A Citizen With 4 Fewer Teeth

I no longer have a green card! Or anything that identifies me as a valid citizen rather than a large, watermarked piece of paper. Which is likely worse…but better, once I get the new passport sorted out. Anyhow, the citizenship ceremony was fairly straightforward, except that our current President still hasn’t got around to recording a welcome message for new citizens, and a complete absence of him from all printed material. Not that most of us minded when we realized.

After a weekend of boardgames, Doctor Who, buying 8 cases of Diet Coke, and a longer-than-expected-dinner-because-reasons, it was Monday and time to celebrate being an American in style: getting my wisdom teeth removed. I have always been hesitant to have them out, due to one of them being apparently close to one of my jaw nerves. But the dentist here seemed very keen on yanking them out, and well, I was getting tired of the infections they kept bringing. I was informed that I have the smallest mouth she’s ever seen…but I was also one of the nicest patients she’s had. So swings and roundabouts there (everybody seems to agree on the small mouth thing…BUT NOBODY EVER SAID THAT TO ME BEFORE! But fine. Sure.).

Thankfully, it was fairly quick and easy to yank them out, but as everybody thought it would be a bad idea for me to be alone afterwards, Tammy drove me all the way back to Kentucky for the week. I spent the 8-hour car ride apologizing every five minutes, so I’m grateful that she didn’t throw me out in West Virginia.

Aside from running a fever on Wednesday and making the well-intentioned mistake of eating pizza yesterday, it hasn’t been too bad. Some pain, but not unbearable, not too much swelling, and the nerve ended up not being a problem. Hurrah! Though I am looking forward to being able to drink Diet Coke and tea again next week.

In the meantime, I am hopped up on ibuprofen, antibiotics, and percocet, whilst doing work and dying over and over on Zelda¹. Tomorrow, mostly recovered, I fly home to Durham. Home for now, anyhow…

Brian Cant

RIP.

As a point of comparison to American readers, I’d say that Cant was something akin to Mr. Rogers in terms of importance to younger viewers. But whereas, to this foreigner, Rogers comes across as the classic American staid gentleman next door, Cant and the Playaway/Play School set gave the impression that they spent their evenings debating Marxist tracts in their omnisexual polyamorous commune.¹ They were firmly pitched in the ‘now’…even if that ‘now’ seems a lost time and place for us, particularly in the light of recent events.

Brian Cant, star of BBC kids' shows Play School and Play Away, and narrator of Trumpton, has died aged 83. https://t.co/6HfAjMq2u0 pic.twitter.com/Q6VKSzZxA4

— BBC Four (@BBCFOUR) June 19, 2017

The other thing about Cant is that he was always there. We grew up with him on Playaway and Play School, but even after going to school, you’d see him somewhere when you were off sick and watching the schools programmes. Or when he was doing a rotation on Jackanory. Or during the Summer when repeats of Camberwick Green or Trumpton would fill in time on But First This… And then even later at university in the late 90s, where he did The Organ Gang shorts for This Morning With Richard Not Judy. A reassuring twinkling smile when you’re drinking a lemsip…with a hangover on a Sunday morning at the age of 28.²

You can’t claim that he was one of the Pythons, or up there with Spike Milligan, but he had that sparkle of safe anarchy that us British and children in general love:

You could never describe Cant as cool. And yet, a generation of us watched him whilst we were small and knew that’s what we wanted to be when we grew up. Even if we didn’t realize it until much later.

One More Day

My family got an extra night in the US after their plane failed to reboot properly. As of right now, they’re delayed another two hours on their second attempt. At this rate, they’ll be here for my citizenship ceremony on Friday. But hopefully they’ll get underway this evening. After all, the cats back home are getting hungry without their supply of treats…

The Absolute Boy

22:00 BST. When the Exit Poll fell.

Although I didn’t make it explicit last week for fear of jinxing it, the YouGov/Survation polls of last week didn’t just make me hope. Given the completely inept way the Tories ran their campaign, the other polls just seemed wrong - surely we wouldn’t give somebody a 100+ seat majority when they spent six weeks seemingly hiding from the press?

We did not.

And we laughed and laughed and laughed. The Tories achieving an amazing Pyrrhic victory, managing to lose a 25-point lead to a man that just two months ago looked like he was taking Labour to the point of destruction.

But they were wrong.

Along with Macron’s En Marche giving people a trouncing in the French elections, things might be looking up¹? Just maybe?

In less globally-important news, my citizenship interview went well, and I will become a US citizen on June 23rd. I will celebrate by having my wisdom teeth taken out on the following Monday. I know how to have a good time, y’know.

And, a good time was had this weekend - a full house with many friends, Tammy and I spending Sunday making cakes, ice creams, other pastry items, and then me abandoning her to cook all the chicken. But: so many people that even the extended table wasn’t enough for everybody. Pools and slip’n’slides as well!

And I Just Can't Help Believing, Though Believing Sees Me Cursed

I have started to get invested in the polls (at least YouGov/Survation). This will inevitably lead to a crushing sensation around 17:00 EDT on Thursday when the party that has run the worst GE campaign in living memory gets elected in a landslide.

It’s not the despair, Laura. I can stand the despair. It’s the hope!

To cheer us all up, here’s Gyles Brandreth on his short career as an anti-porn crusader in the 1970s:

(if you’re American, then Gyles is essentially so English that if he didn’t exist, we’d be forced to create him in a lab.)

And that’s it this week. Citizenship Interview and Family Arrival tomorrow…

The Car That Didn't Go

I don’t have too many vivid memories of childhood¹, but I do remember one day in primary school. We had been given a project to make a small wheeled vehicle, and we were out testing them on the netball court. It was a sunny day, warm and hot.

My car was a mash of Construx and ice-cream cartons², while Scott’s was a constructed kit affair with a proper motor and gearing. Mine had a huge power block with D batteries and not a single gear in sight. It had worked fine in testing. But testing was my table back home, not the tarmac of the court.

It started, it spluttered, it threw off the belt I had liberated from one of the many video recorders my Dad had let me disassemble. It sat on the court while Scott’s fancy car zipped away in the distance.

The lesson here is not, surprisingly: learn about gearing, or that the rich kid will almost always win, but that if you’re wearing a jumper on a hot summer’s day and you’re still freezing, you might be ill. And so, defeated, I laid back on the grass and shivered until my Mum came to pick me up.

I did build a computer this weekend. It works. My first build since…2006 or so (and even then, that was just replacing a blown motherboard. This is likely my first totally new tower since before UNC…and let’s not count up those years!). I can’t really do anything fancy with it until I buy the graphics card in a month or two, but it’s coming along.

Success, then…but I am still under a blanket, shivering, having difficulty standing up or sitting down without pain, and oh, yes, almost managing to give myself third-degree burns whilst attempting to carry a Lemsip. Perhaps I shouldn’t be left alone. Maybe I’ve become allergic to Durham! Maybe I’m just sick.

Still, a week tomorrow, my family arrives and I have my citizenship interview. So probably need to get better.

Cincinnati Again!

Back in Cincinnati again for the week. And having come here quite a few times in the past year, some things are leaping out at me:

• I can now reliably spell it, which means auto-correct on my iPhone is having a happier time.
• It’s a fun little city - bigger than Durham, obviously, but not insanely huge like, say, Chicago or New York.
• I still haven’t gone on the fancy new trams.
• You can go outside for more than five minutes and not drown in sweat!
• OH/KY Mexican restaurants have a surprisingly good showing in tortillas.
• Jungle Jim’s provides a comprehensive selection of real Cadbury products and even…imports from Tesco.
• Apparently in Newport, they have the largest bourbon selection in…anywhere?

Anyway, back home to Durham on Saturday…and then…I attempt to build a computer again. Oh dear.

Question 12 - What is the Rule of Law?

Quiet week, really, eh? Nothing out of note happened. Nothing at all. Not a single thing that makes you somewhat hesitant about the months ahead. Nope, everything is fine.

In a completely unrelated note, I got my interview date for my US citizenship application this week! Which means a few weeks of revising the questions that they’ll ask. You can laugh at them making sure you know that Ben Franklin was the first Postmaster-General, but then you remember that the UK test literally can ask you a question were the answer is ‘Morecambe and Wise’ and you’re rather grateful that the US test restricts itself to things that are fairly sane.

At the moment.

Anyway, aside from that, not too much going on this week; I’ll probably announce the little PyTorch thing I’ve been working on tomorrow, and I’m slowly accumulating parts for my first scratch-built PC since 2007 (or so) like a little packrat, if a packrat had access to Amazon Prime and was going to get a graphics card with an incredible 11Gb of memory and so many fans that it could probably be used to power a small wind tunnel.

And my family is visiting soon! Should probably clean the house up a touch. They probably don’t want neural network papers all over the place…

Tied To The 90s

Indulging in nostalgia again. Yes, yes, you with the smart mouth at the back, that is what this blog has mostly devolved into. But! This time, not the nostalgia of a forgotten Britain that I never knew, but the 90s!

(I have probably done this before. BUT!)

If you are ever looking for a decoder ring to my psyche, then you should look at Kenickie, The Invisibles, TMWRNJ¹, and a random copy of Amiga Power. Which, just to be more iconoclastic, I never actually read, not having an Amiga (obv.). BUT THAT ISN’T THE POINT.

The point is that I re-read The Invisibles last weekend whilst still high on jetlag tiredness and got into all sorts of bizarre thoughts about where we are now and where we were then. Key 23, the Memes of the Technocult, and of course, the greatest self-critique ever seen in comic form:

MY TITS SPELL ANARCHY

By the end of the night (around 1am), I was writing down crazy things about altering vectors of neural networks and pulling out new words from the word2vec models that they create. Spilling new realities from the chaos of higher-dimensional mathematics.

Yes, for about two days after every re-read of The Invisibles, I talk like that all the time and start thinking about dressing up in some combination of King Mob and Paul Morley, plastering slogans from obscure British films and Italian Futurist manifestos across the house. It…normally subsides. I am totally going to be trying that neural network Key 23 translation, mind you.

Of course, this week was also a special week in 90s nostalgia, at least for us people of a British persuasion. For this was the week twenty years ago where we stared at a TV screen as polls closed, as Dimbleby, Snow, and Paxman ruthlessly tore apart Tory MPs in interviews, and Things Were Going To Be Better. As The Election Night Armistice put it, 18 Years of Tory Arse had finally come to a close. It was the dawn of a new future.

you may pause here for a bitter laugh at yourself at eighteen years old while showing him a video feed of Neil Hamilton in the Welsh Assembly

Meanwhile, back in the present day, Britain has gone insane, America is…I don’t have the words, and we’re all praying that somehow France doesn’t elect a fascist tomorrow. Meanwhile, memes swarm around the Internet from a messageboard that heralds a new white supremacist order on the back of hentai and lols.

I’m Ragged Robin. I’m nuts.

So sometimes you just want to step aside and remember when the future didn’t seem quite so terrifying. Enter The Net, a BBC series about…The Net, the first series of which has recently been uploaded to…The Net (stop that — Ed.). And it’s amazing in its own way. The games reviews made me fall for Jules all over again with their delightful anti-gamer viewpoint, the hilarious critique of EDS filmed as a The Prisoner spoof, and of course, the prescient “OMG, Nazis can use the Internet too!” section.

I did have to laugh at the ten-minute Apple Advanced Technology Group segment whereupon the ATG essentially invents the iPhone and Siri, with none of them realizing that Steve Jobs would turn up in three years’ time and kill them all². One of them picks up a Newton and says ‘wouldn’t it be nice if it could just give you directions while driving?’ YES, IT MIGHT. But you came too soon for our world, ATG, too soon.

Then! Just as the nostalgia was starting to peak (look, this is a week where I have to recognize that my psoriasis may go beyond being an annoyance and may actually deny me healthcare in the future due to our dark future that we created because a woman had the temerity to be competent and store her emails on a separate server, so I feel like I can be cut a little slack for wanting to retreat into a happier time), Radiohead dropped a bombshell. The 20th Anniversary of The Album That’s Not Quite As Good As Ladies And Gentleman We Are Floating In Space But Still Pretty Good. WITH LIFT ON IT. LIFT. The 20-year-old MP3³ recording from Pinkpop can finally be retired this June! REJOICE! REJOICE!

Thus the week of 90s nostalgia came to a close, and the local election results confirmed that: Yes, this is really happening.

#nofuture

Happy weekend, everybody!

Singapore, There And Back Again

Last week’s entry was obviously written in a terrible mood, facing hours trapped in JFK and then even more hours in the air to get to Singapore where I’d spend 40 or so hours before going all the way back. But I’m home now and almost over the jetlag. Almost.

On the way

Aside from spending oh-so-many hours in JFK, the rest of the journey to Singapore passed without too much incident. Thirteen hours on a 777 to get to Doha, happily advertising itself as the most advanced airport in the world, and then getting us off the plane on a staircase that bounced disturbingly with every step, resonating when more than two people were walking down it, into 35ºC heat. Not entirely sure that was the best introduction. Once inside…well, it’s an airport. With multiple WH Smiths!

Oh the cameras. On take off and landing on the new A350, the overhead displays show either the underside of the plane (taking off) or the view from the tail (landing). It’d be fine if it was limited to an option on the fancy back seat display (and indeed, if you’re insane you can do that), but there’s a certain Alex-from-Clockwork Orange aspect to having the view forced on you like that and oh god I can see the canopy of the forests as we come into land why did I look up why

(even better, though, is that the video feed stutters. Which is fine if you’re watching a YouTube video, but when you’re seeing yourself come into land and everything suddenly stops…)

Finally, then, it was Tuesday. Singapore. A collection of spectacular, but soulless skyscrapers as far as the eye can see. Even Marina Bay Sands, with its insane infinity pool setup, just looks like three bland towers with an ironing board half-heartedly stuck on top.

“Wait, but aren’t you the guy who loves brutalism?"

Well, Mr. Anonymous Italics, at least brutalism tries.

Anyway, if you are ever in Singapore, and you fancy staying a hotel redolent of John Le Carré circa The Honourable Schoolboy, Well, the Hotel Miramar is for you. Faded 70s glory with just that essential hint of colonialism. Plus all rooms come with a kettle and proper BS1363 plug sockets everywhere. 230V like a civilized nation.

I can’t really say much about my trip, except there were meetings and I was in a café that unexpectedly played this and I still can’t get it out of my head a week later:

(also, did Texas pay money to the Gaye estate for Say What You Want? It’s a blatant lift)

The way back

On the way back, I was at a bit more of a loose end. After coming across an unexpected bounty of Transformers in Changi Airport, I faced 20 hours without most of my gadgets. For this part of the trip fell foul of the Trump Administration’s new guidelines that flights from Doha to the US are not allowed to have tablets or laptops in the cabin. So so long.

I had this great, no, amazing idea to spend the entire second flight watching the Star Wars series from The Phantom Menace to The Force Awakens. This idea did not survive the first film. Oh God. I had forgotten just how bad it is. And I’m not just talking about Jake Lloyd or Jar Jar Binks…it’s that there’s a kernel of a decent story here (Palpatine creating a fake war in order to rise to ascendency in the Republic, turning every defeat into a Just As Planned victory), but it fails at every level of execution. Which is impressive.

In the end, I just watched Passengers over people’s shoulders for most of the way back…and slept! People who know me will be astounded at that; I never sleep on planes. It probably helped that I had been exhausted since Sunday morning.

We have to talk about JFK.

I started on my way home at 2pm EDT Wednesday. I got to JFK at 3pm EDT Thursday. And my troubles began again. My flight home was cancelled due to…air traffic. And the flight after that. And apparently the flight the next morning too. The ticket agent and I quickly agreed that getting out of JFK was probably a good idea, and so seven hours after landing in JFK, I flew to Charlotte. Whereupon everybody disembarked and gave the agents there hell because they didn’t have authority to issue hotel vouchers. Which wasn’t their fault, but everybody had been told otherwise.

This included me, but I suspected that the ticket agent in NY was just telling me that so it would be Somebody Else’s Problem, so I wasn’t surprised or too upset; I just found a nearby hotel and slept.

I eventually arrived home just before noon on Friday.

So, so tired. But I’ve been to Singapore now! I also don’t want to be inside a plane for a month or so.