Bugger.
Just found out from Dad that our little dog Bojangles passed away this morning back in Adelaide: something to do with diabetic complications, which we didn’t realise he had.
I was really looking forward to seeing him again at Christmas.  Depressingly stupid animal, but a real little character, scamp & scoundrel nonetheless.
We think he was a Maltese Terrier crossed with Shih Tzu (or, a Maltese Shit, as we used to explain), although there’s no real way of telling because my brother bought him off some bloke in the Trading Post out …

Just a really quick one (to save you having to read another 1700+ word rant on ill-informed bollards) – SCIENTISTS have proven that bacon sandwiches help you get over hangovers.  Like, with molecules, and stuff.
The story, from The Telegraph, appears to be mostly a slight variation on an almost identical story from a couple of days earlier explaining why bacon sandwiches smell so nice.  Again, it’s molecules and chemicals, and stuff.  Who’d have ever envisioned science would be so useful?

In the absence of an opportunity to type anything substantial this week, here’s a selection of photos I snapped out the window of our plane as we returned from Sweden back in January.
Brilliant.
(It has also occurred to me that the reasons I’ve never taken such pictures before are threefold: Firstly, I’ve typically flown in at night or in cloudy conditions.  Secondly, my old camera – bless it – wasn’t capable of such things.  Thirdly, I think you’re meant to have all your electric doohickeys switched off at this point so …

Recently in Londonist (one of my favourite blogs about most aspects of life in London for curious & interested people) and subsequently in other shards of the mainstream media I read about the “£22m squatters” – the story being that a group of squatters who had previously occupied a house in one of London’s more exclusive areas worth about £6 million had been evicted, and they’d found themselves better digs at a larger place around the corner that’s valued at £22 million.  Needless to say, it’s gotten all sorts of …

Judging by the legs that this story gained, I suspect you’d have had to have been living under a rock in the first week of January not to have heard the story (given that it appears in nearly every news source in the UK) that apparently morris dancing will be extinct within 20 years (including one in The Sun featuring a photo of my learned colleagues Andy & Colin, and I).  Admittedly, the first I heard of it was by telephone halfway up a mountain in Sweden (where I was …

There was a parcel for me in building reception yesterday.  I wasn’t sure what it might be, cos I haven’t ordered anything in a while so far as memory serves.  The desk-lady reached under the desk and produced a box, and profferred it to me.  You know how you suddenly know what a box is going to be as soon as you see the way someone else handles it?  You can get a rough idea of its weight and mass-distribution by seeing how people lift and pass an object, and …

Recently on BoingBoing (an excellent blog I read on a regular basis) there was a story featured which really reached out to me – in Caledon, Ontario lives a little boy named Sam Spiteri.  Sam’s 3 years old, and has spastic quadriplegic cerebral palsy – meaning that among other things, he’s unable to crawl or walk.  After his paediatrician recommended horseriding as therapy for Sam, his grandfather bought him a miniature pony, named Emily.  “When we take him off the pony he cries. Even if he’s tired he doesn’t want …

I’ve been quite enjoying the recent story about the campaign to get some atheist-driven advertising onto the side of London buses.  The nuts & bolts of it being that for many years now non-Christians have had to endure Christian advertisements all over every available surface, and after a comedy writer followed a link at the bottom of a religious ad she saw on a bus, to find an expression that non-believers would spend all eternity in hell.  She decided that it must be fair game to espouse an alternative opinion, …

This really should not be happening.