2008 — 20 October: Monday
Midnight here in Technology Towers. Time to declare an end to the week, and to pick my next picture of Christa:
Carbon dating and other bits of evidence suggest this was in 1988, during one of Big Bro's visits over here.
Spam-a-lot?
I've just cleaned out two whole pieces of junk email this morning, both correctly flagged as such by Thunderbird. This is more than I usually get in a whole month. It's 09:29 but I can't pretend it's sunny hereabouts. Still not yet raining, though. Quite windy, too. I shall have to nip out to restock the food cupboard at some point. Better make it something fairly easy to chew bearing in mind Wednesday's date with dental destiny to finish the repair to the tooth that was being undermined by an abscess. Increasing decrepitude as a result of unintelligent design is such good fun, isn't it?
Things that were supposed to go bang... dept.
You'd think, after sixty years, things were settling down...
But many failed to go off because Oranienburg has soft soil with a hard layer of gravel underneath. That meant bombs would penetrate the earth, bounce off the gravel and come to
rest underground with their tips pointing back upwards. In that position gravity stops the chemical detonators from working. They contain a vial of acetone which bursts on impact
and is meant to trickle down and dissolve a celluloid disk that keeps back the cocked firing pin.
But when the bomb is pointed upwards, the acetone seeps away from the celluloid, leaving only the vapors to wear the disk down.
The author's name is, surely, yet another example of nominative determinism.
Democracy...? dept.
Back from the shopping (petrol at below £1 per litre again) and idly leafing through my collection of Ron Cobb drawings, to which I've tried to append appropriate captions (though they almost never need them) while waiting for the cuppa to attain its proper strength, I find a neat question for what is still, just, a slightly drizzly Monday morning:
- In which election did the CIA spend twice as much per Chilean voter (to block Allende) as the total spent per voter by both parties in the US elections of that year?
A clue: the Olympic Games that summer were held in the land of the Rising Sun.
The best job in BBC radio... dept.
... writing the scripts for "Humph" for the last 15 years...
Even though I was responsible for what I like to describe as "post-feminist irony" (known in the comedy business as "knob gags"), I was sometimes equally amazed by what we asked Humph
to try to get away with. Most centred around his assistant and scorer, the ever-delightful Samantha.
"Samantha has been working down in the gramophone library today, where the archivists
have been engaged in a heated argument about who sits at which desk to get the best view of Samantha's shapely legs. To calm things down, she had to keep them apart all morning."
"Samantha is off to see a chef gentleman friend who is renowned for his fine-quality offal dishes. While she's very keen on his kidneys in red wine and his oxtail in beer, Samantha says
it's difficult to beat his famous tongue in cider."
That's the problem with a knob gag: the next one only seems as funny if it's filthier. More than once, between tears of helpless laughter, the producer and I asked each other: "Can we
actually broadcast that?"
I, for one, am very glad they did. I've just ordered his book. Right! Time for a bite of lunch.
Tea-seeking missile... dept.
I'm heading out on a mission of mild mercy in 30 minutes. It entails some brew somewhere, and then the acquisition of a pile of pills for a fellow abscess sufferer. Intelligent Design? Please! Do me a favour!
Continuing that thought, I was fascinated when I first heard of the Stanley Miller experiment of the early 1950s seeking to simulate likely conditions early in the history of this ball of rock, and then to see if any of the building blocks of life could form through natural processes. Samples from that experimentation have now been more thoroughly analysed with modern kit. (Source.)
I live in hope...
... of one day overcoming my completely irrational fear of spiders. (I entirely sympathised with columnist Bernard Levin, who needed to use a ruler to remove them from his wash hand basin.) The fear only kicks in above a certain critical size... so-called "money spiders" can run over me without fear of damage, but the long, hairy-legged monsters that dash out from behind nice warm hi-fi kit and scuttle like miniature crabs across the living room carpet set my heart pounding just as effectively as a snake would.
My version of counter aversion therapy takes the form of trying to get a decent photo of one of the beasts as, for some strange reason, I find them fascinating to look at:
I've long thought...
... that Deckard is a Replicant. Thank goodness the film's director agrees with me! The "final cut" is superb, and Ridley Scott's commentary quite fascinating, too. It's now 22:43 — what shall I get up to next, I wonder? First, wonder at the fact that it's taken me so long to realise that "Gaff" is the same actor who plays "Adama" in Battlestar Galactica...