Here's an interesting documentary for you. "Frozen in Time"
Thus sang David Bowie way back in the tail end of the last century. It was released in 1973 to be precise. Now that has made me feel very old indeed. Today has been a day of rushing around getting things done and, as always, there has barely been enough time to do things in. As I get older, time is being stolen form me. As a child, there was always plenty of time to do things in. Masses of it; positively oodles of time but suddenly there isn't any more "and then one day you find ten years have got behind you..." as Pink Floyd warbled. So what have we done today? Lots of things and nothing is the answer. Given the fact that it is the weekend when normally we would have a bit of a lie in, we were up at just before seven a.m. and out and about. This was because the new washing machine was being delivered today and we needed to get all of the things that we would normally do on a Saturday, out of the way early on. As it was we only just managed to get back home by midday which was the start of the delivery period. Actually, I can't fault the company we used in any way so far. From the moment that we ordered the machine, it has been possible to track it's delivery, I have received an email every day, a mobile phone text message every day and two separate phone calls. As the delivery time got nearer, the online tracking narrowed it down to a one hour period and I got a phone call from the driver just before they arrived. It got delivered and unpacked and I had to check it for cosmetic blemishes before I could sign for it. They are really looking after us and I am happy to recommend them. I half expect more emails or phone calls to see if we are happy with our purchase too. Anyway, it is set up and plumbed in and churning away as I type. This is a good thing as there is a mountain of washing to do where it has been accumulating for the past four days. I think that the only problem is that the new machine takes a bit longer to do the job of washing (it uses less power and less water so I suppose it has to take extra time to achieve the same wash). Thankfully there aren't too many songs about dirty laundry. More time being stolen from me. Oh well, it staves off the evil moment when the ironing has to be done. Peace and love people. I am going to spend some quality time with a glass of beer now. I think I deserve it after all the dashing around today. Here's an interesting documentary for you. "Frozen in Time" Those of you who know me will know that I am definitely not an Apple fan boy. I was one of the few who thought all the fuss over "Saint" Steve Jobs' death was way over the top. Having said that I do have an iPod but only by default I hasten to add (they are rather mediocre mp3 players to my mind). It was a fiftieth birthday present from our friends in New Zealand and for the first month it sat in its box. To be quite honest, for the first six months I didn't use it at all but over the last few years I have found it quite useful. For example it is great for drowning out the noise of London traffic if I am wandering around our capital city. It is also very useful for masking the noise of rowdy brats on flights to and from holiday destinations. Recently it has come up trumps when I have been stripping paint - partly as it covers over the sound of the hot air gun and partly to help relieve the tedium. Over the last five years that I have been putting music onto my iPod, I have added some very eclectic artists and there is everything from classical music to trance and a wide variety of weird genres. Thus my iPod has six thousand four hundred and ninety one songs on it which represents nineteen days and three hours of continuous listening. Being a normal human being, I suppose that there are something like twenty albums I play on a regular basis and the rest just sits there waiting for the right occasion to crop up. Paint stripping is that occasion. I just select some of the weirder ones and strip paint accordingly. You can get lost in the music and it really helps to pass the time. So what did I listen to today? I started off with some Genesis ("Trick of the Tail", "Wind and Wuthering" and "Trespass") but that is fairly mainstream. I then branched out into "Wilderness is Paradise Now" by Morning Runner (who?), "Rich Bitch" by The View (eh?), "We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank" by Modest Mouse (wtf?) and "We Sing, We Dance, We Steal Things" by Jason Mraz (never 'eard of 'im!). It gives me the chance to listen to some of those albums that I bought a few years ago and wonder why the heck I ever bothered (although the Jason Mraz is well worth a listen - trust me). It does allow me to think deep thoughts though. If you can think whilst listening to McClusky's "Lightsabre c*cksucking blues" or "Gay Bar" by Electric Six or "Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)" by The Offspring then that has to be some real sort of deep thought. The problem with all of these deep and meaningful thoughts of mine is that they are like the best dreams - you forget 'em as soon as you are done. Who knows how many times I have solved the riddle of the universe and the meaning of life? Actually, I put it down to the smell of burning paint. Just you wait until I start doing the actual paintwork! I am going to be as high as a kite and... like... WOW! I think that I will be listening to my extensive Pink Floyd collection. Speaking of which, have a video (and a great weekend) ...and fruit flies like bananas. What a day for flies! For some reason the local bluebottle population has been descending on chez nous and have been buzzing lazily around whilst I try to strip even more paint. I don't understand how these flies can make it in through a small opening of a window but if you open it to a maximum, they can't find their way out again and beat themselves senseless against a piece of glass with freedom but an inch away. I even emptied all of the household bins to try and discourage them from coming in but still they came in, in droves to sample the cats' food and to be a pestilential nuisance. I soon found the answer though. Any blue bottle that came near me got a quick zap with the paint stripping gun; end of problem until the next one came along. There are other answers to getting rid of flies and I notice that Mr and Mrs Nasty-Neighbour's son indulges in it. He is one of the most slack-jawed youth I have seen for a long time. When I first saw him in the garden with his mouth open, catching flies I wondered if he was slightly touched but I have since found that this open mouthed appearance is the norm these days and is common amongst many a youth.
There was of course always the individual who had a problem with his mouth. In the last grammar school I was at, this individual was Willy Niven. Poor lad had a grossly oversized lower jaw which meant that his mouth was permanently open and it made mealtimes a particularly unpleasant experience for all. However, he was but waiting for the appropriate age when the surgeon said that he could have his jaw broken, shortened and reset and the last I heard everything was OK. Anyway, that's my little rant over with for the day. Why can't the youth of today close their mouths in normal human day-to-day activities? The end of June is almost upon us so here is a collection of the "fails" for the month. When will people learn that YouTube is a heck of a way to get notoriety? Enjoy, and I will see you all tomorrow. Oh, it never rains but it pours. Operation "Sod Off!" was put on temporary hold today. Our trusty LG washing machine (fifteen years service) decided to die a death yesterday but its last little trick was a beauty. Unless there is power, the door to the washing machine won't open (it's held open / closed by a solenoid). Last night, the solenoid failed because the machine would accept no power. It wasn't a fuse or anything sensible like that; somewhere in the guts of the machine something had burned out so wouldn't accept power, therefore the door wouldn't open. It was full of clothes and halfway through a wash when it died (isn't that typical). So today, I spent the morning "un-plumbing" it, moving it outside, partly de-constructing it to rescue the clothes and to drain it (it was a lot lighter afterwards!) and then moving it to the tip for disposal. I might be short but I am muscly enough to heft a full size washing machine around. We have ordered the new machine (another LG) and it arrives on Saturday (with a bit of luck). That ate up the morning and then this afternoon I was preparing for the opening of the exhibition at East Grinstead Museum which Donna and I attended and have just returned from. There hasn't even been the opportunity for a hot meal for us today we have been that busy. Never mind. Below, I have added the video I created for the exhibition which is now on the East Grinstead Museum's website. Now it is time for me to finish my glass of beer and go to bed. Sorry it is another short entry but my time seems to be being eaten up these days. It's what Mum-in-law has got. Yes, today was the day when I took Ruth to see the thyroid specialist in Queen Alexandra Hospital to find out what the results of all the scans and blood tests pointed to. Everyone was worried about the outcome but no one more so than me. What I definitely didn't want to happen was to have the consultant say "Weeeeeell... nothing conclusive was found but we can do more tests..." and leave everything hanging. As it was, everything was cut and dried. Here's what you have got, these are the treatment options. Wonderful! So, poor Ruth has a multi nodular goitre which means that she has more than one nodule in her thyroid which is overproducing hormones and her body ahs gone into overdrive as a cause. The treatment ranges from (1) take the tablets for the rest of your days (2) Have a drink of radioactive Iodine which will burn the little buggers out and (3) out with the scalpel and let's have them away. I don't know which option she will go for, that is for her to decide. At least the end is in sight for this particular problem. Apart from that I have spent the day cutting lawns (before it rained), taking garden debris to the tip, filling cars with petrol, buying locally produced strawberries and asparagus and driving home again. Once more the trip wasn't too bad until we were on the last five minutes of the journey when someone had an almighty accident which blocked the A272 just outside Cowfold. Not an exciting day but certainly a busy one which is why this entry is short and sweet. See you all tomorrow. Isn't the Universe awesome? Lonely George passed on today, A reminder of Man's greed and slaughter, Unique on Earth in every way, He left no offspring; no son nor daughter. At one hundred, he was but a stripling, But with no spouse for him to care, It matters not he lived alongside Kipling, If he had no company with which to share. So one year after two thousand and eleven, He's gone up to his eternal slumber He's meeting his family in tortoise heaven, Knowing one is no longer the loneliest number, Lonely George died today, the last of his subspecies. Farewell, big boy. ... in more ways than one. Words fail me type (1) I don't have a lot to report today. In the words of major blog writers, if you don't have anything to say then don't say anything however I like to think that I can make the best out of a crisis so I will continue regardless. Words fail me type (2) The nasty neighbours put down some replacement turf in their garden yesterday - there's nothing wrong with that of course. However straight after putting the turf down My Nasty-Neighbour got his lawn mower out, put half a railway timber on top of it (!) and then proceeded to mow his lawn including the new bits. Needless to say, it has made a mess of the new turf. He then proceeded to put his hosepipe on to water the new grass (nothing wrong with that either - the hosepipe ban has ended here) but he didn't turn the water on strong enough so only the existing bit of grass got watered, not the new turf... words fail me. Words fail me type (3) I must be getting old, tired or both but I find myself at a loss for a word to describe a situation or concept. I think it is advancing age that is putting paid to my verbal acuity in the same way that it has destroyed my hearing, eyesight, hair quantity (apart from in my ears!) and has turned my muscles into fat, taken them off my arms and legs and wrapped them around my stomach. Words fail me type (4) Oh deary me! What will they think of next? So, being suitably lost for words for today, I will leave you with some Pink Floyd. Planet earth is fragile, blue and is a small oasis of life in a massive universe. Our planet is uniquely positioned in our solar system. Any closer to the sun and the periodic solar winds from the sun would strip away the atmosphere and poison the surface as it has done to Mercury or would remove all of the water as it has done in the case of Venus. Any further away and there wouldn't be enough sun to provide energy for the sort of life that we know. Earth on the other hand has protection from a lot of the vagaries of the sun's behaviour in the form of a dense magnetic field which deflects a lot of the harmful particles from the sun. It also has sufficient water and land mass to run the climate (ocean currents, wind etc.) to keep the general effects of excessive heat in check. This has made the ideal conditions for life to flourish. I would like to think that we aren't the only life forms in the Universe but if we are then why are we rapidly destroying the planet that we live on? Isn't that like sawing off the branch that you are sitting on? In the coming years, fresh water is going to be a deciding issue on the survival of the human race as is the availability of food and energy. Massive deforestation isn't going to help matters as this is going to cut back on oxygen production and carbon dioxide absorption. Are we, in fact, going to wipe out everything on this planet? If this is the only planet in the universe with the ideal conditions for life on it, aren't we being selfish by destroying it? I hope that these were the sort of questions being asked at the Rio +20 conference this week. Alas, I fear that they weren't. I fear that political lobbying by the big energy firms may have helped to wreck the best intentions of this conference. We can't save the planet in piecemeal form. We need to view things as a whole and that takes governmental control. I suppose that the only saving grace for me is that I won't be around for a lot more years to worry about it and when I have gone, by not having offspring, I will have alleviated a minuscule portion of the environmental pressures on this rapidly depleting planet. More importantly I won't have left any offspring to suffer the fates that the climate, globalization or whatever have to offer them. Have a video clip. The text used for the narration of “Passing Through” is part of a speech Serbian scientist and inventor Nicola Tesla delivered in 1893 at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. At the time he was deeply influenced by the Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach, believing that the world should be conceived as a whole where everything is interconnected influencing each other and that energy is a force that runs through everything be it inorganic matter, organisms or human consciousness. According to this line of thought every single action has universal consequences, not unlike what the father of modern chaos theory Edward Lorenz in the 1960’s termed ‘the butterfly effect’. Remarkably prescient, don't you think? Notice the careful use of the past tense there. I have been struggling to complete the video for East Grinstead Museum today but after a day's worth of work, I have submitted it for approval. The problem with this is that (a) it has meant that for the last four days I have not done any paint scraping at all - I must be thankful for small mercies I suppose - and (b) I haven't done anything worth writing about either. So, lacking any inspiration, I scanned through my two University diaries (1977 and 1978) for something thought provoking. In both cases the dreaded word "examinations" appeared on the entries for this day. In 1977 I was laid up in sick bay with what the doctor thought was a cross between food poisoning and malaria. Therefore I was doing my exams in my pyjamas and nipping to the loo to throw up every few minutes (for which the invigilator had to accompany me to make sure that I wasn't cheating - not that he did after the first time!) and in 1978 I sat a Biochemistry paper in the morning and a Microbiology paper in the afternoon. This was the occasion for which this blog entry is entitled. Little did I know it at the time but I was going to fail these second year examinations big time and would be thrown out of University in a matter of a few weeks. At the time I was praying that I would pass so that I could continue to see my then current girlfriend, Cheryl. As it was I shouldn't have worried too much because she dropped me for a short, fat darts player (not quite the top man in Wales but not far off it) a couple of weeks later. The die was indeed cast because once I was thrown out of University, then I had to get a job. This in turn prompted me to take work with Johnson Matthey Chemicals and Rustenberg Refiners in Royston as a stop gap measure whilst I worked hard to get my Civil Service entrance examinations under my belt. I decided on a clean break from Biochemistry and Microbiology and opted to work with computers instead. That is where it all came from. Inside nine months I had upped sticks from Hertfordshire and moved to Hampshire to work for the Ministry of Defence, where a few years later I met Donna and the rest is just history. Just think; if I had passed those second year exams, where would I be today? I doubt if I would have passed my finals - in 1978 my friend Ian the Scouser found out today that he had failed his - and life would have taken a different turn I suppose. I would probably have gone back to Hertfordshire, joined British Aerospace, met a lass in Hitchin and settled down there instead. Who knows? Sometimes I think that life is predestined. I can't think that I would have been as happy as I have been. Perhaps failing in life is good for the soul. Anyway, have a terrific weekend and have an animation... "Defective Detective" I sort of missed it yesterday but the twentieth of June was the longest day of the year. I won't grace it with the term of "midsummer's day" because we haven't started our summer yet in the United Kingdom. We have had the wettest April on record and now it looks as if we are not only going to have the wettest June on record but also the coldest and with the least sunshine. At least the sun shone yesterday for the majority of the day and it was bright(ish) right up until about ten p.m. which was very pleasant for a change. The trouble with the weather this year is that it reminds me of this bit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Still, at least the slow slipping of the year towards Christmas means that the wretched 0lympics will be here and gone before we know it and the Euro football will be over even sooner. Actually, I must apologise to the national team for casting aspersions on them because they are doing well for once. Keep up the good work and I might even be proud of you. I have been building the East Grinstead Museum video all day today and I think that I have got square eyes from messing around with video clips, transitions, music and stills. I have created about half of it now and I should be finished by lunchtime tomorrow if I am lucky. At least I am getting the hang of the new software now. I think that it is time that I had a glass of frothing ale to help me get over my depression at losing daylight from now on. Here's a winter's tale for you... I mentioned this a few weeks back but it reared its head again today. Technology and how we are all reliant on it to a greater or lesser degree. My parents came from a mechanical era so Mum can field strip her sewing machine and Dad can take anything mechanical to pieces and put it back together without any spare parts being left over. That's not to say that they aren't tech savvy although my mother does have a tendency to press a few buttons and hope that things will work (the microwave is a source of endless, badly cooked meals as a result). Donna and I are from the Home PC era and are vaguely tech savvy although I do try and keep abreast of what is going on. So it comes as quite a shock when something that you need doesn't work very well at all. I found this out this morning when I was researching some things to include in my video for the East Grinstead Museum. My chosen browser, Mozilla's Firefox, was acting like an old cart horse. It struggled to do anything and would freeze for no reason that I could see. Knowing that I had upgraded to the latest version, I began to use another browser (Google's Chrome) to see if Firefox version 13 had any problems and unfortunately I didn't come across any. So in between capturing bits of film and snagging pictures for the video I started to investigate methods of regressing back to the old release. Now I realise that some of you will be saying "Why didn't you just carry on using Google Chrome?" but that would be like swapping one car for another just because the old one didn't work very well and more importantly, I have a lot of addons and plugins for Firefox (security related) that just don't work in Chrome. Anyway, whilst I was fiddling around with another piece of software altogether, I found that it was encountering the same problems - an apparent shortage of available memory. Thinking that I might have an incipient hardware problem I started to investigate and "lo and behold!" there was Adobe's Flash Plugin gobbling massive amounts of memory and then not freeing it up. It didn't take long to regress that to the old release and the problem went away. It's a lengthy little tale I am telling you but the moral is this. Don't expect tech companies to put out reliable updates for their products. Always suspect the worse and be prepared to back out any changes they make or that bit of tech that you so desperately need in a hurry might not work at all. Time for one of those film mash-ups. This time it is the one liner spoken before imminent death. "Do ya feel lucky punk? Well do ya?" Before I was forced to retire by Eye-Bee-Emm (no names mentioned, what what?) I found that I had grown to hate jargon and TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) but what I hated more than anything else was 'manager speak'. Certain words and sayings would crop up ("singing from the same hymn sheet" and "robust response" for example) and would become frightfully popular. Sometimes they would appear from America and other times they were homegrown. Despite their origin, they became hateful and objects of derision. We would hoot with laughter as the latest management puppy spouted one or more of them at meetings. What is a "Management Puppy"? It's one of my creations from several years back, thank you. Have you ever been in a room with a dozen young labrador puppies? They get so excited when they see you that they fawn all over your feet, tails wagging so hard that they fall over themselves and all the while they lose bladder control all over your shoes. Enter the management puppy who acts in a similar fashion towards managers. These are the people who would agree with a manager even if that manager was advocating mass slaughter of the workforce. They would probably say that it was a "robust response" to overcrowding in the office and would wholeheartedly agree to it. These puppies rarely prosper. They might manage to hang onto their jobs for a few months more than Joe Average but not for much longer than that. Enough of the description though and back to the technobabble. There is a phrase that used to crop up from time to time that has become a monstrous management lie. That phrase is "lessons to be learned". It is a vague response for when someone has been caught out, penny pinching and everything has gone pear shaped but you can expect nothing good to come of it. For instance, today the Director General of the BBC answered criticism about the coverage of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee River Pageant which was, to be brutally honest, not what one would expect from the BBC. In it he uses the words "lessons to learn". Well that might be a bit awkward because there is unlikely to be another Diamond Jubilee in my lifetime; Prince Charles certainly ain't going to see his and if the country is vaguely fortunate then William might possibly get to his if the Queen shuffles off this mortal coil tomorrow and Charles follows in short order. It is a blatant lie that is meant to cover up the sort of penny pinching that has gone on at the Beeb. Basically it is saying that we shouldn't cry over spilt milk and that it is likely to happen again. At least he didn't use the word "robust" in his speech. I fear for the amount of covering up that is being performed under the guise of "lessons to be learned". What is actually meant is that there are no lessons to be learned at all and the status quo won't change. It is mindless management speak. It irritates me immensely and I decry any manager who intends to use it. If there is one lesson to be learned then it must be that one shouldn't try to duck well aimed criticism with such mindless pap. Don't talk about it, do something about it! Here's a frightening vision of the future to round the day off. This if followed by a fun animation because I need to chill and so do you. I am not going to bore you with details of the progress of Operation Sod Off! even if I am now officially over half way through the stripping and all the carpets, underlay and gripper rods are languishing in a skip at the amenity tip. I am going to tell you about my day of stags. Actually it began last night when Donna took a bowl of washing up water out into the garden to water a plant or two - after all, waste not, want not. Even though several water companies have lifted their hosepipe bans (funnily enough all that rain water that was just "running away to sea" actually made its way into the reservoirs too - wasn't that a surprise Mr Water-board?) we are continuing to economise on water usage. Where was I? Oh yes... Donna went out into the garden clutching a bowl full of used washing up water and was just about to launch it around some plants when she pulled up short because there, right in front of her, was a magnificent male Stag Beetle. It would have been a great shame to have doused him - heaven knows what soapy water would do to him. It certainly doesn't do aphids any good at all. It was so nice to see a Stag Beetle as they are a rare occurrence in West Sussex these days. This is one of the reasons why we have built a beetle pile at the top end of the garden. It's just the remains of a pile of old logs that didn't burn very well which we are letting rot down to provide good breeding grounds for beetles of all sorts. They are very good for the garden and also provide food for hedgehogs. So that was Stag number one. The second stag happened this morning. Actually I might be cheating here but I will continue regardless. As I drove Donna to the station this morning we rounded a corner and there in the hedgerow were four fallow deer. There were definitely three does and I would swear that there was a juvenile stag as well. The good thing was that for once they had the common sense to hop smartly into the field rather than across the road in front of us. Even though I was only doing forty mph, I wouldn't have been able to stop in time. That is the problem with deer. If the lead animal had spooked and tried to cross in front of me, the others would have followed. So there you go; my day of stags. I could lie and say that I am going to a stag party just to pad it out but I haven't been to one of those in absolute years. Just out of interest, I didn't have a stag party before we were wed. I had a newt party instead because we were all going to get as p*ssed as newts. Much more fun. Talking of fun... here's thirty minutes of Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention. After yesterday when I felt decidedly grotty, today I am feeling much better thanks. First of all, "Happy Father's Day!" to all you folks who messed up on family planning and birth control. I got a CD from the cats ("Elemental Journey" by Sonny Landreth) and to celebrate the reasonably nice weather Donna and I went for a walk. Not that this has anything to do with today's blog entry. Being mindful of the nice weather (make the most of it, this is your summer) I was reminded of this London Underground Customer Information Notice but I thought to myself "What does an Englishman do on a nice day such as this?". Well, there are two answers to this question. If you wake up and the weather is shaping up to be nice you say to the family "Let's all go to the beach!" which is then normally a recipe for disaster. Long lines of cars full of wailing kids all queueing in steaming traffic jams (after all, it is hot and sunny right?) followed by the ritual of trying to find a parking place near to the beach (along with six gazillion other cars full of screaming kids, fractious fathers and hard pressed mothers). This is closely followed by trying to find a couple of square feet of space of sand to pitch the family blanket / windbreak / barbecue (sorry "BBQ" - I forget that most kids can't spell these days), the interminable queue for the mandatory, expensive, melting ice cream or ice lolly and the fight with hordes of wasps trying to scavenge the remains of already limp ice-creams. Then there's the sand in the picnic delight and finally when everyone is browned off (or at least pink with sunburn) there is the reverse traffic jam, cars full of screaming kids etc. etc. The second answer to my question only refers to the true Englishmen amongst us. What the proper Englishman does on a nice day is... wait for it... he mows the lawns. Almost every Englishman knows that his home is his castle and that outside of his pile of bricks and mortar there is a small patch of greensward, nominally known as a lawn, that may or may not be grass but is more likely to be moss, daisies, dandelions with a blade or two of grass in there somewhere. It doesn't matter! This green patch is "the lawn" and it needs regular tending. So you can guess what I was up to this afternoon. Running the mower over the grass (moss, daisies, dandelions, docks, Robinia suckers, plantains included). I used to regard it as a chore but now realise that it is my solemn duty as a son of this country. Otherwise how will we retain England's Pleasant Pastures Green? What is the reward for doing this weekly act of domestic agriculture? That wonderful smell of newly cut grass, of course; sweet summer's day memories. See you all tomorrow. Please forgive me but there will be no real entry today. I have been feeling grotty since I woke up this morning. Not even a bumper haul of secondhand books has perked me up so I am going to take it really easy and try to do nothing more strenuous than sleep. See you all tomorrow. |
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May 2015
AuthorPaul Everest - Shining wit (at least that is what I think they said) |