Geraint Thomas Finishes Tour

He’s the man! Geraint completed the Tour de France on Saturday. Awesome.
He told the BBC, “Everyone dreams of riding down the Champs-Elysee and finishing the Tour, I’m happy to get here but feeling it.”
“I don’t think you can imagine how hard, fast and chaotic it is out there until you actually do it.”
From the BBC website.

Spying Squirrels

Not only have man-eating badgers been released into Iraq by the British, but apparently hi-tech squirrel (cyborg?) spies have been released by foreign intelligence services into Iran. I say “cyborg” because the translated text reads, “Fixing GPS devices, bugging instruments and advanced cameras in the bodies of trained animals like squirrels, mice, hamsters”. Hardware inside the animal?
“A few weeks ago, 14 squirrels equipped with espionage systems of foreign intelligence services were captured by [Iranian] intelligence forces along the country’s borders. These trained squirrels, each of which weighed just over 700 grams, were released on the borders of the country for intelligence and espionage purposes. According to the announcement made by Iranian intelligence officials, alert police officials caught these squirrels before they could carry out any task.”
Washington Post article

Friday 13th

I didn’t realise it was Friday 13th.
I left for work attired for light drizzle, as forecast. Just after it began to chuck it down I punctured. Rear wheel, of course. Finding no sharp bits inside my tyre I started to replace the holey tube with a (hopefully) leak-free one, but two dogs ran up to me, one barking at me and one pissing on my bag. Ace. Once I’d cleared the dogs out and finished fixing the wheel, soaked through, I started to continue towards work but naturally that tube went down too.
I rode the flat tyre back home to my garage, found a couple of tubes that needed fixing (no boxed ones left) and got the puncture repair kit out. I stuck the third tube of the day into the tyre and pumped it up to a gentle 85psi, and had a look for nicks and cuts in the tyre itself. Just as I found a weakness in the sidewall and a bubble of inner tube pushing out it exploded, deafening me and making my ears ring. Ow!
Definately time for a cup of tea and a change of clothes. I drove to work today.

Plague of ferocious badgers?

Quote of the week, from UK military spokesman Major Mike Shearer:
“We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area.”
Full man-eating badger article (BBC News).
Also, “One housewife, Suad Hassan, 30, claimed she had been attacked by one of the badgers as she slept.
“My husband hurried to shoot it but it was as swift as a deer,” she said. “It is the size of a dog but his head is like a monkey.”
“Sattar Jabbar, a 50-year-old farmer from Abu Sakhar, north of Basra, claimed he saw one of the badgers eat a cow.
“It tore the cow up piece by piece. I tried to shoot it with my gun but it ran away into the orchards,” he said.”
Awesome.

Exam day

2007-07-10--Setting Out The Exam
This morning we set up the final anatomy exam for the current 1st years. If they pass this, that will be the end of their anatomy teaching for their “undergraduate” medicine training.