Month: April 2008

Nausea-inducing videos

On By Laura MorganIn Other cities

Last week b3ta.com linked to a video of a horrifyingly steep and desperately unsafe-looking mountain path in Spain. Now Lloyd’s posted the videos, as well as some related pictures which are equally disturbing. Inspired by this, and by my successful posting of a video clip, which also made me think of Tokyo, I went looking for footage of the two rollercoasters that my intrepid siblings went on at Fuji-Q, the theme park outside Tokyo in the shadow of Mount Fuji.

The first, Dodonpa, is the world’s fastest-accelerating rollercoaster, taking you up to 107mph in two seconds. Apparently the moment it shoots out of the tunnel causes physical pain (there are so, so many reasons I don’t go on these things):

And then there’s Fujiyama, which when it was built was the world’s tallest roller coaster, and the POV footage genuinely makes me feel sick, and it’s definitely nothing to do with the amount of wine I drank last night, although the fact that I can’t embed the video may be. I’ll go old-tech and link to it.

If I’d seen that video in advance, I would have forbidden the whole thing. As it was, I let them go off to almost-certain death unknowingly, and spent a happy day by myself in Tokyo, climbing the Mori Tower, which is also quite tall, but which, happily, stays still:

The Mori Tower

No congestion charge for NYC

On By Laura MorganIn Language, Public transport3 Comments

Inhabitat carries the depressing news that the proposal to introduce congestion charging (or “congestion pricing”, as it seems to be called over there) in New York has been voted down. Their headline says all that need be said, I think.

Stupid car-driving voters. If ever a city was designed for walking, New York is it. But perhaps expecting brave and innovative steps from legislators in a country so wedded to car ownership was too much.

Still, I was mildly cheered by the reference in the article to “neigh sayers”. If they’re getting horses to vote on transport policy they’re in a bigger mess than I thought.

Eaaaagles!

On By Laura MorganIn Football

Stoke 1 – 2 Palace

We weren’t at home after all, so I watched it at the Half Moon, which I have long thought was a scrubby dive of a place, but which is actually fine for watching football in, and does really good pizzas, and has a Monday night “2 pizzas and a bottle of wine for £20” deal. I shall return.

Anyway, it was a really good game, with some actual playmaking by both sides. There was a 20-minute period early in the second half where they hammered us relentlessly and it looked like they were going to score, but the luck didn’t run their way and they didn’t manage it until the 85th minute, by which time it was too late for them to claw anything else back. I don’t know who Sky’s Man of the Match was, but mine was our keeper Julián Speroni, who rescued us on various occasions when nobody else managed to get to the ball. I’ve just googled him to check how to spell his name, and it turns out he’s Argentinian. I always thought he was Yugoslavian, even though none of his name sounds Yugoslavian, and I’m not even sure there’s still a country called Yugoslavia. Then I wondered if I was confusing him with Gábor Király, but he’s Hungarian, so now I have no idea what I was thinking.

But we’re back in the playoff spots, and it looks like we’ll have another nail-biting end to the season, one way or another. Hurray!

Stoke, and the FU Cup semi-finals (but not at the same time)

On By Laura MorganIn Football

We’re at home to Stoke tonight. Stoke are the kind of team we should definitely beat, only unaccountably they’re in second place and look as likely as anyone to win automatic promotion. I don’t understand football. Anyway, a win tonight would see us in sixth (from tenth), so fingers crossed for that.

I’m feeling generally cheery about football today, after seeing Portsmouth and Cardiff win their respective semi-finals this weekend. Radio 5 had a caller on who had been at Wembley the last time Cardiff won the cup, in 1927. He was ninety and blind, and said that the R5 commentary was so good he felt as though he’d been there. The boorish phone-in host – who I’m told is called “Spoony”, which probably tells me as much as I need to know about him – was charmlessly dismissive, but it was a good story all the same. I was also cheered and heartened by the Southampton fan who called in to wish Portsmouth luck in the final (really!) and the Man U supporter who said that Middlesbrough had played “as though it was the Champions’ League final” in their 2-2 draw. He went on to be churlish about Chelsea, just to maintain the reputation, rather than smear it by being accidentally nice for a whole minute.

Small pleasures: number 3

On By Laura MorganIn Small pleasures

…getting in to work on a Monday morning and being greeted  by an empty email inbox.  At least, there were five new messages, but two of them were about cake and three of them were telling me my mailbox is over its size limit, which I already know.

Adventures in Austin

On By Laura MorganIn Books1 Comment
I forgot that I also read The Great Psychedelic Armadillo Picnic, Kinky Friedman’s guide to Austin, Texas. I had no plans to visit Austin, Texas, but Kinky’s writing is so evocative that whenever he writes about a place I want to go there, so now it’s next on my list. Well, after San Francisco and maybe one or two other places. Mainly, I’d just like to be wherever Kinky Friedman is, because he’s super-cool.