2011 — 22 September: Thursday
Perhaps unsurprisingly1 I eschewed Alaska in favour of the world of "Firefly" for last night's video entertainment. Most enjoyable, too. But now it's time to come back down to Earth and get some sleep.
G'night.
Quite how...
... this week can have reached Thursday, already, baffles me. What was it? "The hurrieder I go, the behinder I get." And the central heating kicked in overnight. At this rate, I will soon be dusting off my crockpot. Not before breakfast, stage 1: the rest of the delicious raspberries.
An entertaining piece here, made more so by all the comments it's attracted. Source and snippet:
Whatever your supplier, you get the same power. There's no such thing as luxury electricity, and neither EDF nor British Gas can improve your toast. The only competition is on price. If the lowest price were
easy to find and the supplier could be changed in a 30-second phone call, all but one energy supplier would go out of business, and you wouldn't have a competitive market any more.
So the companies devise complex and impenetrable tariff structures, and without a degree in astrophysics you can't be sure what you'll pay...
Last autumn I watched two energy salesmen here (trying to persuade me not to leave their kindly embrace, even though doing so had already paid for my Novatech BlackBeast toy) struggling through their own booklet of tariffs — and hiding it from me — completely unable to see how to match the cheaper offer from the rival I'd just switched to. I always like the articles that so thoroughly accord with my own prejudices and biases.
Now that the second (of two) cars has been loaded onto a second transporter and it's driven off, I can finally get the Yaris out of my garage and fit in a quick burst of supplies shopping before my two lunch companions show up. It's 10:38 and dull but dry out there. [Pause] All safely gathered in, though whether tomorrow's visitor will eat it is another matter. Just nice timing for my "lemonses" before the next arrivals. (One can't go out to eat on an empty tum, can one?)
Bra, humbug!
I've managed to get this far in life without ever having had to buy underwear for dear Mama. The care-home has just told me she's in "desperate need" of some new bits'n'bobs, so I've suggested they raid her little petty cash stash with my blessing and do the deed without my further involvement. Phew :-)
I love a good...
...laugh, and got one from reading a comment appended to an article about the new book by St. Dawkins (illustrated, by the way, by one of the artists who worked on Neil Gaiman's marvellous "Sandman" saga). Source and comment:
Only the other day I was noting how the gravity, the special theory of relativity, the laws of thermodynamics, the Hubble redshift, cosmic background radiation, radiometric dating of lunar rocks, optical,
infra-red, X ray and Gamma ray astronomy, spectroscopy, and mapping of HII regions, biogeographic correlation of the fossil records, morphological similarities between primates, connections between ontogeny
and phylogeny and genomic analysis do, if nothing else, prove that a Jewish cosmic zombie, who was his own father can, if you telepathically accept him as your master and pseudosymbolically cannibalistic (sic) him,
grant you the power of immortality and remove a taint in your soul that has been present in all mankind since the dawn of humanity because a rib-woman, on the advice of a talking serpent, made dinner from
a magic tree.
Anyone who denies that is clearly barking mad.
Nicely put, sir or madam.
Crikey
"CERN says a neutrino beam fired from a particle accelerator near Geneva to a lab 454 miles away in Italy traveled 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light." I presume they mean "arrived 60 nanoseconds earlier than expected". Intriguing. (Link.)