Lost and found

Here's a little story with a happy ending, for a change. I lost my car keys yesterday. Well, to be accurate, it wasn't me who lost them, the real culprit knows who she is, but anyway, the keys were lost. Not a disaster on the scale of global financial meltdown, or the turmoil in Tibet, or Heather Mills' divorce problems, but inconvenient, and potentially costly. Keys aren't just keys these days, they're full of electronic wizardry, and expensive to replace, so we reported the loss to the police. Just a few hours later, on the same day, they phoned us to say they'd got them! Now I don't know how many officers they'd assigned to the case. Maybe they have sniffer dogs specially trained to locate them, or perhaps there was some of that DNA magic involved. Whatever, it was a remarkable piece of detective work, and I hope it goes some way in countering the negative press the police sometimes get these days.

Incidentally, I mentioned Heather Mills above. I'm not very much interested in her private life, but I notice that Mills has now joined the ranks of those, like Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles, who have become the acceptable subjects for jokes involving disability. It's a funny thing, humour.

And farewell then, Arthur C. Clarke, who once said "Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software." I hadn't realised that Clarke was an advisor on the 1950's Eagle comic's Dan Dare stories, some of my earliest reading. I imagine that many young boys were, like me, greatly influenced by him.

I've put a new widget in the side-panel. It links to some free songs at Calabash Music, a good World Music site, where I first heard the Belizean music of Andy Palacio, who also died recently. The video below shows him, with the wonderful Garifuna Collective, performing the title track from their album Watina.