The Lair

Never realized how popular the medium of ceefax (teletext?) was in the UK till I came here. It’s 33 years since the ceefax service launched and I use it for lots of things. In fact, I usually hit the ceefax page for most sports scores.

So about the Cricket World Cup.

The cricket ceefax pages have a number of entries on the world cup, including their seedings for the 16 teams participating and a set of pages which talk up a master blaster and bowling/all round ace for each team. The seedings first. Guess who’s top? Australia. Yeah. The allegedly very beatable team are still seeded Numero Uno and ceefax thinks they’ll get their third successive world cup victory this time around. In a move that dismays fans everywhere, the second seeded team is Sri Lanka. Yeah, there’s more but blah blah blah, whatever.

Two factors make me wonder if this is really justified. Then again, the ceefax pages haven’t been notorious for calling it correctly (unfair though, along with most of the planet - they didn’t call the England Ashes victory in 2005 nor the Aussie drubbing delivered in 2006). First, the SL team isn’t exactly a bunch of spring chickens and secondly, notorious slow starters or otherwise, they lost to NZ in the warm up match. SL’s Ceefax master blaster, Sanath J. was rested for the match and their spin ace Muralitharan got carted around the pitch for 60+ runs in his 10 overs. Hardly inspiring news for a team seeded to see Australia in the final, eh? Shades of ‘99, anybody? Just me then? All right.

Oh and the Six Nations stuff today is boring but tomorrow - England vs France. Woo. And Yaschvilli is probably playing.

Completely unlike the TARDIS, for example.

Any problem or knotty little puzzle abandoned assumes monstrous proportions when I return to it after a few weeks. Consider that for the past 10 days or so, I’ve been wrestling with FrameNet, a very nifty but rather complex lexical resource. It’s important for any number of reasons that I complete this technical arm wrestle and making this glorified dictionary work for me - not the least being that I’m supposed to be in writeup mode now and I still have lots of loose ends to tie up.

Unfortunately, the Framenet stuff is inter-related with some other work that I did almost an year ago. Around March last year, I took an unofficial sabbatical of sorts from this whole research gig and did a bit of commercial work for ye olde filthy lucre. It worked out quite well, on the whole - but all of the experiments I carefully crafted last year look like Klingon crossed with Mumbo-Jumbo at this point.

Most emphatically not of the good, since it’s understood that the person who discovered some novel process is generally supposed to be capable of explaining it. I can’t for the life of me remember the details of my (supposedly) novel process any more, let alone explain it.

This whole “out of sight, out of mind makes problems grow larger” theory has another anecdote. I somewhat foolhardily undertook an ambitious job for Habari - the whole dbdelta business. I had it covered, almost - till I had to take a hasty rain check and dive into the FrameNet stuff. Now that stuff looks indecipherable too. Ugh.

And a final sporting note - I tuned in late to watch Bolton vs Arsenal last night. Adebayor had already scored the first goal. Watched the game inbetween channel surfing and then settled down to watch it to a finish just before Adebayor blew a chance at an open goal by hitting the side post. A couple of minutes later, Bolton scored an equalizer.

What did I do? What any true fan would do, of course. Clearly, Arsenal had been doing great without my viewership and I was jinxing them. So I promptly changed the channel and pretended the match didn’t exist.

It worked too. Although I only found out about it in the news later on that night.

It seems like England won. Will it make up for the mauling they suffered in the Ashes? Maybe not. It’s still nice to see that the frantic (and necessary) tinkering has paid off somewhat. Who’da thunk that Plunkett would become a potent strike bowler? I certainly didn’t see that one coming.

And in more pick-me-up news, it seems that Viagra will be available over the counter. From Valentine’s Day. If the symbolism escaped anyone, please do go to your local A&E and have that nasty pointy stick poking out of your eye attended to. And via the same source, I see that Glaswegian smokers got a head start. That must have made for some awkward consultations in Scotland, eh? “It’s been great, doctor. I’ve had just as many fags and lots more wood after the treatment. Isn’t that marvellous?” [I'm channelling Frankie Boyle here]

And I’m highly taken with UsedToBeCool - only slightly less weird than one of my longtime favourites, Aphex Twin. I discovered UsedToBeCool via Lady Luck - and I somewhat shamefacedly confess that this was completely contrary to my preconceived notions and thus an extremely unlikely (or so I thought) source of decent DnB. Not one of those bandwagon humping indie chicks? Awesome. Now to see if UTBC’s second album will be as good as their first.