One of Meg’s carers turned up yesterday afternoon with a rather unusual request, namely did I have a paint scraper? As it happened, and quite amazingly, I managed to put my hands on a new paint scraper relatively quickly. My young carer needed to remove some tinting material from the front windows of his car and as this is not legal he intended to remove it. I assembled together a range of materials (brillo pads, cream cleaner, scouring pads etc) that I thought might assist him and he together with a fellow care worker they were going to undertake their repair work. It was only when I did some research on the internet I came to appreciate that tinting is allowed for the back windows of a car but not the front. The weather this morning is gloomy and overcast and it had evidently rained overnight. This we did not mind too much as Wednesdays are the days when our domestic help calls around and it is always good to have a chat with her. But the principal appointment this morning is with an OT (occupational therapist) who is calling round by appointment to assess a series of aids to help to manage Meg’s condition. We know that the appointment is this morning but we do not have an exact time so we need to be in for all of the morning. If the weather brightens up this afternoon which well it might then we might treat ourselves to a trip in the park later on. My niece got into contact with me to indicate that she could not get through to this blog so this is taking some investigation – for some reason, the domain name which is fully paid up and in date will not point to the relevant server so I have support tickets in place with my website provider to provide a solution to why something that has been working for months if not years has suddenly decided to go belly up. In the meanwhile, here is an address to which the domain name is meant to point and this might help readers of this blog to get through to it: https://mch-net.info/wordpress This morning, i made a lightning visit down into town to collect our newspaper and whilst in the store, I happened to notice our window cleaner who was on the top of a tall ladder cleaning the windows of a building opposite the supermarket. I was tempted to call out a greeting but restrained myself on the grounds that whilst on the top of a ladder, he could hardly turn round and wave. I am reminded that when we undertook a statistics exam at the end of our second year in university, we were given to a graph where we had to interpret the results. The graph was entitled ‘Death to Window Cleaners by Age’ and demonstrated a generally ‘U’ shaped curve with deaths being quite high when window cleaners were in their 20’s but then dropped markedly when they were in the 30’s and 40’s. Then the death rates started to rise again as taw window cleaners were in their 40’s, and 50’s reaching a peak in their 60’s. The explanation which I supplied to the examiners (together with most of the rest of the 200 of us) was that whilst they were young, the cleaners were somewhat more daring and liable to take risks with their ladders. Then as they got older and acquired wives, children and mortgages they tended to be sober up somewhat and be much more risk averse. As they aged, so almost inevitably they started to lose their grip and their balance and hence the death rates rose steadily as they aged. However, this was a totally incorrect answer. We discovered via a friendly examiner some time later that the correct answer was there was insufficient data to form any conclusions from the data that was supplied and therefore any answers that we might give were completely in the realm of speculation and not at all warranted by the data sets with which we were supplied.
There is a group of activists entitled ‘Led by Donkeys’ which likes to use bill boards and other visual methods to lampoon political figures. In their latest stunt, Liz Truss was captured storming off stage during a book promotion event, after she was interrupted by a remote-controlled banner mocking the comparisons made between her and a lettuce. The former prime minister was pledging her support for Donald Trump when the sign rolled out in the background, featuring a photo of a lettuce with googly eyes, which read: ‘I crashed the economy’. The whole point of this stunt was a comparison that was made during Lizz Truss’s ill-fated premiership between her shelf life and that of a lettuce (in point of fact, the lettuce won) Lizz Truss is trying to endear herself to the American right where her style of free-market economics might find some adherents. However, she is constantly lampooned by the British media and I suspect that she dare not show her face at venues in Britain lest even more fun be poked at her.
With the American elections approaching, I have decided to bookmark some relevant websites that I think I will find especially useful. But first, on my Thinkpad laptop, I have downloaded the DuckDuckGo browser which has very prominent for preserving online privacy and not allowing cookies or websites to have your IP details. I have used this before and its search facilities for simple items seem to be as good as Google. Once the browser was installed I did pay a subscription to the New York Times (which has a very heavily discounted price to new subscribers of only £20.00 for the first year) as its has excellent election trackers. To complement these, I am also bookmarking two other liberal-inclined websites in CNN and MSNBC so I have the three websites available to me very easily and quickly by just using the DuckDuckGo. This curiously named browser, I discover, is really named a children’s game of ‘Duck..Duck..Goose’ and I do not know whether it has been popularised in any parts of the UK. I seem to remember that at the time of the last Presidential elections in 2020 I did something similar and then got rid of all of the bookmarked websites when the elections were well and truly over. But I have the feeing that this time around, the US elections might drag for months with challenges in the courts and Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters refusing to accept the result.
© Mike Hart [2024]