(Death) Star's align..

Forgive the reference to Star Wars but it seems appropriate.

I've just got off the phone with a research director at St. Joseph's Hospice in Hackney, where i'm hoping to accomplish some of my research over the remainder of the academic year. My research interest is in identifying cultural barriers to the utilization of palliative care services. So is their's, it turns out. They have a particular interest in Muslim communities. So do I.

They're redeveloping space in their building to be more useful and suitable for the various communities that they serve. I'm getting ready to write a paper about issues in understanding and reconfiguring dying spaces in the context of the hospice.

It sounds like a match made in heaven. I'm really excited about all this! Pieces are coming together...

Thought i'd share it with hyperspace.

Bike Porn

This is rich (excerpts from an article in this past weekend's Observer):

"A man has been placed on the sex offenders' register for pleasuring himself with a bicycle....Clearly, Robert Stewart, 51, is unconventional; he might even be sufficiently strange to have held down a place in the Jackson 5. But a criminal? He was in his room - in a hostel in Ayr - all pumped up when two cleaners burst in. He was prosecuted and has pleaded guilty to 'disorderly conduct'. But since when was sex orderly? Why was he placed on the sex offenders' register - was the bicycle offended? Did Stewart insist on going off-road when the bicycle onfly fancied a gentle spot of handle-bar-holding in first gear?

"The BBC website shows us, by way of illustration, a bicycle; one can only trust it is not the actual bicycle, as it is an offense to show victims of sex crimes. I mean, first the trauma off the attack, now its anonymity blown.

"Anyway two things strike me about this suspiciously racy-looking bicycle. First, it is not a mountain bike, so perhaps Stewart could have bought it as a mounting bike. SEcond, it is a male bicycle, so either this is a fit-up or our friend is a homosexual pedalophile. But again, I pose the question: is that a crime? Of the recent spate of sexual assaults, thsi seems one of the less harmful.

"Politics is meant to be kept out of the bedroom, so why can't one keep bicycles in the bedroom?"

Well, i for one am shocked. I'm posting a long withheld photo of my trusty delivery bicycle in the hopes that should anyone ever see anyone abusing it they'll let me know. Anyway, i've been talking about posting a photo of it for ages.

Here's a picture of me with my bike in sunnier, warmer days. At the moment it's wet and wet and grey. Daylight has moved on by 4:30 if not earlier. Our plants are having trouble coping.

The Dreaded Lurgi

Came home this rainy evening to a distinctly unwell feeling. Crawling into Caroline's arms for comfort after a particularly disgusting Thai take-out I leaned forward for a kiss and encountered a turned cheek.

"You've got the Lurgi", she said.

"Huh?"

What follows is an explanation ripped from the pages of Wikipedia, or Wikipaedia as they might spell it here:

The lurgy (also spelled lurgi) is British English slang for an unspecified or mythical contagious disease, generally one considered inconvenient and non-fatal with obvious symptoms, such as influenza or the common cold. Phrases like "I've got the lurgi" are commonly heard when somebody is explaining why they cannot attend a social occasion, come to work, etc. It is also often referred to as "The Dreaded Lurgi", based on a Goon Show episode of 1954.

The term is also used in the context of playground games, where lurgi is often used as a phantom contagion or unclean quality, in a manner similar to the North American concept of cooties. For example, "You can't play with us, you've got the lurgi!" could be used when excluding another child from a group.

Etymology
There is some suggestion that it is a corruption and contraction of the word "allergy". This is not supported by the use of the hard 'g' in Lurgy (rhyming with Fergie), as allergy has a softer 'g' sound.

There is also the theory that it is based on the Northern English dialectic phrase "fever-lurgy" meaning lazy or idle.

Another possible origin of the word, and certainly the reason it has become widespread in British culture, can be found in the 1950s BBC radio programme, The Goon Show.

In a 1954 programme of The Goon Show, "Lurgi Strikes Britain", Ned Seagoon must deal with a national outbreak of a highly dangerous, highly infectious and — as it turns out — highly fictitious disease known as the Dreaded Lurgie.[1] It eventually becomes apparent that the disease is merely a convoluted ruse perpetrated by the arch-criminals Count Moriarty and Hercules Grytpype-Thynne in order to sell large numbers of brass band instruments, the playing of which is claimed to be the only cure. In the show, the symptoms of lurgi manifested as an uncontrollable urge to shout "EEEE-YACKABOO!" without realising. It was implied that the disease was fatal; Moriarty claims that the British Isles could be wiped out in as little as six weeks.

References
^ Quinion, Michael. The Dreaded Lurgi. World Wide Words.
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lurgy"

Dear Sahir,

Thought about you last night.

We went to see Devendra Banhart at the Forum in Kentish Town, part of north london. The man seems too long and narrow to have a voice of such astonishing depth. He's a warbler, and a fantastic one. A charismatic fellow, he's as charming when he's mumbling into the mic as when he's speaking clearly. Quite boyish in speach, which belies the beard and the 70s rock-star hair. Anyway, that he's thin as a rail isn't the only reason i thought of you. Missing the times when we could sit down daily and listen to music in the wooden sanctuary of your Burlington flat. Caroline turned to me and said she hopes we don't have a flashback - it was Devendra we were listening to that night at yours post-graduation. "That would be amazing," i thought.

Lot's of music to see in this town. Last week it was Chemical Brothers and Justice (the latter the better) - see photo. I know it's no different from New York, but the endless possibilities for a night out can be paralyzing.

Instead of the NY Times Sunday edition, we get the Guardian (£1.50) on Saturday or The Observer (£1.70) and we read it at breakfast for the rest of the week. There was a funny column this week (in the Sunday Telegraph, actually) from Oliver Pritchett, writing about "'probability forcasts,' so that weather presenters avoid getting things wrong...temperature charts would be replaced by charts showing 'possible' temperatures":

"Good evening, and it's a very mixed bag with the weather outlook today. As you can see, we've got these question mark symbols over a large part of North-west England where, sticking my neck out, the winds could be fairly brisk-ish.

For North Wales, thunderstorms would be a pretty good each-way bet. Scotland, as usual, is anybody's guess. In South-east England we've got a lot of those arrows moving in from Devon and Cornwall, so by midday you should be seeing a lot more arrows here and along the South coast. The pollen count will be, you know, comme ci comme ça.

"That's about all I have to say about the weather, but, as you know, BBC Weather has now taken over the functions of the Office for National Statistics, so now we can look at the wider picture. First, I'll deal with the population of the United Kingdom. As you can see on the map, we've got this ridge of high population moving towards us from Eastern Europe.

"I think this will break up before it reaches us or drift away into the North Sea, although you may get a few scattered Slovenians in East Anglia. And if you live north of the Wash and you're going out today, it might be a good idea to take a Polish phrase book with you....

"If you go to our website, weatherbbc.co.uk/whatever, you'll see we've got some new figures from the Department of Education - which calls itself something else these days. A reasonable percentage of pupils passed GCSE maths and several handfuls of children (that's pretty big hands, remember) can read by the time they leave primary school compared with last year's figure, which was comparable to the population of a fairly large town in Austria.

That's probably quite good news. So, if you're going out today and you have a daughter aged 10, it might be a good idea to buy her a book. The Government has announced that it is investing squillions of pounds in school buildings. (Alex Deakin may have already announced this three times in earlier bulletins.)

"Crime figures now. This year a fair number of people have been victims of muggings, compared with quite a few last year. So, if you're going out tonight it might be a good idea to stay at home.

"Now, let's look at the Health Forecast map. It's a pretty grim picture here with these little skull-and-crossbones symbols sweeping in from the North-east, bringing with them lots of ever-so nasty illnesses, then they collide with these symbols, which are not puffy clouds, but little obese people. And over here, there's a scattering of persistent flu viruses. So, if you're going out today, you've got a roughly one in four chance of coming back alive."

Sounds fairly similar to the forecast in our country. Things aren't so different.

On an up-note, the weather today is actually very Septemberish. I had the french doors open at breakfast.

Hope you're sleeping well, my friend.