Howard the Duck

Movie Reference 6/31

Early blip by my usual standards, and probably not the best photo I'll take all day, but it's not every day you come across some ducks sleeping in the middle of the road. A minute out the door on the bike, half a mile from the nearest expanse of water (Figgate Park) and a mile from the nearest big expanse (Duddingston Loch). Funnily enough I'd seen 3 ducks flying overhead when I left the house yesterday.

Thank Crunchie it's almost the weekend. Wound up piggy-in-the-middle with something at work I really need to try and sort out today (with two colleagues who don't speak to each other much down to a general mutual dislike).

My dad used to always say that my mum was 'too nice'. I used to think it was a daft thing to say. It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice, and all that jazz. But I appear to have inherited the 'nice' gene to an extent, which lands you in situations like this. It also works against you in another way, where the times you say 'no' to doing something, or get stressed or annoyed or snappy, seem so out of the ordinary for you that they get commented on, or people will get annoyed back at you because they're used to the 'yes' side. Whereas the cantankerous sods who are always moody or won't do anything, well it's par for the course with them, there's nothing out of the ordinary to comment on.

It's kind of like the news. Things that are strange, or don't happen that often, get reported on, whereas everyday stuff doesn't:

3,000 people killed by or in cars a year gets coverage in the local press; 2 people a year killed by cyclists gets national outrage.

The Asian tsunami and the aftermath with the struggle of people gets plastered all over the news for weeks, then we get bored and it disappears, despite the fact people are still suffering the effects.

The tiny earthquake in England last year that shook down some chimneys and killed no-one got as much coverage, if not more, than the quake last week in Italy that killed a couple of hundred. As the reports explained that L'Aquila regularly suffers minor quakes our initial interest started to wane.

That said, tonight I'm going to see Waiting for Godot, with Sir Ian McKellan, Patrick Stewart, Simon Callow and Ronald Pickup all on stage. It's not every week that that happens, whereas I'm not sure I even bothered mentioning going to see The Curse of the Staving Class a couple of weeks back.

Petard. Hoist. I am a creation of our times.