News, (warning) Tech stuff (/warning) & Griping about US TV

ByGwyn Fisher

Late News: My cousin Ian and his missus, Yuri, had a baby boy, William James Fisher, weighing in at 8 lbs on Wednesday. He will be the first Fisher with an American accent unless Ian keeps his videos of Jeeves and Wooster on permenant rotation. Also, as the product of two of the finest minds in the county he’ll probably be up for his first Nobel prize by his 4th birthday. Congratulations to the pair of you.

We handed over the keys to 629 last night. After all the sweat and tears of cleaning that place (& thanks for your help, Tanya) I was hoping for a “Dude, you guys like totally cleaned this place. Damn! Awesome job!” from the official UCSC bloke, but nope. So it ended not with a bang, but a whimper and an overpowering smell of disinfectant. It was a nice little house, but we’re up for bigger and better things now…

Scott & Tanya came round again and we ate, drank and played scrabble again. and i fell asleep on the sofa before they’d left again. I really have to work on that. Tanya got a ‘bingo’ in scrabble as they say, all seven letters with the 50 extra points. I got 121 in one go on my palm pilot scrabble t’other day. Still not enough to beet Scott’s 123 with QANATS but I’m on it. Oh yes. It had been a long day though.

I recently discovered the joys of bittorrrent and more specifically the site target=”_blank”>YouKayNova.com which has all kinds of UK telly torrrents on it. I was happy enough just to be able to find tons of radio programmes to burn to CDs, but it looks like last night I went one step further and can now burn pretty good quality DVDs of programs like Room 101, Have I got News for You, Ivor the Engine & much much more. I’m still wary of getting slapped with a law suit if I downloaded full-on films so I’ll just stick to renting those, but I can’t see the BBC going after people for sharing files. The Beeb was talking about using bittorrrent to distribute radio programs fairly recently. So…

One of the many things I miss about the UK is the quality telly. And I never even had cable over there. You can peruse the back page of Guardian Two and join the dots between programs to keep yourself entertained for a good few hours every evening. Ad free on BBC 1 & 2, and on the other 3 channels even the adverts are occasionally amusing or intelligent. And they don’t run for 5 minutes urging you to ask your doctor about the “Purple Pill” or somesuch and then 2 minutes spewing out a list of side effects like nausea, sexual disfunction, boils, and premature balding as men and women dance around a beach at sunset and some brandname with a couple of ‘X’s and ‘Z’s lights up the sky. Which is nice. The US program Jeopardy has about the same type of audience as Countdown in the UK. Both last half an hour (last time I checked). Somehow Jeopardy fits 3 spasms of adverts into its running time. The show itself lasts 20 minutes all told. With Countdown you’ve got a short break in the middle with about enough time to make a nice cup of tea and settle back down for the second half, at worst you may catch a glimpse of Thora Hird selling Stannah Stairlifts from beyond the grave as you head back from the kitchen, but I know which I prefer.

I can’t watch a film on TV in the states, neither. First off, because they’re a) censored beyond belief and b) rarely worth watching. But mainly because in the event you do get into watching a film, the bloody adverts keep coming at you faster and faster until in the final half hour they practically interupt every other sentence uttered. I think there’s an inverse relationship between climate & winter hours of daylight versus general TV quality but that’s for another day.

So that’s my rant. Thank Jeebus I have my interweb to keep me entertained. Might be time for a coffee now… cheersy- gwyn

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This will take about 10 minutes if you fancy it yourself… fill in the blanks for 80s lyrics. Slightly US-centric but i’m not bitter. Can you beat 79.5? … Matt, I throw down the gauntlet…

just watched a bolivian film called American Visa review coming shortly in the right hand column… It might be time to move this computer upstairs, i’m writing far too many entries of late…

Red sweetcorn and downey bound

if these red sweetcorn things don’t poison us first… I’ve seen them used decoratively, but Drsita just picked up 6 from Lucky’s and 4 of them were red.

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Wish us luck.

(Post-prandial EDIT)

They’re not as tasty as the yellow ones, but apparently according to several wise Mexican friends on flickr, they make great tortillas…

Abuela desde Guanatos sent me a whole myth about them, I’ve been translating all afternoon so while I’m in the mood…

It all happened before the Spanish arrived, when the earth belonged to those who worked on it, when nobody fought to live, because living was easy, and men were happy just to sleep, eat, love and grow.

In this particular year there was much happiness. The rains had fallen in abundance; the moon had illuminated the crops.

The Indians sowed the grains of sweetcorn, as white as a girl’s teeth on the well-ploughed earth

A few days later, the ground was covered with little green shoots which grew and grew as they drank up the water.

The goddess Sucuxi, so beautiful, so pure, so good, pondered the work of the Indians from the hill and wanted to reward their efforts by giving them the biggest harvest.

Susuxi came down from the hills to the sweetcorn fields, whose leaves blew in the wind. Thorns pierced the brown soles of Susuxi’s feet and from them fell red droplets of blood.

The goddess fled back to her house, dripping blood onto the kernels of a sweetcorn cob.

The kernels drank up the blood and turned red, as red as the blood they had drank.

Days passed… and the Indians harvested…

The strangest thing: They found a sweetcorn with red kernels.

Spanish source

The story lacks closure. Like then the next day the conquistadors arrived or something… and also maybe kernel’s not the right word, but I’ve been installing ubuntu all afternoon on my laptop…

Anyroad, there’s a blog post for you. They’ll be scarce again this week, no internets yet in Downey we’re told.

eat, sleep, work, LOST

It’s just gone midnight and we’ve put another 6 episodes of Lost behind us. This cannot be good.

San Martin de las Flores- Judea en vivo 2007

100_2787 Just a suggestion for next year’s Judea, have the 200 or so “elements of the security forces” dress up as Romans to add a more authentic touch to the procedings. As you’ll see from the photos, all you need is red and gold fabric and the brush from your kitchen broom… and it’ll make the arrests of public drunks even more watchable. (See the Informador’s version of events here.)

100_2684 So it was quite an experience. First off, travel directions from Guadalajara: from Lazaro Cardenas, take the Carretera a Chapala, go about 3 km, to just after the bottom of the first hill, and turn off to the right at the San Martin de las Flores exit, cross the overpass, the railway and then go about 2 km and you’re there. Park, entrust your car to local 7-year-old entrepreneurs and wander through the impromptu market that’ll be bustling with people selling empanadas, chairs, relics, hats and refreshments until you get to the hill and wander up it. Bring walking shoes, sun tan lotion, and water. And a camara. And while you’re at it with your camera, make sure you’ve cleaned the lense or you’ll get home and realise every pinche photo has a smudge on it. Arse.

Anyroad, 100_2705I got to the top of the hill at around 3ish, where the well-graffitied cross is and there’s a nice view but no shade, luckily they were selling sliced fruit up there so I sat down and watched the masses assemble while listening to Wait, Wait don’t tell me, the NPR news quiz on me iPaq.

By around 6pm the hill was packed, 100,000 people apparently, all jostling to see Jesus carrying his cross up the hill escorted by the aforementioned Romans and local TV camera crews. I had to stop several times on the way to the top to catch my breath, but fair play to Jesus, he managed it in one, very fast, climb. I’m not sure what happened when he got to the top. I thought there was going to be a full-on crucifixion, but I think that only happens in Venezuela or somewhere. I also left before Judas got hanged. I was more interested in taking photos of the crowds from the bottom of the hill. So all in all, I’m well glad I made it there. I think I was the only gringo there, I’m glad I didn’t wear shorts to make it even more obvious.

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All my other photos of the Judea 2007 are here on Flickr if you’re interested.

Plans for today: Watch Howl’s Moving Castle, defluff my laptop (it’s starting to shut down due to overheating. NOT good, especially for next week’s workload), walk the perrito, check there’s no more black widow spiders in my office (*shudder*), and in the evening go on a tour of the expiatorio area of Gwod with José and Fernando, where there’s special events this evening at around 8 onwards. Let the good times roll.