A couple of things of note

Two noteworthy things happened to me in the last twenty-four hours.  Firstly, a call from Mrs Scobi senior, aka my mother, to check with me a few facts about an upcoming purchase she plans to make.... of an iPad Retina.  This is, I hope, a turning point for self-determination and self-rule for Ma.  Years of "you couldn't just pop over, I have a problem with . . . " conversations may well be replaced by "Have you seen the latest Grinder app?" type conversations.  Well, maybe not Grinder, but hopefully she will be able to get to the web unhindered, do her email and banking, maybe make a couple of Skype calls and take a couple of photos, all without a plug, and sometimes even when she is in Spain, all on a device that will fit in her handbag (she being of the Maggie era when it comes to "sensible handbags"), and all on a device that will, fingers crossed, pretty much maintain and update itself.  If she can achieve that, then the last fifty years of technological advancement has not been in vain.

The second noteworthy event is that I clicked through a link on Golfy's blog, to an article that included the quote from an old classic film, a line I have used in one of my songs actually:

Years ago, my Mother used to say to me, she'd say "In this world Elwood, you must be..", she always called me Elwood. "In this world Elwood you must be oh so smart, or oh so pleasant." Well for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me.
-- Elwood P. Dowd (1950)

 Oh, and it was also nice to see the old "rhododendron tree" quote getting an airing.

Some of you, I suspect, may question the worthiness of the second note, but none of you, I am almost totally sure, will disagree with the first.  As Golfy often says, in fact will bang on about for hours and hours if you let him, "Apple just works".  I hope he is correct.

I am not blind to the suffering in the blogosphere either.  Golfy is under strain from ridiculousness in all three of the solutioning trilogy scope/timescale/cost target, all sprinkled with a healthy dose of management help; BadMan has a leak which is undoing a lot of very good work, and The Gorse Fox has a bad foot (something to which I can very much sympathise at this time, me having a bit of one myself).