After yesterday’s Wally photo went down well, here’s another one of him exploring under my bench in the shed as I work above.

Status:

Pottering again, and while tidying the shed I came across the little bilge pump I’d bought some summers back with the intention of pumping bath water onto the lawn (which is annoyingly a few degrees uphill from the house) during a heatwave. I never got it to work, because CFS, but thought I’d give it a go with my new pacing skills. The trick was getting a 12v power supply with enough juice but then I found a car battery charger Fi had bought years ago hiding at the back of a shelf and it worked gangbusters.

Now I just needed to wire it all up, which meant getting the soldering iron out, something I haven’t done for a few years. After a couple of hours I had something that worked, so I retired to the sofa and promptly fell asleep for the rest of the day. Focusing is tiring!

Fi’s in the bath right now. I’m hoping she remembers not to empty it.

Reading:

• Jules went on a tour of a waste incineration site and took loads of photos — I actually drove past this on the way back from Devon once. It’s an amazing looking building, like an extended sandcrawler, and of course I’m utterly fascinated by waste management so seeing inside was a joy.
• My queasy, forest-scented stroll through LA’s new AI art museum — Refik Anadol was one of the data artists I was keeping tabs on in the 2010s when the AI / machine learning stuff was in its infancy and had potential to be interesting. His work was OK, I guess? Not much more than a tech demo but then pretty much everything was back then. Sorry to say he doesn’t appear to have developed it much and this “museum” is a pretty farcical piece of artwashing for big tech that I’m pleased to see appears to have misjudged the public’s appetite for this sort of shit.

Sighing:

• My MP issued a hit-video on my newly elected councillor yesterday, so that was fun. Of all the Birmingham people whose spark to get into politics was Gaza he’s probably the most moderate and harmless, so he’s a weird target. I guess the “think of the children!” angle was too good to pass up. The MP has been pretty quiet as to his actual beliefs since being parachuted in to a safe seat at the last election, spending a disconcerting amount of time climbing mountains and walking to the North Pole, but it seems the mask is finally off. Ah well.
• And then this evening he’s resigned from the government (he was a junior defence minister or something) because of defence spending, something which hasn’t exactly been high on the agenda unless I missed a memo? This comes as racist pogroms are taking place in Northern Ireland. Nice to see where his priorities are.
• My instinct is he’s looked at the spread of votes in the council elections across his constituency and figured it’s between Reform and Green, so he’s dialling up the hard-man bullshit and going Reform. He can fuck off then.

Watching:

• Simone Giertz asks Hank Green anything ‌(1:08:02) — I am very aware that I have a parasocial relationship with Simone Giertz and I think that’s OK as long as you’re very aware of it and don’t make it weird or anything. She brings me smiles.