Kapitano

The Writing on the Wall

In my last week in Bulgaria, I had a camera. In the days between booking the flight out and catching it, I took snaps of whatever caught my eye. Here's some of the graffiti.

You've got a spraycan and an opportunity. What's the first thing you think to draw? What does that reveal about you? Hmmm.

Is this patriotic? Is it about war or peace? Or is it just a nice shape that at one moment appealed to one person with a spare moment?

At least I know what these are about.

They export vodka to us. What do we export to them?

Nazis are wrong in every way. Even their geometry.

Still, some graffitio themes are universal.

There's also a second kind of wallwriting, whose purpose I could could only guess at.

And finally...a scribbled out mistake? A drunken whimsy? Something occult?

Graffiti. A message to everyone and no one. The vandalism of the creative. A way to personalise public space, cultural barometer, and Rorschach blot for the perplexed visitor.

Babyshambles

Babysitting. A task that rarely involves actual babies, and sometimes no sitting at all.

Two little girls - D (aged three or is it four), and J (aged six or is it sixteen). D squealed with delight when I arrived and demanded that we throw pillows at each other. J arrived later, completely ignored me and made straight for a plate of food - which she also ignored after three bites.

They happily watched a Scooby Doo DVD, before deciding what they really wanted was ice cream - with sausages. I spooned out some ice cream which, after some arguments over who should get the bowl with the flower patterns, was much appreciated. I had the flower bowl.

Then J wants to put sugar on hers. Well, why not. And now D wants sugar too. And J wants chocolate so she raids the fridge, dropping several kinds of cheese on the floor before giving up. Then D wants jam on her ice cream so they have a contest to see who can put the most jam in their ice cream before they taste it and never touch the bowls again.

Good thing I'd hidden the chocolate.

D suddenly runs past saying she needs to go to the wee wee. A minute later she plaintively calls for help - she needs some new clothes because hers are all wet. I eventually find some new clothes, which she adamantly refuses to wear because they're pink and silly.

They build a tent of blankets and duvets and sit happily watching Scooby Doo again. I settle down for a read of Bill Bryson, but am soon interrupted by a half-hour stereophonic request for cooked sausages, but with ketchup instead of ice cream.

Okay, okay. I put some sausages under the grill, together with a pastie for me - which promptly goes black and smoking. The young ladies appreciate the two sausages each, but get upset when there isn't enough ketchup for a third helping.

D decides she wanted to go to sleep. But then decides bouncing and shouting on the bed was much more fun than lying on it. We have a pillow fight. She needs the wee wee again, but will only do it with the light off. Then it's back to the TV for Scooby Doo's third outing of the night.

I settle down with Bill Bryson just as the mummies arrive back. D puts some clothes on without fuss and I'm told I didn't need to give them food at all.

I've worked out what TV is for.

Or rather, I've worked out the only worthwhile purpose it can serve nowadays. It's there to be scratched.

You capture streams of video as it's broadcast onto your hard drive, then view them and keep the ones that look useful. You compose a backing track on your laptop, and edit the video (with sound) to go with it. The result is magic.

Dull film clips become scintillating pop videos, faintly silly documentaries become witty commentaries, Old songs become new soundscapes. and just occasionally a politician tells the truth.

It's not a new idea. For as long as there's been enough moving pictures for some to be disposable, people have chopped it up into something that isn't. In fact, I suppose there's been art made from trash for as long as there's been artists and detritus.

Anyway, I'd like to have a go at it. So I've set a PC to randomly record ten minutes at a time from random channels. Once I've got enough to fill a DVD-R, I'll let it mature for a few months while coming up with some music, and then see what sounds and images I can collage together over it.

If you're making videos specifically to go on YouTube, be aware that YouTube recodes all videos it receives to fifteen frames per second. If your original is at the standard US 30fps, that's not so bad because it effectively just chops out every second frame - though it's not that good because...it chops out half your frames.

If your original is in the UK 25fps standard, or the US and UK 24fps standard for movies, then things get a little complicated, and the final form may be a bit jerky.

But of course, if the intended final destination is YouTube, you only need your original to be 15fps, and 320x240 pixels. Smaller files, faster uploads, and fewer recode problems.

Now. If like me you want to fit your images to music, with edit points falling squarely on beats, and if like me you plan on making your own music to do this with, and if like me you get a perverse pleasure from adapting your methods to the oddities of your technology...in other words if you're me...you'll want to arrange the tempo of your music so each bar takes up an exact number of video frames.

Still with me? Well, nevermind. If the frames-per-second of the video divides into the beats-per-second (=BPM/60) of the music without a remainder, then you can edit exactly on the beat. So, here's a list of BPMs that are integral to 15fps. The number in parentheses is the number of frames per beat.

60 (15)
75 (12)
90 (10)
100 (9)
150 (6)
180 (5)
225 (4)
300 (3)

If you're working at 30fps, it looks like this:

60 (30)
72 (25)
75 (24)
90 (20)
100 (18)
120 (15)
150 (12)
180 (10)
200 (9)
225 (8)
300 (6)

At 25fps:

60 (25)
75 (20)
100 (15)
125 (12)
150 (10)
250 (6)
300 (5)

And at 24fps:
60 (24)
72 (20)
80 (18)
90 (16)
96 (15)
120 (12)
144 (10)
160 (9)
180 (8)
240 (6)
288 (5)

If you've read this far, you're probably me. So, hello Kapitano, now you know the tempos to use if you're being kind to video editors. Like yourself.

I'm a Lumberjack and I'm Okay

Monday divided neatly into two halves.

The first half involved watching some bureaucrats filling out some forms, and me putting random squiggles in the box marked "Signature".

I shouldn't be in the country for more than six weeks, and much of that time will be spent arranging a job. However, in order to receive the money I need for the plane ticket to take that job, I have to do a ten week course in how to look for a job.

I have now officially started this course four times, and completed less than three weeks of it. It starts (again) in three weeks time. Unless that is I have a good jobby reason for not attending the first day - like, for instance, having a job interview on that day. If I can't make the first day, I'm not allowed to attend the others.

I'll be dealing with at least a dozen schools, so it's a definite possibility - and some schools want up to three interviews.

Now, if, hypothetically, this happens, the procedure is as follows. One set of bureaucrats send me a letter asking me to confirm in writing what I've already told them in person - that I had an interview. They will want proof that the interview occurred but are forbidden to contact any third parties - such as, for instance, the interviewer, for verification.

I send them whatever evidence there is, and they forward it to a second set of bureaucrats in a different building, who forward it to a third set in a different city, who send me a letter asking for further proof - though they refuse to define what constitutes evidence. They also are not permitted to contact the interviewer. After three months they may or may not check that I responded.

Meanwhile the first set of bureaucrats fill out the same forms again and I put a squiggle on them again, arranging to restart the course a few weeks later. On two occasions the forms have got lost in processing and had to be filled out an additional time.

One week later I leave the country.

Yes, I've been through this before.

The second half of yesterday involved waving a great big chopper around - a real two-hander. There was a lot of pulling and pushing. And long poles of hard wood thrusting upwards.

Yeah okay, I was cutting down some trees.

Tuesday consisted mainly of taking a computer to bits, installing various video capture cards, trying out permutations of cables and adaptors, screaming in frustration, and occasionally reinstalling Windows.

Wednesday was similar, but slightly less enjoyable.

I did not cut down any trees.

I've bought some sunblock. At least I think I have. According to the label it's "Medium Moisturising Sunlotion" which "Protects Against DNA Damage".

So if you've got any mediums that need moisturising, or protection against damage done by DNA, I can help.

Still, that kind of labeling makes a kind of sense - most moisturisers contain sunblock, so sunblock is marketed as souped up moisturiser.

Tonight I've been asked to do some babysitting. This means the baby sits on me. I've asked, and it's definitely that way 'round - even when they're being too loud.

Hot!

I've got sunburn.

I've also got blisters, splinters, cuts, and nettle stings.

This is the result of a few hours "honest work" in the "open air", which is part of the "healthy lifestyle".

Other people spend their lives wanting to be rich, trying to turn the clock back, regretting a single mistake, fighting for a cause, or just waiting for their lives to begin.

I spend mine being slightly annoyed.

My dad's running his car on vegetable oil.

He's not doing it for ecological reasons - he doesn't know the difference between CO2 and H2SO4, and probably thinks a carbon footprint is something left by a coalminer's boot. No, it's just that right now it's cheaper to buy a big can of unspecified "Vegetable Oil" from food wholesalers and mix it half-and-half with petrol from a station...than to buy twice as much petrol.

But then, dad always did think the best way to gain pounds was to save pennies. Our diet was always whatever's on special offer at the supermarket.

Just at the moment, between an oil shortage and a food shortage, a very few people can use one as the other. In six months I don't it'll be cheaper anymore.

I do know someone slightly who's converted their car to work entirely on all manner of edible oils, and his solution to climate change is for everyone in the world to do the same. But he thinks it's a mad idea for everyone to ride bicycles instead.

I know someone else who founded an ecological lobby group to push for things like carbon emission reduction tax breaks. His slightly Machiavellian idea was that it was only when such half measures had been tried and definitively proven themselves ineffective that the necessary radical measures would be considered by governments.

He got squeezed out of his own group for being too radical.

Whenever I hear someone on TV talking about "The Climate Change Debate" they seem to be ambiguous about which climate change question they're engaging with - "What should we do about climate change?" or "Is the climate changing at all?". Discussions about the former tend to drift into the latter.

So the world is doomed because the human race is too mad and silly not to destroy it. But nevermind, because I had sex tonight. In a garage. For the first time in (my god!) three months. It was meant to be last night but, well. he was delayed or something.

I really must dig out those old cricketing kneepads. Cramp is, uh, cramping my style. You know you're getting old when you want to stop halfway through a shag because it's unergonomic.

And when you start thinking of words like "unergonomic" halfway through a shag.

What am I going to call this post? Something that ties together several of it's themes. Oh I know!

House

Nothing much to report today, but I did stumble on a story/monologue that I wrote eight or nine years ago. So, here it is.

I was in this...house, the other day. And someone had wallpapered over all the doors and windows. So if you wanted to move...between the kitchen and the bathroom...or the bedroom and the garage...you had to go...under the floorboards.

And if you wanted to go upstairs you had to be careful. Because someone had installed a moat and drawbridge...halfway up.

But that wasn't the strangest thing about this house. Because everyone in it...was a retired comedian...from one of those old music halls...that you only ever see...in black and white. So every time you made a cup of tea...you did a song and dance about it. And every time you wanted to make love...you said so...in a loud...stage...whisper.

And I was feeling right at home in this old house, which had a giant beanstalk growing in the garden...and TV in every room. And I was getting along fine...because the people were my kind of people. Until they told me...that I was the guest of honour...and it was my job ...to give the after dinner speech...

...in honour if the patron...

...whose name no one could quite remember.

I was watching this film. And every time the hero slapped his thigh, the female lead broke into tears.

Or was it the other way around....

I was talking, to a friend of a friend, about the problem of quantum singularities in space-time, and I said to them, "Why is it, whenever anyone promises to telephone you at eight thirty, they never do it, until nine fifteen.

And why is it, you can never remember the names of all seven dwarfs."

And they said, "It's simple. We're all part of a single creature, feeling it's way towards cosmic truth. And sometimes it takes a wrong turning, and we all have to backtrack a little, to set it back on the right path."

And I said, "Okay then, why is it that whenever you want to open a new tin of soup, the tin opener is never where you left it. And why can you never find any paperclips when you need them."

And he said, "God has been watching you since before you were born, and he will be there the moment you die. Every misfortune and each little setback is just God's way of telling you to be patient."

And I said to him...

"The truth is music played on instruments that make no sound. Thought is a blind man guarding an invisible treasure. And language...is a virus from outer space."

And then I noticed. That I was talking to the bathroom mirror.

The Life and Opinions of Kapitano Shandy

I've been starting to write a lot of posts, but not finishing them over the last few days - and so not posting. Rather than knock them into shape or throw them away, here's the posts what I did wroted, as they stand.

I seem to have been quite opinionated lately.

Friday.

"Mayor of London" sounds like an honourary title with no power. Unfortunately it comes with quite a lot of power, which until yesterday was in the hands of Ken Livingstone - arch-sellout and one of those politicians who's always been a former socialist. Everyone knows that in the past he was a good principled leftist - but if you pick any point in his career, it was in some indeterminate period before that.

Now the mayor is Boris Johnson - arch-buffoon and rightwing muppet. This is the man who was invited on chatshows because he was guaranteed to be ignorant, offensive and opinionated - but it was funny because he was harmlessly silly. Now he's a big voice in the capital city.

Sometimes it's nice when the boss is a blithering idiot, because then the sensible people a few layers down can actually make things work without interference. Unfortunately those below Boris don't want to make things work - they just want to make money.

There was supposed to be a serious challenge from a genuinely left candidate, Lindsey German, but initially promising public support just evaporated. Seeing as I'm somewhere in the Russian-doll-like structure of left groups she represented, I'll have to go to some dispirited meetings to discuss the disaster. While avoiding words like "disaster" and "meltdown".

Saturday.

SkyOne reimagined Battlestar Galactica - as an angsty soap opera. The BBC reimagined Doctor Who - as an angsty soap opera. The movie reimaginings of Spiderman, Fantastic Four, The X-Men and now Ironman are full of handsome youngsters with superpowers getting caught up in their tedious emotions.

Now SkyOne are trying to reimagine Blake's 7, and I for one hope they fail. B7 Enterprises tried the same thing and got bogged down in egos and truely abysmal scripts about telepathic badgers, before eventually turning out some audio adventures that, astoundingly, were quite good.

SkyOne also recently tried to remake The Prisoner recently, an endevour which thankfully fell to ego clashes before the abysmal scripts could even be written. You think I'm being unfair? Then imagine The Prisoner - ambiguous, enigmatic, left-leaning with zero love interest - filtered through the puerile minds that gave us Roswell High and Mutant X.

There's a reason all these old shows and comics are being reprocessed. It's because those in the entertainment business are cowards with no imagination. They're afraid to take risks, afraid of anything new and afraid to pitch above the lowest denominator.

There's also a reason why these new-for-old products are uniformally crap. And it's the same reason.

Sunday.

Item on the news: There is a "huge number" of illegal immigrants in the UK - "up to 57,000". And it would cost "the taxpayer" five million pounds to deport them all.

Some thoughts on this, in no particular order:

* The take-home message: "There's an army of them, they steal our wages, then they rob us again just so we can get rid of them."

* Supporting a faltering economy by removing its supply of invisible labour is...an innovative approach to economics.

* Five million pounds is a tiny amount. It would be a large personal fortune for the taxpayer, whoever that is, to pay. In governmental terms, it's a droplet in the ocean.

* "Up to 57,000" doesn't mean "57,000", just like "you could win up to a million dollars" doesn't mean "If you win you'll get a million dollars".

* 57,000 is one in a thousand people in the UK. Now, if you're extremely gregarious you might know a hundred people. If each of them knows a hundred people, with no overlap, then you might know one person who knows one person who's an illegal immigrant. Truly a mighty army.

* Some civil servant was instructed to quantify the unquantifiable - to count the number of people who aren't in a database. So most likely they pulled the figure of "maybe one in a thousand" out of the air, and it became the official figure.

* We're now casually talking about "deporting them all".

* This country stinks. My instinct is to leave, and in a few years if the smell has faded somewhat, then think about coming back. Maybe.

Monday.

Today I got covered in shit and cut my wrists.

The shit was dried pigeon poo, covering the neglected books and furniture I was carting up and down stairs. The wrists are from stray metal nails in some of the furniture I (rather gleefully) smashed up with a hammer to make it fit in the skip.

The less smashworthy furniture was taken away by a white van that happened to be passing. A local landlord saw by chance that we were throwing stuff out on the street for anyone to take if they wanted it...and somewhat eagerly offered to take it all. He bought us canned beers too.

The fellow obviously thought he was ripping off some gullible rich folk. When he tries to install the furniture in whatever property he's renting out to nonrich folk, he may change his mind.

Tuesday.

A day of quiet house-sitting while my parents relax in their little holiday cottage, munch on a picnic, walk the dogs, and doze.

A day for getting an OD of TV on TVOD, including three CSIs (of the Los Angeles flavour), two Waking The Deads, and Derren Brown's Trick or Treat - in which Brown appeared to teach an ordinary man to memorise facts from hundreds of books in a week. From what was shown, he used a hybrid of Howard Berg's "Mega Speedreading" (with its use of spaced fingers as an eye guide) and Paul Scheele's "Photoreading" method (with its notion of letting all the info sink into the subconscious, which then regurgitates the relevant facts in cryptic form when needed).

Now, Berg's method does work, but needs years of constant practice. Scheele's method, so far as I know, simply doesn't work - the only evidence I've seen is both positive and anecdotal, which is a sure sign of a con.

So how did Brown or the man do it? Brown says he doesn't use stooges - but he also says he uses NLP, which is obviously untrue because NLP has always been a dismal failure. Not surprising, as it's based on Dianetics and EST, with sprinklings of misunderstood early chomskyian grammar and cod freudian psychology.

Derren Brown is a showman and a magician - doubly untrustworthy. If he were a politician too he'd be off the scale.

He demonstrated the effectiveness of his memorisation technique by instantly committing to memory the positions of a thousand or so coffee beans - so he could spot the single bean added when he wasn't looking. As I recall, the world record for memorising the sequence of a deck of cards (using mnemonics) is twenty seven seconds. So either Derren brown is several orders of magnitude better than the world record holder...or it's a magic trick.

Most magic is insultingly simple, and the simplest of all is to use a stooge, and the simplest way to convince viewers you're not using a stooge is to lie about it, just like you lie about everything else in your act.

Don't Rain on May Parade

Happy Mayday.

Also known as International Workers Day. If you're pagan it's the Festival of Beltane, or the Summer Solstice, and if you're German too it's Walpurgis Night. If you're American it's probably Labour Day, unless you're a bit mad, in which case it's Loyalty Day.

It's got a christian meaning too but no one can remember what it is. That doesn't seem to matter - it still gets celebrated.

It's also local election night all over the country, but that doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

I spent yesterday lugging unwieldy furniture up and down stairs, heaving sacks of rubble into a skip, and on one occasion dropping a large bag of bricklike books onto my foot.

I spent today talking to bureaucrats.

On balance, I prefer yesterday, which I why I agreed today to do yesterday again tomorrow.

Another name from the past contacts me. Aimee, who I met at university, and who sat through several weeks of me trying to teach them esperanto...is now an esperantist!

She's also the author of the online equivalent of keeping a list of things to do in your pocket - with the benefits that you don't have to decipher your own handwriting and you can't accidentally send it through the wash. Which always happens to my post-it notes.

She's looking to practice her esperanto and renew our acquaintance. Sounds good to me.

Iuj amikecoj daurxas, iuj mortas, kaj iuj dormas dum jaroj. Oni neniam scias kiuj faros kiun.

How large is your XP?

On installation, WIndows XP is about 1.3GB. But half an hour's work removing unnecessary services, components and backups gets it down to 1 gig. Some more work with tools like XPLite and you can have a fully functional XP of 800MB - especially if you remove the driver and DLL caches after installing all your software.

With some more tweaking, in particular the removal of networking capabilities, you can have a 600MB installation that can't access the internet, but can do most of the other things you'd want to do on a computer. If you're devious (or you use nLite), you can get an XP of 400MB that's fast and good for computers dedicated to one or two tasks - like being a Digital Audio Workstation - though it might be unstable.

After many trials (and a few tribulations) I've settled on an 850MB installation, that with a judicious choice of low-RAM-and-CPU-usage software, turns my old 800GHz 1024MB laptop into a workable DAW that can also play movies, read email and do accounting.

Not that I have any money to account. If I did, I'd get a better laptop.

Obviously these estimates don't include the actual programs, which are on a separate partition. Speaking of which, one trick I hit on: Set up a fixed-size page file on its own little partition. Reduces fragmentation and seems to increase speed.

As an addendum: How many versions of Vista are there? Six? Ten?

Actually there's just one. You pay different prices for the Basic, Premium, Business or whatever version, but what you're actually paying for is the activation code. The fifteen gigabytes of bloatware is identical for all editions - which means if you buy the Starter edition and enter a code for the Enterprise edition...you get the Enterprise edition.

Clever, eh?

Letterbox Format

Every year or so, I get to walk around the maze of towerblocks in one of the more depressed parts of Portsmouth, pushing leaflets through letterboxes. In this way, I do my sterling bit for progressive politics at local election time.

This year, in return for two cups of tea and a mars bar, I got reacquainted with a few hundred front doors - some of which had the same broken washing machines and empty wooden boxes outside as last year. I was assisted by a lady comrade who, if nonstop complaining in a piercing voice were an olympic sport, would be a worldbeater.

After two hours she casually mentioned that she never leaflets doors which look like they might have fierce dogs behind them. I couldn't think of anything to say for quite a long time after that.

Late night channel hopping.

The final ten minutes of The Matrix Reloaded. I've never seen the film, but I've now seen the final ten minutes twice. Keanu Reeves - the only actor who's more talented in CGI. Probably the only actor in Hollywoodland who could make snogging River Phoenix boring.

Fifteen minutes of "Hot Shots Part Deux". You might think that a film about a retarded US president sending a series of disastrous missions into Iraq for no clear reason might be prescient, satirical, and even funny. And you'd be wrong on all counts.

Ten minutes of an episode of Ironside. Featuring a mad murderous Bulgarian, threatening a melange of Lenny Bruce and George Burns.

Five consecutive snippets from different "comedy banter" shows. Seen them all before.

Do you remember that episode of The X-Files where Mulder swaps bodies with a man from Area 51? I saw it the night before I left for the country of mad murderous Bulgarians - and it was on again tonight.

Ten seconds of "Sex Change Soldier", a sensitive and moving documentary about the first British soldier to go through gender reassignment. And not an exploitative pile of portentous drivel at all. Honest.

An advert for catfood, whose main selling point was that it contains anti-oxidants. I think they should make homeopathic catfood with omega three and macrobiotic provitamins

Another comedy banter show. Except it turned out to be one repeated from an hour earlier.

Today's word is Lomography. Taking photos of whatever's in front of you with a cheap camera, and later seeing how the fringing, blurring, wrong colours and bad technique all combine to make an arresting image. It's the old idea of executing a hazy plan in the heat of the moment using wholly inadequate technology, and letting serendipity turn it into art.

My thanks to C for reminding me of the notion, and to my parents for providing me with a camera which can be badly misconfigured. I'm going to give it a go - party as a break from trying to get these dratted computers to work. Sadly, when you apply lomographic technique to a laptop, all you get is a paperweight.

Results soon.

Back to Shite, Back to Reality

Nothing very interesting happened this week.

Well not to me anyway - I've spent the last six days failing to turn a series of obsolete laptops into portable recording studios.

You know how it is - you use every trick you've picked up or invented, you throw all your intelligence and all your time at a problem, and finally conclude that some problems can't be solved with tricks, intelligence and late nights. These are the problems you solve with money, as in "you spend your money on a new laptop and throw the old one away".

If I had some money I might do that.

Oh, and I've had a stinking cold too.

The UK has continued its slide into the abyss in my absence.

The police have taken to raiding curryhouses and Chinese resteraunts (plus the homes of their owners) at odd hours, "looking for illegal migrant workers". Perhaps if they raided expensive hotels, farms and any business that has a cleaning staff they might find some. I can't think why that hasn't occurred to them.

Back in Bulgaria, none of the English speakers I spoke with wanted to live in the UK. They used to - they'd learned English to find a new life, either in the UK (because of its nice culture) or the USA (because of its vibrant economy). But not now. The economies are sinking into the toilet, and the cultures are way past the U-bend.

Everyone knows now what revolting people the Brits have turned into, and the former students of English now want German or Spanish. Which is ironic really, because Germany and Spain are even more racist than us.

There were still a few reasons to favour the UK, one of which was its food - cheap, plentiful and even reasonably cosmpolitan. But now that's gone. Courtesy, we are told, of simultaneous worldwide shortages of rice and wheat, caused by newly pesticide resistant insects.

So, my plans are unchanged, but a little more urgent: Find a TEFL job somewhere exotic and stay there for a year. Finding a job takes a week; Filling out the paperwork to go there takes a month.

England, My England

Tea in England now tastes very strong to me, but I still drink it without milk.

The night before I left, Tania invited me for a meal at her apartment with her boyfriend. A traditional affair, beginning with salad, then steak with potatoes, and finishing off with a wonderfully strange quiche-like concoction. It's made with eggs, yogurt and, erm, lemonade, spread between layers of pastry. Each course served with freeflowing vodka.

Family is important in Bulgaria, each village is a loose bundle of overlapping extended families, and family ties remain when villagers commute or relocate to the nearest town. So it wasn't a surprise when Tania's aunt and uncle dropped in, leading to five of us squashed around a small table, noshing, drinking and jeering at the nation's politicians on the television.

Bulgarians have an easygoing contempt for authority figures - which is reciprocated. There can't be many places in the UK where you entertain your family with the collection of political scratch videos on your computer.

I got a lift back to the apartment to finish packing and grab a little sleep, then in what felt like minutes later woke at 0400, took a shower, said goodbye to Wednesday, and locked the door for the last time.

I'd only met Wednesday two weeks before, when she was a day or two away from death by starvation. Now she was twice the size, full of health and energy, and had got used to my coming and going. She hadn't been whining from behind the door when I left her on her own, or rushing about to greet me with big licks when I got back. But this time, she whimpered.

The coach left for Sofia at 0600, taking two hours. Looking out of the window, there were vast stretches of green land, with hills and the occasional lake in the distance, and further in the distance, snow capped mountains - all interrupted at random intervals by crumbling, rusted villages and isolated shacks with fallen-in roofs.

There was a few surprising sights. Factory chimneys with no factory attached, and a miniature castle with proudly fluttering flag, like something out of Walt Disney - though it's really the other way around.

Sofia is like a compressed version of London. Smaller space, more traffic, smaller cars, more accidents, more and smaller busses with more people crammed inside, and tiny booths with foot-square windows where you buy tickets to ride in them. I spent ninety minutes standing in two busses, annoying half the passengers with my luggage.

As with all centrally planned cities, the planning was done by idiots. In this case, communist idiots - there's a reason Bulgarians sometimes use the adjectives "Communist" and "incompetent" interchangeably. You might think it would be sensible to have a bus route that goes from the national coach station to the airport - but no, the planners evidently thought that anyone jetting into Bulgaria would only want to go to the palatial Hotel Pliska, and then presumably back again.

And then, the same planners - now called "former communists" - decided it would be good for travellers to buy their airline tickets at terminal one, and then take a minibus to the terminal two, which is where all the flights are now.

It may not have been planned that there was some problem with the computers and it took me forty five minutes to buy a ticket - and another ten to confirm that yes, it was possible to buy it in Bulgarian currency.

Security was interesting. I was asked to take off my belt so the metal buckle wouldn't set off the scanner - which didn't seem to notice the ferrous metal in my keychain. Half of us in the queue had to take off our jackets, and a different random half had to take off our shoes. I think my coat looked suspiciously Serbian, but my shoes didn't.

In all, I had to show my passport four times and my ticket twice to get on the plane. Once in flight the attendants (who were of course all gay as pink monkeys on laughing gas) tried to sell the cramped passengers food, drink and, er, toy pink monkeys as souvenirs.

If you wanted to pay the sky high (duh!) prices, they accepted "dollars, euros and all major European currencies" - but not money from the country they fly from. You can also pay by debit card, if you can present your passport. Now, I might be missing something, but if you're already on the plane....

After three hours of flight and one of walking and waiting, the people at Gatwick wanted to see my passport again, at two different desks. After that it was all plain sailing. All I had to do was spend my English money on a day return train ticket to Portsmouth - because a return is one third the price of a single ticket. Maybe the British rail system was designed by Communists.

I then spent the next four hours jumping between various trains, eventually finding one that (a) went to where the animated information board said it was going, (b) didn't go straight back to Gatwick before turning south and (c) didn't mysteriously split into two trains going in opposite directions halfway.

Looking out of the window, green fields but no mountains. And a miniature Walt Disney castle with fluttering union jack.

I'd wondered what emotions I'd feel on returning to my home town. In the event what I felt was:
* It looks exactly the same
* I'd forgotten how annoying the locals were
* My feet hurt
* These bags are rather heavy.

I called my (former) boss, giving him my much rehearsed lines "I resign, I quit, I leave your employ, I'm gone" and "Your dreams are a little mad, but your schemes to make them come true are a lot mad". He was...very understanding. That's not "understanding" as in "He understood everything I was trying to say" - because he didn't. He didn't understand that I'd left because his vacillating fantasism made working for him impossible, and he didn't understand that everyone else who'd worked for him eventually left for the same reason, and he didn't understand that the whole plan to set up the best language school in the world in a poor town that doesn't want one is moderately problematic. He also didn't understand that I wouldn't be coming back - he said he'd wait for me to realise I wanted to work for him.

No. He was understanding as in "I don't think badly of you and I'm not angry".

I was intending to go home to my parents - but instead went to the opening of an art exhibition to drink lots of red wine with some pleasantly surprised friends, then followed them to a slightly pointless but enjoyable local election hustings debate - my friends are political types, remember - and then best of all they bought me drinks in the pub.

And so finally to home, and bed, and instant sleep, for a full twenty four hours. To wake up in a place which is highly familiar, but now slightly strange.

Well, a bit stranger than before, anyway.

And So It Ends - You Have Forgotten Something

There's always something. Some little detail that you forget about, that crops up when you think everything else is sorted out, that means you have to change your plans completely. And afterwards you think "How could I have missed that?"

In this case, it's paperwork. It takes a minimum of two weeks (read: a month) to sort out visas and travel documents and work permits to start a job in China. The process involves the school sending you a formal invitation through the post, you taking the invitation to the Chinese embassy in the capital, them sitting on it for "three days", you making second visit when they confirm they've found the rubber stamp...and then booking your flight.

And somehow I'd forgotten that. Seeing as I need to be gone in under five days, it makes the timing a little tight, Though in a way it's lucky because I've been advised against going to China at all.

So the new plan is: Go home. This involves waiting until I'm paid (today), then using the cash to purchase the cheapest plane ticket I can find that'll get me to Gatwick before my nominal employer trundles into town.

Actually he will literally trundle because he's driving a truck across Europe. The flight...is tomorrow. After I get the cash in my treacherous palm, I'll pick up the phone, do my impersonation of Patrick MacGoohan, and say "I resign!"

After that, look for another teaching job. While fielding the cretinoid schemes of the jobcentre, and modestly accepting all the "welcome home" drinks everyone will cheerfully buy me.

Some sex would be nice too. I'm a bit overdue.

Oh yes, the net connection is back up and working fine.

One other thing went wrong - I took over a hundred photos of the sights, and managed to lose them. This could be my subconscious urging me to forget everything that's happened over the last two months, or it could just be Kapitano forgetting things again. I favour the latter hypothesis.

I've written a letter of resignation. Well I say that - it's more a two page rant addressed to my boss.

Short version: "You're a nice enough guy but you're a damn fool. You vacillate, you answer every question with a soup of equivocation, you're a deluded fantasist, and you never listen. Sometimes I'll tolerate these things in friends, but it's suicide to tolerate them in an employer."

So. In case I don't get to post before leaving: Goodbye Bulgaria. The time I've spent with you has been...er, time...spent.

There will be a Short Delay

Bulgaria's premier ISP is Optilink. And it's being upgraded (repaired). Which means, for the duration of the upgrade, however long that is, my net access is, shall we say, restricted.

I can send email, but seemingly not with attachments. Google's main search is disabled, as are the URLs of other search engines. This makes applying to new schools rather difficult and negotiating with those already in contact with me...a little more roundabout. Documents now go via FTP.

It is of course inevitable that, exactly when I most need good net access, I don't have it.

Still, at least I can blog about it.

I can't look at any blogs, but I can post.

Bunking Off School

Another fifteen schools emailed with my CV - this time all in China.

So far only Hampson have got back to me. They telephoned...and said they'd call again. It seems they'll offer me anything to make me sign on for a year - except a decent salary.

China has language schools the way Britain has pubs, Bulgaria has drugstores and the Gaza Strip has craters. There are companies whose sole purpose is to mail out your CV to their list of schools. Payment is usually good - two to five times a living wage - but job security and employee protection is immensely variable.

The other main country where schools proliferate is South Korea.

Okay, Hampson did call again. Twice. Once from the owner's wife, and once from their only native English speaker. And that one was wierd. He answered my questions, sort of, in a perfunctory way - but honestly, the man sounded like he'd been drugged. Slow, dreamy, uninterested, with long pauses.

There's something rather wrong about that school. I sent them an email saying I couldn't work for them because their wages weren't enough for me to pay off my debts - which is even true.

Shit.

The boss was supposed to wait six weeks before coming over here guide us with his, shall we say, scattershot style of leadership. This would give me enough time to arrange a job somewhere else in the world before resigning.

Now he's planning to come in three days. Or possibly tomorrow. Which means...I may have to tell quite a lot of lies. I could just walk out, fly back to England and find a job to fly out to from there - there's the funds, just about, but if I did that I'd arrive bankrupt. Flying from Bulgaria to (say) China is better.

Deal with that tomorrow, somehow. Now I'm going home. Home to...

A dog that won't stay still long enough for a photograph.

At least until she calms down.

Or goes to sleep.

And yes, Tania has promised me she'll find Wednesday a good family, whenever and wherever I go.

We Gotta Get Out of This Place

I've often thought that you could tell a story just by printing out the contents of someone's "Sent Items" email folder. And because the items are listed with the most recent at the top, you'd be telling it in reverse chronological order.

First a brief note from a woman telling her husband she'll meet him at the airport. Then a longer but essentially contentless letter saying she's fine, but there's not much to do and she can't wait for him to come home. Then a long angry rant sent to another man, followed by a message that's just a time and a place, and then something much more affectionate.

After that, a chatty letter telling us a little about her, and a confirmation note sent to register with a dating site. Finally, a letter to a female friend about how she's missing her man in spite of how impossible he's been lately, and a "hope you arrived safely" message to her husband.

Call it "Pamela @ home".

Well, my story begins today with twenty CVs sent to various countries. And I suppose it probably ends with a similar mailout four months ago. Oh I haven't left yet, and it's just possible I won't, but with luck I'll know tomorrow.

One school in particular caught my eye. Hampson, 50km from Prague. It's run by Pavel Sudík and his wife as center for intensive immersion courses, with lots of new-agey teaching methods involving relaxation, music and fun as aids to learning.

They also do a line in corporate firewalking. That's not a metaphor - they arrange events for corporate types to walk on hot coals to get them in touch with their inner adventurer or some such.

It's touchy-feely, but seemingly in quite a good way, and the students seem to love it. But there's a couple of things that set of alarm bells in my head.

The first is money. They pay CZK120 (120 crowns) per hour taught - thats GBP3.8, EUR4.7 or USD7.5. That's not CZK120 per hour employed, it's CZK120 per hour you teach - so if it's a national holiday and there's no students, you get nothing.

If you do get paid, assuming 25 hours teaching a week, it's close to a survival wage - not much in surplus or savings. They were oddly silent on things like paid holidays and employee rights - and after a bit of research I've found the most astounding reason why. Yes.

The second thing is just how eager they are to have me work for them - they responded to my CV in minutes, which is good, but practically offered me the job there and then.

And when I asked about reimbursement of air fares, they said it's not usual policy but...they'd do it for me. Just like that. And they'd love it if I could start right away - that's "right away" as in "tomorrow". Literally.

They didn't check references or qualifications...and they don't feel the need for an interview.

If a complete stranger running a business wants to do me that many favours, I have to ask whether they're really doing me any favours.

There's a short discussion of the school here.

A Look Around

Things you see on a short walk to the supermarket...

This is the building where I work.

And this is the primary school opposite.

Some things here are quite old.

And some things are quite a bit older.

New houses are being built all the time.

Though old houses could do with a bit of upkeep.

Sometimes it's a bit difficult to tell which is which.

These are everywhere.

Other things are getting quite common too.

There is a bus service.

This is the business venture behind the supermarket.

And this is the supermarket.

Inside I took a few snaps just to see how long it would take some managerial arsehole to tell me to stop. It took about one minute, but the arsehole got a security guard to do it for him.

The guard is a full time teacher of history who gets enough money to live on by walking up and down aisles in a red company jacket. He's been learning English for four years, and is at upper intermediate level. And he thinks rules about photography are idiotic too.

We walked around the market, comparing the German influence on English with the Turkish influence on Bulgarian, discussing East European history, and chatting about his plans to move to America - the UK would be preferable, but the racism makes it extremely unappealing. Occasionally I bought some food on his recommendation.

Bulgaria isn't so foreign after all.

School Report

I think I prepared quite a good lesson today. It's about indirect speech, also known as reported speech.

If you say "Bill said "I love you"", that's a direct quotation. If you say "Bill told me that he loved me", that's indirect speech. See how the present tense "love" becomes the past tense "loved"?

In English you've got four basic sentence shapes for declarative sentences in the present tense, and another four for the past. If you want to report a present sentence, you shift it to the corresponding past - "Bill gates is the antichrist" becomes "Kapitano said Bill gates was the antichrist", "It's been an interesting year" becomes "Kapitano said it'd been an interesting year", and so on.

If the sentence you want to report is already in the past, you don't change the tense - "The emperor wrote hakius" becomes "Kapitano said the emperor wrote haikus", "Stocks had been falling" becomes, rather boringly, "Kapitano said stocks had been falling".

Ah. But. If the reported sentence is in the past simple, you have the option of putting it into the past perfect, so "Gore Vidal ate ice cream" could become either "Kapitano said Gore Vidal ate ice cream" or "Kapitano said Gore Vidal had eaten ice cream".

Fairly simple though. Unless of course...you're reporting speech that has just happened, or that you think refers to states that are still true, in which case you've got a load more options:

"I'm going slightly mad" becomes "He says he's going slightly mad" or "He said he's going slightly mad" or "He said he was going slightly mad".

"Apes are descenced from men" becomes "Roddy McDowall says are descended from men", or "Roddy McDowall said apes are descended from men", or "Roddy McDowall said Charlton Heston was his ancestor".

I put together a little story/test to demonstrate the simpler transformations, and I'm vaguely proud that it's slightly readable as a story while still showing the grammar:

A famous actor is ill in hospital, and a journalist interviews him. This is what he tells her:

"I'm happy here. I'm feeling very tired right now, but I've been tired many times before. I've been thinking about my next movie!

I acted in some very bad films when I was young, but I was always looking forward to the next one. I'd acted in small films, but I was getting bored with that, so I said to myself "I want to be in bigger films!"

I'll leave this hospital soon. I'll be glad to be out of here. Next year, I'll have forgotten these tubes and needles, and I will have been acting in a new film for six months."

Ten years later the actor has just died, and the journalist writes his obituary article. She remembers what he said to her in hospital, and she reports it. What does she write?

Answer:
"He said he was happy there. He said he was feeling very tired, but that he'd been tired many times before. He told me he'd been thinking about his next movie.

He also said he'd acted in some very bad films when he was young, but that he was always looking forward to the next one. He said he'd acted in small films, but he'd been getting bored with that, so he'd said to himself that he wanted to be in bigger films.

Then he told me he'd leave that hospital soon and that he'd be glad to be out of there. He said that next year he'd have forgotten those tubes and needles, and he would have been acting in a new film for six months."

It would have been an even better lesson if the student had turned up.

Okay, there was a mixup over time, but Veli did turn up. Two surprises - first, he polished off the above lesson in twenty minutes, and second he turns out to be only sixteen. Evidently a very well nourished sixteen.

He brought along some specimen exam papers, which we went through. My god. To pick an example, what's wrong with this sentence?

"Whether late nineteenth century classic literature should have taught in schools has proven to be a controversial issue"

Okay, it's not too difficult for native speakers to see that it should be "...literature should be taught in...". But why? Why is "have" wrong and why is "be" correct? How would you explain it?

"Should be taught" is an agentless present-simple passive describing a stable, ongoing situation constituted by repeated action. But it actually took me about a minute to see that. The sentence with "have" is in fact perfectly grammatical - just with a fantastical meaning.

Anyway, I'm happy because my package arrived from England. Containing a rather nice camera for recording the local sights, plus extras of a lead, collar and anti-flea pills for Wednesday.

So, I'm off to snap the local colour. Just as soon as I've figured out which buttons to push.

Straw Poll

Everything is a little confused but here's a breakdown:

* I was told there would be a great demand for my teaching services. So far I've given three lessons to one student. I was then told demand would pick up after the school vacation, but in truth no student wants to take on extra work in the final term, when they're also revising for final exams.

* If there is demand, it would mostly happen at the start of the next school year - which is in September. Five months away.

* The boss has all sorts of plans. These include further building work in the office, more building work in the classroom, the setting up of a second classroom, filling it with computers with the latest (legal) software, running IT and accountancy courses, building a summer school at another site, digitising existing textbooks and writing new ones from scratch.

* Current balance in the school bank account: Zero.

* The one reliable man we've found to do the building work won't be around consistently over the next few months, and won't do any more work till he gets paid for the last lot. Some of which he'll have to do again because he cut corners because we couldn't pay for materials to do it properly.

* The boss says, seeing as I'm feeling down here, he can fly me back to England for a few weeks to do some computer work for him - mainly making PDFs of textbooks, and instructing him in DTP.

* After which he expects me to fly back to Bulgaria and teach.

Now. What do you think I should do?

I have a week to decide.

Time to Think

Wednesday likes to chew things. I've watched enough puppies grow up to know this is normal, but I'm a bit stuck on how to stop her nipping me. It's not painful, but when she's bigger a habit of playfully biting people may just be a problem.

The traditional way of training is to give a sharp "No!" and snatch your hand away whenever the dog tries to bite - but she just seems to think it's a game, tail merrily wagging as she snaps her teeth at my arm or ear. She is a hunting dog I suppose, but hunting dogs are supposed to be highly trainable.

Unless anyone's got any better ideas, I'll just have to hope she cottons on. And get her a stick of something chewable.

There are periods in my life when things which make me happy - like getting another email from the fellow I knew slightly at school - make me very happy. Until something happens to make me unhappy, which makes me very unhappy.

It's always around this time of year, and I really wish it would stop. Because, with life in general being the way it always is, there's lots of little depressing things around that, magnified, make me think I can't cope. And there's a few bright sharp points where something nice happens and I'm all sunny and optimistic.

Five years ago at this time I managed to fall in love - and that was a real rollercoaster from hell. Nightly floods of tears and ecstatic laughing in the street. People must have thought I was mad - which, I suppose, I was.

After recovering - more or less - I set up this blog.

I especially do not need this kind of see-sawing now. A stranger in a strange land, doing a demanding job (at least, it will be when it starts), for a company run by a fantasist.

I wrote all that last night, then was overcome with the feeling that what I really, really needed to do was talk to someone. About being lonely, not knowing what to do, and just generally not feeling able to cope. So, at 2300 I left the apartment, walked to the office (which has skype and a net connection), and spent an hour talking to my parents.

I can't remember the last time I've cried down the phone to anyone, especially them, but we had a good, sensible, supportive discussion, and today I feel a lot better.

The weather is sunny, there's lakes and mountains to visit half an hour's walk away, there's a camera in the post, a letter to C going the other way, a small glut of emails from friends in my inbox this morning...and I've been given advice on housetraining puppies.

Instead of snatching your hand away, shout "No!" and give her something else to chew. And sit her on some newspaper after each meal.

The secondary school vacation is about to end, which means there should be lots of students soon, which means if there aren't, there never will be, which means if this school doesn't take of in six weeks, I can walk away.

My New Roommate

I drank milk today. For the first time in nearly six weeks. Neat, and in tea. Cheap watery UHT rubbish. Delicious.

The reason I drank milk is...I needed some to put in the dog's bowl (which is actually an ashtray) and she won't drink it all before it goes off. So...I have some, so it won't go to waste.

So much of our lives is habit, and habits get formed from such simple chance things like that. I didn't buy milk because I wouldn't use a whole litre carton in tea before most of it went bad. And I was happy to think I might never drink milk again. Now I've got a dog, and she drinks milk, so I drink it too.

Another habit is a film or serial episode eaten with my evening meal, which is yet another habit. I stopped watching The X-Files after season five. Now I've got season seven, and I'm working through it, one or two episodes a night...how many years since I used to tune in every week to catch the latest episode?

It's an immensely silly show - always was - but now it's no longer current, and there aren't quite so many people who think it's all true somehow, it doesn't matter that it's silly.

And William B Davis is really cool.

Wednesday has just figured out what the bathroom is for. Hmm.

I arranged the sofa cushions into a ramp and tower for her to climb up, so she can sleep on the end of my bed. She figured that out too, in two minutes. Before figure out what she really wants to sleep on is a pile of my clothes. Okay.

Hey, it's the closest I'm going to get to bringing up a child. At least, I hope so.

I got bleach mixed up with detergent and got my clothes multihued - in some cases quite artistically. Okay, so I got the distinction clear and washed my blotchy clothes again in detergent. Except it turns out that wasn't detergent either. It was washing up liquid, for dishes.

And the moral of the story is: In Bulgaria, there are no liquid detergents. They're all powders. If it's a liquid, you might not know what it is, but it's not detergent. Though it might be fabric softener.

Stephen P's got in touch, with emails full of questions about what's been happening in the two months (thereabouts, but seems longer) since we last met. We only got to meet occasionally, but it's a very welcome distraction from the poverty of the country and the ineptitude of the school.

Also welcome as a reminder that there are people back home who still care about me.

Speaking of which, I'm going to try posting a letter to C, a process which is significantly more convoluted (and slow) than in the UK.

I don't have an email address for him. Using Skype I can send SMSs - but not receive them - and whether they get through seems to be luck of the draw. Typically, his number is the only one that Skype can't seem to connect to. Gah.

Dog Day Afternoon

How do you break in a new home? How do you announce to it and yourself that from this moment, you are part of your home and your home is part of you? How do you...tie the knot, smash the champagne, slip on the ring, put an announcement in the newspaper, sign on the dotted line...or whichever metaphor appeals to you?

I do two things. I set up my computer on a convenient desk (from which it generally never moves until I pack for the next home), and I make a cup of tea. These acts signify that I have arrived.

A boyfriend and I lasted long enough to live in three separate houses - this was over a decade ago - and our "moving in" ceremony was to share a large portion of fish and chips, eaten from the wrapper. We also had regular "breaking up" ceremonies when I'd walk out on his drunken ass and he'd phone at four in the morning saying (a) he'd decided after much thought to forgive me and (b) could I please please come back because he really did love me. And after a week I would.

Hey, I'm a soppy old romantic. Either that or incredibly stupid. but anyway...

There's other little milestones. The first time you sleep, wash up, use the toilet, rearrange the furniture, or have someone back for a night of passion. Huh, I should be so fucky - fucky, fucky, fucky. Life should be so fucked up in love.

I've moved (I think) twelve times in my life. Not counting the move from the maternity unit. Um, although at least four of these were moving back to my parents house, where the desk was waiting for the computer and the kettle was on already.

Parents are good. Once they've finally grown up enough to realise (a) you're not going to stop being queer, (b) screeching about it looks silly, and (c) grandchildren are vastly overrated. I know this - for I was a grandchild.

I've got six gigabytes of ebooks on magic and mentalism. My excuse is that the principles of people reading and manipulation would be useful in the classroom.

But it has the fringe benefit that, should I ever get a car, I know how to drive it blindfolded. The trick when using the now standard "Osterlind" blindfold is...wait for it...to move the opaque part out of the way by raising your eyebrows.

I trust you're suitably impressed by how skillful and convoluted that is.

We've got a dog.

I came into the office, bright and early at midday, to find Radi the builder/plumber/farmer finishing off the new partition, and a very small dog sniffing around being friendly.

She's a "Dradkhaar", a variety of hunting dog for which I can't find an English equivalent. But she's a stray puppy about twelve inches long, black with brown and white mottling - escaped or more likely abandoned. I've given her some milk and puppy food, which she gobbled up like a mad thing. it's probably been days since she was fed, so I'm rationing her so she shouldn't get ill with the sudden influx of food, or throw it back up again. It looks like we've adopted each other.

She's found a box of soft wool in the corner and is curled up, next to the newspaper, whose purpose she figured out immediately. So I'm guessing this is a recently lost/abandoned/expelled puppy who had a few weeks of domestication beforehand.

Tania and I have one thing in common - we go a bit mushy over dogs. We're considering the name "Wednesday", after today's day, and the girl in The Addams Family.

The BBC are very keen for you to download their webcasts and stream their archived programs, but not download the programs. That's why the podcasts are in MP3 and the programs are in (hack, spit) realaudio.

I'm sure there's an elegant, simple way to download, but all the elegant simple ways I've tried haven't worked, so I've come up with an inelegant, complex way.

You need RealAlternative and Orbit Downloader to download the realaudio files, and something to convert them to WAV or MP3. I'm still looking for a good one of those.

* Load up Orbit
* Go to the streaming site
* Right click on the link to "Listen again", and save the RAM file somewhere convenient
* Open the RAM file in Notepad
* Copy the link to the RA file (ie the webaddress before the question mark)
* Click "New" in Orbit. The contents of the clipboard will be helpfully already pasted into the URL field. Rename the "save as" name if you want.
* Click "Ok"
* The RA file will "stream" to your hard drive, but only in real time, so it takes as long to download as it does to listen. But at least you can stream more than one simultaneously.
* Once it's downloaded, you can convert.

Not the fastest method in the world, and sometimes the audio glitches, but it's what I've been able to come up with so far.

Which only leaves one question. Why are the BBC so determined to prevent me listening to their science documentaries in my apartment? They're happy for me to do it in the office, but the place where I eat and sleep is somehow different.

Moving on up, Moving on out

I have an apartment. Kitchen, bedroom, living room and toilet/shower. Bed, sofa, chair, table, sink and wardrobe.

It's in one of those grim, grey towerblocks you associate with Poland or East London. I'm on the fifth floor, which I get to by pressing the button for "six" in the lift, which has a big clangy iron door, room enough for two at a squeeze, and the dimmist illumination ever.

The apartment itself is a-bit-large-for-one or a-bit-small-for-two, the three main rooms being about ten foot square. I'll still be cooking pasta and eggs in the kettle, drinking multiple mugs of milkless tea at odd hours, doing the laundry in a bucket, eating off the same one plate, and wondering whether things would have been different if I'd taken that job in the Czech republic.

I could get net access in the apartment for 30 leva per month with no restrictions - but I'll still be spending most of my time in this office, and it's easy to carry the laptop back and forth, so there's no great need.

There's an odd sadness in leaving a place that's become familliar, and another, not quite the same, in spending time alone in a place that isn't yet familliar. But hey, now I've got privacy, space, even a chance to make some music.

I've had requests for pictures on this blog. With any luck there should be some soon. In the meantime, here's an uplifting message.

Just say no, kids.

'Cos drugs are made by evil people.

They make you see funny things.

And they give you bad skin.

It's not scaremongering, it's real.

So remember, be normal, like normal people are.

Surplus Supplies of Surprise

Life, they say, is full of surprises.

Surprise No 1:
I have another student. This young lady knows nothing at all of English, and wants a gentle introduction. Now, my other student is above the level of any of the books I have here. But this one is below the level of any of my books.

I have no training whatsoever in teaching English this elementary. So, I'll just have to invent things as I go along, as usual.

Surprise No 2:
The boss has decided he's not coming over after all. It's good news, but I'll keep the celebrations on hold till he confirms - just in case he changes his mind again.

He called yesterday to lecture me for half an hour on how it's vitally important the office, which is half warehouse and half bedsit, looks like neither. He wants it cleaned every day. Yeah right.

Surprise No 3:
I got an email out of the blue, from someone I used to know vaguely at school. He was the best friend of a nodding acquaintance. I thought he was quite happily unbullied and uninvolved in any of the squabbles that teenage boys manufacture amongst themselves. A nice guy, not trying to be remarkable, and basically untroubled.

But no. He says he hated being there and the memories still trouble him. But that's not what he really wanted to say. He'd felt sorry for me, being treated like crap all day every schoolday by the hoards of hormonal morons, and had wanted to help, to offer some support, but he was scared to, in case they turned on him.

I'm...touched. That someone I barely knew, from a time I barely think about, should have felt that way back then, with me completely unaware of it, and has carried a sense of guilt for two decades.

So I guess it's true what they say - you never really know someone, and you don't know who your friends are.

We've exchanged some emails; We'll see what happens.

A bonus surprise:

How many cannibals could your body feed?

Half of my clothes now have odd white bits. There's a perfectly good reason for this, namely that bottles with label illustrations that lead you to think they contain detergent, sometimes contain bleach.

One of my teeth is thinking about developing toothache. I am going to hit it with a toothbrush until it changes it's mind.

My parents have offered to send me a small digital camera in the mail, so I can make a visual record of sorts of my time here. I can go for walks around the hills and lakes, and send snapshots back home.

It's a good plan, but it does require circumnavigating the Bulgarian postal service, which is part Chinese puzzle, part con trick and part oxymoron. Sundry charges are decided by a combination of size, weight and I Ching. Anything that isn't specifically marked as non-commercial is assumed to be a commercial import and subject to around 30% tax, it takes two weeks or more to arrive, and when it does the post office keep it in the basement, waiting for you to drop by.

If you want to get anything out of Bulgaria, it's quicker, more reliable and sometimes cheaper to carry it in your hand luggage.

It's Not Easy Being Green

Friday night, with vodka and orange juice, a big plate of pasta, and The Best Bits of Mister Bean. And I lost the ability to type again. Followed by more vodka and orange juice, eggs on toast and the second Stargate movie (The Pretentiously Named Ark of Truth). Hey, alcohol makes me hungry.

I know why people like to read fiction. It's easier to understand than reality.

Your nerd rating is calculated by counting how many digits of Pi you know. I have this on reliable authority - someone with a degree told me. After he bought me lunch as a thank-you for helping him get his degree. Mine is 9.

So I hereby suggest that your gullibility rating is how many seconds it take you to realise what's wrong with this online business.

Today was International Earth Day - the day when we all show our commitment to saving the planet by switching the lights off. I'm typing this with the lights off. But I'm typing this with the lights back on so I can see what I'm doing.

But what I really want to know is...are you gonna go my way?

No, what I want to know is: who thought it would be a good idea to give me permanent board markers? I mean, without mentioning their permanency? Possibly someone who thinks teachers wind down after a lesson by spending half an hour scrubbing bleach into their whiteboards.

Once, on a course that was supposedly about computing, me and eighteen others got a lesson on ethics. Just the one, and it wasn't on the ethics of writing software for the military.

So we spent an hour pondering whether a sixty three year old professor's life is more valuable than a twenty year old mother. Perhaps some well-meaning committee had decided computer programmers would be better at debugging C++ if we argued about ageism. Or they got confused between "being a well rounded individual" and "having a skill".

Some say being faced with an unresolvable ethical dilemma is a test of character. Though exactly what it's supposed to test is unclear. Whether you can live with being unable to decide, perhaps. Though most unresolvable dilemmas are immediately resolvable by "going with your gut" - ie prejudice. So I imagine it's just a roundabout way of discovering a persons prejudices.

Here's a real life dilemma. If you can resolve it in less time than it takes to read the article, you haven't read the article. That's not to say I have a solution.

The Saturday Night Movie: The Jackal. A remake of Day of the Jackal, but according to the credits not based on the book, but on the earlier screenplay. Which goes some way to explaining it's departures and deficiencies.

Now, I don't have a problem with remakes in general, or with the film being very different second time around - creatively reimagining an old idea is good. Or as artist Tom Phillips said in a different context, "A good old text always is a blank for new ideas". But there are two things to bear in mind. First, almost all remakes are rubbish. No one's entirely sure why, but they just are. Second, if you're going to reinterpret a great book or a classic film, you've got a lot to live up to - are you sure you can?

In the 1973 original, the assassin was played by Edward Fox, an actor who could at least portray the stone cold sociopathy of the methodical killer. In the remake, we've got Bruce Willis playing a thug with a gun fetish. Yes, it's the role Bruce Willis always plays. Though there's a fair supporting cast, including Sidney Poitier who puts in a typically scene-stealing performance as the FBI agent who bends the rules to do the right thing.

In the original, the target was General DeGaulle, who was just that - the target. He was barely seen, never spoke, and had no personality. In the remake, the target was the director of the FBI, and then the first lady. Now, DeGaulle is folk hero, loved and reviled by millions. The FBI director is a bureaucrat no one's heard of. And this target does have a personality - he's an arsehole. The first lady, like DeGaulle, is a cypher, but still a little lacking in mythological status, a poor choice compared to...the president, perhaps?

In the original, the Jackal is hired by Algerian separatists, fanatics with the delusion that killing DeGaulle will progress their cause, but they are believable. In the remake, we have a cardboard cutout Russian mafia boss in two quick scenes holding a personal grudge.

The original has a dedicated but fallible, rumpled and shy detective hero - somewhere between George Smiley and Colombo. In the remake, the FBI are effectively led by an IRA killer - another terrorist but of the good kind.

In the original, the leak from the investigator's office comes from a significant subplot, the good guys win essentially by sheer good luck, and there's a romantic subplot that adds colour to the characters. In the remake, the leak has no explanation and is dealt with in a one minute scene that makes no sense, the good guys win because the assassin gives them a clue for no reason, and there's a different romantic subplot whose only function is to have the assassin kill the girl, giving the hero a "this time it's personal" revenge motive.

Oh and it's just a small detail, but in the remake the Jackal is caught because he is at the shooting scene - which he didn't need to be, because he operated the gun by remote control. I thought the whole point of remote control was you didn't have to be there.

I could go on about why I think the original is better in lots of ways, but what it boils down to is this. In the remade version, the good guys are good (even when they do bad things), the bad guys are bad, and the victims are innocent. It's Hollywood, and the fact that it's an action movie doesn't excuse it being dumb. In the original film - and the book - both sides (French and Algerians) are misguided and immoral, but the twin heroes - assassin and detective - are equal and opposite players in a game of wits.

Need...Education...Brick...Wall

I am writing this in the middle of a building site.

Actually I'm in the office as usual, but it's also a building site. Starting at 0830, a man was building a wall around my desk. It's now half finished and there's dust everywhere. Yes, one of the boss's bright ideas.

The internet connection also wasn't working, and the road was full of water. The street's plumbing burst somewhere, so we had no hot water inside, but plenty of cold water outside. If this had not happened on an unusually warm day for the season, it may have been ice by now.

Still, on the plus side I may be moving into an actual apartment soon. And I actually got paid, only a week or so late - almost in time for the next payday, in fact.

On TV: Stargate: Atlantis, feature length pilot episode.

Among the cast of characters we have:
* A wisecracking, insubordinate young officer.
* His sidekick, a black guy who's not so much Uncle Tom as Man Friday.
* A beautiful and sometimes emotional female scientist.
* The officer's new girlfriend, a high priestess type who isn't as primitive as first appears
* A minor character from SG1 with lots of allergies
* A Scottish medical doctor who's a bit of a loner, and therefore functions as comic relief
* Camply gothic bad guys, defeated with suspicious ease

The thing is, I'm all for insubordination in the military, and wisecracking central characters can be engaging - as they did in Farscape and Buffy. But it only works if it hides (and therefore reveals) deeper insecurity. If your hero wisecracks and doesn't have sympathisable emotional weakness, he's just annoying. This one is (a) the main hero, (b) the male lead and (c) seriously annoying.

Love interest can add to the story, here it's a formulaic afterthought. Comic relief is good, but a character who's only purpose is comic relief is just shallow. And when humans march in and defeat an enemy that's terrorised a galaxy for thousands of years, using a few bullets - and, yes, some wisecracks - the whole story just goes limp.

Update: Oh yeah, and you know how children on American TV are vivacious, cutesy and say things like "Awww gee, I love ya dad"? And you know how they make you want to throw up? Yes, the show's got them too.

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