2009 — 30 June: Tuesday
Hot, certainly, but not too sticky, I hope. Back in early 1987 we bought Peter his combination bunk bed and sofa and office desk (made by "Stompa") as part of our grand plan to be able to accommodate Big Bro, his wife, and all four nieces without too many overflow problems when they descended on us later that year for their first big overseas trip... Tonight's photo shows Christa and Peter trying out the "sofa" bit shortly after it had all been assembled:
Christa and Peter in early 1987
Time for some sleep. G'night!
Is drizzle allowed...
... during a heatwave? I only ask — I'm not complaining. It's a mere 25C in the study, the sky is a bright grey, and the final Reith lecture has just ground to a halt. There is more to freedom than the right to be a consumer in the marketplace. And more to fixing Britain than cleaning up the political expenses corruption.
Asides to Christa
I actually drove up a hill behind that strange Peugeot 1007 we spotted, and briefly considered buying. It seems a bit sluggish, so I'm glad we went for the Toyota. A spot of supplies shopping, a 30-minute burst of retail therapy down in Borders, and it's now time (13:29) for a spot of lunch. It remains warm (glad we opted for air con in the car), bright, but cloudy. Bit like a warm bath out there, but tolerable so far.
The roses behind the relocated pear tree are doing very well, by the way. As are the pears.
This perked me up...
... thanks to David Langford's ever reliable Ansible I was pointed to a story, as they say, redolent of John W Campbell's classic "Thing". (Although if memory serves — and I'm too lazy and too hot to clamber up on a precarious stool and reach one of my top book shelves to grab the SF Hall of Fame, volume 2 [which reminds me, young Jezz still has volume 1 on loan] — the original title of the 1940s story was "Who goes there?".) Snippet and source:
American scientists, showing the reckless disregard for the warnings implicit in quality science fiction that is so regrettably common in the boffinry community, have revived an ancient
lifeform which has been slumbering beneath the Arctic ice pack for 120,000 years...
It's capable of surviving, perhaps, in the most hostile alien interplanetary environments known to man. It can evade mankind's toughest lab sterilisation precautions.
Meanwhile humanity may be nearing its first attempt at a manned mission to Mars. Coincidence? Or have the glacial supermicrobes, having long ago seeded Earth, merely been waiting for a
vector species to arise and carry them onward to Mars for the next stage in their campaign of interplanetary conquest?
Those damned boffins, heh? Mind you, it certainly accords with the late Fred Hoyle's theories.
I've harvested another mixed dish of strawberries and red gooseberries (the latter are very well defended) and stewed my next dish of plums, too. It's 17:50 and, after about 14 drops of rain, it's now hotter and more humid than ever.
Cover art
Crikey! I have had many of these over the years... Penguin covers were often very classy mixtures of art and fonts. This is a magnificent web site.
Given what I said about boffins, it's appropriate that I've just finished watching a film I didn't even know existed until today. I picked it up during that retail therapy earlier:
It was directed by the lady who two years earlier made "Desperately seeking Susan" and there's a similar look'n'feel to the (Miami) set designs. It's positively redolent of the fashion and other trends of the mid to late 1980s. And (of course) John Malkovich was born to play an android!