21
September
Yesterday
was a writing day for me. Arathusia is being written in long-hand to start with
and right now it’s about 16,000, or just over. This really does make very much
a first draft. As it stands, when I come to type it up I can see it reaching
over 20,000 words with some of the added parts I want to add to it. I’m not
sure when that will be though.
We
writers are always being reminded to take notes as and when ideas come to us,
and most of us do of course. Stories abound of ideas scribbled onto odd bits of
paper that were used by many people which went on to become £multi-million
makers. Yesterday evening we watched The
Twin Towers again. The result is that this morning we watched Antiques Roadshow instead or yesterday
as we normally do.
One of
the first items shown yesterday was a group of drawings made by one Avro’s
designers. Some of them were on graph paper, but some of them were on the front
page of The Times. Ideas came to mind
and he used whatever was to hand get them down on paper. The drawings were of
various delta wing aircraft, and one of them looked forward to Concord. So it’s
not we writers who make notes.
Still on
note taking then … As I settled at 1am this morning I had a thought come to
mind about something I saw on Facebook a few days ago. I don’t know why it came
to me at that time, but anyway, I did make a note of it cos it would be gone by
now otherwise. The Facebook item was a list of marks that criminals use to mark
houses where they have entered and walked off with lots of goodies. Well, I’m
not convinced by the list.
I mean,
why would a robber mark something for other robbers? By doing so it might mean
that they wouldn’t get the high price items he didn’t get before. Not only
that, a break in could well lead to an insurance claim for replacements and
maybe a second visit to light the replacements. When it happened to us we were
on holiday and came home to find the results. The attending officer couldn’t
believe how clean and tidy the place was.
That
alone made us know who the robber was. Link that in with the items he took, he
knew just where to get them from. My Sony reader, beside my bed; the two spare 500gig
hard drives; Jan’s camera that she left at home, only taking her larger one.
Not only that, he knew where our safe was and tried to get in there but couldn’t
work out the eight digit combination. After three attempts it turns itself off
and can only be opened with a key, and that is very well hidden. Thankfully it
was all covered on our contents insurance and we got it all replaced. He didn’t
come back again simply because he knew that one of us stayed at home while the
other went out for some time after the break in.
Computers
do have their uses in crime detection too of course. At that time I didn’t use Facebook,
even though there was an icon on my desktop. Jan did use it, and knows this he also
knew that he shouldn’t use her machine to have a look at it and post stuff, so
he used mine. The idea of our holiday was to visit our daughter in Antrim, and
Lynda is a Facebook regular, so I decided to open the icon and get an account. And
what did I find when it opened? Well, it wasn’t the normal opening screen but
the robbers’ page.
He has
always denied it and as there were finger prints, then he couldn’t be charged.
I’m not so sure that they cops tried all that hard anyway. They know the person,
he has a long record of thefts and they know he is on drugs and all the tried
to do was to make excuses for him. To my mind, they didn’t even try to
investigate it one they knew the name. Just one more instance of police
incompetence and laziness that leaves me with very little respect for them.
Today’
photo then …
A pink-red crisi plant.
Today’s
funny …
Well,
late one afternoon, the Air Force folks out at Area 51 were surprised to see a
Cessna landing at their "secret" base. They immediately impounded the
aircraft and hauled the pilot into an interrogation room.
The
pilot's story was that he took off from Vegas, got lost, and spotted the Base
just as he was about to run out of fuel. The Air Force started a full FBI
background check on the pilot and held him overnight during the investigation.
By the
next day, they were finally convinced that the pilot really was lost and wasn't
a spy. They gassed up his airplane, gave him a terrifying
"you-did-not-see-a-base" briefing, complete with threats of spending
the rest of his life in prison, told him Vegas was that-a-way on such-and-such
a heading, and sent him on his way.
The next
day, to the total disbelief of the Air Force, the same Cessna showed up again.
Once again, the MP's surrounded the plane... only this time there were two
people in the plane.
The same
pilot jumped out and said, "Do anything you want to me, but my wife is in
the plane and you have to tell her where I was last night!"
No comments:
Post a Comment