Viva Glasvegas!

I arrived in the UK this morning from France, to the news of the bombs found in London yesterday and then to hear the breaking news of the Glasgow attack this afternoon whilst driving north. Glasgow is the finest city in the UK and my former hometown. Glasgow is beautiful but also hard. You've got love a town where pathetic, muderous, wannabe-terrorists get floored by passer-bys before they can hurt anyone besides themselves. We'll see what details come out over the next few days, but immediate reactions are emotional not intellectual - Viva Glasvegas.

Wild camping

I've spent much of my adult life going of on trips to the mountains and generally, whilst there, camping. I've camped in rain and snow storms in the Himalayas, on grinding glaciers in Greenland, in wild blizzards in artic Norway, and particularly in the savage, sleet and snow storms of the Scottish mountains in winter. So it came as a surprise to find myself on what had been during the previous sunny evening, a rather pleasant rural campsite in Denmark of all places, wondering through the night if our tent was going to survive to see the morn. It really was a rather impressive storm: driving heavy rain and gusts of wind that whipped large trees backwards and forwards as if they were bushes. The roads were littered with broken branches the next morning. Leaving the campsite in the morning was more of an evacuation, with children bundled into the car, followed by all the ready-packed bags from in the tent. Then wearing full waterproofs I wrestled the tent down and into a bag trying not to let any bit fly away. Then we sat in a car rapidly steaming up as everyone and thing began to dry out, and head south towards Germany looking for better weather.

It wasn't the wildest night I've ever spent in a tent, but it may well have been in the top ten.

What's the point of MySpace?

I want to be down with kids, so I signed up for MySpace. Actually, truth told, I was investigating/cyber-stalking someone and found they had a MySpace page with photos and I couldn't see the pictures without signing up. So one way or another, I now have my own page.

At the moment I have a grand total of no friends. Getting "friends" seems to be the thing to do on MySpace. I've had a couple of people email me asking to be my friend, it seems that the standard thing to do is to agree and then leave a wee message on their page saying "thanks for the add". After that I'm not quite sure what you do with your "friends"? Will any of them buy me a pint?

All three of friendship offers so far have been from musicians or bands, two in Finland which kinda makes sense, but one from a funky dude in NYC. One of the Finns, a female singer-song writer, is VERY pretty (see pic above). I'd like to be her friend, but I suspect all the attention I'll really get from her is email updates as to when her newest release will be out. Best of all, a Finnish hardcore metal band "Skavenger" want to be my friend! As noted in a recent post, I think metal is pretty sad, and I don't get why death-metalers want "friends"? It's not very 'core is it?

DIE! DIE! YOU'RE ALL GONNA DIE!
DEATH! DEATH! THE APOCALYPSE IS COMING!
But, in the meantime would you like to be my cyber-buddy?

Perhaps they just need more people to ritually sacrifice to the devil or something? Anyway, if you have a MySpace page and want to be my friend - but aren't going to try and sell me some CDs, please email! And if I'm missing something else about MySpace, do tell.

And am I just getting old, or is MySpace the most ugly, god-awful piece of page design on the internet?

dead rock shoes

dead, dead, dead,critical, seriously ill, new, brand new

Do all climbers end up with boxes of old rock shoes that you know you should throw in the bin, but you end up thinking "I can maybe do a few more routes in these", so never do quite get around to throwing them out? Or am I just sentimental/tight?

How to carry an ice axe.

If you aren't interested in ice tool-rucscac interface technology (or 'straps' as they are alternatively called) you can safely ignore this post. But for those of you following Andy K's great "velcro or bungy?" debate, this is what I mean.

click the pic for a high res version

Baghdad critical

These guys might be the police. Or Medhi Army. Or both.

I haven't written anything about Iraq for months. The news from the country is so depressing: militia factions begin to fight between themselves as well as with other sectarian groups; whilst the US political debate has just stopped whilst everyone waits for September in the desperate hope that Patraeus can pull a rabbit out of the magic-surge-hat. And as ever, civilians suffer due to the actions of all the warring parties. But one story actually shocked me rather than just further depressing me. Paul Wood reported on From Our Own Correspondent that:

"One measure of how bad things have become is that Western diplomats will no longer visit the Iraqi Defence ministry, even though it is inside the Green Zone. In fact, militia infiltration is believed to be such that no-one walks anywhere in the Green Zone for fear of being snatched off the street."

I suspect that American patience with the Iraqi "government" - using the term in the loosest way - will soon run out.

For the best Iraq coverage keep checking Iraq Slogger.

Flight of the Conchord - New Zealand absurd

Perhaps I'm behind the times but I hadn't head of the Flight of the Conchords before. I've just listened to them being interviewed on NPR and kept laughing out loud so thought I should blog it for anyone else who needs a laugh. You'll never mix up getting invited to a spit roast and a barbecue again.

If you like that, here's more:

Stasi-baiting in the DDR

I've just heard a fascinating radio programme called the "The Brixmis Story" on Radio 4. At the end of the Second World War the British and Soviet armies did a deal allowing their respective militaries access to the other occupied zone, this rapidly meant that the western allies had a legal method of conducting surveillance inside East Germany and the Soviets, in West Germany. I was vaguely aware of the Brixmis story, I remember flicking through a book on it in a book shop some years ago having never heard about it before. Car chases with Stasi agents through East Germany all sounded like gripping boys-own stuff, but for some reason - probably because as a student I was skint - I never bought the book.

Anyway, the BBC has made a great little documentary on the subject. You can download it as an MP3 file from this website or probably find it on iTunes under "Radio 4 Choice". Because the missions involved NCOs and enlisted men, not just officers, the voices and accents you here range far more across British society than the public school/Oxbridge types you hear interviewed from the civilian intelligence agencies of that time. Normal blokes doing very extraordinary things such as discovering that Soviet troops weren't issued with toilet paper so they tended to use their signals pad, and therefore if you arrived quickly at a spot from where Ivan had recently departed you could find some amazing intelligence by putting "a clothes peg on your nose" and being willing to "get stuck in".

And how do you bait a Stasi officer? Well, the Brixmis teams were often tailed by up to five Stasi vehicles, the occupants of whom weren't keen on being identified as Stasi to the wider public. So on days where there isn't much else to do you stop your vehicle in the middle of a small village, hence blocking the road, jump out and point at your tails whilst yelling "Stasi! Stasi!" As one former Brixmis officer said, this was somewhat "infantile", yet his tone of voice suggests also lots of fun.

More on Wikipedia about Brixmis here.