Today, a legend died.

Arthur C Clarke died today. It’s a sad day - this man was one of my heros - an astonishing mind with vaulting vision.

He will be sorely missed.

Derren Brown in Dublin

I went to Derren Brown’s An Evening of Wonder show last night at the Olympia in Dublin - a truly astonishing evening out. The show is really the most impressive thing of its kind I’ve seen, and lasted a lengthy two and a bit hours.

Since I was first captivated by this performer I’ve wacthed all his TV shows and read some books and so I can hazard a rough guess how he did some of the illusions and guessing games performed last night, but others completely confounded me.

His performance of cold reading from the audience was amazing - whatever about guessing that colin in the third row had a dog called benji who died years ago, guessing that ronan in the fifth row had recently stolen a fax machine from work and should be cautious because he was seen doing it was something else entirely. Perhaps he has plants wandering around during the break listening to people’s conversations? Perhaps statistically there will always be a light fingered audience member called Ronan and it’s a safe guess - I don’t know.

I also don’t know how me managed to levitate a table while a member of the audience rested their hands on it. I suppose she could have been a plant (A plant with a perfect Dublin accent on a 40 date tour) - I suppose it’s possible but not likely. This one really has me stumped - magnets, cables? No idea, and I don’t want to know. What was most impressive last night wasn’t the tricks anyway, but how they were done and the incredibly polished showmanship on display.
A truly fantastic night out and really very very impressive. This guy is something special

One day, on top of a mountain . . .

So the family unit decided to take a jaunt up the Sugarloaf in Wicklow on Sunday.

Now, we don’t have real mountains in Ireland, in the Everest/Pyrenees/Apennines sense of the word but we do have some pretty hills, and so off we set. It’s more of a climb than it looks from sea level, but it’s nothing that can’t be done in a few hours.

This is the view from close to the top.

Bob approved in particular of the day’s activities.

He told me so.

Somewhere over the Russian tundra . . .

I shot this out the window of a Boeing jet on the way back from Japan recently.

The flight passes over Russia, and gives you a good idea of just how big the world is. You can look out the window, and see nothing but a snowy wasteland as far as the eye can see - take a nap for five hours and look out the window again. You’ll still see a snowy wastelane as far as the eye can see. Savagely beautiful.

Speed cabling - nice . . .

I had to laugh when I read this. I’ve just finished re-cabling my office (to take into account a newly purchased 500 gb external hard disk I’m now using for backing up my work archives and records) and so have spent a nasty dusty messy and frustrating hour untangling the rat’s nest of cables behind my desk.

A new “sport” based around unravelling the mass of wires that can typically be found beneath computer desks the world over is taking off in the western US.

The first “speedcabling” competition took place in an art gallery in Los Angeles and was won by LA-based web developer Matthew Howell.

A good 30 per cent of the cables behind my desk weren’t actually connected to anything at all! Anyway. There you go. I bet you feel intellectually richer for having read that, don’t you?

Bringing out the big guns

I’ve just checked my blog stats for the last few days, and as a result of me posting my guns piece below, there has been a massive increase in visitors over the last few days - with 180 people visiting today so far.

Neat or slightly freaky? I don’t know - maybe some of you could leave some comments and let me know why you’re searching wordpress blogs looking for references to the word ‘Gun’, ‘Guns’, ‘GUN’ or any variant therein. Is there some tie in to a news story concerning guns in the US or some other reason why people are doing this search today, but not yesterday?

Enquring minds want to know!

EDIT:Please? A further 222 people have viewed this page since I put this up (on top of the original 180) and not one comment? Come on, put us out of our misery - why are you searching for the word ‘gun’ on the internet? You don’t work for the CIA do you?

Frozen Grand Central

Thanks to Liam F for the link and the good people at www.improveverywhere.com  for the video. This is a very neat piece of performance art. Excellent stuff. You can check out more of their stuff at the address above - I particularly like the one where they got 111 guys to go into Abercrombie and Fitch and then take their shirts off. Very funny.

I was Lost (season three) but now am Found (season four)

Yeah, Lost is back tonight. I can’t wait. A generous Christmas present and a recent long haul trip abroad left me with both the time and means of re-watching the entire third series of Lost so I’m stocked, primed and ready to go.

Not only have I watched the first, second and third series all the way through, I’ve watched the extras and special features on the box sets, listened to the podcasts and carefully combed my way through the fantastic and encyclopaedic (literally!) www.lostpedia.org in order to get my plot lines and conspiracy theories in order.

Will it be worth it? The season finale in Season three got me excited and re-engaged with the story, so I’ll be tuning in tonight and I’m hoping to revisit an island that’s given me some of the most engrossing storylines and fantastic writing of the last ten years worth of television.

It’s may not be as good as the Sopranos (and on that matter, I feel another blog entry coming along any day now) but it does scratch my sci fi/fantasy/thriller itch in a way not much has recently, and that’s good enough for this viewer.

EDIT: Right, I sat down last night in plenty of time for the season premiere and even had the patience to live pause it for ten minutes so I could fastforward through the ads when they came on. Was it worth it? Absolutely - vintage Lost. I loved it and can’t wait to get more.

The writers look like they may have done it again. For Lost fans, series one was all about the crash and the mystery of the island, its monsters and of course, the horrror of The Others. The series ended on a massive cliff hanger with the discovery and opening of the mysterious hatch. Rarely have I shoved a DVD into my player as fast as I did disk one of the second series, and series two did not dissapoint - more excellence as we learned more about the Others and the Dharma Initiative.

This series did dip a little at the end, but came back from another cliffhanger and Series three started with the excellent scene of the Others’ camp at the time of the crash and the revelations regarding Jacob, the ‘magic box’ that produces whatever you want it to, and the story arc concerning the submarine and Ben’s tumour. Truthfully though, this series didn’t grab me as much as S1 and S2 - I think possibly because this was the first series I watched as a series - one episode a week.

The previous two series I’d watched on DVD and so got a different sense of pacing. Three dipped a little, but things are looking up for Series 4. For starters, we now know we’re going somewhere - the writers have announced that there will be another three series (including 4) of 16 episodes each and then it’s finished. The problem with Lost is the lingering suspicion that there’s no end and the makers are just making it up as they go along, but the end is in sight, so it’s go to be wrapped up in 2010.

This first episode has me more excited about Lost since I have been since the end of series 1 - the writers have introduced a totally new story arc and it looks like it’s going to work. A totaly new group of people are coming to the island and through the new technique of flash-forwards, we now have a story being told in three time periods, the past, present and future. Presumably these will all come together as the story is resolved. Bring it on!

Guns are cool, mkay?

I was lucky enough to be in California before Christmas - been doing a lot of travelling lately - and got a chance to call into the LAX gun range to shoot some handguns - .22 calibre revolvers and Glock and Sig Sauer 9 mm semi-automatic handguns to be exact.

(You’d never guess I spent most of my teenage years playing DOOM, would you?)

It might seem weird to be a card carrying leftie - a tree-hugging pseudo-hippie with distinctly pinko leanings - yet also be into guns. However, I’ve no problem seperating the political ideology that goes with gun culture (particularly in the US) from the enjoyment of practicing the technical skill of firing them accurately. To me there is no difference between a handgun and a bow and arrow, or a cross bow, other than the fact that one can be more rapidly deployed as a weapon. However, that said, I find gun culture mostly repugnant.

Because these are dangerous objects, I’m perfectly happy that access to them is restricted in the country I live in. In LA, I thorougly enjoyed the time I spent shooting - if you get a chance, go for it, it’s a blast - but it was also slightly scarey to realise that in Ireland, the odds of you having a gun pointed at you are extremely remote unless you’re involved in the drugs trade or organised crime. In personal crime - muggings and handbag thefts - guns aren’t for the most part used, but in LA, it’s much more likely that a street mugger will be carrying a gun. The police have to make a whole series of different presumptions regarding the level of threat suspects present to them.

I think the society I live in is much richer for the restrictions we have here. The price of these restrictions mean that I can’t own or keep an automatic handgun in my home, but I’m also glad that I don’t feel like I need to. Shooting paper targets is really fun though.

Watch them shuffle out of the way

A friend sent me a link to this video on youtube this morning. I’m just back from a two week training trip and so I find this particularly entertaining. In Japan, bizarrely, bicycles have right of way on the footpath. Why, I have no idea, as it makes no sense whatsoever when there are perfectly good roads all over the place, but as a visitor you’ll frequently find yourself wondering why cyclists expect you to get out of their way when they come up behind you on the footpath ringing their irritating little bells.

Now, armed with that nugget of information, watch this video and see how this person came up with an innovative way to make navigating busy tokyo streets that bit easier. I particularly like the way it works indoors, on escalators and in places it’s very hard to imagine people are expecting to hear a bicycle bell!

I really love the almost pavlovian way that people wander into single file - excellent!