The Life Aquatic...

What a crazy film! I must admit, I appreciated it a little more than the Missus as I had actually seen several of Jacque Cousteau's broadcasts and kind of understood the way this film semi-parodied/semi-homaged the great old explorer. The soundtrack, which I shall be buying, was completely off the wall with a troubadour singing David Bowie songs in Portuguese, and weird, wacky French techno at the oddest moments. It was hilarious, but you've really got to appreciate Wes Anderson's sense of humour.

Bill Murray: dead-pan comic presence; dry and seriously witty.

Off up to the Lake District today to see the folks....actually doing something other than menial taks for once!

I haven't read the news yet, so I can once again pass no comment. However, if any more astronomers have found "nothing", then well done to them. All in the name of science guys!

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Snowed under...

So today I am snowed under in more than one sense of the term. I have an exciting new area of experiments opening up, which will give me some useful structural information on the proteins I work with. I still have this paper that I need to start writing. It's going to go into the journal [Molecular Microbiology] (hopefully). So the work is piling up, much like the snow on my house, car, lane....well everywhere in the valley and beyond!

I've decided to work from home today, a good excuse to deal with the paper in peace and quiet. Outside however, the world is very much whiter and the snow is still falling. I was out for two hours, from 08:30, shovelling snow away and gritting the whole lane so that we could get our cars out (if necessary) and be able to walk up the street. There are plenty of other people taking the day off today, and they're all benefitting from my efforts. It's just a shame that some of the poeple at the top of the lane saw fit to just dump a load of grit outside their own houses - to no real avail as they still needed to drive along the full length of the lane to get out. I saw more than one of them skid their way down the hill this morning.

I think I've earned a few brownie points with some of the older neighbours though, and come summer, I hope to get some home-made jam from them (lol).

Here are some pictures, firstly looking down the lane, and then up.


and...


Of course, having successfully turned the above into something safe for cars to travel down, I then followed the lane to where it joins the main road and discovered a whole strecth of road that needed to be gritted there too. I gave up at that point and just dumped a load of grit at the junction, so people can stop their cars. Oh well.

The missus has made a big batch of country vegetable broth, which will be fantastic later, but before then I suppose I better get on with some work. No political commentaries today - I haven't even read today's news yet - so you can wait for my singular views on that later - assuming the snow doesn't bring the phone lines down!

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Invisible galaxies...

News just in: Astronomers have found a galaxy that has no stars and can't be seen. Well done, chaps, very impressive.

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Book-Crossing...

I discovered Book-Crossing today, what a great idea! ...and oddly, the very next page I visited was [The Dullest Blog in the World], which I found more interesting than my own. So I don't know how I feel about that.

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Oh brother.....

My chimney sweep stood me up again this morning, except he got his wife to ring me to tell me! His van's still in the autoshop, so he'll have to ring me back when he's available. Getting kind of ridiculous, and why wait until 08:15 on the morning he's expected to ring and cancel? Surely it would have been better to do so last night? I'm being strung along, but I haven't found another one who would do any work before Spring. Suckers. They're no Van Dykes!

I finally went for a walk around my new valley yesterday. The missus was playing hockey, so I took off for a 2 hour walk from my doorstep. What a different world it is around here. I grew up in Cumbria, where all the paths are well maintained and farmers look after the land (principally because they're told to and given money for that purpose via the CAP). Here though, the land was ripped up and in a poor state, the fencing was poor and the paths were all but hidden (because aside for the occassional old gent, no one uses the greenways around here). It was a little exciting though, cutting my way through a place where only farmers and cows dare to tread. I discovered this very steep hill with old stone steps all the way up - quite some undertaking I tell you, so it must have been popular at some point.

I walked through an old farm. The place was like a timewarp - looked completely unmodernised, by about 50-60 years. The tractors were all over 40 years old and the buildings were completely original and delapidated. It was like the Penrith farms of the late 60s as portrayed in "With Nail and I". I high-tailed it through there - lest some mad, one-eyed farmer shoot me.

When I got to the top of the hill, and found a small village (with some pretty good looking houses actually), only then did I truely appreciate that I was in another world. The "back and beyond" I believe it's called....or "the twillight zone". The roads were long, thin and asphalted - they probably haven't been resurfaced since the 60s. It was eery, windy and cold. Some of the villages I passed through were really quite unsettlingly dated.

Eventually I got back to civilisation (although even in the bigger villages there is a starkly apparent lack of sidewalks....all the houses abutt the street, so you walk - rather than drive - at your own peril). It was good to get back to my neighbouring village, and my house looked all the better as I approached it's quite solitudous place.

Next time I will try the other end of the valley, I've driven through there and it's very pretty.

Right, better go find something productive to do with my day.

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Utter geekdom, but very funny...

I know, I know, it's terribly geeky, but I am a geek. In fact, I am the Elder Geek.

So here is [Lamond Lab], not my lab unfortunately, but what fun they seem to have! I've been following their work (both academic and entertainment) for some years, but they've outdone themselves in their recent re-vamp. Go to the "Fun" directory in the main site, or read about their research. There's always their rather amusing LOTR spoof "The Lost Nucleolus", which will lose all but the most geeky scientists amongst you.

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Smarties evidently don't have the answer....

I can't believe it. Yet another sweet from my youth is due to be butchered by the "re-designers"......how I miss the unsealed paper and foil wrappers, the "Marathon" bar (actually, I still call it Marathon instead of "Snickers" - or "Silly Knickers" as it became to us latterly), and about half a dozen other fantastic, and probably thoroughtly carcinogenic, diabetes causing, unregulated sweets that I used to drool over and watch other people eat. I never got them myself, I was never allowed (which is to say, I was deliberately financially handicapped in infant school).

None-the-less, leave it alone! I must admit, when your on the move, there's nothing better than a "tube" of Smarties....but now it's a hexagonoid of Smarties. Oh brother!

Ah yes, and Kyoto has come into effect. Quite a multi-layered name for an environmental protocol don't you think? After all, we're talking about a traditional town in Japan, desperately trying to hold onto the "old ways" pre-dating industry, surrounded by the ever encroaching plastic and metal machine that is the modern Japan. It's a strange psychology really. Where a British person might see a beautiful 400 year old traditional Japanese wood/rice screened house, the Japanese see an old and ugly building that needs to be replaced with a modern plastic box (known as deuglification - which in turn is ugly to your British person)....and already Blair is complaining that the UK emission target levels are too ambituous, and he negotiated it! Never mind President Mush opting out completely. That as a fore-gone conclusion.

Funnily enough, I can think of another dangerous country that spends all it's extra money on weaponry and home defence rather than education and health care - it's called North Korea, and funnily enough (and probably a good thing too), it's not the next country Bush's "List of Countries to invade before 2008" list. You can take your pick from Iran or Syria for that. It's just as well really, I really wouldn't like the idea of Bush taking a piss on the Hornet's nest that is North Korea...that could get really nasty, as I believe they've spent their money on some big teeth, at the cost of their citizen's welfare.

So there we go, from Smarties to the worry of North Korea in just over two paragraphs!

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Gmail....

I now have 100 gmail invites I could give to people, and I don't have anyone who wants/needs one....just how many people does Gmail think I know!?

So I'm still doing reading for my papers at the moment. It's not going too badly, and I may actually put finger to keyboard (doesn't have the asame ring to it as "pen to paper" does it?) and write something this weekend. Got some good and interesting lab work on the go at the moment, but none that's worth going to all the trouble of describing for you.

I was talking to a friend about those people who work in government positions where they can't say what they do. How weird it must be to never be able to talk about your day fully, to describe your successes and failures with your friends and loved ones. I have a friend whose parents work for such a place and she has no idea what they do - how strange. I think again though, because I'm in the same position. It's not that I'm restricted from talking about my work (except to my competitors, who get to read about it once it's done), no, it's because noone would understand what I do. Even other biochemists would take a bit of time to appreciate it. I could take time out to explain in great details, giving all the pertinent biochemistry and medical microbiology 101 to get lay people up to speed, but who has the time?

The Missus and me registered at the new village surgery this morning, and it's quite a good place; certainly nicer than other surgeries we've had to go to in the past. It's in a lovely little village too. Amazingly I hadn't actually seen this village in daylight before, but it's a good looking neighbour for our village. Anyway, as usual, my blood pressure was up - as it always is in the morning - and I take one look at that blood pressure cuff and I say to myself "don't be high again", which just makes matters worse. It's crazy because in the evenings it is fine - but as far as "the record" is concerned, it's higher than it should be. Oh, I make my excuses, I tell them how it's normal in the evenings etc, which is why I guess they've never looked into it. Perhaps I should try to make an appointment at the other end of the day for once? Perhaps I should actually ask them to do a proper workup? They just take one look at me, and my age and never take it seriously. So consequently, neither have I.

If it is slightly high, the only thing I can imagine it to be is stress. Stressful job, stressful commute and all round stress - what can you do? I don't have time for Yogic retreats. I eat an excellent diet, I don't smoke, don't drink alcohol (well, the odd ale and glass of wine, but we're not talking double figures of units per week here), am the correct weight, am toned with 7.4% body fat, I spend all day on my feet, use the stairs (I work on the 10th floor in my building), I drink lots of water and have no other health complaints - having said that, I did stub my toe on the bed this morning and it really smarts....and I'm young (well still under 28). So what's going on I ask you? I could run a little more (currently only 2x 30 min runs a week, not including the occassional mad dashes into town to get things before the shops shut...haven't worked out the timings on that), but I'm waiting for the light evenings for my daily runs. I get bored in the gym. So if I can have high readings, what the hell hope do other people have?!

Anyway, time is marching on, and I have to find a way to arrest the limited proteolysis on my protein prior to dialysing it for electrospray mass spectrometry analysis, and crack open some lysostaphinated cell pellets, liberate some recombinant plasmid DNA and check for contiguous and correctly orientated transfer origin DNA....if you really wanted to know. What fun!

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Samples of my day....

I was supposed to be sat at home this morning, waiting for the chim-chiminy sweep to come and sort out my leaking chimnies, but nay. He called me first thing this morning to say that he'd had a bump in his van, and could he come on Sunday instead. Fine I say, a bit miffed as I don't get to bum around all morning. Of course, the fact that it is pouring down with rain had escaped my notice thus far, so it is probable that he just didn't want to be messing around on a wet roof, hence the story. He could have just told me though. After all, it happened the other day, why wait until the morning he's due to work (when he can see the weather) to call me?

I have muchose reading to do today, so I will no doubt come back to this blog as stupor takes me. For now, here is the first article of the day I thought [interesting]....and on a slightly different note, this was [great].

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Uninspiring, but perspiring non the less.....

Help!

I'm totally uninspired. I have writer's block. "Oh, whoop-de-doo!" I hear you say, "who cares if he can't write his wittle bwlog?!" Well, the trouble isn't the blog, although it seems to be slowly spreading into my blogdom judging by the recent posts on grains. GRAINS for God's sake! I ask you!

No, the trouble is in the "real world", the one in which I sit as I type this frogspawn, the one that pays the bills! At last, the time has come to get writing for the sake of getting another publication, but the words are not forthcoming. Typographic and verbal constipation has ensued and the anxiety is increasing. Most of what I need is right here, I can smell the slightly caustic, bleachy, hypochlorite smell of my lab books nary a foot away, but do I rifle through them? Mine them for the data I need? Nope. Instead, I engage in petty displacement activity, which today, like most days, has resulted in me spending more time in the lab generating more data!......

So given this rather pathetic state of affairs, I'm wasting some quality work time in here, my sanctimonious little blog about not-a-whole-damn-lot. Instead, I think I may ply you with some completely irrelevant facts that have been ruminating in my troubled head - and as I've lacked the recent company upon whom to regurigitate this waffle, it is going to happen here, like it or not. Actually, never mind. Go to [MadSci] instead...

Some annoyances today:

I hear there are people protesting at the proposed introduction of females into a flock of all male gay penguins. Sorry, did I dream this or did I read it? Let me just got double check.....Nope, I was right, I read it. Exactly. I think Animal Farm was the last book I read with a similar degree of anthropomorphisation. I don't really have much more to say on that one. Trees have feelings too you know! All these people planting male only Holly trees together....and what about the gender-bending male fish, so pumped on xeno-oestrogens that they change sex? Perhaps we should maintain the levels of pollutants in the rivers so that we're not accused of "curing" the transexual fish?

I tried to register with a GP at the local village surgery today. Ugh. One receptionist, a room full of coughing children and I'd have to wait 19 days(!) for an appointment to see a nurse, so I can have a health check before I register! Needless to say I took one last look at the place and departed, 19 day appointment card (sorry, piece of cardborad with no doctor's details on it) in hand, and went and found myself another surgery. I've found one in the neighbouring village and got booked in for Friday. How ridicuous is that? I go a mere 1 km in the opposite direction, and travel from 2nd world to 1st world primary health care. Needless to say I don't think the former surgery will make the new NHS guidelines on people being able to see a GP within 2 working days and a nurse within one day!

So that all just leaves the rather confused and dosy old cleaner of my corridor to moan about, a nice enough chap I'm sure, but very confused. I particularly enjoyed going for a day trip with him in the elevator the other day. I order the lift from Level 11 and stand there for half an hour waiting for the damn thing to arrive....but then it stops at Level 10. Now this is confusing, because when the lift is going up, it doesn't stop for people unless they too are going up - and who would take a lift up one floor!? Ah, the cleaner, and he's pressed both buttons on Level 10, so I climb into the lift with him on Level 11 and then go back down one floor to Level 10 where the lift opens for the ghost of the idiot stood beside me. I hit Level 5 on the pad, and he hits Level 9, Level 8 and Level 7. I stare outragiously at him, clearly a little ticked off. He informs me (well mutters something) that he can't remember which foyer he left his cleaning trolley! Aaaaarrrrgghhhhh! Also, please tell me why I must endure two witch, hackled voiced horrors shreeking away about their husband's infidelity and what tripe they're gong to eat for dinner - right in the middle of my lab! Whilst I'm clearly working shit out!

The builders are in the building at the moment. We have a little chuckle when we wheel large flasks of bacterial media around the building. It looks suspiciously like urine, and we've managed to convince the builders that this is indeed the case. Oh their faces when we wheel our trolleys bearing 10 litres of piss into the lift with them. Ooh, how indignant they are, as I stare at the food stains on their tops, their sagging trousers and the toilet sinks that are as dry as a pork scratching after they've used the bathrooms. The occassionally come by and say "can we turn the power off for the rest of the day?" Err, no? I say. Just what is it that you think I do here? Do you think I can just go wander off for a bit, you know, go to the pub, watch some telly, scratch my arse? The technical department are the same. One of our principle pieces of equipment breaks down and we submit a request for them to fix it. Four months later they get round to it, "Oh, it was a five minute job", the guy laughs. Meanwhile we've had to endure the elevators, four corridors and an overly booked piece of alternative equipment, costing us time, money and sanity. As long as he enjoyed his newspaper and coffee this morning, that's alright.

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Food bargain...

I've finally realised that if I can hold out until about 2:00-2:15 pm for lunch, when I go to the "Sandwich Strip" (a row of bakeries, wholefood shops and delis opposite the hospital next to where I work), I can get cheap food. You see they throw all their fresh stuff out at 2:30 pm, hence the reductions, but you take a chance as all the good stuff (like ham and egg on granary) could be gone!

On a completely different note, how cool is this! [The Beanock]

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Kamut...

I had a fantastic organic grain salad for lunch today. Nothing new I admit, but today the grain was called Wild Kamut. It was a grain that was used in Ancient Egypt. It has a slightly nutty rice taste, but with a cruncy Cashew nut like texture. Quite good actually.

More on Jim's crazy grains later....

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Raja....

A personal reminder, as much as anything, so I don't forget to get hold of this guy when he next visits my city!

[Raja Fashions]

Lookin' good.

Oh yes, and ["Go Ellen!"]

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Whistlin' Dixie....

So, I finally got round to buying the two [Dixie Chicks] albums I've been meaning to get for some time: "Wide Open Spaces" and "Home". Both excellent, though I've been too busy assembling various items of new furniture to sit and chill out.

As it has been somewhat of a domestic day, the mental stimulus is currently running on "low ebb", which is to say, I'm too tired to actually write anything meaningful. Instead, here is some photgraphic work of mine from the fall of a few years back.



The image is of Woodland between Bethesda and Pen-Y-Pass in Snowdonia, North Wales. I'm going through some of my huge numbers of picture folders, so I wonder what else I'll find?

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Futon sofabed....

Got a cool futon sofa-bed for the spare bedroom. An uninteresrting little fact, much like the fact that we lose 50,000 brain cells everyday after the age of 20. Anyway, I was pleased.

More later...

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Broadbandification.....

Broadbandification, there's a Bushism for you (because using real words just holds you back, hehehe). Yes, I'm at home, and I'm back on my broadband! Didn't think it was going to connect at one point, but I guess it was the first time at this new number/address so the telephone exchange computer was posbably having a hissy-fit :o)

So expect plenty of late night ramblings....just not tonight, as I have a tape of a documentary on The DaVinci Code to go watch. No doubt it'll inspire some commentary on my part.

--- Additional:

Well the documentary was ok, Tony Robinson doing his business with the air of "curious layman" that he always adopts. They debunked about 90% of the book as being pure fiction rather than fact, and those "facts" that remained were tenuous to say the least. So the DaVinci Code: An interesting, if not a particularly well written, piece of fiction that plays on the not totally inconceivable, but completely unfounded, notion that Jesus had a "wife" and a child; and all the repercussions therein. It didn't need to be pointed out that a Jewish man living at the time would have been a real oddity if he didn't have a wife, especially by his age; and if there was a wife, I would be wholly unsurprised if her position hadn't been derogated by the male self-righteous ruling ecumenical class of the day.

It all becomes very much simpler to understand the basis for so much of the mindless doctrines in these religions, if you respect that fact that the founding clerics of the time had a real fear of sex, having ruled it as all but a sin outside of procreation. So women must bear the brunt in the doctrine as the clerics of the day try to scratch any aspect of human realism from the pages of the holy texts, lest their own lascivious minds get the better of them. After all, why not blame it on the people without the power, rather than their own personal weaknesses and debauchery. Surely then it was not necessary to have an immaculate conception when Mary and poor old Joseph were likely to be man and wife. How do we think Jospeh felt about that? Surely the "unexpected" pregancy of a woman in those times, and not by her husband, warranted a stoning rather than worship? They hardly had the political standing to get away with such an outrageous story did they?

Well, that's enough said for now. Bring back Boudica, that's what I say (lol).

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Silence before the storm....

I love to go for a walk around campus at dusk. I'd prefer to take a dusky walk around Derwent Water or Elterwater in the Lakes, but we work with what we're given. Anyway, the dusk thing. It's a fantastic time of day, especially on a Friday. The world seems quieter and cooler. The birds are more distinguishable. At the moment, dusk falls before rush hour, so there is no droan. It gets me away from the computer and the lab for half a hour and airs my scattered brains. On Fridays, you know that the dusky stillness is a mere lull between the frenetic daytime and the party-night that is gearing up. It's a quiet breath (or a sigh).

What other random things come into my head as I sit here waiting? We have a great looking church with a huge steeple just down the road from us. It cuts a great silhouette against the back drop of the valley at sunrise. The bonus was discovering that we have church bell ringers on a Wednesday night and Sunday morning, and they sound superb. It really casts you back to another time. I do love churches architecturally and historically, but the services within I could do without (lol).

I think my gel has just about run now....oh how much waiting do I have to do? Unlike CSI, where they just very poorly pipette random clear liquids into tubes and stick said tubes in a variety of completely different machines and get read outs of DNA profiles and spectrometry data almost instantly. Never happens I'm afraid; and I'm surprised no other lab scientists have written in to point out that their pipette technique really is very poor. I would, but it's all a little geeky hehehehe.

Broadband should have been activated today. Can't wait to get home! I should get on with it.

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Yes, the photography....

Pictures speak volumes, so by that right I could save a whole lot of space if I squeeze a few more in here. I started out well enough with [these entries] and [these] in my first weeks of blogging, but that side of things has fallen by the wayside in favour of long and unaccountable rants about everything and nothing.

The crazy thing is, I have so many pictures on my computer at the moment that I can barely switch the sucker on without it crying - I guess it must be like needing to take a pee, but not being allowed to go. That's no way to treat old faithful. So I guess I'll be going out this weekend to purchase a new external hard drive and a load of CDs - we'll call it digital catheterisation (is that a little geeky?)

Anyway, I have a 1 megapixel phone cam, a 2 megapixel point and shoot, a 3 megapixel point and shoot and a 6.3 megapixel SLR and am I taking photos? Nope, non at all this year so far, well actually I took this one here:



These are the Caldbeck Fells at the top end of the Pennines (the "Backbone of England"). I took this when out for a drive with the Missus and my sister on a frosty morning just after Christmas. I dragged them up to Hadrian's Wall to commune with some ancient history, but they weren't terribly impressed. They wanted to go to an inn to imbibe some fine Jennings Ale (the offer of which would certainly get me into a country inn!).

I'm a bit of a history buff, more the archaeology side of things, but all aspects of history fascinate me. Every story that you could ever wish to hear has been played out at some point in history. When I look at buildings, standing stones, even early- to late-Victorian industry, I can see the lives that touched these things. It's not vivid, it's a rather lucid feeling and hard to describe, but the more you understand the context of an artifact, the more vivid the imaginings surrounding it. I was watching Time Team the other day, a programme that I have been watching avidly since the first episode, and they were excavating an old neolithic site. When they got down to the natural (the level at which the original earth layer of the time was), the enthusiasm of the archaeologist was palpable. He just kept running his hands over the earth, amidst the pottery shards and petrified industry, and commenting on how this was the very ground on which these neolithic people lived their lives.

To that end I wandered over to the School of Continuing Education yesterday to enroll on an Archaeology course. I await information on said subject. If it is not to my liking, I might try the Open University too. That should keep me out of trouble for a bit. I miss the daily grind of studying; it's just work now, and I'm not obliged to do any once I leave the lab - unless I have an exciting experiment to analyse. In the days of my PhD I would work from the moment I got home (usually around 7.30 pm) until past 1 am. Every night, without fail. I don't know how I managed it!

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Ah, you spotted the little gap then...?

Ahem, not quite the "new start" I was planning on. Well in all truthfulness, I can only blame it on the lack of a broadband connection. In the course of any house move comes that point when you are not completely moved out of the old house, and not quite into the new house - except in my case this lasted over a week. This is borne of the luxury of still having access to the old house until the end of March.....

Anyway, I have wanted to blog so many times recently that I started a little blog diary in my moleskine notebook - but as I sit here trying to engage myself in cryptography 101 in an attempt to interpret my little scrawlings on what seems to be a page that has gotten wet and dried badly, I am reminded that I need to do the same thing with my lab book. Experiments have been going well, if uncomplicated, and have generated data that I really ought to sit down and have a good gander at....trouble is, I'm a bit out of it at the moment. I'm at the tail end of moving in and I've still got a lot of things on my mind.

So what has happened since I last wrote? Well my mum's house got flooded out in a freak flood incident, so she's had to move into rented accommodation in the country for 6 months.

My best mate and work colleague has had to return to Greece to do his National Service, which is a poor do; and a real stopper in the career he has worked hard for, and in which the Greek government has played no role nor provided any support. It's going to be lonely in the lab.

I've had to change about a million addresses, and I'm still discovering new ones I need to change - I've just thought of yet another one as I type this! Damn!

Ivan Noble died, which really upset me. For those who don't know about Ivan, he was a journalist who in his final job worked for the BBC Online Science & Technology team. In 2002 he was diagnosed with a cancerous brain tumour and since then has written a "Tumour Diary" detailing his operations, chemo, remissions, resurgences, his marriage, his second child and finally, after so long, his impending death as he prepared to move into a hospice. I'd followed his story since the beginning and hadn't read his diary since I heard his cancer was back with a vengeance, but the last few entries were especially poignant. You can read his story here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4211475.stm

I have corresponded with several friends and learned of terrible events going on in their lives, however, I have also made contact with other friends with whom I have not spoken for some 8 years. It was fantastic to spend time with them, and their spouses, over the holidays. My other best bud Mr. R. With whom I've had the most sustained contact of anyone since leaving school, not only got a job at the same time as me, but has just got engaged, as I am, and moved into his house on the very same day as myself. How strange.

Whist sitting in bookshops over the holidays I noticed that there were a glut of books hitch-hiking on the popularity of Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code. It's getting a little silly now, I mean, yes he's a captivating writer and he spun a good yarn, but that's all it is. It isn't a work of non-fiction and I hope people realise that. I am no fan of the Christian church, amongst others, and frankly, if any or all of it were true I'd be the least surprised of anyone. If you really think that any human endeavour, especially one with so much associated power, can exist in a political vacuum and in an unindoctrinated state for over a millennium, then you must be mad as a hatter. However, his style of writing can be very persuasive when you are ignorant of a subject. He establishes his credulity by including commonly known facts, then speculative facts, then he starts bending truths and treating speculation as cold hard fact. So you don't know what's real, and what isn't. These aren't bad things, it's fiction, and as one English Literature professor once told me, fiction is nothing but a book of lies, if you want to be technical about it. It's made up. If people start believing it, that's another story. I found Deception Point particularly annoying in that regard as there was so many blatant anachronisms.

Anyway, I'm back on the fantasy at the moment. You can't go wrong with fantasy (Elizabeth Haydon); it's the human condition transposed into a fantastical world and if written well, is great literature. Though there's plenty of absolute trash in the genre. I tend to prefer female authors in fantasy as they write men equally well, but create more realistic women that do male authors. It's all escapism, which is what I need as I lie awake at night worrying about work and out of the blue costs that keep cropping up. I'm bleeding money at the moment!

Plus, I've discovered that when it is windy of rainy I get bits of debris (or drips...not sure) falling down the chimney flue onto the board that blocks up the open fireplace in our bedroom. It's like a drum and that is annoying in an otherwise great bedroom. I called a chimney sweep about it and he told me he wasn't interested in capping my chimney at this time of year - good grief, having to beg for a f**king chimney sweep! I've had half a dozen tradesmen on my roof thus far, and not one has complained or fallen off! So I'm going to stuff a load of wadding insulation on top of the board to quieten the impacts - once I've determined how much mess displacing the board will make! The trouble is, I'd like to deal with the root of the problem, I mean, I don't want a damp, unventilated chimney that'll weather and require expensive structural work done to it...but if the damn chimney sweeps aren't willing, I'll have to think of something.

Well, I have a lab book to get up to date, experiments to plan and cells to look after. I get my broadband switched on tomorrow, so YAAAAAAAAY! I hope the new phone line is up to the task as I've already encountered a bit of cross-over on the line.

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Punxsutawney...

I just had to insert something in here. 2nd February! Groundhog Day. This day has several meanings for me. It was the day, 10 years ago to the day, that I passed my driving test. It was the first test of the year as the town was snowed out and it wasn't deemed safe. I passed first time, but I always liked to say that it took me a couple of hundred attempts, as I kept reliving the same day over and over. Of course, I nearly crashed that very night, but I've driven very well since then!

I went to a conference in Pittsburgh PA some years ago and whilst wandering around down town, this coach passed me. I looked at the back of it, and where was it going? Punxsutawney, "the weather capital of the World", home of the Groundhog. So I took a picture of course (the touristy thing to do):



Pittsburgh was a fantastic place, and one of the last that any tourist from Europe generally thinks of visiting, but that is a shame. It has some fantastic architecture, some classic turn of the century buildings, 1920s department store buildings, skyscrapers. A lot of industrial history, but it felt clean, and safe and very friendly. It was damn hot though! I couldn't find a balance between the heat (with the 98% humidity!) and the arctic air conditioning in the buildings! I went on a trip to Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water too. It kind of reminded me of Cameron's house in Ferris Bueller's Day off.

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