Sir Bobby Robson, 1933 - 2009

Sir Bobby Robson died today.


A gentleman, a fighter*, and a true local hero in my native region. He managed Newcastle, England, and Vancouver.


I'm glad he managed to hold on for the game held in his honour at the hallowed grounds of St James' Park last Sunday. But he will be sorely missed, in Newcastle and elsewhere.


RIP, Sir Bobby, and thank you for all the good times.




My all-time favourite quotes from the great man:


"He's got his legs back, of course, or his leg - he's always had one but now he's got two"


"We can't replace Gary Speed. Where do you get an experienced player like him with a left foot and a head?"


"There will be a game where somebody scores more than Brazil and that might be the game that they lose"


and, of course, "I would have given my right arm to be a pianist".


More here if anyone else is trying to cheer themselves back up after this sad news.


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*From the BBC:

Robson, who was first diagnosed with cancer 18 years ago in 1991, fought a brave battle against the disease. He beat bowel cancer in 1992, a malignant melanoma in 1995 and a tumour in his right lung and a brain tumour, both in 2006. In 2007 he vowed to "battle as I've always done" following the start of chemotherapy treatment after being diagnosed with cancer for the fifth time.

Probably not a miracle

This fire happened just a few blocks from my house this morning. We first saw it on the news just as we started to hear the helicopters and smell the smoke. Thankfully, no-one seems to have been hurt.

From the CBC article:

A suspicious fire has destroyed the Khalsa School near the intersection of Fraser Street and 45th Avenue in East Vancouver, but the school's holy book has been miraculously recovered from the burnt remains of the buildings. [...] It is was not known what condition the book was in as firefighters brought it out covered in a white cloth, but members of the temple attributed its preservation to the will of God.

Members of the temple are free to say whatever they feel to be the truth... but is anyone else a little surprised that the (publicly funded) CBC would use the word "miraculously" in such a way?

I seem to remember similar claims being made about a religious relic that survived another fire that I saw in person - York Minster in 1984. I was a wishy-washy kind of Christian at the time and believed the claim (as well as my Grandmother's allegedly eyewitness account of a sudden fog saving Durham Cathedral from being bombed during WWII*), but I remember touring the Minster when I was a bit older and noticing that the whole area in which the relic was stored was almost completely undamaged anyway.

IMHO it is much more likely that the most treasured items in a given building are the best protected.

ETA: and now Blackcomb Mountain (part of the Whistler resort) is on fire too. I wonder if some miracle will save Seventh Heaven (my favourite ski area on either mountain), or if the militant Olympics NIMBYs will have something to cheer about.

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*Corroborating story about 2/3 of the way down this page

It's the wrong t-shirt, Gromit!

As blog regulars will know, my habit of showering and changing at work (after cycling in) has caused a number of wardrobe malfunctions in the past.

Yesterday's incident, though, is worthy of a whole post of its own.

As I was getting ready for work, I grabbed some capris and one of my favourite t-shirts, and stuffed them in my panniers.

This is the t-shirt:

The squid is Teh Awesome. People are always asking me where I got it (the Militant Penguin, on Main & 10th. And here's a plug for the local designer, Grumpy Clothing).

The designer prints onto American Apparel t-shirts. As, apparently, do lots of other printing operations.

Because here's the t-shirt that I pulled back out of my panniers after my shower at work yesterday morning:



Yeah.

I wore my gross cycling t-shirt until 10 am, at which point I went straight to the nearest clothing store and managed to find a somewhat decent top among all the weird old lady clothes.

The friend who gave me the second t-shirt is highly amused.

I should probably turn my inside-out clothing back the right way before putting it in my drawers.

Dear Lilah,

You are the most hilarious baby I have ever met!

Within a few minutes of meeting you for the first time, you:

winked at me while holding a lotus position,

threw me a rockin' devil horns salute,

and told me to "fuck off" in time-honoured British style.

I can tell that you and I are going to be the very best of friends. I offer you the same welcome to the world and promises that I gave to baby Morgan, with an added bonus of two whole weeks of auntie-to-a-newborn experience. It must be working, because you fell asleep so peacefully when I first held you.

Maybe cut back on the attitude a wee bit though, eh? The monkey hand-puppet was a freebie; all future gifts need to be earned.

Just think about it. Have a good ponder.

All my love,

Auntie Cath

xoxoxox

Book meme!

Canuck-hater and soon-to-be Invading Yankee Imperialist DuWayne has tagged me with a book meme. The official rules are "list fifteen books that had the most profound impact on you - ones you can think of in fifteen minutes or less."

Well, I'll do the fifteen minutes rule, but I can't guarantee I'll think of fifteen books in that time. I'm not even sure there are fifteen books that have had a truly "profound" impact on me, and I want all killer, no filler in my list! I'll add hyperlinks and comments after the time is up.

Here goes.

"All Creatures Great and Small" by James Herriot. Made me want to be a vet for about six or seven years. I didn't stick with that plan, but the idea was what first sparked my interest in a career in or around biology.

"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams. I was "different" as an adolescent - different from my family, and different from my peers at high school. I think this book was the first one I ever read that made me feel like my interests and sense of humour might just be shared by someone else*.

"Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen. I soooooooooooo thought I was Elizabeth Bennett when I was thirteen! I have "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" on order; it's currently being held up as it's in the same order as something that doesn't come out in paperback until September. Can't wait.

"Cannery Row" by John Steinbeck. I fell head over heels in love with this book, and must have read it about twenty times by now. I turn to it when I'm stressed or unhappy, and Steinbeck's wonderful characters never fail to comfort me. This was also my gateway into his other, more serious, works, which helped shape my politics as I grew up.

That was eight minutes' worth and I'm now drawing blanks...

Oh! "Pecked to Death by Ducks" by Tim Cahill. A collection of adventure travel articles that first inspired me to try ocean kayaking. I will be forever grateful to Tim Cahill for this introduction to one of my favourite activities. I've read his other collections too, and they're all great.

Which reminds me... "Swallows and Amazons" by Arthur Ransome. Made me long for adventure; unfortunately, my one attempt at learning to sail resulted in a lot of unplanned ocean swims.

"The Chrysalids" by John Wyndham. One of my first forays into science fiction.

"Eva" by Peter Dickinson. Fuelled my passion for primates and the environment.

Well, that's eight (or twelve, if you count Hitchhiker as a trilogy of five books) - I did better than I thought I would! I'm sure I'll start thinking of more examples once I've posted this.

I tag... anyone who's ever fallen out of a sailboat.

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*In his wonderful foreword to The Salmon of Doubt, Stephen Fry wrote the following:

“When you […] read Douglas Adams […], you feel you are perhaps the only person in the world who really gets them. Just about everyone else admires them, of course, but no one really connects with them in the way you do. […] It’s like falling in love. When an especially peachy Adams turn of phrase or epithet enters the eye and penetrates the brain you want to tap the shoulder of the nearest stranger and share it. The stranger might laugh and seem to enjoy the writing, but you hug to yourself the thought that they didn’t quite understand its force and quality the way you do – just as your friends (thank heavens) don’t also fall in love with the person you are going on and on about to them”.

Yeah. Been there, done that – although not with complete strangers! I would read snippets out loud to whichever friend or relative was nearest, but they never seemed to properly appreciate the words.

Hierarchy in the UK

One of the things I love about Canada is the relative freedom from snobbery and classism. In the UK your accent gives away so much about your class, your education, and your region of origin, and people do judge you based on this information. I know, because I used to do it too.

In my case, inverse snobbery was deeply ingrained into me by classmates at my state (=public, in North American terms) comprehensive school*, and it took a few years to start to erase those impulses. "Posh" was used as an insult, and we mercilessly took the piss out of the kids from the city's public (=private - yes, posh schools that you have to pay for are called public schools in the UK, don't ask me why) schools whenever we met them on the streets or on the hockey field. As a frequent piss-taking victim myself, for my good grades and perceived "posh", non-local (at first) accent, I had to work a bit harder than normal to prove my inverse snobbery credentials to my peers, and consciously changed the way I pronounced certain words in order to try and fit in with everyone else.

I didn't really encounter classical (i.e. top-down) snobbery and classism until I went to University. Former public school kids who heard my accent and learned I was from a state school in Yorkshire assumed I was "thick" (direct quote), and were "amazed" (another direct quote) to hear that I was one of the top three students on my undergraduate degree course. Others saw my grades before they really knew me, and assumed I was from a public school "because you're intelligent" (yet another direct quote). My sister, who moved South instead of North, had an even harder time; some of her peers had never heard a real-life Yorkshire accent before, and actually laughed out loud when she spoke. She also blames her accent for her failure to get into Cambridge, despite getting straight As and being on multiple city and county sports teams and two musical ensembles.

Oh, and I'm sure I unfairly disparaged plenty of people with posh accents. Sorry.

But really, despite this divide persisting well into my undergraduate years, I'd barely thought about state vs. public school education since moving on to grad school 11 years ago. I was under the naive impression that the further you get from your school years, the less they matter. Surely, once you have a degree or two and a few years of real-life work experience, no-one cares where you went to school.

But this report on the BBC website yesterday gave me a wake-up call. How depressing that this state of affairs still persists:

Granted, I have no idea how the corresponding Canadian or US figures would look. Maybe they'd be quite similar. But somehow I suspect that the depressing graph above is an indicator of a very British problem. Both top-down and inverse snobbery, along with that pervasive British anti-intellectualism streak, contribute to this sad state of affairs, and to the waste of far too much potential.

Ugh. Now I feel icky.

ETA: this new article is an interesting take on social mobility. Canada is in the top five countries for social mobility, alongside the Scandinavian nations (yay socialism!) The US and UK are at the bottom. There are some very interesting points about how state education is funded, and the relative influences of parents vs. the state. Highly recommended if you're interested in this issue!

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*charitably described as "mixed ability intake". Two thirds of kids in my year left at age 16, and only about half of those who continued went on to University at 18. Three girls in my form of ~25 kids were pregnant by 14; one of them was divorced with two kids by the age of 19. But, thanks to some wonderful teachers, those of us who did well, did very well. The opportunities were certainly there for people who had the ability and the desire to take them.

Tuesday pet peeve: militant NIMBYism

NIMBYism is rampant in Vancouver, and it drives me nuts.

Olympics? No, we don't want that, it'll be too chaotic. Rapid transit to the airport? Nope, we don't want the inconvenience of the construction. Better cycling infrastructure? No, it'll jam up the traffic.

But what really pisses me off is the kind of NIMBY who actually wants the above initiatives to fail, at great detriment to the city, just so they can prove that they were right. The kind of NIMBY who would cut off their nose to spite their face, rather than admit they were wrong.

Seriously, people are being interviewed on the TV news, and commenting on news websites, who seem genuinely disappointed that the recent bike lane trial on the Burrard Bridge hasn't brought downtown traffic to a complete standstill.

The most obvious example though is the continuing Olympic NIMBYism.

Now, there are valid arguments against hosting the Games. For example, once the global economy tanked and the city was left on the hook for the Olympic Village construction costs, those of us who started out strongly pro-Games had to admit that the naysayers might have had a point when they kept going on about generations of debt, and eternal doom and gloom in general.

But if you say that you hope the Games get cancelled because of a swine flu epidemic, or that no-one comes because they can't afford to travel and the whole thing is a disaster, YOU ARE AN IDIOT. Do you really want that to happen? So you can sit there smirking "told you so" for decades to come, as property taxes rise and the city's other infrastructure suffers?

Really????

Some people are even saying that they want to actively disrupt the Games!!!

The Olympics are coming, like it or not. You didn't vote for it, you didn't want it to happen, but it's gonna. So accept it, get over it, move on. Let's do whatever we can to make the Games a raging success!

You never know, you might even enjoy having a global party in your backyard, with some of the world's best athletes as your guests.

A plague of noisy hockey fans upon Vancouver's militant NIMBYs!

Current view

I missed the 6:40 ferry by 5 minutes... but bumped into a friend on a
patio, had a beer, and am on the 8:40 ferry right now with 2 other
friends. The sunset view was worth the wait!

I think we might have a mouse problem

I came into the kitchen today to see a rather suspicious scene.


This is what I saw when I got down on the floor and looked under the dresser:



So that's where all those toys went!

I fished out everything I could with a coathanger...


...but there are still lots of goodies under there!

Could I possibly trouble you...

Erm, here's a link for my readers. Especially those based in BC.

if you wouldn't mind...

could you possibly...

only if you want to...

if it's not too much trouble...

Gaah, being British sucks sometimes! And Canadians are too polite to help me get over it.

OK, I'm gonna try the American way.

"Please nominate my blog".

"Thank you".

(Sorry to bother you)

Tuesday pet peeve

I don't know why everyone's so negative about Mondays. I like Mondays. I come in all fresh and well rested, chat to various colleagues about their weekends, and settle into work full of enthusiasm and motivation. I spend my lunch break stocking up on milk, fruit, and other supplies to get me through the rest of the week, and have a very productive day.

(Mostly).

Wednesdays are hump days, which is nice. On Thursdays the weekend is in sight, with a pay cheque every second week, and then Fridays are usually the most relaxed day of the week, with coffee dates and longer lunches.

It's the Tuesdays that get me.

Tuesdays are busy but generally unproductive days, with endless meetings and emails and additions to my to-do list. I'm no longer quite so fresh and enthusiastic, tend to get bogged down in admin and crisis-of-the-week issues, and the weekend is still days away.

So it's a good day to start what may or may not become a recurring series of Tuesday posts.

Today's Pet Peeve:

"Regular" does not mean "Frequent".

How often do you see a questionnaire with options labelled "Never, Occasionally, Regularly, Always"?

"Regular" means that an event occurs at, well, regular, predictable intervals. That can mean once an hour, once a day, once a year, once a century, or once a millenium. It does not tell you anything at all about the frequency of the event.

A plague of constipation upon people who misuse the word "regular".

A Mad Tea Beer Party

I got to meet another of my favourite bloggers yesterday! (That's three blog meet-ups now, and they've all been great. I highly recommend it).

This time it was Mad Hatter's turn. She's in town for a few days, and had a long enough window in her busy schedule that I got to take her kayaking! It was a very windy day for this time of year, so my promised "leisurely paddle no more than 20 metres from the beach" turned into a solid two hour workout, during which we had to fight to get the boat to turn back towards shore from the middle of the harbour. But despite being a novice kayaker, Mad Hatter paddled like a pro and didn't let the wind or waves phase her. She even claimed to enjoy herself! No eagles out yesterday unfortunately, but we did spot a seal, some cormorants, a tern, and assorted gulls.

Meeting a blogger is a bit of a weird experience, with elements of both a blind date and a catch-up with an old friend. You really can get a decent impression of what someone's like from their blog, and indeed Mad Hatter was much as I expected her to be - smart, funny, and with lots of common ground to talk about! Our animated conversation about blogging, science, pets, and life in general continued after the kayaking, on Vancouver's best patio...


...and the four hours we spent together simply flew by.

Thanks mate! I hope you enjoy the rest of your stay!

Unanswered questions:

• How did Massimo guess who I was meeting on his first try?
• What would his other two guesses have been?

Dear Morgan,

It was an absolute pleasure to meet you last night.

Your Mum told me she'd try to hold on until I got back from my trip, but you came out to join the world while I was still away. That's OK though - she'd waited a long, long time for you, with far too much heartbreak along the way.

And now that you're here, I just wanted to tell you that you have the best parents a little girl could wish for. They can't wait to take you home so you can start life as a family. (I'm sorry you had to see your Dad's cheesy Star Wars themed birth video on only your second day in the world, but I suppose it's just as well; you're going to have to get used to it. Content yourself with the knowledge that you already have more hair than him).

Speaking of family: beyond your parents and your furry siblings, you have a huge extended family of friends and relatives who are very excited that you're finally here. You'll be seeing a lot of us! I will be your babysitter and your diaper changer, your Auntie and your friend, and I've already signed up to go on your first outings to the aquarium and Science World.

So much fun lies ahead! I can't wait to get to know you.

All my love,

Auntie Cath

Morgan says "YAY!" \o/

Where in the world is Cath this weekend?

Guesses in the comments please! I'll add more photos later if you're stumped.


Second photo now added - people already have the right answer, but I wanted to show you what the rest of the fence looks like!

The best Gregor since Mendel?

Vancouver is a fantastic place to be a cyclist. Designated bike routes everywhere (I attended the opening celebrations for the newest one last weekend), and more considerate drivers than in Glasgow (although everything's relative, and some of my fellow cyclists aren't exactly helping, as Dr. J has already commented). The city has even gone to extraordinary lengths to keep my regular route open during the loooooooooooong light rail tunnel and station construction project on Cambie Street, as evidenced below:

The exact configuration of bollards, cones, signs and fences has seemed to change almost every week for two years, so you're never exactly sure which way to go, but hey, it's open! And you gotta admire their creativity in constantly finding novel ways around the new holes and other obstacles.

I actually stopped a few weeks ago to thank a member of the construction team for keeping the route open, and she was so touched that someone had actually taken the time to do this that I wanted to make my appreciation public!

But since we got our new eco-conscious mayor, Gregor Robertson (follow him on Twitter!), things have gone from good to better:

• A trial bike-share programme
• A doubled cycling infrastructure budget
• Car free days on many Sundays (same link as above)
• Segregated bike lanes on the deathtrap that is the Burrard Bridge
• And, today, a proposal for a new pedestrian and bike bridge.

The only thing better than the actual improvements is the spluttering red-faced reaction of the many local NIMBY and anti-cyclist types (see comments on any of the CBC articles linked above).

Yay Vancouver! Yay Gregor! And he even has a kilt, and is trying to get us rapid rail links to Seattle and Portland, and has started community gardens at City Hall!

I think I know who's getting my vote in the next municipal election...

Pros and cons of an itinerant lifestyle

ON TUESDAY I went for farewell drinks with a grad student friend who's leaving Vancouver for an overseas postdoc position.

It's been a bad year for friends leaving town. This aspect of the academic lifestyle affects me more now that I've stopped moving and put down roots - it's always more depressing for the ones left behind. I commented on this at the pub, and we got into a discussion about whether PIs who have supervised more than 50 students and postdocs ever start seeing new trainees as replaceable, interchangeable units who scoot in and out of their labs while the big picture research keeps on moving. Kind of like how tectonic plates would view the constant waves of new species that cavort on their backs. We agreed that, for PIs and random friends alike, it's important to maintain periods of overlap between different lab generations.

ON SATURDAY I'm meeting up with a former lab-mate in the States.

I have work-related meetings on Monday and Tuesday, but decided to fly out a couple of days early to spend time with a friend who now lives in my destination city. She and I joined the same Glasgow lab on the same day, as postdoc and student respectively, and both subsequently joined the transatlantic brain drain for the next stage of our careers. I managed to meet up with her on a previous work-related trip to the same city, but we only spent about three hours together. This time we get, oooh, about 30 hours!

I need to keep reminding myself that every friend who leaves town is a potential new vacation destination.