Matt Hobbs

Just back from a lovely weekend up in Montreal with Miette. Smashing – and apparently my new passport works just fine, apart from Air Canada’s automated ticketing machine not letting me put a passport expiration date more than 10 years in advance, and my passport is valid till August 2016 since it’s an extension. Technology, eh.

Some bad news though: while I was sitting working at Miette’s apartment on Monday someone tried to break in as the yoga studio downstairs had left both outside doors propped open. Great stuff. At first I thought it was just someone going in next door, then the noise got louder and the door popped open – I said ‘Hello?’, they said ‘Sorry’ then they started running and I ran after, stopping after getting onto the street and loosing them round a corner. Exciting stuff indeed, or as Josh pointed out ‘that was stupid – they could have had a knife or gun’.

Flight back was uneventful except for turbulence and a 50 minute holding pattern that, after circling round north of Manhattan for a while, decided on a stunning route down the Hudson river before circling Staten Island twice then coming in to land. Stressful for the delay, but amazing views – check them out.

In other news: David Blaine unfortunately didn’t manage to break the record for holding breath under water, luckily he is still alive after his liver started to fail and his hands fell apart. Yeuch. Also, Colbert’s amazing roast of the President at the White House Press Assocation Dinner continues to be number 1 most popular Google video – and rightly so! Go watch it now if you haven’t already and keep it in public sight where it needs to be.

Last night I wandered down to see David Blaine‘s latest escapade – Drowned Alive. After his huge success at attracting unwanted attention from English drunken louts in a box over London, he’s now going for the slightly more down to earth approach of living in a ball of water for a week. Can’t he just get drunk like everyone else?

Anyways, went down there at night as the light looked interesting and unfortunately arrived just as he was getting his hands seen to by the doctor. You know. If you spend 20 minutes in the bath your hands go all pruned? So think what a few days underwater will do to them?

Ps, in other exciting news – just got my passport back from being renewed. Finally! It’s totally different from the old passports. The part with the photo is thick card containing an RFID chip (yay tracking!) and all very shiny with lots of birds on it. I asked for an extended passport, which apparently I got charged for, but still seems to be pretty skimpy on the pages compared to my old passport. The good news is that the royal crest on the front has not worn off like it had on my old one from too much bar hopping.

In the wake of Colbert’s stunning roast of the President and the US Press on Saturday I came across this Google video called ‘911 Loose Change‘. This simple but effective documentary lists out the well documented discrepancies around 9/11.

For those of you who didn’t pick up on Stephen Colbert’s amazing roast at the White House Press association dinner on Saturday you can watch it at Google video, officially approved by C-span – here you go.

What’s even more astounding about this is the almost complete absence of commentary in the traditional media. Most of the newspapers only mentioned that Bush came out and mocked his own pronunciation of ‘nuclear’ with a Bush impersonator “and then Steven Colbert did a nice little thing.” The web media have not been so un-impressed though, or should that be un-censored? And if you hurry along you can see Colbert’s own report on himself on Monday’s show at Comedy Central. Although given their earlier censoring of Mohammed from South Park it’s kind of surprising they haven’t just pulled the show for fear of reprisals… good job Comedy Central on showing some backbone. Finally. And Mr Colbert, we salute you!

Apparently the huge fire that started this morning in Greenpoint is still raging on. Luckily noone seems to have been hurt in a set of buildings that apparently only contained “lumps of rope and tied up bales of clothing”. The owner, who was proposing converting the disused warehouses to a park and shopping center, must be very happy – except that he had suggested using a lot of the existing infra-structure for the new construction.

Arson investigations are, as usual, underway as the fire blazes.

Diving High

The enRoute issue with my diving photos has just gone live online (and in air) – go check them out.

Pressing the Issue

Stephen Colbert of the amazing Colbert Report was one of the speaker’s at the Whitehouse Press Association dinner – you can watch his speech here, and at the same time give him top ups for doing that all in front of the President. Of course he may not of realised Colbert was joking…

On a darker note though: you have to wonder if, in some way, all this humour around serious issues makes us treat it all as noise rather than something to raise a ruckus about. On the one hand humour makes these issues more accessible, and Colbert’s representation of himself as a republican supporter, who draws attention to the failings of the government through apparent pro-government reports, must definately raise the sensitivity of the average viewer to double meanings. On the other if you end up finding the people who caused thousands of people to die laughable then do they seem less dangerous? In my childhood we used to have Spitting Image in the UK which, at its best, was highly cutting and satirical (and at it’s worst just a bunch of distorted latex with hamster jokes) – I’m not sure what effect that had on popular opinion, but they definately liked Thatcher and Reagan for all the material they provided.

Impeachy Keen

In my usual oblivious state I wandered onto the fair isle of Manhattan today to take advantage of tax free shopping day, and walked straight off the (for once working) L right into the April 29th March for Peace, Justice and Democracy at Union Square.

Luckily I had my camera with me, hopefully capturing some of the spirit of positive marching for peace that was going on from so many people. Kind of reminded me of halloween night parade except possibly less political.

Another book in the vein of the Tipping Point – converting academic economic knowledge into easily digestible (and readable) tidbits. However where Tipping Point had an overall goal, explaining how things become popular and then not, Freakonomics has no such unifying goal – something the authors happily point out at the start. What you get instead is a series of interesting economic analyses of how what is perceived as common sense is often just not true, and how seemingly unrelated events affect each other. For example the authors assert that by allowing abortions legally in the 80s the crime trend of the 90s was reversed from its expected huge upward trend, based on the simple logic that a potential mother who would normally get an abortion would do so because they believed they could not bring up the child properly. All the observations are interesting and give a good sense of how to understand and not mis-interpret statistics, but overall I was left with the feeling I’d eaten a beautiful but unsatisfying meal and was now gagging for a McDonalds. Read it to have handy observations for parties but don’t expect your world to change.

Draw your own house

Another genius aquisition from the kids at Gooogle – Sketchup is a 3D modelling tool that lets you quickly and easily draw 3D models. Duh. But what makes this really cool is that it integrates with Google Earth! I guess Google is hoping that people will start uploading accurate models of their own houses and save them the bother of paying people to do it. Genius.