General Musings for the week 8th August 2010

Quite an interesting week this week. Two news stories of interest to me:


Firstly it appears that meat from the progeny of a cloned bull has made its way into the UK food chain. This has caused an uproar in the UK. Presumably folks deem it acceptable to eat beef that is fed with growth hormone and feed that is chemically optimised to produce better growth, but to eat meat that has been anywhere near a perfectly healthy cow that was duplicated is a no-no.  I will remind you that it is not a cloned cow that got into the foodchain, it was the offspring of the cow - a naturally born beast. Now I can take the morale high ground here, being a vegetarian, and denounce people for being silly when it comes to things like this. After all my attitude to this is "If you're going to eat dead animals - which is absolutely your right - why be picky about what you eat? Why not eat horse, dog, cat, squirrel, cloned cow, son of cloned cow? What is the difference?"


Secondly Google has pulled the plug on its Wave product. Citing poor user take-up they are stopping further development of Wave. Now I don't know about you but I could never see the advantage of Wave right from the start. There was nothing about it that appeared to give me an advantage over existing - established - technologies. The collapse doesn't surprise me at all.

Mental note to self: If you drop your razor while shaving, don't try and grab it as it falls or you risk personal injury to whichever digits you use to catch it with. On an unrelated note I am absolutely amazed at the number of things you do everyday that involve pressure on the ball of your thumb. This can be very painful if said thumb has a large razor gash across the centre of it.

For the first time in my life this week I was subject to a wash-out. Filming an historical drama set in the inter-war years we were shooting in a location that had been dressed to look like a mining village. The production had carpeted the floor with foam rubber sections that looked like cobble stones. Midway through the morning the clouds opened and everyone retread into a nearby barn for shelter. On our return we found that that foam rubber cobblestones had over saturated themselves with the water and were now floating on a small lake of rainwater about 1.5 inches deep Everytime someone stood on them they sank squirting rainwater into peoples shoes. Charming.

Finally got on the Stieg Larsson bandwagon this week by buying 'The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo' for my iPod. Absolutely fantastic. So much so that I've gone and bought the two sequels as well - 'The Girl Who Played With Fire", and "The Girl who Kicked The Hornets Nest". I read the first book in a little over 4 hours or so. The others I'm waiting until I get on set to start (If only....!). Highly recommended.