AGE Rant...

"I'm getting old!!!!!!" I hear them cry...

Increasingly amused by people who think they're old at the age of 23... you've been grown up for about five years! You are a spring chicken. In all probability your span of grown-up-ness will be about 75 years, and you've done five of them. One fifteenth. Six per cent. And even that is based on the theory that you were adult at eighteen... I know a few people who were well grown up at a younger age than that, but I've met a fair few twenty-something children, too...

What young folks are really good at is learning. Soaking stuff up like a sponge. But there's still no substitute for water under the bridge. That's where the age card trumps all. Let me put it like this - if you're 21, then a 30 year old has been adult for four times as long as you. Think you can compete with that?

Now I just have to work out why it feels as if the older I get, the less I really know... Hmmm...

Young people!!! Save the world while you still know everything ;)

SOCIAL NETWORKING Rant...

Myspace, Facebook, Yammer, Twitter... where will it all end?

When I first noticed the phenomenon of online social networking, I was fairly nonplussed and pretty much refused to be a part of it. My philosophy was that networking online is for people who don't have a life out there in the real world. People who spend their time in front of a screen. A network of losers, I called it. I was wrong.

There is little we can do to change the fact that many of us spend a large amount of our time away from our family and friends. Our tribe, if you will. We are either at work, or on some form of transport, or at home recuperating in the evening. Few choose to spend every night of the week out socialising any more. It's too expensive, it's a school night, I'm on a diet, I have a report to write.

My intolerance of social network websites stemmed mostly from the fact that I wasn't one of those people. I wasn't encumbered with a regular job per se, I spent my days playing in the water or working with all manner of interesting folk, and I did spend every night of the week socialising and had the hangovers to prove it! But at the same time, I can remember recognising the fact that I was in a rather privileged position, and theorising that the mobile phone might be the saving of modern society, in that it lets us carry our "tribe" of 100-200 people around in our pocket for instant access at any time.

Sites like Facebook have just taken that ball and run with it, as reported here. The problem with a phone call, text, or email is that it's a brave step - it lays your ego on the line in a way many of us are uncomfortable with. Far better to put something out there publicly, and see who responds. Online trial and error has shown the status update (or tweet) to be the popular mode of expression. Most people simply can't be bothered with any deeper level of creativity. And that is perfectly natural. It's just like seeing a member of your tribe across the campfire - their expression/body language says "I am happy", "I am sad", "I am angry", "hungry", whatever. And you can choose to respond to that, or not. As you wish. On the internet, we can do that irrespective of physical separation. That, and the innate gossip factor of posting photos of oneself and others (and tagging) emulates real life incredibly well. It's genius. If your tribe is spread all over the planet, as I sometimes wish mine wasn't.

NOT REALLY A RANT but kinda fun...

The Fall Guy...

My friend Caoimhe shot this. She was waiting on me to come and meet her for lunch after a powder run on the back side of the hill. So she filmed me riding in, and this occurred!

I didn't even see what happened until we got home and watched the video. The guy seems to be skating along fine, and then he picks one ski up and bam! S'kinda weird... on the plus side though, my GPS tells me I went over 70km/h at some point in that ride, and since my only on-piste riding was an incredibly bumpy/mogully red and the run out at the end, I'm guessing it must have been in the powder... awesome :) My target is 80k's though....

********* 23/4/09 s'funny re-reading this now, I went through the 80k barrier so easily, and 100k's is only a little it terrifying... I guess that's what a season wil do for you. I always wear a lid, now though... **********

NOTHING TO RANT ABOUT AT ALL Rant...

I went cross country skiing today. In the tracks, out of the tracks, in the deep stuff... I am super-impressed with my new Nordic toys. It all works. Shame that my execution of said noble sport resembles the antics of a new-born giraffe, but since I haven't actually tried to go around corners on skis since I was about 14, I'm not going to give myself a hard time about that. I went from A to B (and back again) at a reasonable pace, and didn't fall down. Result.

I have to say that I've never really seen a new-born giraffe. I'm extrapolating that experience from a new-born foal, which I have seen, and imagining how it would be if it was taller, with bigger feet... and, err... on skis. That is how it was for me. Only with fewer legs. Ahem!

It's a culture shock of a sport and seems super old school. Makes me feel as if I'm in some grainy sepia film shot! But it's all good.

EASYJET FOOD Rant...

I dunno... maybe I don't have a clue about business ( this assumption would seem to be borne out by the events of recent years ;) but I think the budget airlines' business model is missing a trick.

All airline food is unutterably awful. I understand that the scale of the operation, and conversely the confines of a passenger aircraft, dictate that some chefs somewhere behind the scenes need to be awfully clever to make available anything even remotely presentable... and that genuinely healthy and tasty food is probably not achievable. I hope I am not being unreasonable when I say that even the food lauded as "Award Winning" is, generally speaking, barely identifiable as food and, at the other end of the spectrum there are phenomena such as this - food, yes, but executed in a way absolutely not calculated to enhance the quality of the customer experience, shall we say? I think that in the average longhaul aircraft a great cheer would go up if the cabin crew marched down the aisle plonking a McD's Happy Meal in front of each passenger. And this coming from a man who really would rather not grace the golden arches with his presence... just on the basis of judgement and good taste.

Anyway... returning somewhat circuitously to the point... I fly budget when it's cheap - when it isn't I think the non-budgets offer superior scheduling, a better overall experience and something that at least bears comparison to a meal. Inclusive. So... if I buy a ticket that costs 25 of your English squids, and then buy a £4 sandwich/baguette which appears, to my inexpert culinary examination, to have little or no biological content let alone nutritional value, would I not rather have paid £30 and been provided with a repast, say, half as good as a blatantly mass-produced meal I can purchase for £6.95 in any Wetherspoons in the UK? Let me answer that tricky one for you - yes I bloody would! Rip me off, but do it with style and decorum.Your clientele are not regulars at the Pound Shop, Stelios. People who have some taste actually do fly budget. Do you know why? It's because all airlines are shocking, so if we're going to have a bad time we might as well not get fleeced into the bargain... and to most of your flyers, a half-decent bite to eat would justify a £10 price hike. The rail companies do a better job in the face of exactly the same challenges... and the gods know I never thought I'd be saying that!

Grrrrrr......

Mon ami Howard came out to do some snowboarding this weekend and I spent much of the time chasing him down hills filming with my petit compact camera. See above pic of... well... my shadow. I was going pretty quick tho. Anyway that's not what this vid is. This is mostly an experiment in uploading vid to Blogger... a lil bit of footage of me and where my house is that he shot with his much better vid cam. Although, he declined to film while riding, which judging by the number of close calls I had and the awfulness of my footage, was a perfectly sound decision. I do want to say that I managed to keep him in frame the whole time while charging flat out down steep-ish pistes... but that's the only good thing about my material... so clearly, set-up shots are the way to go. I live and learn.

VAN DRIVER Rant...

I have just had THE best telephone conversation with a French delivery driver:

(freely translated)

FDD - Monsieur Mattos?

Moi - Yes

FDD - You live in Chinaillon?

Moi - Yes

FDD - In The Old Village?

Moi - Yes

FDD - At Chalet xxxxxx?

Moi - Yes

FDD - I don't know where that is... can you meet me at the Tourist Office in twenty minutes?!?!?

I am not sure how a man who knows where the tourist office is in an obscure hamlet in the French Alps would not grasp that they could tell him the way to the delivery address. Neither was I allowed to explain the route chez moi from said tourist office, although this is something even I can manage. So maybe he already knew that completing the mission as his employers might have intended was going to include careering up something akin to a bobsleigh run in a laden front-wheel drive van, narrowly failing to avoid 18month-old luge pilots with their inadequately-shod mothers in hot pursuit, and roundly cursed by octogenarian snow-shoers who have somehow failed to grasp that it's a road! In which case, I applaud him. The upside of our imperfect but frank exchange of views, however, is that I now have cross-country skis which I shall probably be seen stumbling around the valley on tomorrow. I have no idea what I'm doing, but cross-training is always good, and it beats the hell out of sinking in deep snow, of which there is a lot.

I apologise sincerely for my ski-miles - I did not purchase my skis/boots/poles from a local shop because that worked out twice as expensive as some (better, Norwegian) kit from Norway to England and then France. On the subject of being soundly ripped off, I just paid a local woman £12 to wash and dry six towels. You have to laugh...

SNOW Rant...

My new abode is very, very snowy. Not that I'm bemoaning that; I came here specifically because it seemed to me that a winter without snow is a winter wasted... but I hadn't really grasped quite how snowy it would be. There is more than enough snow to make a fool of oneself in, and enough sunlight (three overcast days in the last month, and that's 'cos it was snowing) to immortalise it on... some sort of optical media, anyway. I am even considering buying a proper camera rather than the iPhone (sob!) or the compact (you know, party, red-eye) camera that is currently chained to my side lest I miss something of importance to posterity. You know, another mountain. Another drift. Another snowboarder sitting down. Or, slightly better, a snow-laden tree, poised, mantis-like against a cobalt sky, occasionally whispering with intent to unload its icy cargo onto the unwary or the simply reckless. Despite my famously meagre photographic ability, I know just enough about it to understand that my ickle cameras and their even ickler lenses are not doing my surroundings justice.

The other thing about snow that I hadn't fully taken on board [sic!] is just how much of one's energy needs to be spent moving the stuff from one place to another. A local chap avec tractor has been engaged to clear the drive after each snowfall, but he does this circa 4am and to be fair he can do little about any cars that might be in the way at that time. So there's a significant amount of shovelling potential. The good thing about this is a) the free workout, and b) that the tonnes of snow surplus to requirements in the drive, on the steps and outside the front door, for instance, can gainfully be deployed making a snow park at the bottom of the garden. Cool, huh? Well, no, in fact. Bloody hot work, actually. And then after a hit on le spot, as les gens français would call it, it's a hot old trudge back to the take-off. Which encourages one to ride it in a T-shirt, which in turn results in ice-burns to the elbows. Oh well... no pain, no gain.

My latest obsession is trying to capture the general awesomeness of my surroundings by stitching together photos to make panoramas. This one an almost 360 from the front of chez moi. To be fair, it doesn't do the place justice, but maybe you get the idea.

PR Rant...

Lies, damned lies and publicity. It's long been acknowledged that the public are becoming increasingly immune to display advertising. Most of us flick past the ads in newspapers or magazines taking only a minute subliminal hit, one which needs to be reinforced over and over before it might have the slightest real effect. Yet it's equally well known that the articles and entries that we choose willingly to read have an immediate and substantial impact or influence.

Recently that principle is being taken much too far. I suspect that difficult times have influenced editors to avoid paying contributors wherever possible, and that's fine (except for me as a contributor!) but the net result is publications with no real content. Just cover to cover press releases, advertorial, product placement and sponsored bits. Maybe I'm unusually discerning or something (I'm not, believe me, although I am pretty cynical it's true), but I find this uninteresting and not a little frustrating. It doesn't rank as entertainment, for me, if I'm constantly thinking "what are you selling, your film opens tomorrow, your single is released next week, you are sponsored by X, Y paid for this article didn't they?" It's tedious.