the corner office

We marked the start of the Hottest! October! Evar! by paying a visit to Lullingstone Country Park, which, like most country parks is a mix of woods and lovely countryside and a stream and some hint of beautiful Victorian architecture (in this case Lullingstone Not-A-Freakin'-Castle), and for a deviation from the norm, a golf course, replete with bunny wabbits cooling in the shade at the 7th tee.

Now there are only two things I want to know:

1. Today was hot, but if the Met is predicting that this is truly going to be the Hottest! October! Evar! then do we have any grounds for believing them? Does it mean we'll have snow by next Saturday?

2. If this does turn out to be the Hottest! October! Evar! then does that mean we're in for a snowless winter? Please no!

The best way to help poor people is to let them move freely.

A modest increase in emigration out of low-income countries - just 5% of the people now living there - would expand the world economy by several trillion dollars every year.

... I just don't know when to stop.

I shouldn't type up assignments so late at night.

Y'know, you half expect someone to find out that a moth got into the tunnel. Or maybe the world's finest minds will learn something new. The news that some teensy itty-bitty particle exceeded the speed of light is a bit beyond the rest of us, really. What I quite enjoyed was this quote from the end of the article.

"we are not claiming things, we want just to be helped by the community in understanding our crazy result - because it is crazy".

"And of course the consequences can be very serious."

And of course, that made me think of only one thing:

How bad? Bibilical proportions!

Light reading on the train. Some newspaper articles have a line you just have to quote. This one about a bloke who rammed his Peugot 206 into his girlfriend's house has two:

The court has heard Bruton had planned to "take out as many people as possible" after drinking a litre of antifreeze.

and

Bruton needed two week's hospital treatment after propping a garden fork between the steering wheel and his neck before the crash.

The poor chap's imagination was clearly not matched by competence. The trial continues...

All within 10 minutes of Father and Son entering the local Tesco:

LOOK DADDY, THAT BOY DOESN'T HAVE ANY FINGERS

(poor disabled kid who works as a trolley-collector trying to tell me we've dropped one of our carry-bags)

LOOK DADDY, THAT MAN'S ONLY GOT ONE LEG

(poor geezer on a mobility scooter)

DADDY, THAT MAN IS FATTER'N YOU.

(excessively hefty dude serving us at the fish counter)
(Thanks, son).

After each of these episodes Father patiently explains to Son that people are all different and there's nothing wrong with that but that it's not polite to say things about people because they might hear and be embarrassed, and if Son wants to tell Father he should wait until we are away from the person and he can tell me quietly.

So soon, we have

DADDY, THAT LITTLE BOY ... (Leo, what have I told you about talking about other people?) silence

Down the next aisle ... "what did you want to tell me about that boy?" "He had a Spiderman toy."

Supercomputer predicts revolution. I saw this article and I thought 'bah, the BBC is at it again.' But it's actually an interesting piece of research. What fascinates me is how such vast amounts of information can be now be analysed. Data mining isn't new, but the scope of the information you can now crunch through, and the computing power with which to do it, is just in another league, and you have to know we're only getting started.

When people ask why it is that make-no-money companies like Twitter and Facebook are worth so much, I think this has a lot to do with it. Imagine the kinds of things you can learn about humanity by throwing just a day's worth of Facebook interaction at a herd of supercomputers.

Catching up on the past 2 months' reading... including a stash of books from a charity shop and some I've had for a while.

Passenger To Frankfurt, by Agatha Christie

You see an Agatha Christie novel on the shelf, you buy it, expecting good things. Instead you get a novel written in 1970 when the poor lady must've been about 135, sadly and obviously impoverished of faculties and ability to fathom the modern world, yet blessed (or cursed) with a literary legacy and overly indulgent publisher. This book is a confused, misguided, implausible ramble about the world's "youth" being taken in by some Hitlerian superhuman feller and kids the world over rising up across continents, armed with bombs and guns and chemical weapons. And on drugs. Don't forget the drugs. It ends with some geezer being commissioned to drop happy gas onto everybody. I'm not joking. What a dreadful book.

(The novel actually marked her 80th birthday, what a sad way to go out).

The Fourth Inspector Morse Omnibus, by Colin Dexter (The Way Through The Woods, The Daughters of Cain, Death is Now My Neighbour)

I enjoyed but wasn't blown away by the TV series, and so took my time before starting on this. What a revelation, though. Colin Dexter is, apparently, a cryptic crossword compiler and clearly a right proper educated dude. Chapters are short and plentiful, eclectic in style and content, each starting religiously with some or other quote apropos to what follows (how on earth a single human being have such a vast store of them at hand or mentally noted, I don't know). The man delights in words. This is a taste:

With a sort of expectorant 'phoo', followed by a cushioned 'phlop,' Chief Superintendent Strange sat his large self down opposite Chief Inspector Harold Johnson. It was certainly not that he enjoyed walking up the stairs, for he had no pronounced adaptability for such exertions; it was just that he had promised his very slim and very solicitous wife that he would try to get in a bit of exercise at the office wherever possible. The trouble lay in the fact that he was usually too feeble in both body and spirit to translate such resolve into execution. But not on the morning of Tuesday, 30 June 1992 when ...

Perhaps you had to be there, but I chuckled on the train when I read it. As with all good detective novels, the stories are somewhat secondary to the style and the telling of the chase. The books are a celebration of real ale, cigarette-smoking, being cerebral, slightly grumpy and at odds with a world which is nonetheless pretty enjoyable to be in.

The other thing I loved is that the novels are set in Oxford, and having worked there for 9 months, many of the names and places come to life all the more. I really do miss Oxford.

As for each of the novels themselves, 'The Way Through the Woods' is about a body being found in the woods with twists and turns, obviously. Morse also goes on holiday to the coast, I aspire to British holidays at hotels in Cornwall. 'The Daughters of Cain' has a prostitute and a battered wife and someone with a terminal disease, and someone dying who deserved to. 'Death is now my Neighbour' sees a mistaken identity murder with machinations for some or other honorary position at an Oxford college. Morse gets very sick, Morse finds love, and on the final line of this, the final Morse novel, you learn Morse's first name.

As mentioned, the first 3 Morse Omnibii are in the post as we speak. I'm sorted on the train for some time to come.

I'll leave it at that for now, more to come.

I'm in the market for some decent quality copies of Inspector Morse Omnibii. Not collectible quality, 'cause I'm going to read 'em and they're going to get banged around in my bag (and I'm tight), but I'm partial to hardbacks with dust covers. I don't know what byzantine system of kickbacks and rebates the postal system offers, but there are plenty of books in the Amazon MarketPlace going for bugger-all plus postage, to the point where the charity outfits flogging their books online are approaching as cheap as their high street equivalents.

That's not the cool part. The cool part is I've learned the hard way that a quick 'is this really a hardcover and does it still have the dust jacket?' question to the sellers is the best way to make sure you're getting what you want. And maybe if enough people ask then sellers will get off their butts and describe and categorise their books better. Actually, there's nothing cool about that. The cool part is I fire off a few emails at 10 o'clock at night and get answers back from two of the sellers in minutes.

What an awesome world we live in.

I've cycled home in the rain enough times, but cycling to work in the rain... not just getting to Lewisham and suddenly encountering some precipitation, but knowingly and unflinchingly venturing forth into the stuff... not until today. Once you make peace with the idea of being drenched from head to toe and the squelch in your cycling shoes it's not so bad. Kinda nice actually, as the rain pitter patters on your rain jacket.

I was impressed by the number of cyclists who braved the rain. Except for the buggers who don't have mudguards.