Got the usual Christmas cards away in December and got the usual bunch back. And looking at one of them it occurred to me that in some areas I can be startlingly conservative. I’m not used to thinking of myself that way, and in most ways I’m not, but in this thing I am. One …
Category: This occurred to me
A Surplus of Tea Caddies
It forcibly occurred to me the other week just how often surplus items are another person’s treasure. Back in 1978 I purchased my first home. It was a two-bedroomed cottage a block from the local beach and as partt of the purchase deal it was partly furnished. I moved in and discovered that three of …
The Joke That Wasn’t.
There seems to be a perception that practical jokes and prank phone calls are funny. This is two-sided. To the perpetrator they are hilarious, they may be regarded as funny for bystanders, but for those who are the butt of such events, no matter how much they they may appear to be entertained by their …
(Mis) Casting
In November I had the chance to purchase some DVDs very cheaply, I did so, settled to watch them and noticed that casting people of a realistic age seems to be a problem in some TV series and movies. One of my purchases was the box set of Agatha Christie’s series of the Tommy and …
!@#$%^Spam!
yesterday I posted several items on my blog, this morning I clicked on it to check something and discovered that in less than 24 hours I’d received another 50+, and I wonder why on earth these idiots keep bothering. Apart from anything else, I have no interest in buying camping gear (I’m crippled) fake Louis …
Drowning Not Waving
from Steve Johnson – guest blogger. There was a tragedy in the waters off Auckland recently. Seven large males went out in a small boat. They grossly overloaded the boat’s capacity in those numbers, and they went out without bothering to take lifejackets. As anyone with a grain of commonsense would have expected, the boat …
What Goes Around…
Watching TV news the other week it occurred to me that some businesses do howl when they kick someone else and stub a toe. There was a news item about the amount of stock that self-service checkouts in supermarkets are losing. But that goes back to their own decision to lose a number of checkout …
I Think I’m Atypical…
The Readers Digest this month offered a whole list of ways to sleep well. I feel that there must be something wrong with me. They say that you should go to bed at regular times. Ah, well, I go to bed at any time from 7pm to 2am. They say that you should take a …
LANCE ARMSTONG and Le Argument Circular.
    Items continue steadily appearing in newspapers about Lance Armstrong and his possible involvement in doping. So far as I understand it the argument put forward by the agency that wishes to convict him goes like this. We are certain that Lance Armstrong is a drugs cheat. We can find no proof of this, therefore …
SPACE JUNK
It’s interesting to note how often commonsense predictions in SF come true. Arthur C. Clarke’s predicted satellites for example. The most recent item was a report I saw on TV just the other week, in which they demonstrated a space harpoon. Not for whales, but for space debris floating in an orbit around the Earth …