In the Dark

I’m grateful to Franco Vazza for pointing out this superb bit of product placement in the advertisements on yesterday’s blog post:

I wonder what advert it will place under this one? Will it cause an infinite regress?

I’m sitting in the bar of the National Concert Hall in Dublin ahead of tonight’s concert but I have enough time to congratulate all the winners of this year’s Royal Astronomical Awards. The full list of awardees, announced this afternoon, can be found here.

In particular, I’d like to congratulate John Peacock on his Gold Medal!

John is an occasional commenter on this blog, and may even read it sometimes too!

Well, it’s been a miserable Christmas Eve with heavy showers of sleet and God knows what else nearly all afternoon. Nevertheless I’m determined to make an attempt to get into the Christmas spirit for tomorrow. If Fats Waller can’t do help me achieve that, nobody can. Here’s his classic version of Jingle Bells on which the general atmosphere of hilarity and inspired chaos allows his superb musicianship to shine all the more brightly. Few ever managed to play Harlem Stride piano as well as Fats Waller, and he’s on top form in the opening choruses of this record.

It’s December 19th 2022 and my 2023 RAS Diary has arrived in Ireland, this time with an added Brexit bonus of a customs declaration!

The diary part of the RAS diary, being I suppose intended for academics, actually runs from October to December the following year. In previous years it has arrived in time to use it for Semester 1 but for the last three years it hasn’t arrived in the post until December, meaning that I couldn’t use the first three months in the new diary. The heavy delay of the diary is matched by that of the RAS house journal Astronomy & Geophysics which usually takes a couple of months to reach Ireland. I notice that this year’s wasn’t even sent out from Burlington House until 7th December…

Apparently about a quarter of all Fellows of the Royal Astronomical Society (including myself) are located “overseas”. Those in far-flung places presumably get everything even later than I do here in Ireland.

This year’s diary is a much brighter orange colour than the picture suggests. I’ve included a picture here along with various others from over the years.

Although many of my colleagues seem not to use them, I like old-fashioned diaries like the one above. I do run an electronic calendar for work-related events, meetings etc, but I use the paper one to scribble down extra-curricular activities such as concerts and sporting fixtures, as I find the smartphone version of my electronic calendar a bit fiddly.

I know quite a few people these days are asking what Mastodon is. Fortunately, I see in the latest Private Eye that some leading experts have given their opinion on the matter:

I hope this clarifies the situation.

Once upon a time, there was a public house called The Bird Cage.

As pubs go, it was very big and very popular. At times it was quite rowdy, and sometimes nasty people came in just to annoy the customers. The landlord, however, appreciated the regular customers and, from time to time, threw out the worst troublemakers and banned them. He also put bouncers on the door to stop them coming back. Some annoying people remained but the pub was big enough that nice people could ignore them.

Then it came to pass that a rich man, Mr Musk, having grown tired of trying to persuade his camels to go through the eye of a needle, decided to buy The Bird Cage. Why he decided to do this is not clear, as he had made all his money from selling exploding cars and kneweth not of the business of public houses, but many said he was lonely after splitting up with his young partner, Darren Grimes, and thought being a landlord would make him popular. Perhaps he even thought the customers might laugh at his jokes.

After buying the pub for a price that even he couldn’t really afford, Mr Musk the new Landlord put all the prices up and sacked all the bar staff to save money. He kept the bouncers but instructed them that from now on they should throw customers in rather than out. And all the people who had been banned by the previous Management were allowed back in to annoy the nice people.

There was much wailing and gnashing of tweets teeth.

One by one the nice people all left to go to smaller but nicer pubs such as The Beehive or The Elephant. Moreover the nasty people discovered they didn’t like annoying each other as much as annoying nice people so they left too. Soon there was nobody left in the pub except Mr Musk and his bots friends.

Eventually the The Bird Cage lost so much money that Mr Musk was forced to close it down. The nasty people were sore vexed but the nice people couldn’t give a toss.

Here Endeth The Lesson.