test please delete

[NickFitz]

Lunch has been a few bits of leftover chicken 65

I wasn't too hungry as I also had a leftover sausage mid-morning

[NickFitz]

Much of the afternoon has been devoted to working out this stuff for my sister's website

It's proved to be quite an interesting problem, which is a polite way of saying it's been driving me up the wall

All good now though, in the sense that I'm finally in a position where I can get started on the really tricky part

[xoggoth]

stuff for my sister's website

Yeh, been there. Pain in the ***, sisters.

Cinema this afternoon with not so loony lady 3.

[NickFitz]

Yeh, been there. Pain in the ***, sisters.

Ah, she's OK - she hasn't been nagging me about it, but I'd like to get it done

Tea has been curried mince and chips

And to go with it, the start of a NEW! two-part 24 Hours in Police Custody

I think this is the second time those tower blocks in Luton have featured in it as the scene of the crime

[NickFitz]

The case in 24 Hours in Police Custody is pretty grim. I get the feeling it'll get grimmer in part two

Later, I started reading Fifth Planet. The Hoyles acknowledge in their introduction that it's hard to predict what a society will be like in the future (the book is set in 2087) so they extrapolated from apparent social trends at the time of writing (1962). They would have been better off glossing over wider society and sticking to the spaceship stuff, as their vision of the future would have been looking pretty ridiculous within twenty years or so, and certainly does now. Husbands having to live off sandwiches when their wives are away because they're incapable of cooking anything for themselves is just one example

Mind you, they don't fare much better with the spaceships. There are two, Russian and American, and the Russians score a great PR coup by sending up a female cosmonaut, the first woman in space. While the book was written in 1962, the introduction is dated 6 April 1963, so just ten weeks before Valentina Tereshkova went up in Vostok 6. Only about 125 years out, then. There's also a bunch of stuff about the Russians having to develop special techniques because women are physically incapable of withstanding the acceleration of a normal launch!

So yes, showing its age a bit. Maybe the stuff that happens off-Earth, which is just getting started, will make up for it

Loads of fireworks over the weekend and an absolutely crazy amount tonight, which are still going on. I was wondering why there were so many on Saturday night, and of course it's Diwali, the most important day of the celebrations being today!

Goodnight all