test please delete

[NickFitz]

E2 of the Pompeii thing was also very interesting

And I've read the first few chapters of The Sisterhood by Katherine Bradley, being the other book that covers the events of Nineteen Eighty-Four from Julia's perspective

Tomorrow, I go to the GP surgery for my annual blood tests. Just remembered that, at the old surgery, they expected me to fast for them. They haven't said the same here but I think I better had just in case, meaning no coffee when I get up

Goodnight all

[WTFH]

Morning all
Chilly at 6am, but at least it's dry.
Garmin app is running but has been updated to be more useful. Has taken me 10 minutes to find the information that used to be right in front of me.
9.52km walked.

[NickFitz]

Morning denizens

Sunny and Simpsonesque start out there today, though it's supposed to get a bit cloudier later. Still not as warm as it could be too, at 5°C rising to 9° this afternoon. The barometers are down somewhat at 1006/1014mB

On the question of fasting for blood tests, I vaguely remember being told last year that it wasn't necessary any more for the ones I have. Investigation reveals that although it used to be required for the triglyceride level test, it was decided a few years ago that it doesn't really affect the results and isn't needed. So I'm having my coffee after all and if it turns out I shouldn't have, well, they should have told me

[DoctorStrangelove]

Morning.

Wednesday.

Sunny.

Blue sky.

Dry.

Chilly in here at 14.3 deg, 13 deg in the kitchen & leanto.

1015 mBar, 29.97 in Hg, 761.3 Torr, 14.72 psi, (down from 1019 last night), 77% RH (GDR hair), 67% RH (Lidl electric).

Glad to see the board is running like a slug on mogadon again. .

Meanwhile on the 20th of September 2019 NF was making scotch broth whereas I went shopping.

Walk (unabbreviated) walked in wan sunshine & very little blue in the sky.

Five lawns duly mown. Knackered now.

Lunch: scrambled egg etc.

Entertainment: 37 seconds of Y&Y. 15 mins of TWAO due to obnoxious politicians waffling on. It went <click> A Lot..

No butterflies today, unlike the unidentified example yesterday and the Peacock on Monday.

Freecell score: 88%, running average: 86%.

Veronica Mars S1 E17 "Kanes and Abel's".

The Mentalist S2 E20 "Red All Over". Malcolm McDowell as a nasty con man.

Walking Victorian Britain. I fell asleep for part of it.

[NickFitz]

Back from the surgery, where we went through the annual ritual about units-per-week and also discussed my surplus of weight and deficit of exercise, before getting to the highlight of the day: blood

At least the walk there and back closed the green ring

Due to the flooding earlier in the year, the ground floor is still unusable, so access is via a back entrance on higher ground which opens on to the first floor. Apparently the idea of the ground floor being so far below the surrounding ground didn't raise any alarm bells with the architects about where water might collect

Anyway, this means having to cut through the university campus to get there, so that made a change. Forty years ago, I was just about to start taking my finals there

[NickFitz]

Lunch: corned beef hash. Very tasty

This was also an excuse to christen the thing-dicer I bought the other day, basically a mandolin with knobs on that can slice, julienne, and dice. Worked very well at chopping a few small spuds into little chunks

Meanwhile in stalking news, there was a delivery for the lady with the colourful hair from the ground floor sitting in the hall when I got back from the blood tests, so naturally I Googled her; I'd figured she was probably an academic, like the Pepys expert who used to live across the landing. Turns out she's actually a movie producer and screenwriter, and has also worked as a makeup artist on Strictly Come Dancing, and on a surprising number of zombie and sci-fi films (though IMDb describes many of them as shorts)

[ladymuck]

Afternoon all

It's been a dull old day, much cloud and little sunshine. It's currently 10 degrees and the high was 11. Although no rain was forecast, I swear there were a few spits and spots. Barometer is down to 1016 mBar.

I was at the office today. It wasn't a bad day because I'd generated something for me to do that kept me occupied.

Received a call from the letting agency about the flat, to go through the offer and be encouraged to "improve" it, which I resisted. There is another offer from a couple with a small child who viewed it just before me. My viewing was delayed 5 minutes by their tardiness in getting out of the building. It all depends on what the landlord wants, I guess.

I have a ticket to see Dune Part 2 at the IMAX this evening. Part of me can't be bothered to trek over to Waterloo and have a late night.

[xoggoth]

on a surprising number of zombie and

Sounds like my sorta lady. I'm a zombie addict.

[NickFitz]

Tea tonight was leftover Turkish mixed grill

This was accompanied by the Brighton night policing thing, reminding me why I don't like Brighton very much. And then a couple of episodes of a new thing on All4, Murder Case: The Digital Detectives which is the usual sort of murder documentary thing, but with an emphasis on the evidence gleaned from phone data and the like. No great secrets revealed, but the second one made some interesting use of Apple Health data

[NickFitz]

Read a chunk more of The Sisterhood. I don't think it works as well as Julia. The author has tried updating Orwell's Oceania, and I don't think it works.

For example, Orwell has Julia as a mechanic servicing the novel-writing machines in the Ministry of Truth: "He had sometimes seen her with oily hands and carrying a spanner." In this, the novels are written by AI, and there's a token mention of her using a spanner to remove a panel and fiddle with the wires in some kind of computer. Where are the oily hands coming from in that scenario?

Worse still, it seems to be understood by Outer Party members that Big Brother is some kind of AI supercomputer, and that's what's watching people through the telescreens. I'd say it's a major point that Big Brother is supposed to be a real person, and any suggestion to the contrary would be crimethink. And I'd argue that it's the fact that the people on the other side of the telescreens are people that helps to make their presence so menacing. Also, how did the Party manage to develop such advanced technology by the 1980s?

Then there's a character who's supposed to be aged around sixty, yet is supposed to only have a notion of what life was like before the revolution because she heard about it from her parents. As she would have been born around 1924, and Orwell's Oceania is implied to have come about as a result of a war after the Second World War and probably in the 1950s, she would have her own adult memories of life before Ingsoc. In fact, she'd be only ten or twenty years younger than party elders such as Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford, who'd been senior party members alongside Big Brother but were arrested around 1965, broken by the Ministry of Love but then released as an example to others, and lived out their last days drinking at the Chestnut Tree Café where Winston himself had seen them in his adulthood. So if Winston is about forty and has dim early childhood memories of the revolution, a woman who's twenty years older than him must remember life before quite clearly.

So not as impressed by this one

Goodnight all