Barcelona, LLX, and being sick

A lot has happened since my last post. We were in Barcelona over Easter, attending the Barswingona swing festival. But as you can probably tell from the photos, we were a little more focused on the weather, food, and the wonderful scenery than dancing on this trip. For Lotte and I it was a really nice opportunity to go back to this amazing place for a proper look, because the last two visits were too fleeting. The social dancing was slightly patchy for me, although that may depend more on not knowing many people at the festival. Last weekend was spent at the London Lindy Exchange, which was a much more satisfying dance experience for me. The people were really friendly, and the parties were conducive to mixing, which is one thing I really like in an exchange. And it was excellent value. Unfortunately my weekend ended badly when I came down with the most severe bout of gastro I think I've ever had! As a result we were stuck in London for the whole of Monday, and I stayed home from work for most of the week, only reluctantly venturing in for important meetings. Lotte's been quite unwell with a cold as well, so we spent most of this weekend still in recovery mode, while being visited from London by the lovely Dory. Actually, over the next month or two it looks like we're going to be having a string of guests: Ko & Carla, Beth & Emil, Jojo, Anthony & Sarah, and then Corinne! Then we'll be off to Week 2 of Herrang, so we have a lot to look forward to.

BBC shuts down failed £150m online service

An amazing amount of public money appears to have gone to waste after a flood of complaints to the BBC over its BBC Jam service. The BBC Trust released a statement, saying, "Despite a rigorous approval process... BBC Jam has continued to attract complaints from the commercial sector about the parameters of its activities."



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Sponsor Me!

On Saturday the 17th of March, I'm going to be taking part in a dance marathon. 8 hours of non-stop swing dancing, all in the aid of the Cystic Fibrosis Trust. So, I know what you're thinking. Why am I telling you, the Internet, about this spectacular dance charity event? I'm glad you asked. I'm telling you because you can be involved even if you can't be there, just by sponsoring me! Donating online is simple, fast and totally secure. It is also the most efficient way to sponsor the event. The Cystic Fibrosis Trust will receive your money faster and, if you are a UK taxpayer, an extra 28% in tax will be added to your gift at no cost to you. At present there is no cure for cystic fibrosis, but the fautly gene has been identified and doctors and scientists are working to find ways of repairing or replacing it. One of the main objectives of the CF Trust is to fund this work.

Melbourne Visit

It's a very confusing feeling to go 'home' to Melbourne and then arrive 'home' in Cambridge. More than ever it feels as though there are two parallel universes, each with its own distinct system of spacetime. For instance, I had this overwhelming sensation of travelling back in time as we got to Melbourne. As we drove around familiar streets in the car we hadn't seen for a year (it still has that new smell) we slipped back into Melbourne's rhythms accompanied by the sounds of familiar bands and songs and ("remember THIS?") intelligent public debate on the radio. Even our old mates Ian and Heidi were back in Melbourne, which was even more puzzling since they'd also been in England until very recently.

We got far more achieved in our 20 days than we'd dreamed, including wrestling with two storage units for 4 hours in order to reduce them to one, finding some needed tax records, dozens of work meetings, and some hundreds of hours of much needed social and family time. I decided to edit down our photos into a short slideshow as a QuickTime movie. It's 6Mb, so beware that it might take a while to download. Download Slideshow

A Refreshing Moment

Ok, this is one of the things that the internet is good for. The Coca Cola Refreshing Filmmaker's Award is a contest for budding film-makers run every year, and this year's theme is pretty funny. "This year’s screenplay should present a story that illustrates how Diet Coke is an ally for survival in a hectic everyday life… picking people up and calming them down… making their busy lives seem effortless." There are 10 finalists, and a friend of mine submitted the piece that is clearly the best of a good bunch (and I sincerely mean that by the way Paul) entitled 'The Working Girl'. If you have a minute, stop by and click "Submit vote". I suggest going straight to the voting form because you can view all the movies on the voting page and it's much easier. Each clip is only a few seconds long -- ignore the slightly obvious advertising angle and you have to admit they're pretty amusing.

Ways of the Headless Chicken

Mike the headless chicken disproves the theory of 'threshold concepts'. Let me explain. I recently started reading David Sudnow's Ways of the Hand - A Re-written Account, on loan from a friend. It's an ethnographer's approach to learning improvised jazz piano, and is interesting to me in the context of the question of the embodiment of (for want of a better term) knowledge. After I got into the first chapter of the book I picked up a couple of others, getting stuck on a Sci Fi thriller that was a present from my sister, Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan, among other things. Anyway today a colleague (another Richard) emailed about 'threshold concepts' in canoeing, which reminded me to get back to Sudnow. Threshold concepts (Meyer and Land, 2003) are supposed to be difficult bits of learning that we tend to get stuck on but ultimately allow a kind of breakthrough moment. The thing is, most of the work on these has been done in areas where knowledge is thought of as something you obtain through careful thought, not by practicing something by tinkling the ivories, or in my case, treading the boards. In Lee's case, it also involves kicking people's teeth in (in self defense of course) because he teaches Pencat Silat and just finished his anthropology PhD thesis on the topic.

So is it really all about threshold concepts in that case? Sometimes it must be, because you can often get to the next stage of learning by introducing a concept, like say, lead and follow technique in lindy hop, Sudnow's techniques in WOTH, or in Richard's case, "the static paddle" in a canoe. But also, obviously people must learn these things without ever going through the stage of conceptualising anything. Like learning to drive a manual car without anyone needing to tell you just how to ease off the clutch, or all the pianists who have never really thought about technique but are still technically brilliant. Anyway (stay with me here) this talk of embodied knowledge got me thinking of the story of Mike the Headless Chicken. Yes, Mike the rooster stayed alive for 18 months after having his head lopped off with an axe. He even toured, raising quite a hefty amount of money for his owners before starving to death by accident. He reportedly only had a bit of brainstem left and one ear, yet his bodily functions and reflexes remained completely intact -- so much so that he gained quite a bit of weight over his life time. So Mike's body, in a sense, still "knew" how to survive, just as a spider knows how to spin its web. Yet at the same time we can say that a great dancer might not really know how they do what they do. Yet there will, I'd argue, still be thresholds in their ability to do the things they do -- embodied thresholds, if you like. That's surely one reason professional musicians, dancers and martial arts experts still practice for hours every day to get to the next level. I think this shows that it's not necessarily about concepts, but it might still be about thresholds in learning.

Corn Starch Holes

Engagement party photos - part 2

Engagement party photos

Here's the first batch of photos from our Engagement Party in Utrecht. If you were wondering where the photos were, so were we. It turns out that the family had been preparing a really amazing printed book made from all the photos taken on the night. We were given the book and about 230 digital images when we went over for Sinterklaas. These are just a few of my favourites.

Barcelona Party

Here's a couple of photos from the Friday night party at Barcelona. Lotte is judging the Jack'n'Jill contest, and generally having a great time dancing to the spectacular Ivanow Jazz Group. We were over there for a series of weekend workshops that Lotte was teaching with Bill at the Balliball dance studio. I deejayed a 2 hour set on the Saturday night at the studio, and both of us had a fantastic time dancing till the wee hours both nights. We didn't really have enough time for sightseeing, even though we planned an extra couple of days -- but that just means we will have to go back for the Barcelona Swing Festival next year.

Stupidity is Global, but so is Bravery

Lotte and I were in Barcelona on the weekend, travelling on a train when a young guy standing next to us was attacked by thugs. It was just before 11pm and the trains were full, mostly with soccer fans returning from a big game that day. As we entered the carriage I noticed two guys with short cropped hair, army boots and the sort of straight-legged jeans of a trademarked 1970s skinhead. To top it off, even though they were speaking Catalan, they were sporting Union Jacks on their jackets, which made me think more of certain skinhead revivalists and their Nazist tendencies. They were probably about 18, sitting with their legs propped up across the benches, and travelling with a girl who was carrying a small white bulldog. It was the sort of group you generally try to avoid. We kept an eye on them until they got up to leave, pushing past me towards a young guy with long hair, probably 16 or 17, standing near the door right behind me. They started to speak to him, obviously taunting him, and one of them reached out and pulled his hair. Hard. He resisted answering them, and then as the train pulled up to the station each of the guys took a swing at him. They hit him hard -- one of the guys connected flush on with his face, sending his head backwards into the wall. It was all too fast to do anything much, and he just stood his ground. He was okay, physically, but I could see how shaken he was by it, as you would expect. All I want to do now is tell that guy how brave I thought he was to just stand there and not give the guys the satisfaction of a fight that could have ended very badly. We reported the thugs at the station, but that was all we could do. Sorry, kid.

UCPD Police Assault Student in University Library

If anyone needed any more evidence that the U.S. has become an out of control police state in the last few years, just watch the horrifying video that is doing the rounds today. The student was not able to produce ID on request. Despite the fact that he is quite clearly attempting to comply with the police, he was brutally attacked by several officers with a taser, a technology which is not used in many countries because of the potentially lethal effects. For more about the incident, see Student shot with Taser by UCPD officers and Community responds to Taser use in Powell in Daily Bruin, UCLA. Warning: the video below is distressing.

Does Bush Threaten World Peace?

Following up on my last post, it appears that a lot of people both in the U.S. and abroad agree. The Democrats now have control of both Houses, which no doubt has a lot to do with how out of touch the administration had become with public views on the War on Terror. I also noticed today that the Herald Tribune recently published an article entitled International poll ranks Bush a threat to world peace which states: "A majority of people in three countries with close ties to the U.S. — Britain, Canada and Mexico — consider President George W. Bush a threat to world peace, ranking the U.S. president right up there with the leaders of two countries he has labeled part of the "axis of evil" — North Korea's Kim Jong Il and Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad... Majorities in Britain, Canada and Mexico — 69 percent, 62 percent and 57 percent, respectively — said U.S. foreign policy has made the world more dangerous since 2001, according to the poll." So what do you think? Does Bush threaten World Peace?

The US Government is Unhinged

Recently I've been following the case of Indiana graduate student Chris Soghoian, who got himself into trouble with the FBI after putting up a website that creates fake boarding passes, just to show how stupid airport security can be. You can argue that Chris made a mistake by creating a script to automatically generate a fake boarding pass, but he did it to prove a point. He probably should have stopped at describing how someone could do it rather than actually creating the script. But the FBI beating down his door to confiscate all of his computer equipment after the site had been taken down? That is not a response that's in proportion with the crime.

Today's Wired story on the incident has a good summary of what happened. Chris has been heartened by a back-down from one of the politicians who was rather hasty in calling for his apprehension, but the fact remains that undue force was used. The story reads more like something you would expect in China or a few years ago in the USSR, not "the home of the free". The speed of descent of United States into a police state is truly astounding, and the sad truth is that it is probably only because Chris is young, articulate, English speaking and computer literate that we're hearing his story at all. I happened to be watching CNN the other night when they were discussing the state of delusion that the US government appears to be in. I couldn't agree more with Andrew Sullivan in that interview. If you happen to be a US citizen, you should do something about it. Write to a politician and tell them you don't think it's right. Link to Chris' blog. And whatever you do, don't vote for the GOP.

Borat does Cambridge

I hadn't seen this before, but this clip is really worth watching. Borat interviews a few Cambridge Dons in front of Kings College, and learns how to play cricket.

BBC Article

The BBC Cambridgeshire website posted a story on swing dancing today, featuring me and Lotte answering some funny questions in a short video interview. There's even some shots of all of us doing the Shim Sham, and if you listen really closely you can hear us talking to a woman on her bicycle who wanted to know why not all of us were dressed up in 40s gear. It was all pretty unplanned, and the music's timing is a little off, but we really enjoyed doing it. Hopefully a few more people will hear about us as well.

Cambridge Lindy Hoppers Unite!

Over the past couple of weeks we've been working on launching a website for our new student society, Cambridge Lindy Hoppers. We're hoping this group will catalyse new interest in Lindy Hop in Cambridge, and we're planning to start classes with social dancing next month.

Justin and Sara

This week we were visited by Justin and Sara. Below are just a few of the 700+ photos taken mostly by Justin during the week. They spent a few days here in Cambridge before we headed down to London to hang out with Dozka, Heidi & Ian and Simon & George. Visiting London means we actually got to go social dancing, which we've been missing recently. We also finally got to go punting when the weather improved on Tuesday evening, and it was worth the wait.

Gothenburg and Kungshamn

My last post was a bit short on detail wasn't it? Perhaps I should explain. Every year (well almost) we go to the Herrang Dance Camp in Sweden. This year was my 6th at Herrang, and Lotte's 4th. The only recent year we've missed is 2003, and I can't remember why that was -- probably we'd already done too much travel that year! We're already planning to be there again next year.

More photos, including of Gothenburg and Kungshamn, here.

Herrang and Stockholm

Here are a few photos from Herrang and Stockholm. We've just returned from our trip this morning. It was a really fantastic holiday and involved an awful lot of dancing and an awful lot of sleeping, with some sightseeing in between. I'll post some from the second part of the trip (in Gothenburg and Kungshamn) shortly.