2009 — 25 November: Wednesday
I have to admit "The Thick of It" goes from strength to strength. The meltdown in the BBC Radio 5 live studio was as funny as anything from "Yes, Minister". Perhaps not quite as funny as the secret financial jiggery-pokery — news of which has been, as it were, popping out of the woodwork, but then I have to seek my amusement wherever I can find it these days.
I have consciously decided, two years on from Christa's funeral, that perhaps I can survive without a picture of the dear girl in this diary every day. We shall see. Besides, I've more or less exhausted the supply.
In high hopes of a walk later... G'night.
Keep watching the skies!
After all, that's where the rain is currently dripping (with some vigour) from. It's 08:46, so it's a bit late for the old Rain before seven, fine before eleven lark. Let's see if a nice hot cuppa helps.
Those tricky skies will get us in the end (of the world). Solstices and sun flares in 2012, heh?
Amazingly, say the starry-eyed soothsayers, the Maya saw it all coming. Centuries before Cotton Mather's Puritans invented the Rapture Bunny to pass those long New England winter nights, they figured out the exact date,...
We moderns don't usually take seriously the teachings of ancients who practiced ritual toddler sacrifice. Yet when it comes to the end of the Mayans' peculiar calendar, a growing number of Amazon.com shoppers and History Channel viewers seem eager to make an exception. In honor of the plot spoiling Mayans, here's another 2012 giveaway: the new Emmerich film is worse than anyone predicted.
Robust film criticism; that's what I like to see. Besides, didn't the Mayans reckon a year had 260 days? (Source.) A bit like the state in the US that decided the value of pi should be defined by legislation. (Source.)
Right! Rain or shine, it's time (10:02) to hit the roads of Hampshire for some freshly-washed oxygen (and well-scrubbed carbon monoxide). Watch out butterflies, here I come.
Nary a butterfly in five miles or so of, at times, considerable mud, and one rather showery bit, but I have hopes of being sent a nice picture of a large fungus in due course. It's 13:08, quite sunny — it's obviously been raining here while I was elsewhere — and I'm about to wrap myself around the packed lunch and a hot cuppa.
What a scorcher
The chap now typing has no idea whether the activities of the supposedly intelligent species that infests this planet are responsible for climate change. We could, after all, be simply along for the ride while the planet we call "home" is traversing an area of space with slightly less dust for a while. (Of course, the fact that that "while" may last an hour, a century or a few millennia is something we cannot do anything about.) I'm bemused, too, after listening to the US Administration's Nobel-winning science advisor as he dodged the giving of a "straight" answer on "Newsnight" last night. Nor do I hold out much hope for the beneficial effects (if any) of carbon offset trading, other than to line yet more unworthy pockets. So, to where does a chap turn?
The Interweb, of course. This particular site prides itself on its studied neutrality.
If you prefer a lighter topic, there's a lovely 43-second burst of the divine "Seinfeld" here with a wonderful punchline. Who said Fox was, erm, rubbish?
Say hello to "due course"...
The diameter of today's "large fungus" was about eight inches. Quite a whopper, in fact. I wonder whether the two small buttons in the foreground (click the pic) are siblings of it, or just of each other. My ignorance of fungi is pretty profound.
It was, by the way, a flash-assisted photo. I think the least nice part about November is the way it gets dark so damnably early. It's 16:46 and there's currently a dullish moon shining down through some wispy high cloud, though when I looked about 20 minutes ago it was a lot brighter — sky and moon, both. Almost daylight, in fact.
Too late, now, to note today's deliveries — one mere minutes ago — as I have to put on best bib and tucker and set off into the dark... It's 18:09. No rest for the wicked.