Road Trip!

So, a road trip to Surrey and back completed without too much drama. Except in the last mile when some... cad in a London-registered Mercedes decided that merging in turn wasn't really for him... Grrr. Still, I'm very pleased with Radio 3 at present. Yay.

Recommendation

Tuesday 28th November, 18:30 at the Royal Society: "Mind - the gap?" with Nicky Clayton, Doris Lessing, Will Self and Andrew Whiten. Be there or be under-informed about comparative psychology and suchlike.

"You should be making it easy on yourself"

Get the reference?

Having driven rather a lot over the last few days, some observations...

Annoying: people who sit in traffic with their brake lights on. Especially the super-bright variety.

Irritating: people who drive in normal conditions with their foglights on. Yes, yes, we've been here before. To be fair, the last one of the evening today was behind me and did in fact turn them off when I flashed my foglights at them. Hurrah.

Barely believable: rounding a bend on a fast A-road to find a guy in an old Mondeo overtaking a tractor, whilst talking on a hand-held cellphone.

Entertaining: making use of the fact that people don't use all available lanes to skip a long line of slow-moving traffic. Hurrah.

Plan: entertain myself / indulge in retail therapy / possibly make life easier by getting satnav. Hurrah.

Epistemology

My Vodafone bill arrived today; the envelope bears the question: "Did you know that 1 in every 100 people on the planet own a Vodafone mobile phone?" Now, I don't believe that this is true, which means if I'm right that the question is rhetorical, the answer being 'no, it would not be possible to form a justified true belief [for example] to this effect'. But that sounds unlikely. Can there really be 600 60 million people with Vodafone phones? (This being, of course, not the same as there being 600 million Vodafone phones)

Beautiful ladies in danger...

What would Bill Bailey say?

"He considers insurance a form of gambling"

A certain well-known insurer has just quoted me over £2000 to insure, on a Third Party, Fire & Theft basis, the very car we were yesterday offered £700 for in part exchange. Quote me happy? Not exactly... Even the cheapest quote so far is £513 TPF&T, £720 comprehensive. It'd be nice - if unrealistic - to find an insurer who recognised that 1) the car is six and a half years old and not unshabby; 2) I've held my licence since January 2002, have no endorsements and have for most of that time been insured on one or more of my parents' cars, with no claims made; 3) I did my Pass Plus test too. It doesn't help that I need to be insured for business use, for an unknown but probably uncomfortably high annual mileage. Of course I could buy myself a car with a lower insurance grouping, but the £3000 or so that would cost for something decent compares unfavourably with the £0 I can buy this one for...

So, yeah. Just thought I'd share that.

Cellphones

Yes, cellphones. I enjoy delivering Americanisms in an over-the-top English accent.

Nokia 6120, 6230i, 6822, or Motorola V3i?

Anonymous new blog has been set up and has a few posts. If you want to know where it is, ask me - but please don't tell anyone, or link to it, just yet.