Peterblog

Sea people

A few mornings ago I was exercising on the ol' ergonometer, wondering if my shoulder tendinnitis would stay away. I had warmed up and I turned up the power, thinking to do some serious work, when I came over nauseous and had to slow down again. I kept going for another five minutes and then, finally, had to stop altogether.

This was a pretty weak performance, even by my own standards, and I got to thinking that it would not have got me very far on the ocean. I am following two extraordinary rowers on their voyages: Roz Savage is currently on the second stage of her attempt to become the first woman to row solo across the Pacific (she is already the first woman solo transatlantic rower).

Sarah Outen is crossing the Indian Ocean. When she finishes, she will be the first woman as well as the youngest and fastest person to make this crossing.

Both people are doing this for their own reasons, to support different causes and that is laudable. But they are both doing it as a personal challenge and because they can do it, and that sets them apart from you and me. A challenge like this has an enormous physical component, but as sports coaches have told aspiring athletes for millenia, the biggest problem is in the head.

So imagine being alone in a small boat on the ocean for three months at a time, thousands of miles away from anywhere, reliant on your own strength and resources only? For those who have never been out if sight of land at sea, it goes a bit like this: the thrill of setting out decreases gradually into a sober reality as the horizon dips away, and even on a short trip, you are faced with reliance on your own limitations should anything go wrong. And that is still barely out of range of cellular phone networks, with rescue only an hour or so away.

This is today, remember - a generation or so ago, out of sight of land meant out of contact, no means of calling on support, no GPS, no blog, no nothing.

Then there is the story of Debra Veal, now Debra Searle. In 2001, she and her husband set off as part of an Atlantic rowing race from Teneriffe to Barbados. After two weeks, her husband - an elite medal-winning rower - had to leave the boat. He simply could not stand the isolation and the exhaustion any more. Debra carried on alone.

There probably is a secret to being able to stand up to this sort of challenge. Reading the blogs of Roz and Sarah, they both seem to be stable, optimistic people, but I am sure there is a lot more to it than they let on in their public writings. For some of us, the challenges of changing a wheel by the side of a dark, lonely, rainy roadside in winter are enough to bring on the tears. Imagine what strenths you would have to call on if, as in Sarah's case, your boat is rolled over 360° by a wave?

Cruel soup

We come across the food of other cultures with interest; and finally, with horror. It's the way we are. I think basically we are all racists. We like our own, and what we are used to. In the end, we will come back to hot chocolate or jam sandwiches or whatever we learned from our parents. We have brief excursions to exotic food, but we always come back to what we know and love.

Top candidate for heroic food is, of course, Chinese. Bear paws, fish lips, drunken shrimps. Then there's the monkey brain story, where people supposedly gather round a live monkey's head and scoop the brains out - an urban legend, never happened. Not lately, not so that anyone had witnessed, anyway.

I have a friend from northern China, and she told me the other night about a dish that surpasses all others I had heard of in its cruel beauty - I mean, whoever could have thought something like that up? How long did they have to work on it to perfect it? 

It's a soup made with broth, pieces of tofu and frogs. You throw the live frogs into the boiling broth. The tofu is colder than the broth, so they try to save themselves by clutching the tofu. They die; they are eaten. It apparently looks quite spectacular and the frogs taste quite crunchy. She didn't say this, but I am sure that the most important ingredient is the broth. 

So what type of society develops a dish like this? How important is the fleeting pleasure of food, that an animal can be sacrificed in such a cruel and evident way? Are we the hypocrites, that sacrifice our food sources far from the dinner table?  It's enough to make me become a vegetarian once more.

Cheap light

The video shows a novel way of lighting an interior - low cost, low maintenance, fully solar powered. The only possible problem is that it only works during the day. But it is definitely cool.

Michelle Grito

I have no interest in a number of sports, tennis among them. But every so often it throws up a curiosity. This one is the Portuguese tennis player, Michelle Larcher de Brito. She screams. Appallingly. In fact, if I were playing against her I would complain. I read that a BBC journalist has watched her practice, and she does so silently. She has said she cannot stop the noise. She is a product of the Nick Bolletieri tennis academy, which means she looks and talks the same as the others that have been manufactured there, and also sounds the same - although much, much louder. Maybe this is the Bolletieri secret. Anyhoo - judge for yourself.

How shit is Wikipedia?

Not really, just a little bit crap as long as you take care not to believe everything you read there. However, WikipediaVision gives some insight into just how crap. The app was built by László Kozma, a Romanian with a Hungarian name studying in Helsinki (that's in Finland for those of you who learn their geography from Wikipedia).

What it does is track the anonymous edits to Wikipedia. It displays them on a world map with the subject and how long ago the edit happened. The flags pop up one after the other every minute or so. If you click the 'diff' link on the flag, it displays the previous and the current edit. The flags disappear as the next one pops up, so it is difficult to keep track, but the vast majority of anonymous edits seem to be malicious. Sometimes two follow each other closely, as if two people are playing at leaving scurrilous graffiti about each other in the same Wikipedia entry.

I know that there are millions of serious edits happening at the same time, and that these silly additions do not represent any serious number compared to the bulk of what is being added to the site. But still - that constant stream of obscenity and offensiveness gives you another view of just how many people are sabotaging Wikipedia by using it as their own private toilet wall.

László asks you to buy at  Amazon via his site to help him keep it running. A small enough thing to ask for such a clear view of WikiReality.

Another photograph I didn't take

I am very interested in photography, and I wish that my photographs were better than they are. I always notice something in other people's pictures that I would like to emulate, but somehow, I never can.

Once I was walking to work and I saw a man and his young daughter walking the other way, towards me. She was hugging her father's arm with all her strength, it seemed to me, her eyes screwed up with happiness, while her father, a briefcase swigning from the other arm, looked ahead, thinking - of what? The meetings he had to go to that day, the hangover from the night before? He certainly was not thinking about his daughter at that very moment.

That would have made a great picture, I thought, providing I could have captured everything in it, every nuance and studied feeling. But no camera, no courage to take the picture, no talent to tell the story in a single frame.

So I am very glad that a photographer I know, Corinne Vionnet  has sent me this link to a site run by Michael David Murphy, who I do not know. I think he has discovered an art form that I might actually be good at. Unphotographable.

Schatzalp arrival

I spent the weekend before last in Davos, before the heads of state and the great and the good arrived to debate the financial crisis. I spent the time in the Hotel Schatzalp, a former sanatorium perched above Davos Platz with its own funicular. The hotel - when it was still a sanatorium - is the inspiration for the setting of Thomas Mann's 'The Magic Mountain', which is a book well worth reading. If you have already read it, follow Mann's advice and read it again. I am.

The Friday I travelled to Davos was foul - there was a snowstorm all the way as the train wound its way up from Zurich into the Grisons. The taxi dropped me at the bottom of the funicular, and the conductor waved me aboard. I was one of two people sitting inside as it set off, jerking up the mountain, but it seemed I was alone in the snow. I looked up the hill, and there were the two enormous lamps of the valley-bound car, heading straight down towards us.

The rails parted and we passed side by side - one car empty and the other nearly so. We arrived at the top and the other passenger hurried off through the snow. I was slower, with my skis and my luggage. The doors swung open ahead of me as if they were haunted and I came into the hotel by way of a colonnade, open to the elements. On one side was the blizzard and on the other the dining room with isolated groups of people sitting finishing late supper.

I looked in through the windows as I passed. The double glazing isolated me from any noise from the diners. Not a whisper from the valley below. The tables and chairs of the dining room were covered with white cloth, and the reflection of the snow in the windows made it seem as if the snow itself was falling inside the room, covering the tables and sparing the diners. 

Magic Mountain indeed.

That miracle in New York

Did anyone else react to the news of the safe ditching of the airliner in New York with an automatic reaching for the computer to check out the video footage? And was anyone else surprised and disappointed that in this age of pervasive photography there was none? It's almost as if a thing never happened unless we saw the cell-phone footage of it.

But what and amazing escape, and what a series of lucky breaks, and what a meeting of skill and dedication. And what superb professionalism form Captain Chesley Sullenberger, who finds his options reduced to one - a single option that he has never been able to practice - and he carries it out perfectly. And then, in the age old way of captains, makes sure that his passegers are safe before leaving.

There is a facinating symmetry, is there not, with 9/11? The first was an evil that came from the sky that defined and stained America in a way that we have come to distrust and even hate. The Miracle of the Hudson was a demonstration of the other side of America - how simple down home ability - 'Yes sir, it's what we train for' you can hear them say - and readiness to roll up the sleeves and get busy can turn a potential disaster into a glorious episode.

The ferries that appeared on the scene. The divers. The tugboats. Suddenly, everyone was there as part of a rescue effort, people who moments before had been going about their daily business, knitted into a team by the necessity of the moment. That 'Aw shucks' ability to deal with things and turn a very bad situation into an episode to celebrate.

That's the America I remember best. 

Did you wonder what is wrong with Christmas?

This is it. Where do you start? Where do you finish? Is this the sort of marketing-created society we are becoming? Maybe it is so disturbing to me because I don't have kids. Maybe I would regard this with more equanimity if I had. I dunno.
Via Seth Godin, of course.

Blogging is so, like, last year?

My old mucker Bruno Giussani has announced that he will be stopping blogging for a while (he was quite sporadic for a bit before then, in any case). You can read for yourself why he is calling a halt. He is quite right - blogging takes up too much time for too little reward, and Twitter is a waste of time.

From my point of view, blogging is also a waste of time. You blog and blog and nothing ever changes, even though people do read what you write. I have met the unlikeliest of people (are you there, unlikely reader?) who said they regularly read and take note of my blog. But I haven't noticed the world turning into a better place.

There's that old 90-9-1 rule, that 90 people do nothing, 9 people read and one person writes and comments out of every 100 in the interactive world. That one person would be doing in any case, whether via a blog or a community meeting. Blogs still have not changed the world, have they? One of the most infamous examples is the Kryptonite lock story.

Scofield and Israel in Naked Conversations said that Kryptonite could have rescued their business if only they had responded faster via the blogosphere. Sorry - that would not have helped. The blogosphere did not bring down the company. What happened would have happened in any case, just a little slower. And the last time I looked, Kryptonite locks are still the lock of choice for two-wheeled transport owners.

But the worst thing about the whole sorry story is that with all their investigation of the Kryptonite thing, they did not bother interviewing anyone directly involved. No, with devotion to duty like that, it's no wonder that the blogosphere hasn't changed the world, or even the few streets close to where I live. Citizen journalists, you see, don't have editors breathing down their necks to make sure they are fast accurate and accountable.

But I won't stop. Not yet, anyway. I like writing too much and at least this way a few people - unlikely or not - read this. And this represents me writing what I feel like. I write for my job, too, and many thousands more people read that, even though it is sometimes not excatly what I want to write. I won't be stopping that for the time being, either.