Now, bend over a minute...

Explorer Premium – Wireless Inspection Camera with Recordable Monitor

That, with all the catchiness a tool company called Tool can muster, it what it says on the tin. Or, to be more precise, what it says on the label stuck on the plastic case. Even as I brought it indoors, I knew I was making a terrible mistake. It's on loan, and I'm going to be using it tomorrow, and there's going to be at least one person watching, so I don't want to start all that “now, where does this bit go, and how do you turn it on?” with an audience. So I've brought it home to get it out of the box, assemble it, get it working adequately, and put it away again.

However, at some stage BLISS and DLL are going to say something like “cool, lets have a go”, and then there's going to be shenanigans. They're going to get up to no good, and by tomorrow it'll have flat batteries, or be in pieces, or have a micro SD card full of moving pictures of behind the cooker or under the fridge or someone's tonsils...

...well, that was predictable, and unpredictable, too.

There was some inspection of dental stuff, there was no checking under the kitchen appliances. But I wasn't expecting this from BLISS:

“Oh. Look. My roots need doing.”

However, the “bend over a minute” was only ever a matter of time.

The Road to En-Dor

The library service have kindly retrieved a copy of The Road to En-Dor from some deep, dark and dank local authority storage facility and delivered it for collection, for the (totally un-princely) sum of sixty pence. During the first world war, in a PoW camp in Turkey, having exhausted a succession of games and pass-times to alleviate the boredom, they turned to trying to summon spooks, using the ouija upturned glass and letters technique.

The author, after several evenings of contacting only dyslexic Russians, for some reason got a bit of the devil in him and decided to invent “Sally” from the spirit world, with her love of sailors and distaste for bad language.

It must've been written around 1920, so it reads very much as a book of its times, but it moves at a furious pace. Just a few chapters in, and the author's being tested: blindfolded, letters rotated, even the board turned upside down. There's also a rival séance running in the hospital, where, lacking imagination, they seem to be calling up the same spirits, just changing some stories a little. However, meaning to come clean sooner or later, the author now can't do that without grassing up whoever's pushing the glass around in the sickbay séance...