Friday 13 August 2010

The Perseids

Remarkably there was only slight cloud cover last night as we gathered in the garden to gurn at the Perseid meteor shower. We even managed to see a couple!

The good Mrs Mungo and I have a rather dismal record when it comes to seeing astronomical events, having missed eclipses (both solar and lunar), meteor showers, aurora, black holes and flying saucers* due to the UK's rather unfortunately cloudy weather. For the first time in years we weren't denied. Might try again tonight and see if I can get a few snaps.

*OK, so not all of those are astronomical and not all of those are phenomena either.

Caveat Emptor

Just had my first epic Internet shopping fail. I bought a book through Amazon marketplace, which was swiftly dispatched. When I opened it, initially everything seemed fine, the cover was slightly damaged but it was a second hand book, so I wasn't too worried but then I noticed there was a chapter called David Lee Roth. "That's a little odd..." I thought. I was eating dinner so put the book down for a moment. I picked it up again and idly noticed that the inside front page of the book referenced Henry Rollins, then my eyes wandered up and I also idly noticed that the title of the book seemed to be "Do I come here often." These thoughts drifted round inside my head for a few moments before suddenly crashing together with a bang. "This isn't the bloody book I ordered!"

Now, you might think that would be the sort of thing that would leap out at you straight away but person or persons unknown had ripped the cover off the book I actually wanted and glued it over the cover of the Rollins book. They'd done a fairly decent job of it too, the Rollins book was almost exactly the same thickness and shape as the original book so to a casual glance there was nothing untoward.

I should add that I contacted the seller and they are dispatching another straight away. So that part at least is working properly.

Monday 2 August 2010

Why Are Some People Annoying?

It doesn't happen often, but sometimes I just immediately dislike someone for no reason whatsoever. At my previous job I ended up working with a man I found amazingly annoying, even before he'd ever spoken to me. In the past I've just gone with it, but this time I thought I would try and understand why I felt this way about him, after all, I'd never met him and didn't know anything about him, so there shouldn't be any reason for me to feel that way.

Initially I made some discreet enquiries and found that other people felt the same way. So, at least I knew it wasn't just me. I decided to try and work out what it was about him that was so irritating, but nothing seemed to leap out. Now admittedly he did do some irritating things, the most annoying of which was sending me an email full of questions, despite sitting next to me, then immediately coming over and standing behind me and saying "I've sent you an email..." Then just staring at me while I waited for it to arrive, and read it, before thinking a bit and then answering him. So yes, that was annoying but crucially can't be counted here because I didn't know he did things like that when I first met him.

I never did work out what it was!