being lashed with gales and torrential rain.
Last night, as I helped them unpack their dripping wet gear from the van they seemed remarkably chipper about it all. Over here, it seems, astronomy is not so much about looking at the stars, it's more about hope … the hope that one day before we die we might get the chance to actually see something in the sky other than water.


Welcome to astronomy in England.

Paella Time

All through autumn and winter I'm a risotto hound but April is paella time over at my house.

If you want to join me, here's Old Dive's "Dumb As Fuck Paella" recipe.

Enjoy.

New Baby

Shitty biscuits! I didn't realise how dusty my lamp was until I looked at the photo. Now it's all nice and gleaming and shiny again.

My many Macs have been misbehaving while I've been at work and I got home yesterday to find they had produced a new baby. A teeny-tiny sooper-cute ickle MacBook Pro. How sweet is that?

Apologies for the mess all over my desk. And yes, that's the Big Box of Buffy (again). Yesterday was the one-hundredth anniversary of the death of Bram Stoker, which gave me the excuse (as if one were needed) to start my annual non-stop seven series Buffy-fest; one of the greatest pleasures of not having a life.

Anyhoo … There are now eight boxes of Apples in my house. I SO need a girlfriend to nag me and shriek "YOU CAN'T AFFORD THAT!" and "WHAT THE HELL DO YOU NEED ANOTHER COMPUTER FOR?"

Yeah, right …

In the meantime I'm off to play with the new baby. It really does demand my attention …

Pen

It's a pen.

Plain and simple.

P … E … N … Pen.

My fountain pen ran out of ink in a meeting earlier today and as the ink is upstairs at my workstation I delved into my stash of sketching pens and yanked one of those out to finish what I was writing.

I didn't get to finish the sentence, however, as I was brought up short by something that told me I had left reality and ended up somewhere else entirely.

"Something the matter? asked the Structural Engineer.

I stared at the pen, turning it around to make sure …

"Yup." I replied. "This isn't my world. I've been suddenly transported into an alternative and totally fucking dumb universe."

I passed the pen around and they could only agree.

Apparently, in this universe, pens are no longer pens. This one is a "pigment liner."

That's what it says. It's clearly a pen but it doesn't say that anywhere on it; it just says "pigment liner" … except it's in upper case.

What the fuck kind of dipshit marketing department calls a pen a "pigment liner?"
It's a PEN! A PEN, you buttfucking morons! It's puts ink on paper and you write with it. It's a fucking PEN!
A PEN as in my all time favourite typo: "The Penis mightier than the sword."
It is not and will never be a "pigment liner."

These are the same people who call a delivery van a "logistics solution."
They deserve to die.
Slowly, painfully and amusingly.

So anyhoo … That's how my meeting went this morning. We all agreed (and minuted) that a pen is a pen and that anyone calling it a "pigment liner" is a buttfucking moron.

So how was your day?

We All Scream For Scary Larry

After yesterday's comments I'm off to Boise to track down Scary Larry, the ice cream man. Many thanks to Ms.M for enlightening me as to his existence.
I can't beat that for a creepy name; the best we can do around here is "Mister Whippy" which - sadly - is not an S&M ice cream franchise but merely one of those who peddle that sloppy gunk that looks like wet poo (and hence never comes in chocolate flavour).

About as far from real ice cream as … er … sloppy poo, the stuff is an aerated froth of high fructose corn syrup, water, powdered whey, mono and di-glycerides, calcium sulphate, cellulose, guar gum, polysorbate emulsifiers, a gelling agent made from seaweed (of which I approve), magnesium hydroxide (usually used as a laxative or a deoderant, it is used here to bleach the product), plus a whole lot of stuff from a chemistry set; all of which is excreted (there can be no other word once you've seen it) from a tube. Purportedly a dairy product, very little of it has ever been near a cow's udder and indeed most of it is air or stuff that you would never naturally choose to put in your mouth.

I don't know about the Colonies, but over here the stuff only comes in "white" (neither a flavour nor a colour, merely a chemical bleaching to stop it looking too much like poo) and if you want chocolate, they stick a Cadbury's Flake in it and call it (for reasons beyond the ken of mankind) a "99".

In case Flakes are only sold over here and not across the pond, a "Flake" is history's most pornographic chocolate product.
In the late 60s and 70s they used to advertise them on TV using scantily-clad (and backlit) beautiful young girls - usually in fields for some reason - who would peel back the plastic foreskin and - accompanied by a jingle litigiously akin to the "Aaaaah, aaaaah, aaaaah …" bit from The Beatles "A Day In The Life" - would then proceed to fellate the thing in close-up.
Yum!
Rampant prudery put an end to the adverts, which was a great shame as they were the only easily accessible form of soft porn available to my spotty, adolescent self. They left me with a permanent hankering for as certain shape of lip … Sigh.

When I was a kid, we had Dairyland and Paravani ice cream vans vying for our attention. Mister Softee then invaded and pushed the traditional ice cream sellers out. Foolishly we craved the sloppy gunk that was so addictively sweet it burned our mouths.

As for real ice cream, I do seem to remember a tiny place down on Blyburgate when I was very little. It had a pair of those lovely plaster figurines in the window; half-sized children with rosy cheeks and inappropriate lederhosen who looked for all the world like props from some Hitler Youth propaganda movie.

As far as I can remember, we walked in to someone's tiny living room and sat down and were served real ice cream in a bowl, made in the kitchen by an Italian immigrant family. From cream! I remember strawberry flavour and biscuitty wafers (not the crap you get in ice cream vans) and not much else.
Of course the place is long gone now but perhaps Mum can help me on this one? What was it called? It's on the tip of my tongue, but - like the flavour of the ice cream they made there - I can never quite recall it.

And now I've got Frank Zappa's "Flakes" stuck in my head. Hey ho; at least it's a considerable improvement on yesterday's song …

Muß i' denn, muß i' denn Zum Städtele hinaus

Still waiting for Spring, though with increasing impatience. I woke up to frost and then the sky threw lumps of ice at me on the way in to the office.

It was perhaps not the best start to a Monday so I was hardly surprised when it got worse.
Some idiot spent the entire morning driving around and around the neighbourhood where I work. What gave me this nervous twitch was the fact that said idiot chose to drive around and around in an ice cream van.

Now I like Elvis as much as the next man (ice cream, too), but a whole morning of Wooden Heart played on ice cream chimes is enough to make Saint Francis of Assissi rip the heads off birds …

… or to render an ice cream vendor completely insane, so that they spend an entire morning driving around a single neighbourhood trying to sell ice cream on a day when the kids are all in school and the clouds are emptying sacks of hail on people's heads.

The title of today's post is the opening of Wooden Heart in the original German and translates as "Got to go, got to go, got to leave this town …" an increasingly attractive option this morning, I have to confess.

I'd take this world back and change it for another one if only I could find the receipt.

Some Things Ending In 'O'

Κρασατο

 Barolo

Boffo!

Hope your Sunday's as tasty as mine.

Here's the recipe.

No I Don't Want A Fucking Cheeseburger

Had a good chuckle at this over breakfast, The antidote to all those idiot LOLcats posts.
Enjoy …

A Nice Quiet Coffee

One of my favourite coffee shops and a regular rendezvous with Joy and Thom is Little Red Roaster, a place so tiny you have to leave your bag and coat outside and grease yourself up to squeeze in there, yet famed for the total awesomeness of their coffee - these guys are serious.

They're also known for their polite if oddball signage (witness this one I found in there last summer), and somewhat bizarrely this morning, one of their polite signs got them onto the national news.

The sign simply states: "Sorry, we are unable to serve you if you are on the phone. Thanks."

Suddenly a ray of hope and sanity in an obscene world. There's been quite a stink about this, kicked up by morons who insist on holding up the queue and annoying the fuck out of staff and customers alike by rudely bellowing inanities into a small box while waving away the barista trying to serve them.

Listen up, dipshits:
Either hang up the phone and get served, or leave the queue, go stand outside - somewhere away from the door where your imbecile shouting will annoy customers a whole lot less - and come back in again when you've finished your call.

It's basic politeness. Consideration for others. Do it or I will kill you.

Most of you (if anyone still reads this dross) already know my views on mobile phones and their users.
If you want the less sweary version, let's just say that anyone who happens to be talking to me face to face and then answers their phone, waves a hand up at me and continues chatting to their caller will know that I'll simply walk away and not bother speaking to them again for their unutterable fucking rudeness.

More on this another day, but I'm starting a campaign right now for mobile phone users to be provided with small covered areas outside coffee bars and restaurants where they will be required to go (like smokers) and indulge in their antisocial and FUCKING ANNOYING habit away from people who want to enjoy their coffee with friends, talking face to face at normal conversational levels without some inconsiderate fuckwit shouting drivel at the entire establishment.

Hoorah for Little Red Roaster!

Message ends.

Hello. My Name Is Dive And I'm A Pastaholic.

Fuck, I'm fat!

Hokay, time for an intervention. Time for all of my more reasonably proportioned body parts to gather round and gawp in disgusted awe at my utter rotundity.

Holy shit … I wouldn't look out of place in a Mid-West strip mall, shopping for cheese in a spray can. Not being one for mirrors and only having a top view of the corpulent crisis going on in my midriff I had been only vaguely aware of the effects of rampant inflation … until this weekend.

Last Sunday, given the choice between Easter church service and traditional family roast dinner, I sensibly opted for neither and instead moseyed on down to the studio to make an unholy racket with my disreputable friends (or at least one disreputable friend and my equally disreputable little brother).

Phil has gone all gadget-happy and spent his groats on one of those new fangled moving picture screens (an Apple eye patch I think he called it). Anyhoo, he propped the thing up on an amp while we spent a pleasantly unproductive afternoon busking old songs that none of us could really remember and songs that none of us actually knew … pretty much par for the course.

It would appear that the piratical eye patch captured some of the shambolic mess on video. The upshot of which is that I caught sight of myself standing sideways on to the camera and screamed like a girl.

Fuck, I'm FAT!

As a friend has since put it: “Most people would simply opt for conventional gender reassignment, but you? You have to be different. I mean the man-boobs were bad enough, but how the hell did you manage to get yourself pregnant?”

I took a screen grab of my planet-shaped pregnancy and stuck it on the fridge door with a big red sign that simply states “DON'T YOU FUCKING DARE!” I have another sign on the kitchen door which reads “Don’t even think about it. Turn around one-eighty and get your fat, ugly arse into the gym, lardboy!”

On an unrelated note, Nokia recently took over the company I used to use to post all my music on my blog and - to improve their service - are pulling the plug on the whole thing. So if anyone clicks on my old music tracks all they'll get is a bunch of Swedish incompetence and no noise whatsoever.

Whilst the more culturally advanced among you might consider that an improvement, I'm a sadistic bastard, so here's some of last Sunday's cacophonous crap to annoy the hell out of you and to remind me to lock myself out of the kitchen.
Knowing myself pretty well, however, I predict that dieting will be a non-starter and will be replaced by the simple expedient of never again standing sideways on to a camera.

Toodle pip.