what's in a name

We named our son Robbie so when he grows up he can be, Rob, Robert and of course Bob. In Italy he will be known as Roberto. So what's in a name? He is named after his Grandpa - a good man - but he carries a great moniker and i did have a little think about who he might emulate. No pressure then son.

Robert Plant - if you don't know you can't be in my gang

Robert Smith - he of the Cure and the godfather of goth

robert johnson - made a deal with the devil but invented the blues

robert cray - handy with a strat

robert palmer - smooth

robert wyatt - for shipbuilding....the song

Robert Rauschenberg - messy art

bob dylan....do I need to explain?

bob marley - likewise

bob geldof - a hero

Rob Trujilo - Bass player with Metallica & Suicidal tendancies

Robert Louis Stevenson - pirates
Robert De Niro - for Deerhunter
Robert Carlyle - for begbie
Robert Plant - again
Robert Redford - for the Sundance kid
Bobby Moore - for '66

Bob Weir - Guitar & Vocals, The Grateful Dead

Bob Willis - for Headingley '81

Robert Altman - for the Player and MASH

Bob Seeger - for Hollywood Nights' drumming

Bobby Gillespie - for Screamadelica

Bobbie Kennedy - for trying to step out of a shadow

Bobbie Darin - for mac the knife

Robert Frost - yankee poet

Robbie Robertson - for The Band

Robbie Coltrane - for Tutti Frutti

Robert Mitchum - for the Big Sleep & Cape Fear

Robert Downey Jnr - for weird science

Robert Duval - for Colonel Killgore...'smells like victory'

Robert Shaw - his boat wasn't big enough

Rob Lowe - for The West Wing & St Elmo's Fire

Robert Fripp - in the court of king crimson...mainly unlistenable but you have to at least 'know it'

Robert Kubica - fastest Pole

Robert Maplethorpe - flowers & fisting

Robert Powell - he was Jesus afterall

Robert the Bruce - jock King

Robert Burns - jock poems

Bob Kane - Creator of "Batman & Robin"

Bob Woodward - all the president's men

Robert Menzies - Former Prime Minister ofAustralia

Rpatz - coz hes soo like omg in heat magazine

Roberto Baggio - scored some goals. missed one penalty

Roberto Benigni - life IS beautiful

Roberta Flack - killing me softly

Sponge bob - he of the cuboid legwear

and yes robbie williams

so a pretty good name

as long as he has tiny bit of marley/dylan/willis/plant/wooodward/truiljio...then I'll be proud.

my boy Robbie

and today the world is a different place...... the arrival of Robbie Bruce has rocked my axis in the best way possible and everything that was important to me now seems either doubly so, or really rather trivial. a new life is a wonderful thing. The details for the record.

a boy. 7.14lbs (3.2kgs) born at 4.23pm on 12th january 2010 - a very snowy day.

sad but important

I think we all knew it was never going to deliver, but it seems that it was worse than we thought....

this from Greenpeace's Ben Stewart, via radiohead.com.

sad but important

"The most progressive U.S. President in a generation comes to the most important international meeting since the Second World War and delivers a speech so devoid of substance that he might as well have made it on speakerphone from a beach in Hawaii. His aides argue in private that he had no choice, such is the opposition on Capitol Hill to any action that might challenge the dominance of fossil fuels in American life. And so the nation which put a man on the moon can’t summon the collective will to protect men and women back here on Earth from the consequences of an economic model and lifestyle choice that has taken on the mantel of a religion.
Then a Chinese Premier who is in the process of converting his Communist nation to that new faith (high-carbon consumer capitalism) takes such umbrage at Obama’s speech that he refuses to meet – refuses, in fact, to do much of anything beyond sulking in his hotel room, as if this were a teenager’s house party instead of a final effort to stave off the breakdown of our biosphere.
Late in the evening the two men meet and cobble together a collection of paragraphs which they call a ‘deal’, although in reality it has all the meaning and authority of a bus ticket, not that it stops them affixing their signatures to it with great solemnity. Obama’s team then briefs the travelling White House press pack – most of whom, it seems, understand about as much about global climate politics as our own lobby hacks know about baseball – and before we know it the New York Times and CNN are declaring the birth of a ‘meaningful’ accord.
Meanwhile a friend on an African delegation emails to say that he and many fellow members of the G77 block of developing countries are streaming into the corridors after a long discussion about the perilous state of the talks, only to see Obama on the television announcing that the world has a deal. It’s the first they’ve heard about it, and a few minutes later, as they examine the text, they realise very quickly that it effectively condemns their continent to a century of devastating temperature rises.
By now the European leaders – who know this thing is a farce but have to present it to their publics as progress – have their aides phoning the directors of civil society organisations spinning that the talks have been a success. A success? This deal crosses so many of the red lines laid out by Europe before this summit started that there are scarlet skid marks across the floor of the Bella Centre, and one honest European diplomat tells us this is a ‘shitty shitty deal.’
Quite.
This deal is beyond bad. It contains no legally binding targets and no indication of when or how they’ll come about. There isn’t even a declaration that the world will aim to keep global temperature rises below 2 degrees C – instead leaders merely ‘recognise the science’ behind that vital threshold, as if that were enough to prevent us crossing it. The only part of this deal anyone sane came close to welcoming was the $100bn global climate fund, but it’s now becoming apparent that even that’s largely made up of existing budgets, with no indication of how new money will be raised and distributed so poorer countries can go green and adapt to climate change.
Not all of our politicians deserve the opprobrium of a dismayed world. Our own Ed Miliband fought hard on no sleep for a better outcome, while President Lula of Brazil offered to financially assist other developing countries to cope with climate change and put a relatively bold carbon target on the table. But the EU didn’t move on its own commitment (one so weak we’d actually have to work hard not to meet it) while the United States offered nothing and China stood firm.
Before the talks began I was of the opinion that we would only know Copenhagen was a success when plans for new coal-fired power stations across the developed world were dropped. If the giant utilities saw in the outcome of Copenhagen an unmistakable sign that governments were now determined to act, and that coal plants this century would be too expensive to run under the regime agreed at this meeting, then this summit would have succeeded. Instead, as the details of the agreement emerged last night we received reports of Japanese opposition MPs popping champagne corks as they savoured the possible collapse of their new government’s carbon targets. It’s not just that we haven’t got to where we needed to be, we’ve actually ceded huge ground. There is nothing in this deal – nothing – that would persuade an energy utility that the era of dirty coal is over. And the implications for humanity of that simple fact are profound.
I know we greens are partial to hyperbole. We use language as a bludgeon to direct attention to the crisis we’re facing, and you’ll hear much more of it in the coming days and weeks. But really, it’s no exaggeration to describe the outcome of Copenhagen as an historic failure that will live in infamy. In a single day, in a single space, a spectacle was played out in front of a disbelieving audience of people who have read and understood the stark warnings of humanity’s greatest scientific minds - and what they witnessed was nothing less than the very worst instincts of our species articulated by the most powerful men who ever lived.
I will leave the last word to the late Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who would have given voice to the insanity of Copenhagen better than I ever could, and whose poem Requiem is perhaps appropriate at this moment: ‘When the last living thing, has died on account of us, how poetical it would be if Earth could say, in a voice floating up, perhaps from the floor of the Grand Canyon, “It is done. People did not like it here”

all of me out there

Spurred on by the whole new-year-new-start vibe I had a little think about all my stuff out there in the cloud - because I'm often working all over the place I use gmail, google docs and flickr - felt a bit fractured and split. So I can now be found here.http://flavors.me/timleroy

It's lovely little app that I sense will become huge in 2010. I rather lost interest in tweeting; I just wasn't getting much from it - Steven Fry, Ross Noble and Bill Bailey are all heroes but my Lord do they prattle on. So I've resolved to only tweet with purpose and to let dirtmeetsthewater and flickr be my main reportage.

new start. again.

so a new year and a new start. With a slightly heavt heart, I've had to move (for work) away from the beach and into the depths of rural, frost-bound, Somerset but will start the new start with a resolution to blog more. Dirtmeetsthewater will continue to have an eco-slant as recycling and sustainable energy is my job and a passion, but hopefully it'll ramble off into uncharted territory and throw up something diverting from time to time.

here we go again

Things come in threes (good things as well as bad I suppose), and all signs seem to be pointing to a revival of ilovemybeach. First was a call from long-time beach cleaner Angela, to get us involved in the MCS' annual big beach clean-up and second was a call from Katy at the BTCV (British Trust for Conservation Volunteers) to see if we'd be involved in their end of the beach clean - so of course we said yes to both. One is starting from one end of the beach and the other from the other....so hopefully we'll meet midway. Third sign was the timely broadcast of Panorama on Beeb1 focusing on sewage outflows onto Britain's beaches and featuring our chum Andy from SAS and a nice sounding chap from MCS' good beach guide. As is the way with modern reportage it was long on simplistic blame and short on sensible solutions but at least they gave the silly lady from the Environment Agency enought rope; which she duly used to show what a toothless, ineffective and cowardly organisation the EA is.

So after a few months off we'll be back on the case and blogging up a storm to help make it a big and special occasion. I've become a bit sceptical about the usefulness of Twitter but we'll tweet our activities too......just in case anyone is listening on that frequncy.