OK, for this to make sense, you need to know that a) prostitution is legal in the UK and b) the demand from women for straight male escorts (SMEs) is very, very tiny and the supply of men who want to be SME's is huge. Probably worksafe, unless you have really really nannyish work in which case you've probably been blocked already
Failing as snow again, never wanted to..
A tiny bit, but gosh, this will have been the snowiest winter in London for ages.
The walk to school did help me wake up a bit (although I feel the bed beckoning) because the Super Bowl was good enough to stay up until 3am UK time for the end again. This is not always the case…
I first became interested in American Football in the mid-70s through the boardgames on it, especially the super rock-paper-scissors of Football Strategy. At that point, TV coverage in the UK was fifteen minutes a year, five of which was explaining the rules.
When Channel 4 started in the early 80s, one of its best bits was a weekly hour long highlights programme, and they showed the Washington Redskins – Miami Dolphins Super Bowl live. That spoiled UK viewers a bit: it was close until the end, and was decided in a play that used to feature on the opening credits of the highlights programme for years afterwards. Prior to the snap, Redskins' running back John Riggins goes in motion, the man on the Dolphins' defence who had done such a good job tracking him slips slightly and loses a yard, ball handed to Riggins who runs outside, the defence just misses the tackle because of that slip.. touchdown. Truly a game of inches.
Reality set in with games like the Chicago Bears – New England Patriots one in the year the Bears had an awesome defence and everyone knew what the result would be before the end of the first quarter: lots of Super Bowls are not good games.
But this has made three very good ones in a row.
Cut in case you haven't seen the recording you made of it yet
Things I had forgotten, #6435
The sockets on one side of the UPS* are battery backed up ones. The sockets on the other side are 'just' surge protected.
Why yes, I did have this PC plugged into the latter. The battery side had the old PC and the monitor.. and an empty socket.
Still it's been an excuse to have its monthly reboot into Windows for the various patches.
* 'Uninterruptable Power Supply', otherwise known as a battery which will keep mains-powered things running in the event of a power cut for a few minutes at least, long enough to turn them off properly or put them into hibernation until the power is back.
Edit: Ah, the cleaner managed to get water in the kettle's electrical contacts.
One for Bad Science?
Hmm, a Press Association story saying breastfeeding has almost no benefits to the baby has been picked up by the Mail and the Telegraph and… with predictable results.
It says the study was published in the January 2010 edition of Acta Obstetricia et Gynecologica, a Scandinavian journal, and was a metastudy of the benefits of breastfeeding involving tens of thousands of women overall.
Except that it wasn't. There is one article by Sven Carlsen, but it's about hormone levels in breastfeeding women, involving a study of 181 women. It's not surprising he's interested in this, because he's at the Department of Endocrinology of Trondheim University Hospital.
The source of the PA article appears to be at news-medical.net, which makes it clear that the basic story is the one on hormone levels, but tags on Carlsen's comments about the benefits of breastfeeding at the end.
And it's that which has been picked up. As I am not about to pay to read the journal version, I don't know what studies the comments were about, but they were clearly not the focus of the article – this aspect is not even mentioned in the abstract!