You say tomato, I say potato

A potato/tomato plant - how good is that?  It's a tomato plant grafted onto a potato plant (unless today is 1st April).  Not the other way round, that would be pretty pointless.  It does, of course, bring us to the old 'is the tomato a vegetable or fruit?' question, and this would seem to indicate it's a vegetable if I make the bold assumption that grafting a fruit to a vegetable would be more difficult.  However, it has made me think of other good combinations which can take advantage of a root crop and a non-root crop (don't know what a non-root crop is called - 'air crop'?).  What about carrots and peas?  We often cook and serve these together, so that would seem ideal.  Or swede and peppers?  Save on peppering the swede.

The world marathon record was broken at the weekend - down to 2hrs 3mins 23secs.  I hope I live to see it go down to 2hrs, now that would be something special, akin to the 4 minutes mile etc.

A warm front approaching

Climate change is a reality according to the UN, so should we all be afraid?  Probably, but we'll also probably leave for the next generation to worry about, I mean, we're near the end of the road aren't we?  I suppose the difficult thing here is that seeing into the future is beyond most of us, well, all of us actually, although you could be forgiven for thinking that some of us believe we can.  We're very good at foreseeing something that has happened as in the proverbial 'told you so' manner, when in actual fact, they didn't tell us anything.

Horror of horrors!

The 'Psycho Ward' and 'Mental Health Patient' costumes for sale at Asda and Tesco have caused a rumpus - angering mental health charities etc.  I'm not surprised - over 18 quid for essentially an orange boiler suit?  Outrageous.  I guess the boiler suit version could be recycled as 'Guantamano Bay warden' or similar.
These items are (I suppose) marketed as being essential garb for Halloween which to my mind has slowly become too commercial for it's own good, and therefore hyped up by marketing men which leads to more commercial activity encouraged by a younger public who do not yet have the cynical gene developed enough.

Power to the people.

Politics - don't ya just love it?  At last we have something controversial to discuss instead of the sat on the fence policies that are designed to just go under your 'controversial limit' from all the main parties.  It's the 'we'll freeze electricity prices until 2017' policy just announced my Mr Milliband that has lit up the comments pages in the newspapers, prompting 'furious' responses from the electricity companies.  Personally, I can't see this working to the customers advantage - are we expected to believe that a private company will lose money?  If they do manage to get some agreement to keep prices the same, we'll just end up paying for it somewhere else, like via the fixed charges, or inflated prices for the year before it.  It's a purely political statement, no more, no less, but what I expect is that some anti-privatisation people will jump on it as the best thing since the nationalisation of the East Coast trainline.  I expect government/elec company discussions will be interesting!

Time, it's getting on.

The earth is probably going to end in about 3 billion years, or sooner, if you think a rather large piece of rock will land on us.  Evidently we'll get quite close to the sun and all water will evaporate, but I think there will be probably be other signs first.  I don't think we'll wake up and think 'Hmm, not much water here is there?'.  I'd actually like to be here as the 3 billion years gets closer - should liven up the day's discussions.
The thing is, we never know the future, and we can't predict the weather more than 3 days at a time (and then it's often wrong), so why do we bother with this 3 billion years stuff?  They probably only report it to scare us into buying a solar blanket or something the following day.  Still, I suppose we need to have one eye on the future.

Talking of the future, I see Ed Balls is doubting the wisdom of investing in HS2 - the high speed rail line that's going to cost us a small fortune.  About time someone spoke up about it - what a waste of money.  I've probably ranted on about this before, so here goes again.. Why not spend it on upgrading the existing, elderly, network?  Raise a few bridges and put double decker trains on the tracks like on the continent thereby raising capacity and bringing more people onto the trains.  Time does not allow me to do a proper rant, but I really hope they see sense by dropping the HS2 project.

Write on!

What a great idea - a beauty contest where the participants are judged on their knowledge of religion as has happened in Nigeria.  I wonder how that would go down in the UK? 
I'm not going to say much about religion, some views are known to upset some people, suffice to say that as a one time Christian, I'm convinced that religion plays an important part in peoples lives, just please keep it out of mine.  I think the same way about fishing - something else I have tried and not found to my taste.

Anyway, how exciting to read that we have a new judge on The Voice, and there's an absolutely terrific tip on how to bake cup-cakes on Yahoo News.  Oh, did you see the 'start-up tips' for that super game Grant Theft Auto? (although I should really abbreviate it to GTA - how remiss of me).

Bring back journalists - I never thought I would be saying that!

Sliding down memory lane.

Ah, the joys of returning to work after 14 days in the sun, doing nothing much apart from leisure activities.  That's leisure activities on holiday of course - not at work.
I've been back at the desk for about 7 hours now and the holiday is a dim and distant memory.  Luckily I have some photos taken on my phone that will remind me what it was like - or will it?  In fact I hardly (if ever) look at old photographs nowadays, and if I do, it's probably so I can send them on to someone or use them as an avatar on some forum or other.  It's not like the 'old days' when  we used to show the slides to family and friends whether they liked it or not!  I have about 1200 slides in the loft that I converted to JPGs a couple of years ago.  Not that I needed to see them again, but because they were deteriorating and (maybe) the family will want to see what they looked like in their tender years, how dark dad's hair was and how slim mum was.

Aint no rest for the wicked. But there is for me.

Holiday: A day of festivity or recreation when no work is done.
I have 14 of these from tomorrow.