2010 — 1 March: Monday — rabbits!
And it's St David's day yet again. If March arrives can Spring be far behind? Remains to be seen. But there are certainly plenty of daffodils on the way in both parts of the garden.
Time I was in the Land of Nod. G'night.
Plenty of frost...
... but, at 09:10, the sun is currently gaining the upper hand. I'm throwing down a quick bite of breakfast as I've just promised to take my main co-pilot down to the nearest car battery1 shop. [Pause] After a certain amount of assault and, erm, battery, the old dead battery has been removed. And the new live one installed. My respect for the Mercedes clowns who "designed" this Smart roadster has been somewhat unenhanced. But at least Peter's engine starts — that's the main thing. It also rather begs the question: if and when my car battery fails, how do I drive down to pick up a new one? Hadn't ever thought of that before. Another in my continuing line of motoring firsts.
The delight that is Beethoven's Symphony #2 (in what sounds like a pretty venerable recording) is a nice accompaniment to the morning's "lemonses". The sky is still almost cloudless, but the thermometer is hardly troubling itself to get up. What's next, Mrs Landingham? I was right about the "venerable", incidentally. The recording was made in April 1952 in the Great Hall of Sydney's uni. It was (to be honest) taken at rather too pedestrian a pace by Eugene Goossens (the third).
Bruxism
Having relatively recently learned that some of my dental woes are almost certainly caused by sleep-related tooth-grinding, I predict the incidence will also rise among some Microsoft workers in Europe. Fancy being forced to offer alternative software and then trying to spin it as a critical security update. Crikey.
I'm a "Paulette"
And have been for many years, all unknowing. (Source of this dubious claim.) Further (visual) proof of a more personal nature2 is on offer here.
Time for a spot of fresh air, methinks. I'm outa here. (It's 12:59 and still sunny.)
You don't say
It's comforting to have science on your side, don't you think? Awfully good for sustaining any little prejudices you may harbour, too:
General intelligence, the ability to think and reason, endowed our ancestors with advantages in solving evolutionarily novel problems for which they did not have innate solutions... As a result,
more intelligent people are more likely to recognize and understand such novel entities and situations than less intelligent people, and some of these entities and situations are preferences, values,
and lifestyles.
(An earlier study by Kanazawa found that more intelligent individuals were more nocturnal, waking up and staying up later than less intelligent individuals. Because our ancestors
lacked artificial light, they tended to wake up shortly before dawn and go to sleep shortly after dusk. Being nocturnal is evolutionarily novel.)
A simple chat with Mrs Google shows the good doctor (whom I was blissfully unaware of) to have some detractors.
As professors go (as it were) I'd far rather hear from AC Grayling. And this should be good for ruffling a few feathers, too. Not to mention this — great stuff. As for the heretical idea that a guvmint official would ever use the law to enforce his personal morals... how could that be? (Find out here.)
It's hard to believe that random evolutionary processes and pressures brought us to this amazing state of enlightened grace, isn't it? :-) Particularly when you think that so much of the human genome consists of viral bits and bobs. Talk about intelligent design.
R.I.P. David Severn
Aged 91. He wrote (among other things) the 1957 SF novel (for "young adults") The future took us that I used to borrow from the library each year when I stayed with my favourite mad aunt in the Midlands for a happy fortnight of literary (and other) freedom. (Source, as so often: Ansible.)
Plans for tomorrow?
It would have been a good day to walk, today, as far as the weather goes. But Mike had a date with his Dr Fang. As it happens, I have a date with my Dr Fang (assuming he's returned intact from the ski slopes) tomorrow morning but, with luck, we should be able to walk after that.
This evening (it's 22:29) I've been reading, and catching up with the last two parts of that Interweb documentary my Hi-Def PVR so kindly watched for me the other week. I've yet to own up to a few tiny acquisitions down in Soton this afternoon. I've also given my terribly primitive and old-fashioned (no camera, no MP3 player, no keyboard) little mobile phone a brain transplant — until today, I thought SIMs was a PC game — having switched away from "Mobile World"3 just a couple of weeks before they shut down their service. Just call me Mr Vodaphone from now on, it seems. So I now have a new number that I don't remember, to take the place of the old one I didn't ever bother to learn :-)
(Recall Hazel from the Treasury department, and her "Radiohead" tickets dilemma while up a mountain?)