Big Surprise

I post saying that the government should make the decisions that individuals find hard, but are in our own best interests, and I get multiple comments from people saying "But I don't want things made hard for me."

Not a single week has gone past in the last few months, and not a month in the last 10 years when I haven't read more about the climate of the whole fucking planet going horribly wrong, because we're polluting it.  A large part of that pollution comes from flying machines inefficiently burning up hydrocarbons and releasing great wodges of Carbon Dioxide and Nitrogen Oxides at high altitude.

Imagine if every time you took a flight you had to grind up a couple of people and put them in the fuel tank.  You can bet that people would still be saying "But I want to see my family a lot."  At the _very_ least, airline fuel should be taxed enough to pay for the planting of trees to soak up the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide - at the moment there's no tax on aircraft fuel at all, making it effectively heavily subsidised compared to all other means of transport.

I'm sorry, but when the whole bloody planet is at stake, maybe we'll all have to make a few sacrifices.

Calm before the storm

Here you can find Garfield cartoons with his speech bubbles removed (but Jon's left in).  They work fantastically well, as do the Fred Basset ones on page two.  Even more fun than watching TV with the sound turned off.

The door flew open, in he ran, The great, long, red-legged scissorman.

"Show, don't tell", they say, immediately violating their own edict.  Of course, miming that kind of thing is tremendously tricky, and were Charades to be played, or scored, in that manner would undoubtedly score a vast number of points.

Anyway, the epitome of "Show, don't tell" in the performance arena is undoubtedly mime.  You'll be very glad to hear that I'm not going to talk about mime.

I am, instead, going to talk about musical theatre, which is like mime, only set to music and with more dancing.

And before you all run away, I should probably mention that this was an adaption of Edward Scissorhands.

It was, to put it mildly, incredible.  I was there with a whole group of friends (diotina is 43 next week and wanted a birthday trip) and we were all completely swept away by the magic of it.  The set design is gorgeous, taking the 50s suburbia and gothic elements and reducing them down to their archetypal basics.  The dancing is inspired, covering a whole range from a couple of ballet set pieces to modern dance but always putting the story first and always infused with the style of the individual characters.  In the larger scenes there were always at least three things going on, and I'm sure it would bear up to repeated viewings to catch all of the little details in the background.

Anyway, take a look here at the site and see if you can catch it somewhere, you won't regret it.

Gosh. Technology

So I downloaded VMWare Player and the Ubuntu image.

And I booted up Linux, running under Windows on my computer.

Gosh, I though, I'm running Linux.

And I have access to all sorts of programs, like a web browser, and a text editor, and a paint program.

Um.  Um.  Now what?

I can't think of a single good reason to switch to running it generally.  I haven't had a virus in about 8 years (and I've only ever had one, that having been caught from accidentally booting off a floppy someone had handed me).  I don't have any spyware (at least not that my spyware detectors can detect).  I have numerous bits of software that only run on Windows.

Anyone?  Someone?  Anyone?

(And the first person to suggest that Linux is inherently more moral than Windows will get a kicking)