Mind you, this is probably only funny if you’ve spent as long reading the shite produced by Safespeed (“cyclists present a greater risk to pedestrians than White Van Man” — I’m not joking) as I have.

Crapspeed: The moon is made of cheese!

C+ Poster: Errr got a source for that?

Crapspeed: It’s on my website:
www.moonmadeofcheese.com

c+ poster: No, sorry, I mean an independent source

crapspeed: You are an idiot. Look, there’s a graph and everything!

www.moonmadeofcheese.com

Oh gods. My ribs hurt. Thanks to YusufAlBinDoonPub for that one.

60 pagans turn up for Solstice at Stonehenge.

On the wrong day.

It’s an easy mistake to make. Pick the first website off google for checking the date and you’ll get an American one. In America the Solstice is on the 21st.

But not in the UK. If I were going to Stonehenge I’d check more carefully.

It is possible to fit a 5 and a quarter kilo Gressingham goose into a Carradice Trax even on a bike with only just enough clearance for the SQR — just. You have to put the bag on the bike before you put the bird in the bag, but it does fit.

It does make getting up steep hills on a 70″ fixed a bit of a trial though, especially when caught by a gust of cross-wind.

Amazing what you can fit on a bike when you put your mind to it.

Remember the C+ jersey? It finally made it back to base and they’ve written an article about it.

Having signed the jersey three times in total, it would have been remiss of them to fail to mention me, I suppose. There’s a picture too, down there in the collection at the bottom. I’ve singled it out for you there in case you were wondering which one it was.

Nice to be reminded of some familiar names. Looks like I left SW England just in time to miss the finishing party. Typical, that is.

I stumbled across this rather sweet screensaver over at Electric Sheep yesterday. I was hunting for a new screensaver, having become bored of my Gorillaz one (I know, I know), and fancied something recursive and fractal. Everywhere I looked the maths junkies were crowing about electric sheep.

It’s a nifty little programme that uses the downtime of your computer to calculate fractals. It then produces the most glorious — utterly mesmerising — animations and you get to vote whether or not you like them. The most popular ones get kept.

This is just the sort of thing I was looking for. Sadly, annoyingly and frustratingly, however, as it was cheering me up no end, the damn thing keeps crashing the internet connection on my BT Home Hub. Now we’re on the most expensive of BT’s packages, at a hefty 40Gb/month download, and I can’t imagine we’ve run up against either our fair use or bandwidth limit. This leaves me thinking it’s probably a port setting or something, only I don’t know enough about that sort of thing to work out what’s causing the hub to keel over.

I suppose I could try stopping it from downloading any more sheep, but that was part of the enjoyment. If anyone has any ideas as to why this would be causing problems (it uses bittorrent to download) then drop me a line. Ta muchly.

OK, so it looks like it’s a problem caused by bittorrent opening too many connections for my Linksys router.

Do I sound like I know what I’m talking about? I don’t really.

Not a lot I can do about that because as far as I’m concerned the Home Hub is a magical blinky box that connects to the wall and sends magic wooey goodness to my computer allowing it to bring me mail and web pages. But apparently not sheep.

Damn.

We got our new monitor. It am black and lovely. It’s a 17″ ViewSonic. Never heard of ’em, don’t really care. It was a reasonably good offer from PC World and is the biggest monitor we’ve ever owned so we’re happy. The tellybox is a tellybox again and I don’t have to kill my knees on the floor to type.

I also got, just cos I wanted to, an optical mouse that glows like a Mathmos. Groovy.

Superman Returns.

I’m not going to bother with plot spoiler warnings. This is because Mr Singer, damn him, has simply rehashed every cliché that has ever been in any other Superman film. So if you’ve seen the other films you’ve already seen this one: you just don’t know it yet.

Let’s start with the opening sequence. Lo, doth it tell us the entire story we all know in one succinct paragraph, ending with the additional information that astronomers discovered the ruins of Krypton and Superman disappeared.

Yay! Excellent. We can sit down and look forward to something completely new because they’ve dispensed with all the old stuff right there and then.

WRONG.

The opening sequence is there only to excuse Ms Lane suddenly being married and with a son. A son? Oh dear gods no. Please tell me we’re not going to end up… oh. We are. We know we are as soon as little tyke puts inhaler to mouth because that is classic pulp movie misdirection of the sort that left the unthinking masses wondering who in the hell Kaiser Sozay was (is it Kevin Spacey’s fault, I wonder? Does he have a thing for that?)

OK, maybe Bryan, bless his cotton socks (at this point I’m still loving him for X2, please remember), is actually going to address the burning issue of what happens when supersperm meets human ovum. That would be novel.

I spend the rest of the movie waiting for Singer to regain his sense of originality. For doing something — anything, dammit — that hasn’t been done before. Even the new landmass shtick has been done before (anyone else remember Otisland?) I couldn’t tell you what I thought of Brandon Routh, he was so vapid and bland. Oh, except: I thought he wasn’t supposed to be a Christopher Reeve lookeylikey. He was. How disappointing.

So here we are. Superman is in love with Lois. Lois is unattainable but still loves Superman. Lex Luthor has evil schemes involving Superman and kryptonite. All the old one-liners are there, cut and pasted from previous movies, and they even do the saving the plane thing. The only thing missing was the flying round the Earth RILLY FAST in order to make time go backwards — and this was a disappointment because by about half an hour through we were hoping to collect the set.

Superman as Salvator Mundi. That hadn’t been done before. There is a good reason for this. It’s sickening. I don’t want religious comparison shoved down my throat by the image of Superman holding the world (the Daily Planet globe in this instance) while Perry says “Jesus Christ Almighty”, or words to that effect.

Other problems, largely to do with casting that probably won’t affect many others…

James Marsden as Richard. All I could think was: “So that’s why you were killed off so early in X3 – what, have you and Bryan got some sort of bum chum thing happening and you had to go with him? Traitor. Get yer bloody Oakleys on and blast the crap out of that bald eejit instead of flouncing around like a wet dishcloth.”

Parker Posey as Kitty, dripping all over the scenes with that bloody dog. She was pulling the same facial expressions as she did in Blade Trinity (impressive given the lack of teeth) with the result that she continually reminded me of Minerva in Hudson Hawk. Every time she oozed into view I had to resist the urge to yell “Bunny! Ball ball!” at the screen.

Other than that we had issues with sound quality, which meant we had to be on constant stand-by with the remote to turn up the whispering and turn down the bangs (we have the sub-woofer on an eggbox, but we could feel some of it through the floor even so, and we live on the top floor). And it was too damn long. Singer did not need to take 2 and a half hours to rehash every single bloody moment from the previous films. We’ve seen ’em all already, Bryan! Get on with it! It got to the point where the standard “plane goes over the edge and disappears out of sight only to reappear in a moment having made a last ditch save” took too long. Frood and I were both exclaiming “Too long! Everyone’s seen Indiana Jones! We know how long that should take!”

Disappointing is not strong enough to describe this film. Added to that is the awful knowledge that he abandoned the X-Men series to make this film. So he left us with the crap that is X3: not to produce an exciting new take on the DC universe, but to produce this pile of pap. Double damn him!

You know, I’d rather watch Ultraviolet again. Seriously. It’s that bad.

Verdict: only good for playing a Superman drinking game on a night when you want to get totally blotto. Our copy will be donated to my parents, who will probably also hate it, but it’ll serve ’em right for foisting The Da Vinci Code on us.

Our fecking PC monitor died last night. I’m currently running the PC through the tellybox (three cheers for Samsung thinking to put a PC port on the back of their tellybox!) This involves moving the PC around and sitting on the floor with the keyboard on my lap – not ideal in the slightest.

Damnit. DAMNIT! Why couldn’t it have waited until after Christmas, when I could have got a new one in the January sales? Now I’m probably going to have to go all the way to Corstorphine to get a new one.

Something has taken an executive decision that today will be a rest day.

Fair enough. Tomorrow swim, Saturday bike and run.

Oh, and today Splinister introduced me to the forum at Runnersworld and I found myself perusing the thread on the Stratford 220 Tri. Entries now open! Hosting the National Triathlon Show 2007!

Oh dear. I think I shall leave that alone until after the Edinburgh Tri. Maybe entries will be closed by then…

To Splinister for introducing me to Pandora.

OK, so they don’t have any Plus Tech Squeeze Box, have never heard of Yellow Magnetic Star and don’t have anything by NES, Alienbreed or Laut Sprecher, but hot damn. I now know that Harvey Danger have a new album (yay!) and I’m being introduced to some funky new tunes.