Judge Judy jogged my memory

I was writing a document today in work and while I was doing it I was listening to some episodes of Judge Judy through my headphones. As I was listening to this particular episode, it brought back a memory of a very funny thing which had happened to me whilst I was living in Italy.
Firstly, just in case you can't be bothered listening/watching all 10 minutes of the episode, let me summarise the Judge Judy program - girl was sueing boy for a broken window in her car, caused by the police, because they had to smash it when they couldn't wake him and he was dead drunk inside the car.
So going back to me and my time in Italy. I taught at a private language school and one of the other teachers, Monica, was from a small village, some 15k outside of Forli. I also taught a pupil from that same village, Rosie, who was a girl about my age, and we got on quite well. We met up on various occasions and did stuff together during the year I was there.
The village that they both came from, (Rocca San Casciano) had an annual festival, called the "Falo" and Rosie invited me over to stay at her parents' for the festival. It was great because she was really heavily involved in it - so the 1st night, which was the night before the festival, I was helping out finishing off the float, and stitching buttons on costumes, and the second night, which was the festival 'proper' we watched the procession from the square, and then, went back to her parents to watch the bonfire building (all part of the festival) that was going on in the river bed. Her parents' house backed on to the river - imagine medieval town where the river follows a route through the town centre and the houses are literally built into the banks of the river; the windows of her parents' house backed straight onto the river. It was a great vantage point. The 4 "borgi" (town areas) competed to build and burn the biggest bonfire and we sat and watched them from our great viewpoint.
Finally the time came for me to leave, and because Monica (the teacher I worked with) and her husband Marco were both from the village, but lived round the corner from me in Forli, we'd arranged to meet up at a particular time and they were going to give me a lift home.
We met up and had a swift coffee in the bar in town, well it was about 5am at this point, and we went to get the car. Marco had left it not far from his mother's house, in a tiny triangular shaped car park, at the corner of town.
Eeeeek! When we got there, totally blocked in. I mean it looked like 10 people had deliberately parked so as to not let us out! Good job I was with some locals. Monica, Rosie and Marco were pretty cool about it. They recognised a couple of the cars, and we spent an hour or so, running round, getting people's keys, shuffling the cars around in the car park like some giant game of solitaire!
Finally we were left with one car, it was literally the one directly behind Marco's car, and we'd not been too worried about it, as although it wasn't regognised by the guys, the drunken reveller who owned it, was actually fast asleep inside. (Ahaaaa! Now you see how the Judge Judy episode ties in!!!) We had decided not to try and wake him, as initially there were about 5 cars behind him and it'd have been pointless. But the time came when all those cars were out of the way, so we tapped on the window. Nothing. OK fine we thought, we banged on it a bit. Nothing. Well it went from the sublime to the ridiculous, we must have spent a good 10 minutes going from polite 'wakey wakey' type noises to all 3 of us rocking the car from side to side and shouting our heads off at him, to try and wake him up. There was a point at which we started to think he must have actually been ill, or in a coma, or worse, BUT, during the time we did see him move, and turn over, and given that it was late, on the night of the festival, we knew he was just beltin' drunk!
Nevertheless, we still needed to get the car moved to get home, so Marco went back to the bar we'd had our coffee in previously, where we'd actually been chatting to half of the town's police force, who were 'taking it easy' in the bar, looking cool, waiting for something to happen (in the style of Italian police everywhere!!!) Of course, Monica, Marco and Rosie knew most of them (had been at school with them etc) so it was a jovial crowd of them that Marco came back from the bar with!
They started off as we did, trying to wake up the lad in the car. They too, shook the car and shouted, and banged on the window, but nothing, and noone, was going to wake this boy from his restful slumber!
By this time, quite a few police, at least 10, were there, and a few people from the bar had come to have a look so there were about 15 chaps standing around. I was chatting with Rosie and Monica and we were having a laugh about it all. Once I'd realised the guy wasn't dead or in trouble, it was all quite amusing. Next thing we knew - the police had organised themselves and some of the guys from the bar, all around the car. I was wondering what was going on, when I heard the Italian equivalent of 1...2...3...hup! They bent down and picked the car up.........walked it through the car park and onto a side street, where they (non too gently) let it fall back down again. We were hysterical. The occupant was still snoozing away, none the wiser, and we were free to get our car out, which we did. The final manoevre was the police lifting the car again and putting into the space that Marco's car had just vacated. We spent the journey home wondering if he would notice that he'd moved car spaces in the night.
Thank-you Judge Judy episode, for reminding me of that funny funny event!!!!

Just bought a new Gadget

For the last few years i have been messing around with having to move data / delete data / burn data to dvd etc . So very painful.

So i went out and bought one of these .

Its great .

It has tons of storage . 2 TB (which is a bloody lot).

So now no storage problems for many a year.

Its not the fastest on 100 MB, but just got a GB switch so that should quicken it up. But it streams movies / tv from the unit to my Xbox (running xbmc) , also streams fine from the laptop, also streams music from it to my Squeezebox aswell. So all is good.


All i have to think of now is how i backup the whole thing. So thats my next decision

Earthquake Update

The European-Mediterranian Seismology Centre is reporting it as slightly higher than the USGS website - 4.9 on the Richter scale. and the British Geological Survey has been timing out for me so far but the BBC is reporting that it is saying 5.1
Stop Press, I've just got on to the BGS website and they're actually saying 5.3!

Earthquake

What's going on?

I woke up and couldn't work out what was going on - it sounded like someone was rattling the windows, and it felt like someone was trying to drive a bus through the downstairs of the house. I opened my eyes, the alarm clock read 00:58. I couldn't get my head round what was happening.

It's all coming back to me.

Then I remembered - back in 1996 when I was living in Italy - it was Christmas Eve, and it had been unseasonably hot, immediately after some particularly cold weather. I was laid in bed, just like last night, and was disturbed to be woken up by what I thought were some very thoughtless lorry drivers whose vehicles were so loud that they rattled the windows.
-- Huh, Italian drivers, I thought! The next morning, when Daniela (my cousin) came to pick me up, she said (in Italian)
-- So, did you feel the......? (and she said a word I didn't understand)
-- The what? I said
-- Terramoto, she replied. I did a quick breakdown of the word in my head...Terra = earth, ground, land. Moto = movement, motion....OH I thought, it means EARTHQUAKE! I thought back to my being woken by the 'loud lorries' and realised that what I had actually felt was an earthquake!! Wow, my 1st one and all I had done was rolled over cursing the lorry drivers!!
So when I woke, at just before 1am this morning, I knew EXACTLY what was going on.

Disbelief

I heard Dan turn over.
-- Did you feel that? I said.
-- Yeah, I felt like someone was shaking the bed, he replied.
-- It was an earthquake.
-- Don't be silly.

T'interweb

I reached down for the laptop and logged on. Nothing on the news. Nothing, in fact on the whole of Google. At 01:09 I was just researching earthquakes on Wikipedia and I came across a link to a list of earthquakes in the UK - BINGO! The last entry didn't have an awful lot of data in it; no epicentre, no force, but it referenced an Earthquake on the 27th Feb, and, when I looked on the Wikipedia "history" page, you could see it had been updated in the last 10 minites. In fact, the 1st revision to the data had happened at 01:02. Someone was quick on the draw!
Refreshing the page over the next 20 minutes or so saw many additions to the "where it was felt" section which ranged from sensible entries (Lincolnshire, Manchester etc) to the ridiculous ("Dan's face", "my pants") and almost every number between 1 and 300 on the alleged "Richter Scale". I think articles always go through this upheaval before they settle down to a more stable version
Finally, one of the posters cited a reference to the US Geological Survey website with full details on the quake. (Interestingly the British Geological Survey website was down!)
Although I kept searching the news websites every so often, it wasn't until 01:35 that the BBC reported it as breaking news. Only 33 minutes behind Wikipedia!

Dodgy BBC reporting
Rather misleadingly, on the BBC website at the moment ( 02:18) the Breaking News symbol has 3 articles next to it. The 1st one is the one linked to above and is entitled 'Earth Tremor felt accross England' and below it are 2 articles (in smaller font) - one of which is 'Hundreds of homes damaged' and the other 'How earthquakes happen'. I saw the 2nd article and clicked on it thinking that people's homes had been damaged by the quake - only to realise it was an article on the 2007 earthquake felt in Birmingam. Don't you think that seems a bit misleading?

Dublin

Well it's been blowing an absolute gale all night! I didn't sleep too well because of that and knowing I was going to have to be up at 6, so I'm a bit shattered this morning. Not looking forward to the flight home much either if the truth be known - if it's blowy here, at Leeds Bradford Airport it'll be a nightmare landing.
But anyway, here I am, in Dublin - in the lovely Castleknock Country Club, just waiting to go down and get my cab to Blanchardstown shopping mall to meet Nicola, the manager of Miss S, and prepare myself for the onslaught! I'm hoping it'll go well and the store will be trading normally at 9am! At which point I think I'll be off to find a nice corner of starbucks and get on with writing some documents I need to finish!

Oscar Results

# Best Picture: No Country for Old Men
# Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis
# Best Actress: Marion Cotillard
# Best Supporting Actor: Javier Bardem
# Best Supporting Actress: Tilda Swinton
# Best Director: The Coen Brothers
# Best Original Screenplay: Diablo Cody
# Best Adapted Screenplay: The Coen Brothers

Oscars - Elizabeth the Golden age - review.

I remember when the 1st Elizabeth movie came out - Ruth and I kept watching the trailer (as I recall it was some horse men galloping across the countryside dressed in dashing Elizabethan costume!) we were so excited, and the move did live up to expectations. I'm not that fond of sequels (apart from Rocky - more on that later!!) But I do like Cate Blanchett and Clive Owen so I was quietly looking forward to it.
I knew Dan wasn't going to be so keen so I watched this in about 3 installments on my own. 1st impressions were that the costume and attention to detail was fabulous. There was the requisite torture and cruelty of the age. There was a bit of vulnerability from the Queenie herself. All in all, not bad to watch. IMDB gives it 6.9 and usually we find that anything above 7 is pretty decent. It's part costume drama, part romance, part political, part historical. I'd say perfect for a girl's night in!

Oscars - Lars and the real girl - Review

Well

A bizarre film about a bizarre guy.

But it worked very well.

The main premise is LARS is a bit of a lost soul , and instead of getting a girlfriend goes and buys himself a replica of a woman (Basically a blow up lady).

The story is basically what he gets up to and how his family deals with it and also how he finally deals with it.

Worth a watch!

Mike Read, DJ, and not Mayor of London

So, I don't know if you've read my recent posting on the Guardian article which caught everyone's attention for the amount (and quality) of comments it attracted?

Well, as I was trawling (and giggling) through the comments, I noticed a few strange references:
"Is this going to be a new Mike Read then?"
"best thing since Mike Read"
"this thread is the funniest thing since Mike Read"
- how Roger Irrelevant I thought to myself.

Finally I got to one of the comments which said "I take it you've never seen the infamous Mike Read blog then? And it posted a link http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/mike_read/2007/07/im_backing_boris"

I clicked, and started reading.

Well - what a joy the Guardian commenters are when provided with a bit of quality fodder.

Thank-you Mike Read, for not running for Mayor, for supporting Boris, and for deciding to announce the fact so publicly. Thank-you, thank-you Guardian commenters for providing such entertainment in your heartfelt response to Mike's manifesto. But mostly THANK-YOU to LondonFido and ItIsFeasable who briefly managed to update Mike's Wikipedia entry (but were thwarted by the spoilsports) and finally made the sensible choice of creating an Uncyclopedia entry on him instead.

Genius, sheer genius!

Brief sample of the opening barrage on Uncyclopedia.........

This article or section may be Overly British. Americans may not understand humour, only humor.

The Canadians and Australians may not understand anything at all. Don't change a thing to remedy this.

Michael Jean Michelle Jarre Mega Drive Read (Born 1782) is a fictional character created by Chris Morris to entertain the Guardian reading masses in a rainy week one July. Mike loves to blog about his plans for London. No animals were harmed in the making of Mike Read (well, maybe one or two).

Remember - Mike Read loves each and every one of you.

Blogs I read

As an amateur blogger, I'm very interested in other stuff that's out there and I have a few favourites I read every day.

Random acts of Reality - to quote the website "Welcome to Random Acts Of Reality, a Blog based in London, England, written by an E.M.T working for the London Ambulance Service. Also, number one search result for "Womble porn". All names have be changed to protect the guilty. This Blog was previously known as "Why I Hate Humanity" but the antipsychotic medication seems to have kicked in."

NHS Blog Doctor - Dr John Crippen* is angry! Angry about the NHS, the UK and the world!

Mr Eugenides - one of the best ranting websites around!

There are more but I'll list them in another blog post!

Guardian Tsunami of Hate

I read quite a few blogs regularly using Firefox's RSS feed reader (don't worry Mum I'll show you how the next time I'm home) and I noticed over the weekend, at least 3 of them mentioned a particular article from the Guardian website which had had some 'viral' attention from the world's blog readers and commenters.
To summarise; Max, a 19 year old gap year student is going to blog his way round a 2 month trip to Thailand and Australia. Unfortunately, alongside his rather uninspired writing style, (Hi! I'm Max! I'm 19!) young Max happens to share a surname with one of the Guardian's travel hacks (daddy dearest) and once this fact was outed, this proliferated a set of comments so scathing and vitriolic, that you can actually forgive the blandness of the original article, for the entertainment value provided by the comments section. There are 500+ of them so take a bit of reading, but settle down with a cuppa and enjoy the frenzy.
You might think that the level of comment is OTT, and that it's slightly unfair to pick on the poor lad, but the problem lies with the fact that these people weren't commenting on someone's home-grown family blog, or travel diary, or informal witterings (as per this one!). This is a national newspaper, with people who are PAID to write! Expectations are high, and passing off someone's informal travel blog as a piece of quality journalism is just asking for trouble! Especially when your dad works for the firm!

Read and see for yourselves......The original blog article is here.

Needless to say, that wasn't the end of the story - the following day, the Editor published a response to the comments, and also, his father is quoted in a further response here.

Poor Max, whose only fault lay in a slightly slack opening article, landed in Mumbai over the weekend, and has decided against any form of journalism career!

The Holiday - Skiing

I suppose we couldn't go away on such a fab holiday without mentioning the skiing. Let's make no bones about it IT WAS TOUGH
We both found it quite hard. Dan from a beginner's perspective....

• doesn't like learning new things
• doesn't have very good balance or coordination
• doesn't like being told what to do

Me from an 'experienced skiier' point of view

• loves being taught new stuff
• knows how to ski reasonably well
• BUT am about 4 stone heavier than I was last skiing holiday
• my fitness was such that just WALKING with the skis wiped me out!

So lets just say it was a challenge for both of us! I think we overcame/worked around it quite well, and, realising our limitations, paced ourselves accordingly!
I think we did really well and skied within our limits, and really enjoyed ourselves. We didn't go too far out of our comfort zone as I didn't fancy being brought down in the blood wagon / helicopter. That said, we're deffo up for another one - we were only chatting about it last night - and it'd deffo be in the Les Arcs area (and probably the Arc1950 resort in particular) that we'd return to.

Oscars - Into the wild - Review

Well were both full of cold this weekend so ended up having to sit in and watch some films (I know what a nightmare, But someone has to do it).

INTO THE WILD

Long but very good. It is base on a true story and is about a young guy who has had enough of the everyday rat race, and after finishing at university he leaves on a journey of discovery.
The scenery is amazing the acting is great (the main character is very good), and it makes you think on what in life is important (Or not).

As i said previously a little long, but very well done and again Sean Penn as Director shows that he knows what he is doing.

Oscar widget below (link to the movies we're going to review)

We love the Oscars!

....well kind of!
Every year we make a point of trying to watch as many of of the Oscar nominated movies as possible so that we can rant and rave at the outcome of the voting (you can't comment if you haven't seen the movie, right?)
So here is a nice Oscars widget - and watch this space for our comments on the movies in the main categories!

Nick has Pood His Pants

Well, not really! It was the day he'd done the most skiing so far....and also had come into the bar and left his boots done up...

The Holiday

Wow, well how can you sum up a week like we just had? I suppose there were several bits to it.

Firstly, the journey.

We went by EuroStar from St Pancras all the way to Bourg Saint Maurice....


View Larger Map

...which was amazing, because B-S-M was only about 20k (took us half an hour) from our final destination of Les Arcs 1950. This was a BIG advantage over the various airports (Chambery and Geneva) which were at least a 3 hour transfer.
Of course being on the train meant that we could move around, get up, change seats, wander to the restaurant car/bar, and go to the loo when you wanted(!) so I think it's a much more relaxed kind of travel than flying!
The only thing we did wrong on the journey out was not plan to bring butties or any refreshments ourselves. We had to buy everything from the train. However we rectified this on the way home with fromage et jambon butties, crisps, biccies & pop.
So in summary, yeah we'll deffo be doing the EuroStar snow train again!

Next, the hotel & the resort.

Well what can I say, we got off the coach at Arc1950 after our half hour jaunt up the mountain from Bourg-S-M and were led by the Inghams rep through a hotel, out the other side into a winter wonderland village (check out some of the pics) we all kept saying 'it's like Christmas!' across some snow and into our hotel where we proceeded to check in. We were then given our room number, 608. Of we traipsed....into the maze of corridors, up a lift, across a bridge(!), up another lift. Finally we arrived at the door of 608. Looked like any old hotel corridor....until you opened the door. First thing we all noticed was that we had a staircase within the room. Turns out the 'room' (well apartment actually) had 3 stories within it. 4 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms and a view to die for. We were all VERY chuffed with the place.
The resort itself was SUPER. A very small village - purpose built - but with every amenity. Shops, bars, restaurants, and the most important thing....ski-in-ski-out facilities.

Skiing pictures

Well, the skiing pics are now up on Picassa. Access them -----> here.

They will also be present for a while in the photo widget we have over in the right margin for a while, (well until something else more interesting comes along!)

He can do it!!!

I wasn't sure how he'd get on....but Dan Can Ski!
Evidence.....

Normal Service has been resumed!

Apologies for the lack of posts since our return - neither of us has felt particularly inclined to blog or even upload the piccies....until now that is! I've removed all snow-related messing about from the blog and normal service will be resumed.