Orwell and Jura

Just loved this recent photo essay about Orwell and the island of Jura. In 1971 with three friends, I backpacked around the coast of Jura. Sleeping in caves that were more often the refuge of deer, and walking on paths that were carved out of the gorse by deer, it took us 5 days to circumnavigate the island, and in that whole time we didn't see another human soul, not even a footprint.

Just a great article in the NYT from Tim Kreider. I too am a cat-man. There's no shame in admitting it.

A Man and His Cat By TIM KREIDER AUGUST 1, 2014 6:33 PMAugust 3, 2014 9:11 pm 576 Comments Menagerie Menagerie: Just between us species. E-MAIL FACEBOOK TWITTER SAVE MORE Photo Credit Lisa Hanawalt I LIVED with the same cat for 19 years — by far the longest relationship of my adult life. Under common law, this cat was my wife. I fell asleep at night with the warm, pleasant weight of the cat on my chest. The first thing I saw on most mornings was the foreshortened paw of the cat retreating slowly from my face and her baleful crescent glare informing me that it was Cat Food Time. As I often told her, in a mellow, resonant, Barry White voice: “There is no luuve … like the luuve that exists … between a man … and his cat.” ‘You’re in love with that cat!’ my then-girlfriend Margot once accused me. To be fair, she was a very attractive cat. The cat was jealous of my attention; she liked to sit on whatever I was reading, walked back and forth and back and forth in front of my laptop’s screen while I worked, and unsubtly interpolated herself between me and any woman I may have had over. She and my ex Kati Jo, who was temperamentally not dissimilar to the cat, instantly sized each other up as enemies. When I was physically intimate with a woman, the cat did not discreetly absent herself but sat on the edge of the bed with her back to me, facing rather pointedly away from the scene of debauch, quietly exuding disapproval, like your grandmother’s ghost. I realize that people who talk at length about their pets are tedious at best, and often pitiful or repulsive. They post photos of their pets online, tell little stories about them, speak to them in disturbing falsettos, dress them in elaborate costumes and carry them around in handbags and BabyBjorns, have professional portraits taken of them and retouched to look like old master oil paintings. When people over the age of 10 invite you to a cat birthday party or a funeral for a dog, you need to execute a very deft etiquette maneuver, the equivalent of an Immelmann turn or triple axel, in order to decline without acknowledging that they are, in this area, insane. This is especially true of childless people, like me, who tend to become emotionally overinvested in their animals and to dote on them in a way that gives onlookers the creeps. Often the pet seems to be a surrogate child, a desperate focus or joint project for a relationship that’s lost any other raison d’être, like becoming insufferable foodies or getting heavily into cosplay. When such couples finally have a child their cats or dogs are often bewildered to find themselves unceremoniously demoted to the status of pet; instead of licking the dinner plates clean and piling into bed with Mommy and Daddy, they’re given bowls of actual dog food and tied to a metal stake in a circle of dirt. OP-TALK Confessions of a Cat Guy The author spoke with Op-Talk about people and their pets, and his relationship with the cat who inhabited his life and home for 19 years. I looked up how much Americans spend on pets annually and have concluded that you do not want to know. I could tell you what I spent on my own cat’s special kidney health cat food and kidney and thyroid medication, and periodic blood tests that cost $300 and always came back normal, but I never calculated my own annual spending, lest I be forced to confront some uncomfortable facts about me. What our mass spending on products to pamper animals who seem happiest while rolling in feces or eating the guts out of rodents — who don’t, in fact, seem significantly less happy if they lose half their limbs — tells us about ourselves as a nation is probably also something we don’t want to know. But it occurs to me that it may be symptomatic of the same chronic deprivation as are the billion-dollar industries in romance novels and porn. I’ve speculated that people have a certain reservoir of affection that they need to express, and in the absence of any more appropriate object — a child or a lover, a parent or a friend — they will lavish that same devotion on a pug or a Manx or a cockatiel, even on something neurologically incapable of reciprocating that emotion, like a monitor lizard or a day trader or an aloe plant. Konrad Lorenz confirms this suspicion in his book “On Aggression,” in which he describes how, in the absence of the appropriate triggering stimulus for an instinct, the threshold of stimulus for that instinct is gradually lowered; for instance, a male dove deprived of female doves will attempt to initiate mating with a stuffed pigeon, a rolled-up cloth or any vaguely bird-shaped object, and, eventually, with an empty corner of its cage. Although I can clearly see this syndrome as pathological in others, I was its medical textbook illustration, the Elephant Man of the condition. I did not post photographs of my cat online or talk about her to people who couldn’t be expected to care, but at home, alone with the cat, I behaved like some sort of deranged arch-fop. I made up dozens of nonsensical names for the cat over the years — The Quetzal, Quetzal Marie, Mrs. Quetzal Marie the Cat, The Inquetzulous Q’ang Marie. There was a litany I recited aloud to her every morning, a sort of daily exhortation that began, “Who knows, Miss Cat, what fantastical adventures the two of us will have today?” I had a song I sang to her when I was about to vacuum, a brassy Vegas showstopper called “That Thing You Hate (Is Happening Again).” We collaborated on my foot-pedal pump organ to produce The Hideous Cat Music, in which she walked back and forth at her discretion on the keyboard while I worked the pedals. The Hideous Cat Music resembled the work of the Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti, with aleatory passages and unnervingly sustained tone clusters. Biologists call cats ‘exploitive captives,’ an evocative phrase that might be used to describe a lot of relationships, not all of them interspecies. I never meant to become this person. My own cat turned up as a stray at my cabin on the Chesapeake Bay when I was sitting out on the deck eating leftover crabs. She was only a couple of months old then, small enough that my friend Kevin could fit her whole head in his mouth. She appeared from underneath the porch, piteously mewling, and I gave her some cold white crab meat. I did not know then that feeding a stray cat is effectively adopting that cat. For a few weeks I was in denial about having a cat. My life at that time was not structured to accommodate the responsibility of returning home once every 24 hours to feed an animal. I posted fliers in the post office and grocery store with a drawing of the cat, hoping its owner would reclaim it. It seems significant in retrospect that I never entertained the possibility of taking the cat to the pound. When I left for a long weekend for a wedding in another state, my friend Gabe explained to me that the cat clearly belonged to me now. I protested. This was a strictly temporary situation until I could locate a new home for the cat, I explained. I was not going to turn into some Cat Guy. “How would you feel,” he asked me, “if you were to get home from this weekend and that cat was gone?” I moaned and writhed in the passenger seat. “You’re Cat Guy,” he said in disgust. Photo Credit Lisa Hanawalt It’s amusing now to remember the strict limits I’d originally intended to place on the cat. One of the boundaries I meant to set was that the cat would not be allowed upstairs, where I slept. That edict was short-lived. It was not long before I became wounded when the cat declined to sleep with me. “You’re in love with that cat!” my then-girlfriend Margot once accused me. To be fair, she was a very attractive cat. People would comment on it. My friend Ken described her as “a supermodel cat,” with green eyes dramatically outlined in what he called “cat mascara” and bright pink “nose leather.” Her fur, even at age 19, was rich and soft and pleasant to touch. Biologists call cats “exploitive captives,” an evocative phrase that might be used to describe a lot of relationships, not all of them interspecies. I made the mistake, early on, of feeding the cat first thing in the morning, forgetting that the cat could control when I woke up — by meowing politely, sitting on my chest and staring at me, nudging me insistently with her face, or placing a single claw on my lip. She refused to drink water from a bowl, coveting what she believed was the superior-quality water I drank from a glass. I attempted to demonstrate to the cat that the water we drank was the very same water by pouring it from my glass into her bowl right in front of her, but she was utterly unmoved, like a birther being shown Obama’s long-form Hawaiian birth certificate. In the end I gave in and began serving her water in a glass tumbler, which she had to stick her whole face into to drink from. Sometimes it would strike me that an animal was living in my house, and it seemed as surreal as if I had a raccoon or a kinkajou running loose in my house. Yet that animal and I learned, on some level, to understand each other. Although I loved to bury my nose in her fur when she came in from a winter day and inhale deeply of the Coldcat Smell, the cat did not like this one bit, and fled. For a while I would chase her around the house, yelling, “Gimme a little whiff!” and she would hide behind the couch from my hateful touch. Eventually I realized that this was wrong of me. I would instead let her in and pretend to have no interest whatsoever in smelling her, and, after not more than a minute or so the cat would approach me and deign to be smelled. I should really be no less impressed by this accord than if I’d successfully communicated with a Papuan tribesman, or decoded a message from the stars. WHENEVER I felt embarrassed about factoring a house pet’s desires into major life decisions, some grown-up-sounding part of me told myself, it’s just a cat. It’s generally believed that animals lack what we call consciousness, although we can’t quite agree on what exactly this is, and how we can pretend to any certainty about what goes on in an animal’s head has never been made clear to me. To anyone who has spent time with an animal, the notion that they have no interior lives seems so counterintuitive, such an obdurate denial of the empathetically self-evident, as to be almost psychotic. I suspect that some of those same psychological mechanisms must have allowed people to rationalize owning other people. RELATED More From Menagerie Read previous contributions to this series. Another part of me, perhaps more sentimental but also more truthful, had to acknowledge that the cat was undeniably another being in the world, experiencing her one chance at being alive, as I was. It always amused me to hit or elongate the word “you” in speaking to the cat, as in, “Yooouu would probably like that!” because it was funny — and funny often means disquieting and true — to remind myself that there really was another ego in the room with me, with her own likes and dislikes and idiosyncrasies and exasperatingly wrongheaded notions about whose water is better. It did not seem to me like an insoluble epistemological mystery to divine what the cat would like when I woke up and saw her face two inches from mine and the Tentative Paw slowly withdrawing from my lip. I admit that loving a cat is a lot less complicated than loving a human being. Because animals can’t ruin our fantasies about them by talking, they’re even more helplessly susceptible to our projections than other humans. Though of course there’s a good deal of naked projection and self-delusion involved in loving other human beings, too. I once read in a book about feng shui that keeping a pet can maintain the chi of your house or apartment when you’re not there; the very presence of an animal enlivens and charges the space. Although I suspect feng shui is high-end hooey, I learned when my cat was temporarily put up elsewhere that a house without a cat in it feels very different from a house with one. It feels truly empty, dead. Those moments gave me some foreboding of how my life would feel after she was gone. We don’t know what goes on inside an animal’s head; we may doubt whether they have anything we’d call consciousness, and we can’t know how much they understand or what their emotions feel like. I will never know what, if anything, the cat thought of me. But I can tell you this: A man who is in a room with a cat — whatever else we might say about that man — is not alone.

EDC Victorinox...

Like a lot of people who enjoy Swiss Army Knives, I have an ongoing quest to compact as many useful tools (for me) into the smallest, lightest space possible. Often this involves rolling your own from off-the-shelf parts, then modifying them and assembling them into the "perfect" package. Perfection has a habit of shifting under one's feet as time goes on, so this is my latest attempt at perfection. The scales are made from aluminum plate about 3/32 inch thick. All riveting is with 2.2 and 2.5mm diameter brass. No keyring attachment. Most knife components are from 91mm Victorinox models. Opener/screwdriver layer: A new-version Philips driver ground down to the thickness of the Vic cap lifter. The cap lifter has had the cut-out modified so it will open both bottles and cans, and is aided in the latter by grinding a sharp edge at roughly 45 degrees along the can-cutting edge. It'll still work as a large screwdriver blade too, and retains the "wire-bending, cable-stripping notch. Scissors layer: stock 91mm Vic scissors. All I did to them was grind the end of the center screw flat, so they's slip into the scales with minimum width. Saw and Metal file layer: 91mm Vic parts again. The only non-standard issue here is they are running with no liner between them for maximum thinness. There is a 5 thou thick brass washer between them. Blade layer: a 91mm Vic main blade with the thick tang, and a 84mm nailfile (from a cadet). They both ride on a backspring that has been ground to fit and tweaked slightly, as has the spacer. I had to carve a nail-nick relief for the nailfile. As you may know, the nailfile point also does a decent job on #1 Phips screws. Backtools: a modern Vic 91mm awl with sewing eye, and a corkscrew. I intend to add the mini eyeglass screwdriver to the corkscrew. A number of backsprings were mixed and matched, and sometimes tweaked, from various sources. So, after construction, the thickness of this 5-layer knife is about 1 layer thinner than a 4 layer Explorer with Vic Scales. I can live without the toothpick and tweezers as I often have those in a small Vic on my keyring. All in all, a good marriage of tools, utility, and space.

Wenger Can-Opener and #1 and #2 Phillips Combo Tool.

Ground the end of my Wenger can opener to 57 degrees, and took the thickness down till it just fits snugly into a #1 and #2 Phillips screw. Resembles the Vic Combo tool now doesn't it, and there is still plenty of can-piercing ability. The very end also fits regular flat screw heads that are a bit too small for the flat blade on the end of the bottle opener.

Old 50's Vic.............now.

Reprofiled the main blade, hard to tell it's 1/4" shorter. Turned small blade into a flat Phillips. Got rid of saw. Used new 91mm scissors with old saw spring and custom brass spacer. Corkscrew is from a modern Wenger. Awl tip needed work to restore shape and straightness. Needed to reprofile the saw spring to work with scissors. Scales were a bugger to get off, some damage occurred. All pivots were 2.2mm through whole knife. Had to grind down toothpick and tweezers to fit the narrower than current slots.

Beat up early 50's Victorinox...

'Twas a slow day at the TSA bin...

Sometimes it's hard to fathom why we sometimes do what we do. Case in point: I frequent the bins where the TSA confiscated knives are sold to the public at my local State Surplus auction and retail emporium. There's usually a fairly broad selection of sad Victorinox and Wenger SAK's to chose from, any of whom would offer sterling service for many years, and for just a couple of dollars. However, it was a slow day, the bins had been well picked over, and all I could find that half-way piqued my interest was a 84mm Vic Waiter, and this: a Vic 84mm Tinker that must be about 40 years old, and had had a very hard life. They were having a sale though, so both knives only cost me $1. Fortunately I have no "before" photo's, it would be just too gruesome, but here's the overall state of the knife before I started work. It had been used as a hammer, or chisel, or both. One end of the knife had severe damage to the liners and scales consistent with the knife having been hit very hard. The toothpick and tweezers had been forced into the scales, wedging the ends of the scales off of the knife. The scales were in bad shape overall, with numerous scrapes and gouges, and the badge was missing.Both the blades were broken at the ends. I created a sheepsfoot blade from the smaller blade. The back-side Phillips driver was the semi-squared off section variety, the one with the slot in the end for opening cans. That helped date the knife (but I'd appreciate your best guess as to its year of manufacture). Both the can opener and the bottle open needed some work, as both seemed to have helped transfer some of the force applied to the ends of the knife. After repairing the scale damage the knife end looked like this: So, I set to work, determined to make a nice user out of a sad case, hoping to use all the original parts if possible. I managed to repair a lot of the liner damage using a dremel, a selection of small files, and various grades of wet-and-dry paper. The small blade was reprofiled using my dremel and parting disk, and a cheap diamond grit knife-sharpening-stone from ebay. The openers were smoothed of blemishes, then buffed. The edge to the Awl was removed of it's damage using a small diamond sharpening rod. Finally, I epoxied the scales back on (they were too badly damaged to snap into place), let them set, and then polished them smooth with 400/600/1200/1500 wet-and-dry, fine steel wool, finally simichrome. The knife started to look like a well used, and cared for tool. Finally, I opened and closed the main blade a couple of times. It was catching the small blade when it closed. I decided to crink the blade about half a millimeter, and used a couple of large Crescent wrenches to apply gentle force. The blade stayed strong, refusing to budge. I decided to repeat the crinking with a little more force. Drats, the main blade snapped at the tang. All that work, and now disaster. What to do? Well, the only spare blade I had was from a 85mm Wenger. It was the approximately correct size and shape, but it was 1mm longer, has about 1mm extra belly on the blade, has a tang that's significantly thinner, and finally: the pivot hole is 2.5mm diameter, compared to the 2.2mm pivots in the Vic liners, pivot end bushings, and can opener. Some surgery would be required, and even then there was no guarantee it would work as a transplant. I removed the broken Vic blade keeping the pivot end bushings. I opened up the holes in the bushings, the liners, and the can opener to 3/32" (about 2.38mm) using my dremel and a small diamond hone. I reshaped the tang on the Wenger blade to closely match the Vic tang by pinning them together and grinding the Wenger tang to match the Vic profile. I cut a piece of 3/32" brass pivot to length, mushroomed an end, then assembled everything. To take up the discrepancy between the blade tang thicknesses I used a small washer of the correct thickness, and just the right diameters (it was the first washer I tried out of my fairly large fastener bin!!!). Some force and squeezing was necessary as the knife springs resist assembly. Finally I put on the end bushing, cut the brass to final length, and peened the pivot till the blades opened well, with no play. Re-epoxied the scales (again!!!), let everything set (again!!!), then finish-buffed everything. The original scales were starting to get pretty thin by now, what with all the material removal due to marks, gouges, and blemish removal, but they still just about function OK. The final steps involved getting the main knife blade to sit nicely in the liners/blade stops. As the blade was a little longer, the end of it tended to hit the spacer and liner at the very end of the point of the knife. I went in very gingerly with the dremel, and a parting disk, grinding small amounts off of the liner/spacer, till the blade fit as well as could be hoped for. The blade even looks like it might have been even original equipment, but for the fact that the blade proudly bears the name Wenger. So, after all that effort, was it worth it? I think so, at least to me. I enjoyed the challenge, like to "save" worthy tools, am pleased that the knife didn't end up in a landfill somewhere, and I think it looks like a pretty nice user. And it's now somewhat unique.

Creating a form-fitting "Cocoon" for a knife or Multi-Tool...

The advantages of keeping your knife or Multi-Tool inside a custom made "Cocoon" are many. It keeps the item from accumulating pocket lint. It stops bangs and dents from marring the tool, which is an inevitable result of general pocket carrying. It quietens things down in your pocket somewhat as the Cocoon adds sound-deadening qualities. And it prevents wear to any other items that share the same pocket. A Cocoon adds very little thickness or bulk, and the tool or knife can be extracted from its Cocoon very quickly indeed. To my mind, there are so many advantages that I make a Cocoon for every knife or tool that I carry frequently. Here's how to make one. Take the tool/knife, and try slipping it inside Electrical shrink-tubing. It needs to slide in, without undue force, and not be a really sloppy fit. Shrink-tubing is available cheaply in a huge variety of diameters, usually sold by the foot, on Ebay. For my Vic Compact here, I found that 20mm diameter tubing was perfect. Cut the tubing about 1/4 inch longer than the knife. The extra will form around the ends of the knife after molding, increasing retention, and reducing wear and tear on the very ends of the tool. Take some Priority Mail tape, and wrap 2 thicknesses around the whole knife. Smooth it out as best you can. Look at the tool/knife in profile, and imagine trying to extract it from a form-fitting tube. You'll want the greater volume to be at the end that you mold first. I have found that all my Victorinox knives extract easiest by pulling on their keyring attachments, so I always make my Cocoons with the keyring on what will end up being the open end of the Cocoon, with the keyring at the bottom. Slide the tool/knife into the tubing after rubbing a little light oil on to the Priority Mail tape. Without the oil, you will have a very hard time extracting the knife/tool. Now, I use a cigarette lighter, with a medium to low flame for this next part. I guess a Heat Gun would be best, but I don't have one. A lighter allows for a more precise heat application anyway. I apply heat to the tubing, not too close, not too far, constantly moving the flame, till the tubing contracts tightly around just the "tight half" of the knife/tool (the end of the tool that you envision extracting it by). Don't do more than half of the length. Stop heating the tube, let it cool a minute or two, then, using a toothbrush end, or a small dowel, push out the knife tool. Remembering the orientation of the tube to the knife/tool, cut a small slit, with a rounded end (otherwise the tube may tear with use). This slit will permit the tube to give enough, and you'll be able to get the knife/tool in/out easily soon. Return the knife/tool to the tube, in the correct orientation, and repeat the heating process to shrink down the whole tube till it fits seamlessly, and without lose areas. Next, pull out the knife/tool through the slit you made. It should slide out reasonably easily. Remember, it still has the Priority Mail Tape on it, when you remove this, it'll slide easier still. Remove the Tape, and the Cocoon and knife/tool will look like this. Finally, carefully trim the Cocoon around its opening for neatness, and check for fit as you slide the knife/tool in several times. I find that making small changes slowly is best. You can never add material back on !! Also, the best scissors to use are the tiny scissors on Vic Classic's, Rambler's, MiniChamp's etc. Tight circular cuts are best made in an anti-clockwise direction. Lastly, the area that often gets caught up with Victorinox knives, is the area around the corkscrew (if your knife has one). The most central first wind of the corkscrew catches easily on the thin shrink-tubing, and I usually pare back the tubing in this area till the corkscrew clears easily. Remove the oil on the inside of the tubing with a cloth, and check for final fit. You have something that probably looks like this: If you still have issues with the Cocoon being too tight a fit, you can try paring away a little more on the areas that might be catching, or I have also used a very small amount of Baby Powder rubbed in to the inside of the Cocoon. Conversely, if the fit should be too lose for you, put the knife into the Cocoon (without the Priority Mail tape on it), and gently warm an area of the tubing till you see it start to contract a little more. Keep checking for tightness, Don't overdo this part. If you want to hide the lettering that runs the length of the Cocoon, you can use a black Sharpie, or sometimes the lettering will easily buff off with a little metal polish.

Extending the bit-range on your CyberTool...

I have a Victorinox CyberTool 34, and am very happy with it, but being an inveterate tinkerer I would be exstatic if it had a greater range of bits than the very limited selection available through Victorinox. As you may know, the Vic uses a rather off-beat shank size of 4mm for its bits, and they also use a ball-retaining system to keep them from falling out during use. So, essentially my problem boiled down to this: find some (hopefully cheap ;-) bits that fit, and then come up with an easy way of retaining the bits when they are being torqued on, even upside down. No small feat. I was aided in my search initially by this post on EDC Forums, by podus1, on Jan13th 2013. He laid out the way to track down extra bits that fit perfectly: "Here's a Victorinox store that carries 16 different 4mm Cybertool bit sizes (see page 2). http://www.pizzini.at/shop/contents/en-us/d31_schweizermesser-ersatzteil_01.html Here's the current edition of Felo's European catalog. Their reversible, double-ended 4mm bits (that fit the Victorinox Cybertool) are listed at the top of page 148. http://www.german-hand-tools.com/files/Felo_Catalog2.pdf FWIW - here's the current edition of Felo's USA catalog. http://www.bondhus.com/catalog/felo_catalog.pdf" So, this is my CyberTool, with a standard Victorinox phillips/slotted bit installed in the driver: I took a trip to Home Depot, and bought this exact screwdriver set, it's made by HDX, contains 21 assorted 4mm bits, a screwdriver, and a bit extender, all for less than $5 (*Much*, *much* cheaper than the $5 or so per bit for the Vic-branded bits): The bits fit the CyberTool fine, but invert the tool and they will fall right out, so, what to do to retain them? As you may be aware, Swiss Army Knives are made to pretty exacting tolerances, so there's not a lot of room to work with. I contemplated making a small magnet, and adhesing it down inside the Vic bit adapter, but that seemed difficult to undo should I ever want to revert the tool back to original/standard, so I hit on this method. I took about a one inch length of electrical shrink-tubing of diameter sufficient to just slip over the head of the tool like so (the tubing, when flattened, measures 10mm across): Now, making sure there's one of the bits in place, I used a lighter to shrink the tubing around the bit and the tool head like so: Voila!!! The bit slips into and out of the end of the shrink tubing, and there is retention of the bit even when the whole tool is inverted. Even better, one can also use the original Vic bits with no further modification, which is a great thing as some of the original Vic bits don't seem to retain very well anyway, and need a little help to stay put. Finally, here's a pic of the CyberTool closed, with one of the HDX bits in the extender. As you can see, the length of the after-market bits is about the same length as the original Vic bits, so the tool closes perfectly: One final, minor, caveat. Depending on your particular CyberTool, and the brand/wall-thickness of the shrink-tubing you use, you may have some minor interference between the bit adapter and the adjacent tools. If the adapter is closed, and you try to open the Pliers or the Bottle Opener, it might be a tight squeeze. On my knife everything does open and close OK, but YMMV. At worst though, you can always first open the adapter, and then open the Pliers or Bottle Opener to use them.

Leatherman Crunch Saw mod...

A commercially available power saw blade can be pretty easily modded to enable using a Leatherman Crunch as a tool holder. A Dremel and parting disk cuts the appropriately-sized slot in the saw at the non-business end. The slot in the end of the saw then fits into the wire cutter area of the Leatherman. I also use a short length of shrink tubing to make a sheath for the saw, which protects the Leatherman inside the sheath. Obviously, I chose a relatively short blade, such that everything travels together.....a longer saw will cut more stuff, better ;-)

Lighweight pocket carry: Leatherman PS4. Vic Minichamp 8-blade with pen and light scales. Toothpick and tweezers. E-gear flashlight. All protected with sheaths from shrink-tubing, helps keep things a tad quieter too.

Tiny flashlight...

Staircase...

...from a book store in Portugal.

Prior hub...

A bicycle sink...

Two bike pics...

Victorinox Minichamp...

Eight blades of goodness, check. 58mm pocket form factor, check. Pen, check, tweezers, check. And toothpick, check...............wait a minute, there isn't room in the scales to have a pen, tweezers, and a toothpick. Well, a little formed to shape beer can, and a plastic toothpick cut to length; and you too can have it all my friend. The blade locks at all into position along the edge of the knife. It's quite cute really ;-)

It's difficult cycling anywhere in England these days, what with the weather 'n' all.

Barbara got a spiffy new iPhone 5 last weekend. The last few days have seen deteriorating call quality, that's sporadic, but at times it's frequently so bad that it makes the phone unusable. She went back to her carrier, Verizon today, who basically told her that it was how she was holding it, and that was interfering with the antenna!!! BS that smacks of antenna-gate a few years ago with the launch of the iPhone 4. Anyway, to help her out a bit I went online, and searched "iPhone 5 reduced call quality". The first link took me to just one Apple forum, where there was already 15+ pages of disgruntled iPhone 5 owners, all on Verizon, who were having the same issues.

Worlds Heaviest bicycle...

It probably breaks a few other records too...