European Grand Prix (Nurburgring)

The story today is about tyres and gravel. It used to be the case that gravel traps were supposed to stop cars, quickly and safely, but in today’s race car after car was running off the track, through the gravel, keeping going, and able to drive back onto the track. Schumacher, Alonso, Raikkonen, Massa…. And the tyre problems for Raikkonen, Massa, and others were spectacular. First, watching a strip of rubber from Massa’s left front slice off the end-plate of the wing, and then just now, as I’m typing, Raikkonen’s crash at the start of the last lap, while he was leading; his flat-spotted right front tyre vibrated so much that his suspension finally failed.

My man DC wound up in 4th place (beating Michael Schumacher!) after leading at one point; he might have been 3rd if he hadn’t incurred a drive-through penalty for speeding in the pit lane.

Oh yes, the result. Alonso/Heidfeld/Barrichello.

The art of cheese

As many of my colleagues have bemoaned in their blogs, the weather here in New England has been miserable for the last few weeks. However today dawned bright and warm, with a nice breeze: still a little humid, but otherwise a perfect spring day. So we headed down to the North End of Boston to poke around the Italian groceries and bakeries. We had lunch just across the street from the Paul Revere House, and visited it afterwards.

The people that “restored” it early in the 20th century seem to have brought more enthusiasm than historical rigor to the project. They actually reconstructed it as it had been first built at the end of the 17th century. To do this, they removed many of the features and additions that Paul Revere would have known when he lived there 90 years later. There’s a lesson there, I feel.

Before heading home we stopped in Salumeria Italiana, a wonderful Italian grocery on Richmond Street, and picked up some bread and several kinds of cheese. Among these was a Blu del Moncenisio, which turned out to be one of those truly great cheeses that one encounters every now and then. I’m a sucker for blue cheese (preferably with a baguette and a robust red wine or port), and this was a marvellous example of the cheesemaker’s craft. Recommended.

Did someone say "theocracy"?

The Indianapolis Star is reporting that: “An Indianapolis father is appealing a Marion County judge’s unusual order that prohibits him and his ex-wife from exposing their child to ‘non-mainstream religious beliefs and rituals.’ The parents practice Wicca, a contemporary pagan religion that emphasizes a balance in nature and reverence for the earth. Cale J. Bradford, chief judge of the Marion Superior Court, kept the unusual provision in the couple’s divorce decree last year over their fierce objections, court records show. The order does not define a mainstream religion.”

What’s really bizarre is that Bradford normally hears only criminal cases. Apparently he chose to get involved in this domestic matter because he read a “confidential report” (yeah, right) from a counseling bureau. “‘There is a discrepancy between Ms. Jones and Mr. Jones’ lifestyle and the belief system adhered to by the parochial school. . . . Ms. Jones and Mr. Jones display little insight into the confusion these divergent belief systems will have upon (the boy) as he ages,’ the bureau said in its report.” So we’re not just dealing with a constitutionally-challenged judge….

A bit of history: down the chute at CDG

I was sorting through some old (paper) files this evening and came across some photographs from about 15 years ago. They were of an event that, as you can imagine, I’ve never forgotten: evacuating an airliner by going down the emergency chute. Since several people have bugged me about this over the years, I thought it was worth posting the pictures.

In brief, what happened was this. I was flying home from Paris on a wet and windy November day: CDG-BOS on a TWA L-1011. We taxied out and started the take-off run, but just below V1 we lost the #3 (starboard) engine in a sheet of flame. Maximum autobrake but no reverse thrust, of course; the runway was wet, the plane was heavy, and we barely stopped at the end of the runway. As we turned onto the taxiway, several passengers reported smoke coming from under the starboard wing. We’d blown several tires and they were smouldering. Fire in close proximity to a wingful of fuel is bad news, and we evacuated via the port slides. For some reason I was sent down first to help to catch people as they came off the slide. A fire truck (visible in the second picture) extinguished the smouldering undercarriage, and eventually we were bussed back to the terminal.

Before they could make alternative travel arrangements for us we had to retrieve our baggage and carry-on items. So we were bussed back to the plane, and were allowed to re-enter (in small groups, under the watchful eye of the airport police) to recover our things. It was after I’d got my briefcase (and two bottles of the nouveau Beaujolais), while I was waiting for the remaining passengers, that I remembered that I had a camera in my bag. Standing in the drizzle under the nose of the L-1011, I used my last bit of film to capture the scene.

The first five thumbnails are the pictures that I took. I scanned them in and used Arcsoft’s PanoramaMaker to stitch four of them into a composite. The original photos were a bit scratched up, but I hope you enjoy them.


Cultural dissonance

While the U.S.A. is getting its knickers in a twist over gay marriage, children’s TV depicting a kid with “two mommies”, and books by gay authors, DER SPIEGEL is reporting that “there is a very real possibility that Germany’s next government will be a coalition between a woman — who will likely become Germany’s first woman chancellor — and a gay man”. Right on!

Wind, rain, floods, trees

A huge storm has been pummelling New England for the last couple of days, and isn’t going to move out until later tonight. (There’s a low of around 995 hPa that’s been stuck just south of Nantucket, blocked by a Greenland high.) The folks at the National Weather Service office in Taunton, MA, say that it’s the most severe storm in late May since 1967. Just down the road there’s a huge tree (a London plane, Platanus x acerifolia) uprooted, leaning at 45 degrees and resting on the roof of a house. This means that my street is blocked off while things are cleared up. Elsewhere around the Boston area there are numerous reports of flooding, power outages, trees down, and other storm damage. In our neighbourhood, we’ve had about 3 inches of rain; last night we experienced sustained winds of over 35 MPH, with gusts around 50 MPH.

A good day to work at home, I think.

Liverpool! Liverpool!!

GO REDS!!!!Liverpool What a stunning performance by Liverpool tonight in the Champions League Final. 3-0 down to Milan at half-time, they looked crushed. Then in the second half they came back to make it 3-3 at full time. They survived several near misses during a goalless extra time, and won the penalty shoot-out 3-2 to win the title. Sheer determination. Congratulations!

(And now as the officials prepare for the medal ceremony, the Liverpool fans are singing “You’ll never walk alone”….)

Blogspam: good news and bad news

I just checked out the Activity Log for my blog. I have good news and bad news. The good news is that the MT-Blacklist module that I installed back in February has been doing its job. The bad news is that in that time it has detected and blocked 5,109 trackbacks and 854 comments. (In the last 30 days alone, it’s nailed 1,012 and 60 respectively.) Just think about the bandwidth involved, and then remember all of the unprotected blogs out there….