Too Late...

...you have all missed Carl Sagan Day! I have just left the chat room which was linked to the live stream from Broward College in southern Florida. I was the last one still standing in the chat room...another first!

Carl Sagan is one of the very few people on my list of "people I would really like to meet/to have met" and the speakers made me even sadder at not being able to achieve this.
The most moving tribute was kept for the last... paradoxically coming from a very frail looking but still keen-witted, belligerently atheistic James Randi. He mentioned the many rumours about Sagan "converting" to religion on his death bed (so reminiscent of all the twaddle about Darwin's last words) and very emotionally told how Carl was together just with his wife Ann Druyan as he lay dying. She told Randi how they had said their goodbyes, knowing that it would be for the last time... and that was it.

It's easy to see how wishful thinking can fuel a wishful belief in the "afterlife" but you have to imagine there's no heaven...

New (Old) Look

I got a mail from my younger daughter last night about a website she had found:

www.yearbookyourself.com

You have to upload a suitable picture of someone and then you can choose a "look" from decades gone by.

This is how our Bid would have looked if she'd been a dedicated follower of fashion in 1960:

She looks frighteningly like a couple of my old teachers from when I was in infant school!

I was going to do the same with a picture of mine but then I realised I already have real pictures from that time which look like that ... duh!

Happy Birthday Atchoo

Yes, it was my birthday yesterday and, yes, I managed to get some kind of cold/cough combination which meant that I spent the day (and the day before actually) coughing and sneezing in bed.

At least this means that my diet has got off to a good start... I poisoned myself with alcohol last Sunday, poisoned myself with some strange beans on Monday and then came down with this lurgy on Wednesday. Haven't even felt like food&drink for a week. It's not exactly Atkins methodology but it'll have to do.

Meanwhile, in Deepest Bavaria, we had our first snow yesterday... yep, s n o w ... time to start thinking about that little dream house in Greece (<- flu-induced ramblings by the way - unless anyone has a suggestion).

So basically: bleeeeeeeeuuuuuuuuuugh

Neutron Resurrectus Est

There is only one good thing about having a hangover - there comes a time when you actually feel better. Correspondingly, having a really bad hangover means that your recovery is like getting over a serious illness. Having a catastrophic, supernova, brain-bursting hangover makes your recovery more like a resurrection - returning from the dark netherlands of the deceased.

It all started as an innocent bread-and-butter gig in an Irish pub not far from where I live, about a 15 minute walk (and I do like to walk home from a gig - it's nice to be in the fresh air and away from the noise). I had a beer during the last set (I don't normally drink during gigs - well, not much - but as I have made a pact with one of the other guys in the band to start a diet this very Monday I was perversely aiming at getting a few last beers down me neck before the deadline).

A birthday party arrived in the pub... a lot of people I knew, including my elder daughter and a lot of other people I hadn't seen for a long time... visitors from the States, Aussies, a New Zealander...
"Have a beer!" "Don't mind if I do!"
"Ouzo?" "Certainly... yeia mas!"
"Bet you don't know which whisky this is." "Erm... hmm, definitely not the same as that other one we just tried".

And so on, and so on...

Time to go, handshakes, hugs and farewells, the warm glow of human fellowship.

Outside... fresh air and... kerPOW: drunk!

My 15 minute walk home became extended to more like 45 minutes due to the substantial number of involuntary steps to the side, to the left and to the right... and back again. For the first time in my life I started to understand Greek dance.

I shall draw a veil of discretion over the events of the hours following my difficult but eventually successful attempts to overcome the evasive keyhole in our front door, just as my memory itself has drawn its own veil over that cloudy time until I finally was able to still the rollercoaster in my head and sink into sleep.

Yesterday was a daytrip to Hades, metaphorical rending of garments and gnashing of gums spent in the company of the chthonic gods; a day when I didn't wish that I was dead for the simple reason that I thought I was! But today... oh glory to my liver... I have returned not, however, to say a futile "never again" but an "at least not for a while".

Don't Ring Us...

Will you look at that! A newly discovered diaphanous ring of dust around Saturn.

Full story at NASA

54 going on 22

In the run up to my birthday next Friday (bleugh) a few disjointed remarks.

We had visitors from Scotland last week - an old friend and her new boyfriend. We got to talking about age.. and he said in a wonderful Edinburgh brogue which I won't even attempt to spell phonetically, "I saw a t-shirt the other week. On it were the words I'm 18 with 36 years' life experience".

That's exactly how it feels, isn't it - there's in-your-head age and on-the-outside age.

I've just had a lesson with two ladies who are enjoying their retirement and this subject came up. We sit around a table for the lesson and I always end up facing a small mirror on the wall opposite. Invariably I look over at it at least 50 times during the hour and each time I think "who's that old bugger?" before realising it's me! (In-your-head age and on-the-outside age.)

The subject of age came up again at the gig I played on Saturday - I don't quite klnow how the conversation turned to wrinkles and cremes to fight wrinkles and injections to iron out wrinkles and so on...

I said, "as far as I am concerned the best way to get rid of your wrinkles is to take your glasses off when you look in the mirror".

Maybe I could get that on a t-shirt...?

Liza23 and Big Bruvver

My elder daughter plays bass in a band... and they have just won the Bavarian Music Lion Newcomer 2009 award!!

Here they are:

Liza23

A Neutron as proud as a very proud thing.

So we went to Berlin to take part in the awards. Great evening... red carpets, TV cameras everywhere, good food, good drink (FREE!!!) and good music.

Then next day we did some sightseeing in Berlin.

It's a marvellous city Berlin but they still have this left over from the DDR days...it gave me the creeps the first time I was in Berlin in 1978 and it seems it still gives me the creeps now. There's something insecty, soviety about it - I had the feeling that there was someone behind every facet watching you with binoculars...

BUT...

then you can get some of this...


and the world is new!

My (well, Dawkins' actually) Latest Book

I just have to find time to read it now...

It's Only 36 Pages...

... but it's still my book!




I couldn't resist getting a test copy from lulu.

Unbeerable

For those of you waiting with that good old bated breath to find out what that frozen beer tasted like...

I'm sorry to confess that it took quite a while to get round to trying it. I didn't want to try it without being sure of having a few other beers in just in case but then when I had a few beers in, I simply ignored the unfrozen half-opened experimental bottle.

Anyway I tried it on Tuesday and it was f****** HORRIBLE!

HORR-EEE-BULL!!

So if you have forgotten your beer in the freezer and you think, "hmm, maybe blah blah..."

DON'T BOTHER.