Ian

A tiny bit, but gosh, this will have been the snowiest winter in London for ages.

The walk to school did help me wake up a bit (although I feel the bed beckoning) because the Super Bowl was good enough to stay up until 3am UK time for the end again. This is not always the case...

I first became interested in American Football in the mid-70s through the boardgames on it, especially the super rock-paper-scissors of Football Strategy. At that point, TV coverage in the UK was fifteen minutes a year, five of which was explaining the rules.

When Channel 4 started in the early 80s, one of its best bits was a weekly hour long highlights programme, and they showed the Washington Redskins - Miami Dolphins Super Bowl live. That spoiled UK viewers a bit: it was close until the end, and was decided in a play that used to feature on the opening credits of the highlights programme for years afterwards. Prior to the snap, Redskins' running back John Riggins goes in motion, the man on the Dolphins' defence who had done such a good job tracking him slips slightly and loses a yard, ball handed to Riggins who runs outside, the defence just misses the tackle because of that slip.. touchdown. Truly a game of inches.

Reality set in with games like the Chicago Bears - New England Patriots one in the year the Bears had an awesome defence and everyone knew what the result would be before the end of the first quarter: lots of Super Bowls are not good games.

But this has made three very good ones in a row.

( Cut in case you haven't seen the recording you made of it yet )

I've forgotten to go 'hooray' here over this story from a couple of weeks ago: Food labels advice change over Palestinian territories. I am happy to eat food grown in Israel. I am not happy to eat food grown in the occupied territories but sold as from Israel. As there has previously been no way to tell which was which from the label, this has meant not buying any of it.

This last bit hasn't got through to the Israeli embassy - at the moment, people like me don't buy any food from 'Israel', and far from this change playing "into the hands of those who are calling for a boycott of Israeli goods", it means we can now support goods produced in Israel proper while continuing to boycott the ones from illegally held land. Hooray. It'll be very interesting to see how much stuff was from the latter...

We came back to London yesterday. Normally, we check the traffic news before going on a long journey, but with the final leg being a simple Cambridge - M11 - London trip, why bother? This is why: earlier that morning, a lorry full of pigs overturned between two junctions of the M11 with no other good route between them. If you didn't check the traffic news, cough, the only warning was a sign that the road was closed about a mile or so before one of the junctions. This meant a big queue of vehicles turning off to go another way.

We could see the two most plausible routes were solid, so elected for a tour of the narrow wet roads of the Essex countryside, including the delightfully named village of 'Matching Tye'. Overall, the journey took us about four hours, twice what we had expected. The story doesn't mention why there was no indication of this closure earlier on the M11, at a point where sensible alternative routes existed...

A week ago, someone was murdered in Brighton and their flat set on fire.

Can you spot the problem with the BBC story? ( Read more... )

Bottom: Mindless Violence

"For 25 years, Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson have been kicking the ( Read more... )

Just as I think people start off with more than one 'virginity', there's also often more than one thing to come out about or to. This is going to be about the bisexual stuff.

To myself

It was my masturbation fantasies aged 11 or 12 that made me go 'ah ha': when I thought about a male/female couple having sex, I realised I fancied both of them. I also didn't just enjoy the sensations of having my penis stroked, I also liked stroking the penis.

I was confident that I wasn't gay, because I also wanted sex play with girls and I really don't think I ever thought I was straight. I can't remember if one of the better sex ed books of its day (the credited author is one of the co-authors of the Kinsey reports) gave this a name - I think I had that already - but did have a very good sex-positive, diversity of desire-positive approach and meant I was never going 'argh, oh no' about it.

To others

One of the things that struck me most in a presentation at a CHAPS conference a few years back was that most young men's first homosexual partners are no longer found via school, but via the internet. I pre-date the internet :)

Having hit puberty early, I was invited around to a friend's house and, also at his invitation, a 'I'll show you mine etc' game ensued. I vividly remember looking at his (then small) erection and thinking 'that'd fit nicely in my mouth' and not being at all surprised never mind shocked at the thought.

There ended up being a lot of sex play between pupils at my boy's grammar school, and I don't remember it been stigmatised, or indeed commented on. For most, it was definitely 'situational', in they'd have prefered female partners, but they were not available for most until later and there were other boys who were. With, very interestingly, a definite 'I'll do this for you iff you'll do it for me' ethos: one of the reasons I didn't get fucked until much later is that, although I was interested in trying it, the peers I was playing with didn't want to be fucked in return.

Not all of it involved physical contact, but playing soggy biscuit turns out to be particularly interesting (even to watch) when more than one participant really does not mind 'losing'.

Favourite outing

During a temporary job at a market research company working on the RAJAR listening figures, the blood donation service paid a visit. I got taped on the shoulder by the office Daily Mail reader and pointedly asked why I wasn't donating blood. So I told her why. All of the reasons why...

The only bad response

Around 1982, I was doing a temporary job at the (now deceased) Royal Agricultural Show. Wandering around the show ground, I was stopped by seeing a painting of a woman lying face down, legs in the air, with a frog on her bum. Tell me you've seen a picture of that, and I'll find it hard to believe you :) So I bought it. I chatted to the artist, who was a woman a year or two older than me, and over the years, I bought lots of other things from her. (I still have them, and if she ever became famous, I could be rich.)

On one visit to her home in the mid-80s, I mentioned the name of my father's then partner, who had a French woman's name that sounds like an English male one. 'Oh, is he gay?' she asked. 'No,' I said, 'but I am bisexual...' I was in the middle of paying for some more pictures and she went to an envelope she was going to post to someone, took the money out of that, and replaced it with my money.

Why yes, this was in the middle of the 'bisexuals will infect nice people with Aids' scare, and she did read the Daily Mail... but WTF?!?

She apologised for it later, but that's as bad as it's ever been.

Amongst my interests is naval combat. WWI is - for me anyway - particularly interesting.

So when two designers with good records produced Jutland on the largest clash of battleships in history, obviously I was interested. ( Read more... )

A couple of Christmases ago, I was in Nottingham at somewhere with, gasp, no internet. So ( Read more... )

The Times Online website emailed to say that it is about to introduce "a new, improved reader comment system".

They reckon "Times Online attracts the most insightful and informative reader comments from around the world", but that the change "unfortunately .. means that all old comments will disappear from the site."

So... they're about to throw away several years' worth of the world's best comments.

Oops.

Losing content in this way is stupid. As well as losing all of this valuable (and free) content, they're also putting off people from commenting in future. Why bother if they're going to throw it away?

Would they go through the archive of the paper and delete all the letters to the editor because they were introducing a new format? No, people would think they were insane. Same here.

I missed this at the time, but Stephen Holdsworth, one of the founders of the Edinburgh Bisexual Group died in March.

If you have a copy of Bisexual Lives, he's the one mentioned in Kate's section, and she did the obituary.

A bash script I use ends by displaying a line it wants you to add to another file. It would obviously be easier if the script did this itself. As the line will be somewhere in the middle of the file, just using '>>' to append it is no good.

Somewhere :) I have (or had) The AWK Programming Language and my Google skills are enough to be reminded that:

awk '/NEW STUFF HERE/ {print;print "my new line";next}1' test-file

will add 'my new line' after 'NEW STUFF HERE'.

Now, 'my new line' needs to have a number in it that is different to all the other such lines (it's an array index).

Can someone remind me of a good way to do that? The line count of the entire file prior to adding the line would be fine, for example.