2010 — 4 October: Monday
Not only did I have a glitch with my quarterly calendar archive earlier, but I'd also forgotten to adjust my watch, which has one of those multi-function widgets that you pull out and twist the right way (having first twisted it the wrong way to make sure you have to wind it through a complete month, of course). Still, having received from my son1 the perfectly adequate reply...
Yes; back safely but really tired. Had a great time :-)
... I'm off to bed, where I propose to sleep the sleep of the angels, assuming angels a) exist, and b) sleep. I have my doubts about both propositions. G'night.
Martin Rowson's cartoon...
... has produced an interesting set of reactions to our delicious coalition's proposals for welfare reforms. Simplification is a laudable-sounding goal, but the devil is invariably in the details around the edges. The cartoon is rich in cruel detail. (Source.)
Still, at least it's stopped raining for a while. Breakfast?
I see our latest Chancellor thinks "we're all in this together. Each part of society is going to be making a contribution" so I have no doubt he'll be tapping bankers any minute now. No, wait, don't we own the banks now? Perhaps he could approach the list of high earners with offshore HSBC accounts? The stolen HSBC records from Geneva detail about 15,000 people (1,800 Canadian, and 1,600 US, citizens are being investigated by their guvmints). Brenda's heavies are sniffing around 100 or so UK account holders already. Hard though it is to believe:
HMRC has already compared the data with tax returns, disclosures made as part of the New Disclosure Opportunity and ongoing enquiries and has identified a significant number of individuals who have thus far failed to notify the presence of an HSBC Swiss account to HMRC.
Every little helps, specially if we're all in this together.
Thorium?
My detailed knowledge of nuclear power production is somewhat lacking, but this looks promising. And I was quite taken, too, by the comments some time ago detailing reasons why it wasn't as popular as, perhaps, it could be:
Why aren't we using liquid fluoride thorium reactors?
They are lousy at producing weapons grade material, so the Defence industry did not like it.
You don't need to make complicated fuel rods, which the nuclear industry makes a lot of its money from, so they did not like it.
You wouldn't have to mine uranium, and the scale of the mining needed for the thorium is quite trivial, so the mining industry did not like it.
It has the potential to displace coal at a reasonable price, so the coal industry did not like it.
So it got cancelled after successful tests.
Supplies run? Done. How about a trip into Soton? After all, you're going to be confined to barracks tomorrow awaiting Mr Staples. Good point. Lunch? Too early. True. Healthy brunch over at Loomies with my main co-pilot? Nope, they're closed on Mondays.
Cue SFX: sound of Yaris disappearing into the mist in a Southerly direction, pursued by a rain cloud.
I followed a trail of...
... post-Soton-trip, post-prandial, reminiscence kicked off (while driving home) by pondering the irony of locating a store called Brantano's (which sells only footwear) next door to a store called Boots (which doesn't), and recalling that in Wilmslow in the 1950s I borrowed and read all the "Kemlo" books from the Boots lending library that operated on their first floor. (These books now all fetch remarkable prices, it seems.)
A minor-league Google expedition found the essay by "John Grant" (aka Paul Barnett) on his personal top 10 SF items (including a mention of Kemlo) and culminated at a delightful automated selection of items from the Thog's Masterclass that appears in David Langford's "Ansible" newsletter, whose October email variant has yet to appear because "some hidden hand has pulled the plug on the long-established Ansible mailing list server". (Barnett invented "Thog the Mighty", lest you wonder.)
And 'twas in an ancient "Ansible" spat out by this randomiser that I found a perfect justification for continuing to avoid a very popular, and extremely successful, author:
'The last chance to stop the operation had passed by. The die was now cast, if not yet thrown.'
Tom Clancy in Debt of Honor, 1994
More tea, vicar?
And isn't this still a lovely site/sight for sore eyes? Last browsed some time ago.
Quality restorations
I was astounded by how good the 1995 BBC production of "Pride and Prejudice" looked by the time the mastering for hi-def had been done. Going back to the original film negatives and magnetic audio recordings worked wonders. I don't know how the engineers worked similar wonders on this feel-good favourite 1989 film of mine...
... but it is crisp, clean, and has an awesome soundtrack too. This is how Blu-rays should be mastered. Mind you, I still don't have a clue about the rules of baseball. It seems rather more complex than cricket.
Time marches...
... relentlessly on, and shows me that ERNIE has once again refused to smile — however fleetingly — in my direction this month. Bother. I'm off to bed.