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The BBC News site always asks for my comments, but they never publish them. They only seem to select comments from deranged left-wing risk-averse party-line-toeing buffoons. I can’t imagine why this is. Anyway, I’ve decided to start publishing my comments myself.
In response to this ‘article’ (which is entirely old hat anyway) and inspired by the stupid comments they published, here is my contribution:
Mia has a talent for inventing strange new games. My all time favourite was blindfold dog hurdling. Just to be clear, it was Mia that was blindfolded (by pulling her T-shirt over her head) and the dog was the unwilling hurdle. The game only ended, as you might have already guessed, when the dog decided enough was enough and went to find somewhere else to try and sleep.
Today’s invention is Plum Roulette. Place your bets…
The wheel is part of a washing machine I dismantled. It spins very well. No more bets now…
Jake supplied the plums, straight from the tree. They’re not quite ripe yet, but that doesn’t really matter when you’re not eating them.
The Linksys SR224G is a 24-port network switch. A bit excessive for what I needed, but I couldn’t resist the price of £4.99 on ebay. One problem – very noisy indeed. This would be fine in it’s normal environment, a rack full of other noisy equipment but I wanted it in my office, because that’s where most of the Cat5 cabling in the house terminates.
Introducing Baby 3.0. He’s called Tom. I’m still not getting involved in the very strange but apparently compulsory “how much did he weigh?” thing. I was going to mockingly suggest that our lovable NHS bureaucrats would have already ticked a little “overweight, prone to diabetes, and will probably die of a heart attack next week” box on their clipboard. No mocking is necessary though, because I put his details into their stupid calculator thing and sure enough, he is off the end of the scale, and “obese”. They are telling me he is at risk of cancer, and needs to eat less burgers and chips, and get more exercise. I guess we need to hope he drastically loses some weight by the time he’s four weeks old, but in my experience these babies just keep on getting bigger.
Can a baby starling swim? This is not a question I’d ever asked, until I saw one fall into the River Nidd yesterday. Luckily I had a camera in my hand at the time:
You might need a good connection to view that video. I tried to reduce the bitrate, but it came out too blocky and spoiled it when I went too far. The quality of the original video (96MiB of it at the original resolution of 1280×720) is amazing. It was recorded on a Panasonic DMC-ZS3, which I think is a superb almost-pocket-sized camera, the only downside being a shortage of manual controls. Unfortunately the cameraman wasn’t of the same quality, but you get the idea – after a few seconds of pondering its predicament, the baby starling can indeed swim.
Note to self: I converted the video using the following command:
ffmpeg -i /shares/pictures/2010/2010-05-29/P1010955.MOV -ar 22050 -s 400x226 -qscale 5 -f flv waterwings.flv
Next question – do they like swimming. I think the expression on its face says it all:
It let me get very close to take that picture. I suspect it sat on that rock for a long time, drying out and coming to its senses. Again, only the original uncompressed image at 3648×2746 really does the camera justice, but the version I’ve butchered for the web doesn’t look so bad either. Click it twice to get to the 1024×768 version. Any arguments that it’s not a starling will be happily accepted if you know better – I’m not 100% sure.
In which I present, for no apparent reason, a list of books I’ve read since the last list.
The Secret Agent – Joseph Conrad: This is the fourth of his books that I’ve read (the previous three are here, and it’s now level pegging, with two of them (this included) being very enjoyable, and two not so much.
Dead Souls – Ian Rankin: First of a set of “three for five quid” picked up in a bargain bookshop that’s conveniently near where I was waiting for the old Merc to pass it’s MOT test. This one was picked because I’ve read quite a lot of Rankin’s stuff. A fairly standard “Rebus” novel, but with an unexpected twist – I spent quite a lot of the time having a strange sense of deja vu, like I’d read some passages of the book before, and some bits of the story were familiar too. It turned out that it was adapted from a short story I’d already read, which was published in Beggar’s Banquet.
The Front – Patricia Cornwell: The second of the bargain-bookshop-three. This was ok, but it deserved to be in the bargain bookshop.
Roman Blood – Steven Saylor: The wildcard entry from the bargain bookshop. I’d never heard of it (or him), or any of the other books on offer, so I picked it up almost at random to make up the set of three. It turned out to be the best of the lot by a long way. Very good indeed. Luckily it’s also the first of a long series, of which I’ve already purchased the next book.
The Turn of the Screw – Henry James: This was ‘recommended’ by my wife. Recommended as in she read it, then passed it on to me, but failed to inform me beforehand that she didn’t really like it. There are two stories in the book. I got about halfway through the first page before I asked if she’d read them both, and she said no. I wondered why not, but with hindsight it was a valiant effort even reading the first in its entirety. I lasted about three chapters then gave up.
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley: An astounding vision of the future, for it’s time, although it doesn’t seem so far away now. Also, in my opinion, an astoundingly bad piece of writing.
Set In Darkness – Ian Rankin: More of the Rebus stuff. Readable enough, as always.
The Falcon Flies – Wilbur Smith: Without any reasonable grounds for doing so, I always had Wilbur Smith down as some kind of author of junk fiction. I only read this because I found it lying around. I thought it was great, and I’ll be reading more of his books.
It’s not that I’m saying that being able to spell, use proper grammar, and not make countless sloppy mistakes in almost every sentence is a prerequisite for a prospective MP. It might be that someone who couldn’t do any of these things would make a great MP, but in that case if they were touting for votes, you’d hope they’d at least have the common sense to get someone else to proof-read what they publish.
We have an independent, Chris Nolan standing in our constituency. I was slightly interested when I found out about this – at least, more interested than I would be in any of the LibLabCon coalition, who all have virtually the same policies. Via the wonders of modern technology, I found his campaign web site and was put off before I’d even started by the default Wordpress theme. One out of ten for effort, but no big deal. But then came the words. Some examples:
It’s planting season at last. Although we have enough runner beans saved from last year’s crop to plant out a whole field, there’s not much else, so that meant buying seeds. I put a bit more effort in that last year’s grabbing of packets from the racks in the garden centre, and the first batch arrived in the post recently.
These came from The Real Seed Catalogue, which has a great selection of proper seeds – none of your hybrid leeks bred for supermarket straightness here. Also, all this stuff should, in theory, produce usable seeds for future years. It all looks good on paper, but the proof will be in the eating and we have to wait for that.
James Lewis is the Labour candidate for Elmet and Rothwell, thus making him, in his words, my “real local choice” in the forthcoming General Election – local, because he grew up in the area, went to school here, and served as a City Councillor for some time. I know all this because he was kind enough to send me a leaflet, printed in far-off Essex, to tell me all about it. It seemed rude not to reply, so:
Jake has appointed himself chief egg collector:
A task he takes very seriously:
Every day:
