A whole bunch of inane ramblings about stuff. I can't be more precise than that, I'm afraid.
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| chocolate and vodka A whole bunch of inane ramblings about stuff. I can't be more precise than that, I'm afraid. |
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Tuesday, June 03, 2003 Chocolate and Vodka permanently moves I've decided. CnV is off to Blog-City forever. Please update your links, bookmarks, whatever, with my new address: http://chocnvodka.blog-city.com/. The archives will remain here until, well, until blog*spot kicks me off. ;) posted by Suw | 6/03/2003 02:23:00 PM Monday, June 02, 2003 still can't decide... I don't seem able to fix that Keanu post, which is really bugging me now. Still not sure if I am going to move everything over to Blog-City or stay with Blogger. I guess it depends on whether I can move my archives over or not. I have bigger things to worry about right now, though, but somehow this blog has become important. And I don't like having this knackered post ruining my archives. Ah well, we'll see. I'll just carry on cross-posting for a while and see what gives. posted by Suw | 6/02/2003 04:17:00 PM The Beagle's away, and the Celts are still everywhere, maybe At long last, Mars Express and the Beagle II lander are safely away! Launched today in a Russian Soyuz rocket, it’s sending back telemetry and all systems are functioning normally. We now have only six months to wait before it reaches Mars, when we will find out if the ESA knows the difference between yards and meters. Call me biased, but my money is on a yes to that. NASA, of course, with all its super-duper fandangally pretty American technology and super-duper ohlookdidwereallywasteallthatmoney budget, is also launching Mars probes this month, although I’m not sure whether JPL have yet managed to learn how to count to ten with out taking off their shoes and socks. For all their attempts to strut their stuff as the world’s leading space exploration agency, NASA couldn’t tie their own shoelaces without instructions and some nice big diagrams. They haemorrhage money through inefficiency and incompetence, and their shiny mantra of "better faster cheaper" has ended up costing them dearly, and not just in terms of cold hard cash. The loss of both the Mars Orbiter and Polar Lander missions were serious PR disasters in themselves, but the cost in human, PR and scientific terms of the Columbia catastrophe is uncountable. On the other hand, the ESA have been seen as also-rans for some time now, but with the launch of Mars Express and Beagle II, they prove that you can do real science in space on a tight budget, you just have to be a bit inventive about it. I really hope that we get to hear the obvious line "The Beagle Has Landed" in six months time, and that we get some high quality data back from the red planet. Not only would it be a poke in NASA’s eye, but it would also give a huge boost to European space exploration. After all, there’s no rule that says we can’t do it a lot better, cheaper and faster than NASA. Meantime, though, the damn Celts are everywhere. Maybe. The NY Times (registration required) and the International Herald Tribune both run stories on research that was done last year into the ancestry of a selection of British males which discovered that actually, the English aren’t all Anglo-Saxons, but often Celts. This implies, they say, that the Anglo-Saxons didn’t drive out the Celts, but married them instead. The BBC commissioned the research for their tediously dull series Blood of the Vikings, which was about as watchable as a wallful of Dulux’s newest colour. The data has now been published in Current Biology, a medical rag where I used to work, hence, I think, people jumping on what is actually quite an old story. (Well, they’re not jumping on the story because I used to work for Current Biology. Obviously. Although as an aside I would like to say that that particular job, as Editorial Assistant, does remain my longest ever job, and I left there in May 96. I was there nearly two years and jumped shortly before I was pushed, having become office photocopier queen and thus realising that there was, therefore, nothing left to achieve.) It’s also an old story that’s contradicted by this piece on the BBC Wales website which discusses research showing that the Welsh are genetically different to the English. This suggests that the idea that the Anglo-Saxons pushed the Celts out of England into the Celtic fringe of Wales, Ireland and Scotland is actually more accurate than the theory that everyone got on spiffingly, shagged and made babies. Me, I know the Welsh are different. They don’t have the laundry gene for one. posted by Suw | 6/02/2003 04:11:00 PM Sunday, June 01, 2003 my other blog Until I can fix the godawful mess I've made of this blog, you can read entries at my other blog. posted by Suw | 6/01/2003 02:30:00 PM blerugh i've killed it. posted by Suw | 6/01/2003 02:09:00 PM More Matrix stuff... I've been having an ongoing discussion as regards Mr Reeves over on Sweet Addy. There is one faction that believes that Mr Reeves is not quite the talentless jerk that some people would like to paint him as. There is another faction which believes that Mr Reeves is so thick that he coudn't find his own arse without directions. Me, well I believe that there are some actors, like some bands, that it's fashionable to hate. Maybe they're not the best at what they do. Maybe they've made some bad calls in the past. Maybe some things they've done haven't turned out too well. But somehow this gets translated into a real hatred, and I don't understand that. It's one thing not to like a certain film or certain music, but somehow this dislike of the end product gets translated into a real hatred of the purveyor. "I really fucking hate Grandaddy" or "I really fucking hate Keanu Reeves". Calm down guys, there are more worthy people to hate in this world. Like Bush. Anyway, how can anyone hate Keanu? I mean, really? Look at those big brown eyes and tell me he's not the cutest thing? Failing that, read this and tell me you don't have at the very least some grudging respect for the man. posted by Suw | 6/01/2003 01:38:00 PM |
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