Name Origin

“Alianora” came out of a fantasy novel called “Dragonsbane” by Patricia C. Wrede, and is the name of one of the princesses in there. The roots of it are Old German. If you split the name, “Alia” means “all” and “Nora” means either “honour” or “light”.

“La Canta” bit came straight out of a Spanish dictionary. Her 11-year-old self thought this meant “to sing”, but discovered a few weeks later when she started doing classes at secondary school that one can’t just have the stem of a verb in Spanish without sticking something on the end of it. Babelfish translates it into “sings”, apparently unaware of the grammatical error. In case you're wondering, the naming convention of her sites is whatever Babelfish decides is the Spanish translation for what she has there - for instance, the blog is the 2004 translation of "La Canta Grand Prix Blog". She broke this convention for her shop, largely because "Tienda La Canta" would confuse too many people unfamiliar with the way the convention works.

Individual Origin

Contrary to the occasional accidental rumour, she hails from Derbyshire. This is a county in the middle of... ...England.

Around the web:

Blog - La Canta Magnifico Blog
Wiki - La Canta Magnifico Blog Wiki
Shop - La Canta Shop

Around Sidepodcast:

Known for long comments, sometimes veering into the statistical (the practise-qualifying-race comparitor, which still hasn't been more than 20% accurate at any point since its introduction in Britain 2008) or the argumentative (the divide-by-zero debate was a good example), but usually just slightly daft (like naming all the corners of Valencia and Singapore after musicians who share their names with food and animals respectively). Notable for insisting on counting the number of comments ago someone else's quote was, which indicates she may not have enough to do with her days at present.

A Force India, Fisichella and British drivers supporter, she tends to have a somewhat unusual view of F1.

Used to be a regular in the Most Talkative section until the introduction of live commenting on podcast productions. The RSPCRF1 project is housed at her wiki because it predated Sidepodcast getting one of its own. She is the head of R&D there, with a fairly extensive range of theoretical achievements (but no actual 2009 car yet...)

She also researched the formal name of Cémian Jia-Tou (Chinese for side pod cast) for the podcast mascot. The panda is known as Jia-Tou on a day-to-day basis as a result (except for Jordan Allen, who insists on calling it Carlos for some reason).

She sung lines 10 and 11 on 12 Days of F1 Christmas, and was compared to a singer on shellac (possibly due to the natural tremelo). She also sang "We Wish You A Merry Christmas" at the end of the 2008 Season Megamix.

She drove a Force India in a BATRacer F1 2008 Sidepodcast competition, scoring a total of four points. This went considerably better than the real-life karting where Christine, "me" and Steven Roy participated (she came seventh of seven), though one could argue that as organiser, the lack of any major disasters was a success in itself...

If anyone is going to have a technical problem with an aspect of Sidepodcast, it will almost certainly be her due to a somewhat quirky computer set-up (Christine and me would argue this starts with the fact that it is a PC).

Particularly active during Friday practise sessions when most people are busy working.

First Comments

Her first comment was on "About That Hiatus" on April 19, 2008:

"Congratulations on your marriage, Christine and “me”. May your marriage be happy and long :) "

Her first comment pertaining to the F1 circus was in "Episode 59":

"Yellow-flag posts are supposed to have two marshals - one looking each way up the road - as well as headsets to allow communication with race control - so there really wasn’t any excuse for what happened. Especially since marshals for a Grand Prix are supposed to get training before taking up their posts…"

Races

She has been to qualifying for the 2002 British Grand Prix, standing at Club (which proved to be a good place to watch - I ended up seeing Fisichella's Jordan go kaput about 150 meters in front of me.

She did her first full weekend of the British Grand Prix in 2009 and is looking forward to Donington because she won't have to mess around with accommodation.

Hopefully, she will get to Turkey and Belgium 2010 as well, but it's not clear how she will get to either yet.