On Thursday we looked at the five day weather forecast and Saturday was going to be sunny intervals with no rain whilst Friday was going to be overcast.  Let’s go on Saturday, we decided.  Well, here it is and we sit here on Saturday looking out of the window at the pouring rain having had a lovely sunny day yesterday wondering how it is the Metereological Office staff keep their jobs and why weather reports are not listed under Fantasy & Fiction.  Best guess is that they have a pack of cards with weather symbols on and just flick a few down for the coming five days and then when each day arrives they do what we all do and look out the window first thing in the morning.  Then they quickly change today’s weather forecast to whatever looks most likely for the day.  When I was twelve years old our geography teacher explained cold fronts, weather patterns, wind speeds and then exclaimed that all this shows why weather reporting is so accurate.  He was most upset at the howl of laughter that went up from thirty young kids yet all these years later we still go by these predictions that are so often wrong … must be to do with the wrong type of leaves or something

We were buying authentic Epson ink cartridges for our office printers via Amazon Marketplace sellers. Then we got two cartridges that stopped working even when they showed up as still half full. We emailed Epson about it. They weren’t amazingly friendly but did agree we could send them in for testing and refund if they were not more than 90 days from purchase (how generous!). So we did. What we didn’t expect was an email from Epson telling us they were not genuine Epson cartridges but fake Epson cartridges with non-Epson ink in them. We emailed Amazon about it but have still had no reply. Epson won’t tell us what action they’ve taken either. Whichever of the Marketplace sellers we bought from who supplied these is obviously a criminal taking advantage of these wonderfully overpriced Epson consumables. So what do you do? Buy list price genuine Epson ink cartridges from Epson just to be sure, which probably involves remortgaging property to afford the bill or buy compatibles that are vastly cheaper and which, after a few replacements, pay for a new printer from the savings. This of course does leave you with the “oh god, what am I doing to the environment” blues. Maybe we should all sue Epson for causing such emotional suffering in the first place. Or should we all go back to pen and paper and stuff these daft printers that jam, squeak, splurge and drink ink faster than a Mancurian can down beer? If the planet is going down the pan maybe we should go right back to writing on stone tablets since they’ll still be there when all our books have been eaten by cockroaches, our CDs all rusted and our film records decayed. In those circumstances the only good point is that Epson won’t be around to laugh about it and nor will their printers.

Apparently, if the oil refinery employees strike for 48 hours the British economy loses 50 million pounds. Come on guys, I know the pension stuff is a right royal pain but how about only striking for 47 hours so HM Government can send me a cheque for £1,041,666 ? I’ll buy you each a drink I promise!

Watching Star Trek Next Generation recently I was forced to think back to when we were kids and produced our own humourous sketches on an old battered reel-to-reel or cassette recorder. Later on you’ll see why!

We had a vague idea of a plot and who was going to play which character but then basically pretty much anything might happen … sometimes it was hilariously funny, very often it wasn’t. Sometimes we’d rehearse a sketch we liked to the point it lost all sense and was no longer funny (assuming it had been in the first place!).

One of these sketches was based on the original Star Trek. My friend Howard, due to his deep sonorous voice got the part of Spock and I was probably Kirk because I’d rarely play unless I was in charge (nothing much has changed there!). Anyway, we beam down to this planet and Spock comes out with these immortal lines right off the top of his head, “Captain, why is it that every planet we beam down to has the same blue sky and the same pink rocks on the ground?” There was no easy way to answer that and so Howard carried on with, “I believe this studio has limited facilities!”

So why was I reminded of this old Star Trek sketch from further back than I care to count the years to? Well, it is true that you do tend to see Klingons nowadays on Star Trek rather than just a glimps of a Bird of Prey before Kirk has it blasted to oblivion and the special effects are far better than way back then with the lower budgets and even lower technology available. But, it is is still similar in that, although the planets do look different, they all by some incredible freak of chance have an atmosphere breathable by human beings. In one case on Star Trek Next Generation there was even a planet with a breathable atmosphere and no vegetation, which is a really neat trick. I guess suspending disbelief has always been the name of the game even with the most scientific of sci-fi. The Enterprise travels millions of light years through space and encounters an alien whose conceptual framework is almost exactly like ours and his words are translated into perfectly understandable English! Mind you, the idea that the English language could be the same in a few hundred years time on a Star Trek starship is far-fetched enough (just read Shakespeare or any other old English writing). It may not be the same pink rocks on the ground but by God none of these Star Trek actors and actresses are going to have their fizog off the box for a few minutes while they bounce around wearing a space suit … but then the gravity on these planets is always identical to earth gravity so I guess they wouldn’t….