2012 — 28 June: Thursday

It doesn't seem to matter1 how many times I hear Tchaikovsky's fantasy overture "Romeo and Juliet", it surely beats housework.

I have yet to peek over the Interweb parapet this morning, so I've no idea who else has died. Reading "Private Eye" is quite disheartening enough, thank you. Meanwhile, I find it oddly amusing that the digital audio output from my Humax Freesat box downstairs and the analogue audio output from the new FreeviewHD box I've moved into the reading room upstairs is — near as dammit — perfectly in sync. Go figure.

And there's me...

... thinking clover was merely a (personally) irritating source of pollen:

At least the Church rejects the slippery-slope argument, according to which gay marriage will lead to troilist or n-person conjugation, to coupling with siblings, the dead or animals. Predictably the Bible has a downer on bestiality (e.g. Leviticus 18.23, 20.15), which perhaps reflects how endemic heavy petting was in ancient Palestine; a 1533 act denying priests benefit of clergy when charged with bestiality suggests that early modern English clerics, too, were no strangers to a rubdown with Clover.

Glen Newey in LRB blog


I must ask Big Bro whether one of his bovines is called "Clover".2

I should know better than to watch this.

There's a throwaway...

... line in the November 2010 issue of "Scientific American" in the article "Dark Worlds" by Jonathan Feng and Mark Trodden:

There is some evidence that the universe has less lithium than expected,
and the super-WIMP hypothesis is one way to explain the discrepancy.

I believe I may have just discovered an alternative explanation. My chum Brian has over 600 lithium batteries, one of which is now nestled in that hdmi switchbox remote control, driving it perfectly.

It's turning into one of those warm, sticky, enervating days when the best thing to do is kick back with my newly-delivered book of poetry by Paul Durcan:

Book

Did you know that there exists, among the genes of Drosophila, (aka the fruit fly) a pan-neural repressor called — wait for it — 'deadpan'? It's on the Interweb, so it must be true. (Link.)

If I didn't know...

... better, I might suspect the small-egg-shaped bulge itching away on the back of my right elbow marked an "Alien" injection of DNA rather than my reaction to an insect bite yesterday. I shall continue to do my best to ignore the damned thing. Time (19:33) for some light entertainment, I think.

  

Footnotes

1  Why would it?
2  I was actually on a different point, but he's just reminded me that a) he recalls my liking for steak, and b) as far as naming goes, that he "Stopped after the first 10 when it became clear that it was not the right thing to do! Saying bye-bye when the truck came was a little traumatic for the family. Since then it has been a strict no names business".