The house painter takes a break

Clare takes a break from painting our front room. I wish I could claim credit for this pencil sketch .. but no, it's the magic of my new Honor 10 AI phone again!

Art

In the great traditions of Clare's Galleria we bring you .. art!

The Male Patriarchy. punching down onto the Oppressed

The Wax Horse

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Sometimes we get visitors here from the United States. No-one could be more opposed to stereotype threat than myself, but it has to be said that Americans sometimes don't 'get' British humour. So let me clarify.

• The top picture, sketched by myself on my Nexus 10, is utterly without merit.


• A child could do better.


• The Wax Horse demonstrates my wife's extraordinary skill in 'remote art'. In a typical moment of casual inattention, the pink candle on the hearth went into malfunction spilling hot wax across the tiles (and indeed, onto the carpet where it currently remains). The shape, solidified, seems indeed to resemble an equine quadruped.

To be fair, Clare has more success when she is actually in the control loop .. .

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Did any of that change your view on the quality of the art portrayed above?

...As the wheels churned uselessly ...

It was a last resort - Adrian calling me - to report that his car was irretrievably stuck in mud off the A350 just north of Warminster. Sometimes the satnav demands a U-turn, and sometimes you have to pull off the main road to effect the manoeuvre. And sometimes that side road in the dark is, unbeknownst to you, the entrance to a sodden ploughed field.

Adrian's stranded car

Alex and I arrived about 45 minutes later laden with planks, spades and chocolate bars. After watching them work for a while from the warmth and dryness of my own car, I was persuaded to transfer to the stuck one to reverse out (on those newly-laid planks). At this point a large white van pulled in; the livery said 'Garden Centre' and the guy and girl offered use of their winch.

We compromised: I reversed enough to show in principle we could have gotten out, and then they winched the car to the concrete entrance way. Nice people.

Adrian finally retrieved

Here's Alex's impression of Adrian safely back at ours, checking stuff out on his laptop.

Oh Mighty One - thank you for helping us!

And here's Alex's impression of ...? A Greek God? A Roman Emperor? It's hard to be sure.

The painter

This has been a long time in the planning. I escaped most of yesterday as I was visiting my mother in Swindon hospital (she fell and broke her hip at the weekend and is awaiting an operation later today).

This morning I spun out the gym session, but there is only so long you can physically torture yourself.

To be fair, I have got off lightly. My services needed for sanding and dabbing those hard-to-reach corners of the bathroom upstairs. And we're mostly done now.

Clare's paintings

During our sojourn in the States back in 2001/2, Clare had a fair amount of time on her hands while I was participating in Cable & Wireless Global's stately descent into terrain (Chapter 11 in 2004). She took up painting and here is her gallery from that time.

"Flames"

"Freesias"

"Planes over Wolftrap"

"The Matrix"

"Steel Tooth"

"Wolftrap Theater in the Woods"

A Cable & Wireless colleague once asked to buy "Freesias". She said she had always liked the "Primitive" style. I smiled demurely and declined her offer; I never had the nerve to tell Clare.

The great moth of sleep

To all those who mentor ...

The CEO mentors -- at Dilbert

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The great moth of sleep alighted upon me yesterday afternoon, and as I drifted off my thoughts turned towards the Fool.

"In literature, the jester is symbolic of common sense and of honesty, notably in King Lear, the court jester is a character used for insight and advice on the part of the monarch, taking advantage of his license to mock and speak freely to dispense frank observations and highlight the folly of his monarch. This presents a clashing irony as a "greater" man could dispense the same advice and find himself being detained in the dungeons or even executed. Only as the lowliest member of the court can the jester be the monarch's most useful adviser.
...
"Jesters could also give bad news to the King that no one else would dare deliver. The best example of this is in 1340, when the French fleet was destroyed at the Battle of Sluys by the English. Phillippe VI's jester told him the English sailors "don't even have the guts to jump into the water like our brave French".

And then, for some reason, I thought of Jeremy Clarkson ...

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The house painters are back!

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A novelty door stop .. (in Wells this morning)

The Dieting Mirage

Every day you eat three to five pounds of food - where does it go? Most of it is (or is metabolised to) water which leaves the body as sweat, moist breath or liquid waste. Between half a pound and a pound is excreted as solid waste (eat more fibre!). The remainder is exhaled as yet another metabolic by-product - carbon dioxide. Oh, and maybe some of it adds to your unsightly girdle of fat!

Remember conservation of mass?

Suppose you go on a diet; you reduce your day's food intake by 1,000 Calories (i.e. half rations). Next day you weigh yourself. Triumph! ... you weigh a pound or two less!

So now it's an eating day again. Next day, omigod ... you've gained two pounds!

This is not a story of yo-yo dieting. You're weighing differences in internally-carried food!*

A pound of fat provides around 3,000 Calories. If you reduce your daily intake by 1,000 Calories you will metabolise of the order of one third of a pound of fat to compensate. Honestly, you will not notice this on the scales. If you can maintain a 1,000 Calorie daily deficit for a whole week (a big ask!) you might lose that magic two pounds for real - something noticeable behind the daily ups and downs of eat-process-excrete! Think incremental, marginal gains and stick at it.
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* I don't think we should forget the gut microbiome either. Weighing in at two to three pounds, it seems plausible that this mass of symbiotic bacteria should be quite responsive to levels of nutrition, dying back when the host is dieting and re-expanding once the good times return. This additional (non-fat related) ebb and flow of weight probably occurs on a timescale of some days: yet another delayed reaction to dietary change.

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And now for something completely relaxing: take your shoes off, lean back and just chill with this ...

Thanks to Marginal Revolution.

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In other stuff, we have not seen the painter for some days after an initial half day of preliminary wall-scraping, an absence due entirely to rain and inclement winds. We hope to see him again tomorrow.

Free Energy is a thermodynamics concept: it's the amount of energy in a system which can do useful work. It's the reason why only differences in temperature can power machines like steam engines: a uniformly warm heat-bath can't make anything work. This has (negative) implications for life in the outer solar system. Remember Europa in the book/film 2001?

How do we know it's Spring? A vole's head, tail and unidentifiable lump on the kitchen floor yesterday morning + the animal has taken to ambush-hunting birds in the bushes under the feeders. Just thought I'd share ...

Stuff

Tomorrow, weather permitting, EA Construction will be coming around to paint our house. The front had been refaced with cement and looks gray and rough; the rest is old, tired and colonised (picture). I'm told that after two weeks we will be somewhat pink - I prefer to believe we're talking adobe.

Before painting (the back of the house)

What else? A spare bed which has been cluttering up the house for years is due to be collected by the YMCA, also tomorrow. I really have no knowledge of this organisation beyond that imparted by noted troubadours, The Village People, but I'm sure the bed will be put to good use.

I had an application in with the OPG for LPA which I had rather feared might lost in the post. I called this morning and yes, they have received it, there are no errors and the registration process is ongoing.

The author: why so smug?

Anything else? Well, this morning I weighed in at just 10 stone 11 (68.5 kg) ... and we have Clare's special homemade spaghetti carbonara tonight (.. so that might change, then).