2012 — 1 May: Tuesday — rabbits!

Like Anne Fadiman's daughter's hamster, I sometimes tend towards the nocturnal. Sleep fled (wherever it is that sleep goes) this morning at around 03:30 and I've now (06:07) long since raised the white flag and made myself a cuppa. It is, after all, jolly nearly morning. I mean, all the streetlights have gone out (for example). But it's still too early for breakfast.

I suspect a few hours of probing on an analyst's couch1 might reveal the current state of dear Mama as having something to do with the relatively curtailed period of neural downtime, but what's a chap to do? Take up pipe smoking? I think not.

Haven't been here for a while — four years to the day, in fact.

The female...

... on BBC Radio 3 has just (07:34) chirpily announced that it's going to be sunnier and dry. I think she hasn't seen the wet, grey, gloom out there. Still, it's only water. [Pause] It's 09:27... so where's all the sunshine, then?

Shorn, the alpaca

Are you looking at me?

Alpaca

Seriously cute.

Given last Sunday's...

... abject failure to upgrade my Ubuntu desktop PC — possibly assisted by the intermittent network failures — I've chosen a more familiar route, made even easier by the fact that Win7 has finally learned how to burn and verify ISO images:

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

It's busily playing by itself upstairs as I type. Time for a spot of "lemonses", I think. Either that, or stare at the Twitter feed during the installation. <Sigh>

Right. All up and running. Meanwhile, today's lunch is a culinary experiment. Report may follow if it doesn't poison me. The sun is actually shining. [Pause] Yum; delicious. And now most of the sky is blue. Amazing.

Somebody around here keeps eating me out of house and home. Wonder who? Well, I can't be bothered to get the car out at this point. I'm sure I'll survive until tomorrow. Meanwhile, it amuses me to learn that a subset of our MPs has concluded that a certain ex-Australian newspaper proprietor is unfit to run a major corporation. I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Tee hee. There's a comment from a chap in Hull addressing itself to the article in the New York Times about the Murdoch nonsense:

Practically, the laws which Murdoch (Jnr and Snr) have undoubtedly broken were enacted by the government, the Police should be arresting them but won't because they have taken bribes, and the judiciary won't convict because they would be disgraced publicly.
My question is: given that you guys invade anywhere which doesn't have a democracy, why in the name of God didn't you come over?

"Clive G" in New York Times


I've just copied the Home Office (inter alia) on my email reply to Brian as he thinks it's a good idea to show our Masters that we have no problem with them reading our exchanges. So, if the Goon Squad shows up in the wee hours and bundles me off with a cardboard suitcase on a cattle truck with an ID tattooed on my arm at least you'll know why Molehole has gone off the air.

I'm still in...

... a (mild) state of shock. The final track played on Marc Riley's evening show a few minutes ago was Family's "Wheels" — from a 'Top Gear' session in July 1969. Do you realise how long ago that was?

I'd recently returned from a family holiday in the South of France (Apollo 11 Moon landing, anyone?) and was then working (for the second year running) at a summer job in Alcan's aluminium foundry in London Colney — and deciding that a life of metallurgy, though quite interesting, was not really what I wanted.

  

Footnote

1  Were I daft enough to believe in such stuff.