the original and best

I'd have to check the results but I'm sure one of those recent "what's the best invention ever?" surveys recently didn't mention the book. Maybe the question had been more specifically about recent inventions. Hmmm. At least the bicycle won. At least money wasn't mentioned although without money there would be no evil duck-shaped moneyboxes. Perhaps the computer and internet have already replaced the book and printing press; I wonder if the current crop of childs will have the same affinity for books as the last generation to grow up without total computer ubiquity.
Whilst I worry about the poor trees being beaten, killed, mashed, pulped and rollered to make lovely books it's probably still slightly better than the power and manufacturing impact-share incurred during the few hours it would take to read a book using a computer. Hopefully the boffins working on electric paper will get it sorted soon and produced in a format which will be adopted widely and quickly enough. I suppose the book (probably the most popular format of written-language-entity if one ignores news-paps) will undergo something similar to the gradual progression of the delivery format of the record from vinyl to cassette to CD to download.

Maybe someone will even invent a kind of automatic page-turning OCR-scanning-thingby so that people can rip their current collections rather than re-purchasing in the new format.

A lazy Sunday featuring reading, another half-hour of macro bee-chasing in the garden (slightly less success than yesterday), breakfast, reading, coffee, reading, sleeping a bit more after too much food and searching vainly for an hotel somewhere midway between Edinburgh, Ayr and Woodhall Spa so that we can meet up with both sets of parents at the end of the month. The previous two occasions on which this has happened weren't anywhere near as bad as they could have been so the occasion can almost be viewed as an holiday, albeit one in which I might have to walk around much more slowly than I like.