1. What do you try to stay away from? Germs, crowds, the London Underground, buses (yeuch!)
2. Are you clumsy or graceful? Clumsy.
3. What is it too late for? Getting somewhere in life. Making a real difference. A decent pension.
4. What/who was your first love? Sandra Shorer. I think we were eight; maybe as old as ten. She wasn’t interested. OMG that’s a lifetime ago; nearly 50 years!
5. Friday fill in:I believe that the sun will turn green in 38 days time.
Happy Chinese New Year. Today is the first day of the year of the Pig, Red Fire Pig to be accurate. I’m not going to write lots here about Chinese New Year because there is a pretty comprehensive item on Wikipedia.
Quite by chance I was earlier today reading the Transport for London webpage on the history of the Central Line, and came across this oddity about our local Underground station:
[…] Greenford station, the entrance hall was at ground level but the railway was on a viaduct, and thus became the first, and only, station on the London Underground to have escalators [actualy only one escalator these days] leading from street level UP to the trains.
BBC News has today published an item under the title Nuclear review ‘was misleading’ . Here are a couple of quotes from the opening paragraphs:
A High Court judge has ordered a rethink of the government’s nuclear power plans, after a legal challenge …
[The] judge ruled that the consultation process before the decision last year had been “misleading”, “seriously flawed” and “procedurally unfair”.
Tony Blair said while the ruling would change the consultation process, “this won’t affect the policy at all”.
Has Blair totally lost it (did he ever have it?) or is he just a dictator? If the policy isn’t open to being changed, just what is the point of having a consultation? I give up, I really do. This guy has absolutely no clue! Please will someone teach the guy what democracy is about?
It seems to me Blair’s only saving grace is that he can’t be as bad as his apparent successor (Gordon Brown) will be. And that is so scary I think I want to go and hide.
According to BBC Focus magazine the 10 most loathed inventions of all time are (in reverse order):
10. Religion 9. Speed cameras 8. Fast food 7. Television 6. Cigarettes 5. The car 4. Sinclair C5 3. Nuclear power 2. Mobile phones 1. Weapons
Do not ask how they arrive at this conclusion. I can see why most of these things get on the list, even if I personally wouldn’t have nominated them. However I wouldn’t even have thought to mention the Sinclair C5, it was so pathetically a no-hoper, let alone put it in the top ten most loathed. I’d far rather see things like politics, the aeroplane, the iPod, non-essential plastic surgery and fireworks on the list. But what do I know: I’m an educated thinker!? 🙁
Apparently the UK government is proposing to reduce the British Library’s funding and force it to start charging researchers for use of its resources. This will have a major impact on all researchers, both independent and academic. It is also illogical as the government has insisted that access to the national museums is free, and that they provide research facilities free of charge. How then can they insist that the BL — perhaps the country’s most prestigious museum resource (its objects just happen to be books and not “stuff”) — charge for its services. This is crazy!
A petition to the Prime Minister has been set up; you can sign it electronically here: . I urge you to do so! You have to be a UK citizen to sign.
The heron sitting in the top of the hawthorn tree in our garden in North Greenford a couple of days ago. He obviously had his beady eyes on my pond fish, and I can’t blame him as it was a cold winter’s day. I felt rather sorry for him having to probably go hungry tonight when he took fright at me opening the back door, but I don’t think he’d have got any fish as they were all huddled in the deepest middle part of the pond. And it was quite amusing to watch this large, rather ungainly bird, trying to balance on those small twigs whilst not getting its feet stuck with the thorns! It’s not the best photo I’ve ever taken, but the best I got: it was almost dusk and I was taking through the study window.
“YOU cannot be serious,” tennis ace John McEnroe famously shouted when the umpire ruled one of his shots as “out”. Reader John Mulligan suspects that the patent officer felt the same way about Timothy Wace Roberts’s patent application for a “Business method protecting jokes”.
The abstract of his US patent office application 200602593306 opens: “The specification describes a method of protecting jokes by filing patent applications therefor, and gives examples of novel jokes to be thus protected. Specific jokes to be protected by the process of the invention include stories about animals playing ball games, in which alliteration is used in the punchline; a scheme for raising money for charity by providing dogs for carriage by Underground passengers; and the joke that consists in filing a patent application to protect jokes.”
We don’t know what the first jokes referred to are, but suspect the second relates to notices beside London Underground escalators saying “Dogs must be carried”. As for the third – does this mean Wace Roberts’ patent application is evidence of “prior art”, making itself invalid – or is it valid and in breach of itself?
I’m currently struggling through a nasty gastric flu bug, which meant yesterday I had time to lie in bed and watch the Six Nations Rugby Union Internationals on TV. And I realised a strange thing about modern rugby: it’s the only game I know where the referee spends the whole match telling the players how to play the game while play is in progress. In all other sports I can think of the players are assumed to know how to play the game and the referee penalises them when they transgress. In rugby the referee tells the players what to do then penalises them if they ignore him. Listening to the referee’s radio mic there is a continual chat of things like: “[ref waving arm] Offside line. Eight white your feet are behind it … [blast on whistle] … Penalty blue. Eight white, offside.” The forwards even have to be told every time how to scrummage: “Crouch … Touch … Hold … Engage”, or form a line-out: “Lads I want one metre between the lines. Three blue, that’s one meter not half a meter.”
Its a good thing rugby is a relatively slow and even-paced game of set-piece plays, little heaps of big men fighting for the ball, someone kicking the ball and occasionally a bit of open running. Can you imaging how interesting it would be for cricket umpires to run their game the same way as a rugby referee? Or the confusion that would ensue if the zebras tried telling American Football players how to play while play was in progress?
