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Vive la France! Fry and Laurie have been exhausted. I've started another round of chess games on the internet and already managed to turn one of them from an incredibly promising position to a near-loss. Sigh.
Posted the photos for 21st December.
[Photos added 2007-01-31. This is the point at which Jen discovered that she was using the wrong fabric to make her skirt. I was able to repeat the experiment; Tim was able to look like a Gumby. Jen did a good job of looking windswept afterwards, at least.
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Tim, by the way, loves having his photo taken.]
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Pottered around during the day and played a bit more chess. Off to the Castle with the systems group / Xen people in the evening. Yay! for decent beer. Conversation occasionally became incomprehensible but you get that when you join a group of people who all do the same thing, about which you know next to nothing.
Mary Poppins was on the telly when we got back. I still find the scene where they're trying to convince the kids to invest their tuppence in the bank to be deeply disturbing.
Wandered into town for a thoroughly unsuccessful shopping trip. While I was sitting on the wall outside King's, eating my lunch, the wind turned my 3/4-full cup of coffee into a 1/4-full cup of coffee and a caffeinated pavement. Neither branch of Jessops had spare batteries for my camera (except for their own brand) or 2GB compact flash cards (except their own brand, for £99). So I bought a camera bag from them and a copy of Is It Just Me or is Everything Shit? (Volume 2) for half price at Borders. And then I came back to Tim's and made myself a cup of coffee and bought the other things from Amazon.
Jen's friend Louise came round for dinner. Much pizza was eaten. No, really. Much pizza. It just kept coming. And then people started declaring themselves full. But there was still more pizza. By the time the last one came out of the oven, Jen, Tim and I were the only ones still eating. Except it was too spicy for Jen so Tim ate most of hers. It's a good job we all like pizza. And then there was chocolate cheesecake. Mmmmmmm.
Listened to England getting whitewashed before I went to bed. I don't understand England cricket these days. Why on earth did we send in Monty Panesar as a nightwatchman to protect Chris Read? Yes, this is the same Chris Read who, until last match, couldn't get into the side because of his batting. Now, suddenly, he's such a great batsman that he can't go in in the last couple of overs of a day.
My Amazon order arrived. Turns out that the CF card reader has large plugs on both ends of the cable so I can't use it yet -- laptop has only a small socket. The new camera formats a 2GB CF card in a couple of seconds; the old one would have taken about twenty. Of course, 20s is perfectly acceptable but the new camera is just so shiny!
Drinks at the Blue with Neil, who's the only school-friend I'm still in touch with. Also turned out to be drinks with some random guy called John, who's originally from Cambridge but now lives in Jersey. Nice chap, though has a slight tendency to retell urban legends with his friends as stars. Neil now drinks real ale -- yay! Alas, his last train home was around 9pm. Which we discovered about two hours too late. So he spent the night at the station hotel, which didn't seem to be too expensive from the signs outside; I suppose I should have hung around just in case they had no sensibly-priced rooms left.
Slobbing in front of the telly, mainly. Jen bought me a four-to-six-pin firewire converter while she was in town but it turns out that the two missing pins are power and ground. So my firewire thingummy is no use at all. Bah.
Went to church with Tim and Jen to see where they'll be getting married. The church at the end of their street is something of the anti-Tardis: a very large building has been internally divided into a fairly small church and a hall. The service was rather chaotic as it involved small children being the three wise men and so on; they did hand out chocolate, though. The world, by the way, is very small. One of the members of the congregation is, if I'm remembering this correctly, the daughter of the priest who baptized Tim.
Quite unconnected with the Lord's Smarties, I had an upset stomach for most of the day. This was fixed by going to the pub with Daniel. I'm not sure if it was the 3½ pints or the curry but something sorted me out.
Went to London. Ad on the tube: can't remember the exact phrasing but it's something very close to, ``Love sick? This is just what you need.'' Oh, the difference a hyphen could have made... One of the free papers also told me that Jessops' sales in the last six weeks of 2006 had been lower than expected, mainly due to stock-control problems. That figures.
Bought lunch at Pret from a very tall, very blonde and indescribably cheerful Dutch woman; ate it on a bench outside St Paul's, in the drizzle. The cheerfulness contrast was quite stark. (I'd have found somewhere sheltered if I was bothered by the rain, of course.)
Tate Modern was excellent as usual. All the Epstein has gone away but Giacometti's still the coolest thing ever. ``Light Switch'' (a projection of a picture of a light switch onto the wall) is back and seems to have been restored; there was also an excellent video installation with four separate tracks of bits of music and sound-effects, giving a rather Charles Ives kind of effect. (In fact, it wasn't nearly as good as Ives' fourth symphony but you can't have everything.) There was also a rather disturbing documentary of a project to make Tirana a better place to live by painting the buildings in one neighbourhood in bright colours. Dismal failure if you ask me: it's evocative of the general idea of happiness but that doesn't really cut the mustard when the pavement looks like something out of World War I Flanders. The turbine hall exhibit is a set of helter-skelters coming down from the upper levels. Alas, I didn't get to go on them. To avoid massive queues, you need a (free) ticket but the next time tickets were available was an hour and a half away from when I enquired, after I'd already seen everything else.
When I left, I decided to get the camera out and find something worth shooting on a damp, grey day in central London. Note to self: don't leave the good camera at home ``because I won't want to take any photos on a day like this.'' After a while, I gave up trying to capture the contrast of St Paul's against the modern buildings around it and found this angle.
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I got back to King's Cross at 16:45 to be told that my ticket wasn't valid until 7pm. Apparently, these days, ``off peak'' means ``not leaving London between 4:30 and 7pm''; when Ah were a lad, it meant, ``Not leaving Cambridge before 9:30am.'' I'd thought something might have changed as there was a sign on the ticket machine at Cambridge saying something like (I forget the exact phrasing but it's the typesetting that's important),
Ticket validity Restrictions apply Monday
to
Friday only
Of course, I only read the second line.
Since upgrading my ticket was going to have to cost a fortune and give me a half-hour wait for the next train, I decided to take a chance on the National Gallery being open. Ended up with forty-five minutes to whizz around and see all my favourites and neglect all the rest. Pottered around Trafalgar Square afterwards and managed to get one pleasing tourist snapshot and one photograph, both longish exposures braced against walls.
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Got back to Tim's at about 8:45 to find a note on the living room door saying that he'd gone to the Cambridge Blue. Which is about five minutes' walk from the station. Oops. This was, no doubt, why he'd tried to call me when I was in the Nat Gal. I then found that he'd texted this information to me at 7pm but the message had either been delayed or, more likely, I'd just not noticed it. So I cycled to the Blue and found Tim's bike outside but didn't find him or anyone I recognized inside. Understandably, he'd given up on me and gone for food. Ah well; it's a nice cycle.
Tim had been telling me horror stories of people turning up for airport busses with tickets and seat reservations and being told that the bus is full; go away. Since I had neither a ticket nor a seat reservation, I was OK. Well, also because there were only about ten people who wanted to go to Luton.
Flying with a cold isn't fun. Specifically, landing with a cold isn't fun: my ears hurt a lot and didn't settle down for several hours. On the up side, the Metro no longer stops running to the airport at 6pm. On the down side, they put as much effort into announcing this as used to put into announcing that Greece's major international airport was only accessible by road after 6pm. Which is to say, none whatsoever. I only found out after standing on the bus most of the way into central Athens, carrying my bags down into the Metro station and glancing at the destination indicator of the train arriving at the other platform.
Things that cheered me up about being back in Athens: a 15ft Christmas tree standing by the bins at the end of my street (sorry -- didn't get a photo); a police car parked outside the place where I get gyros; the policeman inside buying large quantities of take-away food; eating gyros. Things that pissed me off about being back in Athens: the cock on a motorbike who tried to run me over (I exaggerate only slightly: he swerved at me and laughed as I leapt out of his way); the students are striking again, according to Alla's text message.
Text from Alla saying that the strike is ineffective. Went into the office but, as expected, I didn't get anything done except for preparing a diagram for a paper Alla's writing. I was only there for the internet, really.
From the Greek news bulletins in the evening, it seems the students were having a riot of a time in their protest march through Syntagma Square.
Stayed at home, as I should have done yesterday. I was woken around noon by the landlady ringing the doorbell to make sure everything was OK, which it was, apart from my cold. She was very apologetic and asked if there was anything I needed, which I said there wasn't. Nevertheless, the doorbell rang again in the early evening, and the landlord gave me a little bag of groceries, which was ever so kind of them.
Turned CNN on to see if Bush's new Iraq plan is as dumb as yesterday's speculation suggested it would be. It is but the news was being upstaged by Beckham's move to the USA. He says he wants ``new challenges'' but, as far as I can see, what he actually wants is the total absence of challenges. Well, apart from the challenge of spending nearly one meeellion dollar each week. No longer will he have to cope with the trauma of not being selected for the team; no longer will he have to deal with not always being the best player on the pitch and having eleven competent players against him. Very challenging, Becks. Very challenging.
Finished All the President's Men, which I bought at the airport. I think I'll need to read it again: it's very compelling but quite hard to follow, especially to those reading it because they're feeling too brain-dead to go to work.
Eep! The local terrorists launched an RPG at the American Embassy in Athens this morning. Apparently, it broke a window and landed in the toilet.
Spent a few hours in the office but didn't get anything much done. I did receive a spam with subject, ``Hei comrade with small prick!'' though and it's good to know that people are still prepared to acknowledge me as a comrade, even despite my penile inadequacy.
Have now started on The Final Days, Woodward and Bernstein's (and Scott Armstrong and Al Kamen, who are mentioned in the ``Author's note'' but not on the cover, for some reason) account of Nixon's presidency from the resignation of Haldeman and Ehrlichman in April 1973 to his own resignation in August the following year. It seems much easier going than All the President's Men. It's also rather thicker and in rather smaller type.
Dubya says it's unacceptable for people to be so quick to criticize his ``new'' Iraq strategy without suggesting something better. This is, of course, true. It is also, of course, a total straw-man, since the criticism of his plan could accurately be summarized by the three words, ``Baker'', ``Hamilton'' and ``report''. Which constitutes a suggestion of something better. I note, from my current immersion in Woodstein, that Nixon was also fond of illegal wire-tapping, getting his own way and only listening to people who tell him what he was about to say himself. The Daily Show was more interested in suggesting comparisons with Lincoln.
Dave's missing hyphen of the day: ``Pakistan pres. to approve first mixed sex marathon,'' according to CNN's headline swoosher. I wonder how many gay sex marathons he's approved...
Sorted out the photos for 23rd and 30th December and 8th January.
One of my internet chess opponents has mysteriously resigned. Fritz (which I can now ask, since the game is over) reckons that I have some advantage, equivalent to about a pawn, but that's hardly grounds for resignation. Interesting game: I ended up with queen for rook, bishop and pawn. Meanwhile, one of my other opponents has lost two knights and the plot.
CNN told me about the weather in Jyväskylä in Finland. Unfortunately, after looking questioningly at his script for a moment, the weatherman pronounced it Jeave-ass-KILL-er, rather than YOO-vass-ker-ler. Interesting that an Argentine should resort to, ``Oh, damn. Let's just pretend it's an English word.''
Oh, what a surprise. The students have voted again to strike. At least, these days, they can't padlock the corridors shut as some wise person has removed all the fittings from one of each pair of double doors, leaving a completely smooth metal surface.
In other news of how wonderful working in Greece is (as distinct from merely being in Greece, which is just fine, thanks), today, I filled in a bunch of forms which required me to sign individually for each working day since last February, that I had both arrived at and left the office. That's right: two signatures per day for almost a whole year. Including days when I most certainly wasn't in the office, be it for the purposes of academic visits, conferences, being ill, or, er, you know, just not being there. This is so that I can be paid; except that I've already been receiving monthly cash advances since the actual pay cheques stopped last January.
Went to see The Prestige with Alla and Ted after work. The first half was good. The second half depended on the revelation that Nicola Tesla had invented a machine to teleport matter by the power of electricity. This was not good. But it did have Michael Caine doing the Michael Caine role.
Apparently, the RPG that was fired into the American embassy toilet failed to go off, being beyond its use-by date. Greek terrorists: not the most effective in the world.
Cool pictures of Turkey on the BBC website.
Last week, I printed off a bunch of Killer Su Doku from the Times website. (These are the ones where the grid is partitioned into regions and one is told the total of the numbers in each region; standard Su Doku rules apply, otherwise, plus the rule that no digit can be repeated in a region.) Either they've got massively harder since the last batch I printed or they've revised their time estimates. I used to be able to do most of them in the suggested time; with this lot, I'm doing well if I finish within 150%.
Not sure what happened this morning. Having gone to bed rather late, I set my alarm for 9am. It woke me up; I turned it off. I read about ten pages of The Final Days (executive summary: Nixon still an asshole). I got up and looked at the clock. 11:15. I can only assume I fell asleep again at some point but I've no idea when.
In the news: don't be a dick.
Around sun set o'clock, I noticed that the concrete monstrosity next door was turning an interesting shade of pink so wandered to the end of the corridor and took these. (Except for the small one, which was taken at the bus stop on my way to the seminar.)
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Seminar was an interesting, philosophical (and, thankfully, non-technical as I was half asleep) discussion of determinism and such in the foundations of mathematics and physics. My laptop had been drafted in at the last minute, as the speaker had a postage-stamp--sized Vaio but had forgotten what would be a port replicator if there were actually any ports on the laptop. Of course, the two USB memory sticks holding the PDF file of the slides were both USB 2 (my laptop only does USB 1) and, when we tried to download the slides from the web, the laptop decided it would be a perfect time to take five minutes to set the IP address and another three to load Firefox. There were only twenty-five people waiting, after all.
When I got home, CNN were making a bit thing of the alleged racist behaviour in Celebrity Big Brother and promising full details of the eviction vote when it happened. I didn't bother staying up.
Watched a full scroll through CNN's headline swoosher and Big Brother wasn't mentioned at all. Obviously, they've realised how important it is.
Jon Stewart has pointed out that Bush's plan to sort out Iraq by returning troop levels to those of December 2005 does have one significant difference from the previous, failed plans. Before, planning was based on the assumption that the Iraqi army would ``stand up'', allowing the US to ``stand down''. The current plan, instead, requires the Iraqis to ``step up''. And, of course, failure is not an option. So success of this plan is guaranteed.
For Christmas, Christina gave me a little book about the modern architecture of Athens. Armed with it and my shiny new camera, I set off to find some of the shiny new buildings. Actually, I left it all a bit late so I only got to one of them, the Greek national power company (DEH) building, seen in the first two shots below. As you can see, the sun was rather low in the sky by the time I got there; all the other buildings in the area mentioned in the book were north-facing so there didn't seem much point in looking for them. The hideous tower block is the Greek telecoms (OTE) building near Viktoria station; the building site is a building site near the National Archaeological Museum and the church is, I think, the Church of St John of the Column, on Eolou. (It's certainly on Eolou but there are two churches and I'm not quite sure which one is marked on my maps.)
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As I passed the National Archaeological Museum, a little after closing time, I noticed a couple of yoofs break-dancing in the portico. This is the result of a longish lens (the 80-200mm zoom I borrowed from Jen, set at 135mm), the camera's motor-drive and a little editing. Also, while wandering around, I found what would have been an excellent photo of two people using adjacent phone booths facing away from each other. Alas, by the time I twigged that the way to avoid the appalling camera-shake was to use shutter-priority mode and crank up the ISO, they'd moved. (A 180mm lens at 1/40th without a tripod is not pretty; probably would have been OK at ISO 800, with the correspondingly shorter exposure.)
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By the time I got back to Monastiraki, the sun was close to setting and hitting the western faces of the buildings on the Acropolis at a rather spectacular angle.
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These were taken on the way back to the flat. I'm not sure why, but I can't seem to get a sharply-focused photo of Aghia Triada, despite having tried on a few occasions. I hope you like the fourth shot as I took it lying in the middle of the (pedestrianized) street and got a few funny looks for my trouble.
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While I was taking the photo of Aghia Triada, this dog came to stand next to me and have a bark at the dogs on the street below. Thankfully, he soon decided that posing for photos would be more interesting for him and less stressful for me.
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I've managed to find a spot in my bedroom that gets decent phone reception so I was able to chat to mum and dad for half an hour and hear almost everything they said. This is a dramatic improvement over the last few calls, where I was doing well to pick out the key words in any sentence. (So, if I've previously uh-huhed or yeahed anything that was dramatically inappropriate, please forgive me: I probably didn't hear you say ``not'' in the middle of the sentence.)
The Final Days update: Kissinger also an asshole.
Spent the evening listening to Shostakovich and Schoenberg (Verklärte Nacht really is very good) and editing yesterday's photos. I was going to watch CNN's documentary on British radical Islam but decided it would only annoy me. Their earlier interview with peacenik ex-president Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale was very interesting, though. Mondale was very careful to stress that he felt that they had been good, truthful and ethical and make it clear that he felt the current presidency was the exact opposite, without actually describing it as being ``bad'', ``deceitful'' or ``unethical''.
Nnnnnnnng. Yesterday, President Bush said, ``It is important for all Americans to remember that our Declaration of Independence states that every person has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It also states that these rights come from our Creator and that governments are formed to secure these rights for all their citizens. And we believe every human life has value...'' By this, he, the man who signed 152 death warrants in six years as Texas Governor (that's one a fortnight), the man who is president of a country that executes more people each year than any country other than China, Iran and Vietnam (source: Human Rights Watch), means that abortion is wrong.
The water was off when I got up this morning, which explains the note that was taped to each of the doors on the street the other day, clearly warning of something happening on the 24th. I'd guessed it was probably going to be something like that but I forgot it was today. So I now haven't shaved for two days on the trot and am getting distinctly sand-papery.
It's windy, too, though nothing like the storms in the UK last week.
Well, this time last year, it was snowing in Athens; now it's snowing in the UK. The second of these pictures is particularly classy.
Had a chat with Dimitrios, which looks like it might turn into yet a third paper, unless it's more relevant to paper two than I thought.
Some indications of the quality of driving in Athens, all seen this morning, apart from the last one.
Nonetheless, CNN tells me that Chinese roads are worse. Apparently, they have 2% of the world's cars and 15% of the fatal accidents, not least because it's only in the last five years that significant numbers of people have owned cars and driver education and testing hasn't, until now, involved any driving on public roads whatsoever.
In other news, how happy is the News of the World going to be that tapping royal telephones merits a prison sentence but downloading kiddie porn doesn't? My guess is that, on a scale of one to completely over the god-damn moon, it'll rate about an eight.
Skaï, the Greek TV channel that, annoyingly, shows most things dubbed, rather than subtitled, seems to be getting better, of late. I watched a bit of Mythbusters, subtitled, and then most of a documentary about photographers, in which the photographers themselves were subtitled but the narration dubbed. Nothing of any practical use, since they were dealing with the sort of photographer who goes base-jumping off Angel Falls with three cameras strapped to his head, or abseils down a Peruvian cliff to photograph the undisturbed pre-Incan tomb half way down, or abseils into a volcano (bonus fun: the rocks are sharp and eat ropes for breakfast). But very interesting.
Went out to take some photos of my own but the light was indifferent and the results disappointing. Part of the problem, I think, is that I set off without a clear idea of what I was doing. I did get a few reasonable shots of the Gay Guards but they required heavy processing. Here are three I sorted out today; I might post some more later.
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[These two posted 2007-07-16. ``Later,'' like I said...]
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Walking through Syntagma with a decent camera round one's neck makes one a total magnet for bar touts. These are the invariably middle-aged men, smartly dressed and terribly polite, who accost single male tourists, invite them to some bar they allegedly know, ply them with a couple of drinks and then stop being friendly and polite and present an infeasibly large bill. For some reason, their opening gambit is always to ask the time. I shook off three of the buggers: one who claimed that his wife, er, girlfriend (make your mind up, man) was from Leeds (not that I'd told him anything more precise than that I'm from England), one who claimed that he got back five days ago from visiting his son in Manchester (he made exactly the same claim to me last August at a time that put his alleged departure right in the middle of the bomb chaos) and one whom I just told to go away when he asked the time.
It's become noticeably colder. Yesterday, the temperature was up around 17°C; today, it barely made 10. On the other hand, it was a beautiful, clear day with a bright, blue sky. Perfect for photography but my day was filled with tedium.
CNN has a new batch of adverts.
Things that are still going on, even though I'm not mentioning them much: the students voted today to strike for another week; I still haven't shaken off the bloody cold I picked up nearly three weeks ago.
Oh, the irony. In an article about Ségolène Royal's gaffes, the BBC calls her partner ``Françoise''. He is not, to the best of my knowledge, a woman. Bit of a gaffe, really. [2007-02-01: they've now corrected the spelling.]
Louise had a scan today. Apparently, the baby's a girl. Probably. But it wasn't very clear.
Run, Lola, Run was on the TV when I got home. I watched it for fifteen minutes or so but my German isn't good enough to make it worthwhile watching for longer than that without English subtitles.
I've posted numerous pictures from this window at the end of the corridor outside my office. Most of them have been sunsets; a couple have been illustrations of the pollution. Today was nice and clear so I took some photos of the city. I've not sorted them out yet, though. First attempt at pasting them together produced a 20° kink in the middle and I've not had chance to go back to it.
[2007-02-04: here's the second attempt at stitching the photos together, this time without the kink.]
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Sorted out the photos for 2nd January. Still haven't done new year.
Had another go at photos of the city, with the nice camera, this time. Unfortunately, the haze was back.
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I also took this one of Alla in the office.
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[Posted 2007-07-16. And this one, which isn't very flattering but which I quite like as a photograph.]
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And I gave a lecture for the first time in weeks. Since our department's still closed, I went down to History and Philosophy of Science, where Costas has his office.
In other news, one of my internet chess opponents has just blundered his queen and not resigned. It seems he's going to take the game all the way to checkmate at the rate of a move a week. Most annoying, given that it's a tournament game and the next round of the tournament can't start until this one's finished. One of my opponents in a different tournament is down two rooks and two minor pieces for queen and two pawns and he's not resigned, either.
Copyright © David Richerby, 2007.
