The calm before the storm:

okay, so this has been an even slower news week.

Josh came up to visit over the weekend, notionally for a Vegas that unfortunately went the way of an apathetic dodo. Instead we began by pre-lubricating ourselves (in a social sense) with mucho beer and then patronised Annabel's birthday bash at the Human Be-In. It was an excellent night, if somewhat blurry. I cornered Annabel and talked at her about writing websites (in both senses) and have now resolved to at least look into creating one of my own; marvelled once again at the smallness of her phone and later retired to a booth to have booze ferried my way by obliging friends.

The next day, a planned pub crawl from the Shore up to the centre of town was very nearly dead before it even began. Eventually, feeling extraordinarily averse to alcohol, I caught up with Jeff and Josh in the Wash. I forced a few down to keep up and was eternally grateful when the appointed hour for dinner rolled around. Ash joined us at the old flat for some hybrid lasagne (mmm hybrid lasagne) and we all headed very slowly back to the Wash for a few more. Jeff and Josh gamely headed off to a party twice removed and I was very, very glad to be able to call it a night.

[Next time the RF should be coming at you from the other side of the world. Return to Oz is go.]

Okay, so it's been a slow news week.

On Sunday morning, impelled by some vague desire to both recapture lost youth and grow up a bit into the bargain, I made an executive decision to make some French toast. I bought some bacon, eggs, a none-less-healthy Mother's Pride plain loaf and an Observer. The basic idea of a civilised, cooked breakfast avec lefty newspaper covered the growing up part of the equation (and oddly is something I almost never do), while the artery-hardening mix of bacon and plain loaf harked back to childhood days of pushing the token fried tomatoes to one side to get to the good shit.

Of course I made rather a meal of it and eventually sat down to some rubbery French toast that managed to be simultaneously over- and under-cooked, a cup of burnt coffee and a couple of rashers of uninspiring supermarket bacon, but y'know, the thought was there.

Ash ate cereal and yoghurt. Hippie!

On Monday night Coba Fynn - shambling behemoth of rock that it is - got together for the second rehearsal for our Second Coming. Doug and I were so late that David and Charlie went to the pub in our absence, but my word: once we were plugged in and warmed up, you could palpably feel the rock. After you sifted through the cacophonous layers of ear-splitting noise, that is. Roll on December! I predict a Christmas number one.

P.S. Jez' sister Cis (yes, I too thought she was everyone's sister for a while) has put a minor masterpiece of a video up on YouTube. Wilfred the dog: il espère. Il espère.

Business as usual:

Dave, Gill, Ash and I met up at the Car Wash (yes, I have lived here for that long) on Saturday and got utterly plastered. The next morning I felt very bad indeed. The end.

On Saturday night, afraid to go near a pub for fear of an allergic reaction, Ash and I patronised the cinema again, this time to see Right At Your Door. If you haven't seen anything about it (and I'm not giving anything away here), it's about a dirty bomb attack on L.A. and one guy's attempt to seal up his house against the airborne toxins.

I was underwhelmed. It should have been excellent. It should have been claustrophobic, but ruined that by moving the point of view outside the house for no real reason. It should have been tense, but squandered what little tension it had created by some melodramatic, unconvincing character building. The denouement should have been unexpected and shocking, but was mundane (in the context of the film) and fleeting.

Basically, as far as films costing less than a million bucks to make, Hard Candy owns Right At Your Door very hard indeed. Try that instead.

The mighty iron steed:

further to the preparations for next month's globetrotting, fund-eating trips I've been pratting around with posting to my Flickr account via email, and so I now present to you the first fruit of this astonishingly nerdy pursuit: the finished form of my over-described bike.

The last big piece to fall into place were the forks - a pair of Kona Project 2s - sized to mimic suspension forks with 80mm of travel. This suits the frame much better than the £10 under-the-counter specials I was using until this week, and suddenly it feels like a real bike. The steerer of the original forks was very slightly narrower than the 1 1/8^th inch headset diameter and so there was far too much play in the steering; the Project 2s look to be made to a much lower tolerance and everything is rock solid now.

It now goes, stops, turns and imbues the builder (i.e. me) with a trememdous sense of smugness. Job done!

I took this photo with my phone's camera, and well, it's not great. Bit of fish-eye type distortion evident on the back wheel and despite the original image being 1600x1200, there really isn't a lot of fine detail. A bit of experimentation is going to be required, I think...

Anyway, stay tuned for more similar techy high jinks. I bet you can't wait.

I really am failing to do anything of note

these days, with the exception of interminable amounts of preparation for the upcoming RF World Tour: Colonial Edition^TM. I'm now insured to the eyeballs for snowboarding, scuba diving and general holiday hijinks anywhere "worldwide including North America" which is funny because I thought "worldwide" meant just that.

I've also signed up for a new mobile contract that includes a phone the size of a planet. "That's no moon," I mused as I uncrated it on Friday. The somewhat weak/geek rationale for this purchase is to have mobile internet access so we can plan ahead in terms of accommodation and avoiding tropical storms. Of course my contract doesn't actually stretch to mobile internet in the US, and so the phone will no doubt see me skulking around business districts looking for unsecured wireless networks.

Rock. And. Roll.

The weekend was taken up with working (sigh) and some low key, pleasantly grown-up boozing in honour of Dave's birthday and then a rare visit by Waxy to Edinburgh. At some point Ash suddenly asked me, remembering a conversation about philosophy books no less: "Did you dig into my Kant?"

I almost died.