From now on, as well as the usual cobblers that make up this blog, every week I’m going to try and nominate a bird for the “Bird of the Week” and this week is the beautiful Red-winged Blackbird.

We first became aware of this beautiful little guy last year during our drive to work. We noticed a bunch of odd little birds flying across the road at the same point of our journey every day, but flying in a most peculiar way; rather than just flying in a straight line they give a little burst of wing flapping, which caused them to gain altitude, followed by a short glide, during which they drop again. It gives them a sort of sawtooth flight pattern. On a few occasions they flew close enough for us to notice that they had red go-faster stripes on them.

Once we’d managed to identify these lovely little guys, we noticed from the pictures that rather than go-faster stripes, the red markings are actually more like the epaulettes of some dodgy military dictator – right down to the gold trim.

Over the winter we haven’t seen them at all and were beginning to wonder whether we’d imagined them…until last week.

Waiting over the road from my office, at the bush that designates the bus-stop, I noticed a swarm of odd little birds. They flew past me into the distance and then, two minutes later they appeared behind me and flew past again – all the time in a peculiar sawtooth flight pattern. This went on for about ten minutes before I realised…the red-wings are back! Now that the temperature is rising, they’ve come back to make babies and hang out in Philly!

Now, I know I do bang on about the depressing, soulless, pit of malfeasance that is King Of Prussia a great deal, but it’s so difficult to paint an accurate picture. Fortunately, the job has now been made easier by the geniuses at Google who created Street View; now you can take a virtual tour of the area where I spend most of my weekdays.
In fact, I’ve become so obsessed with the anti-pedestrian sentiment of the entire area that this Saturday we’re going there to make a film about it.

More details later.

Last week it snowed. Heavily. This week is warm and springy. The robins and red-winged blackbirds are back.

American news media doesn’t really cover many stories that aren’t directly related to America or Americans. So ever since Obama was elected all we’ve heard on the mainstream media is a perpetual discussion of what he said today, conjecture about the implications, random predictions of how it will pan out, and how the Republicans reacted. Obviously the Murdoch organs are emphasizing that last point more than anything else, but what do you expect from media run by Beelzebub himself. But it’s clear that the twitching, wrinkled, mephitic remains of his revolting earthly manifestation are getting desperate. A Monkey ? Really Rupert. Face it, you lost this time. Now just pop off and die in a fire would you ?

The bewildered Republicans have been throwing their toys out of the pram since Obama decided to spend a load of government money on the poor majority, to the almost negligible cost of the rich minority. The only thing I don’t understand is why anyone would object to reducing tax breaks from the very rich to pay for healthcare. How can anyone possibly think that is anything but straightforward common sense ?

The top end of the economy is fucked. Over here that means that the poor are in serious trouble. Not the bankers who are directly responsible, but the poor. No bonuses for them, just the dole queue. And not like the British dole queue, because this one is fatal. If you get ill, you could easily die, because you can’t go to to the doctor. Healthcare is really, really, really, seriously expensive. If it wasn’t so expensive then Blue Cross couldn’t possibly afford to have their logo on top of the tallest, shiniest, pointiest, most phallic skyscraper in Philadelphia.

So the idea of these massive, wasteful, cash-cow health insurance companies being threatened by the spectre of public heathcare worries Republicans. Even the poor ones.

You see Republicans here all suffer from severe mental illness. They will fight to the death to remove their own rights, pay more for it, and die in the process; all in the name of Freedom(tm), Liberty(R) and Democracy(C). Of course in reality they don’t know what freedom means, and if they did they’d hate it. They want to be told the right thing to do by an avuncular leader who will banish crime from the streets (by simply recruiting violent thugs to join the law enforcement agencies), and pay for what they use to Free(tm), non-governmental, private companies – all of which are owned and run by the same people who run the government.

But I’m alright Jack! My first iPhone app got put out to the app store today and it even got a good review!

Ever since we moved here, we’ve been astounded by the number of English accents on the TV and radio. Not that they’re even particularly good voices, but over here it’s lapped up regardless. About a month ago a friend of mine noticed that a nearby school was running classes in doing voice-over work and, knowing my interest, forwarded me the link. The first class was this evening and it was really quite fun. Thanks Jon. Michele liked the idea of doing another evening class and so picked Yoga, which runs at the same time as mine.

I’d expected the guy running the class to be a bit bent and a bit of a bullshitter. Bullshit he had in quantity, but he is clearly not trying to rip us off…no more than the cost of the course anyway. Jesus that sounds like famous last words.

So there were twenty of us in the class, and if anyone had accidentally wandered in trying to find AA they would have felt like they were in the right place.

Then our man wanders in looking like the gay brother in the Sopranos. Serious Mafia face, sovereign rings, big shouldered white shirt tucked into smart trousers…and the dodgiest syrup you’ve ever seen. I had to employ the utmost willpower to avoid staring at it and laughing out loud. If that isn’t a qualification for being an actor, I don’t know what is.

He was great though. Imagine getting paid to talk!

After our classes, we went home via Wawa…Mmmmm…Wawa…

Creative juices are low so here is a list of good stuff from this weekend:

• The Atheist Movement in the UK makes me proud.
• Watching Deliverance, Doubt, Dirty Filthy Love, and The Magnificent Seven.
• Getting a really decent curry on Saturday.
• Installing debian on a new VirtualBox server.
• Parrots.
• Chatting to Andy over Skype.
• Snuggling.

npr broke with tradition yesterday morning and broadcast something interesting and highly amusing during Morning Edition; a piece describing what is meant by the term “Zombie Banks”. It would seem that all the bank bailouts have done is keep the organs of the corpses artificially alive, dragging the rest of the economy, and therefore the rest of us, down with them. Sapping the life out of all of us, they continue to stumble on like flesh eating zombies. Now, I like this analogy and it seems pretty accurate from my perspective, but I was truly awestruck by the earnest pleas from the interviewee who was getting quite worked up:

We have a situation where there are zombies roaming around and the government programmes so far are an aspirin, when instead you’ve got to chop its head off and get the economy growing again.

Please give it a listen, it’s four marvellous minutes of mirth.

This weekend we hosted our first proper middle-class dinner party! That’s “middle-class” in the English sense rather than the American sense; over here no-one identifies as working class, and so everyone is either middle-class or “upper-class”…again, very different to the English idea of upper-class.
Other than that, everything else was pretty much what you’d expect in Islington, only we enjoyed it immensely. We’ve been very lucky in meeting so many cool people since we arrived.
The news over here remains as blinkered as ever; Obama Vs Republicans, or J.M.Keynes Vs The Free Market as it will be recorded in history. No mention of the rest of the world, such as the massive bush-fires in Australia. Some links:

• Explained: right-wing dads forwarding their shit
• The UK rushing closer and closer, and closer to the inevitable Police state.

Do you remember the exhilarating feeling of finishing your last A-level [high-school exam] ? Do you remember thinking “thank fuck I’ll never have to remember any of that shit again” ? Finishing the Maths exam was particularly cathartic because I just didn’t understand it. I found it fascinating, but no matter how much work I put in it just didn’t click. Goodbye calculus, good-riddance imaginary numbers, sod-you complex planes, and bollocks to natural logarithms, I remember thinking.
Twenty years later I’m now dealing with all of them in my job! It was hard enough when my brain was fresh and quick, before the years of alcohol and TV abuse, but now it just hurts. The last two days have involved a load of head-crunching and I still don’t understand how any of it works. Whenever I see a formula that involves either e or i, my brain goes into shock and changes the subject so it doesn’t have to deal with it.
There is however a benefit of twenty years’ experience: I can now use all of these arcane concepts, without actually knowing how they work and get stuff done.
But it’s not enough. I need to understand how they work. It’s like being confronted by a locked door or some copy protection – and that’s why I have sets of picks and a large collection of 2600 magazines.
Any tips for how to understand difficult sums welcome.

At the age of 15 I was really into hip-hop/rap/electro; at the time the three were difficult to separate. It always seemed astounding that some people (mainly old-farts, but quite a large proportion of peers) hated it so much. They would try to explain why they didn’t like it but to them it was so repugnant that the best they could manage was along the following lines: “It’s just shit! Listen! It’s just…shit! That’s not music! It’s shit.”
Well the other day, as part of my job (really), I had to listen to Get Naked by G-Mack. Now, as much as I’d like to think of myself as being reasonably articulate, I can only accurately describe it as obvious shit. Because it’s shit. Listen to it. It’s clearly shit isn’t it ? Either that, or a CB4/Ali-G style joke ? “G-Mack” ? It’s got to be a joke.
Annoyingly this occurred in the same week that I heard the Snoop Dog remix of “Walk the line” by Johnny Cash. It was so bad that I couldn’t stop listening to it – it made me laugh!
Now there are two possible explanations for what’s going on:

1. This young people’s music is genuinely piffle.
2. I’m now officially an old fart.

As someone who listens to all kinds of new music, to me it’s clearly explanation 1. But deep down I know the real reason is explanation 2.
And then, after tripping over this embarrassing mess, I realise that it’s only a matter of time before I buy a cardigan.

Shameless geekery – look away now.

• One of my favourite pieces of the internet is this classic rant from my boy, Linus Torvalds, on C++. I read it regularly and it gives me a warm feeling that maybe I’m not wrong about everything. Well today I noticed the message ID (see above) – he uses Alpine too! I was beginning to think me and Michele were the last users on the planet.
• The Google got broke this morning for over an hour. It turned out the culprit was a single solitary byte: ‘/’. The vast, global, unstoppable, empire-smashing Goliath knocked out by ASCII 0x2f. I wonder if it was fired from a slingshot ?