Iâve just finished reading âThe Science of Discworldâ by Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen. The book alternates chapters based in Discworld, where Ponder Stibbons has created a miniature cosmos called âRoundworld", and chapters in which the science of our own world (from the Big Bang to the present day) is explained. I have a confession to make. Iâm a biologist, but I donât really like reading popular science books for fun, or indeed any non-fiction. Call me mad, but after a long day at work doing science1, the last thing I want to do of an evening is read more about it: give me fiction, and the more escapist, the better. So I approached this book with the secret, guilty intention of quietly skipping over the science chapters.
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Yes, it's that time of year again. The time to start collecting that new partwork on Understanding Your PC/Collecting Miniature Teapots/Worming Your Opossum. Who buys these things, and more importantly, why? You can buy a book with identical information in it, and pay about the same, so why wait every week for some pathetic little magazine thing? Do they need that sense of anticipation? Or can they only digest a certain number of words at a time before their brain becomes dangerously overloaded, and might explode? My theory is that the publishers rely on some kind of New Year related enthusiasm to start a hobby. I'm betting that 99.9% of people buy less than three parts and then lose interest in the nuggets of opossum worming wisdom. But there must be a few people who do, in fact, have a complete partwork set. I think they need help.
It struck me when I went home to my parents for Christmas, that you never really leave your former selves behind. Superficially, a lot has changed in the house that I grew up in, but when I walk around in it, I keep finding myself drifting into layers of my childhood - seeing myself aged 5 or 9 or 13. There's an old Russian saying that you can't step in the same river water twice. That may be true, but the family home seems to act more like a lake or pool, and the water stays in layers. This isn't a bad thing - I had a very happy childhood - but it is odd when you are a grown woman visiting with your husband.
For as long as I can remember, the bolt on the bathroom door only slid half way because, when I was little, I stuck a green crayon into the bolt's staple (in a spirit of scientific enquiry), and the crayon broke off. Dad (amid a good deal of muttered cursing) tried to get the stub of the crayon out with a knife, but nothing would budge it. So there it stayed for the next 15 years or so, impeding the progress of the bolt. My parents redecorated the bathroom a few years ago and replaced the bolt, but when I go in there, I'm still surprised when it slides all the way home.
It's happened at last - I've finally got round to getting my gallery fixed up. It doesn't have a lot of pictures in it yet, but that will gradually change over the next few weeks. Take a look
here, or follow the link in the new navigation bar above (so much newness!). I've also added a handy little widget in the sidebar so that you can see a thumbnail of the latest picture here, courtesy of the wonderful MTOtherBlog plugin, developed by
David Raynes.
Enjoy, and let me know what you think.
We've just got back again after visiting my folks for Christmas. We're laden down with nice presents (including the extended DVD of The Fellowship of the Ring, so many hours of happy watching in store there), and left-over food.
So, what happened chez les parents this year? A huge quantity of very nice food was consumed. My mum went over the top as usual with the catering arrangements, and we had enough food to survive a reasonably extended seige. We watched "Mrs. Quinn's speech" (as my dad refers to the Queen), and a certain amount of slightly drunken Trivial Pursuit was played. Our question pack is getting long in the tooth, and contains questions about rather obscure early 80's TV series which we no longer remember anything about.
My car decided to develop a seasonal fault as a nice Christmas present for me, so Dad and I spent ages on Christmas Eve with our heads under the bonnet trying to work out where the coolant leak was. Ah, Dads - what would we do without them when something greasy breaks? I'm fine with computers, and while I can just about identify parts of the engine (I know my distributer from my spark plugs), I don't really know how to go about fixing stuff in there. Added to which, I have a very small and economical Korean car. The engine is all neatly packed into a very small space, which is all very well until you have to do anything more complicated than check the oil. Then it's an absolute bugger to get at anything.
Anyway, we made it back in one piece. One of our great presents was some money for a
DAB radio, we we're looking forward to overdosing on The Goons, Round the Horne and Phillip Pullman readings. Hope you all had a good Christmas!
We've just got back from seeing The Two Towers. One word - fantastic! It really lived up to all our expectations. The acting was superb (Gollum was particularly good - voice and CGI came together a treat), and the scenes were absolutely stunning. The battle scenes were the only part of the book that I found a bit tedious, but they were totally awe-inspiring in the film.
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Mr. Butshesagirl and I are off to my folk's place for Christmas tomorrow, first doing mightly battle with the jams on the M25. Since we'll be deep in ancient dial-up territory (and no doubt, busy stuffing our faces with mince pies) I'll be off the air for a few days.
Have a good holiday yourselves, and remember - it's rude to eat all the green triangles from the box of Quality Street.
I was reflecting today that I would rather give up watching TV than listening to the radio. There's The Archers of course, but Radio 4 and now
Radio 7 have some excellent programs. This afternoon, we listened to
"The Northern Irish Man in C S Lewis", a play about C S Lewis' early childhood in Northern Ireland, and the events that influenced his writing. It had great acting, evocative sounds, and set the scene beautifully. The Christmas before last, Mr. Butshesagirl and I spent all Boxing Day listening to Stephen Fry reading "Harry Potter and The Philosopher's Stone" on Radio 4. It was so gripping and vivid that we were severely disappointed by the film. This time last year, I was terrified that the film of The Fellowship of the Ring wouldn't live up to the fantastic radio adaptation that I listened to as a kid. Luckily, I needn't have worried - the film just enhanced the picture in my mind from the radio play and the book.
The play also fitted well into a current theme in our lives. We're going to see
The Two Towers tomorrow (yay!), and spent a very pleasant Saturday lunchtime last weekend in the snug of the Eagle and Child pub, where C S Lewis and J R R Tolkien spent a lot of time with the other
"Inklings", drinking, smoking pipes and discussing elves, amongst other things.
It was my last day at work before Christmas today. When I got off the bus, the nice bus driver (the nicest driver on the route) wished me Happy Christmas. It reminded me of the driver (aka Mr. Nice) we used to have on our school bus. I went to school just outside Croydon, a good 15 miles from my home. A lot of girls (I went to an all girls school) were in the same boat, and there were no public bus services on the route, so the parents clubbed together to hire a coach.
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I was convinced that
this [via
BoingBoing] was a wind up. Can you see yourself wearing the
Heartcam? Sure, it might prevent you being the victim of crime, but that would be because potential attackers are paralysed with laughter. Still, it might be amusing for those "Hello, I'm up here" moments (women - you know what I'm talking about).
This afternoon was The Great Work Christmas Do. There was a slightly different format this year - gone were the tiny sandwiches, sausage rolls and cheese and pineapple on a stick. This year we had a proper sit down Christmas dinner with all the trimmings, and (more importantly) lots of free booze. Me and my co-workers are a cynical old bunch, so our expectations of a 3 quid dinner weren't what you might call high, but it was really quite impressive.
Then there was the disco. At 3pm. This was just plain wrong on so many levels. Even the provision of copious quantities of more free booze and ABBA on the sound system couldn't pack the dancefloor out. As far as I know, no one tried to photocopy unusual parts of their anatomy, have any ill-advised sexual liasons, or go on an expedition through the ventilation ducts. But it was still a good party.
I made a big decision today. I came out as an Archers listener. Note that I said âlistener", not âfan". This is very important. I donât, for instance, feel the need to write to the BBC and complain that cows take about 300 days to be cured of mastitis, and NOT two weeks as the so-called writers believe1. Nor do I believe that Ambridge is a real place. I know this because:
- Everyone knows each other, and, more importantly, speaks to one another.
- Ambridge has a village shop, and people buy things in it every day.
- No one goes to a big supermarket.
- Everyone who lives in the village works in it. It is not full of people who visit at the weekends and find it âterribly convenient for the City - just a quick hop down the motorway in the Beemer on a Friday night".
Despite all that, itâs blumminâ exciting at the moment. Mr. Smarmy-Love-Rat-Git-Face-Bastard (aka Brian Aldridge) has finally been found out, and now has to choose between sultry Irish temptress Siobhan, and long-suffering wife and cake-baker extraordinaire, Jennifer. Itâll all end in tears, you mark my words.
1When surfing briefly to check the correct recovery rate (I know - Iâm a sad sad person, but I aim for accuracy), I discovered that there is a journal called Udder Topics. I must subscribe immediately.
I wasn't able to check my email all day today, so I was expecting to have quite an overflowing inbox when I got back. However, I hadn't bargained for the flood of mailing list posts I was going to receive. I hadn't bargained for it, because I hadn't signed up for it. It seems that someone called Jason T. Slack has bought a text editor, Pepper, from its original creator Maarten Hekkelman. This is good news: Pepper was a very good shareware text editor, with many nice features, but Maarten had stopped developing it. I bought it some time ago, and used it frequently until development slowed and I switched to BBEdit. The bad news was that Jason had signed all the purchasers of Pepper up to a new mailing list, without their permission. Now this wasn't really going to win him friends and influence people, let alone persuade people to buy his new version of Pepper. All day, my inbox has been filling up with emails from angry geeks berating Jason for signing them up. Worse still, when he provided instructions for unsubscribing, all the unsubscribe emails got sent to the list as well, increasing the numbers of unwelcome emails even more. Oh dear. To be fair, some people have welcomed the return of Pepper, but many will never want to have anything to do with it again after this debacle.
I'll be forever grateful to Peter Gabriel's RealWorld Studios for producing this album. Without it, I might never have come across the late, great Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Nusrat was a Sufi singer - a mystical sect of Islam, in which ecstatic music, singing and dancing is an important part of the devotions. In this collaboration, Nusrat's remarkable voice is paired with the subtle trance-like music of Michael Brook.
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I've been doing a bit of housekeeping on this site today. I've added a few links to the Browsing section in the sidebar to update it with some weblogs I've started reading recently. I've also fixed the "More.." link in the About box so that it actually goes to the about page as promised. Sorry about that - the link broke when I moved hosts, and I've only just noticed.
I've also been doing some more work on my long-promised photoblog/gallery. It's still not done (I'm being a bit of a perfectionist with it), but it should be coming soon. I'm hoping that when I finish work for Christmas I'll get a bit more time to sort it out. Watch this space...