Ragged Clown

It's just a shadow that you're seeing that he's chasing.

  • I have a very special memory. One that I have not thought about for years but it came to me today in the middle of Saving Private Ryan. I don’t think I’ve shared it before. In my solitude, you haunt me A long time ago, I had a girlfriend and I used to sing to … Continue reading Solitude

Featured Posts

  • The line between a terrific teacher and a terrible teacher is a fine line indeed. So many of the very best teachers dance along the line with fancy steps on either side, changing the lives of students fortunate to be touched by their magic or cursed by their conceit. Mr Gooden was terrifying and a … Continue reading The Terrible Mr Gooden

  •   The first gun I ever fired was a Lee-Enfield, the mainstay of the British Empire for the first half of the 20th century and the weapon of choice of the Sea Cadets. Wikipedia says that our Lee-Enfields were modified to fire .22 rounds but, in my memory, they were the original .303s. Who knows? (Petty … Continue reading Fun with Guns

  • I’ve always thought of automats as lonely, melancholy places. I entered my first automat when I was 14 and visiting the first of many, many navy bases. Naval establishments in those days were almost defined by their automats and automats were the place to be for a certain kind of junior rating. There were the … Continue reading Lonely in the Automat

  • A long time ago, I went to a school called Chislehurst and Sidcup Grammar. It was a good school: very academic and very sporty. Purple blazers. It was about as close to being a public (i.e. private) school that you could get without paying large sums of money. At one time, Chiselhurst and Sidcup was … Continue reading Sozzlehurst and Hiccup

  • It’s hard to miss Terry Gross if you are a commuter in Silicon Valley. As much as I intend to leave the office in time to hear the endlessly entertaining Kai Ryssdal, by the time I have shut down the computer each evening and made it to the car, seven o’clock has crept up on me … Continue reading A Fresh Look

  • I love the show RadioLab (from W-Y-N …Ceeeeeee!). It’s an hour-long show but I never get to listen to it because I can rarely find an uninterrupted hour to put aside to sit through a whole podcast. Sometimes, I’ll catch a bit on the actual radio in the car but I always regret it because I’ll catch … Continue reading What day is it?

Finger Painting

  • This one’s for Stan.

  • In one of the universe’s subtle attempts to mess with me, my grandmother died yesterday on the same day that I finished this painting – Girl Seated in a Cemetery by Delacroix. In another week or so, I’ll be standing in cemetery myself with lots of other sad people, remembering the fantastic lady who was … Continue reading In a Cemetery

  • I have a routine now. I google for an image on my iPhone and prop it on my knee while I sketch it on my iPad. I think that’s enough copying for now though. Time to come up with my own idea. A portrait, maybe. Funny thing about Monet prints…the images that turn up in … Continue reading Monet’s Field of Poppies

  • I did this one on Monday while waiting for Jazz. I used to have a print of this picture when I lived in London until, one day… I was taking a shower before work in the morning when the water suddenly stopped. I went to work with suds in my hair. When I came home, … Continue reading Monet’s Sunrise

  • When I first started fingerpainting, I would slap out a picture in an hour or two. As I got better at it, I would pay more and more attention to the detail and it took longer and longer and became less and less fun. I was able to whack this one out in a couple … Continue reading Captain, My Captain

  • I might have to take a break from sketching. This one took me forever. More sketches on Flickr.

Recent Posts

  • Choose your metaphors carefully. Brexit is like a game of tiddlywinks We played a game two and a half years ago and you lost. That’s why you want another game. Then what? Best of three? But you cheated last time! So did you! But I won the previous game 50 years ago! Brexit is like … Continue reading Brexit is like a game of Tiddlywinks

  • The hardest thing to bear in all of this is that no one is allowed to tell the truth: not May, not Corbyn, not the People’s Vote People, not the Daily Mail, not the BBC, not even the Guardian editorial writers. It’s like everyone watched A Few Good Men and learned the wrong lesson from … Continue reading Brexit Despair and Brexit Hope

  • Mrs Clown and I attended the Remembrance Day parade in Bristol yesterday. My nan and grandad took me to my first parade in Footscray in, maybe, 1972. I was in the first rank of the Bexleyheath parade as a Sea Cadet in 1980 and marched with the grown up soldiers and sailors on Plymouth Hoe in … Continue reading When do we forget?

  • The core idea is sound. According to the author of The Three Languages of Politics, there are three separate buckets of political thinking in the USA: a libertarian bucket, a progressive bucket and a conservative bucket. For each bucket, there is a corresponding axis along which we evaluate political ideas. For example, a libertarian will … Continue reading The End of Political Science

  • That Google memo business has got me thinking. The author got himself into trouble for a bunch of reasons (too much logos and not enough pathos for a start) but I thought the core of his argument, restated to be more positive, could be appealing to many of the people who condemned it. I’m going … Continue reading A More Social Software Engineer

  • I’ve had an idea that answers the question “What are dreams for?” floating around in my head for several years now. Whenever there’s an article or a podcast about sleep, I listen to hear whether anyone else has had the same idea. This meaning of life dialog comes close. Bob Wright asks the classic question “Why do we dream?” and … Continue reading The Dream Watchers

Pencil Sketches

More Posts by Ragged Clown

  • I wonder if people seeing new paintings at the dawn of each new period experienced them the way we experience an exciting new technology? When the renaissance painters rediscovered perspective did their fans experience it the way we experience 3D movies? Was the incredible depth of emotion in Baroque anything like technicolor was for us? … Continue reading Virgin at Prayer

  • When I returned from travelling around the world, I took a crappy job fixing avionics on planes at Heathrow Airport. Ooooooooooh how I hated that job. I quit after about three months with no idea of what to do next. Eventually, I narrowed it down to one of five things. Six years in the navy … Continue reading It Changed My Life – Book Four

  • Something – The Ragged Clowns http://www.raggedclown.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/something-the-ragged-clowns2.mp3 Liner notes by Wikipedia “Something” was recorded during the Abbey Road sessions. It took 52 takes in two main periods, the first session involved a demo take on Harrison’s 26th birthday, 25 February 1969, followed by 13 backing track takes on 16 April. The second main session took 39 … Continue reading Vague Traces of Rhyme

  • Little Red Rooster http://www.raggedclown.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/rooster-take-2.mp3 Too lazy to crow the day.

  • Four years ago, I drove up to Portland, Oregon to make a new life and I fell entirely in love with every detail of the city. I loved exploring Portland and I found something new each time I looked. I have a sense that the puritans never made it as far as Portland. In San Jose, … Continue reading Here we go out of the sleep of mild people

  • I find it simply amazing that, one thousand years ago, people were drinking excellent beer and singing this fantastic song and that even now, one thousand years later, beer is still excellent and the song is still fantastic. There were three men came out of the west Their fortunes for to try, And these three … Continue reading John Barleycorn Must Die

  • I’ve had an idea that answers the question “What are dreams for?” floating around in my head for several years now. Whenever there’s an article or a podcast about sleep, I listen to hear whether anyone else has had the same idea. This meaning of life dialog comes close. Bob Wright asks the classic question “Why do we dream?” and … Continue reading The Dream Watchers

  • I just read Alan Kay’s Early History of Smalltalk. It was timely for me because Brian Marick’s mention of the New Math put me in auto-rant mode on how schools optimize for students who are unlikely to excel in the subjects they are being taught. One of the themes of Alan Kay’s sparkling career has … Continue reading For whom?

  • As I mentioned at our reunion, we had quite a few stories of teacher on pupil violence. Mine was best 🙂 It was the end of the third year (8th grade for the ‘mercans)  and we had to pick our subjects for ‘O’ Level so Paul and I went to speak with Mr Lewis to get … Continue reading Hey! Teacher! Leave those kids alone!

  • Ever in search of new experiences, I went to church on my own for the first time ever. Church-going folk always seem delighted to welcome non-church-going folk. That pleasing fact makes me smile down deep inside. I sat discreetly in the most out-of-the-way spot I could find and was all alone until an older lady … Continue reading Don’t Break the Chain

  • It cost me an E string and the skin off the top of my ring finger but I am done. While My Guitar Gently Weeps http://www.raggedclown.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/while-my-guitar-gently-weeps.mp3 Recording Notes Making music is hard. I started with the drum track this time and it made everything so much easier. The rhythm guitar was fun even though you … Continue reading An End To Weeping

  • Crossing the line is an important milestone in a young sailor’s life. King Neptune demands that every time a ship crosses the equator, everyone aboard be called to account for his sins and he rises from the deep to hold court. He pays special attention to those who are crossing the line for the first … Continue reading Crossing the Line

  • Trying out my new coloured pencils. I’m planning to draw one of Renoir’s dances every decade. Country Dance is overdue.

  • See, I was looking for a picture of a freshly inked tattoo. I knew it was there somewhere but I found a thousand other pictures first. There goes my evening. I’ll have to look at every single one of them….and so will you! First up, Falklands tour from September, 1984 to March 22, 1985. Your … Continue reading I Was in the Navy You Know

  • I read about america’s worst mom when she became famous last year. She has a book out. The media dubbed me America’s Worst Mom (Go ahead, Google it.) But that’s not what I am. I really think I’m a parent who is afraid of some things (bears, cars) and less afraid of others (subways, strangers). … Continue reading Child Abuse

  • It has come to my attention that there is a whole continent of people who have never listened to Jeff Wayne’s musical version of The War of the Worlds. This is a crime against humanity. The War of the Worlds is the very pinnacle of that mountain of great concept albums that defined the 70s and … Continue reading The chances of anything coming from Mars

  • Affirmative action is counter-productive. So is the minimum wage. And minimum standards of education. Technology is uninteresting. Well over 90% of science fiction is crap. Checked exceptions are stupid. I am afraid that pubic hair will go the way of under-arm hair. C# is better than Java. There is not enough testing in schools. Tipping … Continue reading More than fifty surprising things that I believe

  • In my travelling days, I used to keep one note and one coin from every country I visited. I just came across some notes in a photo album and, on a whim, had a look on eBay to see if they are worth anything. I have a Gibraltar Pound from 1979. This is a £50 … Continue reading A Pound’s a Pound the world around

  • A little while ago, Jeff and I attended a funeral because Julio reminded us that you should always go to the funeral and on the way back we talked about how the one thing religions really do well is funerals and that it was a pity that atheists didn’t have anything as good. The discussion … Continue reading Funerals for atheists

  • Oyasuminasai! First customer visit. After three train rides, four tickets (costing an average of 8 million yen) and about a thousand miles, Australian Jeff, Polish Mirek, Japanese Yukio and English I arrived at our destination (late) and rushed in to give my first presentation with Yukio translating for me. I have no idea how it … Continue reading This side of Nagasaki (day 2)

  • When I was a lad, it was the law that every school had a religious assembly and, at my primary school especially, we used to sing 3 or 4 hymns every morning. In the assembly hall, we had two enormous (to a 10 year old) contraptions that dangled enormous hymn sheets from the ceiling. One … Continue reading Judas and Mary

  • I hate internet memes too, but I like this one. List 10(ish) books that had a big influence on your life. Here are Will Wilkinson’s and Conor Friedersdorf’s and Ross Douthat’s. At the end of the third year at Chis and Sid, I won a prize for the most improved student. After coming dead last … Continue reading It Changed my Life – Book One

  • Whenever we hear a story about someone who has suffered a tragedy or illness that leaves them in a bad way physically, we have that conversation. The one that goes “I wouldn’t want to live that way. Just have me put down.” I always have the same response: as long as I can still think, … Continue reading A Beautiful Mind

  • I’ve been a Billy Bragg fan since I saw him at the Portsmouth Guildhall in ’86 and I’ve terrorized my family and friends by singing his songs ever since. My best Billy Bragg memories include teaching Train Train to Dylan when we lived in New York. He was only a year old and he used to finish … Continue reading Levi Stubbs Tears

  • Wish You Were Here http://www.raggedclown.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Wish-You-Were-Here.mp3 (performed by The Ragged Clown) I got a bit carried away with the overdubs but it was fun. I got most of the parts in a couple of takes – except the last two lines of the second verse. I sang the second verse about 20 times before I realized … Continue reading Trading Heroes for Ghosts

  • Scene: It’s 3am at the Hotel Fifty. Only the rumble of the train and the roar of the traffic disturbs the silence of the over-active air-conditioner. Our hero is sleeping softly. *door creaks* *door slams* Mysterious Stranger: Fuck! What is this shit??! Our hero awakes.  Startled by the noise and the stranger in his room, … Continue reading The Intruder

  • The folks who wrote Pragmatic Programming recommend that you learn a new language frequently because, with each language, you’ll learn a new trick or a new way of thinking about programming that you never thought of before. When you go back to your old language you’ll take your new trick with you. Last year, I learned Objective … Continue reading What’s your trick, Python?

  • When I was a teenager, I thought there was nothing that I couldn’t do if I worked hard enough at it. Except art and music. All my attempts at drawing ended in tears and my attempts at playing the recorder made people cry. Miss Sindy, my art teacher at Chis and Sid, always seemed to … Continue reading No Limits?

  • When the big little clown was in fourth grade, he and his friends were really into Texas Hold’em. I regularly hosted a bunch of nine year olds for poker sessions. They couldn’t get enough of it. The Little Clown and I used to play all the time, even when his friends weren’t around. Nine year … Continue reading There’s a one in five chance…

  • They teach way too much english and history in school and not nearly enough physics (but that’s the topic of my next blog). But the one subject that they really need to teach more of is rhetoric. Jay Heinrich believes that every parent should teach their children to argue and I agree. To disagree reasonably, … Continue reading Teach Your Kids to Argue

  • Hearing the reports and interviews about the San Francisco plane crash brought back a long lost memory. I had just turned 21 when I joined the nuclear submarine HMS Revenge. I was one of two petty officers responsible for all the sonar systems on board. The other dude, Mark, was a year or two older … Continue reading Fire! Fire! Fire!

  • I used to sing this song every day to my first baby clown.  He used to sing along. Not any more. Oh no. And It Stoned Me (performed by The Ragged Clown) http://www.raggedclown.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/It-Stoned-Me.mp3

  • There is a beautiful, sprawling tree on top of a hill by our house. It has a rope swing and someone has nailed boards into the trunk to make it easy to get up to the crown where a splendid panorama of Almaden Valley awaits you. The tree has a special place in clown family … Continue reading Have fun!

  • 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 … Continue reading Purple Madness

  • Tom lent me the Game of Thrones to read recently. I enjoyed it thoroughly but I couldn’t help but think that – if you take away the thin veneer of magic and fantasy – it reads a lot like the history of my country. And how much more fantastic to read a true story? So … Continue reading Hic Harold Rex Interfectus est

  • When I said that Crick was a flawed, flamboyant genius, I was guessing really. Pretty good guess, it turns out, as Matt Ridley’s fascinating mini-biography makes vividly clear. Let’s get the flaws out of the way first. What I had in mind first time around was his total disdain for the institutions of religion and … Continue reading Flamboyant Genius – a little bit flawed – never in a modest mood

  • Mrs Clown and I attended the Remembrance Day parade in Bristol yesterday. My nan and grandad took me to my first parade in Footscray in, maybe, 1972. I was in the first rank of the Bexleyheath parade as a Sea Cadet in 1980 and marched with the grown up soldiers and sailors on Plymouth Hoe in … Continue reading When do we forget?

  • When I was 20, my girlfriend’s brother bought me Bleak House for my birthday saying “I love buying books for people who will get pleasure from them.” I’ve flirted with Bleak House more times than I can remember but there is always some other book ready to steal my affections. I’ve been through a substantial proportion of the … Continue reading The Gift of a Book

  • I’m not really sure why they call him Slowhand. My hands were much slower than his. I gave up trying to copy the last two measures of the solo and just made something up. Sunshine of your Love http://www.raggedclown.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/sunshine-of-your-love.mp3 Performance by The Ragged Clown I thought it’d be at least easy to sing. Turns out… … Continue reading Sunshine of your Love

  • Timoth Garton-Ash describes in The Guardian what he sees as the root cause in the difference between the US outlook on the War on terror and the European outlook. He compares the pro-war conservatives in the US with the militaristic imperialists (“Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori“) in pre-World War I Europe and suggests … Continue reading The Old Lie

  • It used to be hard to find well-thought-out justifications for atheism. Most people I knew were atheists but didn’t like to talk about it much (probably because they didn’t know that most people they knew were atheists too). The only famous atheists were either the shouty, angry kind or weirdos. You had to go all … Continue reading Why not?

  • Roger Ebert has written a powerful, meandering essay about shame. The essay takes many twists and turns and each one of them is fascinating journey in its own right. It starts out as a review of the movie The Reader I was watching Tony Scott on the Charlie Rose program, and he said, in connection … Continue reading My Deepest Shame

  • One of the many books I am reading at the moment is The Peregrine by J.A. Baker. It’s a bird-watching diary written by a man who (according to the intro) is in the last year of his life and decides to devote it to watching falcons. The book is just day after day after day … Continue reading What is, is now

  • I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance three times. The first time I read it, I thought it was the best book ever and it got me reading Plato and interested in eastern religions and philosophy. I also had a flurry of interest in zen-influenced physics books (Dancing Wu Li Masters, The Tao … Continue reading It Changed My Life – Book Two

  • Remember, remember The fifth of November. Gunpowder, treason and plot. I see no reason Why gunpowder treason Should ever be forgot. A long time ago, there was a King of England called King James I. In the years before James came to the throne, there was much religious strife in England. James’s great-great-uncle, King Henry … Continue reading Gunpowder, Treason and Plot

  • Footscray. Council estate. Fancy grammar school. Parents divorce. First in class. Run away to sea. Engineering apprenticeship. Girlfriend. Falklands patrol. Girlfriend. Sonar engineer. Polaris submarine in Scotland.  Patrol North Atlantic. Midshipman. BRNC Dartmouth. Quit. Backpack (California, Tahiti, Moorea, Bora Bora, Huahine, Raitaia, hitchhike Sydney->Cairns->Darwin, Bali, Lombok, Sumbawa, Flores, Komodo, Singapore, Malasia, Thailand). East End. Poor. Girlfriend. … Continue reading My life in 100 words or less

  • I’ve been reading a lot recently about how leftists are supposedly disappointed with Obama because he was not leftist enough and centrists are disappointed because he was not centrist enough. I’m disappointed, but none of that rings true with me, perhaps because I am neither a leftist nor a centrist and my criticism of Obama does … Continue reading President of my Dreams

  • Who knew that this : Would become this: ? Can anyone in the first picture pick me out from the second? Vice versa?

  • I have a sense that Facebook is about to score its first victory in the battle for civil liberties. Facebook has been ablaze with outrage over the new Porno Scanners at airports and their creepy human cousins, the Groping Agents. Facebook has managed to bring the issue into everyone’s consciousness the way that newspapers and … Continue reading Private Principalities

  • Bob’s post about liberty reminded to to finish a post I started about 3 years ago. Most people think of politics in terms of left and right. In America, there are liberals and conservatives and anyone in the middle is a moderate. This is a gross over-simplification and distorts the political discourse in many ways … Continue reading Go down, not left !

  • Since I have access to all the songs in the world I told Rhapsody to just play me some songs that you think I might like. Rhapsody thought I might like to listen to some Kate Bush which was nice because I haven’t listened to Kate Bush since I was about thirteen with hormones and … Continue reading Pick me Kate! Pick me!

  • Because your my best girl and the best you’ll always be.

  • Like I wasn’t gonna get the new GarageBand for iPad?? It’s pretty good but VERY frustrating. There are tons of bugs and it’s a  little too slow to keep up with any kind of complex strumming. I lost my whole guitar track once and, by the end of the session, the sequencer view thingie was … Continue reading iPads make iMusic

  • A few years ago, the wife of a dude I used to work with died. I didn’t really know him well – and his wife not at all – but word got around and a friend of mine said “are you going to the funeral?” I said “well, no probably not. I didn’t really know … Continue reading Always go to the funeral – redux

  • I heard from several correspondents that they thought my attitude to religion (Christmas vs Holidays) was unusual. One had been brought up in a religious environment and now rejects the whole shebang – she can’t understand why I am interested in Christian mythology at all. She wouldn’t even let me buy a children’s bible for … Continue reading A kindly old man

  • I finally made it back to my room, giftless and tired, with two hours remaining before our next installment of eating and drinking. I was looking forward to just relaxing in the bath but, when I checked my email… bling-o! blong-o! … American Jeff IM’d me to see how I was getting on. I told … Continue reading This side of Nagasaki (day 4.5)

  • Quick! Name a heroic action in World War I. I bet you can’t. Modern European attitudes to war and nationalism were largely shaped by that most patriotic of wars. Passchendaele, The Somme, Verdun, Galipolli. The names of the battles are associated in our minds with tragedy and disaster. The names of the generals will forever … Continue reading At the going down of the sun

  • I bought The Golden Treasury of English Verse and a harmonica as my only mementos of civilization when I set off to go backpacking around the world. I’m not entirely sure why though because I couldn’t play the harmonica and I hated poetry. By the time I got back, I was enchanted by both. Being … Continue reading It Changed My Life – Book Three

  • Why is that these two statement evoke such different reactions? I hear they are making a movie of  The Lord of the Rings. I hear they are making a movie of The Lorax. Those of us who are fans of JRR Tolkien were positively thrilled when we heard the fantastic news all those years ago. … Continue reading Once-ler Goes to Hollywood

  • A couple of years of ago, Beckham left ManU for Real Madrid and, a few days later someone new showed up wearing the No7 shirt. “Who is that?”, I wondered. Within about 3 minutes, I said “I think we got the better end of the deal here. This guy is much better than Beckham”. This … Continue reading Play Beautiful !

  • I just got through reading Charles Murray Real Education so I was perfectly primed to be alarmed by this passage Teachers can’t prepare for the content of the tests and so they substitute practice exams and countless hours of instruction in comprehension strategies like “finding the main idea.” Yet despite this intensive test preparation, reading … Continue reading What is education for?

  • It started with a random comment on a blog. A few months back, I blogged about a rather famous party at my school and, last week, Helen left a comment. It’s always exciting to get comments on my blog- especially when the commenter is someone you haven’t spoken to for 25 years. Helen was at … Continue reading Reunions FTW

  • Spoilers Ahead! Before I read the book, I had always understood Lolita to be a sexually precocious teenage girl who seduces an older man. In this scenario, Humbert is technically guilty but it’s still possible to have a little sympathy for him. It’s only our prudish modern society that frowns on sexual relationships between middle … Continue reading Betraying Lolita

  • The third post in which I blog my reactions as I plough through Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. This was the first section where I was listening to most of the albums for the first time and I had an intense reaction to every one of them. OK. Except Robert Johnson. I … Continue reading Quest 500. 21-30

  • My new favourite song is Águas de Março. Pandora found it for me in my “Mas que Nada” playlist where it is sung by four or five different performers so I get to hear lots of different versions. This one – with Elis Regina and Antonio Carlos Jobim – is the best version by a mile. … Continue reading They are the waters of March, closing the summer… and the promise of life… in your heart.

  • Wonderwall (performed by The Ragged Clown) http://www.raggedclown.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Wonderwall.mp3 A late entry in Gizmodo’s rip off an album cover contest. Winning entry by Mrs Clown

  • When Netflix first started their DVD service, we did what everyone else did. We loaded up our queue with classic movies from the old days and started watching stuff we’d always wanted to see but never gotten around to. Then Netflix recommended “more like this” and the movies we watched got worthier and Worthier and … Continue reading The Curse of the Worthy Movies

  • Haven’t recorded one for a while. I’m stuck on a plateau and can’t seem to make progress. I have three or four songs where I can play everything but the solo. This one doesn’t have a solo so it’s good to go. It isn’t quite right, but it’s about as close as I’m gonna get. … Continue reading My aim is close

  • Atlas Shrugged is a classic tale of good versus evil. The heroes are easily recognized by their strong profiles, high cheekbones and tendency to speech rather than speak. Heroes always know the precise angle to present their bodies so that the setting sun can highlight their virtues and their flat hips while the bright red … Continue reading Atlas Whatever

  • I started this picture ages ago but I got frustrated trying to draw her face. So she has been stuck on my iPad for about a year waiting for me to finish. Then, when I came to finally finish her, Art Studio crapped out on me and wouldn’t start. I had to back everything up, … Continue reading Lady by a Wall

  • [story is a little out of sequence due to international dateline] Woke up this morning feeling only slightly fragile and, with my three dinners of the night before fully digested, I was ready to make an attempt on the World Breakfast Record. I had miso, nearly raw egg – just the yolk – in a … Continue reading This side of Nagasaki (day 3)

  • HMS Invincible just sailed off to the scrap yards. Invincible came into service right before I joined up. It was a big deal at the time because Thatcher’s Axe inflicted a series of massive cuts on the armed forces right before I signed on the dotted line. HMS Invincible was actually sold to Australia and … Continue reading Tempus Fugit

  • The next ten albums in my quest to listen to 500 Greatest – according to Rolling Stone – Albums of All Time. It’s handy, on a quest like this, to have access to all the music in the world. Imagine if you had to buy them all on iTunes at 99c a track. It’d be … Continue reading Quest 500. 11-20

  • A new day, a new trap… Hello! Son of Simon!

  • I’m reading the biography of Winston Churchill by Max Hastings and I’m also following along with The Orwell Diaries on RSS. I’m at a similar point in both stories and what strikes me most forcefully is how bleak those times were and how close Britain was to utter disaster. My imagination won’t stretch far enough … Continue reading In Our Times

  • Here’s a quick way to test whether you understand what’s going on or whether you are still clueless like me. Scenario There are three people on a bus going to the beach. One person says “Does anyone want a newspaper?” The correct answer is: No, I’m fully up-to-speed with the day’s events already thanks. Yes, … Continue reading Philosophical Comprehension

  • Over at www.developertesting.com, I wrote about the Monty Hall problem and how I was convinced of the answer by an unused variable in my Java simulation. Markus wrote a nice simulation in Squeak (dunno what it will do if you don’t have squeak installed but it makes a good excuse for you to go get … Continue reading Monty Hall in Squeak

  • I’ve been following John Walker’s Hacker’s Diet for about nine months now. I love the simplicity of it. “Anyone can control their weight. It’s a simple matter of balancing calories.” – John Walker Mr Walker’s book is a fun, simple read. If you are technically inclined and you want to lose weight, you should certainly … Continue reading Hacker’s Diet