Tuesday 26 September 2006

Bowie vs Ikea

Milton Keynes first came to prominence in my life when I ordered tickets for David Bowie at Wembley in '84(?). These were Bowie's first concerts for a few years and so ticket demand was high. So high in fact that the three Wembley shows were sold out. However, the Thin White Duke, under the careful mentoring of Harvey Goldsmith, added a further three dates to be performed at the Milton Keynes Bowl to cater for the ticket demand for the Wembley shows.* As is often the way with my luck, I was unable to attend the concerts because I was away on holiday and I wasn't yet at the age when my parents would allow me to stay at home while they had their annual two weeks.

This is a rather long introduction to the main body of the post. My daughter has a very good taste in music. By which I mean she likes a lot of what I like. She will often borrow the Smiths CDs, or I'll find the bulk of my Cure selection missing. Anyhow, I decided it was time to give her a thorough grounding in Mr Bowie. I pulled out Ziggy and Hunky and put them on the player and let the music permeate her ears.

However, I was shocked that she had never heard the wonders of 'Life on Mars', 'Oh you pretty things' and 'The Jean Genie' and many others of the, as I believed, common knowledge catalogue. On discovering this I exclaimed that 'she hadn't lived!' To which she replied that another of her friends had said the same to her, about not having been to the new Ikea in MK.

It seems what qualifies as quality of life is very subjective in MK.


*Notice how over twenty years later MK is still helping out when Wembley can't manage to host some gigs - Robbie

Tuesday 19 September 2006

Call me stupid

Call me stupid but isn't this a little obvious...

Scientific American: Statistical Analysis Reveals New Mortality Predictors

Actually it is a good article as it goes on, but the first paragraph did make me laugh. I half expect a further article to say...

'less than a pint of blood left in the body is a sign of impending death'

'a gaping gunshot wound to the head could prove fatal'

'falling several hundred feet could have damaging affects to the bodies chances of recuperation'

Monday 18 September 2006

Apology to Mr Allen

I heard over the weekend that MK Dons boss Martin Allen used to allow fellow team mates to call him 'mad dog' because they knew him, but he wanted those who don't know him to call him Mr Allen. Therefore, I would like to apologise publicly for calling him 'mad dog' several times at home and in the work place.

I do not want anything to cause offence and upset Mr Allen. For the first time since MK bought and saved* the former Wimbledon footbal club they are doing well. And it is down, in no small way, to the attitude of Mr Allen. His drive and determination has inspired the team to so far lofty heights. They now play like a pack of wolves, devouring the opposition without a care, and they play like a team possessed, like they are crazy gang again; a bunch of mad dogs.

From the bottom of my heart I thank you Mr Allen, keep up the good work.

*I couldn't care less about franchise football or any negative arguments concerning the whole affair. Wimbledon were bankrupt and about to disappear. MK wanted a football team and so buying their postion seemed like a good thing to do. Stand back and feel the flame

Impervious or impertinent

And it came to pass that our car died and we had to spend a while without personal motorised transport in the land of Milton Keynes. Miklton Keynes is a new city and as such has been designed, amongst other things, to be car friendly. Unfortunately this has meant that public transport, specifically, the buses, seems more of an after thought.

Take a simple trip to Milton Keynes central from one of the surrounding small towns/ conurbations/ districts*, just like we did. Get on the wrong (but still right bus) and a trip of 10/15 minutes becomes an adventure of almost an hour as the bus winds its way through seemingly undiscovered tribes of urban citizens [I believe the word chav is often used as a description]. And why would you get on the wrong (but still right bus)? Because you ask the wonderful driver whether the bus goes somewhere, and the answer is more vague than the safety instructions for swimming with Stingrays.

Having spent some time in the centre of Milton Keynes, and discovering the right (correct this time) bus to journey home, you meet the other sort of bus driver that has been bred in MK. Rather than the vagueness expressed in the first leg of our journey, we now experience the brash 'I rule the road' attitude, that is normally associated with taxi drivers or owners of BMWs. At times, despite being surrounded by several tons of metal I felt no safer than negotiating the M25 in a Sinclair C5 (see pic), and I now fear the day I get back in a car and have to share the road with someone like this. I shall be constantly looking out for this rogue driver who seems hell bent on taking others there.
After the above episode, I decided to stay in this weekend.

*delete as and if bothered

Thursday 7 September 2006

Poser 5, free 3d software

If you fancy playing around with 3d software then there is a good freebie offer on at the moment. Poser 5 creates 3d people and animals and allows you to animate them.1 If you pop along to http://www.contentparadise.com and create an account, you can, until the 8th Spetember, add Poser 5 to your shopping cart for the wonderful price of $0:00.

Unfortunately, demand has been so high that the download is taking some time, and often can't be attempted as their download bandwidth is exceded. However, once you have gone through the checkout, the download link stays open indefinitely, so you can return when things have slowed down a bit.

I am sorry that I didn't manage to get the link up sooner for another free download. Those nice guys at http://www.daz3d.com2 were offering Bryce 5 as a free download and so if you wanted to play around with some 'world' creation that would have been quite helpful. As far as I know though, that offer expired on 6th September

1 Poser 5 does much more than this but that is the sort of description you'll get from me.
2 No relation