Happy birthday

Happy birf’day…

To you,

Happy birthday to you

Happy birthday dear BLISS

Happy birthday to you.

So

You are working

On your birthday

That does

Not seem right

Somehow

And

I bet that the IT

System won’t be

Working again

Causing untold

Frustration

No

Point sending

An eCard or

A tweet

Because it won’t

Arrive

Not

Until you

Get home, where

The IT systems

Are much more

Reliable

Which

Seems daft

When you work

For a huge

Public sector

Organisation

Maybe

One day the

Penny will drop

And they’ll stop

Their obsession with

Outsourcing

Until

That day comes

Electronic birthday

Wishes will have to

Wait until you’re at

Home

Gangstagrass

Listening to ‘Lightening on the strings, thunder on the mic’. Bluegrass / rap hybrid. It’s a great album. I came across them checking out the theme tune playingover the credits of…

…Justified…

…a series that, after watching the first episode, I knew had me hooked the way The Wire had. Elmore Leonard. Based on Elmore Leonard books. That’s a good start. Then, don’t waste a scene or a line of dialogue.

More lies

The vanity project Olympics are over and the politicians are claiming a benefit to grassroots sport. A benefit the statistics don’t support, with less people playing sport on a weekly basis than did before the Olympics. Nice opening ceremony, though. Shiny.

A bad spell of weavva

The last above average summer was 2006, in terms of sunlight hours and low rainfall. Sensible measures of a decent summer, I think. The only average summer since 2006 was 2010.

The Met Office and their chums are sitting down to jolly well thrash out doing something about it, apparently. Or for a nice chat and some tea and cake, anyway. I don’t think a few scientists can just decide to pop out and put back a gazillion tonnes of melted polar ice and make the Gulf Stream drift return to its former glory.

Maybe they’ll just arrange for the manufacture of bigger and better umbrellas.

Black holes and plenty of ‘em

Twenty-six of them, in our next-door galaxy. They’ve gone from a theoretical postulated phenomenon based on an equation on the back of a fag packet in a German WWI trench, to “look, twenty-six of the buggers, just over there” in about a hundred years. They’re now called black hole candidates, as you can’t actually see them, because they’re made of matter packed so densely that even light can’t escape their gravitational pull. All the astronomers can do is detect the sort of stuff going on in their general area that gives them away.

Playing hide and seek, on a cosmic scale, black holes are the kids that pick brilliant hiding places, then chatter and giggle away to their inevitable discovery.