Corporate Watch: Nuclear Contamination in Reading

Here's a rather alarming article by Corporate Watch about Raymond Fox's ongoing failure to get any justice over plutonium contamination found in his backyard at 338 Wokingham Rd in Earley near Reading. A soil sample was found to contain five times higher radioactive contamination than pollution at a nuclear weapons factory in Aldermaston! The scarey thing is the "Wall Of Silence" that he has been subjected to as no one want to do anything about it.

If I lived in the neighbourhood, I'd be pretty upset and demanding a thorough investigation. What about the groundwater?

Generally the UK seems quite good at being evenhanded but I do get the impression that there are many area's where corporations and institutions can steamroller over individuals that  have little recourse. Unfortunately, Mr Fox seems to have found one of those areas.

Buddhist Economics

Nice short essay on the value of work and the need for meaningful work. It's hosted on a site called World Transformation which looks pretty interesting.

Conkers

Yesterday, I taught the kids how to play conkers. There's a horse chestnut tree at R*'s school so the kids there collect them but they don't know how to play conkers so I figured I would teach her this most English of games. As a kid, I had my five seconds of fame playing in a conker competition with the shattering of my conker being broadcast on local TV news. My opponent went on to win the competition with a very seasoned seven year old indestructable conker.

On Sunday, we trooped down to Windsor Great Park and collected a bag of them. It's a little early in the season but wasn't hard to find some. At home, I attached the strings and we were ready to play.

I was soon reminded it can be rather painful to play conkers. It's easy to whack yourself. R* even went and put on her skateboarding pads. After I lost to R*, I set the kids up with a hanging conker to practise on but unfortunately, Kieran whacked himself in the nose and head! So, ok, maybe there's a good reason conkers isn't played much!

Still, I might keep some conkers in a dark corner of a cupboard. They could prove useful in several years.

Back From Bavaria

Got back safe and sound from our road trip to Germany yesterday. Had a great time and I'll try and get a travelogue written up and posted this week. Driving the Autobahn was a real highlight for me. Here's a picture of my speedometer showing us hitting 145 mph as we got near to Munich.

I have a new found respect for German cars; they all seem to be built for driving at speeds like these!

Learning the Nurburgring

On Sunday, a friend and I are off on a roadtrip driving around Germany. A big highlight will be driving the famous Nurburgring race circuit. I've been spending quite a bit of time preparing to drive this massive circuit of 13 miles and 73 bends. Ben Lovejoy has put together a fabulous Nurburgring website which has been a tremendous help. There's also lots of help at the Ringers Group including maps with race lines of the circuit.

Best of all, the Xbox game Project Gotham 2 has a very realistic depiction of the circuit. I've spent the last month playing it just to get to the end where you unlock the Nurburgring circuit in the very last race. I've had a few evenings to drive around and around and around learning the layout. It matches up well with the other maps I have so I figure it's a better way to prepare than driving it cold - that together with Ben's Photo Lap.

Exciting stuff! I should be at the real circuit toll gate at 1pm on Monday.

Egypt Vaccinations

My left arm still hurts a bit after Jenny and I got our combined Hepatitis-A and Typhoid vaccination this morning. If you want to travel, you need to consider the health risks so in preparing for our holiday to Egypt next month, I spent some time reading the WHO's International Travel and Health website. Quite interesting - especially the world disease maps.

Egypt doesn't require any vaccinations but we decided the prudent ones to have covered in our family are Polio, Tetanus/Diptheria and Hepatitis A. Luckily malaria is almost non-existent in Egypt. It's the disease responsible for the highest death rate among travellers. Meanwhile, Hepatitis A is the most common disease travellers catch.

I hate injections. Even though I know they don't hurt much, I can't help getting queasy, light-headed and can even breakout into a cold sweat. Silly, I know, but it's like a real phobia. In a couple of weeks, I'll take the children for their injections and somehow I have to pretend I don't mind getting a Tetanus shot. I can just imagine hearing, "Dad, why are you lying on the floor?"

Das Experiment (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2001)

German movie based on the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment  (read more about the experiment here) but this movie takes the experiment much further. Twenty ordinary people are divided into twelve prisoners and eight guards and asked to play these roles for two weeks. The story is centered on one of the prisoners, Tarek Fahd.

The drama is intense as behaviours escalate to the flims climax. Plausible and topical given the prison abuses in Iraq. Worth watching (thanks Jennifer for the recommendation).

Love Actually (Richard Curtis, 2003)

Park your mind and prepare to feel good. It's a sickly sweet romantic comedy cuddle movie. Don't start analysing how crassly commercial and shallow it is or you'll stop smiling. Fine acting and well made, it's ok for a Friday night rental. Better still, use it for foreplay.

Nowhere In Africa (Caroline Link, 2001)

This German film won Best Foreign Language film in 2002. It's about a well off German Jewish family that leaves everything behind in Nazi Germany and survive as poor farm hands in Kenya. It's based on the autobiography of Stefanie Zweig and is told through the eyes of her as a little girl. Great story, well acted and beautiful cinematography. Highly recommended.

Smart Music

Here's another little thing I found ages ago that I meant to blog about. I haven't tried Smart Music Studio out but it's description sure is intriguing:

SmartMusic Studio is an interactive, computer-based practice program for woodwind, brass, string and vocal musicians. SmartMusic Studio Intelligent Accompaniment®accompanies you while you practice so it can improve your musical performance in less time by making practicing more fun.

The interesting thing is that it actually changes tempo to follow you; you don't just play along with a recording. It looks slick but since I don't play a monophonic instrument, it's not of any use to me. Would be great for orchestral instruments.

Top 10 Urinals

You can also view the top 100 urinals. No, I don't know what the judging criteria is. The site does claim that it's the "best place to piss away your time on the Internet".

Thames Valley Farmer's Market

Went to the Thames Valley Farmer's Market today. We're trying to buy more things directly from local producers rather than from the supermarkets.  Makes sense to support the local economy and it's great being able to chat with people who actually know how their produce is grown or their animals raised. They can also tell you a lot about how to prepare it too. Overall, it means you can be much more confident about what you're eating and it's fresh - no air miles involved!

It's feels like the right thing to do in a "I recycle too" kind of way.

Two of the vendors we bought from today have websites. There's Cross Lanes Fruit Farm which grows over sixty varieties of apples, pears and plums. They're excellent. Note they're having an Open Day on October 10th which I hope to get to. There's also Brookleas Fish Farm which farms trout. It's a nightmare sourcing trustyworthy seafood - by the way is fresh water fish lakefood or riverfood? - but I had a good chat with how they raise their trout and it sounded safe. What's even better is that I learned you can go there and catch the trout yourself! Will have to take R* and give that a try.

BBC: Gun firms pay out over US snipers

Two gun firms have settled with families of the victims of the Washington DC snipers. It's significant because this is the first time a gun manufacturer in the United States has agreed to pay damages for negligent distribution of weapons. This isn't an admission of liability but still it's a promising step towards bringing some sensibility to gun happy America.

Cordon Vert

Jenny is away for five days on a residential cookery workshop at The Cordon Vert School in Manchester - learning how to kill vegetables and skin them. Alright, she's doing the Foundation Workshop which aims to "give students a thorough knowledge of a vegetarian diet". She's very excited about having this break and attending her first professional cookery workshop.

No, we're not planning on becoming vegetarians but we'd be happy to eat more vegetables if the dishes were more interesting. I think vegetarianism is highly admirable and as this BBC article explains, we should all eat less meat.

Meanwhile I'm home alone with the kids learning to survive as a single dad. I have to admit, I don't enjoy cooking much and I quite dislike feeding kids. Worse still, I hate watching kids eat as they torture their meals and find novel ways of eating its contents.