Naughty Pluvialis!

Pluvialis takes her goshawk rabbit hunting in a nature reserve:

I glassed the car-park and the field.  No dog-walkers.  Check.  No birdwatchers.  Check.  No punters out for an evening stroll.  Check.  And off we crept, gos and I, off to the top wood, where the rabbits are. Sneaked around the corner of the wood.  About thirty yards away, a little way out from the margin of the wood, were three rabbits, in sillhouette, ears glowing backlit by the sun.  Surely there were more there, crouching to feed.  Ah yes.  Fringes of dry grass.  There.  Hop hop.  And next to them, a cock pheasant.  Such a quiet, lovely, sylvan scene.  Into which I intended to let slip havoc and murder.

The Single Helix by Steve Jones

A collection of science articles from Jones' View from the Lab column in the Daily Telegraph.  All are short, easy to read and entertaining.   No great depth but then they were written for newspaper readers.  Jones is the friendly geneticist and most of these articles are pretty amiable, but in one or two he does bare his teeth, in particular when talking about creationists and anti-vivisectionists.

The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch

Bradley Pearson, an aging writer suffering from writer's block has decided to go on a holiday to see if that will get him writing again.  However, a cascade of visits by friends, relatives and hangers-on conspire to prevent him from leaving.  We learn about his relationship with his younger, and now more successful, protege Arnold Baffin, Arnold's wife Rachel and daughter Julian.  Complications ensue as Bradley's ex-wife turns up and then his unhappily married sister come to stay.   A sort of black hole forms around Bradley, preventing him from getting away to do his writing.  Then Bradley and the 20-year old Julian fall in love, elope, and all hell breaks loose.  Eventually Bradley does get down to writing, but not in quite the way he was expecting.  Quite gripping.  I came away from this book with the impression that Murdoch is a seriously powerful writer, a sort of Beethoven of the novel.

Buying Safety Pins

On Thursday I had a green experience. 

I was in Reading town centre with my wife Liz who has recently lost some weight and whose trousers kept falling down.  I suggested that what she needed was some safety pins.  But where to buy them from?  My first though was Mothercare but I then realized that babies nappies (diapers) are probably no longer secured with safety pins.  My wife suggested Jackson's department store and, as we were just over the road from it, that is where we went. 

Jackson's always reminds me of the Co-operative department store in Guisborough that my mother used to drag me round in the early 1960's.  A labyrinth of rooms on different levels, joined by short staircases with wood-panelled walls.  Pigeon holes stacked with pullovers.  Assistants behind long wooden counters writing out receipts by hand.

We went down to the needle work department which was manned by two dotty old women.  Liz asked if they had safety pins.  "Oh yes" said one, pointing to a box in the corner.  There in the box were hundreds of loose safety pins.  No packaging.  I was taken aback.  I have become so used to moulded plastic packaging that it was a shock to come across goods being sold without it, as if they were naked.  The label on the box said "10 pence each".  Liz took two to the counter and paid for them.  We went out with two safety pins.  No packaging.  Just safety pins.  That's how it should be. 

I think I will be going to Jackson's more often.

Nautilus Open Terminal

Fancy desktops such as KDE and Gnome are all very well but if you want to get real work done with Linux then you have to open a terminal window.  The commands available in a terminal window far outstrip those in the GUI both in number and in power.  One of the minor annoyances I have found with my Ubuntu installation has been the awkwardness of opening a terminal window in a particular directory.  If I was going to use a directory often I would usually set up a shortcut to gnome-terminal in it and set up the shortcut's start-up directory appropriately.  Well I recently came across nautilus-open-terminal, an extension to the Nautilus file manager that adds an Open in Terminal option to the right-click menu on directories.