Head Rambles

Electricity supply interruptions could have ‘huge’ impact on Irish society, expert warns.

This must surely go down as one of the great understatements of the year, if not the century?

Let’s just look at the current situation [pun intended].

We heat our homes using oil [bad], solid fuel [bad] or gas [bad] or electricity [good]. We are told that all the bad sources are to go, not because they are in short supply but because they are somehow causing hurricanes in America or flooding in Bangladesh. So in future all our home heating and cooking has to use electricity. There are a few who will mutter about heat pumps but they require electricity too.

Petrol driven cars are baaad, Diesel engines are even worse so all cars, buses and trains have to use [you’ve guessed it?] electricity. All those thousands of batteries are going to have to be charged every night [and frequently during the day] so that should heat up the grid a bit?

How about commerce and industry? Well, they have become pretty reliant on computers and automation and strangely enough all computers and automated equipment require electricity to work, whether it’s a robot assembling something or the cash register in your local shop.

I’m not too sure about shipping. Battery driven ships seem a bit fanciful so they’ll probably have to revert to sails [and therefore the wind]?

The single industry which appears to escape all this migration to the electron is aviation. That relies of fossil fuels [baaaad] so it’s only a matter of time before there is a call for the return of the dirigible, which of course will use batteries for propulsion [when the dirigible isn’t actually exploding].

So it looks like all our proverbial eggs are in the one proverbial basket. We are down to electricity for our very existence with no alternatives whatsoever. If there is no electricity you are stuck at home in your dark cold house, eating cold baked beans [assuming you have been clever enough to hold onto an old manual tin-opener and not once of those fancy electrical ones].

Where is all this electricity going to come from? Fossil fuels are out so we are down to those “renewable” sources – wind, sunshine, tide/wave and hydro. The only one of those which is a guaranteed source is the tide. All the others rely to a greater or lesser extent on the weather. So far they seem to be backing wind power which is notoriously fickle [as I look out my window there isn’t a single leaf stirring].

There is of course another source of electricity but that requires the use of a dirty word – Nuclear. It is the only power source that is constant and reliable even if it does occasionally render large tracts of the planet uninhabitable for a few thousand years.

So there’s your answer folks.

Soon every parish will have to have it’s own Chernobyl.

Every once in a blue moon Herself wants to play the lottery.

Normally she is fairly sensible and I would even stretch to describing her as quite smart, but she does have one little flaw – she is numerically illiterate. She openly admits this herself and says that anything to do with numbers just confuses her.

So each time the subject of the lottery comes up we have our little “debate” about the laws of chance.

I point out that she has a better chance of being run down by the 15 bus, and she points out she doesn’t even know where the 15 bus runs so there’s no chance of that, to which I reply “precisely”.

“But someone has to win it?”

I point out that this isn’t necessarily true as it frequently rolls over to the next draw, but assuming there is a winner then the chances of it being our ticket are less than one in ten million. This little nugget of information is lost though because of her lack of numeracy. I explain it in another way, in that we would have to buy nearly eleven million tickets to be guaranteed a win. She points out that anyone who does win hasn’t bought eleven million tickets. There’s no answer to that.

Yesterday I gave up. Why not throw our money away? We might even get the odd tenner back. I went into the Irish lottery site.

“Welcome, you’re 3 minutes away from making magic happen!” the page declares.

I entered the details. I gave it my name address, post code, gender, date of birth, email and I made up a decent password.

“Password must be less than 12 characters” it replies.

I put in a shorter password.

“Password must contain letters and numbers only“

My password only contains letters and numbers so this is a bit odd. I put in a different password. At this point I am about twenty minutes from my promised magic. I click the submit button.

It comes back with a server error and a little apology. Maybe I would like to try that again?

I fill in all the details again, I am very careful to make sure there are no mistakes.

“Your username/email address or password is incorrect.” What the fuck?

I try logging in on the assumption that my registration worked.

“Your username/email address or password is incorrect.” Sigh! I am now well over an hour from making magic. I went into Password Recovery. I entered my email address and answered a security question.

“Your username/email address or security is incorrect.”

At this point it is way beyond a challenge. This fucking web site doesn’t like me but that’s nothing compared to my hatred for it. I am determined to crack it, not out of desperation to waste my money on the lottery but out of sheer determination to get the fucking site to bend to my will.

I tried with a completely different ego, with a different name and email and all that. I entered the details with great care and precision.

“Your username/email address or password is incorrect.”

Fuck!

I’ll try again another day……