According to the weather app on my phone it’s currently -1°. This is an improvement on earlier today when it was -6° but I think -1° might be our high for today.
Its been one of those days when you stand in the shower and realise that your feet are in standing water! The pipe that takes water from the bathtub to the drains has frozen again. It did this last winter. It’s the section on the outside wall. It’s practically horizontal and consequently water collects in it, which is not a problem until we get what the weathermen happily refer to as a “cold snap”.
In some parts of the UK schools have closed because of heavy snow. We have a sprinkling but today is bright and crisp again.
In Munich they skate on the frozen canal. If the canals here froze, which they do on occasion, I doubt that we could muster enough ice skates to organise some canal skating. We are not as organised as the people of Munich. But no doubt people will have been rooting out the sledges that they put away in the garage after the last lot of snow!
I was thinking about the odd ways in which IT has played games with our lives. There’s all the hacking that goes on, not just the serious stuff where they mess up the deliveries to places like the co-op and M&S, but the stuff in your everyday life when you discover that someone is trying to steal you identity and post strange stuff in your name on social media.
Then there is photoshopping - remember the horror with which people greeted the possibility that Kate Windsor might have tweaked a family photo. Nowadays the photoshopping is much more subtle, often impossible to detect, and it’s hard to tell which are genuine photos and which are concocted: works of art in their own right almost. Facebook is always showing us pictures of famous folk in their hospital beds - all inventions as far as I can tell.
And now AI is messing with our heads, producing supposed songs by famous artists and podcasts which their supposed authors never recorded. It’s hard to tell who hasreally said what!
Here’s an article by Yanis Varoukis, YouTuber, protesting about discovering recordings of himself that he never made.
Fake news has become a regular part of modern life. Maybe I should only ever read the book we already have on our shelves. At least I’m pretty sure most of them are not plagiarised. But then, you never know. Perhaps it’s all been going on for longer than we know.
Here’s something by someone called Jason Okunday:
“I love spoiling the plot for myself. It’s something I do fairly regularly. Before watching a film, I tend to open Wikipedia and read the entire plot synopsis. If every episode of a series has been uploaded to a streamer, I often open the last episode, watch the final five minutes, close it and then start from the beginning. I did as such when the final season of Top Boy dropped in the autumn of 2023. When I tweeted about it from my now-deleted X account, I drew a range of bewildered and outraged responses, including from the official Top Boy Netflix account.”
Oddly enough when our son was in his teens he used to speed-read his way through books to find out what the ending was and then go,back and re-read the novel in a more leisurely fashion, allowing himself to enjoy the good bits. It’s one way of approaching literature, I suppose. Part of the fun of a good mystery, though, is working out for yourself what you think really happened and then verifying it. And I have been known to getnto the end of a really good book and go straight back to the start justbto enjoy it all afresh!
Here’s an odd story provided by columnist Arwa Mahdawi:
“A 3ft-tall wallaby called Rex ended 2025 by breaking out of a farm in New Jersey and going on the run. Eventually, the wandering wallaby was found hanging out next to Walmart. The marsupial is now back at his farm and possibly planning his next escape – hop-fully to somewhere rather more exciting.”
Even animals deserve a bit of adventure.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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