I’m entered in the Galway triathlon on the 25th and have been worrying about the lack of open water time I’ve managed to put in this year. After a couple of stressful days in court (as a witness, I hasten to add), I emerged today and realised there was no wind. It was utterly still.

I’d had the presence of mind to pack some training gear and so I had my wetsuit with me. I stopped off at Lower Largo on the way home to Edinburgh, just by Largo Bay Sailing Club (I used to be a member, when I was a whole lot younger), to go swimming.

Whenever you say to someone that you’re going swimming in the sea, unless he too is into open water swimming, the reaction seems to be one of absolute bafflement. Today was one of those days when I wish I could have dragged the naysayers along to see what makes it so special — only that would have meant sharing, and some things are just too good to share.

Visibility was in the tens of metres. The surface, after some initial chop left over from today’s electrical storms subsided, was glossy. The mirror finish was broken by a brief spell of rain, the sound of it hissing into the sea around me only making the experience more magical. The red lenses of my goggles brought a hazy purple, mystical quality to everything; and there were bright clouds of silver fish that drifted away in lazy formation at my approach, as well as crabs waving their armoured pincers like angry robots on the delicately rippled sand far below.

I love the sea. I’ve always loved the sea. They say it’s in your blood, and if that’s true then my blood runneth with seaweed and plankton. I would have stayed there until dark and beyond if it were not for my mum waiting for the safety call at 18:30 and the knowledge I had to make it across the bridge before the roadworks started. Swimming in the sea is a bit like riding a bike on busy roads: those who don’t do it think you’re mad if you do. Those who know how great it can be nod, smile and have that twinkle in their eyes that is the outward manifestation of happy memories.

You should try it some time. It’s one of the best stress remedies there is.

He thinks this is the best thing he has ever seen, EVAR. Every time he sees it he starts laughing.

Mind you, so do I.

We made this:

I can only imagine Thudthwacker really loves me because he said he read this and thought of me (and Munky, to be fair, but that’s an awkward threesome).

You really need to read the whole thing for full FLAVR, but I shall present you with an excerpt or two that I found particularly lulzy with which to whet your appetite:

If some twat on some message board somewhere says that you can use the lockring from your bottom bracket as a lockring for a fixie conversion doesn’t mean that A: you can, or B: you should. Please listen to me on this stuff, I really do have your best interests at heart.

…

So you want a bike that you can ride to work, goes really fast, is good for that triathlon you’re doing this summer (snicker), is good on trails and mud, and costs less than $300. Yeah. Listen, I want a car that can go 200 miles an hour, tow a boat, has room for five adults, is easy to parallel park but can carry plywood, gets 60mpg, and only costs $3,000. I also want a unicorn to blow me. What are we even talking about here? Oh yeah. Listen, bikes can be fast, light, cheap and comfortable. Pick two, and we’re all good.

Yes indeedy. Especially on the lockring. I was never convinced about that. I can think of a few others, too, especially that one where they say you can convert a single speed into a fixed hub using araldite. Buh. I personally wouldn’t trust araldite to stop the damn thing slipping, but, you know, I don’t mind buying a fixed hub and rebuilding the wheel. If you think it’s easier and better to shove epoxy resin into the freewheel then good luck to you.

That’s a very good description of an interaction between a car driven by someone unobservant and a cyclist. It’s also a description I saw attached to this infomercial that has been produced to encourage New York drivers to pay more attention to cyclists, rather like the THINK BIKE! campaign here in the UK.

I don’t think this is quite as shocking as the current “It’s 30 for a reason” series of adverts we have here, which include dead children (not real ones, of course, but played by actors), however it does make one point very well: cyclists don’t have the protection of a metal box equipped with safety gear. I do sometimes wonder if some drivers subconsciously extend the sense of security offered to them by their high-tech carriage to other road users.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7YKDrl0Ir0]

I don’t go on MySpace very often. It might surprise you to know I even have an account. I can’t for the life of me think why I do. Primarily, I think, it’s because there’s a Truck Bar MySpace page, Alibarbarella (the bastard offspring of Pygar and Barbarella, norly) has an account, and it’s where all the hip bands hang out. Or something.

One of the (many) reasons for this is the amount of advertising. MySpace makes Facebook look positively conservative and even considerate in its approach to the commercials that splatter you merely for having the indecency to log in. I’m not sure if this is a problem common to all social networking sites — I have a paid account on LJ and have never been anywhere near Bebo — however MySpace does seem to be a prime example of commercial carpet-bombing.

My purpose for today’s visit? I was trying to find out what Ben Astrop is up to these days, and had tracked him to a new band, which has a MySpace page, and so I thought I’d better log in and attempt to add him or whatever it’s called, just in case. The advert that greeted me today was particularly lolworthy, and so I screencapped it for your amusement:

Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear oh dear. What next? A singles bar for aliens? Speed-dating for ghouls? Swing parties for goblins?

The Day the Earth Stood Still.

First off, I know I’m late on this. Frankly I didn’t want to go to the cinema to see Keanu “Woah” Reeves reprise his Johnny Mnemonic performance — which I could tell he was doing by the simple fact he was going to be wearing a suit — and thus have to pay for the privilege. Nor was I going to buy the DVD, as I already own a copy of Johnny Mnemonic. Somewhere. So I had to wait until it came out on pay-per-view.

Bite me.

If you don’t know the plot by now, then you’ve been living under a rock in a swamp. Alien comes to Earth and says that unless mankind changes its destructive ways then powers immeasurably superior to ours will wipe the species from the face of the planet. Faced with complete destruction and massively superior technology, someone has to change his mind about humanity’s right to live. It has been many, many years since I last saw the original, so I’m not position to make anal comparisons between the two and watched it as a film for its own sake. Up to a point.

We started off up a mountain somewhere in 1928. In this scene KR played a bearded mountaineer who finds a strange glowing sphere in the ice, and proceeds to poke at it with his ice axe. I mean, really. If you found a strange glowing sphere encased in ice would you poke at it with your ice axe?

Yeah. I probably would too.

“Oooh! He’s going to get abducted! How exciting!” I exclaimed, already thinking this is a much more satisfying explanation for a human alien than them growing one.

But no. Bright flash of light then beardy is waking up slightly puzzled and the sphere is gone. Not a lipless cow to be seen anywhere, either.

Skip to the present day and we meet our heroine. Hollywood has banned action girls from the movies, for some reason. This leaves most girls with the fate-worse-than-death of being a soppy screamer who faints at the sight of a beetle. Here we have avoided this by making her a biologist specialising in the sorts of bacteria that get off on making scientists say “WTF is that doing growing THERE?” Her personal drama, because we can’t be without personal drama, is provided by being the widow of a man who died serving in the army, leaving her with the care of his son by his previous wife, who doesn’t like her very much and wants nothing more than his daddy to come back. Yada yada.

The action begins by having a bunch of feds turn up at her door while she’s trying to persuade the kid to get off WoW and come eat dinner while he reminds her, in that precious way movie children have, that she’s not his mother.

It’s all very Crichton, and here was where my niggles started blowing up into full irritation. I detest the idea that any government in this day and age doesn’t have a contingency plan in place for something like this, as ridiculous as it seems. In The Andromeda Strain, which had exactly the same multi-disciplinary mobilisation, the scientists were at least aware that they might be called upon. They were thus prepared to get straight to work and were much more effective and efficient, rather than spending valuable minutes — and minutes were valuable in this film — faffing around stressed because they didn’t know what was happening.

I started becoming genuinely uncomfortable when they went to meet the sphere in Central Park. I’d really like to think that we wouldn’t, as a species, turn up to greet our first verified alien visitor with howitzers, tanks, snipers and rocket launchers, but upon reflection I suspect that we probably would. And yeah, we probably would shoot him as well. That many nervous people with guns, accidents are bound to happen.

After that the whole thing just derailed and it became downright silly. The giant robot was the best thing in the film, and I’m going to ignore the painful way they shoehorned an acronym in there to explain his name. The alien arrived in a spacesuit made of placenta, which fell off and allowed KR to reprise his Matrix adult foetus role, after which he did his emotionless cool act, making him look like an escapee from Equilibrium. That was fine in context. We are talking about a portrayal of inevitability and implacability, after all.

The major premise of the film is summarised in the scene where the kid asks Klaatu whether they should run or fight and Klaatu responds “Neither… There is nothing you can do.”

I didn’t think enough was made of this. I can tell they tried, but other than some feeble attempts to destroy the giant robot, they didn’t do anything that really hammered home just how powerless people were. That’s the part that should have been really scary. Here we are currently facing potential environmental disaster and we still can do something about it, if we get our act together. We are, as the Professor (John Cleese) said in the film, “standing on the precipice”. Right now we can still step back. I wanted to be shown how abjectly hopeless it will make us as a species feel when there is nothing we can do about it any more. When it’s too late.

Unleashing a self-replicating mass of matter-eating artificial locusts just didn’t do it for me. Wasn’t exactly environmentally friendly, either.

As it is, the film went something like this:

Jacob: Ure not mai mom. I hates U!
Dr Helen Benson: Put your computer DOWN and eat your dinner, FFS.
American Military: Dr Helen Benson U must cum with us and leev horribl child behind cos we say so and we has motorsickles with flashy lites.
Dr Helen Benson: Oh. OK.
American Military: Now U help us meets visitor from owter space.
Dr Helen Benson: Kewl.
American Military: Noes!!!!11!! Ebul alien cum to eats us! Shoot it! Now! Kwicks!
Giant robot: DESTROY DESTROY DESTROY. LOL.
Klaatu: FFS. I’m not even out of my spacesuit yet. Quit it, Gort. Just… Give me a minute. FFS. We’re off to a great start already. Way to go making me think you guys have the potential to be nice.
Dr Helen Benson: Medic!
American Military: U R ebul alien cums to eat us. We am be interrugating U nows.
Klaatu: I think not. FFS. I just want to speak to the UN. What is it with you people?
American Military: Aieeee! He has used speshul ebul alien powahs to eats our branes thru the wiring!
Klaatu: I got the box. Damn straight. Now to get me to the UN. Aha! Here I have found what appears to be a transport hub. My word. How vicious and violent this race is. The sooner we’ve got rid of them the better. Oh. I appear to be bleeding and unwell.
Dr Helen Benson (answering phone): Yes? You have found the alien cough I mean my patient? I’ll be right there.
Klaatu:Your race is vicious and violent and destructive and must die. I am here to kill you all so that the bunny rabbits and the polar bears can live in peace. You must act as my chauffeur because, although I am excellent, I do not possess a driving licence.
Dr Helen Benson: Oh. OK. But we’re really not that bad. I shall introduce you to my professor, who is also excellent, and has a Nobel prize for being excellent, and he will show you how wrong you are by being excellent.
Professor: See my excellent maths! Listen to excellent Bach through my most excellent sound system.
Klaatu: Your math is promising and Bach is indeed most excellent.
Jacob: U is nasteh ebul alien and ai call army on U Bcoz that’s what Dad wud do and Dad was like JEBUS.
Klaatu: FFS. I thought we were getting somewhere. No, that’s it. You’re all going to die.
Giant robot (turning into artifical locust plague): DESTROY DESTROY DESTROY. LOL.
Dr Helen Benson: Noes! I has been kidnapped from the alien by the military in an ironic subversion of the alien abduction experience. No rly.
Jacob: I am be all alone in woods and am scared. Can U help me ebul alien who isn’t so ebul eny moar?
Klaatu: Kids, eh?
American Military: We gots nuthin. U try, Dr Helen Benson. Heer is Ur fone.
Jacob: I kno! We can meet at Dad’s grave and alien can bring him back to life with his alien powah, just like Jebus!
Klaatu: Look, kid. He’s not just dead, he’s worm food. He has been recycled, FFS.
Jacob: Waaaaah!
Dr Helen Benson: Oh, poor baby! Here I shall hug you and make you feel better.
Jacob: Mom! I luvs you!
Klaatu: It would appear I was mistaken about the nature of humanity. If this child can hug the woman who cares for him, then perhaps their world leaders will not blow the living shit out of each other with nukes and will cap carbon emissions to stop polar ice melt. I must stop my giant robot locust plague, all because this child embraced this woman.
Rest of world: Yay! Say it. Say it! SAY IT! WTF? He didn’t say it! Even Bruce Campbell said it in Army Of Darkness! We spent the last 100 minutes waiting for him to say it and all we get is a lousy EMP? FFS. The only real consequence is that we’ll need to reboot everything and our watches have stopped. What’s that supposed to teach us? Hey, Klaatu! You SUCK.

Still. Could have been worse. It was better than Sunshine. It didn’t make me want to gouge my eyes out with a rusty nail.

I gave up smoking a few weeks ago.

I know, I know. Right now you are motorboating like a stunned goldfish. “Say WHAT? But you’re one of these triathlon nutcases! You refuse to eat additives! You won’t even mix protein and carbohydrate, FFS! How could someone as obsessed with what you put into your body as you are possibly SMOKE?!”

I’m not going to justify my vices. They’re vices.

Put it this way: I like to exercise discretion over what toxins I allow to enter my body. I believe that everyone has the right and capacity to choose whether or not to poison themselves. I’m not going to turn into one of the evangelical anti-smoking types who won’t even permit a whiff of tar and nicotine to pass her sensitive nostrils. I still drink, after all. I support the legalisation of drugs. On the other hand, I reserve the right to get narked about having to breathe the pollution pumped out by motor vehicles and find it somewhat redundant to ban smoking in train stations when you still have to breathe the PM10s pumped out by the diesel locomotives. Even when I was a smoker I wouldn’t inflict my smoke on someone who didn’t smoke (if we had non-smokers round for a visit I’d go outside for my fag). Your body is your temple, and you get to decide what sort of temple that is. Mine is architecturally sound, demanding in upkeep, very well maintained and rather grubby.

I quit by the simple method of not buying baccy any more. I am a firm believer in the effectiveness of zero resource provision. If you want to stop eating so many crisps or bacon butties, don’t buy crisps and bacon. It’s not hard. It’s much easier not to hand over your money than it is to pull out your wallet. I confess I’d probably have had a harder time if baccy was available at the checkout the way sweeties and magazines are, but it’s not. You have to go to the kiosk and ask someone for it. That’s takes effort.

I strongly feel that giving up anything is much easier if you make it less effort not to have it. If it’s made a “big deal”, something that you do as a New Year’s resolution, or have anniversaries that you celebrate, it’s a hurdle to overcome or, worse, still part of your life. Giving up smoking isn’t something to celebrate simply because celebration turns it into a massive thing and we find massive things harder to do than little things. Giving up should be made as little a thing as possible.

I’m not saying that it is a little thing, not for everyone. I have certain advantages that I’m not going to discuss in detail, but suffice to say I have a non-addictive personality. I realise that for a lot of people giving up smoking is a big deal, and very hard, and I’m not here to belittle their achievements. What I’m suggesting is that, from a psychological point of view, turning it into a big deal in the first place is counter-productive. It should be made as small as possible, so that it seems easier. Small portions are easier to swallow than big ones, after all.

Telly adverts tell us that we need willpower plus substitute chemicals. The commercials for some nicotine replacement products are frankly terrifying. The thought of having to deal with hallucinations of giant cigarettes and little old ladies bearing offensive frozen chickens would put me right off the idea of giving up. I stick a patch on my arm and I’m assaulted by giant imaginary fags in the middle of the night? Fuck that. I’d rather keep my sanity.

Everywhere they look smokers are told that giving up is so hard that they need the support of the NHS and drugs and a variety of other things, and “requires willpower” is in the fine print at the bottom of the page.

I really think this is completely arse about tit. I don’t think it even requires that much willpower. What it requires is that you stop spending money on this particular toxin. What it requires is that you don’t walk up to the kiosk and ask the faintly disapproving man behind the counter to provide you with 25g of Cutter’s Choice and a packet of silver Rizlas before handing over an ailing cephalopod (six quid) and hoping for change.

The television campaigns make out like you need to make an effort. I quit by not making an effort any more.

Part of me wonders why the Government is making quitting into such a big deal that people need to go to support groups and take “therapeutic nicotine”. They are being told that they are embarking on something really difficult. Telling someone that what they are doing is really hard is not the way to encourage positive thinking. Positive thinking is the most valuable tool in success at anything.

I’m not making a big deal out of it. I can’t even remember when exactly I stopped. That, I think, is the best way to tackle this. I’m not putting money in the pockets of the replacement nicotine manufacturers, whose adverts, I would remind the honourable reader, are not there to aid your health but to earn them profit. I’m not obsessing over it. I’ve got through the grumpy stage by treating it as PMT and am currently working out how to deal with not having an appetite suppressant any more because I don’t want to put on weight. Other than that, it’s no biggie, and that’ll be the thing that keeps me off the fags.

It was never that big a deal in the first place. And who goes to any effort over something that’s no big deal?

I went for my first ever spin class last night. Keiser cycling, it’s called. I figured I’d be fine: I ride fixed, FFS. Not only that but I ride fixed on the turbo, when I can’t be arsed going out. It’s just an exercise bike, right?

Wrong.

I went because I had a swim lesson with my coach Zoe (whose website is still broken) immediately after the class, and she was taking the class, so I figured what the hell. Turned up, having ridden there (fixed, natch) at a sprint because I was running late, found a few people already sitting on the machines pushing the pedals round. None of them gave the outward appearance of being super-fit. One guy looked about 65. They asked if I’d done it before. No, I told them.

“You’ve picked the wrong class then,” they chortled. “This is the hard one!”

That’s just great.

It took some fiddling to get the bike set-up acceptable (not right, just acceptable), which was watched with some amusement by the two guys either side of me (the old guy and a guy who looked about 50). I tried explaining that I am used to riding real bikes. They asked if I race. I mentioned triathlon, muttering a bit.

I really shouldn’t have done. They made a big deal about this. All of a sudden I was supposed to breeze through this airily, like a dandelion clock on a sunny summer’s day.

The warm-up was fairly hard. Halfway through the session I’d drunk nearly all my water and it had sweated out into a nasty puddle on the floor underneath me. The gents flanking me were merrily having a conversation over my labouring back, neither of them having so much as broken a sweat, while Zoe yelled at us to go faster and faster in bigger and bigger gears.

“Up two! Minimum 16! 110 – 120! Three… two… one… go!”

The man on my right was singing along to the music.

He was singing along.

It was just sickening.

The pair of them kept offering me a tissue to wipe off the sweat, and would lean over to peer at the electronic display on my cycle every now and again. If I wasn’t up to speed or had failed to select a high enough gear they would mercilessly point this out, as if I were cheating or something. The old bloke, having ascertained that I was wearing an HRM, occasionally asked in a conversational manner how my heart rate was doing.

Come the end my ladybits were rubbed raw from the dodgy saddle and I felt the same way I imagine a Fremen would if he tried to run 10k over dunes in a stillsuit at a 20 minute pace. Climbing into the pool with my core tempature through the roof felt like plunging into the Weddell Sea. Half of me was worrying about leopard seals.

Hmm. I wonder if there are any places left for Monday’s class. The one that’s on just before the running club Zoe thinks I should attend.

She’s a sadistic minx when she knows you can take it.

It has come to my attention that one of the secret endings (that roll after the credits) indicates that Deadpool’s fate might not have been quite so final.

If anyone gets to see that one, please let me know. I’m going to cling to the idea that Weapon XI wasn’t really Wade. It was a different actor, after all.

I liked the suggestion that one of the endings should have been Deadpool leaning in close to camera and telling the audience “Time to go home now.” That would have been awesome, and made up for the disappointment of his depiction in the rest of the film.