[continued from There Be Dragons...]

Actually getting the tattoo was pretty cool.

Tattoo parlours always intimidated me from the outside but inside it was just like going to the dentist (if your dentist had a lot of tattoos) [is that supposed to be less intimidating?-ed]. My hostess - I wish I remembered her name. The google was no help. I’ll call her Tattooed Lady - sat me down and pulled out a Bic razor. Ooooh! Didn’t expect that. Never had my legs shaved before (or since).

Next, Tattooed Lady traced the outline of a dragon with a Bic ballpoint pen (didn’t expect that either) before going over it with the needle thingie. Holy crap! It hurts when the needle hits your tibia! I don’t know how people can tolerate it when they get the really bony bits - like the top of their feet - tattooed. When I mentioned this to Tattooed Lady, she showed me the half-finished tiger that she was having on her skull.

My Brand New Tattoo

Colouring the tattoo didn’t really hurt (though, oddly, when I had my other tattoo done it was the colouring that hurt most). As far as I could see Tattooed Lady was working blind because all I could see was a mess of red and yellow ink. Every now and again, she would wipe it away and I’d get a brief glimpse of a stunningly vivid dragon before the ink (or was it blood? *shrug*) would flood back and my dragon faded back into the mess.

When she was done, she covered it with a bandage which quickly got soaked with red ink (or was it blood? *shrug*). She gave me the after-care speech and sent me on my way.

I happened to be staying with my mother at the time and it was hard to hide the huge, red-soaked bandage. She assumed the worst but all sympathy vanished when she found out that I had not been in a horrible accident.

Everyone thought I was nuts. I got all the usual lectures.

“Only bad people get tattoos. People will think you are a bad person.”
“You’ll regret it when you are older.”
“They cost a fortune to have removed.”

But I can honestly say that I am still fiercely proud of my tattoos. I don’t notice them very often but when I do, I still get a flash of pride - as though I drew them myself. I know a ton of people that regret their tattoos and it’s usually because they are sick of seeing them or because they got some spur-of-the-moment image that they don’t like any more. Don’t even get me started on the people that tattoo the name of a former lover.

To summarize, my tips for getting a tattoo that will give you a lifetime of pleasure:

• Get it on a part of your body (ideally not a bony part) that you don’t have to stare at all the time
• Don’t settle on the first image that takes your fancy. Take your time over it. You will have to look at it for the next 60 years. Make a few trips to the parlour until you are sure.
• Don’t be under the influence when you get it.

Bonus tip that may or may not apply to you:

• I like to make big decisions alone. Getting advice is fine but in the end, it’s me that has to make the decision and I like to do it free from pressure. I make better decisions that way so I went to the parlour alone. YMMV.

I still love my tattoos. Will you still love yours in 60 years?

[I wrote this for a friend. I hope he won't mind that I recycled it for my blog]
I got my first tattoo when they were quite unfashionable. I was in the Navy and even there no one was getting tattoos. OK. A couple of people had them and everyone laughed at them - especially the kid who got the enormous Homeward-Bound-ship-in-a-sunset tattoo. The captain of my sub had one - which seemed rather scandalous because officers never got them. But I had always been fascinated by the idea of a tattoo and, one day, I happened to drive past a tattoo parlour and felt an tremendous urge to pull over and go inside.

The walls were covered with the most delightful sketches I had ever seen.  Every now and again an attractive lady came out to ask if I was OK and if I saw anything I liked. From the magazine clippings on the wall, I knew that she was - according to the Guinness Book of Records the World’s Most Beautiful Tattooed Lady two years in a row. That’s “was” as in used to be. Her Most Beautiful days had passed but she was still quite striking. And very tattooed.

I stared and stared (at the sketches, not the lady) for maybe a couple of hours and resolved to get one. But not today. I wanted to sleep on it first.

I went back to the parlour (does “parlour” sound dirty to you? It does to me.) a couple more times.

“Oh hi! It’s you again! Made up your mind yet? Take your time it’s an important decision.”

On the third trip I picked out an enchanting-looking dragon for my calf and ask “How much for the dragon?”.

“I charge for the bigger ones by how long they take. £30 for each hour. That’ll take me about an hour.”

I wanted one more night to sleep on it before I was sure.

“I’ll be back tomorrow.”

“I’ll be waiting. See you tomorrow.”

[to be continued... I have to go to work now]

Took the kids to the Exploratorium today. It’s currently my favourite museum. Better even than OMSI (although they don’t serve beer at The Exploratorium. How come that hasn’t caught on outside Portland?)  I wish San Jose had a decent museum. The Tech sucks worse than possibly any museum in the world except Morwelham Quay.

I couldn’t find my favourite exhibit - Ladle Rat Rotten Hut. There are so many great exhibits that I have never actually seen them all.

Wan moaning, Rat Rotten Hut’s murder colder inset, “Ladle Rat Rotten Hut, heresy ladle basking winsome burden barter an shirker cockles. Tick disk ladle basking tutor cordage offer groin-murder hoe lifts honor udder site offer florist. Shaker lake! Dun stopper laundry wrote! An yonder nor sorghum-stenches, dun stopper torque wet strainers!”

Jazz fell in love with the drawing board and watched it for about 90 minutes. It’s basically a table hung from four ropes like a pendulum and a pen that draws patterns on a piece of paper as the table swings and twists.  There is a weight that makes it swing eccentrically to make the patterns more interesting.

I promised to make her a real one but I wanted to see if I could do it in Alan Kay’s excellent Squeak first. It was pretty easy and quite effective.

Here’s the program. I messed around with the constants to get different effects.

and here’s a picture I made with it:

Today: simulation. Tomorrow: the real thing.

Wish us luck!

UPDATE:

I just downloaded the latest version of Squeak (now called etoys). It’s MUCH better than it used to be. All the bugs are gone and it doesn’t look like it was made in 1983 any more. Go get it from http://www.squeakland.org/ then you can play with my project - Squeak: Drawing Table

Maybe you could add damping for me.

I’ve been looking for a decent photo editor for Mac.

Found one. Pixelmator. It’s the champion.

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For more than 25 years now, I have been convinced that the second best beer in the world is Fuller’s Extra Special Bitter despite all evidence to the contrary.

ESB took the title from its little brother - London Pride - when I ordered it by mistake. At that time, Pride was hard to find even in London and, recognising the pump handle from the doorway, I ordered a pint without reading the small print. The deliciously rich rounded taste that I loved so well was strangely more complete and more intense than I remembered and my love for ESB was born.

When I moved to New York in ‘94, the state of the beer market was pretty dismal and I had my only sustained period of drinking crap beer since my career began in 1978 (I drank only wine and milk for two months in Australia in ‘89 for fear of permanently damaging my taste buds with their insipid swill). I shudder at some of the piss that passed my lips in those dark days.

After the cold winter of New York, California’s microbrews were a soul-warming blast of sunshine and they renewed my respect for the progeny of John Barleycorn.

In my home country, American beer was always thought of as something of a joke - an oxymoron almost. But the incredible array of tasty beverages in every bar buried that long-standing truth deep underground. Even the now-mass-produced Sierra Nevada is worth returning to. Anchor Steam - which, with Sierra, helped rescued American Beer from the Laughing Stocks - deserves a special shout-out. I especially recommend it with mushroom, jalapeño, kalamata olive, anchovy and extra cheese pizza.

The Bay Area even had Fuller’s ESB which I ordered out of nostalgia. I still called it The Second Best Beer in the World even though I was disappointed every time I tried it and I tried it many times. The pubs just seemed to not give it the care it required and from a bottle it just tasted… well… wrong. ESB was like a childhood friend who had grown up to be a dick. I wanted to keep in touch to rekindle the flame of my memories but I had no desire to spend a lot of time with it. I stuck with the California microbrews.

But the best California microbrew was actually from Oregon and an almost-emigration to the Land of the Hop Monster changed my beer drinking habits for ever. Portlanders don’t like too much beer diluting the taste of their hops and when you first arrive, you wonder how anyone can even drink the stuff. As my friend says, it’ll shrivel your labia if you are not man enough. After a while though, you wonder how anyone can ever drink anything else.

I have tried drinking Portland-style beers in California but they just don’t work. The first time, I thought it was the weather - I accidentally drank an IPA once after a couple of hours of football in the hot sun and almost had to call an ambulance - but no, controlled experiments have shown me that it is not possible to enjoy strongly-hopped beers in the Golden State.

I still look forward to my visits to the rainy north for the welcome assault on my gustatory system (and the pleasant company!) but when I come back south the beer tastes as dreary as the Portland weather. We have already established that I can’t drink Portland beer down here, so what is a fellow to do? Go back to wine and milk?

I discovered the answer a couple of weeks ago.

We had a family crisis and, as with most crises, we decided that it was best resolved by going to the Britannia Arms. Well, the pint of Fuller’s Extra Strong Bitter that they served me that day transported me instantly to my misspent post-adolescence and to the banks of the River Thames at Chiswick. As if the surprisingly hot wood-nymph from Disney’s version of The Firebird were lovingly caressing my taste buds back from the ravages of devastation, I wanted to soar on wings of delight.

Welcome home, my long lost friend.

Epilogue

I have done several controlled tests since that glorious day. I have had ESB several times and it has been marvellous each time. I have been careful not to overdo it - as with a promising relationship with a new girlfriend, you don’t want to spend too much time with her for fear of ruining something delicate - but our relationship is holding up rather well.

I even tried it at home. From the bottle, it’s awful but pour it into a proper pint glass and Fuller’s ESB reclaims its rightful place as the Second Best Beer in the World.

Hooray, beer! Hooray Fuller’s!

We arrived early enough for a beer and the biggest pizza ever shared by two and, once we had our nasty little tickets in our sweaty hands, we ambled up to the stage and picked out a comfortable spot about 5 people back from the rail and started gently bobbing to the crazy, improvised sounds from Pedro’s music contraption - a mashup of MIA, samba beats and the sound track of a horror movie by Salvador Dali - animated by Chairman Mao’s sexiest concubine. Boiler suits were never so hot.

Gradually, the beats got louder…and… closer!?

It was Stomp Meets Cirque Du Soleil and GB’s warmup band were performing in the middle of the crowd. Their throbbing conga line encircled and eventually pushed us aside, performing most of their set practically standing on our toes.

After a few false alarms, the teeming multitude which is Gogol Bordello swarmed onto a stage barely able to contain them. I haven’t pogoed for twenty years but tonight I had no choice but to bounce along with the rest.

In just a handful of measures, my fellow pogo-ers - a mixed bunch of young couples, college girls and a few other oldies - had been displaced by hordes of violent youth and suddenly it was Thermopylae and we were the Spartans fighting for our very survival.

By now, I was 30 feet back from the stage and being battered from every direction. Frenzy doesn’t begin to describe the sensation until the enemy added a new direction of battering when a very large man landed on my head - the crowd surfing had begun!

The surfers - more Gimli at Helm’s Deep than Brian Wilson at Malibu - continued their crazy violence throughout the show but that first surfer, in a wild swipe, grabbed at the crowd taking my glasses and bandana in one greedy handful [note to self. wear contact lenses next time.] My bandana was lost but I grabbed my twisted spectacles back and stuffed them into my pocket.

Two tracks in and I was starting to doubt my stamina. I didn’t expect to last the night but my jostling neighbours jostled me back up to the front and I enjoyed the rest of the concert in relative calm just two bodies back from the rail and just four feet from Eugene and his band of manic troubadours.

Gogol Bordello are the band that Peter Greenaway and Monty Python might’ve conjured up after an acid flashback. Dexy’s Midnight Runners meets The Pogues meets Guernica. Even their ballads are played with an intensity more appropriate on a battlefield.

Despite a couple of weeks of cramming on Rhapsody, I only know a handful of their songs but every track was an old favourite tonight. I screamed the obscenities along with the rest of them.

The highlight of course was Start Wearing Purple and this video barely captures the insanity. Like Dumbo’s dream, like Pooh’s Heffalumps and Woozles, like Dali’s telescopic elephant legs, like Lear’s Jumblies, the song conjures up juggling midgets and bearded circus ladies and organ grinders on meth.

Start wearing purple wearing purple
Start wearing purple for me now
All your sanity and wits they will all vanish
I promise, it’s just a matter of time…

So the Czech Republic is taking over the presidency of the EU and they commisioned a sculpture from one David Cerny to celebrate the occasion. Cerny led the commisioners to believe that he was going to cooperate with artist from each of the EU countries.

Instead, he and a bunch of friends built a mosaic with a panel for each country.

Cerny apologized to Bulgaria for depicting their country as Turkish toilet

and Romania as a Dracula Theme Park.

He denied that Germany resembles a swastika.

See what he did for Denmark, Luxembourg and Holland.

Finished. What a delight!

This one is a lot less prescriptive than The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and what one learns, one learns by osmosis.

The book skips around a lot of different ideas and it reaches deep into the toolbox of the design artist. Sometimes too deep, I thought - but perhaps I am not the target reader.

The pictures are nice though.

You can find some amazing pictures with StumbleUpon. It’s certainly the best way to waste time on the Internet. If you were my friend, I could send you the pictures but since I only have 4 friends, I’ll have to do it the old fashioned way.

Extreme Beginnings

Dangerous Games