Loneliness of the non-drinking runner

[peterbirks]

My mortgage offer officially expires Thrsday, so I spoke to C&G today. They seemed very helpful and the guy I talked to held up his hands at one point (as I was heading into rather obscure territory) and admitted that he needed to check something with the supervisor. She gave him the information (which was the right information), and we carried on. Theoretically, C&G now have my application as "pending", i.e., expired, with no request for an extension, but not deceased (unlike various members of the chain, but, well, that's another story).

So, everything is on hold, and we await developments. Oh, and, to add to the fun, my solicitor is ill.

++++++

I ran up some stats on PokerGrapher tonight (in the midst of another couple of sessions of "running bad", but not "running horrific") and it did not make for cheerful viewing. The inescapable conclusion would appear to be that, since August last year, I have been a break-even player at $2-$4. This doesn't include bonuses or rakeback, which is why my profits graph still has an upwards slant. But, playing at the tables, I'm going one step forward, one step back, except with rather more volatility.

It's not that my play has got worse. Indeed, my play has got better. I'm constantly tweaking things and making gradual improvements, but the opposition is getting better faster. I fear that to generate a profit rate akin to that achieved in 2005, I would have to devote almost full-time study to the stats and to playing. And that just isn't worth it. I could do it, but I choose not to. Even for Birks, addiction has its limits.

I'm not even that bothered about it. The money made is nice, but an irrelevancy in the grand scheme of things. The only problem is that if I devote less time to the game than I do at the moment, the chances are that I would become a losing player (practice, and all that).


+++++++++++


There was an interesting news item this morning on "left-field" answers to global warming. One of the proposals that appealed was to create some kind of gigatonic artificial volcanic explosion, thus generating a "volcano winter" (you may remember that when the volcano in, er, Washington State? British Columbia?, blew a decade or so ago, the temperature dropped the following year because of the amount of material blasted into the atmosphere).

But why not take this a logical step further? We all know about the nuclear winter effect. So, why not have a couple of controlled nuclear explosions and a "controlled" nuclear winter to offset global warming? Perhaps these controlled nuclear explosions could be in ooooh, to pick a couple of places at random, Pyongyang and Tehran.


However, my own preferred solution is for us to manufacture a giant parasol, which could be planted in the Earth, rising several hundred miles in the air, being opened when required.


I think a light pink with tassles would be a nice effect as well.

______________

Comments

Controlled nuclear explosions

[(Anonymous)]

Yo, Briks! Good thinking. I'll get right onto it.

George W.

Controlled nukes

[(Anonymous)]

No Pete, you can't have two in the Northern Hemisphere and none in the south, unbalanced, Harare maybe? and Mururoa Atoll, but without pansying about with burying the things, that should do it

Re: Controlled nukes

[(Anonymous)]

Sorry, that was me John W, I suppose another approach would be to deliberately set off the
super volcano that is supposed to be under Yellowstone Park. Bad news for Yogi mind

Cheeky request for advice

[(Anonymous)]

Ah homebuying and talking to mortgage advisers! Two classic ways to lighten one's mood!! I've just got off the phone to the local building control to discover how much hassle it's going to be to get retrospective consent for the structural building works my vendor undertook without so much as a by-your-leave. That's fun too.

Your comment about mortgage offer extensions interests me. If we have to ditch the house we're offering on we have an expensively arranged mortgage (with everyone's favourite lender the Nationwide) that might expire, so my question is: how flexible do lenders get with extending their offers beyond the original expiry? I just assumed I'd lose my £800 reservation fee and be back to square one. Any thoughts?

Same Lurker as the other day.

Re: Cheeky request for advice

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

My understanding is that my deal with C&G is that I am not back to square one. Although terms of the loan might have to be renegotiated, the level of fee for arranging the loan might stay where it was (i.e., I only pay to arrange the one loan; I am not required to pay twice). This is because the house is still the same house and I am still the same person, so they have done most of the work. And (as they well know) if they try to charge me again, I am likely to tell them to piss off and go elsewhere. And then they still have to chase me for the original fee, which I would be in no rush to pay them.

However, if you are buying a different place from the one for which the loan was originally arranged, I fear that you would be back to swuare one, because the security is on the property you are buying, not on you. New security, new deal, new arrangement fee. But, if you end up buying the same house, but later than anticipated, or at a different price, then you should not have to pay more than one arrangement fee.

PJ

Re: Cheeky request for advice

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah that sounds all too plausible. Oh well it's only money. Ta, and good luck with your property tribulations.

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

That would be Mount St Helens, very definitely in Washington State, Pete. Those of us who are historians, of course, would prefer to think of it as in the north-western part of the disputed Oregon Territory (disputed, that is, between the British Empire and those upstarts from beyond the lands of the Dakota). So: British Columbia; all right, if that's the way you want to think of it.

Oh, and it was twenty seven years ago. Unless you're thinking of the current eruption, which started in 2004 and is still rumbling away. But what the heck, I'm just a historian, I didn't get to learn anything useful, interesting, or indeed particularly accurate.

I love Webley's idea of "deliberately setting off" Yellowstone. I'm not sure there's a dentral drill powerful enough to get to the appropriate, ah, root ... Good luck trying, though. (Christ, "deliberately setting off" the central heating at home is difficult enough, at times.)

Your idea of a global parasol won't work, the novels of Arthur C Clarke and Charles Sheffield notwithstanding. Tassels are the sort of thing that Sir Norman Foster would attach to the parasol, with his usual ignorance of the engineering constraints imposed by the 250mph jetstream. Too Victorian, my dear, and the dry-cleaning costs would be astronomical. In the modern age, you clearly need to replace the tassels with wind chimes -- rather large ones, unless you want your ears pierced on the wrong side of the tympanic membrane -- which would also offer the undoubted benefits of feng shui.

If the two co-ordinates of the Axis of Evil -- not sure whether they're XY, YZ or XZ, but we can have the FBI lineup later -- can be persuaded to make like Chernobyl (I'm trying to remember whether that was in Byelorossyia or in Chukotka. One of the two. About five years ago, I believe), and point the result at the parasol, then we also have the ability to move the Earth out of the way of the next catastrophic meteor impact. Of course, it would obliterate Iran and North Korea. I don't see any dinosaurs crying over that.

Incidentally, did you know that you can reach the Governor of Chukotka on 2-90-00 or 2-90-40? (Obviously a busy man, what with the two telephone lines and all.) He's also reached the modern age with a fax number: 2-27-25.

Enjoy!

Volcanoes

[(Anonymous)]

No, Pete, it's not Mt St Helens, which is just a normal volcano that could "just" take out most of Oregon. The lava chamber under Yellowstone Park, that powers the geysers there, is an order of magnitude greater, set that off, (drill a nice deep hole, lob in a megaton or so and retire immediately) and you'ld really have an eruption to write home about. But according to the report i saw, it's going to go up any day now whatever, something for us all to look forward.

And Chernobyl is in the Ukraine and it was twenty years ago. And looking it up, there's a note that the expected sharp rise in cancers in the western USSR as was, hasn't occured, at least not in the intervening twenty years, which is heartening. Maybe the effects of setting off a couple of bombs wouldn't be as bad as we think, at least not as far as fallout damage is concerned.

John W

I'm sorry. What was the question again?

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

Sigh.

Immense amounts of sarcasm wasted again. (If that's possible, what with sarcasm being heavily discounted these days. Apparently it's to do with the infelicitous connection with historians, rather than, say, engineers, Mother Theresa wannabes -- now there's a "*-Star" show I guarantee won't reach prime-time TV any time soon -- or other valuable members of society.)

OK. Let's do this in baby steps.

(1) Birks references the (now, at least temporarily, discredited, theory of Nuclear Winter). Oh, how we laughed in the 1970s. At least, if we had 90% of our temporal lobes working.
(2) Birks connects this to one particular event in question. I can help you with this. No, let my mortal enemy, "Internet Combined with Wikipedia," do this for you. The relevant link is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_St._Helens.
(3) Birks gets the date of the eruption hopelessly wrong. What do you expect of a political scientist, I thought at the time.
(4) Birks also buggers up the location, although, to be fair, not by much.
(5) Through sheer love of Birks, I resolve to protect his image by getting things even more screwed up. I know. I will do this with "humour." I will even use (once more) my sworn foe, "Internet Combined with Wikipedia," to fill in the cavities.
(6) Chernobyl might not be funny, particularly to a dentist who has for a while been domiciled in Germany. Actually, given that as a basis, I'm worried what "funny" might be. Laughing gas with one too many Nitrogen molecules, perhaps? Obviously a faux pas in terms of taste, on my part.
(7) Roman Abramovich is funny. Well, I think so. Not the person, just the idea. For more on this, see http://www.chukotka.org/authority/distr-adm/governor/?lang=en.

It isn't the site I originally quoted, but there you go. I notice that his phone number has inflated rather.

I'll let you know when I can find the nearest dormant volcano to either Kim Il Sung or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

In the mean time, you're going to have to live to around 100,000 years to see the Aurora Yellowstonia over Mitteleuropa, given a standard deviation or two. Keep brushing those teeth. I understand that they're quite important to general bodily well-being, which is more than you can say about listening to cretins like Gore spouting pseudo-science with no references. (I was amused to find that he's been caught out on his Oscar-winning performance by quoting rising sea-levels at 23', rather than 23". Oh, how the spirit of Spinal Tap pervades modern life.)

Yes Sir, we have both kinds of nuclear idiocy here: winter *and* summer.