The punishment from heaven

BBC news:

“London's mayor has been suspended from office on full pay for four weeks for comparing a Jewish journalist to a concentration camp guard.”

A four-week paid holiday as a punishment? Oh, punish me, please...

Perfect colour on screen

Today I acquired an Eye-One Display 2 from GretagMacbeth: a little gadget that looks like a computer mouse but is in fact a kind of light meter, which I can use to generate an ICC colour profile of my computer's monitor. This enables other programs to adjust their colour output for the deficiencies of the monitor, thus displaying colours fairly accurately. If you edit colour images at all, it's useful to know that you're editing the real colours in the file, and not whatever distorted version your monitor happens to show.

Mozilla Thunderbird

I've installed Mozilla Thunderbird as my e-mail program, in place of Eudora. Thunderbird imported my Eudora settings and messages automatically, and it seems to work. The main problem I find with it is that there's no proper help file, just a few tips here and there on the Web. So, if I want to find out how to do something, there's no single place where I can go and look.

Too easily offended

There's an amazing fuss going on about a few quite mild cartoons of Muhammad in a Danish newspaper. If a newspaper in a small Muslim country had published similar cartoons about Jesus Christ, they would simply have been ignored. The fact that some Muslims apparently lack the maturity to ignore such things is to their own discredit.

easyCruise

I read that Stelios Haji-Ioannou, the easyJet guy, has now set up easyCruise, offering low-priced cruises in the Mediterranean in summer and in the Caribbean in winter. Quite a nice idea, except that it seems to be set up for young singles raving it up in discos ashore every night—and this wasn't my lifestyle even when I was young and single. On the other hand, the formal dinners and professional entertainers on conventional cruises aren't really designed for me either.

Al Stewart biography

While we were in Madrid I managed to read Neville Judd's biography of Al Stewart, which arrived from Amazon not long ago. Judd isn't a brilliant writer, but he had Al Stewart's cooperation and access to his family, friends, and associates, and I think he's made a good job of the book, which even has a useful-looking index. A pity about the rather silly-looking late-1960s cover photo; the man doesn't photograph well, but I think some better photograph could have been found, perhaps from his peak period of around 1977.

I'm certainly not Al Stewart's greatest fan, but I have most of his albums and I've been listening to his music for about 35 years, so it's interesting to find out more about his private and professional lives, and more background information about the songs than I knew already.

Night train to Madrid

After Christmas we spent four days in Madrid visiting Ana's friends and brother, who lives in Madrid and has just become a father for the first time.

We travelled to Madrid and back by the night train, in a sleeper carriage, which I've never tried before and don't plan to try ever again. We found ourselves trying to sleep in an ordinary railway compartment which had six rather narrow bunk beds (three on each side) in place of the usual seats. There wasn't enough headroom to sit up in bed, and the only bedding provided per bed was a sheet, a rather small blanket, and a tiny pillow. The bed was probably full of house mites as it gave me an allergic reaction.

We were travelling with Ana's sister's family, so we had the compartment to ourselves, but it was rather crowded with four adults and three children, and none of us slept well; the children seemed to survive the experience best.

We'd have been much more comfortable travelling by day, seated, in the normal way.

In praise of iTunes

I suppose there are various programs that could do it, but I chose to use iTunes, and I find it more wonderful than I ever expected to have all my favourite music on tap and playable in random order at the press of a button.

Currently I have more than 1500 tracks in my iTunes library, and they're quite carefully selected: in most cases I don't include whole albums but weed out the tracks I'm not so keen on. If a track comes up that I'm just not in the mood for at the time, I can easily skip to another one, but I don't need to do it very often.

I've gone off the whole idea of playing music an album at a time in the old-fashioned way. I prefer my own private radio station, which gives me constant variety but never plays a duff track. It sounds great. I haven't enjoyed music so much for a long time.

Floods and tornadoes

Yesterday afternoon we had a bout of heavy rain. It didn't cause us any trouble. But in nearby Sitges there was serious flooding; in some streets, parked cars were swept away and piled on top of each other. Underground garages and car parks were flooded, plus the estate agency in which Ana works, although it's not underground.

This sort of thing has happened to Sitges more than once before in the years I've been here. It seems exceptionally vulnerable to flooding and I wonder why nothing seems to have been done to correct that vulnerability.

The area was also visited by a number of tornadoes, which did some damage to buildings and vehicles, though we didn't see anything of them. Aircraft were damaged at Barcelona Airport.

Buy your sword here

My brother-in-law Juan Carlos is a mediævalist in his spare time. He makes his own chain mail; and yesterday he showed me a brochure from Albion Swords, a company that makes swords designed to look and function like authentic period swords.

I was quite impressed. Before looking at the photos, I never fully appreciated what a terrible weapon a sword can be. It's limited by very short range, of course, but within that range it's a killer.

He told me that Americans can buy such things without restriction, but within Europe it's not that easy. He has his eye on one of the blunted sparring swords, designed to handle like a real sword but not to kill quite so easily. Apparently these can be bought without problems.