The Value of Failure Symposium at the Tate. This, sounds right up my street. What with my consistent failures. I'd like to get some value out of them.

I know self-googling always comes to no good, but I had a legitimate reason.

Honest.

Turns out I came 1,578th out of 1,700-odd people in the Southend 10k race in 2003. I always knew I wasn't so good at sport.

The Women's Torah Project - the first sefer Torah scribed by a woman.

Anne Widdecombe and Esther Rantzen are talking about sex education and it's hysterical. Anne's position (the kids are having sex because it's "cool") is the voice of someone who lives at home with her mother and clearly never had the faintest inkling of teenage sex.

An abstinence campaign works well in "some areas of the States" because - I'm guessing - it's the bible belt, full of people with religious convictions. What Esther calls "the more authoritarian morality". While her phrase is laden with personal angles, I think it's true.

And I really think Anne Widdecombe sounds... frustrated? About something, clearly.

Urban Junkies made the Guardian on Monday.

Juggling a squillion and two projects, but took a couple of hours out this afternoon to go to the Netimperative Blogging Roundtable. Felt something of a fraud, because I was "just a blogger" and everyone else had a corporate/business model agenda: Six Apart, MSN, the BBC, Shiny Media, the ubiquitious blogging consultants and a couple of super switched on PR people.

In a very old-media way I probably need a bit of time to process the conversation instead of blogging straight out of my head. But there was interesting information about new platforms and technology, moblogging, RSS feeds to your phone, and great discussion about who's gonna read papers in the future (me, since you ask).

Even though I probably knew this already it became clear to me that there is a bunch of people making serious money out of weblogs. While that is not my agenda and I blog for fun rather than profit, I think I've started a process running in the back of my mind ("kill -9 moneymakingideas").

I also discovered Treonaut, Longtail, that people use the phrase "the blogosphere" not ironically, and that after all these years of saying NO-key-a, it turns out I should be saying no-KEY-a.

So I'm watching the news on London Tonight right now, and I want to know who's bright idea it was, for the London Eye story, to have the presenter standing in front of an image of the Eye, and put the text to the story in an arc over the Eye. Artistic, sure, but unreadable.

I am unspeakably delighted to hear that the OFT is finally onto the banks.

Here's what happens. I'm self employed, a good chunk of my client still - archaically - pay by cheque. Whole separate issue about how cheques never really clear and they can get the money back like a year later.

So let's say I invoice someone on 1st May, 14 days terms. They usually pay in three weeks or a month. Fine. Then they post me the cheque. It takes a few days. Then I generally wait till I'm next in town to go to the bank.

It takes "three working days" to "clear". So if I pay it in on Monday afternoon, it's not in my account till Thursday. Then, if it's over a not so huge amount, it takes four or five working days.

Because my work is project based, I tend to invoice for largeish sums, not that often. A couple of months ago, I paid in a chunky cheque, waited the three days, found out from my branch that it's five days if it's a largeish sum. Six days later, no money. I call my branch, they don't know where it is, "out there in the ether" is the phrase that - from memory - they used.

Eventually, it turned up. I worked out that the lost interest for the three missing days was around £4.10.

If there are 60 million people in the country, and this happens once a year (and it happens more often to me) to just 10% of them, that's £24.6m.

And banks make you pay charges.

Wot no Today programme? I was lying in bed thinking "Dizzy Gillespie's nice, and all, but surely there's some real news?" when I realise that people at the BBC are on strike. Power to the workers and all that, but I know people at the BBC. Surely someone would have told me? My day is all out-of-kilter now: I'm having to watch TV and I have to be at Aldgate to talk about project finance in Somewherestan at 8am and I've not even heard the news.

I'm a delicately balanced creative flower. Don't change anything without telling me, OK?

Somebody - looking out of my window, it looks like the people on the corner on Minster Road and Shoot-up Hill - is having the loudest party known to man. And I should know: from my bed, the bass beat is so loud, I thought it was my neighbours upstairs. They who woke me up this time last weekend. I just called Camden's weekend noise service, where the website says they're around till 4am. Turns out, they're around only till 3.30, because they do their last call then. "You should update your website" it what I said to the friendly - ozzie - Camden phone operative. Although not quite as politely.

You know how I've written a lot about encoded antisemitism (for a while, I was the only person on the internet who said it.)

Well, something happened the day after the election - a Friday - that had me thinking.

So I was sitting in Starbucks in Hampstead at 5pm, waiting to meet my cousin. (She is 17, and didn't want to be seen with me in Golders Green Starbuck. Let's face it: I'm not 17).

The place was heaving with kids. Really heaving: like two hundred young people aged twelve to fifteen or sixteen, I'd guess.

Why? Some famous North London B-lister (Cat Deely? They've all merged in my mind) was there, and they were all running around getting her to sign their exercise books while she drank her non-fat decaff coffee-free beverage. Because she is about two inches wide, I do not exaggerate. She clearly doesn't eat. Zaftig, she's not.

So the nice ozzie and kiwi women who work in Starbucks were tearing their hair about it, because the real customers were not having a nice time, and we pay like five earth pounds for a cup of coffee, so it should at least be calm, like the advertised third space.

The Starbucks people started moving the young people on, "time to go folks, nothing more to see here," and they were friendly and charming about it in the way that only antipodeans can be.

Eventually, there was one gaggle of three gangly boys, not drinking a Starbucks beverage. They looked to me like the kind of North London boys I see all the time: the kind of cocky swagger and radiccio that comes from a private school education. Some call it polish. I disagree.

She went up to them. "Time to go, boys," she smiled. "Why?" One of them retorted. "Cat Deeley's gone, and you're not drinking anything, so it's time to go."

One kid stands up, and shouts at her, "you're just being anti semitic."

I am open mouthed. The Starbucks worker is shocked and embarassed.

The kid continues: "it's because I'm Jewish," he says in no imitation at all of is-it-bicoz-I-is-black.

I'm not prepared to be a bystander, so I go up to this group, and say to the boy, "she didn't say anything anti semitic."

He thinks he can mess with me. "Yeah, she did. It's cos I'm Jewish."

I turn to the Starbucks worker and say I'm sorry, and that I didn't think she was being anti semitic.

Then I say to the kid: "people like you cause anti semitism. This woman hasn't said anything wrong and you should apologise to her."

He looks like he still wants to have a go.

"Look," I say to him, "you should learn to behave with more respect to people, and just leave before I ask you who you parents are."

He ran, with his mates.

And they looked to me like kids whose parents had never said to them, "you know, son, you might sometimes be wrong."

Oh, I wish I'd entered the Cooling The Tube competition. Handing out ice-lollies. Posters of snowmen. I'm sure I could have come up with something.

I love the internet.

This is why I love the internet.

I am number five for the google search "Jewish record Does that mean youre not coming."

And finding me, someone who was sitting around in their house saying "what was that record my parents used to listen to? You know, with that gag? Does that mean you're not coming."
And then they thought hey, I'll check out that interwebnet thing and now they know it's You Don't Have To Be Jewish.

QED.

This is great.

Art of sorts..

Image(261)
Originally uploaded by sashinka-uk.

I took this underneath the Trocadero by Haymarket: it's one in a series of adverts for Lillywhites (the sports store).

I'm loving the limitations of my camphone. Only a month ago I was moaning that I had a phone that thinks it's a camera (Nokia 7610) and now I feel like an intrepid photo-journalist.

A bit.

But, most fun you can have with your clothes on etc.

So you're dying to know which carrot cake recipe I used at the weekend, I know. In the end, I made Delia's Low-fat Moist Carrot Cake which was nice, but not overwhelming. I think I made a strategic error not making the High Fat/Ultimate Version, which I later discovered is the one B makes. And he's a guy who knows from recipes.

Did you watch Paul Abbot on the South bank show? You know, the Shameless guy?

I think - judging by the image of his house we saw - he lives in Didsbury.

Didsbury is the West Hampstead of Manchester, but with nicer houses.

I have become obsessed by Sudoku - even though I haven't finished one yet. But better, is Japanese-English: Let's go to WHSmith, clasping £2.75! Yes, let's.

I think it's good for my brain: I read somewhere that crosswords and the like can stave off Alzheimers, even though it's - probably/hopefully - a way off. So I'm still training on the Evening Standard easy crossword - it's basically just vocabulary - and I never get more than 75%. Call myself a wordsmith. But last night's ES sudoku, I couldn't even get started. I've been doing them here, and at least I can get started, but I can't finish those, either.

And I market myself as a completer-finisher. That could be a lie.

rainbow babe

rainbow babe
Originally uploaded by sashinka-uk.

That's me; well, my shadow. Great weekend: people over for lunch (must write more about my recipes, I know), mellow watching-TV kinda evening on Saturday, great walk to Hampstead and the Camden Arts Centre, winding out way through West Hampstead and ending up at Yo Sushi. Summer was made for this.

You know, they offered me a slot on the Canne judging panel, but I was washing my hair. In a kabbalistic fashion, of course, Esther. Sheesh.

Perhaps I'm showing my age, but I liked the old BBC weather symbols.