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This week I feel like I am living life in the seventies, as not only am I listening to ABBA at the moment I am only working a three day week this week, or more accurately I have only worked a three day this week.

However it’s not because of civil unrest, it’s due to me taking some well deserved time off work. Although thanks to weather reports I am not going off to Dartmoor with just food and water for three days and a sleeping bag to keep me warm at night - As you might guess I don’t believe in glamorous camping or glamping as I have heard it called. I lie at the opposite end of the spectrum and practice something called tramping.

Unlike many however who practice tramping though I have a choice about it and as the weather doesn’t look good, I will show what a fair weather tramper I am by staying home.

Photoshop is a very useful tool, indeed any program for photo editing is useful, but they always have more filters than you know what to do with, for every unsharp mask there are 5 artistic filters that usually produce dubious results (at least in my hands as you can see above).

It’s been another exciting day for me at work today. Doing exactly the same things I do do day in, day out at work - Or rather doing the same thing, as I don’t get that much variation in my job to be able to justify what I do as separate things.

Still the monotony of such things does mean that I can put myself onto autopilot and leave my mind free to work on more important issues, such as my plan to take over the world and admiring the pretty woman opposite me.

That said something unusual did happen today, after reading the speech I am required to read to callers for legal reasons. Rather than receiving a yes, or as is more usual an affirmative grunt I had a caller ask me how I stayed sane reciting the same drivel* call after call.

I told her I had no short term memory and so each time I said it it was new to me.

*My words, not hers.

I am far from the world’s greatest swimmer, in fact I actually don’t like it thanks to a phobia of mine. Despite this though I would love to learn to dive so that I could take photos like this in situ, rather than from outside fish tand in aquariums as I currently have to.

At work today for some reason I wound up talking about poisons and the advantages of certain poisons as opposed to others - After all, if you are prepared to murder someone you might not want to inflict a quick and painless death.

One such example of a poison easily to hand I used as an example was nicotine. A cigar contains more than enough nicotine to kill a person if it were to be injected into them rather than smoked (where most of it is just burnt off rather than inhaled), obviously part of the issue is distilling it into a “useful” form. Once distilled though it’s quite handy. It can be absorbed through the skin so it could potentially be used as a contact poison.

So that’s another way cigarettes can kill.

Unlike the blue poison dart frog, who can be slightly poisonous but not enough to prove fatal - Most poison dart frogs aren’t actually that poisonous and ones kept as pets even less so. Poison dart frogs don’t make their own poison they get it from their food and so in captivity they don’t get the right foods to allow them to become poisonous, so the one pictured above from the Horniman Museum is perfectly harmless.

Even in the wild where they are toxic the idea behind it is to just leave a foul taste in the mouth of anything that tries to eat it rather than kill anything that tries to eat it. Out of over 170 species of poison dart frog only a few have actually been documented as used for poisoning darts.

I missed it last year and I have managed to miss it again this year, despite noticing during the week that the Bristol Balloon Fiesta was on this weekend and thinking I should really make a point of getting along to it this year.

The only reason I realised what I was missing yet again was because I was putting some clothes out on the washing line to dry - Technically I do have the rest of the weekend to go to the fiesta, but looking at the weather forecast for the weekend I’ve probably missed the best of it.

Ah well, there’s always next year…