Nixta Sinks

What do you get if you cross a long day travelling with loads of luggage and criminal co-travellers?

A great chance to buy a new Powerbook.

Turn your back for a moment at JFK to lug a heavy bag from the conveyor belt and someone will make off with your laptop bag, the bastards. Dani's car driver was kind enough to drive her all the way back to the airport for a fruitless set of interactions with local police and airport staff at the lost and found office, adding a good 3 hours to her travel time. Security cameras won't come in useful because they're under Federal jurisdiction and those feds don't like working with the local police in matters like this, apparently.

Still, at least she keeps backups of everything on a portable drive, and her now stolen laptop was anyway in the habit of using its hard-drive to make desperate noises as if to say "Fuck me, I'm dying". It was only a matter of time before the powerbook lodged its protest one way or another. It was in need of replacement anyway, but what a lovely laptop bag!

Question is, was there any banking info or anything like that on there that could be retrieved by someone who knew what they were doing?

Update: It was the driver! He put the laptop down next to the car and drove off without putting it in the boot. Some kind souls who own the car next to it and work at the airport found it and called up to arrange its return. Of course, now I have to listen to that whining hard-drive again, and somehow get some sleep before I go to work tomorrow.

I still maintain those bastards in economy are all criminals though...

• Everyone here has only one question: Where is the whale? How is the whale?




• Can you provide us with an "up sum" please?

I want to talk on TV.

Also in the news, there's apparently a footballer named Danny Invincible. I think I might also want to change my name.

One would be tempted to remark upon what a difference a year makes. But does it? A year ago I was suffering insomnia in the stultifying (or slutifying as I freudianly wrote) Graton Hotel on Tottenham Court Road in the smallest room that that the home from home for so many philandering cockfocussed drones could afford. Come 11:55pm Masters Snooker finished to have its tails trodden upon by Snooker Extra, keeping me awake until at least 1:30am every night.

A year before that, I was unable again (or previously) to sleep thanks to the inadequacies of the American Immigration and Naturalisation Service (though they'd changed their name to something I still can't recall). You see, despite being British, despite marrying a born and bred American citizen, despite having paid taxes in the US for 8 years, I was denied permission to travel home to England to work on a project over here on account of the INS or BCIS or whatever having lost the photos accompanying my application for the offensively named "Advanced Parole". It was only 2 days before I headed over here (on Jan 26th) that intervension from my Congresswoman no less afforded me the right to travel home without voiding my Green Card application.

And here I am, a year after insomnia at the Grafton, watching Snooker Extra in a luxurious apartment (the most spacious in Marylebone that the rent allowance will afford), reminded in technicolour of the insomnia of a year ago. Back from the Ballet instead of The Instanbul. Reclining on the sofa instead of crying into the bleach-sodden duvet. Ah, what a difference a year makes. Only this year things are very different. By dint of a New Year's party of my own, my dearest friend appears to have sent me to Coventry (a shithole, I should point out). My job has turned from light-hearted maintenance of a product light-heartedly constructed through jocular budget and comedic scheduling employing embryonic technology from an egomaniacally patronising vendor into a full-time stressful juggling act that I can only hope I will one day look back upon with fondness.

But look back further, and I see that just as John Stewart has changed from Comedy Relief to Political Vivisector, despite what he said on Crossfire, I'm talking about myself. It's a shoddy subject that I need to give up. I promised when I started Nixta.com that I wouldn't write mindless drivel about myself, and look at the recent posts. What a prick.

And so, to review time.

Edward Scissorhands, the ballet, rocks. Mind blowing sets. Stunning costumes. And perhaps 2 of the 25 dancers were great. What the fuck happened to the others? I don't know. For 50 nicker a time I'd expect slightly better. For 5 nicker I'd expect the program to have some content. Perhaps I expect too much. Perhaps they were just hungover. It happens. They're human. But the costumes, music and sets win. The show as a whole was worth every penny. In short, I feel that some of the performers were hired from Camden High Street in a panic, but I don't need my money back.

Sleeping Beauty. Sublime.

Reviews over. Sharon still twitching. Bush moving unsubtly into Republican election mode. Brown declaring that the army is not recruiting enough. Welcome, my friends, to 2006. Fuck all y'all.

Celebrity ego Arnie got in a motorbike accident the other day. Who'd have thought it? Surely you'd think that someone that critical to the running of California wouldn't be allowed to ride a motorcycle on the deadly roads of LA. Then again, they allow Bush to ride mountain bikes at high speed over rocks, but that kind of thing ought to be actively encouraged and forced up El Presidente for the good of us all. Might be the most intelligent thing his administration could do. Anyway, I digress and beg your forgiveness, and back to Arnie for a moment.

I wanted to write a little piece about how he got into a crash, got a fat lip, and then refused to allow clemency to a blind old man in a wheelchair. I was going to say that he was getting a rum deal from the press on this one, this Arnie chap, since the old murderous swine behind bars seemed by all accounts to deserve to be put down. A long time ago. And probably not even humanely. Bucket of sharks is what I'd have chosen for him. But then I'm not gubernator, and neither was Arnie at the time. The last thing this old schlong seems to deserve is to live his life out and die at his own leisure, and I say that as no great proponent of capital punishment, as you might already know, but Tookie was an entirely different case to this.

Then I came across this article explaining that Arnie was being... "protected" isn't quite the word... shielded by the local police (all of them no doubt already own a copy of Terminator on DVD) with wishy-washy excuses you'd expect from Wiggum or Rumsfeld.

Now, I didn't realise this (getting my news as I do solely from John Stewart, who concentrated more on the fat lip than the law slip), and it turned me around entirely (yes, it's now old news, but I've been busy/blind/stupid/deaf). This man, Arnie, broke 6 ribs in 1999 whilst riding his motorcycle too close behind a car. It's unclear if he had a motorcycle license at the time, but one would suspect so. If not then he was given even greater preferential treatment by the police then than he got just now. It's either stupid or revolting. Now he's in a motorcycle accident and is let off not having the right license for some bullshit reason.

First off he should be fined/investigated/impeached/run over properly.

Secondly he's quoted as saying that the woman in the car he hit looked him in the eye and saw him coming, checked the other way, and then pulled out anyway. What does that tell him about his popularity as governor? Could it be that even in LA there are drivers with political conscience? Let's get some pootling around the Bushbaby's mountain bike trails...

In what must surely be bad news for Kodak and others, Nikon have apparently announced (surely as a result of my confidence in their digital cameras) that they are to just about cease production of film-based cameras.

This would surprise me were it not for the eye-opening obituarial documentary on Lord Lichfield that was aired the other day on the beeb from which it was apparent that he did much (if not all) of his work digitally, and a recent conversation with a fine fellow I met in which he divulged that he didn't use film at all any more.

More good news. British rail prices are set to rise. Lovely. I wouldn't mind you know, but the trains really are sbout as shit as any I've come across, pissed in or puked over. When I went to the west country earlier this year the seat allocations were all messed up because they'd got the wrong carriages on the train: people who had booked a set of 4 seats around a table so that their kids could enjoy the ride and they could look after little 3 year old William ended up strewn all over the carriage sitting next to the bricklayer from Slough, Romford's spottiest slapper and a pair of wee-stained old drunks from Cheam.

I have been keeping track and in the last year my record for having my tickets checked on the Kings Cross to Cambridge return route is 1 in 12. Yes folks, that's just over 8%! My brother used to commute for a month at a time on a single monthly return. That's one return ticket valid any time in the next 30 days. He'd pretend to be asleep when the conductor came by and that apparently worked. Considerate, but hardly a way to run a railway. But I have only seen one conductor in 6 return journeys! I'm sure that half the people on each train have no ticket - in fact, when I did see a conductor, that seemed to be roughly how many he was hauling up.

So, I don't see why we should be paying more, because the train operators are allowing people to ride for free. It's analogous to the US giving illegal immigrants a Green Card amnesty every few years (though that's slightly less objectionable because at least they're working and performing useful services, and the US immigration and naturalisation services are about as evil as the Nazis, as lazy as the French, and as moneygrabbing as... er... well, just about everyone these days).