This time from Garry Trudeau (Doonesbury)
Lets go with the 1%
The Web Comic XKCD – Which comes with the following warning;
Warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors)
recently published this:
It is easy to deny climate change, to say “Global Warming, nothing to worry about. it just means that we will be able to grow grapes in Yorkshire”. The reality is that if we don’t stop pumping CO2 into the atmosphere we will be producing a climate that is as different from today’s as today’s from that of the last ice age.
Barbara Ellen has a rant in today’s Observer at people who won’t go out with a vegetarian because they are “too picky” and make dining out “nightmare”.
Now I have some sympathy with her views, having gone out with, indeed been married to a vegetarian for the best part of the last 30 years. Admittedly it does need a bit of reading of menus outside restaurants in France, and (in France) often ends up eating in an Italian or Vietnamese restaurant. But generally, no they are not picky they can’t afford to be.
It is slightly better than it used to be, when the choice was generally the vegetarian lasagna. Or with one memorable, for all the wrong reasons, meal in a pub on the A303, tagliatelle in “mushroom sauce”. They had boiled the tagliatelle for about an hour and the “mushroom sauce” looked and tasted like Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup. An Anglo-Italian family had made the same mistake as us. Their teenage daughter was overheard saying,
“Mama you will not believe what they have done to the pasta”.
My meal wasn’t much better.
Yes you do, but we’ll leave that for another day. Anyway in my case the fantasy is that I’m Heston Blumenthal
No, the time when vegetarians are picky and a pain in the backside in restaurants is when you go to a vegetarian restaurant with them. Normally it takes her two seconds to decide what she is having to eat ( because there is only one choice) but take her to Terre à Terre and Grace can take half-an-hour making up her mind what to have.
Terre by the way comes highly recommended by this omnivore. Only the most blinkered carnivore could fail to enjoy their food.
Ask almost any engineer of my generation what was their favourite toy when they were growing up and the answer will invariably be Meccano. A man named Frank Hornby invented it over 100 years ago. (He was the same person who made Hornby model railways.)
It consists of re-usable plates, drilled strips, angle brackets and nuts and bolts to put your models together. Most kits also included axles, gears, pulleys and wheels so that you could make working models. With a bit of thought and ingenuity you could make some impressive models, like the one shown below.
That model was made by Timothy Edwards Click on the link to see more of his models.
The thing that got me started on this nostalgia trip was a T.V. programme in which James May (him from Top Gear) had a motorbike and side-car built out of Meccano and rode it round the Isle of Man TT course. It kind of puts my models of cranes and draw-bridges into the shade. Maybe I should get myself a Meccano set for my birthday this year.
This is a link to BBC iPlayer if you want to watch it James May’s Toy Stories – The Motorcycle Diary.
That link might not work if you don’t live in the UK.
It’s New Years Day 2014. I’m not quite sure where 2013 went, but never mind it’s time for New Years Resolutions. I find New Years resolutions quite easy. I just recycle last years failed resolutions, eat more healthily, lose some weight, try to do a bit more exercise etc. etc…. This enhances my green credentials and saves racking my brain cells too much. I have also decided that his year I should try to blog a bit more than I did last year. I think I averaged about one post a month. I probably shouldn’t set my sights too high so I’ll aim for a post per week to start with.
Inspiration can be a problem, but there is always the cycling scene to comment on. I’m sure that our government will provide cause for the occasional rant. I’ll carry on linking to YouTube clips of songs that I like and throw in the occasional review of an art exhibition. We also have the independence referendum in Scotland this year. I don’t get to vote on it (because I live in London) but I am very interested in the outcome, so I will do a series of posts on it.
New Year also involves traditions. In the johnm55 household this involves going out for a curry on New Years eve (Hogmanay for my Scottish Readers) with Mrs johnm55 and our friend Mike. We used to be joined by another couple but they have moved to place their daughter describes as “almost the middle of nowhere”, it is actually Woodbridge in Suffolk, which is a bit of a trek just for a curry. After that we come back to our place for coffee, Mike goes home to see the New Year in with his mum, Mrs johnm55 usually declares herself French for the evening and wishes me a Happy New Year at 11 o’clock and goes off to bed, leaving me nursing a Caol Ila and watching Jools Holland, to see the new year in. This year she decided to stay up and see it in with me which was nice.
The other New Year Tradition is exercise, a walk, a bike ride or a trip to the gym. The gym was closed, the wind was high enough to make bike riding unpleasant, hard work and probably downright dangerous. so that left a walk, but where. Headley Heath was ruled out on the basis that with the amount of rain we have had recently it would be more like Headley Marsh. So we decided on The RHS Gardens at Wisley because they have proper paths there. We did try, but after half an hour of battling to keep our umbrellas the right way out we gave up and went to look round the Glass House.
We decided that we would have lunch in the hope that the rain would stop or at least calm down a bit but…
So we gave up and came home.
The Anti-Defamation League is an American organisation that has fought hate and bigotry in all its forms for One Hundred years. They have produced this lovely inspiring video. It may take you a few seconds to realise what they have done here, well it took me a couple of seconds anyway. Some of the references are American, but most of them are universal. It is only eighty seconds long so watch it all the way through. It may well be the best eighty seconds of your week.
Turns out that it doesn’t. Shame, I was hoping that sugar pills might improve my diabetes.
Via CoolHardLogic
The current dispute between The Archbishop of Canterbury and Iain Duncan-Smith is easily explained.
The Church, if it is doing its job properly, takes the side of the poor and dispossessed, the Conservative Party always takes the side of the rich and privileged.
From the Guardian:
Foiled al-Qaeda bomb plot likely to lead to changes in US airport security
Homeland security adviser says FBI is testing latest underwear bomb to determine if it would have cleared current systems
The disruption of a plot by al-Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula to attack a US-based jet using what is being billed as an “improved” underwear bomb is likely to lead to increased security at American airports, the chief White House adviser on terrorism has indicated.
The full article is here. I have a feeling that we might have to take more than our shoes off the next time we get on a plane bound for the U.S.A.
This morning I got up full of good intentions about what I was going to accomplish. The first priority was obviously to make breakfast and read the Guardian, from cover to cover, except for the sections that I don’t read. I had about 60% of this task completed when Mrsjohnm55 asked if I knew how to add some one to an email group. I know how to do it with my work email, but we use Lotus Notes at work, and because it is Lotus Notes, the method will be completely different to any other programme ever written. Being male I was reluctant to admit that I wasn’t sure how to do it in Windows Mail, because I have never needed mail groups for my private email. I came upstairs and opened up my email to work out how to do it. It turned out to be as simple as dragging and dropping contacts into the group. However..
One of my hobbies is Family History, and I subscribe to ancestry.co.uk to help with the research. One of the things they do is email you if someone else is researching one of your ancestors, and there in my in-box was an email telling me that some one had found something on one of my 3x great-grandmothers. I had tried to get a better handle on who she was for a while so I clicked the link. I checked out the information, it wasn’t a significant addition to what I already knew, it gave me an actual date of birth as opposed to the month and the year that I already had. Actually it might be the date of baptism, it wasn’t that clear.
This got me thinking about one of my other 3x great-grand mothers. Checking out her death certificate, I decided to find exactly where she had died. I couldn’t find the address on Google Maps. On a whim I typed into Google “Map of Kelso 1870”. This took me to the National Library of Scotland’s digital map archive. I found the address that she had died at. As I sort of guessed the street had been renamed sometime in the past century and a half.
Maps fascinate me, especially old maps. I don’t know how long I spent exploring the last three centuries of Scottish Borders via the maps I found in their archive, but it was a significant amount of time. If you like old maps have an explore of the site. It is first class and free. Just expect to lose an hour or two of your time.
I thought I might as well check Twitter (@john_m55) and that looks like an interesting article @so-and-so is tweeting about, I’ll check that out. That link in the article looks worth following as well. Should I look at my RSS feed to see if there is anything interesting there, of course there is, I wouldn’t be following these people if they didn’t say interesting things. Another half-hour gone. Might as well check Facebook before I shut down, nothing too much going on, except my sister tells me she has a friend who is cycling across the United States and is blogging about it, so naturally (cycling and cycle touring in particular is another of my passions) I had to check out his blog Bicycle Across America, more time gone.
And now I am blogging about it.
A Scotsman in Suburbia 