Serious Car

I think this is a first for d4d, but I’ve been dribbling over a car from BBC’s Top gear tonight. I’ve always been a fan of TVR cars, but I think that the Koenigsegg has it beaten as “car to dream of owning”.

Of course, the insurance would be crippling, and it would never come out of second gear in the UK, but wow, it looks like a fun bit of gear. Just a pity that it retails for about £350,000.

No added sugar

I’ve just seen an advert on TV for Sunny Delight. They’re bollocksing on about how great Sunny Delight is, because it’s got “No added sugar”. Um – this is the same Sunny Delight that is at least 10% sugar? Or does “No Added Sugar” really mean “Well we haven’t added any more sugar over the 10% that was already in there”?

I thought there were some laws about truth in advertising – but I’m sure plugging Sunny Delight as the healthy alternative to other drinks is bollocks of the highest order. I wonder how long the advert will stay on?

Phoenix my book again, I’ll kill ‘im

Much to the imminent disdain of Green Fairy, yes, I did get the new Harry Potter book yesterday. I haven’t read it yet – and no, I didn’t queue at midnight for the thing. It got delivered at 8 o’clock in the morning, which was pretty impressive.

And no, I won’t say who pegs it. I know (my normal bad habit of reading the last chapter first to find this kind of thing out), but I won’t keff it for everyone.

Stigmata

I’d seen Stigmata at the cinema, and remembered it mainly for the sound-effects, to be honest. That might sound weird, until you realise that the particular sound effect related to crucifixion, the sound of the impact of hammers on the nails/spikes used. And it was shudder-inducing.

Watching it on TV tonight reminded me that it’s a bloody good film too – and the sound effects are still vomit-inducing. Not quite horror, not quite thriller – it straddles a lot of fences, and I think I might even have to get it on DVD…

Choices

Something Green Fairy was saying this week (look at her 17th June posting – permalinks appear to be keffed) reminded me of stuff I’ve been thinking about for a while – namely Wills, Living Wills, and all of that associated garbage. Not the most cheerful of subjects, particularly for a Saturday night, but there we go. At least I’m not cliched.

There’s a lot of stuff around it all too – mainly to do with relying on other people, wondering whether they’d go through with what I want, whether they could handle executing a living will, all kinds of stuff. Is it fair to expect someone else to be able to say “He doesn’t want to live in this state” and to allow death to happen? Is it fair to want them to fulfil the terms of the will, even if they personally disagree with the terms?

Hardly a shock

It looks like the HIV virus has now begun to develop a drug-resistance. Considering how it’s been attacked so aggresively in the last ten years, it’s not exactly a surprise. Viruses (virii?) mutate, they develop resistance to the treatments, and develop themselves. It’s a survival situation – if it’s being killed off, it’ll evolve so that the main source of mortality becomes less effective.

TB’s done it, Staphylococcus has done it, HIV is doing it. The human race never seems to learn that Mother Nature is far more powerful – the more we fight, the more she makes us work for it.

Fling me to the moon

via SlashDot, there’s a piece about using a ‘slingshot’ to catch spacecraft and hurl them up to higher altitudes, or even give them a boost on interplanetary flight. It’s not a new idea, more a re-birth of one that’s been around for a while. But in connection with all the other spaceflight stuff going on at the moment ( tourist seats on Soyuz spacecraft, the X Prize, and many others ) it looks like we could be coming up to a new decade of space exploration.