2016 — 20 January: Wednesday
If there's anything guaranteed to make me begin to feel the second twinges of encroaching upper middle age1 I suspect it could be waking up at 07:00 on a frosty, dark, midwinter's morning and realising that in precisely one week it will be Big Bro's 70th birthday!
The first twinges?
Oh, that was ages ago last month, when it would have been Christa's 70th :-)
In with the...
... morning cuppa, and on with the show. Methinks I feel a minor expotition a-creepin' up on me. I haven't been anywhere near Soton (for example) since quite long before Xmas. I shall probe the thickness of the frost and the density of the freezing fog that is asserted to be out there this morning, muffling noise from the motorway.
I have been led astray
Having noted a story about the older-than-expected lineage of fairy tales I naturally dived straight into the Royal Society Open Science journal looking for the research, which according to the BBC has been using phylogenetic analysis techniques originally developed to look at the evolutionary relationships between species.
I failed to find any likely-sounding areas during my casual "browse by subject", though my search for "Jack and the beanstalk" returned 318 results (finding a statistically significant number of occurrences of both "and" and "the" but — I'm sorry to report — no trace of a beanstalk, ancient or modern). Still, my subsequent random poking and probing rewarded me with a paper produced in July 2015 by a five-person research team examining, in detail, the functional morphology and efficiency of the antenna cleaner in Camponotus rufifemur ants.
Come on, who could resist a peek at that?
It's a stonking -6C out there according to my front porch thermometer. I shall delay any expotition for a while.
Pity Mr Postie...
... brushing the frost off this before handing it over...
... and disappearing.
I do wish...
... phone scammers would shrivel up and die. Still, I'm even less likely to answer my mobile (which has just rung with a number known to be from an O2 scammer) than I am my landline, and I don't always bother to pick that up. Assuming I have either such device here in Technology Towers, of course. Which I will neither confirm nor deny.
Meanwhile, the temperature has soared to 3C but it will be dark soon. What a charming time of year :-)
I've just upgraded my Laptop PC to Linux Mint 17.3 (Cinnamon). It all went smoothly. But I keep it in as vanilla a state as possible since it's my emergency backup PC. I'm still vaguely contemplating alternative systems in the small, quiet, line. (Not that the laptop is noisy, but it does have a distressingly low-resolution screen.)
Having wasted...
... about 10 minutes grappling with the latest bit of marketing from my local grocer, I gave up in disgust and sent a mild nastygram to their Customer Support Manager(ess). A smart idea, but very badly and/or confusingly implemented. All commercial websites are equal, you might say, but some are more equal than others.