I've made it back from my weekend jaunt to Womad, where I had a lovely time relaxing, hanging out with friends and listening to some good tunes. I had been told by the people we went with that there is always a heatwave for the festival, and it was a complete scorcher. We've had temperatures around 30 degrees C over South-East England for the last few days. As I type it's 8.30 in the morning and the thermometer has already hit 25, so I expect it's going to be another hot one.
An Australian court has ruled that it is legal to chip a PlayStation so you can play games from different regions. Before we get too excited though, UK & US courts have returned the opposite verdict.
Good news for the lazy - exercising early in the morning may supress the immune system. On a related theme, a plate of cookies in the morning is no worse for you than some breakfast cereals. I'm off to eat some biscuits in front of the TV then :-)
A new big squid has been discovered in Australia. Apparently it has muscles that other squids don't and has such a high ammonia content that it would taste of cleaning fluid!
Good news for UK surfers - Oftel are forcing BT to slash the wholesale price of unmetered services by 8.5%. The ISPs now have the opportunity to pass the savings onto unmetered 'slowband' users. BT reported this week that they are receiving 12,000 broadband orders a week. Oftel calculate that there will be 750,000 boradband users by the end of the month. For anybody considering the switch to broadband, my advice is just do it. After a month you'll be wandering why you ever waited :-)
The Emmy nominations were announced today. I am currently watching 3 shows at the moment - Six Feet Under (23 nominations), The West Wing (21 nominations) and 24 (a few including best drama & best actor). As I post I am watching a triple bill of Friends which picked up 11 nominations.
It's going to be a PC free weekend for me, so I'm going to go quiet for a while. Off to Worthing after work tomorrow for a wedding on Saturday, followed by a Supertramp concert in Hyde Park. A bit on the busy side then :-)
I'm becoming increasingly annoyed by spam text messages. I don't tend to really using texting myself as it costs money and I'm never far away from a net connection, so I'd say about half of the texts I receive are trying to sell me something. Most irritating!
The GLA opened the doors on London's new City Hall today. Personally I love the building and have done ever since they started putting it up. There is plenty of open access public space, including the whole of the top floor, so at some point I'll pop along for a look. For lots of cool piccies click here.
Had a long hard day's shopping today - looking for a birthday present for my Dad, a wedding present, an outfit to wear to several weddings this summer (starting with one next Saturday), some new boots & shoes for work, camping supplies for a trip to Womad ..... I don't go shopping very often, so when I do I have an endless list of stuff I need to get. Managed to get most of the stuff on the list but failed miserably on a dress for next weekend. This means I'm going have to try and get myself kitted out during a week which is already looking quite busy. (And yes I do need a new outift - all the dresses I already own seem to have shrunk whilst hanging up in the wardrobe since last summer!) Going out to the shops every so often reminds me why I normally just get stuff over the net :-)
I've been catching up on my mail tonight, and I thought I'd share some with you. I've been subscribing to Heroic Stories for a couple of years now. Once a week I get a fairly short story, submitted by one of the readers, telling how ordinary people make the world a better place for ordinary people. The stories are very varied and come from all sorts of people all over the world. Some of them are very moving, and some just make you smile. There are also a selection of comments from readers on previous stories, some threads of which can go on for months. If you've never come across it, I recommend you click the link above and check out the sample stories on offer.
Here's one I've had waiting to share with you since yesterday, a mail-order bride, arriving in Moscow from the US. Normally you would expect a mail-order bride to be going in the other direction, by Lubya is a giraffe who has been sent to Moscow Zoo, in the hope that she'll get it on with Samson, the zoo's male giraffe. Isn't that sweet :-)
I promise to try about something non-animal related next time!
Yesterday, snowcat reported cow-napping in Covent Garden. Yesterday, went I left the office there were 3 members of the cow parade outside the tube station, firmly attached to their concrete bases. This morning, however, there were but two, accompanied by a dark patch on the pavement where the third cow had stood, just 13 hours earlier. Is there an epidemic of cattle-rustling sweeping through London? And why can I find no reports on this anywhere?
In a update on the hedgehogs of Uist, the latest suggestion is to transport all the hedghogs to England and give them to gardeners who want them. Hedgehogs are very effective at eating slugs and snails, and are better for friendly garden animals than slug pellets. Before you decide to accept a friendly hedgehog it mught be worth bearing in mind that Uist went from a population of 3 hedgehogs in the 70's to a surplus of 5,000 they now need to get rid of.
A pair of albino hedgehogs have been discovered in Derbyshire. So there you go.
And on the continent, police in Germany were called out after loud screaming was heard by an old lady. Upon investigation they discovered 2 hedgehogs engaged in a mating ritual. Apparently the male hedgehogs scream at the females until they give in :-)
In an update from last Tuesday, the hedgehogs have won a reprive while the animal welfare groups have their say. One proposed solution to the problem is to transport the hedgehogs over to the mainland where they can't eat all the eggs any more. Adding 5000 additional hedgehogs into an established ecosystem sounds a little crazed to me - I can just see the headlines 20 years down the line when someone suggests culling the hedgehogs that are upsetting the ecosystem on the Scottish mainland.
Yesterday I went to the Game On exhibition at the Barbican. A top day out for any gamer within reach of London - £11 to get in and play all those arcade games you never see any more. Some of the games didn't live up to my recollection (like Frogger for example), but then I guess we didn't know any better at the time :-) They have machines spanning the last 40 years, right up to the latest consoles. They've even got groovy new technology that's on it's way. I may even go back for another go myself. If you're interested, it's open till 15th September.
And for anyone who hasn't yet, wander along to the bloggers tube map to see who's blogging in your neck of the woods. Obviously only relevant to those of us who live in the sprawling mass that is London. If you wandered over a couple of weeks ago when everybody else was talking about it, now could be a good time to meander back. Just been for a repeat visit myself, and loads more links have appeared.
Time for me to go and do some chores whilst contemplating which of the many topics running through my head should be blogged first :-)
It then dawned on me that I had no idea who my own MP was, and thought I'd see what his web presence was like. Meet Jim Dowd, MP for Lewisham West, whose only web site is quite frankly pitiful! So I thought I'd try to find out more about the man who had described Lewisham as a "fairly anonymous part of inner suburban London". Well, it appears we have a "fairly anonymous" MP to match :-) The most informative article I could find was in The Guardian, but that only tells me he's an MP and when he was born!
Reasons why we shouldn't play with ecosystems #7 - A cull of hedgehogs is being proposed in a couple of The Western Isles in Scotland. A pair of hedgehogs were introduced to the islands in the 1970's by a gardener as a form of pest control. There are now so many that the plan is to kill 5,000 of them as the hedgehogs are busy eating thousands of bird eggs, to the extent that some bird populations are down by around 60%.
Reason #1 - the extinction of the dodo, caused by deforestation and the introduction of cats, rats and pigs by Portugese sailors on the island of Mauritius.
Reason #2 - the near extinction of the Mauritian calvaria tree, which sprouted seeds only after being eaten and digested by the dodo. When the dodo became extinct, the calvaria tree nearly followed. Man, of course, caused the extinction of the dodo (see #1).
That's enough learning for one day. I'll come up with reasons 3 to 6 another day.
In the news today, Vivendi are the latest conglomerate to be hit by a major accounting scandal, sending their shares, along with everybody else's, plummeting downwards. A few days ago, whilst commenting on Worldcom, I mentioned ntl: as one I thought would follow soon. I also mentioned off-line that I thought Vivendi had to crash and burn too (if only I'd put my keyboard where my mouth is :-). I wonder if any of the bookies are taking bets on the next finance scandal to hit - the way the markets are going I'll need to boost my pension pot somehow!
