Spring Rain - Miscellaneous and reading

I love Spring rain, cool on my face but not cold, falling on the skin more than striking it. I love to walk in it wearing a hat and a good wool coat. So cool and gentle. Short of a friend to hold your hand, it's the nearest thing I know to ice for the injured soul. There may be hailstorms, too, but in the meantime, I love Spring rain.

Wonders of the Solar System is great telly. When he went up in a fighter jet and looked at the top of the atmosphere I wanted to compose music, to sing. Good documentary telly is about the subject, never the presenter, and apart from about ten seconds of boilerplate in the first programme which I daresay was foisted on him, Professor Brian Cox entirely gets that.

The Planet Money Podcast is one of the best radio programmes ever. They've bought a toxic asset. As a pet. You can watch it die. The podcast is outstanding and includes someone saying “Dude. This is a disaster” in connection with a financial instrument.

What happens if you ask Google a full-sentence question starting with "is ...". But you can take the experiment further - follow the "is" with any single letter selected at random and you soon learn that what humans with internet access mostly want to know about the state of the world is whether other humans they have heard of are married, pregnant, homosexual, Jewish, or dead.

From the Centre for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, Medford, Massachussetts, a moving and fascinating qualitative study paper: Preachers who are Not Believers. "The loneliness of non-believing pastors is extreme. They have no trusted confidantes to reassure them, to reflect their own musings back to them, to provide reality checks."

I am going to be away over Easter, I am working on another project and probably won't be posting.