I want to blog about this because I’m *seriously* wound up, but I don’t dare write it on my own blog in case my sister, who I stupidly gave the url to, accidentally reads it and gets upset. Babel has therefore volunteered to let me use his blog, which is very kind of him and may stop me exploding and making a nasty mess everywhere.

The background to this story, is that a couple of months ago the husband of my aunt, who is in his early 40s, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. It was a severe shock to the entire family. Parkinsons is a disease which people typically do not suffer from until they are much more advanced in years, and even the doctors are surprised to have discovered it in someone so young. It’s a degenerative disease, and one for which there is no cure. He has now been provided with appropriate medication which is supposed to slow down the effects of the illness, but it’s all a case of buying time; the prognosis for the future is not good. (more…)

I’ve been hit twice today by the majesty of numbers, by their capacity to throw up surprising results that fly in the face of all expectations.

The first time was when I was working through some simultaneous equations earlier. Nothing special there, until something happened that made me very nervous about pursuing any future career in economics, illustrating to me what a disaster could ensue by the very smallest slip-up in my modelling.

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Try as I might, I couldn’t come up with a catchy title that summed up the various threads that woven together will comprise this post, so I stole a little from Radio’s post on the same subject.

The Moosemobile is the name that Big J (“He’s big, and his name’s J“) gave to my car, in reference to an old nickname for me that he still uses, Moosedog.  (Now you know what that little drawing at the side of the Meddysong logo is )

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Well, of course it isn’t, but it may as well be.

I’ve just realised that I have read about a dozen books since I last updated my blog.  That’s a lot of writing to do if I’m going to comment on them all.

And that’s where this title comes from.  It seems that I find reading pretty easy.  One of the books that I read goes over 500 pages, yet it was polished off in about three days.

Yet I’ll be damned if I can write about all these books.  It seems to me that I don’t have time.  The illusion is that reading seems to be less consumptive of my time than writing about the books would be.  Utter trash, of course, but that’s how it feels.

To get around the problem, I thought I’d write about the books in a single post, add a comment, and that could be it.

I’ll write about them in order of preference, seeing as it would be unfortunate to put potential readers off by inflicting on them a line on the dull book that is Waterloo, by Andrew Uffindell and Michael Corum.

So, here I, eventually, go …

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