I’ve been getting a lot of “penny stock spam” recently — unsolicited and bogus bulk marketing email trying to raise the price of various dubious stocks by purporting to be “insider” tips and investor alerts.

Today I received several that were particularly ironic — they were bogus “investor alerts” for some company called Epsion International Inc., “a leader in the fight against email based viruses, spam and outbound threats of corporate espionage.”

It’s REALLY hot in New York today — it’s now 36 degrees celsius (96 F), although apparently with the humidity it’s supposed to feel like 41C/107F.

I just went outside for lunch and it was a bit breezy, so it felt like having a hairdryer blown in my face!

However, although electricity consumption in New York has broken records and people are apparently dying because it’s so hot, I’m not finding it as bad as it could be because the humidity is only around 50%. Having said that, it’s only the 3rd of August…

I did something I’d never done before today — pulled the emergency brake on a subway train.

The first thing I noticed was a loud disturbance at the other end of the southbound A train carriage at a station, and a whole pile of people running off the train in a panic.

I turned out there was a loud and increasingly violent-looking domestic dispute taking place at the other end of the carriage from me, where a guy was shouting at his evidently-estranged ex-wife/ex-girlfriend in front of their child in a pushchair, while another guy — who’s role was unclear, possibly the woman’s new boyfriend, or possibly just a concerned bystander — stood around trying (unsuccessfully) to calm things down.

I watched the dispute get increasingly heated until the estranged father punched the woman in the face, at which point I jumped up and pulled the emergency brake cord, narrowly beating another guy to it.

The train braked hard and came to a stop in a tunnel, and the main lights (which had only been half-working beforehand) went out completely, leaving just the emergency lights on. But it seemed to have the desired effect — the estranged father came up to our end of the carriage, very emotionally distressed, pacing up and down and muttering and cursing at the woman over not being allowed to see his son since April.

Then he went down to the other end of the carriage, and they started talking more quietly, until eventually the mother let him sit with his son for a while.

And the train sat dark and motionless in the tunnel. And then sat in the tunnel dark and motionless some more.

After half an hour, the guard came lumbering into the carriage and walked to the far end of the carriage before returning, at which point I told him that I’d pulled the cord because there was a violent domestic dispute going on. He relayed this to his controller via radio, reset the emergency brake, and went back to his guard car, and the train eventually moved off again.

What shocked me was how long it took for anyone to come. Maybe pulling the emergency brake wasn’t the right thing to do under the circumstances, but I wasn’t going to get physically involved in a domestic dispute (I’ve learnt from experience that this is pretty much always a bad idea), and doing nothing wasn’t an option either. But for a city supposedly on an “elevated” state of alert, it seems scandalous that it took 30 minutes for anyone to come.

Yet more World Cup heartbreak for England — knocked out by Portugal on penalties AGAIN! It’s just like Euro 2004 all over again.

It just seems really unfair; England played much better than Portugal, even though they were a man down after Rooney got sent off (for a much lesser offence than Figo’s head-butt in the Portugal v Netherlands game).

I was texting a friend about the game yesterday and the predictive text dictionary in my ‘phone suggested “ennui” as the spelling for “footie” — a bizarrely accurate alternative spelling.

I went to see An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary about Al Gore’s mission to raise awareness about global warming tonight.

It was very good, although also very scary — “the scariest movie you’ll see this year,” as the tagline describes it.

A few years ago, when Bill Clinton was still the President of the United States and 9/11 hadn’t happened yet, I was convinced that climate change was the single biggest issue facing humanity. An Inconvenient Truth reminded me that this is still true, although the World has had the wool pulled over its eyes by manufactured threats like global terrorism. If even the most conservative estimates come to pass, the effects of climate change will make events like 9/11 seem trivial in comparison.

Personally I feel pretty good about my own personal response to this threat; I sold my gas-guzzling (but very cool) ’69 Mustang, I recycle, I buy energy efficient appliances, I turn off unnecessary lights whenever I see them and I recently signed up with Sterling Planet and agreed to pay $10 extra per month to force ConEdison to buy my electricity from renewable sources.

But it’s not enough. Unless CO2 emissions are dramatically reduced in the next few years, the Earth’s climate is going to change dramatically and the low-lying regions of the World (including New York and London) will be under water.

Apparently, one six-second drum break from 1969 has been the foundation of pretty much all hip-hop and electronic music for the last two decades — check out this interesting 18-minute documentary about the Amen Break.

I’m very angry with Angry Wade’s, a sports bar on Smith Street. I tried to watch the last 15 minutes of the Portugal v Angola World Cup game today, but the woman behind the bar threw me out after just 5 minutes, even though I was quietly minding my own business watching the game, because I wasn’t drinking anything! Unfortunately I didn’t have any money with me because I was on my way to the gym.

Anyway, she was rude as well as uncharitable, so I won’t be going back there in a hurry.

I had a very hectic and varied trip to the UK recently, which was mostly a lot of fun, although also quite stressful (and painful!) in places.

I arrived into Heathrow on Sunday 28 May, picked up a rental car (a big Renault estate), and immediately drove up to Sheffield to visit family and friends. It was a lot of fun — I caught up with friends at the Lescar, went to a party, and also went to the Peak District National Park with my sisters Sharon & Vicki and their families. There are some pictures here: http://home.earthlink.net/~tonygill99e/2006-uk/

On Tuesday I drove down to London, and after navigating through nightmarish traffic on the A406 North Circular, arrived at the storage unit in Clapton where I had dumped a load of stuff when I moved to the U.S. almost exactly 7 years previously. I estimate that I’ve spent something like £2,350 over the last seven years storing stuff that’s probably worth less than a tenth of that amount!

I started loading the contents of the storage unit into the car, but very quickly realized that there was no way it was all going to fit. I stuffed as much as I could into the car and set off through yet more nightmare traffic for my parents’ place in Chatham, Kent.

I finally arrived at my parents’ house, and then fell down some slippery stone steps behind their house while unloading the car, hurting my back quite badly in the process (at first I thought I’d seriously injured myself, but fortunately I was OK after a few days).

I made a start on sorting through all the junk, then had to go back to the storage unit the next day for the rest of the stuff. Even then it didn’t all fit, and I ended up giving a bunch of stuff to the guys at the storage place before heading back to my parents’ house again to sort through the rest of the junk.

After packing a couple of boxes to ship to myself in the U.S., gratefully dumping a load of stuff on my parents to dispose of somehow and throwing out a huge amount of useless crap, I headed back to London for a night out in Brixton with a few friends.

The next day, Friday 2nd June, I picked up my friend Haidy and we drove to Southwold in Essex for Lucy & Dirk’s wedding. We arrived at the sleepy seaside town just in time to change and drop off some projection equipment at the village hall before the wedding ceremony on the end of Southwold Pier. It was a nice simple civil ceremony, after which we all went back to the village hall for the reception, which was a lot of fun and involved much eating, drinking and dancing to Romanian folk music!

There are some pictures from the wedding here: http://home.earthlink.net/~tonygill99e/lucy-dirk-wedding/

The next day I drove Haidy to Luton airport, stopped for lunch in a pub on Upper Street in Islington where I also watched the England v Jamaica friendly (6-0 to England!), then dumped the car back in Brixton before heading back out to Islington by public transport for dinner and drinks with friends on my last night in London before returning to New York the following day.

I finally got around to putting some pictures from India online — they are here: http://home.earthlink.net/~tonygill99f/India/

I just had a bit of excitement at lunch; I was having lunch outside at Republic, a noodle restaurant in Union Square, when the sky suddenly grew dark and the wind started picking up. A few seconds later, the huge (and heavy) umbrella covering about 6 tables was caught by a gust and started falling towards me. Luckily I was able to catch it, otherwise it would have hit me in the head.