February 2004

…and smiled (a little ruefully). I’ve had a few of these in my time…

Meanwhile…we go away tomorrow, and once again I marvel (helplessly) at how, no matter how hard I try to get Pre-Travel Stuff done four or five days before the trip, I still wind up doing so much of it the day before. Is all the current business e-mail migrated to the laptops, have we packed all the necessary cables and chargers, blah, blah, blah…

The trouble is, Life (meaning the normal progress of it, which at the moment largely seems to involve cats, laundry and firewood) keeps interfering with my trip-management plans. (mutter) Well, never mind. At least at the moment we have the minor pleasure of a small but strictly scenic snowfall — it’s just barely sticking: “wintry showers”, as the local weatherfolk call it, and nothing more. (I hope I haven’t now spoken too soon: last time it snowed here just before Fasnacht, we had a blizzard, the first genuine one I’d seen here in fifteen years — one which almost saddled us with the massive irony of not being able to go to Switzerland because of snow in Ireland: several feet of it, so that the taxi almost couldn’t make it up our road two days after the major fall…)

It’s almost Fasnacht: so we’ll be heading out for Basel on Friday morning. I’ll blog from there as I can. Phoneblogging is still a little iffy — I don’t believe I can get GPRS roaming in Switzerland at the moment — but our hotel has broadband, so I should be able to upload some pics of the Morgestraich and the parades that follow it on Monday afternoon and Wednesday afternoon.

Don’t expect many pictures of the Tuesday part of the celebrations, though. Tuesday is children’s day, and those kids are merciless about stuffing the clothes of non-Baslers with confetti…even if you’re wearing a blaggede pin like the one to the right, which identifies you as a supporter of the holiday and a “friend” of Fasnacht. Anyway, we’ll probably head off for Germany or France that day. (From one side or the other of Basel, you can be across either border and into another country in about ten minutes.)

Meanwhile, for those interested in seeing the Morgestraich — the opening of Fasnacht, the “reveille” candlelit parade through the Old Town of Basel with thousands of fifers and drummers — the action kicks off at 0300 GMT/UTC on Monday morning, March 1st. There’ll once again be streaming video and audio courtesy of the wonderful Radio Basilisk: the link to the audio and video streams is here — in the middle column of the page, scroll down to see the link in the right-side column that says “Morgestraich”. The link becomes active on Monday morning early, Basel time: that’s about 6 PM EST, 3 pm PST. But the marching starts on the stroke of four by the Münster clock, when almost all the lights in the city go out for the benefit of those marching with candles and lamps and the huge satirical lanterns, the laderne. …The page also has links to video from last year’s Fasnacht, if you’re interested of getting an advance taste of what’s to come.

There are webcams, too: check this page. And the Fasnachts-Comité, the “umbrella” organization that takes care of everything including cleaning up tons of confetti every night, has a link here.

I know that when you try to log in, you’re getting a message saying that the Forums have been suspended. This is due to a billing problem (a charge got declined due to a full credit card, and Infopop’s notice about the decline got missed). Lee and I are working to get this situation sorted out today, if possible.

The conference scheduled for tonight should be able to go ahead as planned, since the chat client itself is not affected by the discussion forum problem. Use this link to get at the chat client for the time being.

As always, you need to be a Forum member and to have been issued a chat username and password by Lee in order to attend.

(sigh) Sorry for the inconvenience, all.

…Whether or not that’s true, we got ours in the mail today. (Picture follows.)

The shirts have the title of the old miniseries, but sure enough, the title’s just been changed…it’s now “Kingdom in Twilight”. And the format seems to have changed too, from miniseries to feature. So maybe this means there’ll be new shirts closer to release time… 🙂

The film will also have its own website, http://www.kingdom-in-twilight.com. (There’s nothing there right now but the title.) There are, however, some yummy publicity shots of Kristanna Loken as Brunnhild at her own site, www.Kristanna.com.

I love it when things start getting real….

Reading this bit of article in the Washington Post this morning makes me laugh, albeit in a rather dark and annoyed mode, after having watched the new (and, I think, terrific) miniseries version of Battlestar Galactica last night: since BG dealt, if glancingly, with the same kind of issue…

“…[James] Mann quotes an unnamed program planner as saying that, “One of the awkward questions we faced was whether to reconstitute Congress after a nuclear attack. It was decided that no, it would be easier to operate without them.”

(mutter) Yeah, I just bet.

And not a moment too soon.

And look, there are chocolate “manekineko”s, too! (Forgive me the “s”…I don’t know how the plural of the word is correctly formed.)

“Soople is [a word in] an early English dialect, which means ‘to soften, make supple’.

“That’s exactly what I envisioned for this site ; a site that softens all the fantastic (advanced) functions Google offers. Initially I made this site for my mother, who, though computer-savvy, still didn’t know about all the possibilities Google offers.”

(Thanks to Shikencho for the link.)

When I read this the first time, I shook my head quite hard: I thought I was hallucinating.

“…the Joyce estate has informed the Irish government that it intends to sue for copyright infringement if there are any public readings of Joyce’s works during the festival commemorating the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday this June.”

What? WHAT??

Hearing stuff like this makes me want to suggest that every resident of Ireland who can stand up and walk outside their house carrying a copy of Joyce should do so, on the 16th of June, and pick some favorite bit (or pick a bit at random if they hate Joyce or are disinterested) and start reading out loud. Let them come sue all of us.

(stalks off muttering in disbelieving fury)

(…and thinks: has the estate also sued Aer Lingus for the little bits of Joyce printed on the upholstery on the seats in their aircraft? Gee, guys, don’t miss that opportunity.)

Yes, you heard me right.

My only complaint: it’s not nearly long enough.

(Uh, maybe I should rephrase that…)(Anyway, thanks once more to BoingBoing.)

There had to be a connection between two of the best things in the world…

“Princeton physicist Paul Chaikin’s passion for M&M candies was so well known that his students played a sweet practical joke on him by leaving a 55-gallon drum of the candies in his office. Little did they know that their prank would lead to a physics breakthrough….

“A series of studies have shown [that oblate spheres like M&Ms] pack more tightly than perfect spheres — something that surprises many physicists and Chaikin himself.”