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2014 — 18 April: Friday

Well, we may be past the Ides1 but it's still looking good for our next walk this morning. Good Friday, indeed. Breakfast, and the packing of a snack lunch, are thus high on my non-existent "to do" list.

Christa's continuing absence, alas, means no sign of an Easter egg. Dagnabbit.

I was unaware...

... until hearing a snippet of radio news yesterday that this mysterious "Omega-3" stuff that some of our fishy friends are rich in (yesterday's salmon lunch being my latest ingestion of same, I suspect) comes, not 'naturally' from the fish, but from some of the algae they eat. Hence the permission granted (or, at least, reported) to gene splicers at Rothamsted2 — just a couple of miles down the road from where I lived in Harpenden in the 1960s — to splice some magic DNA into a plant (Camelina sativa aka false flax) to persuade it to produce seeds rich in "Omega-3" oils. If these seeds are then fed to farmed fish (hopefully without poisoning them, I guess) the idea is that we eat the fish and thus boost the quality of the human food chain.

I wonder if the fish are happy about this? And I do hope these floral Dr Frankensteins know exactly what they're doing. I shall keep my pitchfork and flaming torch at the ready.

Just a thought: could they splice the same stuff into Cannabis sativa and make healthier pot, I wonder?

I need to retract...

... a staggeringly ill-informed opinion I ventured last Monday. Having now heard a couple of the tracks from the audio-only Blu-ray of that venerable Genesis album3 (as remixed and remastered in 2007, apparently) it is not by any means the "audio snake oil" that I suspected. Until now, both Mike and I had thought that the remastered King Crimson material on DVD audio we'd both bought was probably about as good as it was likely to get. Not so, it seems.

So, having trawled through the 283 items currently listed by Amazon under "Blu-ray audio", I've just placed my order for:

The "Americana" is a mandolin quartet (apparently). And the Vivaldi is a chamber piece rather than a full-blown orchestra variant.

I've just listened...

... to a live relay of John Taverner's The Protecting Veil — commissioned by the Beeb for a Prom in 1989, apparently. Remarkable piece of music.

  

Footnotes

1  My lazily unchecked term for the middle of a month.
2  My Irish Times link is probably because the trials are being run by a chap born in County Monaghan.
3  I should have realised that Mike, being a keen fan of that particular prog-rock beat combo, would have got himself a copy of this disc. This afternoon, after our walk, Brian and I were treated to a demonstration of its outstanding quality on his 7.1 audio system.

© David Mounce.