It's all a blur

[caddyman]

Hello Kiddies, your hero is back in London and regular service is about to be resumed on the LJ front: brace yourselves for a resumption in pointless meanderings and outrageous exaggerations which stop just short of being downright lies¹.

Yesterday’s trip back to London was the usual fraught engagement with public transport. I had intended to pop into the NWO ref meet chez ashenkat and immerwahr, but missing the train at Shrewsbury by approximately 2 seconds² ensured that never happened. Instead I spent a rather boring hour on the station followed by a very sedate ride to Wolverhampton in a train that stopped everywhere on the way. Any final thoughts about attending the meeting were squelched by the fact that there didn’t appear to be a single train between Birmingham New Street and Coventry, so the Intercity took an oddly circuitous route from Wolverhampton to Rugby avoiding anywhere even vaguely recognisable. I finally arrived at the Athenaeum Club just before 8pm, having been travelling since 2pm in one form or another.

Is it any wonder I am such a fan of public transport?

Late on last night, before deciding to watch the Superbowl, I thought, amongst other chores, that I would log in with my new laptop and download the necessary updates for XP. It took me about a half-hour of dedicated fiddling and generally faffing to confirm what I suspected from the outset: I have no idea how to set up a LAN, even when we have one. I had hoped that just by plugging the brute in and making the settings match those on my desktop, it would all work nicely.

It doesn’t. The term Plug and Pray may be less true these days, but in Bryan World it remains true as far as installing anything more challenging than a new mouse.

I shall say nothing about the Superbowl other than to observe that what I saw was actually rather entertaining, but that the Seahawks’ chances were clearly torpedoed by the fact that most of their receivers seemed to have forgotten how to catch the ball for long periods of the game. Of course, it didn’t help their cause that several exceptionally dubious refereeing decisions went against them, and that their returner had clearly been bribed before the match.

Fair catch my arse.

Still, there you go. I did appreciate the US commentator’s dismal attempt to be inclusive for his non North American audience. To paraphrase, ”Of course, European viewers will be familiar with that sight which is very similar to the scrum you often see in European rugby soccer”. What he was referring to was more like a ruck or a maul, but the good intention was there, bless him.

And on to today.

Today is an auspicious occasion. Not only is it Accession Day³ and Waitangi Day for our friends in New Zealand, but it is also the day I picked up my new, and first ever, bins.

I can’t see a bloody thing in them. Well, strictly I can, but it appears that the optician-standard comfortable reading distance and mine differ somewhat. If I look at the papers on my desk, they are refreshingly big and clear. The computer screen is more of a challenge and anything over two feet away has acquired a bizarre Doppler Shift effect, whilst anything a yard or more away is reassuringly out of focus. I get dizzy turning my head, because I still have good peripheral vision and that is not magnified the way everything close up suddenly is, and it is disorientating.

I doubt I shall wear these buggers over much. They seem to be making my eyes more tired than they would normally be.

On the plus side, I have discovered the art of the Giles Manoeuvre which involves polishing the lenses extensively instead of doing anything constructive.



¹This is, of course, entirely untrue.
²The damned train pulled out of the station just as I got to the platform. Grumble.
³Fifty-four years and going strong. Gawd Bless Her Majesty, and all who sail in her.