Latex, handcuffs… and a donkey

Alec just drew my attention to this newspaper story, which I unhesitatingly nominate for the “Best Opening Sentence of 2007” award:

A man who was found dressed in latex and handcuffs brought a donkey to his room in a Galway city centre hotel, because he was advised “to get out and meet people,” the local court heard last week.

I also liked the following example of Irish legal compassion: He was also charged with damage to a mini-bar in the room, but this charge was later dropped when the defendant said that it was the donkey who caused that damage. The whole thing is strangely reminiscent of Frank Zappa’s tour de force album from 1971: The Mothers: Fillmore East.

A fresh look

I just upgraded this site to WordPress 2.1.1, and while I was in the mood I decided to update the look and feel. Ever since the WordPress “widget” mechanism was introduced last year, theme designers have been cranking out some really beautiful styles, and I spent a happy hour browsing through the latest offerings. Eventually I picked MistyLook by Sadish Bala, and customized it with a header clipped from a photograph I took of a stormy Boston skyline as seen from Brookline. I wanted a simpler, cleaner look, and I think this works well. My one concession to fashion was to replace the traditional “category” list with Lee Kelleher’s “Category Cloud Widget”.

My mother's at the JR in Oxford with a broken hip

I learned today that my mother, Lorna Arnold had a fall while walking home from the shops, and broke her hip. She’s at the John Radcliffe in Oxford, where she had surgery yesterday evening. Obviously at the age of 91 this is a fairly serious matter.
Lorna Arnold Lorna Arnold
I’m planning to phone the hospital around 11pm my time (7am in England) and I’ll update this entry with any news.
UPDATE: I just spoke to the nurse, who said that Lorna’s doing fine… blood pressure a little low, but otherwise excellent; she was awake most of the night, talking to the staff. I’m not going to try to talk to her now – the bedside phones in English hospitals are an expensive, hit-or-miss affair, and I doubt I could Skype-out – but I’ll check in with my brother soon.

The consequences of JBLU

We just landed at Washington Dulles from Boston, en route to Seattle. We’re now on a taxiway, with nowhere to go. All of the gates are full, and none of the planes are ready to go. The current plan of record is to plough the remote parking area (currently under a heavy blanket on snow), taxi there, and use the (in)famous Dulles mobile lounges to deplane us! It will be interesting to see how long this takes – we’ve been waiting here 30 minutes so far – and whether continuing passengers get to stay on the plane. (And what about bags?)
Until recently they’d probably have pushed back one of the departing aircraft and kept them sitting on a taxiway until it was clear enough to depart. But after the recent Jet Blue experience, no-one is going to do that – especially in Washington!
More anon….
UPDATE: We just pulled in to a gate, conveniently close to a Red Carpet Club – which is where I am now. United is currently showing a departure time of 2pm, which seems optimistic.
ANOTHER UPDATE: It’s just after 2 and we’ve boarded. Latest prognosis is 20 minutes to get the fuel sheet(!) and then 45 minutes to get de-iced. The snow has stopped, and we now have a steady freezing rain. Mmmm……
Of course the flight is full. Cancellations will do that.
FINAL UPDATE: We actually pushed back around 4:45pm EST, and after 4:45 of flying over unbroken cloud cover we reached Seattle at 6:30pm PST. According to the captain, ours was the only flight to make it out of IAD to SEA all day. After waiting around for my bag (I’d checked it, because it was overweight with some liquid contents) I got back to my apartment in time to watch the first episode of the third series of Slings and Arrows on Sundance. (Hat tip to Merry.)

Sorry for the hiatus

A whole week without blogging! Surely not…. Well, I’ve been spending the entire week getting Merry moved from the house in Chestnut Hill to a condo in Brookline Village. Moving house is always exhausting, fragmented, disconnected…. A further complication was that I was offline for several days, and I discovered that the web browser in my new Windows Mobile device won’t work with WP admin pages. I finally downloaded Opera and I’m now happily surfing on my phone. So why is Microsoft incapable of building a usable browser? And since they are, why not just admit it and license Opera?

How hypocrites really "support the troops"

The first two paragraphs of this story in the Washington Post make it very clear why no Republican (or Joe Liebermann) has any moral right to castigate others about “supporting the troops”.

Behind the door of Army Spec. Jeremy Duncan’s room, part of the wall is torn and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold. When the wounded combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. The entire building, constructed between the world wars, often smells like greasy carry-out. Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses.
This is the world of Building 18, not the kind of place where Duncan expected to recover when he was evacuated to Walter Reed Army Medical Center from Iraq last February with a broken neck and a shredded left ear, nearly dead from blood loss. But the old lodge, just outside the gates of the hospital and five miles up the road from the White House, has housed hundreds of maimed soldiers recuperating from injuries suffered in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

[Hat tip to Jesus’ General, who puts the point even more graphically. And Maha cites it in her devastating fisking of the odious Jeff Jacoby’s slimy op-ed in today’s Boston Globe. Jacoby is one reason I don’t miss the Boston press too much.]

Looks like I picked the wrong time to be away from home

Here’s The Seattle Times reporting on the celebrations, just a few yards from where I live:

The thunderous rat-tat-tat of firecrackers, the smell of gunpowder and the thumping of drums filled the streets of the Chinatown International District on Saturday as throngs flocked to celebrate the Lunar New Year and the beginning of the Year of the Pig.
In Union Station’s Great Hall on South Jackson Street, children in costumes from China, Japan, Korea and other Asian nations performed traditional dances.

Oh, well. Roll on the Rat….

"…schedule change due to crew"

I’m scheduled to fly back to Boston tomorrow, booked on a 6:05am flight from Seattle which is supposed to connect with a 1:05pm flight from Chicago. The good news: United Airlines is doing a good job of keeping me informed. The bad news….
From: United@ualmessaging.com
To: geoff@...
Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2007 23:17:33 -0600
Subject: United EasyUpdate
** UNITED AIRLINES FLIGHT UPDATE MESSAGE **
The following flight time has been revised:
Flight Number: 682
Departing From: Seattle Washington (SEA)
Traveling To: Chicago O'Hare (ORD)
Date: February 17
Gate: N6 (Gate is subject to change)
Estimated Departure Time: 6:45 a.m.
followed just four minutes later by:
Estimated Departure Time: 7:15 a.m.
I have a bad feeling about this trip. Let’s check…. OK, UA is saying that UA682 should arrive at ORD at 12:43 and park at gate B7, while UA534 should be leaving at 1:05pm from gate B9. Average taxi time at ORD is about 10 minutes….
UPDATE: We pulled up to the gate in Chicago at 12:57, and I could see my connecting flight two gates over, still loading baggage. But when I reached it, the doors were closed. Fortunately, there was another ORD-BOS flight at 2:00, and it was almost empty: I got an entire exit row to myself! So now I’m back in the Boston area for a week, and rediscovering the fine art of negotiating treacherous sheets of ice. Ah yes, New England winter….
There was an unusual “bonus feature” on the SEA-ORD leg. The captain wanted to explain exactly why the flight had been delayed (the crew had got in late from Denver the night before, and needed to wait until their legally-mandated rest period was complete), so when the in-flight movie finished, he announced that he was going to give a 20-minute tutorial on air traffic control on Channel 9. A bunch of passengers toggled their FA call buttons to indicate that they were interested, so he went ahead. He did a nice job, going through the entire sequence from clearance to pushback to taxi to take-off to departure to en-route to approach, with a little bit about how airways and radio fixes work. He let us listen in to a sequence of instructions from the en-route controller and then interpreted them for us. Quite a few people seemed to enjoy it, as did I; of course I didn’t hear anything I didn’t already know, but then I’m not exactly typical….

"I'm not sure anything went wrong"

File under “You can’t make this stuff up”: Salon.com has this gem from today’s White House press briefing:

Reporter: Slides from a prewar briefing show that by this point, the U.S. expected that the Iraqi army would be able to stabilize the country and there would be as few as 5,000 U.S. troops there. What went wrong?
Tony Snow: I’m not sure anything went wrong.