pumpkinstrokemarrow

Connecting the cable set me to pondering about all that signal floating around peoples' back yard, which can be captured by a few bits of aluminium and piped down into crystal clear pictures on the box. Lips a bit out of sync. with the sound but I don't think that that is anything to do with my connection or positioning of the aerial. Now the thing is, do all these signals float around for ever? Do they go whanging their way into outer space? Is the first intimation of earth on life to the little green men on Mars a dose of red hot porn from Rotterdam? Or do the signals attenuate through space and time, so winding up lost in the grey clutter of background radiation? Perhaps I could capture the signal in a special box lined with mirrors. The signal goes in through a hole then spends eternity going backwards and forwards between the mirrors. Presumably there is a catch with such a device but I do not know what it is.

Then we have another, possibly simpler puzzle. I have been wondering about why cut grass warms up when it is in a heap. Warming up which kicks in within minutes of heaping. Where is all the energy coming from? At the time of writing I have two options. Option 1 is that while grass, when alive and in the sunlight, is a net producer of carbohydrates, it also consumes carbohydrates to drive the processes essential to grassy life. Pushing food and water up and down the roots, stems and leaves for example. An end product of all these processes, just as with a computer, is heat. Processes which continue for some time post-mortem, plants being rather dumber than people. Once the grass is in a confined space, rather than waving around in the wind, it heats up quite quickly. Option 2, which does not exclude option 1, is that micro-organisms move in fast to start devouring the dead grass, no longer able to defend itself from attack. And all these micro-organisms burrowing into the grass generate heat of their own.

Meanwhile, I see our friends in the US are having their midsummer bash-a-brit festival. Making quite a thing of it on this occasion, even managing to make a lot of money out of it. That is to say, the Brit. in question is having to provide a lot of employment for bog standard citizens of the US who might otherwise be on benefit, to the detriment of the pensions of honest and formerly hard-working citizens of this country. BP being such a big deal that its shares amount to some significant proportion of the holdings of Brit. pension funds.

Not to be outdone the Surrey police are celebrating the feast of St. Securitas by having a fesitval on Epsom Downs tomorrow. To which end they have errected a large enclosure up near Tattenham Corner, displacing the gyppoes who might otherwise be indulging in their traditional sports. That is to say, telling fortunes, bare knuckle fights, horse dealing and fleecing the goujars (gadjos according to http://www.alphadictionary.com/index.shtml) at the fair. God willing, as the god fearing like to say, I shall be up there tomorrow to inspect it.

I close with positively the last word on psoriasis. It seems that our medical word is a Greek verb meaning to have the itch. So while the Turks are content to label the disease in the vernacular, we prefer to euphemise it in medical Greek. A difference which one might explore at length, but for today, I pause.