Craig Sawyers

Doesn't let me read that article unless I subscribe. Sigh.

The number of The Beast!

Happy birthday!!

Those names are absolutely true. I have personally been to both Penistone and Cockermouth.

I had a pair of ESP6's in the mid 70's. Those were the self energized ones with a transformer in each earcup? I remember that they were not light. Sounded good as I recall, but listening time was limited by the head crushing weight and the sweaty fluid filled earcups.

Happy birthday!!

https://www.billboard.com/pro/donald-trump-guitar-company-cease-and-desist-order-gibson/

Pretty tame though by comparison with the ice hockey match I went to on the same trip. Everything went as it ought, until helmets came off and a fist fight started. I was astonished at how totally brutal ice hockey was.

I've sat in the front row during a visit to Salt Lake around a decade ago. The thing that freaked me out is that the ball would be thrown full tilt straight at you - until a hand the size of a snow shovel appears as if from nowhere and collects it. I found it a great experience.

This is turning into Craig and Carole's theatre adventures! Yesterday afternoon we went to Stratford (on Avon) to see Othello. Our benchmark was a superb version we saw at the National Theatre in London maybe 10 years ago with Adrian Lester and Rory Kinnear (https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/whats-on/othello-2013/ . This version seen yesterday however was an astonishingly good performance. 3.5 hours (including interval) so hardly cut back at all. When, near the end of the play, Othello strangles his wife Desdemona, the stage blacks out. So all you hear is legs thrashing and the breathing of Othello. https://www.rsc.org.uk/othello/ The photograph is a multi purpose cube which contains in this case three main characters when they are dead. https://www.britishtheatreguide.info/reviews/othello-royal-shakespea-23889

Went to London today to see The Duchess, with Jodie Whittaker. (She was the only female Doctor in Dr Who, and was in Broadchurch) Modern setting of the early 1600's original play. Only partly successful in a modern setting, but a shocking and unsettling last 45 minutes. The Duchess's deranged brother ends up putting a gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger. There was a spray of blood from the back of his head - I have no idea how they did that. In the movies they use an electrically triggered blood capsule, but I've never seen that on stage before. So a play where everyone dies apart from one - the assassin, now reformed, who agrees to bring up the (dead) Duchess's son. https://trafalgartheatre.com/shows/the-duchess/

One of our most important Labour politicians, John Prescott, has died aged 86 after Alzheimers https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/ce9gp7eke44t https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Prescott That recounts a famous incident where a protestor threw an egg at him from behind. Feeling something running down the back of his neck, he turned and decked the guy with a punch. When Tony Blair (the PM at that time) asked him what happened, Prescott replied "I was carrying out your instruction to contact with the electorate"

Macintosh alas sold its soul to the Private Equity devil. And that means that they take as much money out while they own it, and then sell it. So it is no surprise at all that they flogged Macintosh/Sonus Faber to a company who would buy it and maximise their profit. Hence Bose.

Microsoft, as part of the latest security update, sneaked in a link to Copilot, shoving a link on the bottom ribbon. What is Copilot? Well it is an Generative AI thing, that they have named Prometheus. I knew that I remembered something about Prometheus. Well he was one of the Greek Titan gods. And he bestowed fire for humanity - which I guess what was in Microsoft's mind, intelligence being a metaphor for fire. What they entirely missed is the Zeus was so pissed off with Prometheus that he had him chained to a rock. Each day, an eagle would come and eat his liver. Overnight the liver would grow back, only to be eaten again. So Prometheus was sentenced to permanent agony and torment. I guess the marketing team at Microsoft failed to spot the problem inherent in the name!

The densest planet in the solar system - here; the Earth. Kind of figures - there are lot of dense people living here. Least dense planet in the solar system - Saturn. It is less dense than water. So if you had a bucket of water large enough (and that would be vey large indeed!) Saturn would float. Factoids of the day over and done.

And Earth imaged by Cassini during its mission to Saturn

"From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known." Carl Sagan

That is some hard yards! Nicely done.

Happy birthday! BTW I thought at one stage to buy a bottle of 1956, and realised that it was either that or a new car 😁

To a harrowing play yesterday at the Bristol Old Vic. A stage adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel of the same name "Never Let Me Go" Children are brought up, cloned, so that as adults they can be harvested for organs. None of them remotely question this. That is the basic plot, but it is completely brought to life by the script and wonderful acting. Even if they survive three "donations", they never survive a fourth. The word die is never used, when they do inevitably do so, they are "complete". https://bristololdvic.org.uk/whats-on/never-let-me-go

I also bought a pair of ESP6's again back in the day. Sound quality was great, but each cup had an energizing transformer in it. So the weight was again head crushing. I got rid of those at some point. But a rush of similar blood, I bought a pair of ESP9's. Tarry goop in the cups etc. But at least they come with an external energizer, so the weight is manageable. Sound quality is great. Still not at the heights of my two Stax systems, but pleasing non the less.

Those were my first headphones, bought new in 1974. I got rid of them at some stage. But during a rush of blood to the head, I bought a pair from eBay for not much. The fluid filled earcups were as hard as biscuit, and the foam damping in the cup has turned to tar. Lots of clean up and fabric/foam pads later, I suddenly remembered how god awful uncomfortable they were/are. You head feels as if it being crushed in a vice, and the top of your head is almost bruised by the weight. I would not have cared so much if the SQ was great. But it isn't either. How Koss sold these things defeats me. Koss remanufactured them for a while, but seems that they have stopped.

And that, gentle folks, is precisely why I invested in a lid for my deck. Our monster 5.4kg cat could have endless fun precisely as above!

I was surprised recently to find that the average pooch can recognise over 150 human words. It has the vocabulary of a toddler. Police and search and rescue dogs get up to 250 words and up. A record breaking border terrier got up to over 1000 recognized words. Cats on the other hand rely on their chimp to recognise what their vocabulary of meows, chirps and grunts mean. Basically feed me, cuddle me, play with me. Then once those options are exhausted, sleep for 18 hours a day.

It hit the UK news within hours. A year's rain in 8 hours; absolutely nothing can prepare a population for that, even if forecast.