Gaaah
Still haven't done the spreadsheet stuff, but the references are cleaned up and I've found a value that someone (in this case the recently deceased Michel Blot) obtained for bacterial transposition rates.
And I took some time out to watch Bleak House, which I found immensely entertaining. It did the BBC costume drama thing of having every celebrity in the world in it, from the obligatory (Charles Dance) to the borderline ridiculous (Johnny Vegas). Some people like costume drama because "it makes a change from all the swearing and violence on TV nowadays", which makes me wonder what else they've been watching; I, on the other hand,like nothing better than to see an image of thepast that I can count myself lucky to have escaped. Gout-riddled aristocrats, mucky peasants and all the variously deformed, deranged and debased grotesques in between, that's what I like. And that's what is served up to us, from the magnificently infantile Skimpole, who ran away with the episode, to the getting-uglier-by-the-year Timothy West's stuck-in-the-mud Lord Dedlock. The cast of extras were great too, with faces straight out of a Phiz cartoon framed in improbably baroque hedgerows of seemingly wrought-iron whiskers. The more I experience of Dickens (whether on or off the page), the more I love him.
Which in turn reminds me, I still haven't seen Polanski's Oliver Twist. Tut. Maybe this weekensd, in between Halloween parties.
Now, I think the great thing would be to get an early night, then up and in the computer room for 7 tomorrow, to get these graphs done. Hmph. Many a slip though... I guess time will tell.
And I took some time out to watch Bleak House, which I found immensely entertaining. It did the BBC costume drama thing of having every celebrity in the world in it, from the obligatory (Charles Dance) to the borderline ridiculous (Johnny Vegas). Some people like costume drama because "it makes a change from all the swearing and violence on TV nowadays", which makes me wonder what else they've been watching; I, on the other hand,like nothing better than to see an image of thepast that I can count myself lucky to have escaped. Gout-riddled aristocrats, mucky peasants and all the variously deformed, deranged and debased grotesques in between, that's what I like. And that's what is served up to us, from the magnificently infantile Skimpole, who ran away with the episode, to the getting-uglier-by-the-year Timothy West's stuck-in-the-mud Lord Dedlock. The cast of extras were great too, with faces straight out of a Phiz cartoon framed in improbably baroque hedgerows of seemingly wrought-iron whiskers. The more I experience of Dickens (whether on or off the page), the more I love him.
Which in turn reminds me, I still haven't seen Polanski's Oliver Twist. Tut. Maybe this weekensd, in between Halloween parties.
Now, I think the great thing would be to get an early night, then up and in the computer room for 7 tomorrow, to get these graphs done. Hmph. Many a slip though... I guess time will tell.