the festive season

is about to get festiver in these parts.

Friday night is the works Xmas party (though Scrooge here is hoping to make the usual excuses and leave at the earliest possible moment), and Saturday sees us make the 400 mile round trip to visit family for the day and exchange gifts.

Which means Thursday evening, after the seasonal supermarket trip, fighting off the other shoppers no doubt, will have to be catch-up night for getting everything wrapped and ribboned for the trip south on Saturday.

So this might be my last visit to the blogosphere for a few days. We do have an outing planned for Sunday as well - a very civilized visit to an upmarket patisserie/tea shop for a Christmas special Afternoon Tea. We went last year for the first time and thought it was an absolute delight, and can't wait to try it again.

We'll let you know how it goes!

Fire and Ice

"Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice."


All the newstalk about Copenhagen brought a half-forgotten snippet back to my mind.

I seem to remember being told in a school geography lesson that the earth is currently in an interglacial period that is overdue for ending - giving us all nightmares about waking up the following week to find ourselves surrounded by woolly mammoths and sabre tooth tigers, about to be pulverised by a huge glacier.

And now the talk is about destroying the climate with the heating effects of CO2.

So surely that's ok then - the CO2 blanket will preserve us from the upcoming glaciation.

Problem solved.

is progress good for us?

Just as I was leaving for work this morning an interesting moment launched itself down the radio waves into my kitchen.

We heard that the early humans used to potter about in their small groups hunting passing game; gathering a handful of berries here, digging a tasty carrot-ancestor there. And apart from having a lifespan of some 20+ years were by and large pretty healthy.

Then they discovered Farming. And proper villages grew up where the villagers spent all their time tilling and sowing and eating completely the wrong sort of food (sliced white and all that). And when one chap got a germ, he passed it on to all the others.

And really it's been pretty much downhill ever since.

So much for the man with the beagle then (wasn't that Captain Archer?), getting it all A over T. He should have been pronouncing on the survival of the UNfittest.

moral decline

I have just won a lengthy battle with the cellophane wrapping on a box of liqueur chocolates I had bought to give as a Christmas gift. I haven't yet decided whether guilt or a sense of triumph is the stronger emotion.

By the time I've eaten a few more of the chocolates I will probably be past caring...

bored, board, bored

We've been put on notice that over Christmas we have to play board games, board games, board games - and worst news of all, Santa will be delivering Monopoly City so there will be absolutely No Escape from that.

I would so much rather lose myself in a book, or one of my (25!) cds. Or even play a few hands of cards. Board games have never been my bag.

Except for one - a brilliant game called Careers, which has been with me since I was rising 13. You could choose to be a Film Star; a Sailor in the South Seas gathering happiness points; a Business Man; a University Student and increase all your subsequent earnings; or best of all and always my choice - an Astronaut, and take a trip to the moon. Heady stuff way back then!

WISE up!

It's been a busy year for astronomy and space travel - appropriately in this International Year of Astronomy.

The latest gadget to get off the blocks is the amazing Widefield Infrared Survey Explorer - the name tortured into shape so it could be known in brief as WISE.

This all-seeing eye can look at and look out for objects in the furthest reaches of inter-galactic space. The last infrared scope offered only four pixels (can you imagine such a thing?) while WISE has four million, so the quality of the images is expected to be outstanding.

As always at such times we hope the objects detected will not include candid snaps of yours truly at leisure with a group of willing nymphs; we must remind ourselves at those private moments to draw closed the curtains of invisibility.

only in england

With the UK hosting the olympics in 2012 they get a choice in which events will take place.

Last time out Team GB were a big success in the velodrome, in particular winning gold in both the men's and women's Individual Pursuit.

There has been a decision to level up the number of men's and women's events at five each (fair enough) and one of the solutions would include dropping the individual pursuits.

Surely this option wouldn't be considered. Would it??

Oh dear, it just has been. And adopted. Leaving two of our gold medallists without their specialist disciplines and with only a handful of months to rejig their training, their outlook, their optimism.

Only in England, indeed.

if pythagoras didn't exist

would the greeks have had to invent him?

There seems to be a disburbing notion that Pythagoras may not actually have have been a real person.

And that the theorem about the square on the hypotenuse (being equal to the sum of the squares on the two adjacent sides) was known, understood and probably proved in as-yet untranslated cuneiform texts by the Babylonians long before Pythagoras came onto the scene 2500 years ago.

All I need now is for someone to tell me Santa doesn't exist and that's my world finished...

try this one -

'all the world loves a lover, unless he is in a telephone kiosk.'

Or so said my desk calendar yesterday.

So far it's still quite a funny remark, because those of us of a certain age probably remember pretty well the ages spent queueing outside a phone box waiting for a lovelorn romeo to sign off a call to his beloved.

But in these days of txting that little joke will soon pass into history, along with all the phone boxes.

dog eat dog?

or man eat man?

Not a pleasant idea even if we're thinking about something that might have happened 7000 years ago. Our taboo against routine cannibalism is strong, and just as well if it's kept us free from diseases like BSE and who knows what other horrors over the centuries.

But that does raise the question of how evolution drove us to adopt the taboo when the negative disease outcomes are such a long time a-coming.

I might consider asking my tame anthropologist about this sometime when I feel the science in the answer won't be too much for me to handle.

And if the answer's printable I'll come back and add it in.

christmas arriving early?

The minor godlet is expected back tomorrow, so tonight we must sort out his christmas gifts from the collection Mercury has been delivering to us lately following our exploits on the internet, and put them under secure cover.

One might have hoped that by now christmas parcels could safely be left un-poked, rattled and subject to forensic examination, but alas that stage seems not to have been reached just yet.

Oh for the days when a positive nursery full of minor godlets could happily play for hours on one fluffy cloudlet, while a mount olympian pile of gifts could be stacked on another, and never the twain would meet.

It seems like only yesterday...

calendar fodder

I wonder who finds the little moral titbits that get printed on some day-to-a-page calendars? You can imagine someone looking up the historical facts for the day, but how would you go about finding such morally fibrous morsels as:

Failure is often the line of least persistence

The man who knows most is the first to want to know more


and what would it be like to live with someone who spent all day working with this kind of stuff?

Thursday 31 December 2009: 1st anniversary of wife issuing ultimatum - it's me or those g*ddarn phrases. You got one day to choose.

Friday 1 January 2010: 1st anniversary of door slamming behind wife as she went back to her mother's.

'the man who sees one door close knows the next may open with a new opportunity'

senior moments

Why would it be, that I sat down last night to watch a particular cookery programme on television, and could feel myself nodding off almost straight away?

And worse was to follow.

I struggled manfully to open my eyes every few moments to look at preparations for the next dish. But the moment the turkey was out of the oven I must have dropped off entirely for a minute or two and missed the one thing I was specially waiting for - the vegetarian option that had looked quite unusual in the preliminary overview.

We were pointed in the direction of the website for some of the recipes, so I guess I'll try and find my way to that and hope for enlightenment. I don't know if there's a big glossy book (or even a small dull book) to accompany the programme, it wouldn't have been mentioned of course on the public service channel.

can you have ...

... a christmas resolution?

If so mine is the same as every year.

Not to leave everything to the last minute.

So far I am well on target - which is to say the only target in sight is to have everything ready by 25 December. And some things being nearly ready already, thanks to the wonders of internet shopping, that target is Straight Ahead and no worries.

But just don't blink, because if you do surely that target will turn right round and creep up behind you, just like it has done every year in living memory.