2014 — 21 December: Sunday

We are now1 at the start of winter. Yay! Perhaps I'm at the start of the end of my cold, too?

That would be very welcome :-)

Meanwhile...

... there's already the dregs of what was a nice, hot cuppa and the matter of a fresh batch of plums begging me to stew them and toss in a few cranberries for the appropriate Yuletide dash of, erm, whatever. And — inevitably, at this time of year — a plethora of religious claptrap2 to be dodged on the radio. Nothing wrong with the music, but the quality of the spoken discourse has a strong emetic effect.

Miraculous news from...

... the department of Lizard virgin birth?

Neaves' whiptail lizard

More succinctly, as herpetologist Charles J Cole (quoted by Carl Zimmer in his New York Times piece) puts it:

It's not a Frankenstein genome manipulation...
It's lizards in cages doing their thing.

Glad that's sorted out. I dimly recall a rather turgid novel ("Titan's daughter" by James Blish) about a giant tetraploidal young lady developed by this sort of tinkering.

I've just finished...

... one complete 'pass' through my video discs. A tedious job, this "stock-taking" malarkey, but well-suited to the level of energy a batch of rhino-viruses tends to leave me with. I keep the physical discs themselves in a series of CaseLogic folders. A tiny bit of the collection is still in its original packaging: stuff like my Criterion sets of "Crumb", the "Qatsi" trilogy, "All that Jazz", "Civilisation". A couple of test and TV calibration discs. The cover artwork is in plastic sleeves in display folders. I've scanned all the artwork I could still find, and that's on my internal network.

The titles? Listed here.

  

Footnotes

1  Officially, that is.
2  My first tautology of the day. Sorry about that.