And the rain just keeps on keepin' on, right into May.

Wordle 1,043 4/6*

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Three minute one.

The forecast was for showers but I really want to get to 400 miles this month if I can, so I decided to put up with it and do 30-odd miles after work. The wind was coming from the east so I headed over that way. Thought I'd probably do Rempstone or Wymeswold and back. After Zouch though I had the idea of taking a left off the main route, to try to loop back round to Sutton Bonington.

I did this a few weeks ago but this time I took the left a bit later (through East Leake rather than West Leake). Followed a sign to Gotham, after a while I didn't have a good feel for where I was so I cheated and had a look at Google Maps. This suggested a nice easy way to Sutton Bonington through New Kingston and Kingston on Soar. So I did that.

Good to explore new roads. Quite liked the stretch between Gotham and Kingston. I'll make a note to go that way again.

Came back the longer way through Peggs Green and Coleorton. Listened to another couple of hours of the Reacher novel. Best one for quite a while. Familiar plot ideas, but nicely put together. I didn't get rained on at all.

Back on 34.85 miles and that's 379 this month, coincidentally the precise target for April. But I'd still like to end up with more than 400. At the moment Monday looks like a nice day and I've booked the day off work.

https://www.strava.com/activities/11269907774

Wordle 1,042 3/6*

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Took me about 20 minutes!

I handed my notice in. I'm not convinced I'm retiring. It's not necessarily permanent. Maybe it is. But it is indefinite.

Ideally I would have liked to work for another six months or so but the job is getting more annoying by the day and as Miles Davis once said - when you're at a party, you've gotta know when to leave.

I'm contracted to provide 8 weeks' notice, but I've given them 9. Partly to make the transition easier for them, partly to squeeze another week of cash while I'm in the less stressful situation of knowing I'm leaving.

Wordle 1,041 3/6*

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About five minutes after midnight, then five this morning.

Another Map Men video is out!

Published seven hours ago, and it's had 326,000 views.

2. A Quick One [December 1966]

A bit of a mixed bag, this one. A slightly indigestible mix of '60s pop / R&B and English whimsy, with a prototype rock opera in several parts tacked on the end.

Relations in the band were fractious in 1966 apparently, and perhaps to address this, or perhaps merely to cope with it, the band's manager Kit Lambert pushed for each member to contribute as equally as possible to the album - meaning that less of the album is written by Townshend than would otherwise have been the case. I think it does suffer as a result.

In the end Daltrey only wrote one song for the album called See My Way and actually it's not bad at all.

Entwistle sings really nicely on his two pieces. If he was adept at singing and playing bass at the same time, they could have been a three piece band. But Whiskey Man is unexceptional and Boris the Spider is of course really a novelty piece. It's certainly enjoyable though, with the big man's bass being used as a clanging, growling lead instrument. Sounds like a Rickenbacker to my untutored ear but as far as I can make out from reading around it was a rare slab-body Precision. I wonder if Chris Squire was influenced by this tune. I remember hearing it for the first time myself while visiting a school pal in the early '70s. Like myself, he had an older brother with an ear for rock music. Handy.

Moon's Cobwebs and Strange is an oompah-brass band number. His I Need You is terrible: messy in the composition, the execution and the recording. There's a spoken section that's supposedly a Lennon pastiche.

Townshend's Run Run Run and So Sad About Us are really very good, albeit both redolent of that British '60s 'beat' sound that aged very quickly - echoes of The Searchers, The Dave Clark Five - you know the sort of thing. This album came out a few months after Revolver so it's evident that Pete's band was well behind the curve in some respects.

And yet - famously this record contains what is considered in some quarters to be the first rock opera - the forebear of Tommy, a nine minute oddity in six movements entitled A Quick One, While He's Away. A heartwarming tale of adultery and forgiveness. I liked it. Daltrey, Entwistle and Townshend all sing lead. But it's more old-time Music Hall than prog rock, somehow. Very theatrical.

As a Who fan giving this a spin for the first time in the winter of 1966, I think I'd be disappointed. Very interesting, for sure. But mostly not playing to their strengths.

Car passed its MOT again, that's two years in a row.

Nurse Campbell has been touting a link between the third "booster" COVID vaccine and a rise in the incidence of cancer. Unsuprisingly, it's bollocks.

I was getting quite annoyed listening to 5 Live's Drive programme while out on a bike yesterday. The two presenters were chattering between themselves and asking if was near the edge of the galaxy? or perhaps the universe? And throughout the programme when the subject came up the rhetoric was that it was "out there in the universe" and so on.

But as Picnic points out, it's still very close to Earth in cosmological terms. If you imagine our planet to be the monument at Charing Cross Station and the edge of the galaxy to be the nearest part of the M25, it's travelled about 2mm.

Wordle 1,040 3/6*

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About a minute again.

A sunny, dry day but cool, with the wind coming from the north. So as soon as I could get out of work, I decided to go up toward Derby. I went up Top Brand, up through Castle Donington, west across Cavendish Bridge, through Shardlow, up to Borrowash and west again towards Derby. I stopped when I got to Spondon and picked up some food at a petrol station - which was very welcome as I'd brought none with me. I couldn't find anything suitable in the fridge before I set off, must go to Tesco tomorrow.

I came back the same way until the turn for Aston. I'd intended to come back down via Swarkestone and Melbourne, but ridiculously, and I think I've done this before, I missed the turn for Weston and just looped back onto the main road at Shardlow. So I came back pretty much exactly the same way and ended up doing 41.47 miles rather than the 37 or so I was aiming for. But that puts me within two easy rides or a fondo of 400 this month. Unfortunately there's rain in the forecast every day until May 6th, after tomorrow. I'm starting to take it personally.



Nice to come back that way in bright sunlight, the last time I did that ride or a close variation of it it was properly dark on the way back, at about the same time of day.

Listened to 5 Live and another hour or two of the Reacher novel. Unfolding nicely.

There's an inviting little coffee shop along Shardlow Road now; unfortunately it's always closed by the time I pedal past it after work. Makes me think that it would be nice not to have to work every day, so I could set off a bit earlier.

Nice out there, I overclothed and was a bit too warm.

Quote from: The Picnic Wasp on April 23, 2024, 02:33:55 PM

Quote from: Slim on April 23, 2024, 01:57:25 PM

Quote from: Fishy on April 23, 2024, 01:43:50 PMVoyager-1 sends readable data again from deep space https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-68881369

"the issue was resolved by shifting the affected code to different locations in the memory of the probe's computers"

Amazing to think of people moving code around in the RAM of a computer system that's 15 billion miles away and hasn't been physically touched for 46 years, by using a very slow and weak radio link.

I started to try to imagine one billion miles as an understandable concept. I fully understand the number and what it signifies, but one thousand million miles is staggeringly difficult to absorb. Times that by fifteen and it becomes a pointless exercise of Brian energy, and to think that in cosmological terms it's not even that far away.

It's actually pretty close, despite the fact that it takes the light of the sun nearly a day to get there. If you were perched atop it with a paperback in one hand, you could probably read it by sunlight, just about. A bit like moonlight I think.

Quote from: Fishy on April 23, 2024, 01:43:50 PMVoyager-1 sends readable data again from deep space https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-68881369

"the issue was resolved by shifting the affected code to different locations in the memory of the probe's computers"

Amazing to think of people moving code around in the RAM of a computer system that's 15 billion miles away and hasn't been physically touched for 46 years, by using a very slow and weak radio link.