pumpkinstrokemarrow

Continued with the fairly new Holiday Inn at Solstice Park, mentioned in the postscript to the previous post. Smart new building, although old enough that rust was showing through on the steel work of the roof - it being one of those curved and sloping roofs, presently fashionable, which sit on top of buildings and the edges of which project some feet- sometimes a lot of feet - beyond the walls, steel work thereby made visible underneath. Also visible to the weather. I think a lot of grander buildings - such as the Pompidou Centre - which wear their structure on the outside in the same sort of way, albeit on a larger scale - have similar problems. Architects of today have perhaps forgotten the function of cladding in clothing.

Smart modern room, which I much preferred to the rather older, repro-furnished rooms of the Mercure, discussed previously. Duvet a much more sensible thickness too. Green gesture outside our window in that the flat roof below had been planted with what looked like a grass-sedum mixture, so that we saw a pleasant green carpet instead of the usual chippings. Perhaps from http://www.enviromat.co.uk/.

There were a couple of catches though. The screws holding the net curtain rail to the head of the window had come out of the head of the window and the rail was just lodged up there - all ready to fall down when the BH disturbed the thing. And then while the remote control to drive the air conditioning unit appeared to have idiot proof instructions, we could not get the unit to respond to instruction. Reduced to crawling underneath the thing and turning the power off so that we were not treated to assorted whirrings and whizzings all night. Luckily, the resultant temperature was OK.

Back home to read of a very proper spat in the TLS, where we read all about one Peter Thonemann, Forrest-Derow Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History, Wadham College, Oxford, who the previous week had loftily rubbished some small books with pages made of lead, thought to be ancient. This week, the chap thereby rubbished has come back fighting, citing all kinds of scientific and other evidence in support of the ancienity of these lead books. He suggests referring the matter to the world expert in such things, one Dr. Ziad Al-Saad of Amman. Hopefully he has not been caught up in the recent bother there and is still in a position to help. And another chap, encouraged by Thonemann, uses the occasion to trot out his own bit of forgery detection. While I completely failed to recover the offending article by Thonemann from the TLS Archive, despite my remembering my credentials there for once in a while. Has it been discretely removed to avoid embarrassing the great and the good?

PS: on March 24th I mentioned the difficulty that Chrome was having with Flashdance. Also with some other plug-in called Gears. Particularly irritating when I am booking tickets for a show - these plug-ins seemingly being involved in the display of seating plans. Luckily, I have now turned up someone on their help forum who, instead of having a rude or crude pop at Google, suggests upgrading to the Chrome 11 beta. This has now been done - very painless - and the difficulty has vanished. Four hours in and counting.