Another day, another dollar.

Hmm. B-movie as a lot of fun, incidentally. I actually met wendles (Hi), and she was good enough not to run away screaming. I nearly fell over doing what for want of a better word I'll call "dancing". I put this down jointly to lack of recent practice and insufficient alcohol.

I've just tightened up some of the visible screws on the Rollei, and although the top plate still rocks slightly (a very small fraction of a millimeter, I must stress) it doesn't seem to affect the shutter release any more. It could still do with a look at, but I'm pretty sure now that Rollei themselves aren't going to get involved.

It was a good day at work with various projects getting overdue stuff done on them. The big finshers' get-together meeting we have every couple of months has been cancelled for lack of anything to talk about. This would have been tomorrow, but as I never bother going to them anyway these days, it doesn't bother me greatly. It's a bit odd, though. It's not happened before.

And I've just finished sticking the curtain-rail up. What do you mean midnight's a strange time to be doing DIY? It always works for me.

2 questions :

. . . that I'd actually quite like answers for.

I was talking to Buca Alan at B-Movie and for some reason we got onto the subject of erythrocyte respiration. I said that I was pretty sure that red cells only do anaerobic respiration, and that presumably this means that they don't have mitochondria. Amazingly, given the number of years since I studied this kind of thing, it seems to be true. I love this page. "The shunt provides the remainder", with no explanation of what the shunt is. Fantastic. Alan suggested that the metabolic crippling of red cells might be to avoid them becoming tumorous, as they have such regular exposure to molecular oxygen, with all its hazards. It's possible.

So . . . what's going on here, then? Why aren't there any, and what's the mechanism involved?

The second one is about feathers. How does a structure like a feather grow out of a little follicle?

Hmm. I may have to do some digging around on these ones.