Breathing Room
Two weeks ago today I wasn’t feeling quite right, and thought I’d better do a lateral flow test from the kit we’d recently been given, just in case. Within moments I was confronted with this:
Damn.
10 REM RIP
Sir Clive Sinclair, who launched countless programming careers, has died at the age of (ZX) 81.
No one in Australia would remember him for his failed C5 electric trike (we never saw them, except on news reports), but a mate in high school had a ZX81, and I still remember pressing my fingertips firmly on its flat plastic keyboard. Even though it couldn’t do much, it looked great, with its sharp black corners and red lettered logo, like KITT from Knight Rider. In rural Tasmania in the early 1980s, it was pretty cutting-edge.
I can’t think of too many of the personal computers of the time that were so closely associated with a single individual. None of us knew who’d founded Acorn, or who the Vic was behind the VIC-20. Even Apple had two Steves, not one. Clive was one of a kind.
A Cure for Cancer
One woman’s mission to eradicate Nazi revisionism on Wikipedia.
All of those women were right.
The paradigm that derailed the science of obesity.
Has mRNA biotechnology delivered a cure for cancer?
Falling Down
The twentieth anniversary of 9/11 felt more significant than in a while, probably because the fall of Kabul to the Taliban last month had already taken the world right back to 2001. I wouldn’t add much to my comments of those early years, but some of the articles that did the rounds were worth a look.
“The Falling Man” is still you and me.
My mother died on 9/11. Every year, her absence feels larger.
The wildest shit from ’01 to ’06.
I also watched 102 Minutes That Changed America, which because we didn’t have a TV in September 2001 was the first time I’d seen the footage at such length. A waking nightmare.
The State of It
Why there is a shortage of drivers in the UK.
Why public schoolboys aren’t fit to run the country.
EU citizens who have applied for settled status in Britain are being threatened with deportation.
Quiet is the New Loud
Now that I’ve got 2020’s sounds out of the way, time for a post about 2021’s (so far).
The Soundtrack of Silence
After a reasonable start at tracking my listening in the first few months of 2020, things tailed off in lockdown, mostly because my opportunities for music-listening were more limited when I wasn’t riding back and forth to work every day. (As for podcasts, I’m impossibly behind.) For the months of the first lockdown and the summer school holidays I was sharing the flat with everyone else all day and not wanting to impose my tunes on them all the time. After school went back I hadn’t wanted too many musical distractions while working from home.
Still, I managed to keep up with some of the big releases of the pandemic, and made a few deep dives into artists I’d never given enough time before. So before I turn to my favourite music of this year, here’s the best of (the rest of) last year’s. Hey, if Tokyo 2020 can be held in August 2021, so can 2020 Best Ofs.
Begone
After last year’s non-holiday summer, everyone in our family was yearning this year to get out of Edinburgh for a proper summer holiday. With the Delta variant on the rise, international travel was off the cards, whatever the state of vaccinations, so like the rest of Britain we were looking closer to home. Luckily, school holidays in Scotland start earlier than in England, so we faced less competition for holiday homes in remote locations, and were able to book one without much trouble. It wasn’t cheap, but not as bad as some reports of costs down south.
She’ll Be Right
Watching developments in Australia from the vantage point of Plague Island has been a weird mixture of reassurance and fearfulness. In the early weeks of the pandemic J. and I were worried that our families there would catch Covid while we were stuck over here and unable to travel back. When it became clearer that the risk of that was much smaller than in Britain, the worry was just that we wouldn’t get to see them for a long, long time. It’s two years since I last saw my folks, and will be at least another. But at least they’ve been safe.