Apparently this week is "Bike Week" - no, nothing to do with Portsmouth's very own soap opera, but (the organisers claim) "a national celebration of cycling!"
Apparently it's "an annual opportunity to promote cycling and show how cycling can easily be part of everyday life. Demonstrating the social, health and environmental benefits of cycling, the week aims to get people to give cycling a go all over the UK. This year they aim to make 'everyday cycling for everyone'!"
Phew! It's taken long enough, but finally the EAFOAB Episode Summaries are completely up to date.
Every single one of the 1,020 episodes to date has been summarised and entered into a Google spreadsheet. I intended to complete it before we reached 210 episodes, and I've succeeded :)
The Labour Party's Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transsexual Society were in the Greencoat Boy pub in Westminster, central London, when a row broke out. The duty manager is alleged to have refused them service and said that had he known they were a gay group he would not have accepted their booking. Punch Taverns, which owns the pub, has launched an investigation.
Imagine (for whatever reason) you're going on a long bike ride, but your mobile phone is running low on charge. Evidently someone at Nokia thought that the power generated by a dynamo sandwiched between the frame and wheel could do more than illuminate darkness...
The Wisconsin team tested the health-giving properties of stout against lager by giving it to dogs who had narrowed arteries similar to those in heart disease.
They found that those given the Guinness had reduced clotting activity in their blood, but not those given lager.
So next time you go to the pub, order a pint of the black stuff for your pooch! :)
(Never mind the strange things some scientists choose to research - and the creatures they use in their research...)
Apparently it's the 30th anniversary of the release of Pacman today.
So of course Google has to celebrate with one of its famous doodles. Although there's more to this one than meets the eye. Apart the [I'm Feeling Lucky!] button being replaced with [Insert coin].
This one's written in Javascript (so those with NoScript installed may already have spotted something's up!) and is a playable version of the game - apparently all the way up to level 255...
Just in case you're not a mathematical genius (or have easy access to a spreadsheet), 12,053 days (or, if you prefer, 289,263 hours) translates as 18th May 1977. On that rather dubious day in history, at about 5:31pm, one new life amongst many entered the world...
Anyway, Mum and Katie (my sister) popped over on Sunday, including this very attention-seeking ten year old...
As far as I know, nothing whatsoever to do with the US State, but according to an article on our Intranet today (i.e. lifted directly, including the logo):
17th May marks International Day against Homophobia and Transphobia (IDAHO). Campaigns and initiatives take place around the world to combat prejudice against LGBT people.
Apparently there are people standing in four constituencies for the forthcoming UK General Election for the Cure (Citizens for Undead Rights and Equality) Party.
"You can prove anything you want with statistics!"
How true... especially when it comes to the Aztec ambrosia - chocolate.
In today's BBC news comes the revelation that chocolate lovers 'are more depressive', according to experts. Similarly... 29 Jul 2009: Calls to downsize chocolate bars 24 Dec 2007: Dark chocolate 'not so healthy'
You're probably all familiar with the classic slapstick comedy sketch whereby someone saws off the tree branch they're perched on. Scarily enough, it's happened in real life. And the hotel concerned has been fined £1,000 and ordered to pay £1,000 costs...
(Me) I thought it was about time to give you lot a progress update on the Bike episode summaries. Remember the last time I posted, I'd done episodes one to 103, plus 900 to wherever we'd got to by then. A lot can happen in a few weeks, and the number of episodes covered has grown to over 600. There's also a cast list and a title page.
[EDIT Unsurprisingly as news of the site has spread rapidly today, the server is very busy. You may need to refresh a few times before it will let you in.... the config panel is supposed to have a user count, but whenever I've been in today it's stated "Too many users!"]
So far, the UK, Ireland, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and Sweden appear to have closed down their airspace.
Helpfully, the Health Protection Agency have advised there's no health risk from the plume (unless you're flying a plane through it...)
Here's apparently what the Captain of the 1982 flight in which all four engines temporarily failed told his passengers - talk about understatement!
"Good evening ladies and gentlemen. This is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are all doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress."
There is a school of thought which states that the Daily Mail is engaged in an ongoing project to classify every inanimate object into those which cause cancer, and those that prevent cancer.
Perhaps not quite as daft as Facebook increasing your risk of cancer (!), apparently turning on a light when you wake up to relieve yourself in the night can cause it...
A recent study from the Queensland University of Technology shows blondes earn 7% more on average than women with other hair colours, and tend to marry men who earn on average 6% more than other women's husbands.
The survey of 13,000 women showed that the difference in pay was not connected with other factors such as height, weight or education.
On the other hand, a study by Lycos in 2008 showed that 78 of the world's top 100 billionaires had wives or long term girlfriends with brunette or raven hair...
"Translate for Animals is an application for Android phones that recognises and transcribes words and phrases that are common to a species, like cats for example. To develop Translate for Animals, we worked closely with many of the world's top language synthesis teams, and with leaders in the field of animal cognitive linguistics, including senior fellows at the Bodleian Library in Oxford."
Hospitals feature quite heavily on this site - both in fictional stories and in real life blogs. So you may be interested in this story from Tuesday...
Randomly roaming through today's news stories, I discovered this one (predictably enough on the Daily Wail's website) - which instantly reminded me of Stella's opinion of Siá¢n. Hopefully Siá¢n isn't (or wasn't) this bad...
TV bosses in the US have apologised after preview clips of the Playboy channel were accidentally played out on two children's channels (Kids On Demand and Kids Preschool On Demand)
A Time Warner Cable (TWC) spokesman said a "technical glitch" was to blame for the mistake, which lasted two hours in parts of North Carolina on Tuesday.
The company was made aware of the error after parents called in to report it.
I must remember, next time I spend 10-15 minutes carefully crafting a comment, to copy / paste it into a text editor before hitting Preview.
It doesn't always happen, but on several occasions, when either hitting Preview or Submit, the page has decided to reload instead, retaining the comment title but not the comment text. Aarrgh!
It's probably caused by something like a temporary hiccup in communications between my computer and the server, so there's almost certainly nothing anyone can do about it, but it's still darned irritating when it happens.
Completely off-topic, but it may be of interest to Anglophiles...
Google have released a giant update to the UK street view coverage (the panoramic photos taken from Opal Astras with funky camera gear on top), taking it from a few major cities and patchy coverage elsewhere, to (they claim) 96% of UK roads.
Here's a few highlights, (inevitably) from Land's End to John O'Groats, plus a few extra locations thrown in for good measure.
Couldn't their journalists find better things to do with their time than submit a Freedom of Information request on the costs of SRS? Apparently not... and to think it's the headline article on the paper version.
It doesn't help when the website "designers" think it's a good idea to slap a poll on whether Coventry smells or not (!) in the middle of the article text...
OK, here's the latest example of "World gone mad"...
Police in the US state of New Jersey have ordered a family to cover up their snow sculpture of the famous nude Venus de Milo after a neighbour complained.
Eliza Gonzalez sculpted the snow-woman with her son and daughter on her front lawn in Rahway following a snowstorm.
Many people praised their creation, but a police officer told them a neighbour had found it too risque, she said.
When given the option of covering the sculpture up or knocking it down, she dressed it in a bikini top and sarong.
Here's a nice, cheery blog post (well, sort of...)
Just to prove I'm not afraid of laughing at myself...
A few weeks ago, I attended a weekend social in Bournemouth with about a dozen people from another online community I'm a member of - the Radio 4 PM Blog.
You may recall a few weeks ago, I mentioned a daft weekend project of mine, to slowly produce chapter summaries for a certain story featuring characters with the unlikely names of Cathy Watts, Stella Cameron and Simon Cameron. Not forgetting Tom Agnew, Mima, Trish, Livvie, Danny, Billy, and Julie - together with appearances by Leon and his mum, Pippa and her sons, the lab technicians Neal and Gloria, Simon's father Henry and his other half Monica, several dozen other humans, and a dormouse by the name of Spike.
Found during a link crawl from the "Princess" comic strip (see GeekGirl's earlier blog - here's a handy link), an article covering a (recent?) episode of "The Dr. Oz Show" - a US health issues / investigations show presented by Dr. Mehmet Oz, MD.
Checks can be made out & sent to:
Joyce Melton
1001 Third St.
Space 80
Calimesa, CA 92320
USA
Note: $6000 is the operating, maintenance and upgrade budget. Amounts received in excess of the $6000 will be applied to long term debt accrued over the last 19 years.
