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Kitty doesn’t play well with others so he doesn’t go out unsupervised (even then, he still winds up biting neighbour kitties and dogs).  I grew him some grass to chomp, but he likes to just sit there and reflect on his day:

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I thought I had exclusive license on all 'Bunny' names, but apparently not

This is a grab bag of stuff from this month, maybe becoming a recurring feature.

The concept of ‘Qualifications’ is a funny one in Britain.  To be qualified to do something doesn’t mean that you have the skills to perform a task, but rather that you have “done a course” at the end of which you have received a certificate (literally, a printed out and endorsed bit of paper) saying that you are thus qualified.  As an example, I am not qualified to use a step ladder in this country and when I ask our facilities personnel at Oxford to borrow one it is denied me due to my lack of qualifications.  It doesn’t matter that I was using 20 foot high ladders to climb into hay lofts in the mid 1960′s, that as part of my jobs in a steel mill and on construction sites I dragged acetylene cylinders up higher ladders still, or that upon landing in Grenada (yes, technically I am a war veteran: the beaches were nice and the live fire was distant) I wasn’t allowed to retrieve my cameras and film until I had hauled enough explosive ordnance to level St George’s for my jarhead and squid colleagues up–you guessed it–a ladder down the ship’s hold.  Nearly 50 years worth of experience, but it is deemed too risky for me to climb three feet up to secure some copper tubing with a zip-tie in England , so I have to put in a work request (and, yet, they turn me loose on high voltage systems and powerful motors–kookoo).

So it is amusing to know that a ‘QUALIFIED‘ plumber installed the drains in the trough urinals at the Oasis gym not only poorly (the solder is sloppy enough for me to feel I can comment on it) but upside down so that a half-inch of piss accumulates (diluted, to be sure, by the occasional burst of water):

I mentioned something about the preponderance of lost kitty articles in the Swindon Advertiser in a post about the Queensfield.  Here are the moggy-and-other-small-pet-related articles from the last few days (Tuesday through Saturday) in the paper, not including the pet supplement in yesterday’s edition:

I mentioned a duck I was roasting, and the recipe is worth trying.  My version slit the skin in a few places, salted the inside and threw crushed pepper on the outside, and stuffed it with ten or eleven crushed garlic cloves and a handful of thyme sprigs.  This was tented under foil and shoved in the oven at 130 C to be turned over hourly, then the temperature was raised to 170 C after 4 hours and it was uncovered until the end of the 5th hour.  Served with some sautéed kale and a little rice, this turned out pretty well.

Ready to cook...

...it tastes better than it looks.

Between hour one and two of the roast, I went out for a run and stumbled upon this weird looking statue of Diana Dors, Swindon’s gift to middle-aged drag queens:

Swindon is home to the Research Councils, UK, so science research gets occasional coverage in the paper.  It is good to see that funding for researchers at Leeds that I originally reported on is to continue at, I believe, Leicester…not sure, I really only looked at the photos in this article:

The funds were allocated in small bills....