chesneycat

Man regrows severed fingertip.   <--BBC news article is thataway down the link.

Read it, watch the videos, or just look out for the story in your preferred news media outlet. This is truly a phenomenal piece of medical technology, straight out of SF.

Wow.

[OTOH, it's probably all just bollocks...]

Wahey! About bloody time, too.

Sheffield's an odd town, really, more like a collection of several dozen villages, and even the nicest of areas rub shoulders with the roughest of the rough within the distance of a street or two.  Thinking about it, it reminds me a little of what Jez's aunt and uncle told me about Belfast when we visited them out there - the character of the place can change from one extreme to the other and back again over a few hundred yards.  Anyway.  Sheffield's much the same.  So, the fact that there was a murder just down the road yesterday isn't worrying to me at all, because I know that the area around Valley Road is not the most salubrious of places.  Poor guy was deliberately run over in what sounds like some kind of gang thuggery, so the main road through our district is closed while the police finish all their forensics.  Stupidly, I ran a red light in front of the police cars... driving down Scarsdale road this morning I reached the crossroads with the main road, which was closed off to my right. Mesmerised like a deer in the headlights by the flashing blue lights and aware that nothing else would be going that way with the road closed, I blithely turned left... on red. Big, big Oops.

The thing is, I feel remarkably safe in this town, and have no qualms about where I shop or even go for a walk.  Our immediate area is perfectly fine, but even beyond that I'm not too bothered.  Yeah, there's been an armed robbery at the Co-op down the road in the last year, but the delinquents responsible are usually too busy either targeting the shops on Derbyshire Lane (a few streets over) or spending time in prison to bother our little neighbourhood, whatever the guy who runs the Post Office thinks of the local hoodies (who are actually a rather pleasant bunch who don't bother anyone other than him - in fact, he pretty much demands that they pester him by being so offensively prejudiced himself).  Chesterfield Road, the one that's closed today and where the murder actually took place is also rather an odd place.  It's a main route into town along one of the valleys, running pretty much parallel to the railway line and up-slope from one of the rivers.  Further out of town it becomes a proper traditional shopping street, but down the valley things are a little more varied. There's a huge mix of businesses and residences - scattered amongst the terraces we have a couple of major DIY superstores, a mini retail park with several major chain shops, a string of independent businesses ranging from model shops and cafes to picture framers and the like, a supermarket, some takeaways, a garage, one of the best Indian restaurants in town, and a sex shop.  Oh, and a few pubs, and the poshest furniture shop in Sheffield (Ponsfords).  The full spectrum, from the dodgy to the sublime. 

That's the kind of place this is. And everyone's so amazingly friendly, it's like living in America in a Yorkshire kind of way, less flash but you get to keep your own personal space while you're sharing life stories and helping each other out.

I'll miss this place.

Apparently, there's a bit of a badger problem in the vicinity of Basra.  According to a local housewife who has been attacked by one of these fearsome creatures, the animal in question is "the size of a dog but his head is like a monkey" and "swift as a deer".  Some of the locals are blaming British troops for releasing them into the area, in order to sow panic.

This leads to some fantastic quotes, like the following from a UK military spokesman:

"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area."

Hands up if you just had a flashback to last year's Apprentice...

More worryingly... what does this say about our troops, if this is what the locals expect of them?  I mean, who would resort to badgers?

We had a sudden smell of burning in the office yesterday evening, just after 5.  Thijs thought he'd been running his computer too hard, but it was actually Gatecrasher (one of Sheffield's nightclubs, and therefore stuffed full of stuff that burns quite rapidly) going up in smoke on the other side of town.  We legged it up to J-floor (oh, my poor suffering legs!), closing windows en-route, and watched it burn for a while.

The BBC news story is here, along with a picture gallery.   Some (very) close ups here.  Lucy next door apparently sat next to some utterly devastated teenagers on the bus home last night.  Why?  The Leadmill's still standing!


As always, Sheffield Forum had all the answers to what was going on in seconds.  It's a fantastic local site, and easily makes up for moving out of the Cambridge area where we had the wonderful cam.misc at hand.

What do the rest of you do for your main source of local info?

What a sad start to the day.


In other news, I'm still having stress-dreams, which I can't quite pin down an exact cause on right now (except for the immediately obvious cause, but that doesn't quite fit the bill I think).  They're quite amusing, really... this vague indeterminate stress has been interpreted in my sleep in a variety of wacky ways, most lately by the conviction this morning that I had exams starting on monday and hadn't started revising for them yet.  Honestly!  It's my first years that ought to be waking up covered in cold sweat in a trembling panic, not me! But isn't it fascinating how your mind can pull together a perfectly realistic everyday scene, while keeping facts like "the last exam YOU had to take was back in 1999" totally locked away?