Tom Roper's Weblog

Ascot and York: King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes

The wet going is going to make today's racing interesting and I take Scorpion to beat Dylan Thomas in the King George. Ascot is soft or good to soft on the straight course and supposed to be drying, while York is heavy.
Ascot 310: Al Khaleej
York 310: Winged Cupid
Ascot 345: King of Argos
York 350: El Bosque
Ascot 420: Scorpion

Presentation to Overseas Teachers

Today's presentation to Jennifer Book and Andrew Blair's Overseas Teachers 2: using computers and multiledia class is up on Slideshare. The handout (pdf) is here.

The forward march of technology

I spent Sunday at Newhaven and Seaford Sailing Club, writing down sail numbers and doing sums, converting elapsed time into seconds, dividing by the number of laps completed, and multiplying by the boat's Portsmouth  number over 1000, then looking down lists to sort them from finishing order into final places. This is precisely the same way I carried out the same task nearly twenty years ago, the last time I was involved in a sailing race. Surely, I thought, technology must be able to help. A simple Excel file would do the trick and I set about devising one. Then I discovered the RYA's spreadsheet, the answer to a sailor's prayer

ShandyWorld and WoolfPark

The depressing news that there is to be a Harry Potter theme park set me thinking. Why are other, more worthy authors and their characters not honoured in this way? For some reason the first to spring to mind was Lawrence Sterne and Tristram Shandy, which would lend itself very well to such treatment. Imagine the fun to be had wounding Uncle Toby at the Siege of Namur, or for toddlers, playing in the Cock and Bull paddock with real cocks and bulls. I offer this suggestion to North Yorkshire County Council; I ask for no fee, except acknowledgement of  the intellectual debt they owe me.
Theme parks begin at home, however, and what better way of celebrating Virginia Woolf's time in East Sussex than WoolfPark? Based in Rodmell, attractions will include trips to the Newhaven lighthouse, Mrs Dalloway's party and the Orlando area where visitors can change sex. The refreshment area will be modelled on the don's luncheon party in Jacob's Room. 

Newmarket and Ripon

Racing today has been badly affected by the rain, leaving only two meetings of interest to me.
Newmarket 235: Turbo Linn
Newmarket 305: Folly Lodge
Ripon 400: Spanish Hidalgo

Smart, well-read, interesting, funny people, who seemed to be happy with their jobs

Every librarian in the English-speaking world will be drawing attention to the New York Times's Fashion and Style section, A Hipper Crowd of Shushers, but I cannot resist joining in. We are, it seems, 'smart, well-read, interesting, funny people, who seemed to be happy with their jobs.'

From the parish pump

 

The local newspaper puts a story across five columns on its front page today: pay up or I’ll sue says bride’s mum”, the story being that a bride and groom had to find a new venue for their wedding reception after the fire escape at a club was condemned. I know Seaford is provincial, but surely this cannot be the most important thing to have happened in the area in the past seven days?
In other news, the reader will learn that a youth let off a firework on an industrial estate, some scrap metal was stolen from a recycling centre and, in the aptly named parish pump section, that a woman was woken up in the night by a car colliding with a traffic island. And people criticise blogs for triviality and parochialism…
The latest Information World Review gives excessive space to the maunderings of Andrew Keen, in both an interview and a review of the Cult of the Amateur. Keen believes, apparently, that the whole of civilisation is threatened by blogs and that the ‘mainstream media’ are the authoritative guardians of our heritage. I doubt if Keen can ever have read a copy of an English tabloid national newspaper, or a local one.

Didn't he ramble? CILIP Sussex summer stroll

I went on the CILIP Sussex sub-branch's summer evening event, a walk from Berwick to Alfriston and back. It was a lovely evening and we walked through ripe cornfields. See here for Flickr photographs.

The high point was a brief visit to Berwick church, to see the Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant murals, astonishingly bright and fresh. The photo here is of two panels on the priest's side of the screen between nave and chancel, showing a marriage, and a death bed scene where a dying man, attended by priest and a grieving woman lies below a window looking out onto the very fields in which we walked.

Minister joins public library

Margaret Hodge, now Minister of State for Culture Media and Sport, and therefore in charge of the nation’s libraries, joined her public library at the weekend, according to the Guardian diary.
If true, it is alarming that the Minster with responsible for libraries has not been a regular public library user. Worse, and not mentioned by the diary, is that Hodge was also leader of Islington Council for ten years for 1982-1992 yet, if the story is true, did not use her council’s public library service.
I am not surprised. I remember negotiations with the leader of a London Labour council bordering on Islington at the time of rate-capping. His council were proposing considerable cuts in the public library service. When challenged, the leader, a man who fancied himself as a firebrand of the hard left, said, “I don’t have a library ticket.  I buy all the books I want to read. Doesn’t everybody?”

Eclipse Stakes

I oppose Authorized in this, taking Notnowcato instead.
Sandown 205: Sierra Vista
Sandown 235: Mutanaseb
Sandown 315: Notnowcato

The story of Eclipse's skeleton, now to be seen at the National Horseracing Museum, is one of the most fascinating in turf history,. I may recount it here if I have time to do the research. There's a good article by Sherwin Hall in Veterinary History:
Hall, S A
The skeleton of Eclipse.
Vet Hist. 1984;3(3):94-100

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