The night before last I didn't get to sleep until 4am. Last night I dropped off fine (because I was so tired after the previous night), but when I woke up my alarm clock said 5am. I began cursing my inability to sleep for a decent length of time. So as I was awake anyway, I got up and went to the loo, and as soon as I left my darkened bedroom I noticed it was suspiciously light for 5am in May.

It turned out that my alarm clock had somehow lost a couple of hours and it was in fact 7:19, which is much more sensible. However, that alarm clock is supposed to be radio-synchronised, so I had to check quite a few other clocks before I was convinced about which one of them was wrong. That's the trouble with radio clocks: most of the time they're much more reliable and accurate than ordinary clocks, but while an ordinary clock's failure mode is to gradually drift away from the right time so that as long as you set it or checked it recently you know it must be approximately right, a radio clock is capable of completely losing the plot in the space of minutes and leaving you utterly uncertain of the right time.

Oh well; when I got to work the clocks here seemed to think I'd got it about right, so no harm done. I just hope the alarm clock was only temporarily confused.

Also when I got in to work, I opened my mailbox and discovered that I had received spam about the Da Vinci Code. Arrrrgh! I've been waiting patiently for months for the entire world to shut up about that thoroughly uninspiring book, but it hasn't happened yet. If it isn't a high-profile plagiarism lawsuit or the high-profile launch of the film adaptation, it's endless ranting about the obvious truth, obvious fictionality or otherwise of the utterly clichéd conspiracy theory, which cartesiandaemon pegged very accurately last week as being exactly the sort of thing Foucault's Pendulum was mercilessly mocking fifteen years before it was even published, so nobody has any excuse for taking it seriously, or indeed writing it, now. Nobody in the media seems to be able to stop talking about it, and I am absolutely sure it simply isn't interesting enough to warrant all that fascination. But now spammers are getting in on the deal as well and I've had enough. SHUT UP!