Days 996 - 1002

Aka Monday 21^st October 2019 - Sunday 27^th October 2019

A pretty quiet week again, although I did go up to London (passing the Witching Tree on the way)...

...to meet, and catch up with , an old friend and to see the new Terminator film, ‘Terminator: Dark Fate’, which is pretty bad, mostly due to (a) story problems, there was a time when the good guys when make sure that any Terminator “corpse” was completely destroyed, so that no-one could reverse engineer it and set the creation of Terminators and Skynet/Legion, (b) badly filmed action, how can you make to planes crashing into each other dull? and (c) there is some terrible acting (although there are some good performances from a couple of the main cast, so it’s not all bad) and makes ‘Terminator:Genisys’ look better in retrospect…

 

…I also picked up the latest 2000AD Partwork and my new comic book day comics:

…on Saturday I did the kid’s maths problems in one of the Guardian’s pull-out sections and got this combination:

…now everyone knowns about how ‘23’ is a magical number, and some people know that ‘42’ is the answer to life, the universe and everything and some people know that ‘57’ is the variety of Heniz’s, but to get all three in one go is a little odd…

…I also picked up a Lego Satellite:

…and on Sunday I picked up National Lottery winnings (£33.50p), not enough to retire on (or to greatly offset my past loses), but enough to cover my work lunches and get a couple of drinks in down the pub…

…and I did this week’s G2 Crosswords:

…and the week gets off to a great start with Monday’s crossword, as I only had to cheat on one clue – the clue was ‘like an omelette’ and I went for ‘easy’, as in eggs over easy, but the answer was ‘eggy’, which I’d dismissed as being too silly an answer! Apart from that the little grey cells were firing on all cylinders…

…and Tuesday’s crossword went in the totally opposite direction and I had to cheat on a third of the clues (eight out of 25). I guess the little grey cells were tired from yesterday! But I did learn that a ‘Curlew’ is a ‘large wader of the sandpiper family’, that ‘Brecht’ was a ‘German dramatist and poet who wrote The Threepenny Opera, d.1956’, that the ‘Vetch’ is a ‘climbing plant of the pea family, cultivated as fodder’, that the ‘Alder’ is a ‘tree of the birch family’, that ‘Naphtha’ is a ‘flammable liquid hydrocarbon mixture’, that ‘Tahiti’ is not only a magical place, but also the ‘South Pacific island where both Robert Louis Stevenson and Paul Gauguin spent time’ and that ‘Euclid’ was a ‘Greek mathematician, d. mid-3^rd century BC’…

…while Wednesday’s crossword goes in the opposite direction and I only had to cheat on a twelfth of the clues (two out of 24). And I really should have gotten those two, ‘abscess’ from ‘inflamed swelling’ and ‘analogue’ from ‘something seen as comparable to another’, but it was still a good showing…

…and Thursday’s crossword switches tracks again, and I had to cheat on a quarter of the clues (six out of 22) – its been a real yo-yo crossword week this week! But again, it’s mostly stuff I didn’t know, which means that I learnt that ‘Owen’ was the ‘Welsh industrialist and social reformer, founder of cooperative communities, d.1858’, that ‘Kinshasa’ is an ‘African capital on the Congo River’, that ‘Helsinki’ was the ‘European capital, venue for the 1952 Olympics’ and that ‘pilaff’ is a ‘rice dish’…

…there’s more yo-yoing with Friday’s crossword as I only had to cheat on a ninth of the clues (three out of 26) – which suggests that Saturday’s crossword will go badly! Back to today’s crossword, which taught me that ‘loam’ is ‘rich soil of sand and clay’, that a ‘counterpane’ is a ‘bedspread’ and that ‘Ceps’ are ‘large edible mushrooms’…

…and Saturday’s crossword goes okay, I only had to cheat on a sixth of the clues (four out of 24), a meh end to a week yo-yoing between greatness and terribleness. But I did learn that the ‘shaven part of a monk’s head’ is called ‘tonsure’ and that ‘lilies’ are ‘plants with slender stems and large trumpet-shaped flowers’.