Who's "Wombat"?

Alright, who are you? Where's the photo? Do I know you? Do I owe you money? What are the lottery numbers on Saturday? Will Hearts ever win anything again? If a tree falls down in the forest and no one is around to witness it.....................

Super Furry Animals Live

Check this link out. It's the Furries at a recent show in New York. I hope this works.

http://www.baeblemusic.com/concertvideo/The-Highline-Ballroom/Super-Furry-Animals.html

War and Peace

I have finished reading the monster tome that is War and Peace and wanted to share some thoughts on it.

It's been on my literary bucket list for years and now that I've finished the unabridged version I have a sense of satisfaction akin to the feelings I had when I finished Lord of the Rings all those years ago. Back then I took ten years of reading the novel on and off and, frankly, lost the plot a little bit. I should reread it from start to finish one day to get the full benefit of it but for now I have a few other classic to make my way through.

So with this latest voluminous epic I started in September, stopped a little in November and continued at Christmas until I finished it at the weekend so in all it took five and a half months.

The book is 975 pages long and involves very very small text, hence the length of time to complete it but I loved it. It combines the story of a number of the Russian nobility around the time of the Napoleonic Wars with historical details about the war and Russia's involvement in it. The main characters include princes, counts and other nobility and their interaction with each other, their love lives and of course their involvement in the war. The story flits from peace time activities and the battles, hence the title.

Tolstoy started writing the novel in 1862 when he returned home from the Crimean War and it was published between 1865 and 1869. Tolstoy was a Count himself and one of four sons of Count Nikolai Ilyich Tolstoi who took part in the war against Napoleon in 1812 but died when Leo was 7.

The novel is interspersed with the author's own philosophy on the social issues of the time and of the path of history as it relates to wars. He is clearly opposed to the idea of serfdom and the horrors the practise includes and of war and tries to explain that the recording of history by historians is simply a focus on individual characters (Napoleon for example) and not a complete record of what actually happened in detail. For example, he states, that the outcome of wars and the battles in it, are rarely as a direct result of the direct orders of the military geniuses and more a result of the armies interpretation of the orders executed as best they can be. The final battle immediately prior to the French taking Moscow, the battle of Borodino, was executed after a misunderstanding of where the respective armies stood and ended with the Russian army retreating beyond Moscow to regroup. This allowed the French to enter Moscow and declare a victory when, in fact, the Russian army could have continued a bit longer and eventually taken the French by storm and driven them from Russia. However, Moscow was taken, the French troops allowed to rampage through the city and burn it down (although Tolstoy suggests this was due to disorder amongst the troop rather than a planned affair) while the Russian army regrouped beyond the city walls.

Then, instead of taking over and the rest of the country the French, led by their minute leader, decide to leave and march back to Paris with disastrous results (in the middle of Winter). But Tolstoy argues that even this action was due to a mass feeling of despair among the French troops rather than a direct order from above. Regardless, the French left the city and the country and were pursued by the well rested Russian army who themselves lost half their number in the process. Apparently the French army was leaving regardless of who was following them so the hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers who lost their lives to starvation and the cold, did so needlessly.

If you have the time and the desire to work through this one I'd recommend it.

Now that I have finished I have started to read the Great Gatsby, a tiny novel set in the 20s. Another to knock off the top 100 list. And it should only take me a week due to it's small number of pages.

The World is Watching

The Olympics is well underway and the crowds have flocked to Vancouver. Unfortunately the snow has not so so of the local mountain events have been affected. The week prior to the start, the roads were actually better than normal because an estimated 250,000 people have left the city.

We ventured down town last weekend to soak up the atmosphere and found the downtown area pretty empty. It was the day after the opening ceremony so we went straight to the Olympic flame first and found it to be shielded by a large chain link fence. It was so high you had to put your camera right up to the fence and photograph straight through it. They even had a cherry picker lying around the place so it looked really messy. There have been a huge amount of complaints from the public, and rightly so, so they have now cut a bit hole in the fence to allow people to take proper photos. You still can't get anywhere near the structure though.

The rest of the town was pretty quiet. The main shopping street, Robson, was dead with no one in the shops and the only busy area was Robson Square in front of the gallery. They had an ice rink where the Olympic characters danced about and allowed you to take pictures and a zip line across the road. Apparently the line up for this was 4 hours yesterday and it takes longer to get the safety equipment on than complete the trip so it doesn't seem like a great thing to wait for.

We ended up in H&M and found it to be like a Tuesday night (ie empty) and the restaurant that we had lunch in had two customers so I'm not sure what this event is going to do to the local economy. Obviously the hotels are doing very well as they are all fully booked and charging a fortune and VANOC will be doing ell with their ticket sales and merchandising but I'm not sure about the stores or restaurants.

There have been some funny stories about the lengths that the VANOC organization has gone to protect the official Olympic brand and sponsors. One local restaurant downtown was asked to change it's name as it was called the Olympic restaurant. Apparently this place had been a family run Greek restaurant for years but VANOC saw fit to drag them through the courts. Not sure if they won but it was a media booboo for them. Then there's a local clothing manufacturer of yoga clothing who were not an official sponsor but, nevertheless, put "a famous sporting event held in Vancouver" on their T-shirts and this upset VANOC too. Funny that.

But the weather has been the most disappointing as far as the events are concerned. Beautiful blue skies, warm temperatures and a distinct lack of white fluffy stuff has been an obvious issue. We were up Mount Seymour this morning and, while the views from the top were spectacular, it was like skiing on sugar. There were big rocks and tree trunks exposed where there is normally mounds of snow. It was still fun though.

We watched the opening ceremony on the world wide interweb and it was fun. The event tickets were $1100 each and you had to be in your seat by 5pm. The show ended at 10pm and you were not allowed to take your own food in so you had to buy their food. Very expensive I bet. The show was good, especially the light show but not $1100 worth of good. KD Lang was excellent and has a brilliant voice and was by far the best part.

The Olympics Are Here!!!

We had the Olympic flame down our street this afternoon at lunchtime. The street was full of school kids out from their lessons to watch a spectical that we will probably never witness for the rest of our lives. I have to admit that the sense of excitement grew as the torch bearer gradually approached where we were standing in the crowd but I'm not sure I am overly excited about the overall event.

The traffic will probably be chaos in various parts of Metro Vancouver and I for one will be avoiding the bridge from the North Shore as much as possible. The authorities are encouraging people to use public transport as much as possible while warning of 1-2 hour line-ups at the Skytrain stations during peak periods. For "peak periods" read "most of the time, particularly at night". The two bridges from Vancouver to the North Shore (access to Whistler) will be a nightmare at rush hour as lanes are being claimed specifically for Olympic travel. We only have two lanes in each direction on both bridges normally and they are invariably clogged during rush hour so who knows what it will be like for the next 2-3 weeks.

Then we have to look at the expected costs for hosting this. The Provincial government are forking out millions along with the RCMP and as a result the funding for schools and hospitals have been cut while the government waits to see what the final costs actually are. That means no critical facility upgrades for any schools in BC or any hospitals.

Then there's the weather which is out of everyone's control, but we have no snow. None!! We are having to truck snow in from Manning Park at a cost of $150k and helicopter the stuff from the top of Cyprus Mountain at $10k per hour. And that's just for some of the events. The remainder of the alpine events will be at Whistler where the snow is a lot better.

To top it all we had deal with the process that was chosen for the ticket allocation. About 10% of the tickets were available to the public and they had to apply for them through a lottery. But you couldn't chose, say the hockey gold medal game and nothing else, you had to apply for a group of tickets for other events too and at huge costs. This has meant that people are trying to sell their unwanted tickets to friends as quickly as possible in the run up to the games. Then the authorities refused to let anyone sell their unwanted tickets on Craigslist or any other web site and warned that anyone who did buy tickets in this way would be prevented from entering the events. The tickets have the names of the people on them. At least that was the process until VANOC decided to let people sell their tickets as long as they used their own website and charged 10% of the price to both the seller and the buyer.

Then, on top of all that, you have to buy the official gear with either cash or a VISA. Guess why; 'cause VISA are one of the official sponsors.

The list goes on, but enjoy the games.

Peter

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I don't know about you lot but I am constantly being asked to open a Facebook account by people at work, friends, family and all manner of hangers on, so that people can contact me. Erm, isn't that what email and the electric telephonic apparatus is for? "Yeh, but you can store photos on it for everyone to see". Why would I want my photos on the interweb for everyone to see? The are my personal memories of vacations and days out and soccer games and if I wanted to share them I would email them to my friends, not post them for the entire world to see them. Unless, of course I wanted people to buy them, but that's something else and even then I would create my own website and call it petesphotoemporium.com or something.

And the latest one is this LinkedIn. I do have an account there because I have been inundated with requests from people all over the world that work for Honeywell (yes I know people all over the world that work for Honeywell). I started my page, invited a couple of colleagues and then looked at other people's pages. They had 80 connections here and 40 connections there. I had 2. So now I felt pressure to link up to other people that I knew and spend an hour searching through their database for more people. I think I am now up to a whopping 6.

So my question is this: how do these, normally efficient characters manage to get through their work during the day and have 80 connections? If it took me an hour to get 6 connections how long does it take to win over 80? Or are they spending time at home doing it? Either way, why are they spending this time on it?

What's happened to calling people? Or emailing them? Are we now living in a society where we get satisfaction, not from performing well at work and earning the respect (and lot's of money) from our colleagues and customers, but from how many "friends" we have on Facebook.

And what's Twitter? Is this a social website for twits? Or budgies?

Then we have this new iPad. Isn't it just a slightly larger iPod Touch? A bigger screen to play bigger games and look at your photos, and read emails slightly easier than a iPod Touch. Granted you can read books on it and perhaps this is more environmentally friendly that the traditional paper versions but I won't be able to browse through the old second-hand electronic books in charity stores and pay $1.99 for them. No, I'll pay full price for them and build up an electronic library, drop the bloody thing in the street and lose the lot. Or am I being a ludite?

I'm off to read a book. Made from paper.

Peter