the corner office

Heading home tonight on my bike, and ahead of me in the bike lane is a pretty young thing on her trendy bike, and she flicks her left hand, flick, flick, white blob still sticking to a finger, flick again and a big ball of chewing gum splats down onto the road.

I'm normally a placid kinda dude, and a bit of a chicken, so I surprised even myself when, as I then passed her, I turned to her and said 'that was disgusting.'

Now, I'm not sure what response I was expecting. But I know I definitely wasn't expecting to hear a cheerful American accent saying 'oh I know... but I was really battling to breathe?'

Bit of a blow-up today about the retirement age increasing. Being forced to retire if you're still capable and willing is unfair, but forcing people to work longer, is a far more complex issue. Of course it sucks, but 65 was presumably a fairly arbitrary number anyway - just ask Greeks whose retirement age is lower or Germans whose retirement age is higher. Ask women who get to retire earlier in many countries despite having higher life expectancies and not traditionally doing jobs which entail heavy labour.

So many people are rightfully aggrieved at having to work a year longer in their specific types of careers, but you'd be hard pressed to argue that 65 was that much better for all of them, in the first place.

It goes back to a little rule I've learned in life: people are always disproportionately unhappier about having something taken way, relative to the happiness they got from it, than if they'd never had it in the first place.

Economist and blogger Tyler Cowen on Berlin:

Berlin is evidence that most tourists don't actually care so much about history, culture, and museums, as it is not for most people a major tourist destination, despite having world-class offerings in each of those areas. Mostly tourists like large, visually spectacular sites, or family activities, combined with the feeling that they are taking in culture or seeing something important.

Now if I said something like that...

Another observation:

There are, however, a fair number of Russian tourists who enjoy the nostalgic feeling they get walking through the eastern part of the city and visiting communist monuments and sites.

Oh well, on the upside, George Osborne didn't decree that our firstborn children be sold into slavery to pay down the deficit. I'm very fond of Leo and I'd have been quite upset if that'd happened.

Beyond that, it was mainly just theatre, I think.

This week was a milestone on the bicycling front. I cycled all the way into work and all the way back, all 4 in-the-office days this week. This was quite a big deal for me because a few short weeks ago it was pretty much unthinkable. 140-odd miles (and quite a few calories) later, and it's done.

Gravity and biomechanics waged a slow war of attrition on my muscles and some of my what you might call 'pressure points'. Yet I persevered. London was not to let me off that lightly though, and my triumphant, if somewhat ooh-ooh-ow-ow-punctuated ride home this evening was undertaken as the heavens dumped a load of ice-cold rain upon my phearsome symmetry.

Cycling in a rain jacket is partly pointless though. It's waterproof so the rain doesn't get in, but since air doesn't get through either, all you do is trade getting soaked from the rain for getting soaked from your own sweat. Maybe some people prefer this, you never know where the rain's been. At least you're bright and yellow and and visible and you look Prepared, so people in cars don't think you're just some poor bedraggled schmuck who got caught in the rain. You look like you Mean To Be There, and that's what matters. Can't show the car drivers any sign of weakness.

Getting up the stairs is a bit painful tonight, though.

A few months ago the Times announced it would start charging for content, and I see today they've flipped the switch.

On the plus side (thus far) it seems old archive articles are still accessible.

On the minus side, the subscription page you get presented with offers to sign you up for a "free June preview" but nowhere on the page can I see an indication of what the subscription fees will be like after that, nor does there seem to be any obvious link saying 'what you'll pay after June'. That to me is uncool - doing a bit of email harvesting so when the paywall finally goes up, they've got lots of people to spam. Just on principle, that's a reason for not signing up.

Even if that wasn't the case, I'd still not sign up. Yes, I'm stingy, but the world of news media has changed. In the old days you bought your newspaper and read the hell out of it because that's what you had. Value for money meant getting content for your buck.

In the online world it's different. I have a bunch of news sites bookmarked. I open BBC news every day. The Times used to be my second destination, that changed after the pay-for-access announcement. I also load up the Telegraph, and often the Guardian, and occasionally other 'second tier' (to me) news sites as well. I skim the headlines and dig into things that look interesting. I read popular blogs and follow links into news sites across the planet. And then I move on to doing other stuff.

I know I'm not alone in doing this, and the pay-for-access model is contra to this way of digesting news. For that reason I suspect that the new Times site is doomed to failure. If they're losing money and feel they have no choice, I'm sorry for them - creative destruction is a bummer sometimes. If they make a success of it, good luck to them, but I don't think I'm alone in thinking that their content, while good, isn't so far ahead of the competition that it's worth paying to read it.

Oh dear. World Cup 2010: South Africa ponders vuvuzela ban:

The constant sound of the high-pitched horn-like instrument has so far drowned out much of the atmosphere-generating singing usually associated with games.

...

France captain Patrice Evra has already blamed the noise generated by the vuvuzelas, which has been likened to the drone of thousands of bees, for his side's poor showing in their opening group game against Uruguay, which finished goalless.

He said: "We can't sleep at night because of the vuvuzelas. People start playing them from 6am.

"We can't hear one another out on the pitch because of them."

No prizes for guessing where I am on the likey-the-vuvuzela's-dulcet-tones spectrum.

Well, Bafana Bafana scored the first goal of the World Cup, and they did pretty good. People weren't expecting great things of them but they did 'emselves proud.

It's strange seeing back home through the eyes of British TV. There was a Channel 4 thing earlier this week where the reporter was talking about Yeoville, and he said something along the lines of '20 years ago this neighbourhood was white and posh and now it's vibrant and blah blah', or something like that, and I thought dude, I lived there for a stretch in the 90s, and it wasn't anything near posh and it wasn't exclusively 'white' either. But for a while it was a vibrant and really cool place to live, and if you think it's that awesome now why don't you flog your flat in Putney and find yourself a nice little pozzie a few blocks up from Rockey Street with a toilet that hasn't flushed since the turn of the century, a crack dealer for a neighbour on one side and 15 impoverished and brutalised illegal immigrants squished into the flat on the other side, and let's see how much you like it in 6 months' time.

You don't want the world's overriding impression to be that of a crime-ridden dump, and yet I think it would be wrong, an injustice if people came away from the World Cup thinking or believing the pretence that everything was hunky dory or going to be made OK because a few football games were held in the country.

Also, I must admit to not quite getting the dung beetle. What was that about?

An obscure article about an obscure act of vandalism becomes even more obscure:

Vandals have targeted the ancient Uffington White Horse in Oxfordshire by spraying part of it purple.

Officers from Thames Valley Police were called to the 3,000-year-old chalk monument at about 2200 BST on Thursday.

They found the head and eye of the horse had been sprayed with purple paint. A banner that read "fathers 4 justice stop the secret family courts" was recovered from the scene.

New Fathers 4 Justice and Real Fathers for Justice both denied responsibility.

Yes indeed, there's a "New Fathers 4 Justice" and a "Real Fathers for Justice". Reminds me of something...

Gary Coleman of Diff'rent Strokes fame died this weekend. Brings backs memories... early early 80s on Bop TV with the bronzed braai grille TV aerials that had to be specially installed at 90 degrees to how they were otherwise supposed to be. I think Diff'rent Strokes was on a Thursday night (or was it Tuesday?) and we'd tape it on our big-ass Sony Betamax and watch it over and over again until a few days later when we'd record something else over it.

I still remember some of the scenes vividly. For some reason, the most vivid being the crap beige sheets that Willis smeared water over to let Arnold think he'd wet the bed - probably because I had similarly coloured beige sheets at the time and as kids we'd recently been upgraded to these new-fangled duvet things ourselves. But there are others: the hispanic tutor who fakes a Harlem accent, the hot date aunty who couldn't handle the idea of being a mom, a brick-and-concrete school lunch area with a brown paper lunch bag, and the report card 'not as good as it could've been but better than if I hadn't done as well as I did' - a line I use to this day ;-).

The kind of series that would be worth watching again, although knowing that all 3 kids ended up with drug problems and bankrupt and in court - and in the case of Dana Plato - in jail and star of soft pr0n movies before killing herself, I suspect the youthful magic might be a bit hard to recapture.

In a final sad twist, turns out Dana Plato's son committed suicide a few weeks ago as well.