Joshua Goodwin

I am almost a little bit tempted – yet still far less tempted than those words suggest, I promise – by the Amazon Kindle 3 electrically powered book reading device, which is worrying, because I really ought to finish reading the devilishly numerous paper books that I haven’t yet finished reading before I even think about an unnecessary and soon-to-be-obsolete magical futuristic reading device.

Like Magnús Magnússon, I’ve started so I’ll finish. Yes. (I mean, of course, Magnús Magnússon the dead John Humphrys off of Mastermind, not Magnús Ver Magnússon the Icelandic strong-man, or Magnus Magnusson who was the Earl of Orkney from 1273 to 1284.)

Even after the partially read books, there are just as many that I have placed in my book storage areas but haven’t actually started yet. Only after my finishing those two bulging great libraries would an electronic book machine make any sense. And you are looking at, what, if current trends continue (which of course they won’t), several years before all that’s been ingested? I know, you couldn’t make it up, it is a shocking state of affairs, Michael Gove needs to sort it out.

More than anything, I just want to see what this blog looks like on a futuristic computer from out of the future. I could just get someone to take a photograph – or it would be even easier to make everything here redirect to the New York Times’s website, because in the pictures those machines often have that website loaded on to them. That would definitely count.

The “New WebKit-Based Browser” is my primary source of what it would be wrong to call excitement. There are no pictures of it in action, which could seem a bit strange. (It is a bit cheeky of them to allow people to mistake “browser” for “bowser”, because actually those are somewhat different things. Clarification would be nice, please. I find it a bit off-putting – what if it is a typing mistake, and there actually is an integrated organism that fires poo onto the carpet? Check the stuff about refunds, stay on the safe side.)

There’s some fuss about the stylish graphite body. Is this just the name of a colour, or is it actually made from the stuff of pencils? If the latter were true, it would lead to even dirtier fingers than Belizean newsprint – it probably isn’t, you know, and anyone who thinks otherwise is living in a fantasy world. (I bought a “charcoal” T-shirt once, and it was rather disappointingly made out of cotton.)

I expect the next version will be a yet another different size, forcing each sweaty-palmed idiot to buy yet another leather case. This is a cunning plan. The way forward, I think, is to fashion an inexpensive, handmade, indie case from a dribble-wracked pillowcase and some small blunt scissors from out of a Christmas cracker. That is what a clever person might do. Of course, a sensible person wouldn’t buy an Amazon Kindle, and instead would use their pillowcase as a thing to put a pillow in, to prevent dreams about feathers. (That is definitely why we have pillowcases.)

Watching the video, even just observing the names of the two new versions (“Wi-Fi” and “3G + Wi-Fi”) it looks a bit like they’re flattering Ian Pad rather a lot – with the sincerest form of imitation. (It’s a sufficiently nicely, originally, designed product page. The world would be, well, not all that much better – but, still, better – if all Amazon product pages were that good.)

Incidentally, the man in the video says “Amazon” in a ridicuous way. Like, “Amaz-on”. I am not sure if this is what we are supposed to do – it’s completely unprecedented if it is. Have we all been saying it wrong? Is the man in the video a more pathetic version of Jesus, here to make us correctly pronounce of the name of an American multinational electronic commerce company. No.

(The title of this is very weak indeed. Oh dear. I thought about “Kindle surprise”, but felt that that was slightly worse. I shall try to write something that can be appropriately entitled “Notes on a sandal”.)

(Actually, “Notes on a sandal” appears to have had all the juice squeezed out of it by the Daily Mail. I could reclaim it for something positive, but that almost certainly would be futile. Oh well.)

Recently I went darting around the top of the weather map. There is a place called Shetland there – it is an archipelago, a cluster of islands – and there is where I was.

The weather consisted mainly of wind – I had escaped the nice weather. Although I had envisaged making do with a combination of a folding macintosh and some jumpers, I was quick to acquire a more capable anorak. It is made of a material named Tres-Tex, which I think is an alternative to Gore-Tex for people who don’t want to empty their pockets into the mouths of Al Gore and Gore Vidal.

It’s a moderately strange, treeless place. One’s definition of a tree broadens greatly. The fences have strands of sheepskin stuck to them, and it makes you wonder what John Motson has been up to, before realising that there’s just a significant population of sheep.

Not just sheep, of course. Cows too, and ponies, and birds, and marine mammalia, and people. There were lots of tourists with polyester jumpers and great big phallic SLR camera lenses and binoculars. (I had binoculars. Binoculars are nice.) There are also people who live there – imagine that!

Things are not as primitive as one might rashly assume. They have lots of electronic dot matrix signs, and bus stops, and far too many people have recently registered motor cars – it’s a bit mysterious. The public transport is poorly documented but all right. There was a tremendous amount of going on ferries, which makes sense.

A somewhat famous bus shelter exists – I did not do a photograph of it, because that would have been predictable. Instead I did a photograph of a more normal, uncelebrated bus shelter, a bit like some kind of Wayne Rooney’s wife. Hooray for me, yes. (I will not show you the picture of a bus shelter, because actually it is far too boring.)

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I would produce vibes of ranklement whenever I saw cookery broadcaster Merrilees Parker inside the television cutting bread. Ms Parker’s technique, I observed, was to grab a loaf of bread by the scruff of the neck and take a slice from its middle. I decided that this was a foolish way of going about things. Now I look back on it, however, I can see the ingeniousness in what she was doing.

I had grown up to believe that the proper thing to do was to slice off the end of a loaf of bread, and use that as a kind of lid as the slicing point moves along the loaf. With relatively regular loaves, this works adequately well enough, but even then the ends are often smaller. With ethnic ciabatta things like what Ms Parker used, my primitive hobbling falls to pieces. Take slices from the centre – after the initial slice, you would take one from each half of the loaf, alternating – and the “lid” will continue to be the right size, so that only a minimum of inner non-crust is exposed to the moisture-slurping air.

Francis Galton was some kind of clever man from a long time ago, responsible for so much dozing in the face of squared paper. Today a chap pointed out a thing that Sir Galton did in 1906, about the optimum way of cutting “circular” cake. In 1906, society must have been rather primitive, because it’s not the most breathtaking idea, but I will give Galton respect for actually producing a diagram. Holding the cake together in storage with an elastic band is just asking for crumbs to go everywhere, but elastic bands were different in those days – they were not rubber bands. It really depends on the nature of the cake.

I don’t quite know what, in terms of moisture retention, there is to be gained by having or not having the innards of a cake or loaf of bread exposed. Is the crust hardier? It is probably a harmless placebo for the most part. All this hassle can banished significantly by eating the whole cake in one foul swipe, of course.

With that title it would be dereliction of duty not to mention the World Cup. I will. I considered “Let them eat Kaká”, but that would have been predictable. When I checked I saw that someone else had already done that (albeit without the diacritic), and it was at that point that I knew for sure that I had to follow the part of my moral compass that was egging me towards “Let them eat Ricardo Izecson dos Santos Leite”. I went with that, before realising that it was too long, and doing a U-turn. Of course, a disproportionate amount of the title would have consisted of the sporting element, but that discrepancy would become less pronounced if this waffle continues.

Late yesterday I read a good clever funny thing that a man had written in the Observer. Curiously, it isn’t on the website, I think to sell more copies of the actual newspaper – if demand exists, I suppose I could in theory fish about the recycling bin and cheekily photocopy it onto the internet using magic, but why would I do such a thing? When I fruitlessly searched for it, I instead came across an odd scheme – those two hairy men who ride motorcycles and do food on the television (I’ve never seen it), recently taking advantage of how “bike” and “bake” are similar, have put their faces to some recipes, each recipe representing one of the countries doing the World Cup, and because it’s organised by an electricity and natural gas supply company, there is information about how much energy is needed to carry out each recipe. (Confusingly, more consumptive recipes get bigger star ratings, even though I thought it was better to use less energy.)

The PDF recipe book contains some hilarious quotations from the mouths of important people. For instance, Kevin Keegan said:

[Argentina] are the second best team in the world – and there’s no higher praise than that!

There is a disappointing video in which the game between England and the USA is retold using Lego. Don’t watch it, it’s not worth it. It’s all right, but there is no time for subtle nuances. Disappointing.

The quite good Andrew Collins has blogged a thoroughly all-right piece that I warmly recommend. It is entitled “Essay”. Is the idea that that word sounds very much like the initials of South Africa, which is where the World Cup soccer is happening? It may be a happy accident. In terms of giving a toss, I am similar to Collins, but perhaps my interest is more evenly, and so at this time thinly, spread.

If I had to wake up and not know my whereabouts like in a film or something, during the World Cup might be a good time to choose, because the flags and stuff would make it easier for me to determine my whereabouts – assuming, which I have some doubt about, that I had some choice in the matter, and that I would remember or have ever known the different flags and which countries they represent. Oddly, I have seen very few England flags yet, which rather pisses on the slippers of anecdotes about unblinkingly festooned districts. On Thursday I will go on a train to Scotland, and I should think it unlikely that much difference will be observed. (The last time I went to Scotland, there was a moment where the sound of bagpipes broke into the picnic in which I was parking, which too would have been helpful in one of the aforementioned filmic situations. The picnic was all right, there were plums, and I remember jam. It was Easter, last year.)

It is windy in Venezuela. I haven’t mentioned biscuits either, because that would be predictable. Hooray for me. Good evening.