Added Entries

A journey round the corner to the shops begins with a single step

2008-05-05T13:19:21Z

On Saturday, I played 'Au Clair de la Lune' on Janet's piano with more than one finger.

On Sunday, I identified a horse chestnut and a cherry tree using an Usborne guide.

Today I am 31 years old, and not, as you might infer, eight. It's a start.

Birthdaytime

2008-04-28T08:22:36Z

It's not enough, I've decided, that j4 shares my birthday: being 30 was so much fun that I shall do it all over again.

So: birthday party, Saturday 10 May, Oxford. (No need to reply here if you've already commented there.)

Ad break

2008-03-21T14:28:45Z

I'm a sucker for smart advertising. What I particularly enjoy is clever appropriation of the outdoors: the 'ambient' advertising that many people find particularly objectionable. A company logo on the risers of a staircase, say, or a voucher printed on the reverse of a bus ticket.

HOVIS
Originally uploaded by addedentryThis week I found and photographed three 'ghost signs' in Oxford - faded advertisements painted on walls. Each one promotes a business I assume to be long defunct. I reckon that any proposal to overpaint these signs would be strongly opposed, despite their intrusiveness. The distinction of age offers ads the sympathetic attention of Past Times or a nostalgic museum.

I once wrote that 'the countryside makes me uncomfortable because it isn't labelled'. j4 has a thought experiment of a retreat from text, some place where you wouldn't see letters on signs, or packaging, or anything to read; it would be surprisingly difficult to guarantee. But I don't believe that taking down billboards and shuttering shopfronts would provide a neutral public space, not while libraries, and mosques, and fountains, and so on present their own values.

Soon, and for the rest of your life

2008-03-19T14:29:55Z

Apparently weddings don't organise themselves. Six months on, we've got as far as confirming that it won't be possible to hold the reception at my employers' place. That's a pity, though it's not as if Oxford wants for pretty backdrops.

More pressingly, where can we go for an Easter weekend that isn't threatened by rail replacement buses and heavy snow showers? (We are a no-fly zone.)

Name that band

2008-03-14T21:46:19Z

It is the LAW that EVERY band, local or not, MUST attempt to think of a name one night in the pub, and the first idea will ALWAYS be "Let's call ourselves 'Free Beer'! Then we'll get a really big audience!" Other suggestions will be "The Band With No Name", "Cancelled", "SEX!!!" and "To Be Confirmed" ... [MJ Hibbett]

This theme continues in a mildly diverting article about bands with lame names by Mr Broken Family Band in today's Guardian. I post it because j4 bought me the Oxjam Reading Mix Tape with contributions from groups doomed to be forever local: Hello Wembley, Gonzo & The Razz, Jones Radio, Heartwear Process and (the least excusable) Kev Barz & Springboard to Badinage.

To my surprise, they're not that bad at all. It is for charity. And no punctuation marks were abused.

Mount Weazel

2008-03-11T14:14:44Z

One of many things I like about Oxford is the cluster of obscure villages each side of the A34: Binsey, Wytham, Godstow, the Hinkseys, all a comfortable walk away. Late one August evening, j4 and I wandered through the fields behind Botley, up the hill towards Cumnor. The A-Z showed a wooded hill crowned with "Cumnor Folly", which was an obvious destination. But we couldn't find the folly. We found the trig point and a spooky shack made of branches, but no folly.

Another lovely walk this weekend took us into Wytham Woods (owned by the University, which issues permits). We noticed that the map names one of the fields "Follies", but without trespassing all we could see were two low pieces of stone.

By this time I had a hunch about our folly. The OED confirms a rare sense of 'a clump of fir-trees on the crest of a hill', and a dialect dictionary localised this to Berkshire (where Cumnor and Wytham belonged before 1974). So we'd been looking round for an architectural folly when all along we were standing inside it. The open Web knows nothing of this, so I may as well record it here.

In the meantime, I'd also consulted Headley & Meulenkamp's directory of follies. It drew my attention to a little-known proposal in central Oxford:

In 1975 John Madden, an undergraduate, submitted plans for a 450ft (137m) pyramid to be built in Christ Church Meadow. The submission was properly drawn up and presented: it would have been necessary to freeze the Thames over for seven and a half years in order to excavate the 100ft (30m) deep foundations; then a further 16½ years and 18 million tons of stone from Headington Quarry would be needed to build the thing. Labour was no problem—there was to be compulsory secondment of second-year undergraduates—but the question of finance was delicately avoided. The intention was that the pyramid should serve as Mr Madden's mausoleum, and his application got as far as the City Planning Committee, where it was defeated by the narrowest of margins—five votes to four—after the city engineer pointed out that street lights would have to be kept on all day because the sheer bulk of the monument would keep the city in perpetual darkness.

What do you think, gentle reader? I won't be fooled again.

A home from home

2007-12-06T14:23:12Z

A few years ago verlaine observed how little we know of each other's lives at work, or rather, since we all talk about that part of our social life that happens at work, how little we know of the detail of the work itself. To rectify this, he invited us to post some text, or some jargon, or some account extracted from our working days. Alas, I can't find the entry again, but fivemack reminded me of it by posting a photograph of his desk. So here's mine:

Note how the computer has displaced the books I catalogue off to one side, supported on their multi-part foam rests. The tools of my trade are few, several of them online, the rest a collection of reference books. At the moment the most important tool is the radiator.

And I must take the passport photo when I leave.

Castles in the air

2007-10-12T13:33:01Z

The railway line between Oxford and Cambridge has been dug up. There wasn't enough demand for the Sky Commuter light aircraft. But now World SkyCat is looking for capital to support an airship service.

Rule replacement service

2007-10-12T09:09:04Z

There's a new Highway Code. I have a practical driving test booked for November 1, so I thought I'd better buy a copy. According to various press releases, it has 29 new rules. I wonder what they are?

I know about the trouble over cycle lanes and the further deprecation of smoking. I've found the text of debates in Parliament about the revision. But will I have to compare the new edition with the last rule by rule?

Engaged

2007-09-30T20:13:58Z

j4 and I have spent a fabulous week in Dublin. (Here are the holiday snaps.) We'd intended to go there for some time now but hadn't actually planned anything: accommodation booked three days before and travel booked two days before (ten hours by train and ferry for 54 pounds each with SailRail). We stayed in the Bridge House on Parliament Street, immediately opposite the Porterhouse and its 200 beers. Dublin is such a walkable city: down the four flights of stairs from our room - no lift - and we were right by the river. The Liffey divides the city so neatly for navigation that we would have kept returning to it even if it hadn't looked so grand and wide.

We had expected to spend much of the holiday reading books and playing Scrabble in cafes and pubs while watching the rain. But the weather stayed dry, which let us do a lot of exploring on foot together. We walked out through the villas of posh Dublin 4 to see the National Print Museum, and took the DART train along the seaside to see the James Joyce Tower, where Janet paddled in the cold water. We were, also, often in cafes and pubs, and in a restaurant by the river where we agreed to get married.

It's nearly three years since we started going out. We've been through London and Cambridge and Oxford and are ready to stay in one place. Janet makes me laugh and makes me think; and she spurs me to make more of myself. I think love is not so much an uncontrollable passion than something which can be nurtured and shaped, and that a relationship is not only a meeting of minds but a decision. We've made a decision to share a future.

It's a decision that needed care, yet one of the easiest decisions I've made.

Pig and And and And and Whistle

2007-09-18T08:23:08Z

"Words of great Emphasis are also Set in Italick, and sometimes begin with a Capital Letter: If the Emphasis bear hard upon the Word to be exprest as well as the Thing to be exprest, it ought to begin with a Capital. I shall bring for instance an Observation I made above forty years ago on the Word that, viz. that that Word may be reitterated five times, and make good Sense: If it be set thus it will seem nonsense, that that that that that; but if it be Set thus, that that That that that Man would have stand at the beginning of the Line should stand at the end; it will, by toning and laying emphasis on the middlemost That become good Sense. Now all the thats ought to be Set in Italick, and the middlemost That ought to begin with a Capital, because it is both the Thing and Word."

Thus Joseph Moxon in Mechanick exercises ... applied to the art of printing, section 22, number 15, from 1683. That's at least three hundred years before I first encountered "Smith where Jones had had had had had had had had had had had the examiner's approval".

Sous moi, le deluge

2007-07-25T10:52:44Z

I was surprised that flooding at the end of my road was the top story on this morning's news when there are still thousands of people in Gloucestershire without electricity or clean water. For those of you unfamiliar with Oxford, Botley Road is the only road leaving central Oxford to the west. As the map shows, it's a causeway which straddles the Thames, Osney Ditch, Bullstake Stream and Seacourt (or Wytham) Stream before it reaches the ring road. Our (first-floor) flat is 300 metres beyond its western end; and that has made all the difference.

Botley Road's been closed since Sunday, at least to motor vehicles. We didn't notice all day because we could still see traffic from our flat, heading for the ring road. Janet ventured out on her bike on Monday when the main road was still easily navigable, though the side roads were in trouble. It hasn't rained since then, but the waters have been rising steadily. I suspect last night was the last time cycling along Botley Road was possible, my ankles getting rather wet in the process. Today residents have been evacuated from Osney, which is a low-lying island off Botley Road that's flooded twice in the last ten years.

In summary, I've been very lucky to be unaffected by a major flood happening within walking distance of my home. I've been taking the bus to work, the buses diverting along the ring road and back into Oxford from the north (a major rerouting but one which added just ten minutes to this morning's commute). The city centre is untouched, although there are concerns that flooding at the Osney Mead electricity substation (the transformers either side of 'Electric Ave' in this view) will cause a power cut; and Oxford University Library Services' headquarters, in the very last building on that industrial estate, has been inaccessible all week.

Another fine mess

2007-06-28T13:36:13Z

This year's Glastonbury Festival was the largest ever: 177,500 people, or 'the same population as Norwich or Sunderland'. On a 900 acre site, a more important figure is the population density, which is something like 48,000/km² or eight times that of Hong Kong.

Glastonbury is like a city in one sense: you can only describe one aspect of it, and someone else's experience will contradict yours, just as any attempt to characterise London or Londoners is either banal or incomplete. But the constant Twittering worked well through the long weekend as a sampling of everyone's different impressions.

I caught myself having fun, despite the miserable weather and the fatiguing effort of walking anywhere in mud. I want to go back when it's possible to dance, or even sit down. So we didn't take many risks, but all the bands we hoped would be good were good. Editors were professional, strictly alternating new songs with the hits from the first album, but all of them satisfyingly doomy. Tunng were excellent, again, though we couldn't see the strange percussion instruments they use to beef up their spooky folk tales. And Björk was fantastic, starting with quiet songs like 'Venus As A Boy' and 'All Is Full Of Love' and working up to a frankly aggressive climax of beats, lasers and shouting.

I managed to get sunburnt. 'Wear sunscreen', that was good advice. In turn, my advice is: Do not be sick in a tent. Unfair, given how straightedge we'd been, but j4 soothed me and walked me to the medical tent through the dawn drizzle.

There was more, of course: Peter and the Wolf (a band), 'In C' and panicking in gridlocked crowds, none of which are represented in my intentionally colourful photos. I might go again. We'll see.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive

2007-06-27T13:05:25Z

Blair entered Downing Street a few days before my 20th birthday; he's leaving not long after I turned 30. It's been a good decade for both of us, what with the National Minimum Wage Act 1998, the Human Rights Act 1998, the Scotland Act 1998, the Employment Relations Act 1999, the House of Lords Act 1999, the Maternity and Parental Leave etc. Regulations 1999, the Freedom of Information Act 2000, the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 2000, the Tobacco Advertising and Promotion Act 2002, and the Civil Partnership Act 2004.

-- All right, you ask, but apart from a minimum wage, human rights, devolution, trade union recognition, constitutional reform, parental leave, freedom of information, an equal age of consent, banning tobacco advertising and introducing civil partnerships, what has the Labour government ever done for us?

The Licensing Act 2003.

Twitterbug

2007-06-19T08:46:56Z

People keep asking what the point of Facebook is. It's a low-effort low-commitment way to keep in touch with other people in your demographic. Next?

Oh yes, Twitter. LiveJournal's had an unofficial sms_to_lj gateway for years; Twitter combines this with distribution in the other direction, so your posts on Twitter get sent to your 'followers' by txt.

I'm going to experiment with using Twitter at Glastonbury. (It looks like we are going. The rain forecast for Friday has been downgraded to mere 'light showers'!) Short announcements seem like the best solution to keeping track of what's happening and where people are, so if you'd like me to spam you all weekend, sign up for Twitter and add omassey.

An open letter to Oxbridge Essays

2007-06-18T14:43:16Z

Dear Kate Jones,

Thank you for inviting me to write model answers for Oxbridge Essays. Unfortunately, I must refuse.

Naturally, and rightly, you "explicitly and unambiguously condemn plagiarism in all its forms"[1]. I fear that, despite your good intentions, some of your clients order essays not just for 'inspiration' but to submit as their own work: by working for you, I would risk becoming an indirect accessory to plagiarism.

I was interested that you warn students thinking of copying that "you will be breaching the copyright for this written work which will be held exclusively by Oxbridge Essays"[2]. Perhaps you could reassure me by telling me how many actions for copyright infringement you have brought. You emphasise the confidentiality of the service; does this mean that you do not co-operate with universities seeking to investigate suspected plagiarism?

You supply essays matched to exact questions, even allowing the customer to specify a preferred writing style. Why should I wish to devalue my own degree by spoonfeeding today's students? How could I argue that a degree reflects a capacity for independent thought and expression after tailoring an essay to remove the need for both?

I am suspicious of your quality control. You offer the services of Oxbridge 'experts', but require only that your writers "are now or once were a member of Oxford University or Cambridge University"[3], even including undergraduates. If you were to list the credentials of your writers, it might reassure potential customers that they were getting a better service than cribbing from their tutorial partners.

Finally, I am uncomfortable with the idea of charging £300 for a model undergraduate essay. If use of model answers at this price were to become an expected part of study, it would either encourage student debt or reinforce financial inequities in access to university education.

As you emailed an address only visible on my Facebook profile, you may like to read on and see that my degree is in mathematics: I didn't write a single essay at Oxford.

Yours sincerely,
Owen Massey

Lead soldiers

2007-06-12T08:55:57Z

I've been getting my hands dirty and learning how to print, not by pressing Ctrl+P but by picking up pieces of metal type one at a time and arranging them upside-down. Just as a former employer paid for evening classes in Latin, this was part of my job: when you look at a dozen hand-printed books each day, every detail you understand about them as material objects is useful, from paper to print to binding.

The appeal of handcrafted objects is not one I usually allow, as their beauty often consists of precisely those points which would be regarded as defects in mass production. (Certainly my printing had no lack of defects!) But typography offers an attractive balance of freedom and repetition, of art and mechanism, and I did find both process and result extremely satisfying.

If you're interested in the detail, I've annotated a set of photographs on Flickr: Letterpress printing in the Bodleian Library.

The charm of the highway strip

2007-05-25T21:28:16Z

It was an evening for relaxing, last night. There are so many false starts before the summer arrives, and this has turned out to be one, but when the sun makes you squint you can't see ahead so well.

So I pointed the car west outside our flat, along a straight road but not a direct one, not least when the destination is the same as the start. It was time to appreciate my environment, even if driving to see it is a blatant case of changing it in the act of observation.

Out along the Eynsham Road, past the pinch-point of the Swinford bridge (current toll: 5p). The traffic on country roads may be slight but it's constant, tonight including a family of cyclists in convoy around a chain of bends. I slow the car behind them with indulgent patience. The land is flat and open and there's no hurry.

On to the intermittent dual carriageway of the A420, where driving at speed means dispensing with it quickly; but not before my passenger assures me I'm safe to glance left towards the green boundary of the Ridgeway.

Escaping the pull of Swindon, I turn right, and also up, slowly rising towards Highworth, and through the town and out and down, almost freewheeling down the hill towards Lechlade, irresponsible, but never quite.

Lechlade and Burford: Cotswold towns as appealing as the chocolate boxes they decorate. But I don't stop because the road doesn't stop. The A40 back to Oxford is straight but it flickers in and out of the shade of trees, the countryside a zoetrope with me the enthralled child.

At last I'm back home in Botley. I pass the keys to my driving instructor, who wishes me well before next week's lesson.

Marking time

2007-05-12T14:56:49Z

I'm thirty. It's great. I wish I'd got round to it sooner.

j4 generously let my round-number birthday take precedence over hers and continued her tradition of inventive and elaborate cake decorating with this luxury edible CD. Isn't she the best?

We celebrated by dancing to sad songs at Feeling Gloomy, where we were invited on stage for MOAR CAEK. I'm glad we made it at last: jdc's setlists have been tempting me for months. Straight down the line indie best of. I hope those of you who came on our invitation enjoyed yourselves as much.

Looks are for use

2007-05-01T08:58:39Z

lolbrarians

j4 made you a community. Do not eat it.

XXX

2007-04-30T09:59:18Z

This Saturday night I'm going to party like I'm thirty years old, because I will be. (It's j4's birthday, too, but she'll be just twenty-nine.)

As it's worked well before, we'll be indie clubbing. We'll be very happy if you join us. This year: Feeling Gloomy, London, 10 p.m., Saturday, 5 May.

A reader is a device for turning coffee into narrative

2007-03-25T16:11:42Z

So we're cataloguing our books on LibraryThing. It's hard deciding how to tag fiction: what you want when looking for something to read are the abstractions of the QI bookshop. What we settle for is setting, which is easy to pin down but not, perhaps, what the book is about.

One set I do collect for the setting is novels featuring mathematicians. Unfortunately, they're seldom much better than novels featuring librarians.

There's The Wild Numbers by Philibert Schogt. Isaac Swift is a mathematician in an unnamed, undescribed, but probably American university. He feels a failure professionally and in his relationships; this leads him to investigate a wild-goose chase, the Wild Number Problem. He wonders if this is driving him further into delusion, especially as one of his students already displaying erratic behaviour threatens him with accusations of plagiarism. The novel reads very easily but the characters other than Swift are sketchy, as is the description of 'what mathematicians do all day'. Mostly harmless. On similar lines is Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture by Apostolos Doxiadis, a slight but enjoyable piece about a mathematician who chooses to be a great failure, not merely good.

Finally, there's The Oxford Murders by Guillermo Martinez. I found this after a BookCrosser had left it in a London Wetherspoon's where the upper floor was decorated with books-by-the-metre. (As an aside, tracing a book's travels doesn't just satisfy idle curiosity with a paperback, it's a significant part of my day job with centuries-old books whose owners and readers wrote their names and pasted their bookplates inside. I wonder if I am letting people down by keeping my books clean and should follow j4 by retaining the price stickers.)

Anyway, an Oxford mathematical mystery should have been my ideal read; perhaps that's why it was such a disappointment. I was interested to find that as a setting, Oxford seems more specific than London, as if the capital's streets are already shared with so many strangers that a few fictional characters don't intrude. But the characters barely live, it's all exposition, and that exposition is unconvincing: ironically, though the plot invokes logic and symbolism to make the murders seem ineluctable, their use seems completely arbitrary.

Elijah Wood has been seen in Oxford recently, being filmed as the nameless protagonist (at least, other characters can't pronounce his name). The setting does have one important function: the film should be pretty.

Gaming the system

2007-02-28T13:52:07Z

I am excited to learn that Brighton & Hove City Council intends to allocate pupils to schools by lottery.

It's bad luck if your friends, or your siblings, can't go to the same school as you. But that's all: and you can't challenge bad luck in court. A lottery is simple, cheap, quick, fair and - independently - seen to be fair.

This use of lotteries first came to my attention on the newsgroup uk.politics.electoral for SSV: the Single Stochastic Vote. Henry Potts' original post seems to be lost to Google Groups, but the idea is to select representatives in Parliament by drawing a single ballot paper at random and electing the candidate chosen on that ballot paper. A highly proportional result overall and a strong incentive to vote.

The House of Lords could be elected by lottery, too. Its defenders often claim that the second chamber is valuable as a home for people who aren't professional politicians: why not make a stint in the Lords the new jury service?

Oxbridge colleges, sensitive to accusations of prejudice for or against certain schools, are finding finer and finer ways to discriminate between excellent candidates. They could save themselves effort and be transparently fair by selecting at random from those candidates scoring the equivalent of 3 As.

<catchphrase>How could it possibly fail?</catchphrase>

Mightier than the password

2007-02-19T14:09:33Z

Is there a word for feeling prospective embarrassment at other people's embarrassment?

I'm on a course where the trainers had printed a list of everyone's login details for accessing the test data. It so happens that I'd chosen my (non-critical) password in honour of a previous librarian. But without this knowledge, you would assume, just as 'sex' is supposedly a common password, that I was in some way bragging by starting every session with Hiscock.

I believe that children are our future polluters

2007-02-15T14:45:29Z

Driving a car is 'one of the most selfish routine actions you can engage in', according to reluctant car-owner smallbeds. Someone tactlessly told rmc28 that having a baby is one of the most selfish non-routine actions you can take.

Tactless, but is it true? A recurrent story in the press is the financial cost of raising a child; baby steps leave carbon footprints, too.

Rachel gives the damning response that pressure to reduce births at its most malign results in (female) infanticide, that both are ways of removing women's control over their own bodies. This seems to me to be a sleight of hand in moving from the personal to the general: akin to defending a choice to take the plane on holiday because restricting cheap flights is inequitable to the poor.

The way to justify having children is in the last sentence of Rachel's post ("[M]y baby just extended by several decades the number of years I need the world to remain livable. Not just my lifetime, but his too"). Environmentalism only makes sense if there are humans around to appreciate the benefits. There's no need to save the planet: it will endure anyway. There are wonderful, and selfish, reasons to preserve humanity.