I'm a lasagna boy!

In which we have a story problem

A pretty girl leaves Union Square at 1730. At the same time, a man with a hat begins walking west-south-west on a one-point-three-mile route home'ards, a route that exactly matches several MUNI routes. At the height of rush hour, who will reach their destination first?

Answer: Our man is faster than a speeding MUNI bus. And he had time to stop at the shop and pick up some fiery orange-red lilies.

I am still a little perplexed as to how surface transit moves at an effective 3 mph during rush-hour. No, wait, it's coming to me: bus routes run on secondary roads, and so are subject to stops at each intersection. Some times the buses need to stop for traffic control on one side of the intersection, and then a bus stop on the other side of the intersection -- two stops in three bus-lengths.

In which Aram conquers all; Or, Burly, Part Two

Aram, true to his word, ascended haleakala on a fixed gear bike. I do'n't know why he has the FBI Witness Protection black bar in the photograph, but I'm pretty certain that is he triumphant (and above the cloud-line!). The already-impressive ride hit me with a double-whammy when I realised that, after he got all the way up, he had to get back down. Now that is burly. Hey! Burleigh would be a nice name for a glam-rock band. Wonder if we could practice in Greg's basement?

Some Buried Caesar

I was walking past Powell's Books on 57th Street some years ago when I saw the irresistible discards box outside. On the top was a torn paperback with a gaudy illustration: Some Buried Caesar was the title. Efffusive endorsements rang out from the front and back covers: "The best ... unbeatable!". The author: Rex Stout (what a great name!), creator of the irritating, contrary, and iconoclastic detective-gourmand Nero Wolfe. I recognised the name from a review (of what?) that I had read, which compared the author to P G Wodehouse and Rex Stout. Already having read, re-read, and much loved the former, I picked up the latter.
I could not have done better: Some Buried Caesar is one of Stout's earlier, "post-Depression and pre-war" mysteries, and shows his strengths beautifully. It features a different setting for the action: usually, Wolfe sits in his custom-made chair in his Manhattan townhouse, keeps to his schedule, berates Archie Goodwin, his Man Friday, and drinks beer. In this, the book starts off with Archie crashing the car en route to show orchids at the State Fair. From there, it is but a hop, skip, and jump to the introduction of Lily Rowan, who graces many subsequent mysteries in small but complicating roles; the revelation that Methodists make the best chicken fricassee (and do'n't hold the dumplings); and that anthrax is a disease of cattle. Really, I had not grasped this latter bit, despite the Gang of Four song, until this book's description of the disease as it ravages a cattle herd. Like Wodehouse, Stout has an easy way with words, and gives his characters such distinctive voices that they become caricatures of themselves. Archie would be the perfect tough guy for a Marlowe or Hammett novel, except that he is in the company of Wolfe, who is too cerebral for straight-up noir; Wolfe, confusingly, is also too decadent, in his quiet little "seventh-of-a-ton" way. He has a rooftop greehouse filled with orchids, a private chef, and brooks no nonsense.
Some Buried Caesar is amongst my favourite mysteries; other Wolfe adventures I really enjoy are Fer-de-Lance, the first to feature the detective; Too Many Cooks; The League of Frightened Men, of which I found a first edition in a dusty shop in Palo Alto that burnt down a few days after I raided their selection; and Please Pass The Guilt, one of the later stories but featuring such odd period vocabulary as "balloon-rimmed cheaters". Even Google has not been able to help with illustrating that term.

In which I wants nae skinking ware

No haggis-based cocktail yet exists (horrors!), but apparently haggis season (as legitimate a holiday as any, I suppose. Any reason to have a pint!) is nigh. Th' other sort of haggis I have actually celebrated once or twice. I also celebrate the wikipedia.

While some people cheerfully get away with hunting down platypus-like Highlands creatures, and others skedaddle with boiled sheep's heart, lungs, and liver stuffed into a scoured-out stommick, others are pulling stunts closer to home: If I did this [Lengthy quicktime download], I'd get in trouble. How did the filmmakers clean up afterwards?

In which I wear out the shoe leather

As I found myself at Civic Center at 5.30 this evening, I looked at the surprisingly cloud-free sky and figured that I would walk home, rather than stand in a humid MUNI aisle. And then as I looked down Market and saw nary an outbound bus, I wondered if I might reach home faster than if I were to ride MUNI.
If I walk the MUNI route, I could easily see when one of the outbound buses might pass me. The route is pretty straightforward: along Market Street, turn right on Haight, and then bob's yr uncle.
I walked all the way to Larkin before two buses, both northbound 19-Polk trolleys, rolled sedately past. An F-Market screeched by as I waited at the infuriating intersection of Market and Van Ness. -- infuriating because of the new crosswalk signals, which beep incessantly. When one pushes them, the beeping changes (and a light comes on); what do the different beeps indicate? How might I, as a blind or deaf pedestrian, know what pushing the button accomplishes? And the only gain is a psychological one, for the light timing has not changed at all -- so pushing the button does not accelerate the pedestrian signal. What the intersection needs is an all-walk cycle, really, but that is tricky considering that Van Ness is really State Highway 101 in disguise.
I walked past several moaning derelicts and the new wine bar Cav before reaching the congested intersection of Franklin, Page, and Market: still no 6/66/7/71/71L in sight. Traffic on this stretch of Market gets all buggered up during rush-hour because of the way the freeway exit ramp defers north-bound crosstown traffic onto Market for two blocks before it reaches Franklin. Why Octavia Boulevard does not reach Geary I will never understand -- I swear that is what I thought I voted for all those years back!
I started walking up the last stretch towards home, and not without a trace of worry on my brow: well into the rush hour, and not a single bus had passed me. I saw what looked like MUNI tail-lights ahead, on th' other side of Octavia, but nothing behind me. Might I actually overtake MUNI? I chuckled at the thought.
I waited on the east side of Octavia. A cyclist was getting a little ahead of himself, skillz-wise, with a limp attempt at a track-stand, and kept lurching into the intersection. (Aside: How do you manage to not 'track' stand when pointing uphill?) Finally a big pickup truck honked at him, and he turned back towards me and said, "Will you look at that. They're mad because they're stuck in traffic, and they take it out on us." I told him, "If I had a horn, I would honk it at you. You are in the intersection against the light, and that's not only disrespectful, but your guardian angel is working overtime." Before I finished, he spluttered, "I can't believe you're on the side of the cars!", issued a few choice epithets, and turned to ride off, only to then realise that he was in the headlights of another oncoming car. I smiled. As the light changed and he finally took off, I saw that he was stupidly riding with a freewheel.
I figured that a bus would catch me up for certain as I had to keep in low gear walking up the three blocks towards the Lower Haight, but it was not until I passed the bus stop closest to home before MUNI, and I would'n't have taken the bus -- it was a 71L and did'n't even stop. A 66 Parnassus and I reached the corner of my block at the same time. Twenty-five minutes, during which not a single bus passed me.
I beat MUNI home during rush-hour.

In which we are caught between a rock and a just-say-no place

I ca'n't stop laughing at the idea of paying a tax on marijuana. From the Tennessee State Revenue documentation on the topic:

If I purchase stamps, will I then be in legal possession of the drugs?

No, purchasing stamps only fulfills your civil tax obligation. You will still be subject to the criminal statutes of Tennessee for possessing the drugs.

This is how the IRS nabbed Capone, is'n't it?

Posted by salim at 01:30 PM | Comments (0)

In which I repurpose content

In late '82, I was already a denizen of the remainder table at the local booksellers, and picked up a copy of Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year (1981 Edition). Fantastic stuff lay within: not only had Reagan trounced Carter in the recent national election, but all sorts of exciting governmental shenanigans, both on the federal stage (Stockman was getting worked over in Congress about his fantastic supply-side economics proposals) and local (Californians feared the medfly) provided cartoonists with fodder. I began to read editorial cartoons avidly, and looked forward to the brief chrestomathy presented each Sunday in the New York Times' Week in Review. rss feeds of various editorial cartoonists, such as Tom Tomorrow's This Modern World, satisfy but a small stretch of itch. Happily, isnoop comes to the rescue. The comic-strip snagger even allows a zoom level, so mine tired eyes can see the venerable drawings of Charles Schulz and Al Capp double-size!

In which I revel in being contrary; Or, Turk and Hyde

I appreciate the bustle of the (big) city as much as the next condo-dweller, but I especially like the quiet moments when the city sleeps. I revel in seeing which other lights are on, who is walking down the streets (insomniac joggers and groggy dog-owners, mostly, of a Sunday morning). In the interrgenum between the time that bars shut down and greasy-spoons open, the newspapers noisily arrive, thumping on stoops whacking against iron gates. Between last call and day-break, city crews patrol the streets, picking up trash from the night before. Between four and five this morning, a pile of old clothes and a cracked coffee maker appeared and disappeared from the corner. I even caught sight of a MUNI Owl bus service, ponderously making its way west'ards.

What shops are open in the early hours? Nothing, in this neighbourhood: the grates drawn across the windows belie the bright neon signs and wheezing air conditioners of the bodega across the street. A few blocks and a few hours away, the café-owner, clad in a beret and crisp blue shirt, shakes his head and says, "I never thought that anyone will be here first thing on a week-end, but you always are!". The croissants are still warm from the bakery, and the espresso machine is yet warming up.

I have never seen the corner of Turk and Hyde as cheery as in this photograph of Felipe Dulzaides's "incidental vista", part of the Double Take installation art project.

In which the word is 'burly'!

Gerry Kraynick has choice words, of course, for the riders of the Dirty Dozen hill-climb in Pittsburgh.

"You go past some of these guys and think what's wrong with these people," said Mr. Kraynick. "My idea of nice ride is finding the best 13 hills to go downhill."

The Dirty Dozen -- the name deceives us for the sake of superstition: the ride actually consists of thirteen grueling climbs, including Beechview's 37º Canton Avenue -- began about twenty years ago, and relegates to second place the ten nine ascents of Fillmore St, a mere 18%, that form the main challenge of the San Francisco Grand Prix. "Back in the early years (the 80's) a macho attitude prevented any rider from using gears lower than a 42x24. In recent years, the ride has gotten easier due to lower gearing and several of the hills being paved (asphalted) which used to be rough cobblestone or wavy blacktop killing what little momentum the rider had." I am a little shame-faced to note that Negley between Fifth and Dunmoyle, one of the toughest climbs I ever finished in Pittsburgh, checks in at a sissy 18% for two blocks or so, and does not figure in the Dirty Dozen route (great illustration!) at all. Sycamore St, for many years the heart of the Thrift Drug Classic professional race, fits in the Dirty Dozen just past the half-way point.

Ad-propos of gruelling climbs, Aram reports that he made it up the exhilarating 35 miles and 10,000 vertical feet, from beach to peak, of some volcanic mountain in Hawai'i. Details to follow ...

compere

com·pere (k?m'pâr') Chiefly British. n. The master of ceremonies, as of a television entertainment program or a variety show.

compere, a word I first noticed in the Tour Dates section of ol' Big Nose's web site. I just dusted off the two-record set of "the first 21 songs from the roots of urbane folk music", it makes me want to polish up the ol' dancing shoes and go find Maggie's grave. It was'n't until the difficult third album and the poignant (really!) love songs that Billy Bragg became more than a protest singer to my still-young ears. The politics and attitude enchanted me first and foremost, and, feeling justly disenfranchised from the machinations of the Reagan government, I soured on the establishment. I snuck two tape recorders and several cassettes into the pockets of my parka one wintry evening when he was playing a concert, again with Michelle Shocked! and dutifully bootlegged the proceedings. After I wore that recording to shreds, I found myself becoming dissatisfied with his politics when he started selling out stadia -- emphasis on the selling -- and although his albums still bore artwork, not HMV stickers, insisting that the weary consumer "pay no more than £5.99", he struck me as more commercial and less activist. Shades of Jimmy Thudpucker, but not Bob Dylan. He still wrote and sang great songs, and won some measure of redemption when he researched the unpublished Woody Guthrie material that eventually formed the two glorious two Mermaid Avenue albums.

In which we do the hump-free dance

What do you call a camel with two humps? Bactrian.
What do you call a camel with one hump? Dromedary.
What do you call a camel with no humps? Humphrey. Or, in this case, Rodney:

Camels are one of the more difficult animals to anesthetize,” Cranfield said.

They were lucky Rodney reacts well to low volumes of drugs, he said.

“The other problem with large animals like Rodney is you don’t want to have them down too long because they get cramps in their legs,” Cranfield said.

Aside from those challenges, Rodney is moody.

“He’s not the easiest creature to work on. He’s a little grumpy. Well, he’s a lot grumpy,” Sallaway said.

In which no-one has a handgun

The Chronicle reports that "Two men were shot to death in broad daylight today in San Francisco's Western Addition, just yards from an elementary school where children were attending classes."
Search Google for news on the San Francisco handgun ban.

shiv

shiv, a mellifluous word that never ceases to amuse me when it reaches my ear, means a razor; cited in 1915, variant of chive, thieves' cant word for "knife" (1673), and is of unknown origin. It may be from a Viking word, shiver: (n) A splinter, a small piece of wood. Shiver is the diminutive of shive (a thin slice). Ice skífa (a slice). Compare with Yorkshire dialect (to split, to pare - especially of leather) and the E slang shiv (a knife).
And, of course, there's always the Don Cheadle take on it, from the same film as "You know, in a situation like this, there's a high potentiality for the common motherfucker to bitch out. "

In which we get no dessert (as we ate not our vegetables)

Although I doubt that David "Ketchup is a vegetable" Stockman would agree with the accuracy of this cartoon, the sentiment is true.

In which punk rock is whatever we made it to be

After reading the ugly presentation on Why I hate apache, I felt compelled to clean up my various httpd.conf files, in the process fixing punkrock.virji.net, which rips off the famous d boon sticker and plays The Minutemen's sentimental "History Lesson Part II" from "Double Nickels on the Dime". As much as the song brings tears to my eyes, the album title (and the awesome diy cover photograph) makes me chuckle. The same image figures into The Shins' video for "New Slang", which sweetly pays tribute to this album (and others).
Yes, the punkrock url has been broken for about three years. I finally fixed it. And I really cannot stand apache config syntax, but give me an httpd.conf over a sendmail.cf any day.

In which it is hard to stick to principles

After yesterday's debacle, during which I consumed approx. one-half bottle, Advil, between the hours of 7 ack emma and 7 pip emma, only to belatedly realise that I had not had *any* coffee, I grimly broke my one-cuppa rule and had back-to-back double espressos at the counter of Blue Bottle Coffee in Hayes Valley. For the second cup Mr Travis Crawford joined me, and told the amusing story of how he had once ordered a cup of coffee, wandered over to the nearby expressway Hayes Green, and then realised, "Wait! I didn't pay for this" because he is so accustomed to procuring fine espresso drinks at our office, where they flow plentifully and without denting the wallet.
The Blue Bottle Coffee Blog is quite amusing, and well-illustrated with yummuy photos of coffee, crema, and all things foodish. Today the barista, raffish as ever, was grinding beans from five days ago, well outside their proudly-stated goal of only using 48-hour old beans at oldest, but, hell. Yesterday evening I used beans that have been sitting in our 'fridge for nigh upon a fortnight.

In which we only have this excerpt

I am listening to "Kill the Poor (Live)" by the Dead Kennedys, from a record I have not heard in years, because, "Based on what you've told us so far, we're playing this track because it features punk roots, a subtle use of vocal harmony, mild rhythmic syncopation, major key tonality and electric guitar riffs." Thanks to Pandora, which programs internet broadcasts selected especially for me (or for you), and has some amount of collaborative filtering and personalization. Yuck! Now they are playing Stiff Little Fingers.
This all started out with my trying to stump the personalization engine. I seeded it with legitimate but obscure musicians: Bonzo Dog Band, Cornelius Cardew. But these did not lead anywhere, and it was'n't until I stuffed in "No Xmas For John Quays" that it leapt into life, and started playing an old song by The Fall (you know how some broadcast radio stations devolve to a gimmick of playing all Elvis, or all John Denver, for a week? I could play All Fall All The Time. For months. In fact, I could have a long weekend dedicated to versions of Cruisers Creek.) Every time I give the 'thumbs-down' to a song, the radio falls back to playing The Fall, which is fine by me. It has stuck in several new (to me, at least) artists, and has handy "buy this from iTunes" and "buy this from Amazon" widgets built into the nifty little Flash-based player.

In which we are on a downward cycle

San Francisco Supes are all atwitter about fiscal improprieties in the Barclays Global Investors Grand Prix (nee San Francisco Grand Prix)
When this race, billed as "America's toughest bicycle race", moves to Topeka, it will be in time to clear our sights for the Tour of California. And in the even shorter term, we can push our pedals over to Golden Gate Park this weekend to check out Grand Prix Clark Natwick cyclocross event. Somehow it's not quite as thrilling when sponsors, merch, and ca$h enter into it, but hell! it's cyclocross. Gotta find a cowbell before this weekend .... Thanks to jimg for pointing it out.

Supes blast bike race sponsors
By Jo Stanley
Staff Writer

Despite special fee waivers worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, stunned supervisors were told at a hearing Monday that sponsors of a major San Francisco bicycle race stiffed The City on their 2004 bill of close to $90,000 for police services.

“You played me, you took advantage of me,” Supervisor Aaron Peskin said to Dan Osipow, one of the San Francisco organizers at Tailwind Sports, which helped get the San Francisco Grand Prix rolling four years ago. The name of the race was changed this year to the Barclays Global Investors Grand Prix.

Peskin, who agreed to Mayor Gavin Newsom’s fee-waiver proposal last spring after a contentious debate, said the nonpayment should have resulted in the permit for the 2005 race, held Sept. 4, being withheld altogether. The 8.8-mile-long race was the finale of the Pro Cycling Tour.

Osipow told supervisors he had “absolutely no idea” that the money was in arrears. “I look like a fool right now sticking up for them,” he said, explaining that his company is now merely a consultant to the race’s Philadelphia-based owner.

Police services for the September 2004 race added up to almost $336,000, but under a deal to keep the race in San Francisco through 2007, The City agreed to waive $1 in police fees for every $2 worth of extra taxes generated.

The hearing took place before the Government Audit and Oversight Committee, where Supervisor Chris Daly had called for a comparison of The City’s costs and benefits from the race and any negative impacts to local merchants.

A city-commissioned report from Economics Research Associates found that The City came out ahead by some $367,000.

But Board of Supervisors Budget Analyst Harvey Rose noted that researchers used a survey from the previous year about visitor spending and simply bumped up the amount by 7.5 percent for the passage of time. Another issue cited by Rose: Although the cycling company agreed to hand over 40 percent of its profits to San Francisco, according to Rose, it has yet to produce audited statements for 2004.

“I’d like to find out how in the heck we managed to issue a permit to these folks, how they’re so powerful,” Peskin said. He threatened to introduce legislation at today’s Board of Supervisors meeting that could bar the race’s promoters, San Francisco Cycling LLC, from receiving permits in the future.

Supervisor Chris Daly, who led the fight to block the deal, said he’s ready to see the show move away. “Change your name to the Topeka Cycling LLC and have fun,” he said.

E-mail: jstanley@examiner.com

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

I am very happily reading select Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, in the edition illustrated by Sidney Paget. (To me, he will always be the illustrator, much as Tenniel is to Alice's Adventures Underground, or John O'Neill to The Wizard of Oz.) Complete text is available online.

In which these are a few of my favourite things

Queen, air-guitar, MIDI, and come together to form a truly horrible piece of Flash animation. And while I was enumerating the web widgets that make me chuckle, how, how could I omit the Alkulukuja Paskova Karhu, The Prime Number Shitting Bear?

Almost French

I am adding a widget that shows my current "reading list", thanks to the cheesily-designed website Chain Reading. And I am reading Sarah Turnbull's "Almost French", the satisfying story of an Aussie who implusively moves to Paris for "love and a new life." Everything works out, but slowly, and the travails of French bureaucracy that she related did not make as much of an impression as did the way she ironed out the massive cultural differences with her boyfriend-fiance-husband (there, I spoiled it for you), his friends and family, and builders, neighbours, et al. She also observed some riots, but that's quotidian around Paris now, in'it?

de(s)cant

Transfixed by a rapid succession of bottles, glasses (O! beautiful stemware! How come I drink from a humble tumbler at home?), and, finally, a decanter passing over the counter at Hotel Biron, Aram wondered about the origin of that name. Is it related to canto, to sing? I suggested that the Latin root cant- came into english with the prefix de to form descant, and I was correct:

descant: Middle English, from Anglo-Norman descaunt, from Medieval
Latin discantus, a refrain : Latin dis-, dis- + Latin cantus, song,
from past participle of canere, to sing. See kan-

as for decant(er), the original question, I should have known (and
Meiling would doubtless have remembered) that it comes from the greek
noun kanthos, meaning 'eyelid'. The greek poets drew a visual simile
between a wnie-jug's lip and the tear-duct-y bit of one's eye.

Ah, for the sound of popping corks.

In which I told you so

-------------------------------
** Saturday, November 12th **
-------------------------------

BEAT MUNI CHALLENGE!
10:30am, Glen Park BART Station

In this bike ride, we will experiment with the age-old question: is cycling really faster than Muni? As everyone knows, beating Muni is often a cinch, but can you match the fabled 24 line? If you can beat this line, you can beat any line. The person who passes the most busses gets a free lunch. Meet at Glen Park BART and we'll ride together to the start of the 24 line. Wear a helmet. Contact brandonbaunach@dbarchitect.com for more info.

A terrible, terrible map of the 24 route is on the 511.org site.

Do you remember that stifling summer when MUNI automation meant that Mayor Willie Brown walked the stretch of Market between City Hall and the Embarcadero faster than any of the LRVs?

In which we have a photofilesystem

tuxmann has released 1.0 of flickrfs, a FUSE-based representation of flickr, the (social) photo-storage service.

In which we turn old-fashioned

As my ipod has turned into a brick, I am amusing myself by thinking about album names like Ix-Nay on the Hombre (although, for some reason, I thought it was a grifters record) and Sheik Yerbouti. Ad-propos of FZ, the cover of Ship Arriving Too Late to Save A Drowning Witch also cracks me so consistently up. To wit:

I put a copy of this image, sans title, on the window of a cube I occupied a few years ago. I walked past a few days ago and it was still there, the current inhabitants either blithely unaware or laughing quietly.

In which we stop Catherine the Great from cheating

Amazon's Mechanical Turk intrigues and fascinates me. Cooler (not only because one can make money) than the ESP game built by academic researchers, the Turk challenges the human to write, decipher images, select and compare, and all sorts of menial tasks that cannot quite be automated by a machine -- or perhaps already have, but require human approval to refine their decisions. Already the top results for "Mechanical Turk" are polluted with blogs referring to Amazon's API -- but the fascinating, real story can be found in Tom Standage's book and, of course, in the Wikipedia.

In which the youth are getting restless.

There's not enough rioting in this country. After Rodney King, L.A. burned: but why have we not seen large-scale riots (well, in San Francisco last week a handful of protestors were arrested) because of the Bush regime's continuing violation of international law, domestic due process, and civil rights. We have not see violent outrage at the state's theft of money from the public schools, nor at the undermining of unions. But France gets it: the youth are getting restless, burning cars and staying out all night.

Some of them wear no pants.

In which we are out of sight in the night, out of sight in the day

Just before sitting down to a drink at a sidewalk café along the Embarcadero, I found myself wondering about which jobs society deems "tip-worthy" and how restaurants, especially, are able to regularly under-pay their staff because of the collective anticipation of tips. 10%? 12% 20%? A sawbuck on top of a benjamin? Tip on the cost of drinks, or $1 per, plus the percentage of the food? How does it work? Why ca'n't restaurants around here pay a living wage, and not force the ignominy of a tip jar on every coffee-shop counter from the Haight to Potrero?

"Excuse me, I didn't realise you had a degree in medicine. Are you a doctor? Are you a doctor? Answer me, please. Are you a doctor? Okay, then you admit you do'n't know what you're talking about." This is such a great movie. I saw it by myself at the Pittsburgh Playhouse in autumn of '92.

In which we defend against the rainy season

As the rain begins falling in San Francisco, some comments on fenders:
Kent Peterson and his amiably-recycled coroplast; Drew on wooden fenders, cheerfully recycled from discarded window-frames; the River City Bicycles' Full Wood fenders are beautiful to behold.

In which it is a selective sort of engineering

arup and co. are taking none of the blame for the designed-by-committee Millennium Bridge shenanigans: the current fashion blames the pedestrians on the bridge of collusion in causing structural instability through collective synchronisation. Not quite as dramatic as Galloping Gertie, perhaps, but frightening nonetheless.

Revealed: Why London's Millennium Bridge wobbled
Wed Nov 2, 2005 6:08 PM GMT

By Patricia Reaney

LONDON (Reuters) - A natural phenomenon rather than a design fault caused London's Millennium Bridge to wobble and sway, forcing its closure just two days after opening in 2000.

The elegant pedestrian walkway was conceived as a blade of light linking the south bank of the River Thames to the City of London.

But as large crowds walked across the steel structure on opening day in June 2000, the 320-meter long bridge swayed from side to side because of a phenomenon known as collective synchronisation.

"The phenomenon was that people who were walking at random, at their own favorite speed, not organized in any way spontaneously synchronized," said Steven Strogatz, of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

"That's the phenomenon. Why did they all start moving in step? They did it unconsciously. That is what nobody had thought about and engineers did not anticipate."

The applied mathematician and expert on the phenomenon said collective synchronisation is now something engineers will have to consider when designing bridges.

He and colleagues at Cornell and other universities in the United States, Britain and Germany have devised a theory based on what happened to the Millennium Bridge to estimate how much damping or stabilization is needed in footbridges.

Their findings are published in the science journal Nature.

"We think our theory will provide some guidance to help engineers avoid the problem," Strogatz said in an interview.

Certain coincidences must occur for collective synchronisation to occur. In the case of London's wobbly bridge, it was large crowds walking across a flexible footbridge that vibrated at a frequency of one cycle per second, which just happened to be the same frequency as humans walking.

"The people were resonating with the bridge," said Strogatz.

As the bridge started to move, people would get in step with the sway to steady themselves. They widened their stance to make it more comfortable to walk and inadvertently made the wobbling worse.

"A lot of people were blaming it on the beautiful innovative structure, the design of the Millennium Bridge itself, which was a radical design," said Strogatz.

"But that is not true."

Collective synchronisation occurs in nature when crickets start chirping in unison. In some parts of the world, fireflies blink on and off in perfect synchrony like a Christmas tree. The monthly cycles of women living together have also been known to synchronize.

"It is always very striking and almost spooky because it is like order coming out of chaos," said Strogatz.

After 5 million pounds worth of modifications to steady the structure and 20 months of closure, the Millennium Bridge successfully reopened in February 2002.

Lady Chatterly's Lover

In a rush on the way out the door this ack emma, I grabbed a hardbound book from the shelf. I sat down in my seat on the bus to find out that it was the stupefyingly dull "Lady Chatterly's Lover," which I had last attempted to read while spending an afternoon in Rockridge (indeed, a receipt from a nice wine-bar in that area served as the bookmark). And I again got about sixty pages into the book and could not suppress my boredom any longer. I turned out the window and watched traffic flow past.

In which I day-dream about automobiles

Cars I once thought I would like to own:

• 
  1971 Mercedes 280SEC
• 
  1956 Nash Metropolitan(and it probably would have its hood up most of the time!)
• 
  1984 Toyota LandCruiser FJ60
• 
  Volvo 122 waggon (I did have a 1984 Volvo 240GL waggon, which is also quite splendid)

I did (briefly) drive a burgundy-and-black Mercedes, aka Blinky, which "smelled like money" according to one of my neighbours: now all I have left is the three-cone pininfarina air horn and a single fog lamp (the other flew off somewhere on the road between Breezewood and DC); the Volvo, known during its brief life as Moby; and Winnie the Poopmobile, a handsome brown FJ60 which spent more time on the back of a tow-truck than actually off road anywhere.

In which multicast is our king

Stuart Cheshire, designer of Zero-Configuration Networking (that's RFC 3927 to you IETF fans out there) quoted Antoine de Saint-Exupéry today with respect to protocol design: "You know that you have finished not when there is nothing left to add to the protocol, but when there is nothing left to take away from the protocol." Saint-Exupéry was an aviator, and I suspect that he was referring specifically to aircraft design when he said that "La perfection est atteinte non quand il ne reste rien à ajouter, mais quand il ne reste rien à enlever." I think the same applies to bicycles!

In which I jump the turnstile and you have to pay the fee

Some of the tit-bits wot make me larf: HarMar Superstar; All Your Base; Rather Good's animation for "Gay Bar"; Camper's Hate Blog; the much-missed suck (bless that Mr Terry Colon), the first site, afaik, that hyperlinked to mine (!!). I am thinking about things which make me chuckl because I have a nascent bad attitude. California.