Good morning my lovelies. W7 is taken a much needed break from everything, and will be back in two weeks.
Until then, take care and enjoy life.
Watching Celebrity Masterchef 2010, a friend new to Masterchef asked about Gregg Wallace what is he doing there?
Hmm. Interesting question. He co-presents, in the wake and in the shadow of John Torode, so what’s Gregg’s role? He’s Dr Watson, that’s what he is.
I believe it really was Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle who invested the classic duo: the genius lead figure, and the friend or assistant who asks all the questions on our behalf, and sometimes translates for us poor simpletons, when the detective head presenter goes into cryptic mode.
Amazing that most mystery novels or TV productions follow the same scheme. I hadn’t yet realized that the scheme goes far beyond the mystery novel. Think Breakfast TV, presented by a couple (where the woman adopts the role of the stupid blonde for unclear reasons), Masterchef, Nature Watch, Jamie Oliver’s Kitchen programme, …
Fascinating. A toast to Sir Arthur!
Welcome back. You come at the right time, because I have an important question for your:
It’s hard to soar like an eagle when you’re surrounded by turkeys, they say, and I guess it is true. But, does it apply to chickens, too?
Chickens kept for meat or egg production have some of their wing feathers clipped. Subject to the clipping, this prevents take-off, or makes flight very lopsided, thus preventing flight. Now, what if you don’t clip the wing feathers? Like, a chicken might escape, find a like-minded cockerel, lay fertilised eggs, and then what? Would the offspring learn to fly and soar like an eagle?
Chickens are pretty large birds with pretty small wings, so I guess it wouldn’t be a very elegant sight, maybe more a turkey-style flapping up into the nearest tree, and a slowed-down gliding type of fall back to the ground in the morning.
(And no, I haven’t been watching too much Chicken Run, but I have been looking after the neighbours chickens.)
Hugh Dennis pointed this out just a few nights ago. Well, it was on Dave, so it could have been the 17th repeat, but anyway, here goes:
Men’s life expectancy is approximately eight years less than women’s, according to the Office for National Statistics. Therefore, Hugh argues, men should be allowed to retire approximately eight years earlier than women, allowing both for the same duration of a restful age in retirement.
I like it!
I had to wait for an hour to see the doctor, who was running late, so I had plenty of time to read in Tom Holt’s brilliant May Contain Traces of Magic, and had plenty of time to admire my surroundings and fellow patients or patients-to-be.
One single woman, pensively chewing on a bag of chicken and tarragon flavoured crisps. Everybody else came as a pair, possibly the patient-to-be and the driver – don’t know.
Also don’t know what the hell those people talk about all the time. I mean. Honestly. It’s not normal. Blokes, on top of it. You sit at the doctor’s for an hour with your best mate, the one with whom you exchange twenty text message and five emails every day, and you use up your free mobile phone minutes, and you still have something to say while waiting for the doctor?
I really don’t get it.
I have never been a great small talker, and the meaningless chit-chat is not my thing at all. I don’t get it. Even if chit-chat isn’t my favourite thing, what the heck are those people talking about? There’s only so much weather to discuss, and I will boldly claim that they weren’t discussing Hegel or Kant or quantum physics. Even a devoted followed of soap operas or the rugby or the philatelists’ society, what more can be said? Every day, every hour?
I find quantum physics hard to understand, but its a walk in the park compared to human nature. I best stick with Tom Holt.
Turns out that I don’t have a designer alarm. Or, maybe my alarm has a very dumb designer, and I guess in all probability, so does yours. Goes like so:
Assigned wake-up time: Beep-beep-beep-beep
Me: groan, roll over, press snooze.
8 minutes later: Beep-beep-beep-beep
Me: groan, roll over, press snooze.
8 minutes later: Beep-beep-beep-beep
Me: groan, roll over, press snooze.
…
How stupid, how plain, how unimaginative is that?
When I grow up and get to be an alarm designer, my alarm comes with increasingly shorter snooze intervals (8 minutes, then 6, then 4, …), while the alarm volume and duration increases with each iteration. At maximum forte level, the snooze button disables itself, and you need to physically remove the batteries to stop the damn thing.
Oh, and the easily accessible operation is snooze. The off button would have to be the smaller and harder to find one – unlike my mobile phone, which has this particular detail wrong.
That’s what I call a well-designed alarm.
One particular detail about my recent hospital visit fascinate me though. It goes like this:
Whenever health professional A hands over a patient to health professional B (which, as it turned out, happened quite a lot), they need to go through a ceremonial dance to confirm that A brings the correct patient, that the correct wristband is still attached to said patient, and that B then obtains the correct patient.
It seems a little over the top, but I am sure the ramifications of cutting off the wrong part of the wrong patient could be unpleasant. So, OK, I go along with it. Not that I have a choice anyhow, but you’d wonder with all that scrutiny applied, at least they could try to do it right? You wish:
Sir, are you Mr so-and-so?
Yes.
Sir, are you born on the such-and-such of year so-and-so?
Yes.
Sir, do you live in this-and-that street?
Yes.
There were times when they could have asked whether I am the Queen of Sheba and I’d have said yes. Everyone who ever read a mystery novel knows not to ask suggestive questions. How hard is it to ask
What’s your name, sir?
A new BBC sci-fi drama series. Hmmm. I have not seen some similar series that might have been half-decent and worth watching for a bit of innocent entertainment. Typically, I miss the first few episodes and then fail to jump onto the running train later in the series. The one that I did watch and enjoy was discontinued after a short while. Maybe I was the only one enjoying Defying Gravity.
So, when The Deep was announced, I thought I should watch the first episode. After all, it is a British production, and thus stands a chance of being less silly and stereotypical and boring, with more plausible characters and all that, compared to pure American productions.
Ah well. The Beep missed a good chance here, but missed by a couple of miles. Frustrating:
A mostly inexperienced grew of mainly psychologically unstable young people with unknown qualifications (presumably, scientists), embark on a deep diving mission (The phenomenal depth of 2000ft is noted at 25:40 into the first episode. So much for sci-fi deep diving). The whole mission starts just 6 months after the catastrophic failure of the previous mission – that alone being implausible enough.
A long string of implausible events and details follow, acted out by equally unconvincing characters. At the end of the first series, the crew faces “that big thing” which now hovers above them. It could be alien. It could be a giant Russian foreign nuclear space deep sea station. It could be the new submarine Taliban division. It could be anything, but it is already certain not to be convincing or original.
Good lord BBC. Give me a few days, a room to think, and two creative free-thinking co-thinkers. We’d think up a better story-line for you.
Funny that in all those many years, I never had surgery done, not as far as I remember anyhow. Well, now I have. The surgery was a low-risk thing and, as such, no cause for anxiety and worries, but it was very interesting to experience the whole thing.
First, the check-in to my day-case hospital treatment. I approached the receptionist, stating my name and claiming that I had a reservation for a room with sea view. Turns out they couldn’t deliver the sea view, but a nice long view overlooking a park and golf course, then the new Wembley stadium, with the London Skyline at the horizon (the docklands with Canary Wharf and the London Eye were clearly recognizable). So far so good.
Then, a long series of being fussed over. Temperature, pulse, weight, medical history, lunch menu choice, blood test, and similar jobs kept me entertained for a while, until I was laid down flat on my back, wheeled through the hospital, asked to breath deeply, and then be told everything was over.
(Followed, of course, by a a couple of hours of boredom until discharge.)
Fascinating.
Oops, that was a lazy week last week, when I managed nothing but a single post. I’ll offer my sincere apologies, but no regrets. The last week was most busy due to work demands and parental visitation, so I simply had no time, and no space in my little head, left for blogging.
And the little time that was left, I spent finishing those books that I mentioned last week. All ends with the not all too surprising discovery that the sequels, which I am reading right now, just can’t keep up, and descent into a romantic fantasy novel.
Welcome back.
In all my reading of fantasy literature, I find it interesting to observe a common understanding of some fundamental building blocks that make magic:
I guess you could also argue this demonstrates the limited fantasy of fantasy writers, and I guess there’d be some truth in this claim. It’s just incredibly hard to come up with novel ideas that are original and intriguing.
These days, I take pleasure in reading Anne Bishop’s Black Jewels Trilogy. I struggle to describe these books as great fantasy and reserve this label for the insane craze of George R. R. Martin’s truly epic and insanely complex Songs of Ice and Fire. But, Anne Bishop brings in a new twist and a fresh air into the business. Saetan, the High Lord of Hell (and other places) is a pretty loveable and only very human figure. You’ll always be glad to be back in the safety of Hell. Many of the characters are delightful even though they all seem static, either good or bad, with little character development.
Ah well, that’s where George is needed. If you need to kill the time until A Dance With Dragons finally comes out, Anne Bishop’s Black Jewels isn’t the worst choice.
Well, no, not Happy Birthday to myself. Not exactly; I will be as young tomorrow as I was yesterday. But, this blog is five years old today.
Five years. Who would’ve thought.
Health and safety was all I could wish for this lonely construction worker.
The high-visibility coat that he wore must have magic protective powers.
Click the image for a larger version. Unless you suffer from vertigo, or common sense fear for others taking stupid risks.
I went back later and checked that the guy was still alive.
So, it’s the end of an era, he says. Realistically speaking, its the end of a not quite 11 year employment.
If you live in the U.K., you can’t have missed the huge fanfare with which TV and radio presenter Jonathan Ross said Good Bye with his last Friday night chat show on BBC television, and his last Saturday morning BBC Radio 2 show.
Many came to wish him well and express their sadness to see him leaving.
I wish him well, too. Of course I do, but am I sad to see him leaving? Not really.
I acknowledge that he has gotten better over the years, but he is not half as original and not half as funny as he appears to think of himself, and when not quite sure what to say or do, his humour gets dirty and under the belt. How funny.
It would be very sad news indeed, if nobody can be found who fits his broadcasting slots just as well, and hopefully even better.
So, all the best to you, Jonathan. All the best to the –hopefully young- talent who steps into his shoes.
P.S. It’s Hildegard Knef, not Hildegard Knecht.
