Some Kind Of Rhapsody

So what happens when sixty-odd thousand fans are waiting for Green Day are treated to Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody being played over the speakers? They join in of course, word perfectly and spontaneously with no prompting or guidance (and with now canon headbanging in the appropriate place). There is something so wonderful and awesome about this:

(Green Day actually did this when Heather and I saw them and the twenty-something thousand crowd there did exactly the same thing. It’s hard to think of another song which could achieve this)

Vote For The Future

Or Why I Voted When It Doesn't Matter

I recently posted about how little my vote counts, given what a safe Conservative constituency I live in and the stupidity of this country’s first past the post system. And yet today I did actually vote (not deliberately spoil a ballot paper, or abstain, but select a candidate and offer my support). So why the change of heart?

There isn’t one really. I don’t expect my mark to make a difference, at least not this election. But perhaps it can cut that majority, reduce the feeling of helplessness, for the next election, or the one after that, until eventually my vote might count. A vote for the future then, however distant.

Proper Engineer

The great Isambard Kingdom Brunel offering advice to an assistant, William Bell, as quoted in Brunel: The Man Who Built The World by Steven Brindle:

You cannot take too much pains in making everything in equilibrio; that is to say that all forces should pass exactly through the points of greater resistance, or through the centres of any surfaces of resistance… Consider all structures, and all bodies, and all materials of foundations to be made of very elastic india-rubber, and proportion them so that they will stand and keep their shape: you will be these means diminish greatly the required thickness: then add 50 per cent Isambard Kingdom Brunel

Of course you add 50% 🙂 That’s what engineering is!

Vote For What?

There is a general election rapidly approaching, a mere two years after the last—the idea of them being fixed at every five years having been quickly made a mockery of when it suited the incumbent government—and the media is full of calls to make sure I’m registered* I am, to make sure I go to the polls. Yet I can’t help but wonder why I should. Unlike the last general election where my vote might have counted, this time I moved to James Brokenshire‘s ultra safe1 constituency of Old Bexley and Sidcup.

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