Can anybody explain to me why you would rent a DVD by going down to a net booth on the High Street, picking the one you want, going back home to wait for the postman to deliver it, then go out again to post it back? Call me weird, but if I was going to go out to do that, I'd go to the video store, pick my movie and take it home with me straight away!
Yet another chapter in the Uist hedgehog saga. The cull is due to start next week, so the islanders are being offered a fiver for each one they deliver to be transported to the mainland by the Uist Hedgehog Rescue Coalition.
Today's painting activities have been accompanied by Alanis Morissette and Portishead - a couple of CD's I haven't listened to in well over a year. Top stuff - well worth digging out of your collection if you have them. Mind you, if you are a Brit around my age (give or take a few years) you will have owned at least one of them.
From there, I went a bit more modern with a spin of the latest RHCP, which is totally excellent. Whilst listening to it a few weeks back (predictably I believe we were painting at the time), oin said that one of the tracks reminded him of something else and proceeded to hum "Our House" by Crosby Stills & Nash. The annoying thing is, that since he put this thought in my head it won't go away, so that now when I hear the RHCP track my brain starts filling in the CSN lyrics. D'oh.
On a vaguely related note, we recently spotted that the first track on Melody AM features a sample from Burt Bacharach'sBlue on Blue. I always thought the Royksopp tune had sounded hauntingly familiar, but put it down to the car adverts!
In two coincidental stories, people have objected to culls of ducks and rats. There seem to have been a few stories like this recently. For some reason I only seem to come across news reports about people objecting to culling. What is the story supposed to be - the proposals for the culls, or the objections to them? I tend to sit on the fence for these ones. For me it's one of the bigger picture arguments. I don't think that culling is a bad thing when done for the right reasons. I think that humanity should try to save species from extinction of plant and animal species wherever possible. Should we allow one species to completely obliterate another, or should we intervene to give weaker species a better chance. Particularly given that mankind is often responsible for introducing the agressor in the first place (see previous posts on hedgehogs. Should we be trying to reverse the changes we have inflicted upon the global ecosystem, or should we leave it to nature and evolution to repair the damage?
In the little bubble I call my reality, our car failed its MOT yesterday :-( It's a little VW Polo that dates back to 1989 and is only our second car. It's been good to us over the four or so years we've had it, despite our complete apathy in the car care department. Anyway, the suspension is shot, and the cost of the repairs is such that it no longer makes economic sense to get it back on the road again. We've got a couple of weeks left on the old certificate before we have to stop driving it, so we have a stay of execution while we start looking for a replacement. I find that I am quite attached to the car - I realise that I'd assumed that we'd choose when it was time to trade it in for something newer, rather than having the decision taken out of our hands. So on top of our schedule of non-stop working, painting and partying (pretty much in that order :-), we now need to quickly learn something about cars before a salesman spots us for complete novices and sells us a complete turkey.
And to prove that every cloud has a silver lining, this time next week we'll be in Amsterdam for a well deserved break :-)
In TV news, there will be a third series of 24. In the UK, most of us have seen the first two episodes of the second series. Those of us with pay-TV of some kind (including myself) have seen three episodes. I know the US is about halfway though (and the rest of the world probably don't even know what I'm talking about!). I must confess that I'm not really getting into series 2. With the original, I was completely gripped by the first episode, and watched every second with full concentration. We'd have really good chats about what we thought would happen next, and who would still be alive at the end of the last episode. This series just isn't doing it for me at all - at the moment it's just all seeming a little contrived and far-fetched. I'm going to give it another episode or two in the hope it will improve before I give up watching it. What does everybody else think?
To get you started, here's a picture of London by night taken from the ISS. You can see the airports and the M25 - it's superb! Obviously not everybody on the internet lives in London, so I thought I'd see if I could find pictures from space of some of the places I know you live. You won't spot your home-town in amongst this lot, but worth a view are a Canadian reservoir, the San Franisco Bay, sunset over the Sahara, and the Colorado river. Here's a challenge for you:- there are thousands of pictures in the nasa gallery - if you can find a shot of where you live, post it in the comments!
