Status-Q

This has been doing the rounds on the net for a while - to the extent that I'm not sure who deserves the original credit. But it's very nice.

Thanks to Chris Warrington for pointing it out.

This is, I think, a lovely introduction to Stephen Hawking's big ideas, in a two-minute animation commissioned by The Guardian.

The fact that it's substantially the creation of my nephew Matt Kemp, who works at Scriberia, makes me like it even more! :-)

I had to take a picture of these steps in Chicago's Union Station recently.

If you've seen The Untouchables, you'll know why. The 'pram scene' is a brilliant piece of cinema; you can see it here, though this clip is missing the long build-up which is part of what makes the original so effective.

Of course, it is itself an homage to the scene in Battleship Potemkin at the Odessa steps, but I didn't know until today that it too had inspired a later cinematic tribute.

One thing I haven't generally had to pack when going for walks in the countryside - until I went to Montana - is bear repellent.

These are standard issue in that part of the world - you can buy them everywhere.

To an Englishman, an aerosol seems more appropriate for dealing with a small insect than a charging grizzly, but since the usual alternative advice is to lie down and play dead in this situation (which may cause the grizzly to ignore you), I can see why these are popular travel accessories.

I've always wanted to run with the cool kids and be an Inbox-Zero kind of guy, but it never quite works. I'm more of an Inbox-Four-Digits kind of guy. I also have about half a dozen email accounts.

So I was quite pleased to discover some options in the iOS 7 Mail app which, though not really hidden, are perhaps not immediately obvious and yet might be useful for many people.

If you go to the list of Mailboxes and click the Edit button at the top, you'll find, down at the bottom, a few new 'smart folders' you can enable by clicking their checkboxes.

My favourite is the 'Unread' one, which will show you your unread messages across all inboxes:

There are also ones for flagged messages, draft messages, messages with attachments, sent messages, and so forth: take your pick! If, say, you flag incoming messages which need your attention later, then the Flagged option creates a handy to-do list.

By default, each account's inbox is also visible in this list, but I don't really care too much about where messages came from - if I need to check a particular inbox I'm happy to dig down into its account, so I turn these off to keep things simple.

And lastly, you can of course rearrange the order in which the items are displayed, so I just drag my favourite 'folders' to the top, turn off the ones I don't want, and things are nice and clean:

Well, one quick transatlantic flight, and I've lost even more degrees of centigrade than I have hours of sleep!

For my more geeky readers, I can report that I return with a Scottevest Transformer jacket, and a Google Chromecast.

But the highlight of the trip was definitely the hikes we did in Yellowstone and in Glacier National Park. I leave you with my favourite picture from the Yellowstone Grand Canyon.

(Click for a larger version.)

My brother-in-law's dog Joshua got up on the sofa to help me check in for our flights, but it turned out he wasn't really too interested in Delta Airlines. He was more keen to chat to these girls.

I have a theory. A hypothesis, if you will. It's still in embryonic form, but I think it could have considerable impact, because it relates to a global conspiracy to create a mass delusion affecting hundreds of thousands of people worldwide.

I am referring, of course, to fishing.

It's a subject on which I am far from an expert, having only held a fishing rod in my hands twice in my life. Naturally, therefore, I didn't catch anything on either occasion. But what was more surprising was that on both occasions I was accompanied by somebody much more experienced – in the first case, a Norwegian, in the second, an American. We were in good locations with lots of fish. And yet, after a day of staring at small things bobbing on the water, they hadn't caught anything either.

Not a large statistical sample, I grant you, but it made me start to wonder. And I realised that throughout my life I have been walking on the banks of rivers, or sailing or paddling on lakes, and have seen vast numbers of fisherman sitting looking dejectedly at their lines, but never have I seen anybody actually catch a fish! Doesn't that seem a bit strange, in forty-six years? Yes, you hear stories of people who claim to have caught them, and accounts from others of the ones they almost caught, but I feel that solid evidence is somewhat lacking. I've never seen it with my own eyes.

Except once.

I was in Nottingham, walking my dog along the river, and there was the usual collection of figures squatting by the water. Perched there, you might say. And then, suddenly, one of them jumped up with a cry, and started reeling in what turned out to be a reasonably sizeable aquatic beast. But it was the reaction of all his co-hobbyists that was impressive - they all crowded around with such excitement that I was persuaded that they, too, viewed this as something of a miracle.

Now, I do know that there are fish in the sea, and I have eaten quite a few of them, so somebody must catch them. These trawlers seem rather good at it. And I have even caught fish myself, using the rather trivial technique of stretching a net halfway across a quiet fjord one night and pulling it in again the following morning. That's not what I'm talking about here. No, I mean the process of leaving your wife and family, gathering large amounts of expensive equipment, and sitting for hours beside, or on, a river, looking at a gently bobbing thing, when you could be enjoying the view, going for a nice walk, or, if you like sitting by the river, reading a book. This is clearly not something that rational people would do unless they had been seduced into it by the promise of some great reward.

It's a bit like making pilgrimages to Lourdes, or buying lottery tickets. These also sustain major industries on the basis of future rewards almost never actually experienced by the participants, so you need to make sure that, when the rare miracle occurs, it is well-publicised. Hence those pictures of Hemingway next to an enormous marlin, or the stuffed pike over the rural hotel mantelpiece. They say, "Look! It can happen! Someone caught one once! This could happen to you too!"

And so I rather suspect that the chap I saw in Nottingham was a plant by one of the local manufacturers or vendors of outdoor equipment. He probably kept this fish in a tank and, once the gig was done, would move elsewhere on the river, slip it back on the hook, and chuck it in again. That seems the most plausible to me.

Think about it, dear reader. You know it makes sense. The conspiracy is now exposed. And fortunately, you and I have not swallowed the bait...

Two days ago I enjoyed elk quesadillas
Yesterday I had a bison burger
Today we fished the Yellowstone River under the watchful eye of a bald eagle.
Feeling very Western.

Oh give me land, lots of land, under starry skies above...

We're in Montana, and it's beautiful.

No, I mean really beautiful.

We made some friends amongst the natives.

The humans are friendly too. All in all, a lovely spot.

More pictures are sure to follow soon...