When we don't see one of the cats of the evening, we don't particularly worry. They'll usually be there for breakfast.

Occasionally, they're not there for that either.

The last time we'd actually seen Toro was on Saturday, though I was pretty sure that he'd burrowed under the duvet early Sunday morning. But we didn't see him on Sunday. Or on Monday.

By yesterday (Tuesday) evening, we were round the neighbours asking them to check their sheds for him, but we were definitely worried. I was coming to terms with the likelihood that we'd not see him again.

Four-bloody-a.m. this morning, I hear a demanding yowl. It doesn't sound like Sake who has a slightly different note. I got out of bed in the darkness and headed downstairs to the conservatory where the noise seemed to be coming from. I turned on the light, to see Sake in the doorway. Oh, no, not a false alarm. And then behind the cat tower, there's another cat.

Yes, it is Toro, and he's decided to wander along home to see if there's any food, and if not, why not.

I will admit to the cardinal sin of rousing bellinghwoman at 04:00 to show her that he was back. He was dutifully appreciative of the attention and snuggled under the covers for a while before later wandering off downstairs to be fed.

Of course he was gone by the time I roused this morning to the sound of a neighbour knocking on the front door to tell us she'd seen him for the first time in a few days.

Happy Birthday to simonb. Yeah, just another day, isn't it ...

OK, we're now in the season of Spring. So can the bl**dy weather please get with it?

(Not even our daffs have appeared yet, just the cherry blossom and the snowdrops.)

Last night, we had an ox-cheek pie (with a herby shortcrust pastry top). I like ox cheek - it's a very cheap cut that cooks up really well given enough hours gentle cooking time.

To drink, we had a bottle of Grant Burge's Filsell Old Vine Shiraz 2000, from the Barossa Valley

Damn, I wish we had a few more bottles of that. I haven't a clue where I got it, but the back label was right is saying that it would benefit from careful cellaring. Online guides indicate it peaked a year or two ago, and that I'd have to pay £30 a bottle to replace it. But I may be tempted to get a newer vintage.

It's somewhat ironic.

Saturday saw higher temperatures, with the snow beginning to thaw off. The late evening saw heavy rain, which washed away the last of the snow.

So of course it's on Sunday morning that we got a knock on the door: an elderly man had managed to slip and fall over on the pavement two doors down, and the knock on the door was a passer-by asking for help.

(We were in, whereas the inhabitants of the nearer houses weren't.)

It was an old man from the other end of our street. He was a bit shaken, and bleeding from his forehead. But he was conscious and decently coherent for someone aged 87. Some of his neighbours turned up, and we made him comfortable with blanket and cushion while waiting for an ambulance to come (we wanted him checked out, in case of concussion etc.).

And then we used some of the rest of the tissues to mop up the small red pool on the ground.

Eww!

In a university study in China, a morbidly obese man was put on a diet.

The diet was designed to make it difficult for a particular gut bacterium to thrive.

It worked, because after 23 weeks, the population of that bacterium had gone from 35% to zero.

Perhaps coincidentally, the man lost 51 kilos, despite not exercising.

Or just perhaps, the hypothesis that gut bacteria can do other sorts of harm, not just give you ulcers, may have some truth. We'll have to see more and larger studies, but the general hypothesis that the modern epidemic of obesity may indeed be just that - a bacterial epidemic that anyone can catch - is looking more plausible. The high sugar high refined starch Western diet may be to blame, but I'm wondering how much that is due to it being what the enterobacter likes rather than its actual calorie load. And I wonder it's why diets that are at first sight illogical are effective.

New Scientist article (may require registration)

So, no sooner does Toro gets his knee repaired (at least the shaft of his femur reattached to that knobbly end of it that is the upper half of the knee joint) than we get a call.

From the care home my mother now lives at.

She's had a fall, and been taken down to the Lister to check her knees. By the time that was done, it was getting late, so she spent last night there.

Pardon me if I look a bit distracted right now.

Following yesterday's post, an update on Toro

He's now had his femur bolted back together.

This will do no good whatsoever if he puts it under strain, so for now he's got to be confined. Which means locked in a cage, for weeks and weeks.

(3 to 6, anyway)

We're leaving him at the vet's till Monday, when we will collect him and his cage. (Sake will, meanwhile, be also being collected, in her case from the cattery where she'll be for the Novacon weekend.)

And then we'll be keeping him in a cage at home.

We really don't know how he did it, but Crystalpaws Neko Totoro — or Toro to us — broke himself last night.

He came trotting in through the cat flap at about his dinner time, and went upstairs.

C went up to bring him down to be fed, and put him in front of his bowl, in which he seemed somewhat uninterested.

He ate a bit, and then came out into the hallway and sat down, with one rear leg pointing in the wrong direction.

We think he'd have had difficulty getting in through the cat flap if his leg had already been like that, so somehow, in the course of five minutes, he managed to either dislocate or break something, and he didn't even yelp.

My current hypothesis is that he managed to pop his left hip while coming in through the cat flap, but we're waiting on the X-ray.

(As far as breed is concerned, Abyssinians are energetic and athletic, and certainly not known for hip dysplasia)

ETA: no, it's a fracture of the femur at the growing point. The leg may have finished growing, but it apparently takes time to finish toughening up and meanwhile his musculature is already full strength. So he appears to have managed to snap it under his own strength.

This morning, on the verge beside the road that James I & VI rode on the way to become King in London, and down which Constantine the Great came on the way to the Imperial Throne in Rome, was ... a speed camera van.

It's a common location for it, as the road is opening up after the town centre traffic and it's also at the end of a longish downhill slope after the rise to cross the railway bridge. Both of which make it all too easy to find yourself doing a few miles over the limit.

I wonder how many they do catch there on the Old North Road. And I wonder what a Roman Emperor would have felt.

Since Semagic has just reminded me ('reminded'? that implies I knew it and forgot it. OK, 'informed'): happy birthday today to khrister and songster.

On one of the days during PhoenixCon this year, which was at the Irish Writers' Centre, we went down to a restaurant in the basement for lunch.

The food was expensive, but good, and it was tricky getting a seat.

Checking back, I suspect that we were in Chapter One, which has had a Michelin star for the last few years. That would explain it all.

We've done it before. We've woken up in the Royal Marine hotel in Dún Laoghaire (though we may have been still calling it Dunleary back then), had breakfast, got in the car and driven down to Kinsale, and had dinner there.

This time, we had drinks in the bar of the Royal Marine afterwards.

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Once upon a time, we would attend the Irish National SF Conventions, the Octocons. And perhaps we will do so again. But we will never forget our first one, for two reasons.

Firstly, on walking in to the convention and asking to register, we were recognised by the person behind the registration desk, despite the fact that bellinghwoman had never set foot in that country before our arrival a couple of hours earlier. (sacristan still recognises us, but these days with more excuse.)

And secondly, because it took place that year, and for the next few years, in the Royal Marine hotel, which is in the ferry of of Dun Laoghaire (and no, I no longer have to check that spelling).

This was one of those magnificent places, known for having been the haunt of Sinatra and Laurel & Hardy and a whole lot more. It had a beautiful frontage, and would catch the afternoon sun nicely. Just up the hill from the ferry terminal, and from the DART station, it was easy to get to as well. But it was fading, and at the end of the 90s it was slated for closing and possible demolition, or at the least conversion into flats. Octocon itself moved away and found itself for a while in the hinterlands of Co. Kildare, in Maynooth. We forgot about the elderly lady by the seaside.

This last week, we were back. The hotel is still there, but they've knocked part of it down. Happily, the part they demolished was the rather cheap 1960s (?) extension that the function rooms had been in. And they've built a new 8 storey extension in its place, with new modern rooms. It's got light pouring in through its sides and is, in general, a good piece of modern architecture. It's the right size for its position, being only slightly higher than the car park and shopping mall beside it, and it just works. By dint of arriving two days early, we got a nice room, one with an extra 7 foot of width over the normal rooms, and it had both a bath and a shower cubicle.

It had only one real downside: the bed was too soft for me.

(On the other hand, that meant it was unusually to bellinghwoman's preferences.)

As for the frequent complaint about plugs: there were 4 free sockets just above the back of the desk, and two beneath each bedside table, giving a total of 8 sockets. It's a serious gadget freak that can need all of those.

They also do a pretty good wedding, with above average food. This being Ireland, you will get steamed potatoes to go with your roast potatoes, but the beef served was both generous and tender. And the banqueting suite is not an internal box - it has full height glass along the frontage, looking down to the Irish Sea.

In general, especially if you can get the £65/day rate we got (no breakfast, but that was €9 each if we wanted it), a pretty good one.

We're back from Ireland. It was an excellent time in general, but one particular point is worthy of mention at this point.

I hired a car, a 6-speed diesel Vauxhall Insignia. It came with scuff marks on the front and rear bumpers.

It did not come with that lever one usually finds between the seats for operating a hand brake.

It's just possible the two are related.

---*---

What it did have was a button. Stick a fingertip under it and pull upwards, and a noise would be heard and the wheels would be braked. Press it down, and that brake would not immediately release: instead, a chime would sound and a warning light would appear on the dashboard indicating one should press the pedal.

(Which pedal it didn't actually state.)

So I'd press the button, and then press the various pedals to get the light to disappear.

I'd done about 400 miles over the course of a few days (mostly on cruise control, where hand brakes are totally unnecessary) before finally realising that the button pressing part was not actually required. Just put the car in gear and try to drive, and the brake would release without any fuss whatsoever.

I would have found this out earlier, probably, if a manual had been available in the vehicle.

In future, I will insist on that.

We like live performance. It's something we've only really got into in the last couple of years, but we do go to a number of live performances of both music and comedy. And we reckon that over 90% of the time, we're happy to have gone

But oh dear, sometimes we're not.

Last night was a case in point: we went to see Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick at the Junction in Cambridge. Swarbrick in particular is a legend in the British Folk scene.

We left at the interval.

It was all that is wrong with Folk music: traditional tunes rendered inert under a peatbed of respectful seriousness. We didn't quite have the singer with a finger in his ear, but Carthy spent almost all the time retuning his guitar and still being out of tune. I spent some of the time waiting for the interval trying to appreciate the guitar technique, but it wasn't anything special.

No, not for us. There are obviously people who do like it, judging by the few seats unfilled, but not us.

Contrast that with the gig we went to last Friday: Megson. They were performing in our local church as part of the Royston Arts Festival. They also do Folk, they also do Traditional songs, but they play with life coming out of every note they play. They too are a duo, in this case Stu Hanna and Debbie Hanna-Palmer, but they provide a much fuller performance. Perhaps it's that they're young, but they know that above all music must live.

The upside of going to the Junction is that I bought tickets for Megson's performance there in November, which will be the third time we'll have seen them this year. (The first being when they opened the Cambridge Folk Festival this year - before that we'd never heard of them.)

So tonight, it's Distraction Club night, a melange of performances, some of which we know and will love, some of which will be new to us.

So why did Midge just stop singing?

Oh, because the music player had just auto-updated.

What is deeply impressing is that when I told the new software to continue, it picks up in the same place the old version stopped. This is almost as smooth as it could be.

Ireland. We will be in you next month.

We'll be visiting for the induction into servitude wedding of natural20 in October, and, my having a few days holiday left to take before the end of October, we're coming over on the Wednesday 17th. Anybody who is around on the 17th to the 19th who'd like us to descend on you, squeak here.

We are hiring a car, so we might even drop down to Cork.

There we were last night. We'd watched Dr Who and were watching QI. About ten minutes in, we heard a cat yowling.

Now there are a lot of different yowls, not to mention a number of different cats around, so we just assumed one of ours was asserting territorial rights over the black and white mog that keeps wandering into our garden. But after a few minutes, it was apparent that there were no replies, this was a lone cat yowling.

And it sounded like the "I'm here, would you please come and retrieve me?" yowl. Not a desperate yowl, but one where we were supposed to do something. Oddly enough, it was quite distinctly audible within the living room, less so elsewhere in the house.

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When I was young, one of the dishes my mother used to cook us was a variation on a chilli con carne. It was deeply inauthentic, as befits British cookery of 40 years ago, but it was tasty, inexpensive, and very easy to prepare. And we all loved it.

I have recently started to cook it myself, at least a variation on it, but I think I have the essence of the original.

So, with no more ado

Chilli beans

Ingredients

• 500g lean minced beef (extra lean is better)


• 1 tin of baked beans


• 1 packet of Colmans chilli con carne mix


• 2 tablespoons tomato ketchup


• 4 tablespoons water

Method

• Preheat an oven to 160C


• In a casserole, brown the minced beef


• Add the spice mix and stir in


• Add the remaining ingredients and mix in


• Mix all together and place the casserole in the oven for 45 minutes

The above will serve two hungry people. When I was young, we used to have it with freshly baked crusty white bread, but bellinghwoman and I have it on its own.

The original also had a couple of bay leaves in, but I've so far managed to forget that both times. You can also add some chopped browned onion. If you feel like it, you can be serious with this, adding your own spices rather than using a pre-made mix, and using tomato purée and sugar and vinegar instead of the ketchup, but at that point you're starting to head off into proper cookery. The essence of this one is its simplicity.

Last night we went to see the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Radio Show Live at the Cambridge Corn Exchange, where they did two one-hour episodes gently harvested and distilled from the corpus that is HHGTTG.

And it was with original cast, where available. Which meant no Peter Jones as the book, since he's been gone these too many years, but the original Arthur, Ford, Trillian and Zaphod? Oh yes.

Staging was something between a radio play, with actors holding scripts in front of microphones, and a full stage play. Costumes were worn, and prosthetic bulges used on the Vogons. Marvin was a puppeteered creation, but done well withal. And at the back of the stage, a band who opened the proceedings with the intro tune (diverting momentarily through a Dr Who theme ...). HHGTTG was always a very audio production and this kept to the precedents.

The first episode comprised the story up to the explosion on Magrathea, so a pretty straight telling of the part everyone knows. It was somewhat helter-skelter, since it was condensing what was originally 3 hours down to 1, but the essence was there.

The second episode was a bit more confusing, since it was a concoction derived from the remaining 4 books. Random Dent appeared, and the Guide Mark II, and we also had the Milliways episode, but not necessarily in the order one might expect, and there was a nice lampshading at one point when Arthur conceded that several chapters of his life seemed to have gone missing.

Guest stars for the evening were John Lloyd as an excellent book, and Rory McGrath as the Meat of the Day offering his beer-basted liver (40 years of basting) and a Coq au Vin (one portion, small, only). Oh, and even the Higgs Boson got a mention. All in all, an enjoyable evening, with a packed out audience. The only downsides were that the upstairs bar was closed (why, Corn Exchange, why?), and the merchandise was priced laughably expensive.

What's with the Zombies? Why are they taking over SF&F?

OK, that's perhaps a bit of an exaggeration, but let's look at the Hugo list for this year, at least as far as I've got through it.

Of the 5 novels, two use the Z word

That's Deadline by Mira Grant, and Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey

A third novel, A Dance With Dragons by George R. R. Martin, doesn't use the term. But it's the 5th novel in a series in which — well how shall I describe it? — dead people rise again and attack their former families and friends. Zombies by another name, and even if they don't feature during this novel, their existence is the great threat behind the series as a whole.

In the graphic story section, there is Schlock Mercenary: Force Multiplication by Howard Tayler. His current story (i.e. a year later in the online Schlock Mercenary publication) is also using the zombie trope, though we will have to wait a few more days to discover whether corpses infect.

(In the novella list Mira Grant reappears with Countdown, but I will just note that that's a prequel to her novel and not list it as another example. Also reappearing is Game of Thrones the TV series, which is the dramatic version of the 1st novel of which Dance with Dragons is the latest.)

So we have a whole swathe of stories from a bunch of writers in which zombies feature.

Why?

Is it a coincidence, or is there something in the concept of the zombie that allows writers to play with existential threat? Now that imminent nuclear destruction has gone, is our biggest threat the suicide bomber? Is the zombie a metaphor for the enemy that you cannot reason with, and that doesn't mind if he dies so long as you do too?

If so, how come Martin was there back in 1996, when Game of Thrones was first published?

(I'll also note autopope's Bit Rot, where it's a robot zombie outbreak.)

Oh Google, why? Why is there no SD slot of any form in the Nexus 7 tablet?

You did this on the Nexus S phone. Which is why I didn't buy one of those, and went for the Samsung Galaxy S II instead.

You did this on the Galaxy Nexus phone. Which is why I won't buy one of those.

And now you've done it on the Nexus 7 tablet. I don't think I'll be buying one of those either.

Please don't skimp on storage, even if some other manufacturers do. I will not buy something that tops out at a mere 32 GB - I've got that much filled on my Galaxy S II phone's external card.

Yes, I know, I know, Apple don't do it. But you shouldn't copy their bad habits. This is one of the reasons they never get my money.

I blame desperance.

We previously had a pair of Abyssinians, one male, one female.

They were beautiful, affectionate, and intelligent. They were also well behaved.

We now have another pair.

They are also beautiful, affectionate, and intelligent.

However, ever since desperance visited, they seem to have started trying to steal food from the kitchen surfaces, something the previous two did not. And yesterday, Sake added Assaulting a Police Officer to her charge sheet. Honestly, we've been trying to teach her that licking the top of someone's head is not something to be done.

Rule #1 at comedy clubs and gigs: if you're in the front row, expect interaction of some form with the performers. This may be fairly benign - at the Armstrong and Miller show at the Cambridge Corn Exchange the other month, the worst we had to do was pull our legs in as Ben Miller went charging along the row to borrow a victim for Armstrong's dentist's chair sketch.

But when we go to the Distraction Club, we're usually in the third row. There's a row of tables in front of us. We should be safe.

Yet, two months in a row, I've been 'got'.

Last month, it was Paul Sweeney who somehow caught sight of my raised eyebrow and started taking the proverbial out of me. Amusingly so, and not maliciously, but even so.

This month? Oh dear. A white Dublin comedy hip-hop duo called Abandoman. If I'd read this review in advance, I might have had qualms about being that close to the front. But I got hauled out of the audience, and played my first ever game of Connect 4 — with Mitch Benn and the Distractions around me as well — as the show finale.

I expect it on YouTube within the next few days. D'ya think I could file a DMCA request to have that taken down?

(Abandoman were great. If you ever get the chance to see them, get along and do so. They're the type of act which must be seen live, they rely so heavily on audience interaction. To see someone improvising completely appropriate lyrics in response to whatever random stuff lands in front of him is something that just won't come across on a recording: you've got to see that sharpness in action from a distance of a few feet away.)

One thing I've learnt: from the stage, the place where bellinghwoman and I usually sit is pretty much in the centre of the field of view. I could see her taking pictures of me.

The title may be a little misleading. The trip wasn't a surprise, in that I'd blocked off the required holiday since May last year, when I'd been told to take off the period from the 20th to the 30th of January 2012. But what I didn't know was what - or rather where - it would be.

There were some clues.

I was given some socks for the wedding anniversary back in December. They were marked as hot weather or inner socks.

Second clue - for Christmas, I was given a very effective down jacket, and some other socks, and some other cold weather clothing.

So, Morocco was unlikely (and anyway, we don't really do hot. Well, bellinghwoman doesn't, unless it's somewhere stunning like HK).

And I was informed that we weren't going to Svalbard. I suspect that rather few people go to Svalbard in January: it's before sunrise, and the polar bears have had plenty of time to get really hungry, at least those stirring from hibernation.

So, my primary guess was St Petersburg. I've been collecting the Nordic countries, starting with Iceland in 2004 and finishing with Finland in 2008. That Finnish trip had then continued on to Estonia, another Baltic country, but we'd not been back to the Baltic since, and we need only a handful of countries to complete the Baltic set. St Petersburg is the great Russian city on the Baltic and would have been the obvious next step. However, you need a visa to visit, and I'd seen no indication of that.

So it was with a sense of delighted puzzlement on my part that we departed by car on the Thursday evening. After 200 yards, we turned right at the end of our street, thereby cancelling out a whole bunch of likely destinations. 50 yards later, we turned right again, thus killing another whole set (anything involving a ship from Harwich, or a plane from Stansted).

By the time we turned down the sliproad onto the A1M and thereby avoided Luton, Heathrow Airport was my primary candidate, though Gatwick Airport was still in the frame.

And Heathrow it was, or rather the Holiday Inn on Sipson Road, where we were to spend the night. bellinghwoman had arranged a package of a room for the night followed by the long term car park.

And so to sleep, me still not knowing where we were going.

You looking at the tags may have a better idea.

Although I've not played it for the past fortnight, I've been enjoying the game of Skyrim, which does a very good job of invoking a Scandinavian-style region, inhabited by various races but most aboriginally by the Nords.

It was therefore with a certain frisson that some days ago I went shopping for a camera tripod in the Norwegian city of Bodø. Bodø is the capital city of Nordland.

Oddly enough, I didn't see a single local waving a sword in my direction.

Back from our inspection of the award winning work of one Slartibartfast, I will note one thing: the number of airports visible from the sea. It seems that almost every community of any size has one.

Looking at the SAS in-flight magazine on the way home, I glanced at the map of the places that that airline serves in the region: over 40 places in Norway (a total somewhat higher than all the other countries it serves in the Baltic region put together). It appears that by the time your town has reached 5,000 population (yes, five thousand), it can expect to have SAS planes landing there. There is very roughly an SAS served airport per 100,000 population, which doesn't look so extreme until you realise that Oslo, Bergen, Stavanger and Trondheim together comprise 1.4 million people but only need 4 of their quota of 14.

When you discover that Kirkenes (population ~7000 if you include the surrounding areas) has over a quarter of a million passengers a year - or nearly 40 flights per resident per year - you realise how much flying is required. There are really only three options for getting from Kirkenes in the north to the southern part of the country. Firstly, road. To Bergen for example, that's 2600+ km if you don't route through Finland and Sweden. Or you can take the Hurtigruten ships. Which will get you down to Bergen in 6 days. Or you fly.

So if you need to get anywhere and back in less than a week, the aircraft is it.

(On the other hand, you send your cans for recycling by ship.)

The meme in question is as follows: leave a one-word comment on this post, starting with the third letter of your LJ name, that describes today for you. Then copy this post yourself so I can do it back.

As a change, here's something different

Approximate average speed over the year 2011 by all modes of transport: 1 mph

I'm fairly sure this was the first year this century in which I didn't get into an aeroplane. Countries visited are as a result somewhat down, being only England, Wales, Ireland, France, Switzerland and Germany. Much of this was due to staying home because of the new cats from late spring through till the autumn.

I have to say, I am adoring this Skyrim game. Not only does it have one of the nicest landscape renderings I've come across (I'm running it at Ultra, and not hitting slowdowns), but the world feels lived in. OK, there is an excessively high bandit population, but maybe I'm just a trouble magnet.

I've encountered two dragons so far. One was ... challenging. The other was challenging in a different way, as my attempts to attract its attention didn't actually work, and it flew off. But in general, they're big, fast, nasty bastards that you need to be very careful with. The first one fried me several times before I ended up in a spot where I could shoot at it and its fireballs deflected off the scenery in front of me.

What I do like is the openness of the game. I'm not stuck in a class - well, only my particular game-play style is sticking me with heavy armour and a bloody great axe, but that's me. I could equally well be wandering around firing off spells. I've got a few quests I've been asked to do, but the givers seem rather resigned to me maybe not actually doing them.

And oh, I've got a house, a sidekick shieldmaiden, and a horse, the latter two of which will fight with me. (It's slightly embarrassing when the attacking wolf gets kicked to death before I've got my bow unlimbered.)

I'm majoring in archery, two-handed weapons, heavy armour, smithing and lockpicking, with a side-order of persuasion.

I also like the character building. The Jarl of Dragonsreach has a particular lazy yet penetrating gaze, and the way he focuses on you is more than a little disconcerting.

And while on the subject of weight, I also tried the cats.

Totoro is weighing in at about 10 pounds, which is a not unreasonable weight for a tom coming up 9 months.

The surprise is that Sakura is 9 pounds. Put them together, and she looks smaller than her brother, but weight-wise, there doesn't seem to be much in it. I think it's down to the colouration: he's a black-flecked brown while she's fawn, and I think it's that dark coloured things look larger than their light-coloured equivalents.

They're also both mostly muscle. She managed to push open the bedroom door yesterday morning, despite it supposedly being shut.

Reboot and reload is my phrase for what it feels like my gut has done over the past few days. In the early hours of Monday morning, my digestive system got extremely unhappy — I suspect a norovirus, though without pathology testing I cannot be sure — and between a mixture of projectile vomiting (thankfully only one episode) and watery diarrhoea, went and emptied itself.

There's a lot of bacteria in your gut - it contains something like ten times as many bacterial cells as there are human body cells in the whole of your body. They're a lot smaller, of course, which is why you don't actually weight the best part of a tonne, but it still makes a measurable part of your body weight.

After 48 hours, I'd dropped at least 5 pounds weight.

I've now put a couple of pounds back on, some of which will be fluid replacement. But oh, I really don't recommend it as a weight loss treatment.

As of Saturday, I should be safe to visit a hospital.

Novacon 41 was enjoyed this weekend just gone. We enjoyed catching up with friends, which for us is a lot of what conventions are about, and went out for two meals. The first, with feorag and autopope, was a South Indian place named The Chennai. The food was (mostly) good and pretty vegan friendly, the price not extortionate, but oh my, they really do need more waiting staff on a Friday evening. Despite entering before 18:00, it still took about two and a half hours for them to serve us the two courses we did have, and rather than ask for the bill, I went to the counter to pay. I would go back, but only if I could be guaranteed better service.

The second was with groliffe, Caro, drplokta and flickgc, at a teppanyaki restaurant that the latter two had spotted while lost in the city looking for the hotel. Teppanyaki is a type of cuisine I wouldn't want to eat every day - it tend to be rather limited, in my experience - but I seem to have it about once a decade, and it does makes for a fun meal. It's somewhat more expensive though, with a bill of nearly twice what the Chennai cost (though in the Chennai, no alcohol was included).

Sunday evening was the beer tasting and 'Mexican' meal organised by the con, about half way through which I realised I was developing a really nasty cold, with my sinuses closing up. So I headed for bed at an early hour.

There then followed, rather unexpectedly, an extremely upset stomach and an episode of projectile vomiting (happily, I was in a fully tiled bathroom when that last bit happened). Looking things up, I may well be the victim of one of the noroviruses - the symptoms listed by the NHS all fit. There's not a lot I can do, except stay home and, definitely, do not visit any hospitals.

Bad news #2 - my mother was taken to hospital this morning.

(Bad news #3 - somehow, I managed to miss paying off the credit card that gets one payment taken from it every blue moon, and just got hit by charges on it.)

On the (possible) norovirus, during the tasting, at one point I went out to use the Gents, to discover in there a fellow fan who may well have suffered the same problem. If so, I expect others to also have encountered whatever the cause was.

(Incubation time: 24-48 hours, which means probably something I ate on the Saturday. The Teppanyaki is unlikely, since that was a fully shared meal, and apart from drplokta not having the seafood, and Caro having the vegetarian options, the other four of us had equal exposure. The burger at lunchtime is my #1 candidate, though it can transfer without food being involved.)

autopope starts posting on Twitter as @cstross.

Twitter grinds to a halt.

Surely no connection.

(If I was being paranoid, I'd wonder if TPTB have learnt from the Arab Spring and are strangling social media in an attempt to hinder the Occupy$FOO protesters.)

For those of you who are more used to autumn in Cambridge, MA than in Cambridge, Cambs, we would like to point out that the current weather is not typical. Please don't think that this will continue.

The definition of a Libertoonian - someone who screams 'Marxist censorship!' when the person who is paying for the server refuses to host his rants.

Why do they think everyone else owes them a living, and yet think they owe nobody else anything?

Following the announcement of Unicorn School™: The Sparkling and its first four followups by Hugo-award winning SF author Charles Stross, we are excited by the rumour that the sixth book in the franchise will be written by fellow Hugo award winner Peter Watts. In a heavily coded announcement on his blog, Watts appears to announce that he will be involved in producing Unicorn School™: The Squid, his own inimitable take on Paranormal Romance, one where the paranormal is from HP Lovecraft and the romance is Hentai, and in which he builds on his previous development of vampires as seen in his novel Blindsight.

Should this be confirmed, we're sure that all fans of the franchise will be delighted by the news.

I appears that I need to apologise to the north half of Royston tonight.

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I note that ECMA has published a new spec for a short range wireless link: ECMA-398

It's very fast: 560 Mbps

It's also very short range: a few centimetres

More a contactless docking cradle than a WiFi network replacement, methinks.

Bad news - just as I start using them, I see that Amazon has bought The Book Depository

ETA: Link now demangled (remind me not to use double quotes in a title attribute)

Happy birthday and Bon Voyage to crazyscot.

I'm not sure whether 'many happy returns' is applicable to someone fleeing to the opposite side of the world, but enjoy the day as much as you can.

So I've worked my way through the novel shortlist, and I've a pretty good idea that I will be actually marking 'No Award' above one particular book. If it had been a physical volume, I'd have thrown 'Blackout' against the wall. After 150 pages, Willis still hadn't engaged me one way or the other.

All four of the other volumes are worth reading. I'm putting 'Feed' in fourth place, because I disliked the setting and I exceedingly disliked Grant doing one particular thing (and I can't even begin to discuss what she did without extreme spoilers). However, although it was at least 100 pages before I got over that initial dislike, the story did affect me emotionally and I will probably go buy the second book at some stage.

In third place goes Jemisin's 100,000 Kingdoms, which I enjoyed but found slightly less memorable than the rest.

Second place goes to Bujold's Cryoburn which is yet another Miles Vorkosigan story. However, it does posit interesting questions as to what would actually happen if cryogenic freezing of people became widespread. It does suffer slightly from the 'the whole world is the same' effect of the examined world, but it's allowable for all that. This takes place on a different planet because it needs that separation for it to work politically.

And first place goes to McDonald's The Dervish House, in which he takes on near-future Istanbul and brings a city to life so well that I now want to go there. It rightly received the BSFA award, and I'd consider it a worthy Hugo winner too. Oddly enough, I suspect that if it gets beaten, it'd be by Feed.

(And just how, please, did Mira Grant/Seanan McGuire get last year's Campbell for Best New Writer, yet already have 6 novels in print, and another 2 already ISBNed?)

Today's front page article on Baconnaise contains a table listing the supposed nutritional values per 13g serving.

It would appear that a serving contains 0.08 kCal of energy.

It also manages to contain 9g of fat (a figure not surprising in anything like a mayonnaise, which is after all a way of consuming flavoured emulsified oils).

Something that manages to be both mostly fat, and almost free from calories? I don't think so. I think it's not 0.08 kCal, I think it's 0.08 MCal, or 80 kCal, three orders of magnitude higher than quoted.

ETA: Oh dear, it was all too much for tisiphone, so you'll have to look back in the history to see what I was on about.

It's now 32.5C in this corner of southern England. And there's also a reasonable humidity index - not enough to be positively oppressive, but enough that it can't be termed a dry heat.

Yes, that's 90.5 Fahrenheit. And we don't even have the heat island excuse that London could use.

In other news, we're probably not going to be available for feorag's potential trip darn Sarf, since we're likely to be over at Silverstone again next Sunday. We can't really put it off to the following weekend, since there's a Formula 1 GP taking place that day, and we have no desire to get caught in the traffic.

We walked past the newer 'shrine' on Saturday morning, and had a closer look. I now have another question. Why do people put in them what they do?

a) Flowers. OK, that's what we expect - they're a symbol of the fleeting nature of life.

b) A reproduction road sign, for Stamford Bridge. OK, that has meaning, the dead teenager was a Chelsea fan.

c) Cans of Red Bull and bottles of Lucozade. Hmm, well, there is a long history of libatory drinks, and given the driver was apparently drunk, alcoholic ones would have been inappropriate.

d) A shrink wrapped ball of string.

Yes, you read that right. A ball of string, still in its polythene wrapping.

Perhaps that last one just fell out of a shopping bag while the owner was laying something else.

Oddly enough, if you email me and you mention 'God', every Bayesian spam filter I've got will drop your message into the spam folder.

No, I've not told them to do so. It seems they're bright enough to recognise that ostentatious pretence to being devout is the most effective sign of a scammer there is.

One thing that has appeared over the last few years in this country is the 'flower shrine' - a spontaneous laying of flowers at sites associated with unexpected deaths, particularly road accidents.

Three and a half weeks ago, a toddler was struck down and killed by a car on Kneesworth Street here in Royston, and a stack of flowers appeared strapped to a nearby lamp post. Perhaps because it was in town, and thereby easily accessible, or perhaps because it was a small child, or perhaps because the victim and family were well known by the people nearby, the stack was particularly massive, forming a pyramid about six foot in height.

(Parenthetically, the family appear to be of Malaysian Chinese origin, so incomers.)

Today I saw that the flowers were gone.

Is there an accepted period during which flowers are left? Is it till the funeral has happened and there's a grave available? At what point does the council feel it right to take the left flowers away? Who feels they are permitted to lay flowers? Can anyone do it? Who feels they are required to lay flowers?

***

In a somewhat sad sequel, there is now a large arrangement of flowers on Melbourn Street, and workmen are repairing the lights of the pedestrian crossing there. This appears to be due to some teenagers losing control of their car early Monday morning after being asked to stop by the police. We didn't even hear it, despite being only a couple of hundred metres away.

(The two streets named are both millennia old, considerably pre-dating the town which was founded at their crossing point. In Roman times, it would have been a major but remote crossroads, with no water supply anywhere near.)

Just a note for those that don't follow Twitter that tickets for the next Distraction Club night are now on sale

https://www.wegottickets.com/event/124263

"What's the point of a tablet"

"OK, it's nice, but I wouldn't have a use myself."

"Ooo, shiny!"