2016 — 13 May: Friday
The by-no-means new idea of trying to use bacteriophages1 as an alternative to the rapidly-dwindling arsenal of effective antibiotics has been rediscovered by the BBC. I first met the idea (of course!) in a 1950s SF story by Robert Heinlein:
The ceaseless fight of life against life which is the dominant characteristic of life anywhere proceeds with special intensity, under conditions of high metabolism, in the steamy jungles of Venus. The general bacteriophage which has so nearly eliminated disease caused by pathogenic micro-organisms on Earth was found capable of a subtle modification which made it potent against the analogous but different diseases of Venus.
Alas, no "steamy jungles of Venus" currently exist!
It's been a...
... very long time since my last visit to one of Christa's favourite pair2 of shops. This spirited snippet of news from Brian might even persuade me back into their, erm, hallowed aisles:
[Aldi's] cheap Highland Black whisky won the gold medal against whiskies of significantly more cost per bottle than £12.99 and the blend is getting excellent reviews across the web.
The shop we used most often (which probably means it was the nearest) is not far from the Maplin Aladdin's Cave in Bevois Valley. Always good to have an excuse for a visit.
A second letter...
... from my bank yesterday completed (I hope) their current round of notifications about eroding my savings interest rates to (essentially) as near zero as makes no difference. Of course, if they halved the number of such letters they could save money, surely? But now consider this financial factoid from across the Pond:
As an example, take Helaine Olen's recent Slate piece, a snarky response to journalist Neal Gabler's Atlantic story about financial insecurity. Gabler's article was about the 47 percent of Americans who'd have trouble coming up with $400 in case of an emergency. The twist: He, big-shot writer, author of several books, and occasional television personality, was one of them. Gabler's point is that "financial impotence" (his term) is unspoken, and therefore invisible.
My emphasis.
Nice to know...
... somebody misses me!
in the last few months you have not shopped with Amazon.de ... To impart our joy of a reunion expression will be raffled among all customers who after a long time following us shopping promotional codes...
Google's translation, not mine :-)
A momentary...
... burst of unreasonableness, on both sides of the digital chasm separating BlackBeast's view of my new NAS drive from Skylark's view of the Same Thing. I hate networking glitches. And forlornly hoped they would be less liable to occur in a single OS environment. How naïve of me. Issues so far today have included both "No such file or directory", and "unrecognised file type".
All I was doing was capturing a screen shot on Skylark, as a .png file — the "p" is supposed to stand for "portable", after all — and dropping it on to the NAS, for picking up and editing in the Gimp when back on BlackBeast. Although I got there in the end, even the filename got mangled (from the usual "Screenshot - timestamp.png") to, in this case, "SIKSV6~L.PNG" which suggests the dead hand of some Microsoft legacy long-filename-handling "8.3" format rubbish somewhere...
Anyhowsoever, here's the final snippet showing a burst of Ubuntu-patching activity this morning:
Until I install the Recoll desktop search tool I suspect this will be about as busy as Skylark gets.
Spotting...
... a delicious-looking Lamborghini near my habitual parking space in Shed City (having wended my laborious but successful way there through busy Soton traffic from my exploration of that long-neglected branch of Aldi in Bevois Valley) I strolled over to comment to its young driver that it was quite possibly the most beautiful vehicle I'd seen. The sentiment was well-received, and he rather proudly informed me that there are only 260 examples of this model in the world, only 26 of which are right-hand drive, and only 2 of those are in the UK.
There didn't seem to be much I could add to that, so I smiled and said "Drive safely"...
Having supped a cup...
... over in the Figg Tea Rooms I've just scanned and edited the artwork of three serendipitous acquisitions, once again in HMV's Bargain Basement. This DVD for £2-99 seemed pretty reasonable (though I can't say Hawking is my favourite astrophysicist)...
... and I don't always like what I see done to science in the name of drama or infotainment. Then I found these two early (1974/1975) CDs — both new to me — featuring Keith Jarrett3 and (basically) his quartet of regulars:
Another bargain for £6-98 in my opinion. Right! Time for my evening meal. I'm starving. Oh, and no further filename (or other) mangling during the transfer via the new NAS. Most odd, but welcome.