At last it's cooled down a bit today. The high temperature was predicted to be only 73F (23C) and we've had drizzly rain on and off since just before lunchtime, which is nice.
Otherwise, not much of a day - just noise-noise-noise from the mini-building-site at Nikki's next door, while her brother's building firm struggles to lay the foundations / footings (or whatever) for the new extension on the back of her house. Today they've been pumping concrete into it all from a big truck parked out front - sheer madness !!!!!
flashback to yesterday: Nikki-next-door's back garden,
where her brother's building firm is laying foundations for an extension
- what madness !!!!!
Nikki's back garden as it looks tonight -
with lots of liquid concrete poured into the trenches.
Apart from that, I've written another email to the wills guy at our solicitors - he seems to think that Lois and I don't need to set up a trust, but our son-in-law, Ed and his financial advisor think we do, and Ed himself is a lawyer. Help !!!!!
If only Raymond Burr (TV's Perry Mason, the lawyer) were still around!!!!! I know he's Canadian/American but they both have basically the same sort of common law as us, don't they? Only the other day, a US court cited some pre-1776 English legal precedent for one of their decisions - I forget the context.
flashback to 1958: US lawyer Perry Mason (Raymond Burr)
demonstrates what pencils look like to his secretary Della Street (Barbara Hale),
as Della makes careful notes.
pencils: the legal definition
But what a crazy world we live in !!!!!
14:00 Lois and I are both archaeology buffs, and it always makes our day when one of the many age-old historical mysteries gets solved by new research. At last, it seems, after centuries of speculation, science knows the purpose of a mystical tall monolith in central London, which is nice (source: the influential American news website, Onion News).
LONDON—Archaeologists excavating a site around the iconic
monument theorized Monday that England’s mysterious Big Ben might have
originally been constructed to measure time.
“For generations, we have speculated upon the purpose of this enigmatic monolith, but we’re now reasonably certain that it was created as a sort of primitive timekeeping device,” said Oxford University archaeologist and lead researcher Dr. Peter Munnery, describing evidence that suggested the primitive society originally built it as an altar to their “near-fanatical relationship” with the idea of time and its passage.
“Of course, we’re just theorizing, but the circle and the three dials within might symbolize the sun and the shadows cast from its rays. What’s truly incredible is that to this day one can look at the monument and get a rough sense of the current time.”
The team added that although its origins had been lost to history, the name Big Ben might have originally referred to some sort of all-powerful sun god.
There's no doubt that the mysteries of history are, now more than ever, crumbling in the face of the persistent attacks of today's "men of science", offering hope that one day even such questions as "Who is Tom Tugendhat, and could he become our Prime Minister?", will be answered! Let's hope so, for all our sakes! [Tugendhat had to drop out several days ago - keep up, Colin !!!!! - Ed]
Tom Tugendhat (second from left) - could he be our next Prime Minister?
19:00 Lois and I settle down on the couch to watch the last part of the weekend BBC Proms Concert - and they're playing one of our favourites, Elgar's Enigma Variations.
We always love Enigma Variations - each of the variations was dedicated to one of Elgar's close friends, identified only by their initials. All long dead now, of course, but as one of the BBC's pundits says in the studio, "Here we have all those characters who tonight have been brought back to life through this music, the imprint of human kind, a living, enduring memory by which they have achieved immortality. It's love and memory."
members of the audience who obviously have something
better to do than to wait for the end of the concert haha!
a bunch of people leaving early to avoid the encore
Our top recommendation is for them to play "Chopsticks" - it ticks all the boxes. It's always a crowd-pleaser, and it's short as well. What's not to like! haha!
20:00 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her sect's weekly Bible Class on zoom. I settle down on the couch and watch the 3rd episode in the new "Scandinoir" crime series, "Trom", all about the mysterious death of Sonja, an animal rights activist, on the Faroe Islands.
I agree with the blurb in the Radio Times (above), in that "Trom" is quite slow-moving as Scandinoir dramas go. Even somebody like me can keep pace with it, and most of the time I more or less remember who the main characters are - there aren't too many of them, also, which is a bonus.
It's interesting to see how "provincial" the Faroe Islands are, and how much they rely on back-up from the mother-country - Denmark - for anything technical. They have to parachute in (not literally) a Danish pathologist, for example, to determine the cause of Sonja's death.
They also have to send murder victim Sonja's mobile phone over to Denmark to get the contents analysed, after the local police IT department in the Faroese capital of Torshavn (literally "Haven/harbour of the god Thor") strikes out again.
The thorn in the police's side is the leading character, Hannis Martinsson, a journalist, who recently discovered he was the dead woman's father.
Hannis knows his daughter was a leading protestor against the whaling business. He suspects a cover-up by the authorities and by the big whaling companies, and he's slowly moving round the coast of the Faroes and inspecting remote buildings that his daughter had marked on a map.
At most of these remote buildings on his coastal journey, Hannis finds exactly zero of anything of interest - it's all a bit creepy but also rather tedious if you ask me.
But then in the final few minutes of Episode 3, where Hannis is snooping around yet another typical little cliff-top complex of huts, he suddenly hears the sound of a gun being cocked. And in the closing image we see him slowly raising his hands in the direction of some unseen gunman.
Cue closing credits - and quickly!
at this point the closing credits start to come up
Yikes! And now I've got to remember this ending next week when I watch Episode 4.
What a cliff-hanger - and almost literally haha!
21:15 Lois emerges from her zoom session and we wind down with an episode of the 1990's sitcom "Third Rock from the Sun", where a group of aliens have landed on earth, having ditched their Alien Starfleet Officer status, and have begun infiltrating human society in an attempt to understand Earth's culture.
One evening Dick gets a call from the local police to say they've picked up Harry, and asking for his "father", i.e. Dick, to come down to the station to collect him and bring him home.
I also learn some new vocabulary, which is nice.
A "pop quiz" in Professor Dick's physics class doesn't mean something like the PopMaster quiz in the Radio Times, all about pop music. It's more like what in the UK we might call a "snap test", or "snap exam", one that is sprung on the students as a surprise, and so a test they haven't prepared for.
And a "tallboy", a word used by my parents' generation to indicate a tall, narrow chest of drawers, means an extra tall (16 fl oz) can of beer in the US.
What a crazy language we speak!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzz!!!!!!
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