Status-Q

…then avian ‘flu might become swine ‘flu.

Update: And when I made that observation, I hadn’t seen a Twitter post by my friend Aaron about ‘swine flew’… which is even better.

Blackwell’s in London have installed their first Espresso Book Machine. From the Guardian article:

It’s not elegant and it’s not sexy – it looks like a large photocopier – but the Espresso Book Machine is being billed as the biggest change for the literary world since Gutenberg invented the printing press more than 500 years ago and made the mass production of books possible. Launching today at Blackwell’s Charing Cross Road branch in London, the machine prints and binds books on demand in five minutes, while customers wait.

Which does make me wonder whether, before long, we won’t have coffee shops in bookstores. We’ll have bookstores in coffee shops…

Hap sent me a link to a couple of beautifully-staged performance ‘scenes’. This is my favourite, in an Antwerp train station:

Closer to home, this is in Picadilly Circus:

These were both corporate-sponsored, but it doesn’t stop them from being great.

They’re reminiscent of those staged by Improv Everywhere. I think the ‘Frozen Grand Central’ was my favourite of theirs so far:

From Christopher Hitchens:

What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

which is, I suppose, a corollary of Carl Sagan’s classic: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”.

John’s musings about his old cars, and Sean and Nicci’s post about double-declutching, reminded me of something my father taught me many years ago which few people probably know: that you can change gears without using the clutch, as long as you get the engine speeds right. You shift into neutral, rev the engine (or let it slow down) to the right point for your speed, and then shift into the next gear. It takes some practice, but if you know the car well enough, it is perfectly possible.

Since I’ve been married I’ve been driving automatics (which, I remember being horrified to first discover, you can’t even bump-start!) But growing up with a sequence of elderly second-hand cars, techniques like these were often of real practical use. I remember driving one of my first cars several miles back home after the clutch cable had broken.

There is a real problem, though, with this technique. Because it’s dependent on matching engine speed to road speed, the one thing you can’t do is to stop, or you’ll never get out of neutral again. Fortunately, I realised what had happened to the cable while I was still moving, and so could plan a route home that involved very few traffic lights and where the majority of other places I might have to stop were on downhill slopes…

There’s a post on Sean and Nicci’s site about the family Morris Traveller.

Well, the earliest car I can remember was also, I think, half-timbered. When when we first came back from Africa in 1970 my mother had a Mini Traveller. I was three years old at the time, but amazingly, I can remember its registration number: TBB 571G.

The brain works in mysterious ways…