Thursday, December 29, 2005

Snow Much Snow Good

A light dusting of snow hit Bristol today. Oh boy! Everybody panic! Oh how sad can we all get? As soon as it shows any sign of snow the whole of civilisation seems to want to grind to a halt. The wrong kind of snow stops all the trains. Drivers don't know how to stop on slippery roads - so they press the brake that much harder and wonder why the hell the car still travels on. We are never ready for it because it is so infrequent in this neck of the woods. Think how they must feel in Northern Spain where they have much more snow than us at the moment - if they were British they would probably think the end of the world was nigh. But only the Brits could really shag up their own lives by panicking at the first sign of snow. My wife summed up the amount of snow beautifully when she said "It's as if someone sprinkled icing sugar over the ground." What would happen if we had real snow? Goodness knows.

Global Blindness
Watching Australian television news on the net I saw a story about the hole in the ozone layer causing not only skin cancer but also blindness. Warnings are going out across the country to encourage people to wear sunglasses ("sunnies") to protect their eyes. Eye diseases seem to be on the increase in the Antipodean state. I wonder how long it will be before such warnings become global? I don't know how much fact there is in the story but it would seem to make sense that increased UV would not only affect skin. Keep an eye out for it (sorry about the pun).

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