Swine Flu 2

I think I might have Tweeted about this; on the way to work this morning, listening to KFrothingYankeeIdiot, the conversation in the car turned to Swine Flu. It's a serious concern; we're waiting for Grace and Michaela's school to close thanks to a pupil coming down with flu symptoms and, if that happens, there's a domino effect: if Grace and Mike were exposed, then Danielle was, and if she was then I was. Basically, we have to stay home until we get sick, get better or five days passes with no symptoms.

One thing that's not helping: it's allergy season. A lot of plants are blooming, which means a lot of people are sneezing and spluttering. It's hard to tell whether you're sick or are having an allergic reaction to something. It also means an awful lot of people are sneezing all over the place, which is going to increase the changes of catching whatever they've just sneezed.

Although AZ was H1N1 free, today we hear that there are four cases; we get to work to find notes on the doors: if you're symptomatic or have been to Mexico, don't come into the building. This afternoon, we hear that the W.H.O. (still think they should be the United Nations Infection Taskforce) has upped their alert level and, moments ago, the company has put out a cheerful reminder that we need to maintain good personal hygiene etc. The key is "stay home if you are unwell" - and this is worth pointing out because it runs contrary to American corporate culture. People who get sick come to work. They sit in their cubes making unhappy gurgling noises and demand sympathy, or complain loudly in the elevators that they're so very, very ill and yet still at work. Well, no more of that. They now need to go home, and they also need to start following some very specific rules about coming back to work.

It's all getting a little more serious. I will probably check the bank account and make a couple of sensible purchases - water, fever reducers, some other helpful odds and ends - just in case. You know, the sort of stuff you should probably have in a flat anyway. I can normally rely on my immune system. It's put up with all kinds of abuse, and it generally copes with invaders thuswise: it invites them in for a few drinks and a game of pool, gets them horribly drunk, feeds them a suspicious kebab and then lets them enjoy the hangover next day. The point is, when it comes time for the virus to replicate, it's so drunk it can't, and the following day it's so mortified at the thought it might have replicated the niht before that it doesn't want to and shuffles off looking for a way home that involves meeting the fewest gazes possible.

Don't knock it. My disreputable immune system works.

Anyway, I'm slightly concerned because I'm the least fit I have ever been (and that's saying something...I am blob! Hear me...eat crisps!) and therefore at risk from viruses. If I was a PC, I'd be running unpatched XP with an equally unpatched IE6. It seems like a good time to put some measures in place that mean I can look after myself if I do get ill.

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Swine Flu Fever

I love situations that contain an inherrant contradiction (which is why Discordianism is right for me!). So you can imagine how pleased I was to hear KFYI host Bruce Jacobs this morning, complaining about the Government's response to Swine Flu.

Bruce thinks we should be all President Madagascar* about the problem. American should close borders, should be checking people who fly in from Mexico at the airports, and the Government should be a part of this.

Bruce is, of course, a conservative. He would prefer the Government stay out of his business. He would prefer to take care of his own healthcare requirements and not be a part of any government mandated universal healthcare plan, or even have the government tell him what he can and cannot do about his own health. Until now, of course.

Bruce has tried to insist that the Bush administration laid in good stocks of 'flu vaccine. Of course, it did. For a different variant of flu. Bruce, it's not like prescription meds where you can get a less costly generic brand. Influenza vaccines have to be made to fight a specific strain or they're useless. So right now, the stockpile is useless for treating Swine Flu. Not that it matters to Bruce, howling for the Government to take charge and DO things!

Actually, the government has done about all it can; the best things for people to do right now are all about taking good care of themselves and reducing the risk of getting the disease. Stay away from crowds, wash your hands, try not to sneeze all over people. What else works? Well, not much right now. I would say "it's only the flu" but previous flu pandemics were horrific and I don't want to come back to this blog having crawled out of the smoking remains of civilisation to say "uhh...yeah...about that whole swine flu thing...".

I just find it interesting that Talk Radio is politicizing the disease and the response to the disease, that the conservative angle is at odds with their statements about how little they want the government to interfere in things, how they ask for airlines and airports to institute screening with no thought about cost or organisation (how many flights into how many airports around the country? And isn't it already too late? Because the virus has shown up in New York, and assorted other spots around the world, so to start screening now would be pointless: it's got dozens of other transmission routes already, and will already have spread via the various hubs...won't it?). I also find it ironic, since Bruce is the guy who hates Journalists and who seems incapable of doing the minimal research required to prevent himself sounding like an ass.





*some explanation is required. This is a reference to an online game called Pandemic 2, in which the player crafts and releases a disease with the express purpose of wiping out all human life on the planet. Part of the difficulty is getting your disease everywhere before countries close their borders - with Madagascar being particularly prone to isolating itself from the rest of the world. Hence this cartoon .

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Weird Dave is Weird.

You know those days when nothing goes as you need it to, but nothing fails badly enough to warrant a bit fo a sob and some sympathy?

I'm having one of those.

It begins last night, with the Little Blue Pills of Doom.

I've not been sleeping well, not for about three weeks now; I've had no more than three or four hours sleep a night, which has started to affect my ability to think and also my temper. This is not a good thing for work, let alone anything else. On Tuesday, I caved in and went to the drug store. I bought a box of sleepy-time type tablets that were guaranteed non-habit forming etc. They didn't work at all on Tuesday night when I was awake until midnight and then only briefly able to sleep thereafter. Last night, I tried them again and was asleep by 7pm.

The dreams were interesting. Apparently, the pills pushed my body into sleep and left my head spinning, because I remember several vivid elements from my dreams.

Element One: the most awful horror film ever made. Not awful as in scary or gory, awful as in "dear god, did I pay money to watch this?" I remember watching this movie and seeing very low budget effects and makeup. I remember thinking it was utterly unconvincing. And then I was in it. The thing about unconvincing effects is that apparently the real thing is just as unconvincing.

Luckily, there were other people trapped in the movie with me and they had been there for some time. They rescued me from a horrific scene where something tried to make Richard Dean Anderson look younger by literally slicing pieces of his head off in an attempt to resculpt him.

My rescuers were older folks, all drove a volvo station wagon/estate car (there were six people and three cars, and they were all the same car. No, not three identical cars, the same car. Co-location? I have no idea myself) and claimed to be able to help me defend myself. They said they had guns.

Guns are what people never have in horror movies, but even so I was dubious as to their potential effectiveness. My rescuers seemed to be confident, so I was taken to their house to kit up. They had a Queen Anne style house - that would be Addams Family/Bates house style - with a really big garage and a lot of exposed interior walls. They showed me the guns: I was expecting revolvers or somesuch, and what I got was a transparent green plastic cylinder about 30cm long, with a darker green screw-cap at one end and a big metal spring at the other. There was a hole about half way along the cylinder. I was cheerfully informed that this was where the bullet exited, so I was to press the gun to the chest of the target and pull the trigger.

I pointed out that this was retarded. The sole advantage of a gun over, say, a machete, is that you can hurt people from a distance. Granted, the likes of Jason Voorhees are generally depicted as bullet proof, but my contention was that with a high enough rate of fire or a big enough round you could at least make the scary individual fall over andget time to run away.

I was told I was wrong. I then found that I couldn't load the gun; the big spring wouldn't coil, I couldn't put any pressure on it. Someone loaded the gun for me, but I could already see that the bullets were pointing to the screwcap instead of the hole; when the trigger was pulled, even with the exit hole pressed to the chest of the target, the gun would miss.

Now utterly baffled, I woke up very briefly and then went back to sleep and right back to the same dream, wherein I stayed.

When the alarm went off I stopped it and it took me 15 minutes to get out of bed. I couldn't find anything to shave with. It took me five minutes to find the shampoo that was on a shelf in front of me. It took me five minutes to find clean clothes, because I stood in the closet blinking stupidly at everything. All in all I was damned lucky to make it out of the flat.

I got to work, feeling that coffee would help; it hasn't. This is the only thing I have been able to concentrate on all morning, and I can only do this because the little blue pills have started wearing off, leaving me feeling very like a marionette with half his strings cut. As I type, I am making way moretypos than normal because my fingers are having problems registering that they have pressed the keys on the keyboard. My sense of space is off. And I am having real difficulty concentrating on repetative tasks.

It's almost as though a hemisphere of my brain has stopped working. I feel really creative, but can't pursue any mechanical task or exercise much in the way of logic. Like, i want to write but have no idea what to write or how to write it; the only reason that I can type this entry is because I am doing it in metapad and doing it in a stream of consciousness style. Occasionally with my eyes shut.

So it's all a bit mental.

Plus, the MP3 player has decided it can't sort itself out any more and has signalled to me that it needs my help. The oddness of the day means that what I really want to do right now is rush home and spend a couple of hours diagnosing and correcting the Firmware issue. I know I can (one of the reasons I love my MP3 player so much is that I feel very connected to it, having had to fix it myself on a number of occasions. I wouldn't part with it now, not after investing time and brainpower in nursing it through a couple of illnesses, and it has rewarded me by nursing me through my latest patch of oddness) so I will. The poor thing needs a firmware reinstall and a bit of a format; then I think I will reload the various audiobooks I was planning to listen to.

Why am I mentioning this? Because when it became clear that the MP3 player couldn't help itself I immediately wanted to go home, there and then, because I do not have (and cannot get) the tools to fix it at work. That's making me sadder than I ought to be.

See? Told you everything was a bit mental today.

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"No taxation without representation", they told their elected representatives...

It's been a week of "...wait...what?" for me.

American politics has possibly never been stranger than it is right now, and never more full of interesting jargon and spelling mistakes.

Over the last weeks, the Tea Party movement has been in full swing. Republicans and conservatives have been peacefully protesting against everything from the Obama tax plan to legal abortion and illegal immigration. They have done so to a slightly sinister backdrop too. Here's the fun stuff:

At the tail end of last week the Department of Homeland Security (who, you will remember, were created following 9/11 and given lots of happy powers by the Patriot Act) released an intelligence document to law enforcement groups around the country. There is nothing unusual in this. There are a couple of things to be aware of, though. Firstly, these days the DHS is run by Janet Napolitano, former Guv of Arizona. She's a Democrat. Second, the paper asked Law Enforcement to be aware that assorted factors (amongst them the election of the President) that might lead to a resurgence of activity by right-wing extremist groups. The document is here. Be warned, it's a PDF. And dull.

The paragraph that caused a problem reads thus:

Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups),
and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.

At around this time, we have had the Governor of Texas blathering about total support for States Rights and secession from the Union; however, since the Tea Party folks were supposed to be protesting about unfair taxation, which would make them a single issue protest, talk radio, KFYI in the Phoenix Metro area specifically), and most notably Bruce Jacobs have been referring to tea-party attendees as "fellow extremists", commenting that attendees are now likely to be on the government's "list".

The protests went off without a hitch, or a black-bag operation, or any signs of rendition. They were peaceful.

However. It's worth noting that more than a couple of people I work with told me they were nervous about going; they didn't want to be on a government watch list. They didn't want to be taken from their homes in a dawn raid.

Bit extreme, I thought. But then KFYI has genuinely been creating a lot of concern that the current government is really socialist. And not socialist in the slightly affable Tony Benn way, but socialist in the Joseph Stalin manner. These are, in fact, more scare tactics. But more than that, it's interesting to do the background research. KFYI is an affiliate of the Fox network, and Fox is owned by The News Corporation. The News Corporation is owned by Rupert Murdoch. So, this apparently grass roots organisation is being supported and advertised by possibly the world's most successful capitalist and certainly the world's most successful owner of information. This has been enough to make a lot of left wing commentators in the USA call foul, claiming that the Tea Party movement isn't grass roots, but an Astroturf movement.

Assorted shenanigans aside, a couple of things have struck me.

One: the tea party people have started referring to themselves as Tea-Baggers and what they do as tea-bagging. Oh, dear lord, some people want to reach for their Urban Dictionary before they speak.

Two: As an immigrant, I'm the only person I know who has to pay tax but has absolutely no say in any political forum in this country. None. I'm not a citizen (not going to be one, now) and therefore I have no political representation other than whatever Civis Britannicus Sum gets me. Which ain't going to be much. So when a bunch of white Americans start on about not having any representation, I get a bad case of the "Wait...whut?"

It seems clear that the Right are attempting to make people forget that the elected representatives for a state or area or whatever are meant to represent every one in it. They don't, of course, because the minute they arrive in Washington they are immediately surrounded by Lobbyists who attach themselves to Congresscritters and Senators alike, in much the same manner that these tried to fasten themselves to Captain Kirk, resulting in mass insanity.

However, there are ways to motivate a congresscritter. It's a lot like motivating an MP. You can

- write letters;
- turn up in person for a meeting;
- send e-mails;
- threaten to report that their subsidised housing is being sublet to students/sex workers/asylum seekers;
- etc.

With a modicum of effort, it can be done. But what KFYI, and by extension the rest of the Right, would prefer, is to be back in power and to have conservatives believe that they simply can't be represented by anybody who isn't one of them.

They're trying the same schtick that got the Evangelical Fundies all crazy: a non-minority that insists it is being under-represented and repressed unless it's voice is the only one being heard.

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Good Old Victor F.

I was wandering through my movie collection t'other day and it struck me just how many Frankenstein movies I have.

I've got the Universal release from the 1930s, with Boris Karloff playing the monster. I've got the Hammer version, with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. I've got Mel Brooks's Young Frankenstein (which is still one of the funniest films ever made). I've got the sequel to the Hammer picture, I've got a copy of the not-very-good one with Brannagh and DeNiro in it. And I have a copy or two of the book, plus some of the various literary riffs on that theme.

Why? Well, mostly because it's an ace tale. A very early science fiction cautionary tale in a style that later writers like Crighton would adopt; Frankenstien says, loud and clear "look what we can do! Do you think we should?", with the undercurrent that of course we bloody shouldn't because we really have no idea what we're doing.

It's the sort of cautionary tale that can be applied to every kind of advance, from cybernetics to genetic engineering. The monster of the book is very different to that of the various movies, although following an image as startling as the Karloff makeup for the Universal release, which seared itself into the world's imagination, is this surprising? Monsters put bums on seats, not morality.

Over the years, things have changed a bit. My latest encounter with Victor and his mad science came in Dean Koontz's books; he depicts the Baron as a callous, amoral, cold scientist who has artificially extended his life and is intending to replace the human race with one of his own, much improved, design. Against him stand a couple of New Orleans cops and his original creation - now calling himself Deucallion. The books make undemanding reading, perfect for killing time in an entertaining manner. However, t'other night I came across something rather unexpected.

It's a movie known variously as "Flesh for Frankenstein" and "Andy Warhol's Frankenstein", the latter being why it drew my attention. Andy Warhol? He's not listed anywhere on the credits, but Udo Keir is. So I watched it.

In some ways, I wish I hadn't. In others, I'm so glad I did.

For one thing, quite a lot of time was spent on the look of the thing. Castle Frankenstein is labyrinthine and baroque, with plenty of places to hide and spy on people. The Baron's laboratory is a huge space complete with anatomical statues and lots of things floating in jars, but none of the electrical thingammies that we've come to expect. The costumes are interesting; filmed in the 70s, the period evoked by the look of the clothes is anywhere between 1890 and 1930 although the villagers are your standard Euro-peasant, stuck some time in the early 1700s. Because of the relaxation of censorship laws for stuff rated X, there's a fair bit of nudity and it's not limited to topless females.

In fact, the UK title (Flesh for Frankenstein) says exactly what the movie is about. It's sex. Victor's wife/sister (the two titles seem interchangable) just wants to get laid. A lot. Victor has an unhealthy fascination with internal organs and is creating two people from bits of other people. He intends them to be representatives of some off-kilter racial purity, and wants them to breed in order that he can replace the current crop of humanity - which he regards as trash. Aha, Mr. Koontz, I see where you got the idea!

It's a very visceral film, with much time spent staring at assorted guts and gore, and as stylish as it is, from time to time it becomes unintentionally funny thanks to a script which doesn't seem to know what it wants to do. We go from Victor Frankenstein, brilliant surgeon to Victor Frankenstein, amateur phrenologist. We also have Victor the gut-shagger who declares "To know death, Otto, you have to fuck life...in the gall bladder!". This, and Victor's unhappy choice of a gay head* for his male monster, ends in disaster and the one genuinely chilling scene of the entire film, right at the very end, in which the surviving adult ends up in the hands of the eerily Addams Family/Midwich Frankenstein kids. Two kids, silent and intense for the entire film, alone, in Victor's lab, with scalpels, and a man dangling by his wrists from a crane. A situation like that...well, it just can't end well, can it?








*possibly not gay, but definitely not interested in women of any sort, even before it was removed from the original body.

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#Amazonfail

Most of you will have noticed the furor on Twitter, and elsewhere, which was linked to the #amazonfail tag. I don't need to describe what happened because the BBC have some reportage here.

What I'm interested in is: do we dare call it Conspiracy?

Well, no. From my position inside Tinfoil Hat Central (a bunker deep in the desert), I'm pretty sure it wasn't.

For one thing, people have a tendency to trust technology when they absolutely shouldn't. It very often does exactly what we tell it to, which is why the IT industry coined terms like PEBKAC and the infamous ID-ten-T error. It is remarkably easy to screw up even the simplest set of instructions and take out your own website. How easy? Forgetting which naming convention is important for your webserver, for one. Like if your webhost runs 'nix servers and you built your website in a Windows product, and save the opening page as "Index.html". 'nix is case sensitive, so if all the other references to your index page are for "index.html", it won't show up. It's the simplest error in the world.

Something of that magnitude, a cockup that looks like a conspiracy, happened to Amazon. I'd put money on it. Human error is so very much more likely than Amazon trying to sneak a bit of censorship past us; for one thing, it failed immediately. For another, had this been a deliberate policy by Amazon.com they must have realised on some level that they were lining themselves up for an online arse-kicking. They must have known that an issue like this wouldn't simply blow over. Right now, one imagines, they are feverishly trying to sort out whether the guy who made the goof is a malicious twat or just phenomenally unlucky.

Of course, the stigma of Conspiracy simply won't go away. People have already concluded that Amazon tried to slip a piece of grim behaviour past them and their perceptions will not be changed unless Amazon does something to placate them. The thing is, there isn't anything that Amazon can do.

If I'm right and it's a cock-up, they've already owned up to it. No more need be said.

If I'm wrong and it was the failed implimentation of a draconian anti-GLBT policy, it crashed spectacularly and there's no way they can say sorry.

My own feeling is this: no matter what the cause, support your local bookshops. Go and buy books from shops, make friends with the staff and if you have a local bookshop that isn't part of a chain, cherish it, love it and spend lots of money there. Then you won't have to worry about what Amazon are doing, a group of people you know will be more than happy to order you any book you might want to read.

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The Sarah Connor Chronicles - Terminated?

It's not hard to imagine that this show isn't going to get another season. Fox, home of misplaced Sci-Fi, is bound to have noticed that the show has failed to find an audience. This may be partly because Fox is also traditionally the home of Clueless Program Planners; if you're aware of how Monty Python railed against program planners, and how the Browncoats blame the Fox network for the death of Firefly, you might be expecting a rant about the inability of a network to give a show a good home.

Not so.

If T:TSCC is going to die, it's because it has been a bit too intelligent for it's own good. This is a conclusion I've come to after sitting through most of the last season.

During the last 20 or so episodes, we've seen John Connor grow up to realise who people think he is and what he's going to have to become in order to lead humanity's rebellion against the machines. "Future John" is a lonely, isolated person. Everyone he loves dies, generally to protect him. John has learned about who he can trust and the price he pays for trusting the wrong people.

We have seen the Connors coping with the results of their actions - and this is a bit of a first for a show like this; the premise of Terminator movies seems to be that stuff explodes, covering up the fact that the movie series asks questions about free will, the nature of intelligence, emotion and emergent behaviour. The TV series has asked similar questions, has also dabbled in fate, destiny...wyrd, in a word. More, it has stared long and hard into the repercussions of the life that the Connors lead. For example: John kills a man. Well, every hero kills sooner or later and although a hero never feels good about it, it never slows him down.

It slows John down. It grinds him to a halt. He blames his mother for his having to take a life to save hers. For a while, he hates her.

If you like your entertainment to not only make you think but to do a little thinking of it's own, then this might be the show for you.

Here's another good 'un: Sarah Connor discovers a factory apparently making Terminator type flying robots. Part of the fall-out from this discovery is a terminator stalking the factory and killing everyone in it.

The next week, rather than brush all this under the carpet and move on, we go to the funerals of all the people that died. Yes, we might discover something unsettling about the whole operation that's germane to the uberplot, but we still see a small town devastated by the loss of two dozen people.

Part of the joy that this show brings me is that it has been developing very slowly and carefully; the audience wanted it paced rather faster, but I think they might have missed the point - we're seeing John Connor undergo his last temptation and his hours in Gethsemane. Hey, I'm allowed to point out the biblical links - his initials are J.C. and he's going to save the human race by being something other than human. Not in a sci-fi way, in the most human way possible - by isolating himself from love, kindness and joy so that he can be the most effective leader and commander that he can be. There's a really good reason his best friend is a Terminator called "Cameron".

This is so worth watching, as good as Battlestar ever was, but with far less RDM-wank. People want to watch something on Friday night now the toasters are gone? They're on Fox.

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The Perils of No TV

I don't have a TV. I don't really miss it, other than for watching Doctor Who in full-on surround with a HOOOOJ screen.

It does mean I have to wait for a couple of days to see most of the interesting TV shows to turn up on Hulu. Some I don't get to see at all. But generally I could, often by going to the network's site for the show and catching up on stuff there.

It oh-so nearly works almost all the time.

I have had "Better Off Ted" recommended to me; it's on ABC, and is apparently something I will find funny. Since I don't mind watching ads in between American TV shows, I stroll over to ABC.com and click to see the latest show. Good! I'm only 3 eps into the season, the sample seems to play fine and shows every indication that I will enjoy the full show.

So I click. It tells me I need to install a plugin.
...
....
ok. Sure. It's a site I should be able to trust and it's going to slot into Firefox, which means I can remove it whenever I want.

It installs, I accept the usual license agreement, it shows me an advert and then errors out saying it couldn't find a decent video renderer.

Of course, it renders the ad perfectly.

It allows me to continue anyway, indicating that there really isn't a problem, and then asks me to decide between Standard and Streaming HD. Well, bearing in mind the load on the apartment complex wifi I go for standard. It buffers. For ten minutes.

While I'm waiting I have a look at Twitter (Neil Gaiman has pictures of sticks. See what you miss if you're not on Twitter?), check my mail, fire up the USEnet client and, just for fun, see if I can find Better Off Ted. Ahhhh, alt.binaries.tv has all three episodes in HD. A mere 200mb each file, too. Well, that'll take me all of about...15 minutes to download and reassemble. Half hour to watch, just in time for bed.

Moral dilemma: I don't want to condone piracy. On the other hand, I'm going to watch the pilot, ad free, and then I'm going to delete it. No, I'll just check back with the ABC movie viewer...it's exactly where I left it. Still buffering. In the same spot.

OK, a race. USEnet vs ABC.com
I leave the ABC.com viewer where it is, because that's a 30% head start, and pull the .rar files from USEnet. And, like Clarkson driving the Veyron, suddenly I'm in the grip of POWER!

It's ten minutes later. The ripped version is down, watchable and ready to go. The official, ethical version is stuck.

Odd, how people make it harder to be good than they do to be bad, isn't it?


Update: In the end, I decided to bin the downloaded file and make the ABC thing work. Tomorrow, though. Maybe. I know they're looking at TV shows watched online as part of the ratings and I would really like to see this show - but I have run out of time to watch anything fun tonight.

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Work E-Mail

I was having a spring clean of the "sent items" box, and found this: it needed a little reformatting.

The Original Mail:

Good Morning!!
It is not provided on init form. Can you please confirm with the EE whether he is married or single?
Thanks, Savita.

My Reaction:

Oh, the potential responses.

Version 1
Dear Savita,
Thank you for your request for clarification. I was not aware that EMR required that level of detail to set up a cost management record, so let's be exhaustive and try to provide you with as much as possible.

Mr R. remains a confirmed batchelor, although his mother hopes that this is just a phase he's going through and he'll one day Meet The Right Girl. He wears a size eleven shoe, parts his hair on the left, dresses to the right and votes based on issues rather than party affiliation or personality. He doesn't take sugar in his tea and prefers to avoid caffienated beverages where possible, but like so many of us he just can't seem to get started in the morning without at least one cup of coffee. He prefers Columbian, and whole milk. He stirs anti-clockwise, although when at home in Australia this is, of course, clockwise due to coriolis force.

Mr. R. enjoys the challenge of crosswords and has a fondness for the works of John Le Carre, the famous author of spy thrillers. He loves Christmas, which we all find very endearing in a man of his stature, having taken to heart the lesson of Dicken's "A Christmas Carol" at a very early age. His favourite colour is duck-egg blue - which may be one of those peculiar decorating misnomers because I can tell you, I've studied duck eggs and one thing they aren't is blue - and he has a fondness for soft furnishings that is quite at odds with his engineering background. One might assume that he loves comfort, but in other parts of his life he's quite austere. His kitchen is particularly spartan, mostly stainless steel with only the odd wooden container to soften the impact of all that metal and recessed track lighting.

Version 2
Dear Savita,

We do not speak of Mr. R. The emotional scars are still too fresh.

Version 3
Dear Savita,

We contact Mr. R. to recover the information you requested but his response was in Australian language. We're awaiting a translation.

Version 4
Dear Savita,

Mr. R. declined to comment, but his colleague Mr. Dalliard is single and wants to know if you're available on Thursday night. He says there is a "darling little bistro" he's been wanting to try. Can we give Mr Dalliard your contact details?

Yes, I swiped Mr. Dalliard from "A Bit of Fry and Laurie", which I undersand is available on DVD.

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Blog Announcement!

Game: if you're commenting, and I do love it when people comment (validate me! validate me! I have no existence unless I am observed by others!), you might notice the "word verification" thing that ensures you are not a spam-bot.

At the end of your post, define the word that the verification gives you. There will be an actual prize, eventually (by Xmas, I think), for the best one. I have shamelessly stolen this idea from the blog of David Brin.

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