The story so far: being in Japan means I miss the next Ultravox tours of England and Germany. If I wish to stalk them, I am limited to a few days at the end. Obtaining tickets is the first task.

Amsterdam: happen to be in Amsterdam, so go to ticket office near venue and buy ticket in person. Helpful member of staff reminds me the venue has a membership, best bought at that office early on the day of the gig to avoid queues.

Stockholm and Oslo: via Ticketbastard's Scandinavian companies, different ones, which need sign-ups but not the one you already have for their UK site, nor each other's. Different info needed for each. Usual 5 minutes in which to forget one's Clicksafe password, create a new one and pay for it. Good points: English mostly throughout if you ask for it; e-tickets.

Bochum: Apply by e-mail to promoter for tickets. Credit cards not accepted - get invoice to be paid by bank transfer. Realise this is going to be expensive, but also hear that German friend whose spare bed you are using wants to go to the gig. Accept his offer to pay in return for cash when I arrive.

General peeves: Four countries, three currencies - all in stock, thankfully. Dear Sweden, I know this might sound odd coming from a UK citizen, but please join the Euro. Four languages, but English widely spoken in three of the countries, and I'm okay at two of them anyway, and can order beer and ask "Can you speak English" in a third.

Next up - travel. The plan is fly to Amsterdam, then fly to Stockholm. Take the night train to Oslo then I have to work out how to get to Bochum from there, but I have three days in which to do it. I have crash space in Bochum, and an offer for Stockholm. I know Amsterdam quite well, and I have recently been in Oslo, so I will lean on autopope for his contacts.

Possible amusement: if missedephemera's plans work out, I might be back in Oslo three weeks later for the Eurovision Song Contest :-)

Should you find yourself in an hostelry selling fine British Proper Beer and see a Titanic Chocolate/Vanilla Stout on offer, order it immediately. You will find yourself ordering several more pints of it soon...

Last year, I cancelled a trip to San Francisco to make sure that I was at the first Ultravox gig in 25 years or so (and six others), and I am glad I did.

This year, it looked like a German tour was inevitable, and I planned to stalk the band by train, as it would be a fantastic opportunity to get in some practice and generally improve my Scheißdeutsch. Then it was announced, and I would be in Japan. Then they announced a few more dates, and there was one in Amsterdam which was two weeks after the weekend I absolutely had to be in Japan and therefore do-able, so I got myself a ticket when I was over for the bokbierfestival.

Then they announced another swathe of dates, all in Englandshire, and coinciding with the "absolutely have to be in Japan" part of the trip. Bastards.

On the forum, my situation was greeted with the world's smallest violin. There is no way on earth, not even for Ultravox, that I am not going to Japan.

There are a few more dates, mostly in Scandinavia where beer and hotels are expensive, but they are all after the Amsterdam gig, and therefore possible for me (I would like to hear for anyone on my friends list who lives in Oslo, Bergen or Copenhagen who has crash space before I decide what to do). And there are rumours on one in Stockholm to be announced any day now (suaveswede?)

Best of all is a date in Bochum on May 3rd. Bochum is near Dortmund, home to hashbangchris (who has been mailed). I know that region does 24 hour local trains because I've used them to get from drinking in Düsseldorf back to Cologne (though this was before they got hit with the privatisation disease). It's in a club with the most spectacular industrial interior design and it's in Germany so the worst the beer is going to get is Becks. There is an application process for tickets though, involving sending e-mail rather than through a website.

Mail has gone out, in my finest Scheißdeutsch. Sadly, I will have to change the date of my dental check-up - such a terrible thing!

Yes, I'm bored.

I would go to theauldhoose but the wind is blowing rain up our street, and it's quite a slope. Might give in and get a cab, though that won't help my step count for the day.

Once upon a time, autopope asked me to design a business card for him. At the time, Accelerando was his latest, so I based my design on that of the US hardback of that book. The lettering was particularly attractive, but it soon became apparent that it was something the cover designer had created in Illustrator, rather than being an actual font I could buy. So I made a font based on it, produced the business cards and forgot about it for a few years.

Recently, I decided to release it and have been adding enough characters to it to bring it up to my current standard. Except I went a bit far, and there are nearly 2000 glyphs in it! It turns out one of the annoying bugs in Illustrator has been fixed, at last, making the task considerably easier (the problem was with expanding strokes with rounded ends).

As I was editing the HTML of my site in preparation for uploading Accelerando, nojay stuck his head round my study door and enquired as to whether I planned to add the Japanese syllabaries to one of my typefaces any time soon. I was able to point out that I had just finished a font and that it included a full-ish implementation katakana (fullwidth, including obsolete kana, and halfwidth, plus punctuation. No circled forms yet). It means if I re-do the business card in preparation for the Japan trip in April, autopope's name will be in the same font on both sides.

Adding katakana was interesting, because Japanese characters are based on a square divided into four, rather different from the proportions of Roman characters, and this kana needed to play nice with the Roman characters. It took a few attempts before I got something with which I was satisfied - having highly-stylised glyphs helped. At first, whatever I did looked too small in comparison (Accelerando is all lower-case, so the kana had to fit in the same space as the 'o'), and my first attempts at selectively breaking the square had them all over the place. I am mostly happy with what I have now.

One big problem was kerning the katakana, as TypeTool can't directly import lists of kerning words in anything other than Roman - I'd have to turn them into lists of Unicode glyph numbers in a particular format (Perl would probably be my friend...). Instead, I generated the font and typed a few words into a text editor in it, noting any daftness, then kerning it based on what I saw. Rinse. Repeat. So I'd like screenshots of anything that looks off (note the spacing is quite wide anyway) should anyone use it the katakana in earnest.

Anyway, here it is. The observant will note I have a sample graphic showing more of the font, based on a suggestion by orangemike. I made some for some of the older fonts, too.

Brazil is particularly scary.

Way back in 1997, I released one on my earliest fonts - DaySquareCut, my interpretation of Lewis F. Day's Quasi-Chinese lettering shown in his Alphabets Old and New. A couple of years later, some horrid little boy sent me a really nasty piece of e-mail whining about the quality of something he'd got for free. I could've mailed him back offering to refund all the money he'd paid me for it, but instead I just quietly withdrew the font even though I quite liked it.

Anyway, there's something about the letters that fascinates me, and I decided to include it in the revamping process - I'm slowly going through all my fonts, correcting my mistakes, improving them wherever possible, adding loads of new characters and then re-releasing them under a Creative Commons license so if you don't like it, you can bloody well fix it yourself.

I've slightly changed the proportions of the typeface, and most of the lower-case characters are a wider than they used to be. Not that it makes it anything other than a decorative titling face - albeit one that has a lot of potential for those who like converting titles to outlines then joining the letters up in fancy ways. And I just re-released it a few minutes ago and it's available via the link above.

Okay, I know for sure there are at least two native speakers of some variety of Norwegian on my friends list, and I've noticed that Norwegian differs from other Germanic languages in one very confusing way - nouns appear to be suffixed based on, well, something.

For example, the streets here are all named -gate, -gata or -gaten and I cannot spot any logic as to which variant is used. Similarly with breweries: there's Haandbryggeriet and Oslo Mikrobyggeri. What is going on here?

Please put the unmitigated sentimentalised rubbish that is generally known as the "War poets" under a cut. Some of us are glad that many of them died young and therefore produced less material for inflicting on schoolkids as part of the organised campaign against reading for pleasure.

Thank you.

And, continuing on from my last post, where I advocate sensible drinking through knowing about your booze, here's what I had yesterday.

( quality beer, mostly )

A final link, as requested by rgovrebo. I'm working on improving Norwegian drinking attitudes, one Norwegian at a time, so here's the Norske Ølvenners Landsforbund, the Norwegian equivalent of CAMRA.

The Scottish Government has a problem with the way the Scots drink, and seem to want to make us more like Scandinavia. Last night, I learned a lot about the way Norwegians drink, and I gather the other Scandinavian nations are similar.

In summary: the sort of policies the Scottish Government wishes to introduce seem to encourage the sort of irresponsible drinking they would have us believe they want to prevent.

Firstly, our dear politicians will be happy to learn that Norwegians drink less than most. Unfortunately, they drink their entire weekly quota in one big binge, usually on Saturday night. And their government's bad attitude towards alcohol means that the majority don't see any reason for drinking alcohol other than to get steamin' to the point where they can hardly walk. I suspect the main customers for the micros are foreign EBCU members, and people seem to think I'm a little odd for wanting to savour my beer and take time over it. I don't want to be drunk until the end of the night - too drunk too soon, and it gets difficult to appreciate the beer.

Alcohol purchased for consumption at home is significantly cheaper than that bought in the pub, so here they have "pre-pub" parties to make sure they don't have to spend too much when they eventually get to the pub. This means that there are really drunk people out and about a lot earlier - by the time they get to the pub, most of them are more inebriated than we are upon leaving. And yes, there are accidents and trouble because of it.

The stuff bought for drinking at home seems to be mostly wine. That might be because the difference in price between that and beer is not so great compared to the difference in alcoholic strength; it might be because that's pretty much all the alcohol monopoly stocks. For a country that takes so much pride in its environmental-friendliness, it seems odd that drink imported from a long way away should be preferred by the government to stuff made locally. Again, it might be my being odd, as one of the reasons I hardly drink wine is because I get very drunk very quickly on it. I suspect that that fault is exactly why it is preferred here! Also, 99% of what beer there is here is pseudo-pils, because nobody is drinking the stuff because they like beer - they're drinking it simply to get drunk.

Solutions? Well that's tricky. Finland tried to reduce the tax on beer, in an attempt to encourage people to drink weaker stuff but as the link between alcohol and anything other than getting legless has been broken, it just didn't work - people just went out and got rat-arsed on cheaper drink. I figure, being a beer snob, that if you want people to drink more moderately, you need them to appreciate what they are drinking and to take pleasure from the flavour of what they are consuming as well as from the alcohol content. Progressive beer duty, where smaller breweries pay less tax? It would help, but the Vinmonopoliet would also need to stock more of the small Norwegian breweries' products too, and promote them in terms of their flavours and variety. And it would take more than that - you'd need to take a similar approach to other drinks - fewer wines, but better ones, and hold some tutored tastings.

The other thing is that here, bars seem to be just places to drink, with little, if any food. In Germany, kids end up in pubs every Sunday, where they go for meals with several generations of their family. They learn how to behave in pubs from a very early age, and their first beer is probably a mouthful slipped to them by one of their parents. Strangely the Germans, whilst they do get drunk, seem to mostly behave themselves when sozzled. I suspect there is a connection.

Oslo, allegedly the land of the world's most expensive beer and where I am for a long weekend. There are about 9 kroner to the pound, 8 to the Euro.

( Expensive but excellent beer, with photos )

Update: Thanks to rgovrebo for pointing out my consistent mis-spelling of Haandbryggeriet. Fixed now.

The Grauniad applies new techology to its old ways.

( And here's a screenshot for when they notice and correct it )

It has been exactly a year since I was first allowed behind the wheel of a car without supervision.

I believe there's some other 1 year anniversary today, but it's obviously not as important.

It's pleasing to note that, despite all the shit in the world, British engineers are still delightfully insane.

Amsterdam has acquired some additional canals that are not shown on the maps.

It's not due to adolescent pseudo-Satanism, nor anti-Christian feeling, nor because some racist idiot has mistaken it for a mosque. No, after a few days in the centre of Amsterdam, I thoroughly understand why someone might be tempted to set a match, or a large quantity of C4, to a church.

It's the bloody bells.

Despite there being very few people in the Netherlands who believe in that sort of thing (and most of them are nowhere near Amsterdam), there are a number of churches in the city centre. Sure, they're interesting historic buildings, but every last one of them seems to have a carillon, and they like this to be known. So, we not only get a happy tune, every hour on the hour, but bells on the quarter hour, and another happy tune on the half hour, with bongs telling us what the next hour will be (boy, is that confusing). And, the church clocks seem to be set on faith, rather than something which will give an accurate time, so the moment one church has finished telling you, loudly, the hour, another will start up. The tunes are different every time, and do not seem to have any particular significance - I was woken up to the theme from Blackadder this morning. Dear churches - the overwhelming proportion of the population have mobile phones, and mobile phones have clocks on them. We do not need your confusing time-telling mechanism, so please preserve your bells by not using them so much.

And that's another thing. Amsterdam is a party city. Pretty much its entire economy relies on it being somewhere you go to have fun. Last night was one of the big party nights of the year, and today is Sunday morning. The damn churches have not stopped for the last hour. I realise that both parishioners are pretty old, but can't you use the aforementioned mobile phone to text them a reminder of the service time in the unlikely event that they don't know? If this were the UK, I'd be looking into an ASBO, because it's a lot more annoying than the occasional late-night party. Just because it's allegedly religious (and where in the Bible does it say you must annoy all of your neighbours on the one morning they get a lie-in?) doesn't get you a free pass from anti-social behaviour.

And don't go crying to the authorities if someone burns down your church. It'll be "not guilty due to diminished responsibility and provocation".

Edinburgh
Manchester
Birmingham
Bristol
Cardiff
London, Hammersmith
London, Camden

Almighty gap of a year

Amsterdam

Assuming I get back from Japan on time.

This is an extravagant trip, as I tend to stay in a particular posh hotel even though I plan to be so inebriated that I wouldn't notice if I were sleeping on the streets. Basically, when travelling with lots of folk, I need a hidey-hole where I can be on my own. Also, a loo of my own, seeing as I'll be using it more than usual.

And here is the problem. The hotel bathroom is very nice, and has been recently re-done. So why on earth does it contain the dreaded Dutch [*] toilet?

Look:


So shiny, new and Dutch. I thought those evil things were going out of fashion? I blame fluffcthulhu.

[*] German, too, but they're even rarer there. The only one I've encountered in Germany was in a fantastic microbrewery pub in Dresden that had clearly not been redecorated since about 1920.

Oh yes, and 13,786 steps!

I am in my hotel in Amsterdam, about to head down to Wynand Fockink (and you can guess what we call that place) to meet back up with akicif, Pastor Best, Sir Tys Major and Sister Cumina Condom.

fluffcthulhu is here and tweeting away, though He is going to snooze tonight. He is here because hashbangchris will be here too, and He needs to keep an eye on His minions, after all.