A Drunken Madman

Or is The Spin Starts Here starting to recycle material in terms of just over and over doing the "Hooray For Everything" thing over and over? I mean, does adopting some dickhead's "kind blog initiative" actually have any effect on one side or the other? I had a moment of boredom with the old "deprive us of oxygen" shit, and now, what? we seem to have the same old 'Attack some other blogger' thing going on. Where's the incisive commentary? Where the fuck is the genuine snark?

I await developments. I really do. Caz, Hack, Hambo! please, entertain me. Fuck the blog wars.

It's taken a while, but I've finally watched An Inconvenient Truth. Let me tell you one thing right at the start of what will inevitably become a rant:

On the large scale, it is a GOOD thing that Al Gore didn't become President of the USA in 2000.

Mr Gore has had the opportunity, having stepped back from politics, where frankly he was doing no good, to actually develop a serious platform with the potential to actually benefit mankind.

He has some seriously bad points, personally. For a Democrat, he's far too conservative for my own politics, and he was inevitably (as wife Tipper was a driving force) involved in the PMRC, which I've always thought of as a major assault on free speech, but what does that matter in the long run? If the message makes it through on this issue, I think an abortive, doomed attempt to ban "Catholic Girls" will just be viewed as a speedbump in the road.

Now, what right do I have to speak of US politics this way? I'm a UK citizen living in Australia. I have no vote in US politics but it's inevitable that US politics have a trickle-down effect on my own countries, forming as they do the pivotal points of the Axis Of Evil  Coalition of the Willing. From this, I really feel I have a right to bag out US politicians

The film itself is flawed. In my opinion it dwells a little too much on Gore the man and not Gore the messenger. Perhaps this is required, though, to combat residual scepticism. The data, though, are stunning. And Gore's presentation tunes the data to the point that they really have some impact - none of this information is new to me, but Gore's presentation actually pulls it all together with admirable eloquence.

Hypocritically, while I sit here and pontificate on global warming, I'm using my own aircon to keep myself cool. I'm using two laptops and a desktop. My XBox is sitting upstairs on standby, using amperes as we speak. I'm a major consumer of resources. Surely I'm a hypocritical fuck? Yes I am, but I'll try. You should maybe try too. And if you haven't seen the film, see it. Hell, I'll buy you a DVD if you email me. Get on with it!

I just installed Google Earth. The installer gave me an option to install or not install Google Toolbar. I've never installed it before on this machine. Despite that, my IE instance just crashed because of Google Toolbar.

I didn't ask for it. I got it. Sounds like fucking Herpes to me. Thanks Google!

So yesterday I chucked an hour or two off work in the afternoon and headed to Pearl Bay with James Taylor. It's a pretty small bouldering area but a lot of fun - despite the fact that it started raining shortly after we arrived and carried on for a good half hour.

We got some pretty good stuff done, even though the Block Arete is signposted as 'out of bounds'. There's a lovely little V4 on the main wall though, which is stretchy delicate fun (problem #9 in the book) and a very unusual V3 which the book advocates doing facing out from the rock - Both James and I did it facing in, but by two very different sequences. Aside from that, lots of V2s and below. Pearl, V6, of course, wasn't happening.

After that, we nipped over to Sandy Bay, but the heat was unbearable and soon sapped my motivation, not to mention the pain of my still-extant tendon injury (now dosed up to the eyeballs on ibuprofen, glocusamine and voltaren gel). Back to work after that for a while, then chilling. A nice day. Some photos to follow.