LA is like a fiery bicycle pump

As any schoolboy knows, if you put your finger over the valve of a bike pump and try to push the plunger, it gets hot. Similarly, if you bring air from high in the Nevada desert down to sea level in Los Angeles, the entire basin becomes hotter than a DVD player in a Liverpool pub carpark. It's called a Santa Ana wind and it has the effects of removing smog, torching the San Fernando Valley, and torching the Captain's brain. Whether or not these are welcome effects is a matter of some contention.

You can mimick life during a Santa Ana wind by cranking a radiator up to full in small room with all the doors and windows closed, and staying there for three days. If there's sunlight coming through the window, even better.

A fine lesson in arbitration

I'm delighted to see that the cheese-eating collaborators have finally learned how to deal with striking labour unions - set highly trained killers on them. If Margaret Thatcher taught the world nothing else, it's that the only way to deal with these malingerers and wastrels is to let them feel the sharp smack of firm government.

I only wish that the university here would employ a similar policy. It seems that every time I walk across campus some group of ancilliary staff or another is staging a picket in demand of extra biscuits with their morning coffee. It's completely counter-productive, by going on strike they only demonstrate how efficiently the university can run without them, but of course the gutless management won't do anything.

When money gets tight here it's the faculty that are fired, not the unionised bean-counters.

My reaction to the happy news

I never know how to react when someone tells me she's pregnant. The news of impending motherhood is clearly an emotional event in which the rest of us are supposed to share, but whether happy or disastrous is not always clear, not in the circles I move in at least. Just a few days ago a friend told me she was up the spout, so I had to stammer and stall for few moments, trying to gauge whether this news was more joyful than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide, or more calamitous than an iPod salesman at an Amish gathering.

Fortunately I remembered that she's Mormon. (Actually I tend to think of her as Mormish, since she's neither Jack-Mormon nor orthodox supplicant. For example, she went to Brigham Young, but she doesn't wear the underwear). Anyway, she's sufficiently Mormon that I was able to congratulate her, fairly confident that I would retain my image as a sincere friend. It just goes to show that religious dogma is not entirely without merit, at least in awkward social situations.

Incidentally, Mormons get their name from a revelation their founder, Joseph Smith, received from the angel Moroni. Surely they should be termed 'Morons'?

I am not anti-American

An Englishman, an American and a Canadian walk into a bar in Bangkok - and nobody could tell the difference, because to any non-occidental they were culturally indistinguishable from one another.

The Captain's mailbag usually has at least one or two patronising messages along the lines of 'tut, our American cousins eh', or 'when are going to go a bit easy on the Americans?'. You'd really have to be British to believe that I am in any way anti-American. For the past 60 years, the English have been labouring under the ludicrous misapprehension that they're in some way still globally relevant or important, and for the last 20 years have had the belief that England is in some way the intellectual superior of North America. Hence it's very easy for my British readers, when I comment on the latest act of hypocrisy or incompetence from this side of Atlantic, to believe that since 'it could only happen in America', I'm being anti-American.

Just to put an end to this preposterous fallacy, consider the following:

Information
The Sun remains Britain's most popular 'newspaper'.

Political naivety
Despite a recession, the poll tax and increasing tory corruption, the British still voted John Major into office.

Personal responsibility
It's always someone else's fault when a British driver is fined by a speed camera.

Violence
Britain, the peace-loving home of tolerance and fair play, is also the country that gave the world happy slapping

Freedom
Compulsory ID cards. Enough said.

The USA is far from perfect, but it at least it doesn't need a lot of pompous, lazy, uneducated has-beens from England to defend it.

This man wants to ban gay priests

Ironic, isn't it? Ratzinger is living proof that the only difference between the Vatican and Old Compton Street is a cassock. Choirboys, beware...

Teflon law

Norman Tebbit once famously advised the degenerates of 1980's Britain to 'get on their bikes'. Wise words indeed, but unfortunately not quite appropriate in a town like Los Angeles where cycling is strongly discouraged. (It's an open secret here that the main role of MTA buses is to eliminate those cyclists who have managed to avoid death by SUV. Public transport is just a useful by-product). Thankfully, coming to the fore are the LA County Sheriffs, who are providing a useful transport service by dumping all the useless criminals and bums that they can't be arsed to deal with in downtown LA, whence they become someone else's problem (LAPD's, in this case).

I heartily approve of this policy post-millenium deportation. Why should my tax be used up by Santa Monica Police dealing with criminals and the mentally ill, when they should be dealing with more pressing problems (e.g. jay walking at 3am, enjoying a cigarette on the beach, and generally having good time in an un-American and not officially sanctioned way). Let the gliteratti of central LA deal with them instead.

Of course it would only work in a town like Los Angeles, a city who's law enforcement has more tiers than a cake at Greek wedding, and that is more socially segregated than Johannesberg in 1982. If you tried the same policy in London you'd have to bus them all out to Slough, which with current petrol prices and the congestion charge would be almost expensive as actually dealing with the problem.

Supermodels are a pain in the arse

The 'news' that a super-model stuffs toot up her expensively sculpted nose must be the biggest non-revelation of the year, but nevertheless the fashion industry are falling over themselves to ditch Kate Moss in an orgy of self-righteous indignation. It's as spineless as it is hypocritical, but she's spent years raking in the corporate cash for nothing more taxing than waddling up a catwalk to Frankie Goes to Hollywood, so maybe it's just time to pay the piper.

The latest fashion house to give Moss the elbow is Burberry, who presumably think that taking cocaine doesn't fit in with their corporate image. If she'd downed three bottles of White Lightning before shagging a Millwall fan in the back of Vauxhall Nova then no doubt they wouldn't have minded.

The soundtracks of misery

It's a well-known fact that during periods of prolonged physical activity the mind seems to latch onto repetitive tunes, and unfortunately these tunes are all too often terrible ones. For example, mountaineer Joe Simpson thought he was going to die to the tune of Brown Girl in the Ring by Boney M, which probably explains why he fought so hard to survive. Imagine if you will an eternity punctuated by Boney M (I don't have to imagine, because I've been to a Young Farmers Club 'disco' in Shropshire, which is more or less the same thing).

The soundtrack to my own adventures the Rockies over the weekend started off with the appropriately named I Can't Get You Out of my Head by pocket-sized pop star Kylie Minogue. You won't be surprised to hear that I'm not a big 'Kylie' fan, but at the time I was frigidly cold and mildly terrified, so the mental image of Australia's most talked-about curves was not entirely unwelcome.

As the day progressed and we found our momentum, for some reason Kylie was replaced by Meatloaf's Bat Out of Hell, which is curious because I can think of nothing worse than trying to drag Mr Loaf's enormous lardy arse up a rock face. I love climbing, and I would do anything for love - but I won't do that.


Availability
Please note that I also do weddings, funerals and bar-mitzvahs - contact my agent for availability. I have had to knock the children's parties on the head though, for legal reasons

Thank Christ for inefficiency

One of the things that first struck me as wide-eyed, hopeless foreigner in this land is the degree of administrative cretiny that is a feature of life here. Bureaucratic incompetence isn't just a hobby here, it's the mission statement of the entire government system. Having both lived in France and worked for an insurance company I am no stranger to truly callous and dogmatic administrative procedure, but even I was at times left staggered

For example, it took just two weeks to gain unlimited access to one of the largest supercomputers in the US, but three months to get a social security number (which should take 10 days). The experience was rather Kafka-esque. They had actually lost my application within 30 minutes, but this didn't come to light for three months because my repeated requests for information were met with the rebuttal 'we can't give you that information without a Social Security number'. I don't know who sets the policy on these things, but if I ever meet him I shall congratulate him on the enjoyable idiosyncrasies he has introduced to the system. Either that or I shall smash the useless, lazy cunt in the face.

Just this once, though, I am grateful for the general uselessness of American pen-pushers. It seems my landlords have been a bit naughty and broken some trifling clause of the Santa Monica rental code, and my home is apparently uninhabitable. I've been living there quite comfortably for 9 months, but I don't work for Santa Monica planning department so what would I know? Rather than just fine the landlords or give them a warning or fill their mouths with cement, 'The Council' has decreed that they're going to pull the house down in 19 days. Running the gauntlet of Venice Beach bunny-huggers, vacuous actors and West Hollywood flamers in search of a new home is never appealing, but bearing in mind that in a few days I'll be back to my customary 80 hour weeks the timing is a disastrous blow to the progression of important atmospheric research.

Fortunately though, it seems that it will take the ever impressive Santa Monica City Council six months to arrange the demolition of our property, and I can stay in my apparently squalid third-world slum until I am ready to return to Boulder.

Everyone hates me because I'm English

As a white, middle-class male from Somerset, I know what it is to be a victim of bigotry. For example, I once triggered a race riot in Barnstaple simply for looking at a Devonian 'in a funny way'. Happy Days. Even so, I was unprepared for the torrent of bile and invective my racial background would induce over here in America.

To be honest, half the people here don't believe my accent anyway, they think I'm actually from New Jersey and just putting it on to impress women or something. It's only when I make some terrible social gaffe, like admitting that I've never had Jerky, or that I consider the bus a viable form of transport, that my heritage is truly considered genuine. Those who do believe that my passport is kosher fall into two camps of contempt, falling into broadly political groups of left and right. The right hate my subversive, pinko Anglo-Saxon principles (stuff like tolerance, pragmatism, freedom of speech etc). The left hate me because I refuse to apologise for my part in the atrocities of Britain's colonial past, a period of imperialism that ended 30 years before I was born.

I am not used to dealing with being hated for being English. Back in the Warm Bosom of My Motherland, I am instead hated for being an arrogant, insensitive, pompous little arsehole, which at least is a bit less impersonal.

I have to say, there are times when I have some sympathy with the raging xenophobia. From my vantage point in the mountains, it seems that the whole of England is currently in celebration for beating a bunch of convicts and barmen at a game of cricket, a game so tedious that only a bearded butcher from Kent could possibly have a life so void as to be interested in it. Baseball is pretty dull, but at least it has the merit of not taking five days to play. As far as I can tell we didn't even win the game, it was just that the weather stopped play long enough so that the convicts didn't have time to beat us.

Hurricane facts

Between 1950 and 2004, there were a total of 96 hurricanes making landfall on the continental USA, of which 64 had women's names.

I'm not surprised, women are just like landfalling hurricanes. Fuelled by heat they roar in, stir up a wild shit storm, and then move off leaving only desolation in their wake. When I was seventeen I too was devastated by a Katrina, so I know something of New Orleans' pain.

Hurricanes were originally named by an Australian meteorologist after contemporary politicians*. Imagine being able to categorically and scientifically state that Bush was wandering erratically through Louisiana, or that Rumsfeld was devastating the South East.


* Dunn, G.E. and B.I. Miller (1960): Atlantic Hurricanes, Louisiana State Univ. Press, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 377pp.

Fueling a ruthless arena

Everyone here is talking about the high fuel prices. US petrol prices are still less than half those in the UK, but then US vehicles are more than twice the size, so I suppose it all evens out. If they adopted European sized cars they'd be laughing all the way the fuel pump, but it will never happen. Like so many apparently illogical consumer decisions the reason is fear, the American opinion-maker's friend.

As a longtime resident of London I thought I knew a thing or two about driving in a big city. I've even survived the tortured arena of driving in a Spanish city (Spanish drivers are a hybrid of Mediterranean car habits - as fast as the Italians and as unskilled as the French). Nothing, though, had prepared me for the horror of LA County's freeways. At first glance, traffic is usually so static that it's difficult to see how crashes could possibly occur. At 8am, the San Diego Freeway makes the M25 look like Brands Hatch. It's only when things get moving that the trouble starts.

There is an apparent randomness of movement that would challenge even the most seasoned student of Chaos Theory. It's a bit like looking at fluid molecules traveling down a tube - everything moves more or less in the the same direction but there's a lot of bouncing off the walls and each other. Similarly, the trajectory of a particular vehicle is as difficult to predict as that of an individual molecule. Indicators, like in-car cup-holders, are considered by LA drivers to be an occasional convenient accessory, no more.

With all this close-packed, high-speed Brownian motion going on there are inevitably a lot of collisions. The Californian's solution is not to adjust driving habits accordingly, but to invest in bigger, more robust steel cages to drive around in. Consider the example of my advisor, a woman who lectures undergraduate courses in environmental impacts, and who contends that she would 'like to buy a Mini for the sake of the environment, but if you get in a crash you're screwed'. If you thought the Cold War ended in the 90s, think again. There's a whole new arms race going on in the San Fernando Valley.

For now then, people here will apply the 'British Approach' to the fuel-price problem (i.e. sit around whingeing and blaming the government, but not actually doing anything proactive themselves). Fuel prices will continue to rise, and suburban mothers will continue to surround their families in ever larger battering rams.

The future of Californian commuting - and you thought Kings Cross was bad at rush hour

Journalistic endeavors

Louisiana is still reeling from Hurricane Katrina, but it's back to business as usual in the White House. An article Time magazine claims that the head of FEMA's curriculum vitae contains more padding than a Mississipian's backside. Let's be honest, who's hasn't. The article is ascribed to Daren Fonda and Rita Healy, but I think the writing style is more Karl Rove's. It would be just like that slippery little bastard to have not just one, but two, noms de plumes.

I hear you cry 'is the Captain really suggesting that in the face of awful human catastrophe the US administration would be so crass as to set up a patsy even before the full death toll is known?' Yes, that is exactly what I'm suggesting.

Urgent: translation required

'So, she was, like, you know, like, hey, I don't know. And I was like, whatEVER, like....'

I've just spent an hour trying to decipher a conversation I heard this morning, of which the above is merely an extract (albeit a highly representative one). Given the volume at which this conversation was bellowed into a mobile phone I can only assume that it was important that I (and indeed the rest of supermarket queue) heard it. Since the protagonist was wearing the standard undergraduate summer uniform (pink flip-flops, tiny white shorts and CU t-shirt), she must have the option of communicating in English, so clearly it's me that's the weak link in this particular chain of comprehension.

I'm going to give up trying to comprehend the language of undergraduates. In future I intend to concentrate on the contents of those tiny white shorts, rather than the contents of those tiny grey cells.*

The Captain's policy on sexism
Please don't think that I believe that male undergraduates are any more intelligent (quite the opposite), it's just that they just don't look as appealing in their shorts (not to me, anyway). I wouldn't want anyone to think that I'm a sexist. In my opinion, a misogynist is just an under-achiever, someone who lacks the sufficient mental dexterity to despise the entire human race equitably, irrespective of gender.

This week, I am mostly being existentialist

Back in the old country (i.e. Islington), I used to get my exercise along the Regents Canal towpath. Venice it wasn't, but at least I could get from Holloway Women's Prison to the fleshpots of Camden with a minimum of time spent on the open road, and more importantly out of view of the Metropolitan Police's finest. When I say that the Regent's Canal differs from Venice, I mean that it differs in the following ways:

Venice is home to some fabulous examples of renaissance Art, whereas the graffiti on the Regent's Canal is particularly uninspiring (not a patch on the sidings at Royal Oak, for example).

Although I've heard that it can stink a bit during the summer, Venice is not home to such a fascinating array of dog feces.

Whilst Italians can come across as a bit poncey at times, they at least have an exuberant culture. The Regent's canal is home to a bunch of stone-throwing, uneducated violent little thugs who are only separated from prison by time.

Finally, it's not always pissing down in Venice.

As I went about my business along this supposed waterway, I was always struck by the number of anglers in evidence. On any given Sunday, every hundred yards there is some pasty man fishing. What could possibly be so bad about their life at home that sitting under an umbrella fishing in a canal that probably contains no life form yet known to science is preferable?

By induction, it also begs the question what sort of gaping void has my life turned into, that I choose to spend time posting this dross? Shock and Awe is the Captain's very own sunday fishing trip.

Cloning with two mothers approved

Jesus, most of us have enough trouble with just the one.

It's not just the Astrodome that stinks

Time and tide wait for no man, and neither does economic growth. Whilst the nay-sayers and liberals whine incessantly about what could and should have been done about Hurricane Katrina, the American construction industry is leading the way as the phoenix arising from the rather soggy ashes of New Orleans. For example, only a few months after being awarded a US Navy contract for performing emergency work, the construction company Kellogg, Brown & Root Services Inc (better known as KBR) have already been given the opportunity to cash in.

KBR are, of course, a subsidiary of Halliburton, the company that Dick Cheney headed from 1995-2000. As a military man I know the importance of not allowing the men to get bored, so I think it's great that the boys have something to keep them occupied whilst they're waiting to drive their bulldozers into Iraq.

People from Michigan suffer from chronic flatulence

OK, I concede that the above headline has no real scientific basis, but it must be said 75% of the people I've met from Michigan (admittedly only 4, which is not a statistically significant sample) seem to have inefficient digestion.

I've never been a particularly flatulent person myself, and what little interest I had was cured during an extended bout of gastro-entiritis a few years ago. If you've never experienced the symptoms, then let me tell you that floating an air biscuit whilst suffering from gastro-enteritis is a bit like playing Russian Roulette with one's underpants. You know that there's a live round somewhere in the chamber, you just don't know exactly which shot.

Legal Eagle

Following the much anticipated death of William Renquist over the weekend, the President has nominated John G. Roberts to succeed him as Chief Justice.

I'm impressed by Roberts. There's not many people who can claim to have been promoted before they've even got the job.

Don't let them take you alive

Iraq has had its first post-Saddam executions, now that the Iraqi government has reinstated capital punishment. Apparently, one of the first actions of the coalition in Iraq after Saddam's fall from grace was to abolish the death penalty.

Which is curious, because at over 65 executions per year, the USA is one of the fryingest countries around.