"Nothing but the rain"
So, while watching the Paralympics last night there was an advert for a weekly magazine that gives you the parts and instructions to build a toy warship. I can’t remember which one it was. I didn’t even see the “introductory” price offer. What staggers me most is the total price you would have to pay to finish the model.
£5.99 times 135 issues and you get a grand total of £808.65
Now even in these financial times I reckon you could buy a real warship for that price!
Here’s a very cool glacier photo. I stole the link from Phil Plait. His text from his RSS feed follows:
“This is so cool – photographer André vd Hoeven visited the Pasterze glacier in Austria and took quite a few pictures of it. Quite a few. He then stitched them together to make this astonishing 10,000 x 8600 pixel version that you can pan and scan and zoom:[You may need to refresh the page if you don’t see the pannable and scannable image directly above this sentence.]The scale’s a bit hard to grasp. So do this: go to the bottom left corner, where you can see a little splash of blue. That’s where the glaciers is breaking up, exposing cleaner ice. Zoom way in on that spot using the control buttons on the bottom right of the picture. See the people standing there near the open water? That’ll give you a sense of scale. Keep your eye on them, and then zoom back out.”
Many years ago, when I was a teenager, my best friend and I decided to commit our friendship to a new level. We decided to become blood brothers. Now, I don’t even know if people still do this or even if it happened in the past and is just an urban legend. A quick glance at Wikipedia says:
Blood brother can refer to one of two things: two males related by birth, or two or more men not related by birth who have sworn loyalty to each other. This is usually done in a ceremony, known as a blood oath, where the blood of each man is mingled together. The process usually provides a participant with a heightened symbolic sense of attachment with another participant.
Somehow we had some instructions about cutting our forearms and then clasping arms together so the blood mingles. We misread the instructions! Rather than a cut 5cm from the wrist we made a 5cm cut from the wrist. Our blood was mingled. That was in around 1988 and we remain the best of friends today. In fact he was my Best Man at my wedding and we still share the same music tastes and go to concerts together.
Brilliant!
Here’s a picture of the first charm that WW got for her Pandora bracelet. It was a present from the children for her first day in her promoted job.
My resting heart rate is between 52 and 58 beats per minute. According to Wikipedia this means I am an athlete (adjusted for my age). This is good.
I have spent much of the last 5 months running. I started with a 2 mile loop and not really being able to run all of it and now I can run 6 miles and not really think much of it. I do get some joint aches and pains if I run much more than 5 miles at a time but I think that’s to be expected.
Sometimes it takes me 2 miles just to feel warmed up! Crazy.
As an ex smoker and overweight person I am very happy with the outcome of my diet and training over the last 9 months. I have various health benefits which far outweighs the pain and starvation I have experienced!
Here’s a picture of a slow worm I found in the garden. It was hiding below the wheelie bin and then basked in the sun for a little while before wandering off.
I’m happy.
There’s a Gran Turismo application (or program to someone my age) for the iPhone. It’s called GTune5 and is an app that should make the tuning of cars easier.
I think the idea is that it will give you settings based on a car set up you like and translate them to other cars. So, I like some oversteer in my cars and the app will allow me to recreate that in other cars once I enter the details for a car I can really handle well.
Lovely. Now I just need some time to play the game!
Find me on PSN as Kertz.
Here’s a picture of the lovely sunset from a few nights ago. I was walking the dog. I only just got this shot as it was quite windy and the clouds were moving fast.
Bought a toy rubbish truck for #1 and he loves it. He played with it for two hours straight yesterday. It makes some noise and flashes lights, the rear door opens to retrieve the recycling and best part of all is the motorised bin arm that takes the yellow bin and deposits its contents into the truck. He woke at 530 this morning and the first thing he said was “can I play with my rubbish truck”.
I’ve been watching Human Target on Blu-Ray with WW. It’s, surprisingly, a well constructed and brilliantly scripted tv show. It’s a little quirky but funny and subtle. Anyway, in episode 3 of the first series the main character, Christopher Chance, says:
That sounds like a tomorrow problem.
This is a wonderful way of looking at particular issues and it’s something I’ll be saying in the future, possibly tomorrow.