No, I said 'Punt'.

Todays ramble comes from Dr Language Person, who is spending the weekend
in Cambridge:

The word 'Punt' ( apart from just sounding rude ) has many different and interesting meanings.

The most common one is the football term, to punt the ball. I'm not sure how this is considered different from just kicking the ball, as one can punt in all sorts of situations, but I believe it generally means that you hand ( well, boot, actually ) said leather object to the other team, who are hopefully a long way away.

This then makes more sense of the next meaning , 'to punt', that is often used in the business world, where one would hand off something to another person. ( "The project was so screwed that jack punted it over to operations" )

Now, where I come from - a good British colony, punt has another meaning and it is a gambling term. 'To have a punt' means to place a bet on something. It can also mean to just 'take a chance', and is just yet another word that can be used to add colour to a conversation, "I'm punting that she will call back".

If you end up at a place where there are a lot of people all gambling, like at a racetrack, you can also use the collective plural term the gambling community and refer to them as 'the punters' , or just a bunch of fools.

This close association between foolishness and taking a chance is no coincidence and the word 'punter' can often be used to describe anyone stupid or desperate enough for anything. ( "Did the alligator wrestling night attract any punters ?" )

Now lastly, the word 'punt' can also be used to describe a boat, or more specifically a water borne form of transport. 'Punting along' usually means to move so slowly that the boat leaves no wake and that there is no general plan in the direction or timing of the journey. So one can rightly assume that to 'go for a bit of a punt (on the river)' is just another term for a pointless meandering waste
of time. It is also fairly easy to follow the evolutionary path of the terms
'punting along', 'punting about', 'Farting about' 'Piss Farting about' and
'screwing around'

Curiously enough, in the college town of Cambridge, punting on the river Cam has become so popular that the wooden, flat bottomed boats are themselves called 'Punts'. The fact that this gives a fairly formal association between one of the worlds great universities and a bunch of people screwing around wasting time is something best left unexplored. But I'm sure some scholars out there who are dying to tell me that the boats were called punts first and that the term 'punting' was invented because no-one wanted to admit that they were just 'farting around in the punts' ( actually, I'm punting on it )

It is more interesting to conclude that the many variations of the word mean that you can assemble some truly bizzare sentences indeed, such as this one :

"I'm punting that it will stay sunny when the race is on so we can grab a punt and have a punt with the punters, unless the weather changes and they punt the event to next week"

Fresh Brains

It is 6am, I'm on a plane (again) and I feel like a zombie. Forever
banished to stagger the earth's airport terminals in search of a gate and
intelligent conversation.

There is a excellent scene in "Sean of the Dead" where he is sitting on
the bus hungover and half awake and on his way to his dead end job. The
funny thing is that he doesn't notice he is surrounded by zombies. They
all just look as tired and bored as he is.

So that's how I feel.



A friend called me and asked me how I was doing. All I could respond with
was

"I've spent two weeks on the road living in strange hotels, eating alone
and having business meetings with people I will never see again."

"If I don't have a real conversation soon I'm going to kill someone. What
I need, my friend, is fresh brains..."

Not only am I a mental train wreck, but physically I'm not much better. I
picked up a cold on the flight back from London. So for the two days I
actually had at home I spent most of then limping and sniffling and
moaning around the house searching for more kleenex. My head felt about
two sizes too small and the last thing I wanted to do was get on another
plane and fly back across the country.

Compound that with the jet lag from London and all the cold wanted to
make me do was sleep, so my internal clock was totally out of whack.

Thus clogged, tired, mentally under-fed, and as usual, cranky, I had to
drag my arse out of bed at 5am this morning to spend the day flying to a
mysterious tropical island. To add insult to injury, there was no hot
water at home so I had to debate the benefits of a cold shower whilst
nursing a cold or spending fourteen hours on aircraft with the rest of
the great unwashed.

Somehow I made it to the airport and continued the zombie shuffle: Wait in
line for check in, kick bag forward, wait in line for coffee, kick bag
forward, wait in line for security, kick bag forward, wait in line for
xray, dump bag on conveyor, wait in line for bagels, kick bag forward,
wait in line at the gate, kick bag forward.

When I finally did get on the plane it was totally empty, there were
about ten of us in there. It just added to the whole 'last humans
alive' thing I was experiencing.

As my plane lands I find out that not only do I have change terminals in
Denver but there are no staff around so we have to hold at the gate for
20 minutes. This means that I have to do the unthinkable and run for my
next flight, which, unfortunately, I reach, gasping and wheezing, in
enough time to have no overhead space. As icing in the cake ( literally )
we are 'this close' to take off before we have to turn around to hold on a
de-icing pad.

Of course, none of this factors in the added detail that my last leg is on
a different airline, so I still have to go through a second check in in
Miami. This is something you really never want to do.

So, after landing late, we do the shuffle again: check in, security, gate,
lather, rinse, repeat. Except as an additional bonus I got 'SSSS' on an
interim boarding pass and told.

"You'll have to go to the gate for a seat assignment."

Suddenly my two hour layover became negative 10 mins and I was going to be
bounced because the plane was too full. I also ran into some colleagues
who almost missed the flight because they didn't realise they needed
passports. So we all just stood around looking stupid waiting for someone
to tell us where to go. Eventually they let us on the plane where we sat
for some indeterminate amount of time without actually going anywhere. I
was sure the handlers were debating which heavy bags they could 'just
leave behind'.

I knew things were really bad when the pilot left the cockpit, looked at
me, and the chaos around us, and said "What a fiasco."

Not having had time to stop and eat. All I had for a response was to groan
un-intelligibly and say "brains, we need brains."

Sometime late in the evening I got to the hotel, having never seen
daylight.

I'm hoping for the day that someone perfects teleportation. Ill gladly
pay for any technology that can get me there in an instant, sober me up
and remove a few kilos in the process.

Travel smarter.



Tags travel,bahamas,hotel,airline,restaurant,bar

"I'm with the band"

It is sometime after 11pm. After much research and investigation I have
finally been able to locate the mandatory Bar, cafe, restaurant, Internet
aware, book exchange, and Laundromat that every university town requires.
I was here under the pretext of looking for a comfortable couch and a
decent espresso, but it was probably just my desire to get bandwidth that
kept me here.

Fortunately the sound of deep thumping from somewhere below me pulled me
out of my self absorbed obsession with email and made me go for a wander
into the basement.

What I found was surprising not only because there was an entire
subterranean level to this place that I hadn't discovered, but it also
explained why people kept disappearing downstairs. I thought that they
were just going to the toilet, but my subconscious head count wasn't
adding up. Luckily I was right :

There was a band playing in the basement.

And this really was a basement. A standard household basement that could
barely hold 20 people and was thus causing a certain amount of discomfort
for the 30 or so people who were in there.

Not being one to shy away from adventure I paid my dues at the bar ( yes
there was a bar down there ), decided against squeezing myself between two
broken chairs and a patch of carpet and instead stood in the corner with
my head at an uncomfortable angle so I could see what was actually going
on.

Well, yes there was a band, but this wasn't exactly a stadium gig we were
dealing with here. It was definitely the ad-hoc hand built set up that we
have all grown to know and respect from our struggling student days. The
guys had a second hand missing desk, some borrowed music stands, the
keyboard player also had to do the mix and they had one acoustic pickup to
share between them.

"We need to take a break now while Darren rebuilds his guitar"

I'm also sure that one of the two speakers wasn't working, but no one
cared. They were all friends anyway, this was just a chance to play some
music without the neighbours sending around the constabulary to 'turn
that music down!' at one minute before midnight.

After the second set, the writer of the music then settled in to talk, in
an apologetic way about his home produced EP and how it had taken him a
year to produce, he still felt that it needed some changes, but, '...If
you don't mind the few mistakes, you may want to listen to it more than
once'

Inside my head I found the daemons screaming the harsh reality to this
poor fellow : 'Your music is just fine, the only reason it you don't like
it is because you, like every other consumptive artist out there, are a
chronic perfectionist and can't leave well enough alone !!'

If he's just laid down the tracks, done a rough mix and then handed it off
to some friends to clean it up, he could have had the whole thing done in
less than a day.

Thats the problem with all these 'desktop publishing tools' they give you
too much time and not enough feedback. If he'd been paying an hourly rate
for the studio and had a Sound engineer shaking his head and reaching for
the Jack Daniels every time he said 'Can I just do that bit again' he
would have nailed it by the second take.

Never publish your own stuff. Everyone needs an editor, even me.

As I settled back and pondered this, I watched them play with their
no-frills setup and noticed how the guitarist kept tripping over his cord
that was obviously too short. It made me wonder at what point in your in
your success path do you finally go to your agent and say

"I'm not doing this again without a wireless amp."

It also made me wonder, that in this day and age when people are bent out
of shape about the health aspects of wireless equipment, why has this
never been a problem for the rock and roll industry.

And why, and this is food for thought, is it that, of all the wireless
equipment that exists in the world, mobile phones never interfere with
musical instruments ?

Then again, perhaps here are some things that aren't worth worrying about.


Tags travel,london,hotel,restaurant,music

Where am I going, and who am I meeting ?

Sunny London, England, United Kingdom, Great Britain, or whatever the
name of this crazy island is.

Either way, this is where I'm to make my home for the next week or so.
For some reason all my friends are jealous of the exercise but I keep
trying to explain to them that I'm not actually whooping it up in the posh
part of Kensington, I'm not spending my time at the Tate Gallery, nor am I
rubbing shoulders movie stars or billionaires.

Instead I'm stuck in a town on the edge of the city that bears the scars
of the soulless town planning of the 1960's and unless I want to spend the
evening in the local bowling alley, or hang out in the pub, there is sod
all else here to do. A friend of mine pinged me, and when I told them I
was at dinner the response was,

"How's the food ?"

There was really only one possible reply :

"English"

Pub Grub: You can have anything you like as long as it comes with mash and
a beer. Breakfast of Champions. And don't get me started about the
coffee. Frankly when it comes to the fine art of a well balanced
combination of freshly ground beans and just the right amount of water,
the English make a very good cup of Tea.

Still, I have noticed that I tend to write better when I'm all bitter and
twisted, my sarcasm has more room to maneuver. So I'm certainly getting
creative value out of the exercise. I have no hesitation in saying that
I'm in the kind of place that you only see in movies, where someone gets
murdered in the first reel and the rest of the cast are working class
dropouts living in housing developments.

My bitchiness is also because I've really had no idea what I was doing on
a day to day basis and have had to play it by ear. I found I kept asking
the local sales team if "...I'll be close to London, so I can find a hotel
that doesn't smell and get rid of this expensive rental car."

Not only was I adverse to being stuck in another Village of the Damned,
but I was also trying to get myself over to Italy for the weekend or
anywhere else that would get me the hell out of dodge. I had even heard
of a 3 hour meeting in New York on Friday that I was supposed to attend.
I had not only considered going back across the pond for the weekend, but
had even booked the flights before my calendar was magically filled.

I got the phone call about an hour after speaking to my travel agent and
suddenly I was supposed to be in London on both Friday afternoon and
early Monday morning. This blew my trip to New York out of the water and
also screwed my plans for Italy, all the flights on Saturday were booked.

Meanwhile my friends were asking me when I was going to be back on town
so we could go out and, you know, have a social life. Well, my kind of
lifestyle not only doesn't offer that sort of luxury, but I also found
out that my company wanted to thank me for all the hard work by flying me
to the Bahamas for 2 days. Next Week. This was just what I needed,

"Thank you for all the hard work and travel, why don't you jump on a plane,
again, and fly on a Sunday, again, for 2 more days away from home"

They even said I could bring a guest, where was I going to find one at
such short notice. Thanks guys.

Still I was finally able to get rid of the car, ( Although, doing 70 miles
per hour on the motorway, on the wrong side of the road, in the rain and
fog, with a stick shift, is an interesting experience ). I also found a
really nice hotel in London by the river. It was actually a yacht, with
large rooms, a large bed, internet access and nothing outside my window
but the water and a few ducks. I even get to stay here for 5 days.

So, somewhat grounded, I'm now stuck on a train, with no leg room, nowhere
to comfortably put my laptop, my left leg going numb and a strange pain
developing my right elbow. I'll be here for 2-3 hours while I head to
the south-west of this island for, presumably, a 1 hour meeting. I will
then turn around and head back again.

C'est La Vie. I did sign on for this mission.

It looks like next month I'll be going to japan as well.


Tags travel,london,hotel,restaurant,trainairline

Virtual Postcards

Cambridge, UK. Home of Isaac newton and scores of other great thinkers.
This it the one place where one would, presumably, expect to find every
corner and alcove jam packed with bookish types madly scratching away at
their ideas.

Well, if they are doing this, they are doing it all in private.

I'm in a coffee shop for the afternoon, taking some personal time and
writing all this down, but I'm the only one here with a laptop. I'm
actually getting strange looks from people. It seems that I'm supposed to
be doing this back in my room, or in a cloister somewhere.

Which is, I realise, how the place was designed. I took some time this
morning to wander the gardens at the back of one of the colleges and they
are exceptionally peaceful and quiet. I just sat there, and relaxed, it
was very Zen. This is just the sort of place where someone could settle
down with a small note pad and solve one of the worlds great problems.

So I guess when people come out, they do it to be social, to participate,
not sit in a corner, like I am, and just spectate.

However, aside from the few times I've forcibly shipwrecked myself on a
tropical island where there is no mobile phone reception, I'm very much in
real time contact with the rest of the world. So I end up having this
strange virtual experience where I'm in many places at once.

So currently, although I'm sitting here periodically writing this down
and reading a book, I'm also managing parallel conversations with my
friends all over the world, all in different time zones.

The conversations always start out the same :

> What are you up to ?

< Well, I'm in the UK actually, Cambridge, Cafe

> Cool, what are you eating ?

And thus we enter into the world of the virtual experience. Years ago you
would just send someone a postcard with a photo of some breathtaking vista
and the usual 'wish you were here.' on the back. Now, aside from the fact
that it is less of a request and more of a way of showing off, ( we all
the know the card really says 'I'm here, and you're not!' ) nothing has
really changed. We're still writing and sending the postcards, but we're
doing them in realtime.

At one point the waitress saw the book I was reading and asked me,

"What's happening ?"

"Well," I replied "Our Young protagonist has just been declared king. But
You may also want to know that one of my friends is about to fly to a
funeral, another is having trouble deciding between the chicken or the
fish. The water is still warm in Sydney, but my friends email server is
broken. And I'm expected to be in Boston in two weeks"

So we are all here living life through our mobile devices. I suppose it
is just a matter of time before we have we can all send real-time video
to whomever we want. I can see it being the start of a whole new industry:

Travel Porn, Be There Now !. See live backpackers as they make their way
through Europe. Choose your destination, more than 50 cities online right
now! Laugh as you watch them order Tapas in broken spanglish ( "you
ordered the tripe and bulls testicles, Senior, no ?" ). Upgrade to the
'Five Star Experience' and see extreme closeups of your Mai Tais and personal
massage.

However, I digress.

Somewhere this afternoon there are to be boat races. The Lent Bumps.
Apparently the river is somewhat narrow and interesting things happen. So
I think I shall don a blazer and join the punters having a punt on the
punters.

After all, we are all just going to see who crashes.

P=mv