test please delete

[NickFitz]

Took The Dog^TW for a walk (afternoon meeting cancelled), but then when we came back in I noticed this in the garden


I got to about 2m away before he flew off

[NickFitz]

Tea: rack of BBQ ribs and chips

The car earlier was a Sunbeam Alpine, though it had a Hillman engine (can't remember if it was from an Imp or a Minx) which itself had been upgraded with a Brabham kit. Bit of a Frankenstein's monster, but it seems the car enthusiasts like that kind of thing so they did all right with it, probably helped by not putting stickers on it

The opal hunters varied from fair to middling to doing very nicely.

And then an episode of Trucking Hell, and it was all Crouch Recovery, all the way in this one

I just found a spider on my bed

Only a little one, easily captured and ushered out by way of the window; but it's the principle of the thing

[DoctorStrangelove]

Minx apparently, with the head off a Rapier and a stage ?one? carb upgrade.

The Imp engine is much smaller and all aluminium.

I had an Imp variant: Singer Chamois. It was a grade A piece of crap. I think someone had kept chickens in it.

Lasted 6 weeks IIRC.

And I sold it twice.



Meanwhile back in 27th January 2019 dear old Roy Batty was philosophising about Tears in Rain.

[WTFH]

TFBSZ

[NickFitz]

Minx apparently, with the head off a Rapier and a stage ?one? carb upgrade.

The Imp engine is much smaller and all aluminium.

Sounds right. I remember him going on about the difference between a stage one and a stage two, but I think I missed the bit where he explained the distinction

Tonight's major motion picture premiere was They Live (1988) (or John Carpenter's They Live, because Mr. Carpenter seems to be a bit prissy about such things) in which a guy finds a pair of sunglasses that reveal to him that the world is being controlled by ugly capitalist aliens that have subjugated the human race in the furtherance of their greed. So basically it predicts those Facebook - sorry, Meta - virtual reality glasses that somehow manage to make Mark Zuckerberg look even worse than he does in actual reality, while also revealing his capitalist greed and lack of aesthetic sensibilities. (If you recall, we went through all that lack-of-taste stuff with Bill Gates and Microsoft in the 1990s; but I digress.) I'm not sure why the much-vaunted fist fight had to be so long unless it was so they could boast about the film having a really long fist fight; it didn't add anything of value to the story that couldn't have been achieved with a much shorter fist fight. Anyway, the film's pretty good, I thought

And then a rerun of Passengers (2016) because I like the special effects, particularly the bit when the spaceship slingshots around Arcturus, and also the story more generally. I hadn't noticed before that you get a brief glimpse of a "no smoking in the cabins" message on the wall by the inside of the door when the male protagonist first enters his, suggesting that there are still smokers in the future when we're sending people on 120 year journeys to remote worlds

And finally, one of those S1 episodes of The West Wing that's mainly trying to make you like the characters while remaining extremely vague on the Important Issues that they're supposedly concerned about. I prefer the ones where the issues are more obvious, though these ones do make it clearer why Mandy ever existed: she's a soap opera character, which is why she vanished at the end of S1 when the producers realised they should probably have the characters spend more time talking about actual stuff rather than just talking about each other

Goodnight all

[WTFH]

Morning all

[DoctorStrangelove]

Morning.

Very heavy rain overnight, woke me up, rivers of water flowing down the gutters in the road.

Dry (as in not currently precipitating).

Sunny.

Blue sky in parts.

Slightly less chilly in here at 16.4 deg, 17 deg in the kitchen (before the kettle went on), 14 deg in the leanto, 13.1 deg in the saltinghouse.

998 mbar, 29.47 in Hg, 748.56 Torr, 14.47477 psi, (down from 1001 last night), 75% RH.

Saturday.

Remembered which channel shows Wheeler Dealers this week. .


Whilst on 28th January 2019 I was watching "The Guns of Navaronne" whereas NF was watching the original "Gambit" with that Michael Caine chap.

Wheeler Dealers S8 E8 1954* Chevy Step Side Pickup truck, bought for $8650. £5400, restoration took £5000, total £10k, sold for $13k6. I forgot to take the number plate so who knows if it's still on the road?

*Same age as me then. .

Walk (unabbreviated) walked in the sunshine & intermittent drizzle, nice rainbow.

Wheeler Dealers S15 E7 Dodge SRT10: V10 8 litre POS. Bought for $15k9, total spent $19k6, sold for $22k.

Lunch: baked potato with baked beans and cheese, red corner yog, bramble jelly and marmalade on slices of toast, 0.91 pints of good Glengettie tea.

Wheeler Dealers S14 E3 1973 Mustang Mach 1. Lookout there's a Holley carb about. Watch those sidebowls. I wonder how they take them off without depositing half a pint of petrol on top of the engine. Bought for $18k, total cost $25k2, sold for $26k. WTF? $800 for all that work? Shipped to the UK.

Wheeler Dealers S15 E21 Ford Bronco (again) 5th gen. Bought $10k. Spent $925. Auctioned for $14k. Turns out I've watched this one before: I remember the broken inlet manifold studs.

Wheeler Dealers S15 E4 Chevy Corvette Z06 C5. It's the one where Ant has to remove the back axle and torque tube to fix the clutch. Easy when you've got a lift, gearbox support thingy, and a TV crew.

I can remember how heavy the Essex gearbox was. I think I must have been stronger back then.

Bought for $16k, $1910 spent, sold for $18k. Well they made $90 on that one then.

More brambles massacred, feck me how can anything grow that much in 6 months?

Tea: spag with what I hope is fiery bol, a yog (corner, pippy, run out of the other sort), 0.91 pints of good Glengettie tea

Entertainment: Neil Oliver on Orkney, Ring of Brodgar, Maes Howe etc.

Turner & Hooch (1989) with that Tom Hanks chap before he rescued Private Ryan.

Stonehenge the enigma on 5+1 with Rob Bell: how Stonehenge was used to decode Enigma. Mildly inneresting but barely enough to keep my eyes open.

"Sweeney ! (1977)" on Leg End, wherein that Van der Valk bloke tries to off Jack.

[NickFitz]

Morning denizens

Sunny out with traces of fluffiness, after some overnight rain. It's up to 14°C but won't get beyond that, and the barometers seem to be accelerating their downwards trend at 993/1001mB

[ladymuck]

Afternoon all

There was clear blue sky when I got up this morning but now it's clouded over. Currently 15 degrees and it'll get up to 17 soon. A light shower expected this afternoon - just as I'm due to leave the hairdresser. Barometer down to 1002 mBar.

Dried laundry has been folded up and put away. Waitrose has delivered and shopping put away.

[NickFitz]

Lunch has been a smoked pancetta omelette; very tasty