What a complete Burke!

Head Rambles Posted on by

I love the Burke family. They are the gift that keeps on giving.

Just when you think things have quietened down, up they pop and cause more chaos.

For those of you not familiar with this family, they seem to be some kind of Christian Fundamentalist mob. Without a doubt they are all extremely intelligent [they seem to have no problem getting degrees and the like], but they’re not very clever.

It started last Autumn when Enoch – a teacher – refused to use the “them/they” construct on a pupil who was confused about it’s gender. Now I happen to agree fully with this as the matter of gender pronouns is a very basic grammatical principle – he/she is singular while “them/they” is plural. The latter maybe used as a singular but only in specific instance when the gender can be either [i.e. “a person may agree if they so wish”]. However, having agreed with dear Enoch our paths then diverge. I see it as a matter of basic grammar while he somehow sees it as a matter of religion.

So the bold Enoch was suspended. However he continued to attend for duty.

The school got a barring order. He still turned up every day.

He was brought to court and convicted of breaching the injunction. He fought with the judge and was sentenced to gaol until he agreed to stay away from the school.

Come Christmas, for some strange reason he was released from incarceration. He resumed his presence at the school.

In the meantime the school sacked Enoch. I don’t know why they took so long.

Enoch objected to this and tried to get an injunction preventing the sacking.

The judge reasonably pointed out that he wouldn’t issue and injunction as Enoch himself was breaching an injunction. A row ensued in court. Enoch was fined €700 a day if he continued to turn up at the school.

Enoch continued turning up at the school.

Enoch then brought another case against the school [I think, as it’s getting very confusing at this point]. He case was adjjurned. Another fight in court.

The case finally came up and Enoch [and his family] launched into a tirade of abuse directed at the court and the judge in particular. Mayhem ensued and the whole family were eventually physically and forcibly ejected from the court.

Enter Simeon, He is Enoch’s brother and had been arrested during the previous melee. Like Enoch, he had been offered bail but refused. Now back in court he proceeded to argue with the judge and wouldn’t shut up. The judge remanded him back to prison. He objected as he wouldn’t then be able to finish his law exams. At this point I laughed out loud.

I don’t know where this is all going or how it will end. Certainly the family seem determined to continue their protest by fighting [literally] in court. Who is next for a gaol sentence?

My money is on Ammi, the sister.

With the mother a close second.

 
Posted in Law

When the heat is on

Head Rambles Posted on by

The first house I bought had two fireplaces.

That was it. Two open fireplaces to heat the whole house. This of course was normal, though not as posh as those huuses with a fireplace in each bedroom.

I decided to put in central heating. The only problem was that I knew nothing about plumbing or heating. Foundations, blocklaying, bricklaying, heavy carpentry and of course demolition were skills I possessed in abundance but not plumbing. I got several books out of the library.

I had to do everything from scratch including buying drills [all the walls were solid block], pipe bending springs, workbenches and of course loads of copper piping and radiators. I ripped out one of the fireplaces and dug down. I built a new fireplace with a back boiler and underfloor ash-bucket and draught. Pipes were clamped around the skirting boards and through walls. Radiators were mounted and it was a roaring success, though it was hard pressed to heat all the rooms simultaneously but we weren’t using the front room or two of the bedrooms so that didn’t matter.

The next house we bought only had one open fireplace. Strangely enough though it did have a boiler room built into the house which the previous owner had used as a coal hole. There were also cast iron pipes running under the floors but no boiler or radiators. I installed radiators and also a solid fuel cooker in the kitchen with a built in boiler. That worked to a fashion but the chimney was never right so the house was always full of soot and anthracite fumes. Not nice.

Then we moved back here to The Manor. Heating consisted of one open fireplace and a solid fuel cooker in the extension. The cooker had a back boiler with an output sufficient to heat the water but fuck all else. At that stage in life I decided my plumbing days were over so I called in a firm to install central heating throughout the house and to replace the cooker with a kerosene boiler that looked like a wood burner.

That was a bit of a disaster. The installation and plumbing were all fine and the system worked….. provided the wind was in exactly the right direction. If the wind wasn’t exactly right there would be down-draught that would fill the extension with fumes, while the vaccuum valves clattered and banged like a demented blacksmith. The plumbing engineer tried everything. He tried various cowels on the chimney and installed a couple of vacuum driven valves in the flue. Nothing worked and we had to put up with the fumes and the noise. On top of that, the boiler had to be manually lit and switched off.

In the end, we had had enough. We got the plumbing firm again and they installed a high efficiency high output boiler in the garage. That worked brilliantly. For the first time I could actually time the boiler to run automatically.

That was fine until the first really cold winter. There was now a gap in the house that had been heated with the old burner but that was now redundant. We got the plumber out again to install an extra radiator. He also fixed a leak where a rat had chewed through the piping. The rat is now dead meat.

So we’re grand now. The house is lovely and warm. It’s a pity the boiler controls are in the garage and not the kitchen but that’s a trivial inconvenience.

Also there is a leak somewhere in the branch to the new radiator which means I have to bleed it and re-pressure the system every couple of days.

I couldn’t be arsed to do anything about that though.

 

Minesweeper

Head Rambles Posted on by

Remember that little game that was bundled with Windows 3.1?

I used to play it in idle moments in the office. Though I say so myself, I was brilliant! I held the office record for clearing the large version in somewhere under ten seconds.

Nowadays I have to deal with real and far more deadly mines.

Penny was very adept at laying her little minefields inside the gate, on the path to the front door and also on the path to the back door. I would clear them off and disarm them with a simple swing of a 9-iron. I was quite good at that though the neighbours sometimes complained at the quantity of turds flying over the fence.

Old age has arrived and Penny has become somewhat forgetful. So now I have to deal with landmines indoors.

Initially it would just be one or two mines. They could crop up anywhere, from my bed through to any floor in the house. Strangely she has never dropped one in her own bed. I had to develop a new method of clearing these little deposits as practicing golf indoors would just lead to shite all over the walls like some kind of dirty protest. Instead I developed a technique of folding a sheet or two of kitchen paper, picking up the little nasties and then doing a slingshot out the back door. I getting really good at that too.

Lately she has developed a couple of new techniques. One is laying cluster bombs, four or five small ones scattered in a line and the other is dropping Napalm [I can only assume that’s what the puddles/lakes are]. The latter can only be dealt with using copious layers of kitchen paper. We’re doing a great turnover in rolls of kitchen paper.

The main problem is that I can no longer wander the house in bare feet. I have to wear footwear at all times and walk while visually scanning the floor in front of me. At night this means bringing a torch which I swing from side to side like radar as I walk. Even then she has caught me a couple of times. The Napalm is the worst as it’s almost invisible and I have nearly had a couple of nasty falls slipping in her latest flood.

I don’t blame her. I don’t think she even realises she is laying mines as she shows no reaction when dropping them. I know she knows about the puddles as she has to squat for them. But she has forgotten that in polite society that dogs go outdoors to do their business.

Old age is a bugger.

The kitchen floor?
 

Very artificial intelligence

Head Rambles Posted on by

I thought I would have a chat with Mr Spock.

That’s what I call that “artificial intelligence” machine that they have put online. It gives very logical answers and apparently is utterly devoid of humour.

I asked it a couple of straightforward questions such as “what is the meaning of life?”. It came up with a long winded answer which boiled down to the last paragraph –

Ultimately, the meaning of life is a highly personal and subjective matter that each individual must discover and define for themselves based on their own experiences, beliefs, and values.

And I always thought the answer was 42. Spock is too fucking literal and long winded.

I wondered if he was aware of the gender identity thing. I am calling him as a male but suppose he identifies with one of the many other genders. You can’t be too careful in this “woke” world?

How do you identify yourself?

As an AI language model, I don’t have a personal identity like humans. I exist solely as a computer program designed to process natural language and generate responses to questions and prompts.

However, I have been trained on a vast corpus of text and have been designed to provide helpful and informative responses to a wide variety of queries, so please feel free to ask me any questions you have or to request assistance with any problems or issues you are experiencing.

As I said – too literal, long winded and devoid of humour. At least he has added yet another gender to the long list – a computer program.

I tried a different tack.

why is a mouse when he spins?

This confused him. He thought about it for several nanoseconds…

I’m sorry, but the question “why is a mouse when he spins?” does not make sense and seems to be a nonsensical statement. It may be a part of a riddle or a joke, but without additional context or clarification, I am unable to provide a meaningful answer. If you could provide more information or context, I would be happy to try to help you.

The answer is of course “because the higher he goes the fewer” but Spock got it wrong. Again. However he seems to claim to have emotions as he says he would be “happy” to help.

I was getting a bit tired of his literal interpretations of perfectly logical questions so I decided on a different tack.

Calculate the value of pi

Pi (π) is an irrational number, which means it has an infinite number of decimal places and cannot be expressed as a finite decimal or a fraction. It is usually approximated to 3.14159 or simply 3.14.

There are many algorithms and formulas that can be used to calculate pi to a higher degree of accuracy, but even the most advanced methods require significant computational power and time to produce exact values.

As an AI language model, I have the ability to calculate pi to a high degree of accuracy using numerical methods, but providing the exact value of pi is not practical as it has an infinite number of decimal places. However, if you need an approximation of pi to a specific number of decimal places, I can provide that.

Fuck! He got me. Here was I coming up with the glorious vision of Spock going into a meltdown but he foiled me again.

Maybe I’ll just ask him to calculate pi to a billion billion billion places?