Pykretan

Happy birthday Kate!

I know that makes me sound like a teenage blogger but I don't do it often so there. Margaret Mead would be proud of me.

First link of the day is to this site on which you need to keep your eye. It is the home of the Orwell Diaries, the entries of which will be put up on the days corresponding to when they were written starting in 1938 - like Pepys Diary here. To keep your interest until they start, here is the BBC article on same. I have to confess that I don't remember hearing the phrase "gramophone mind" before but it describes current spin and business-speak beautifully.

We had a wonderful thunderstorm last night - mostly just flashes above the clouds rather than any defined forks to the ground which greatly disappointed daughter but son and fried were happy enough to stand in the porch squealing at every prolonged rumble and sudden increase in rain. It left the air an awful lot cooler and fresher as well which has been very welcome after several nights of airless semi-sleep. The closest it got to use was about two kilometres if you want to use the "bastard French system" which is the extremely uncharitable way of describing metric measurements I read recently. I know all the arguments about Imperial units being tied to human experience and how the break-down makes for east division but when we all have calculators, it is so obviously sensible to use factors of ten rather than the old arbitrary divisions. I know as well that most of us oldies understand height in terms of feet and distance in terms of miles but, in a nice link, we are back to the "gramophone mind" where we only understand the figures because we have used them so much. I see human height in terms of feet and inches but short distances are always in centimetres in my head. This is obviously a bad thing but don't Britons always use Centigrade for cold figures and Fahrenheit for hot ones?