2012 — 10 October: Wednesday
Well, unless the Beeb's had a brainstorm1 our walk is "on", so I'd better start waking up. Happy birthday, Willard White. Like his surely definitive Porgy I, too, have "got plenty of nothin', and nothin's plenty for me" :-)
Breakfast and another cuppa will soon change that. By the way, it turns out that I'd been right to hesitate initially about getting Aardman's The Pirates! An adventure with Scientists! and I should perhaps learn to trust my suspicion of films to which 'they' have felt it necessary to add exclamation marks2 — it was beautifully made but barely made me smile in the first 40 minutes, so I gave up on it.
Dream the impossible dream
I'm not saying it's bad to set yourself tasks, but this particular one would surely defeat even Hercules:
Read at your own risk. I'm not going there. Still, if you're going to tell a whopper, always make it a big one. It worked in another country in the middle of the last century.
Thanks, Mr Yodel
Much preferable to the large amount of bumph dropped off by Mr Postie while I was out:
I had leafed through the book — an excellent idea, by the way, whose title comes from a remark attributed to SuperMac — in a well-known High Street chain, but decided my pension would only comfortably stretch as far as the online supplier's price. The film picked up some interesting reviews.
Back when the Earth...
... was young, and the UK guvmint was assessing safe places to build their new-fangled nuclear power stations (some of which were far more about making fissile material than they were about generating cheap electricity, but that's a whole different story) Christopher Hinton gave a lecture at Strathclyde University...
To our dismay, this showed that the site did not comply with the safety distances specified by the health physicists. That was easily put right; with the assumption of a 99% containment the site was unsatisfactory, so we assumed, more realistically, a 99.9% containment, and by doing this we established the fact that the site [Dounreay] was perfect...
Now, of course, the interest has shifted to considering (carefully, one would hope) where it's safe to bury the waste material for the next several hundred thousand years or so to minimise the risk of two-headed babies or worse. West Cumbria was expensively assessed (and found wanting) back in the 80s and 90s. Yet it's now back on the table, which has brought some of the original assessors out of retirement to repeat their concerns in light of a new, more narrowly-focussed assessment which seems to have found a suitable dump site there. Whether it's had glowing reports isn't mentioned.
My little Yaris...
... along with 138,000 other vehicles, has to have its power window master switch looked at, and then either specially lubricated or replaced, all free of charge.
Since there's been one case in the UK, I'm not unduly worried. But thanks for the tip, Len. (This is what happens when I don't watch the TV news...)