It’s Grim Up The North-East
Sunderland lost two-one at home to lowly Notts County, Middlesbrough lost by the same score to Burton Albion and then in the late match Newcastle lost three-one at Stevenage. When I last looked at the map, Stevenage was in that hotbed of football, Hertfordshire.
Only a few footballers appear to have been born in the county and but they do include Dave Kitson, Kevin Phillips, Vinnie Jones, Jack Wilshere, Ian Walker, Iain Dowie, Rodney Marsh, Dean Ashton, John Radford and Ashley Young. The last incidentally was in the same class at school in Stevenage as Lewis Hamilton and his brother, Lewis, was also on the bench today for Burton Albion.
So there might be some mild celebrations just to the north of the M25. But don’t insult the county by calling them soft Southerners or something similar or they’ll get Vinnie Jones to show you the errors of your ways.
Are Leeds Softening Up Arsenal for Ipswich?
I need to go to Waitrose this afternoon and as I want a bigger branch, it will probably be the Jones Brothers one on Holloway Road. But that lies just next door to the Emirates where Arsenal are having a torrid time against the team that most football supporters don’t like; Leeds.
So I’ll wait until the match finishes.
Let’s hope Leeds maintain their lead for the last five minutes, as Ipswich would probably like to play Arsenal, when they are not happy bunnies!
So if I wait, I can at least wear my Ipswich hat!
The Virtual Beagle
The headline of “It might look like a dog’s dinner; but this artificial stomach will save (canine) lives” caught my eye as I read The Times this morning.
Apparently, AstraZeneca have virtually replaced dogs with an artificial stomach for drug testing. So not only is it good for drug development, it’s good news for dogs. I’ve always felt that animal testing was wrong from a scientifically correct point of view as keeping animals is expensive and the in vitro and computer alternatives are cheaper and much easier to scale up.
The Times article doesn’t say who is behind this development, but it does quote Troy Seidle of the Humane Society International as saying.
This new use of the intestinal model in drug testing is a fantastic example of how innovative technologies can replace animal experiments and improve medical research at the same time.
I have searched the Internet and it would appear that the company behind this wonderful development could be SimCyp, based in Sheffield.
But why is everybody being so coy about this development? This British company should be on page one of all the newspapers.
On a personal note, I was involved in computer simulation of processes for several years in the 1970s, when I worked at ICI. We always felt that computers had a large part to play in modelling the body, but little seems to have been heard over the last four decades. These are two pictures of the PACE 231R analog computer, I used for simulation of chemical processes.
In my view, there are computers, good computers and the PACE 231R.
The 231R was built in the 1960s and it was all valve or vacuum tube, if you are from the United States. It was a formidable beast for solving differential equations and I have a feeling that there isn’t one left even in a museum. These pictures taken by a colleague at ICI seem to be two of the only ones of a 231R in a working environment. Hopefully the Internet will preserve them for ever!
The biggest claim to fame of the 231R was that two of them were used in tandem to solve all of the mathematics and differential equations of getting the Apollo spacecraft to the moon. They were actually linked to virtually a real spacecraft to test everything out.
So when Apollo 13 blew up and they had to use the Lunar Excursion Module to bring the astronauts home, it was these two computers that were reprogrammed to try to find out how to do it. They wouldn’t have stood a chance with a digital machine, but the engineers, programmers and astonauts were able to get the two 231R’s to find a strategy. I’ve never seen the Apollo 13 film, but I suspect that the role of the 231Rs is downplayed or ignored.
So when you ask me, what is the greatest computer ever made, there is only one answer. The amazing PACE 231R.
Nakd Bars
Good gluten-free snacks are hard to come by. But have the Welsh come up with something better than the ubiquitous banana?
Nakd Cocoa and Orange Bar
They certainly taste nice. My only worry is that they seem to be a bit addictive. They do say on the packet that the bars are “Gleefully made in Wales”
Is this another case of a food company being innovative to expand and get us out of the recession?
They are also following a trend of trying to make the packaging funny and very much worth reading. Humour is the greatest weapon in life and we don’t use it enough in marketing and business.
Perhaps the reason we got into the recession was have we ever had such a humourless bunch of politicians as Gordon Brown and NuLabor?
The Fightback Starts Here
So Roy Keane has gone and now the players of Ipswich Town can get on with what they hopefully want to do; play football to the best of their ability, without being bullied all the time.
It’s probably a good thing that they’re playing Chelski on Sunday in the Cup, as if they go down fighting, it will be character forming at worse and if they win, then it will prove that money isn’t everything.
I should think that the ghosts of Sir Alf and Sir Bobby are laughing their heads off, as they share stories and they will be motivating the players in the ways only they know.
I’m going to Stamford Bridge tomorrow and the match could well be something special, no matter what the result.
But whatever happens, it will be the start of Ipswich Town’s fightback.
The fans seem not to like the idea of Paul Jewell as manager, but there are a few out there without jobs, who manage almost in the mode of Ipswich Town’s great ones of the past. Roy Hodgson and Chris Hughton to name but two!
You May Get the Man Out of Suffolk, But You Can’t Get Suffolk Out of the Man
I wasn’t born in Suffolk, but according to my father I was conceived on the floor of the Ordnance Hotel in Felixstowe. But for the last forty years or so, I’ve always had strong associations with the county and of course I still support Ipswich Town.
But Suffolk gets under your skin and every time I go to the local de Beauvoir Deli, I’m reminded of my history, as they sell products from Pinney’s of Orford. C and I must have had upwards of fifty happy meals in their Oysterage in Orford. I think C would approve that I’ve just bought some of their smoked fish pate for my lunch, which I’ll eat with s0me Genius toast.
Smoked Fish Pate from Pinney's of Orford
The Problems With Pakistani Men
There has been a lot of problems reported in the papers and the media lately about Pakistani men.
I have never had any problems in my dealings with them in any way, but C and I stopped going to a restaurant because the owner’s son kept bragging to us about the things he got up to, despite having a wife, who couldn’t speak English as she was from Pakistan at home. C told him in no uncertain terms that she should learn English, especially as she was pregnant.
I think what wer’re seeing in the media is the tip of an iceberg caused by their culture and the way they keep their male kids on a very short lead and the girls completely hidden.
As an example, I’ve never been to an Indian restaurant, where the waiters were female except once and that was a superb place in Doncaster.
Street 20 Cricket
They’re just talking about Street-20 cricket on the radio. Basically, it’s a shortened form of the game for kids and the Lords Taverners are taking it all over the country to places like run-down crime-ridden housing estates to give the kids focus. One guy who runs it, has just been named young coach of the year. They aim to find the next generation of England cricketers too.
The Anonymous Widower 