Wednesday November 25th 2020

11:00 A nasty wet morning, and Lois has indigestion troubling her. I suggest that I do us scrambled egg for lunch, which should be fairly easy to digest.

a typical meal of scrambled egg on toast

I've got out of sync with the fitness programme that my physiotherapist Connor, has devised for me, which is a walk every other day, and exercises on the intervening day. I've got to speak to Connor next Tuesday to tell him how I'm getting on - should I confess to my lapse, or keep quiet about it, I wonder? I'm not sure - the jury's still out on that one. Decisions, decisions!

Cheltenham General Hospital's physiotherapy department

15:00 Steve, my brother-in-law in Pennsylvania USA has sent me an interesting article out of  "Popular Mechanics.com", which is not a website I check very often. Apparently it's even more peculiar than was thought previously that intelligent life has evolved on Earth. The article draws on research by Oxford University's "Future of Humanity" Institute.

Oxford University's "Future of Humanity Institute"

I've been thinking a lot about George Clooney this week - he came to my attention because he doesn't like the current leaders of Hungary and Brazil: I like that in a man (and in a woman haha) !!!!

George Clooney (right) in "Ocean's Eleven" (2001)

The Popular Mechanics article points out that there’s an iconic scene in the 2001 movie Ocean's Eleven, where George Clooney explains the series of escalating improbabilities of his planned crime. After several hugely unlikely outcomes, he says, “Then it's a piece of cake: just three more guards with Uzis, and the most elaborate vault door conceived by man.” In a way, the unlikely hurdles to the rapid flourishing of complex life on Earth are the same way.

I try to make sense of the article. It seems that people think the evolution of intelligent life should have taken far longer than the age of the earth - the fact that it "only" took not much more than a billion years is a bit of a surprise, they think: what a crazy planet we live on !!! The researchers have used a Bayesian model of factors related to evolutionary transitions.

There seem to have been three critical stages: (1) the early stages, where we were "aided" by favourable surface temperature, protection from spaceborne dangers, and the presence of life's "building blocks". At this stage, however, no cells had yet emerged.

(2) the secondary stages: primeval "ooze" gave way to "prokaryotic life", with its "unsuitable" cells, which then developed into "eukaryotic life", thus evolving the kind of cells that intelligent life needed. The fact that it took a billion years for this to happen suggests it wasn't necessarily an inevitable outcome. In contrast, the development of multicellular life, which you might think was quite a challenge, has actually evolved independently over 40 times - yikes!

eukaryotic life emerges from prokaryotic life

(3) some of the final pieces in the puzzle:  the move from fission and other asexual reproduction to sexual reproduction, which greatly accelerates the rate of mutation and development of species by mixing DNA as a matter of course.

Simples (not) !!!! And not particularly likely to happen very often in the Universe, if at all, scientists think. What madness!!!!! 

Can all those films about aliens really be wrong????? I think we should be told!

20:00 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her sect's weekly Bible Class. I settle down on the sofa to watch Episode 2 of the new Icelandic crime series, "The Valhalla Murders".

In the first episode, that I saw on Monday evening, two murders have been committed, apparently by the same man, because he leaves his "signature" on the victims' eyes - yuck!

The puzzle is that the 2 middle-aged victims seem to be unconnected with each other: the first, Thor, is an ex-drug dealer, who seemed to have been flush with cash recently, so maybe he's gone back to the drug trade. The second victim is a well-known financier, Omar.

Here we see the two victims shortly before they get killed:

the 1st victim, drug-dealer Thor, seen here in a bar with girlfriend Iris, shortly before his death

the 2nd victim: prominent financier Omar: his wife hears suspicious sounds

and asks Omar to go check - she never sees him alive again - yikes!!!

The murders are being investigated by Kata, a Reykjavik detective who is not very happy in her job. She's been passed over for promotion and her views are often ignored by her management. 

Poor Kata!

Kata (centre), the Reykjavik detective who takes up the murder investigation

There is a further insult to Kata by her management in this episode. They "parachute in" a detective from Oslo, the stony-faced and humourless Arnar, to work with her on the case.

Kati's management "parachute in" a detective from Oslo, the stony-faced Arnar

I always have trouble following the plots of whodunnits and remembering who's who, but I try my best again. It's a helpful twist to recognising Arnar, the Oslo man, that he always looks stony-faced, or should I say more stony-faced than most of the other characters, which is nice!

I think the main result from tonight's episode is that Kata and Arnar find a connection between the 2 victims. When they look at the contents of the safe belonging to Omar, the murdered financier, they find a package posted to him 3 weeks earlier, marked with a biblical reference and a picture of a group of children, and also 3 adults, among whom are Omar and the other murder victim, drug-dealer Thor.

The biblical reference reads, "Whoever conceals their sins does not prosper, but the one who confesses and renounces them finds mercy." 

They establish that Omar, the future financier, is the dark-bearded guy at the back on the extreme left, and Thor, the future drug-dealer, is also standing at the back, a bit further to the right.

Later they find out from Omar's son, Ragnar, that it's a picture taken at Valhalla, a boy's home at Borgarnes, a long way out of town, where Omar used to work. A third adult in the picture (at the back, extreme right) is identified as Brynja, a woman who lives out at Borgarnes.

Brynja, a third adult who worked at the boys' home

Kata and Arnar realise immediately that Brynja could be the killer's next victim. They're not top detectives for nothing haha!

They drive out to Borgarnes to warn Brynja, but it's too late - they find her dead in the abandoned boys' home, where all 3 victims used to work. Damn!!!

The killer's 3rd victim, Brynja, found dead in the boys' home where she used to work!!!

Poor Brynja !!!!!!

And that's it, there you have it! I think for once I'm up to date with the plot, although there are bound to be lots of dark sub-themes that I haven't noticed - damn (again) !!!! 

Is it significant, for instance, that the killer quoted a Biblical verse on the boys-home photo he sent to Omar, and that Arnar's terminally-ill wheelchair-bound father reads Jehovah's Witnesses magazines, for instance? Jehovah's Witnesses tend to get a bad press in these Scandi crime-dramas, I've noticed!!!

Well, I think we should be told !!!! 

21:00 Lois emerges from her Bible Class and we watch something light to go to bed on: more about comedian Kenneth Williams' life, "in his own words".

22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzzz !!!!!