side breakfall

A few years ago a colleague passed me a link to an internet video advert featuring some music they were attempting to identify in order to acquire. It eventually turned out to be a commissioned track but the advertised product was a trainer containing some sort of microelectronic fanciness which the manufacturer claimed varied the shoes' response to different gaits or terrains. The only adjusted parameter as far as I recall without looking it up was the underfoot springiness but if there were a shoe able to adjust the morphology of the sole and grip I might be interested. Shoes built for knee- and ankle-saving heel-bounciness often lack the stickiners and grippiness available in less bouncy trainers, but with the clever application of ground-squidginess-detection technology and sufficient accelerometry to be able to infer when a shoe is slipping rather than rotating one might create a shoe which detects when the wearer has attempted to turn a squidgy, muddy corner too tightly for the knobble-pattern on the sole and extrudes deeper knobbles or small spikes in order to maintain grip and prevent the wearer having to run around the remainder of the park smeared with mud which might create the impression of having played football or something similarly distasteful.

It's not happened to me for a while but the same sole-adjusting tech could also be used to smooth a dogshit-smeared sole to make cleansing by wiping the shoe on a bit of grass much quicker and easier.

After a not-too-bad first day back (a week (even a fairly busy one) isn't really long enough to forget too much of what I was doing) we popped out to see famous comedian Mr Stewart Lee at the Stand. Despite the repetition and pauses for effect he's worth seeing though it would have been good if he'd left the script a bit to take the piss out of the bloke who was laughing in a really false and overloud manner, especially during bits which were sniggerish rather than guffaworthy. After mocking the likes of Chris Moyles in the Comedy Vehicle it was good to hear similar oaves such as Clarkson similarly targeted. Venue-wise the Stand is always a bit pokey and fire-hazardous but it has the comfortingly dingy feel of an unsanitised nineties' student union bar to it, appropriate for a performer of Lee's generation.