Life, the Universe and Everything

As I approached the dance place last night, I met one of the other blokes. He said that given the ice and snow, he expected a shortage of women. I thought he was probably right. We were both wrong. Sure, overall dancer numbers were way down but there were more women than men. Thinking about it, I realised I'd made this false assumption about women's attitude to difficult travel conditions before. However, when I look at other activities such as getting in to work, the image of men being bold risk-takers stacks up pretty well. So, is it possible that some women make a special effort to go dancing when the weather is dreadful and risky? And why? Here are a few ideas: Women who dance are special and are less worried about risk than average? Women expect fewer other women to turn up and want to go where they think they are unlikely to be wallflowers? Men expect fewer other women to turn up and don't want to go where they think they are going to have to compete for par...

Most people access Facebook via the main site and that's the all singing, all dancing version. As well as seeing what your friends are up to, the silly games and adverts work just fine. At the other end of the scale, there's  a very simple site that's really intended for mobile phone users. You can use it from your PC as well and it's very fast and doesn't hang up or crash like the main site. There's no "chat", games or adverts. Then there's a happy medium which they call Facebook Lite . It does have chat and adverts. Not made it crash yet. Finally, I discovered what they call the Touch Site which is another medium weight version. I'm not sure what its intended mission is. I suggest you just try it and see if you like it!

Our local Asian grocer is into recycling in a unique way. He is unfashionably keen to offer customers a bag to take stuff home in. And the bags are not the flimsy Tesco "split under the weight of a jumbo pack of feathers" style. These are sturdy, heavy-duty items that rival the supermarket's "bag for life" So, how is this recycling? Well, for a start, they're such decent bags, it wouldn't feel right to throw them away. Then when you look at them, you see that they are "surplus" or "bankrupt stock" from other businesses.

In a corner of Martin's room, Meg noticed an old-fashioned draftsman's board with built in sliding rulers. She wandered over and looked at the drawing on it. "This looks like some sort of shoe?" "Yes, it's my design for a Chesil Boot" said Martin.. "What's one of those?" Did you ever hear of Chesil Beach ? "Yeah, I remember going there on a geography field trip." "Quite pebbly and difficult to walk on?" "Yes, I remember now, Kelly Simpkins fell off her stupid high heels and broke her ankle" "I'm going to walk that beach. All 18 miles of it - and not break anything!" "Cool!" Meg pointed to the drawing and looked at Martin questioningly. He smiled and explained how the design supported and cushioned the foot. "So that's what you engineers do?" "Some of us" Meg smiled. "How many pairs are you going to make?"