Zombie

https://www.nifty.org/nifty/gay/relationships/two-distinct-divisions/ it’s not the usual nifty porn fest so anyone with urgent “needs” should look elsewhere and I said “mystery” but there are adventure elements too It’s in first person, which I don’t normally go for, but it’s written so well with interesting characters and good storylines that I read all 13 “episodes” and, from memory, it ended at a satisfying point but with the possibility of more to come I emailed the author at the time asking if he planned to write more and it’s only because I kept that email that I found it. As you’ll see he’s since posted another (#14 in February) but, having done a very quick skim through, it doesn’t look like it continues the previous characters so I can’t comment on this latest addition which was posted 9 years after he finished the 13 episodes maybe you can feed back on suggestions you receive?

Do you like Miss Marple type mystery/detective fiction? Only she’s younger, she’s a he, rides a motorbike, has a nipple ring and a partner and it’s set in the present. So, maybe not like Miss Marple…

Useful video but I think we need to know more about what Sir Buttmunch said …and did

The earliest stuff I can remember reading is comics. I LOVED The Beano and The Dandy and my favourites were Dennis the Menace and his dog Gnasher , Minnie the Minx, Beryl the Peril, Desperate Dan, and the Bash Street Kids - all of them always up to no good And if I had been good I’d get the Xmas annual - so I guess that counts as a book

Research student Michael L Smith won the 2015 Ig Nobel Prize for physiology and entomology by being stung with bees more than 100 times on various parts of his body in order to find out on which body part the bee stings were most painful *yikes * Smith shared the prize with colleague Justin Schmidt, who presumably enjoyed using the data (measurements of the volume and duration of Smith’s screams) to create the “Schmidt Sting Pain Index” while Smith was strapped down as Schmidt carefully administered an angry bee to each part of his body… Answer? Nope - not where you think It was inside his nose *ouch!* https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/man-been-awarded-science-prize-10084228

Uranus - the gift that keeps on giving

yes, usually something dodgy, nefarious or downright criminal

The OED suggests it was coined in the 1960s by an employee at Bell Labs, Don Macpherson, citing an article in Telecom Heritage magazine (1996 No. 28) “His thought process was as follows: There are eight points on the symbol so octo should be part of the name. We need a few more letters or another syllable to make a noun... (Don Macpherson… was active in a group that was trying to get Jim Thorpe's Olympic medals returned from Sweden). The phrase thorpe would be unique.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Thorpe

Jacques Loussier plays JS Bach 2019 saw the death of France’s talented composer and musician, Jacques Loussier, best know for his “jazzed up” interpretations of the works of the baroque composer JS Bach. Whether he was the first jazz exponent of JS Bach’s music I don’t know, but he clearly recognised, understood and loved the rhythmic and harmonic qualities of certain JS Bach compositions which offered potential for reinterpretation in a jazz form which Bach would not have understood. Or would he…? Because the fact is JS Bach did understand one of the cornerstones of jazz - “blue notes” - which he often used to create emotional tension in dissonance and then resolution. And JS Bach was simply using techniques and conventions established centuries before during the Renaissance and possibly earlier. So what we call “jazz” is not profoundly new, different or strange to what went on before - and maybe JS Bach would have greatly enjoyed these inspired reworkings of his music - merely a development in a particular direction focused on rhythm and “blues” of work done by generations of musicians and composers in previous centuries and across various genres of folk and popular song, and so-called “classical music”. The point is, to quote the 60s, you either dig it or you don’t This is one of Jacques Loussier’s more introspective arrangements of JS Bach, the Andante from his Concerto in D major BWV 1054

Latin is a dead language As dead as dead can be It killed the Ancient Romans …and now it’s killing ME! This was scrawled inside my battered Latin textbook at school probably by some scruffy, disgruntled “Just William” type character but the joke was really on him because obviate, and more than 60% of the English lexicon (according to Stacker), derives from Latin (and Greek) https://stacker.com/stories/3885/50-latin-roots-will-help-you-understand-english-language

it’s a great track, and there’s a real trippy “live in Cologne” version of Airborne on the tube too

Congressional hearing Last December a stronger disclosure requirement was included in the annual National Defense Act. The law requires the military to establish a permanent office on UAP research - now called the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group. Yesterday, Tuesday, the House Intelligence Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation Subcommittee held the first public congressional hearing into UFO sightings in the US in over 50 years. During the hearing Pentagon, Intelligence and military officials said: a number of events have defied all attempts at explanation some Unexplained Aerial Phenomena (UAPs)… seem to have been moving without any discernible means of propulsion through "rigorous" analysis, most - but not all - UAPs can be identified "There are a small handful [of events] in which there are flight characteristics or signature management that we can't explain with the data we have available" the US is "not aware" of any potential adversaries with such technologies Following the public hearing, the committee closed its doors for a private classified session with lawmakers… https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-61474201

News flash! According to a recent survey… nearly a third of people aged between 25 and 34 think Salman Rushdie is a fish dish

There is clearly a wide-ranging cultural problem within some healthcare trusts where staff seemingly are unwilling/afraid to speak out on management failings (whether administrative or frontline medical). This is especially worrying where patient safety is/may be compromised and, even worse, the NHS’s seeming unwillingness/inability to deliver on its promises to “learn” and “change”, solemnly delivered by the relevant Chief Executive to the media with monotonous regularity every time things have gone badly wrong. Contrast healthcare with the aviation industry where the focus really is on “learning” what went wrong and why, and then implementing genuine “change” through regular industry-wide incident reporting and updated management/maintenance/production/training requirements in order to ensure, as far as possible, that the same issues don’t keep getting repeated and causing further avoidable pain and suffering and loss of life. Why the difference? In aviation, generally (there are exceptions of course - like Boeing), the culture and regulation promotes and operates within an open and transparent and widely used process of reporting (including anonymously) without fear of retribution. The NHS should do the same starting with the job description of every CEO being required to include, at the top, their individual and personal responsibility and accountability for implementing adequate processes for staff to be able to report, without fear of retribution, all issues that potentially undermine or threaten staff and/or patients.

Health and safety Travellers on Britain’s early steam railways could purchase a nifty travel guide. This provided nervous passengers with helpful and reassuring advice Like where to sit in relation to the steam locomotive in order to minimise the risk of death 💀 “get as far from the engine as possible—should an explosion take place, you may happily get off with just the loss of an arm or a leg”* * Francis Coghlan - The Iron Road, 1838

Excellent blog! Hitchock’s Psycho (forget the others) is indeed a Masterclass The Sixth Sense? When I first started watching this I’d worked out the premise within the first five minutes. Because of that I got bored and so I gave up on the movie (I’ve never actually seen it through, and won’t now). The problem? The foreshadowing was so obvious right from the start - clumsily done. For me, anyway - and I don’t have any Sixth sense Had it been done with more skill (difficult, given the nature of the premise) then it could have been a fantastic movie and I’d have stayed with it. When I read “So, all of that being said, I'd like to suggest a movie where almost all of these methods come into play all within a ninety minute space, and that I thoroughly enjoyed MUCH more than I ever could have guessed that I would. And that movie is...” I already had another old movie in mind - Irwin Allen’s brilliant The Poseidon Adventure (the original and best), with Gene Hackman, released 50 years ago in 1972. I recently snagged an eBay bargain of the restored blu ray and it’s well worth watching both for entertainment (great cast, characters, story and all the sets and stunts are real - no CGI) and to see a good example of what you’ve been saying, as it delivers many of the points you make in this blog

Henry V 1943/4 - William Walton Today is Shakespeare’s birthday and to celebrate here are two brief pieces from the music William Walton composed for this movie version of Shakespeare’s famous play. Amazingly, given the economic state of the nation, it was made in glorious Technicolor (it used the only colour camera and film stock Britain had) Opening scene at the Globe Theatre as the eager crowd gather for the performance Passacaglia: Death of Falstaff

under English law, copyright exists automatically from the moment of creation of an original work eg visual arts, music composition, writing etc - it does not need to be registered or asserted. The key issue, as you correctly point out, is having documentary evidence to prove who created it and when, should a dispute arise - I’ve simply emailed a pdf to myself which is quick and simple. Interestingly English laws of copyright for printed material started to develop under Henry VIII (initially to control the printers) which continued to be developed and extended (eg Hogarth’s Act) then in the 1800s the Berne Convention provided the framework for international protection, providing mutual recognition of signatories’ copyright laws and minimum legal standards. Sadly, digital media proved too problematic and the current position for international protection has become more complicated https://rkip.ca/2015/04/10/early-history-of-copyright-part-1-letters-patent/

fair point. I guess I was reacting to Comicality’s comment “ I've seen people take pictures of the MOON...and try to 'privatize' it and own it and cover it with watermarks, and it's like, "Come on, dude. Really? You own the MOON now?"“ Anyway we’re now way off topic, but Comicality is getting his wish - plenty of different points of view

This is true, but where a business is established through effort and over time then most people would see justification for legal protection by trademark - not opportunistic “land grabs” where no effort has been made (other than paying lawyers) and over time in order to justify such protection (such legal protection which would in itself instantly, and with no physical/business effort, create a “real estate” asset with significant commercial value purely on the back of the legal “land grab”). And then there’s encroachment - extending the “borders” of your real estate into other areas until total control is achieved. Could you set up a local grocery business trading as “Apple”? Pretty soon, I suspect, you’d have a bunch of unsmiling lawyers knocking on your door... Indeed Apple had to pay a price (chicken feed at today’s values ) to buy the trade name from The Beatles who’d created their own Apple Corps music business while Steve Jobs was still an annoying kid at school… —— Edit to add not living in a big city, I just spotted that Apple already moved into the grocery business years ago… proving the point https://www.thegrocer.co.uk/stores/apple-paves-way-for-retailers-to-trade-mark-store-layouts/369304.article

Never underestimate people’s desire for making money from stuff they’ve not even created by their own efforts - like words. Words that are the basis of our most valuable common shared resource, particularly on this site - language. I believe someone with the name Markle is at this very moment seeking ownership of the word archetypes* with the obvious objective of taking control of this word (stealing?) in order to remove it from common ownership (i.e. us) and make a lot of money from it for their own personal enrichment *archetypes has been owned by all of us as part of our English language since at least 1599 (OED), and before then was part of the normal everyday lexicon of the peoples of Ancient Rome (archetypum)

sorry you lost your hard drive data using the iPad Safari browser it takes just two “clicks” to display the source code for this thread - the bookmark icon top left, and then “Show page source” from the drop-down list. The html source code is then displayed in a new tab, not a new browser - there’s a lot of it! on my old Windows laptop there’s a drop-down menu source code display option under Tools (I think) so that’s also just two clicks, but that’s in plain sight - the iPad feature needs to be set up as per the OP but, once done, it’s easy peasy to use

The svelte grace of penguins is immutable

In the Deep no-one can hear you SCREAM!!!