2013 — 8 December: Sunday

"Bother," said the Mole.1 But I've long since learned there's no profit in chasing after sleep once it's ridden off into the, erm, not yet sunrise. (Actually, it may not have been "Bother" but that will suffice. It's near enough.) I wonder if my subconscious simply thinks it's too quiet in the house? I can accept the "simply thinks" bit, but I've also long since mislaid the instruction manual that tells me how to reset the "alarm" noise threshold. I blame evolution.

I've also long been...

... a tad dubious about psychotherapy...

Skipton!

... not to mention Yorkshire. Still, there's nowt so queer as folk. And, inevitably, one born every minute.

Fresh insight...

... brings new delight.2 In 2008 I revealed a note from Christa that she wrote to me on the eve of her cancer surgery in June 2006. A few minutes ago, while folding away an accumulated pile of laundry (ironed? don't make me laugh!) I found a printout of an email she'd also written to me on the same date. It made me smile:

email instructions from Christa

I wonder if I still owe the paper bill?

Oops

Now, what on earth would make my Audiolab pre-amp suddenly cut out? Can't be the nice harp music, surely? I still sometimes wonder if all this digital stuff will ever catch on. I also note that exactly seven years ago I was just starting to ponder the acquisition of a top-of-the-range DVD player ahead of Blu-ray and/or HD DVD. (Whatever happened to HD DVD?) I didn't know then, of course, just how good the built-in video upscaling of standard-def material would become. I was equally (blissfully) ignorant of all the horrors of hdcp that were in store for me.

Given the name...

... of this splendidly educational little enterprise, I shouldn't have been surprised to find (on digging deeply enough) its creationism and "youngish" earth (or have your cake and eat it) approach to certain aspects of life hereabouts:

Genesis states that Noah took on board a male and a female of
every 'kind' of land animal - in some cases seven pairs - and
enough food for them. Since today there are millions of
species, how could the ark have carried so many?

The answer depends on how many fundamentally different 'kinds'
of animal existed in the beginning. Since animals evolved
enormously after the cataclysm, the number of original kinds
would have been small. To arrive at an estimate, we need to
trace the evolutionary family trees found in the fossil record
back to their original ancestors.

Through ongoing research, a current estimate proposes that all
mammals, living and extinct, can be grouped into fewer than 50
original kinds. As we are still getting to grips with the
amazing capacity of species to change form as they diversify
and evolve, the actual number is likely to have been even
smaller. Similarly there may have been fewer than 20 original
kinds of bird and 20 kinds of reptile.

I'd been going to poke fun, but Life's far too short to waste on it.

My guess is that...

... the slightly unnerving silence3 now pouring continuously out of the kitchen means the freezer I switched off last Wednesday was actually running all the time (and I just unconsciously filtered out the sound). I'd need one of those little electrical consumption gadgets to confirm it, but I'm hoping the electricity bill will indeed diminish a bit. In time for the next price rise. So I delved gently into the wacky world of guvmint policy docs and found this gloriously unhelpful picture (Fig #1 on page 11):

new indicator of fuel poverty

It's got some explanatory text but, again, Life's far too short to waste on it. Was it intelligently designed, do you suppose?

  

Footnotes

1  As his bleary eyes focused on a bedside clock suggesting it wasn't much after 03:30.
2  A line that I seem to recall from my first reading of Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land".
3  Except when either the fridge-freezer or the CH boiler is operating.