...saddened by accurences in motorsport this week

Normally I wouldn't think this was the right place to comment on motorsport. This is a blog about, er, pointless trivial things but...

...as F1 pilot, Felipe Massa's lying in a doctor induced coma, Formula motorsport is in shock.

A freak accident in which a F2 car crashed lightly into a barrier forcing one of it's wheels free claimed the life of Henry Surtees. The wheel bounced back onto the track in to the path of the oncoming Surtees driven car, striking him on the head with force enough to prove his helmet wearing near useless. An accident like this hasn't happened in open top racing for a large number of years, and to claim a life in this way is so rare, not seen since Markus Höttinger's death in 1980. Then, within a space of 6 days, a spring from the rear suspension of Rubens Barrichello's Brawn GP F1 car worked itself loose, to hit Felipe Massa's passing Ferrari, impacting him on the front left of his crash helmet. Compared to the Surtees incident, Massa was lucky as the weight and angle of the impact was lighter and less direct to the spine. Felipe had this happen to him in the end of 2nd practice in qualifying at the Hungaroring, near Budapest, Hungary. Then next day in the race there, another freak incident in a pitstop caused Fernando Alonso's Renault to lose a front right wheel, resulting in it working free, to bounce in this case, harmlessly into a barrier before coming to a rest off track. Also in the race, Sebastien Vettel's RedBull Renault F1 car breaks it's suspension in a way reminiscent of Barrichello's car the day before. However only shards of carbon fibre broke off, lying flat off the racing line, with no other driver being affected. RedBull claim a front suspension fault, completely unrelated to the Brawn GP incident.

It is strange in motorsport for freak breakages and accident to be mirrored so closely. It hasn't happened since the dreadful weekend at Imola for the F1 San Marino GP of 1994. That weekend, three similar accidents claimed the lives of Roland Ratzenberger and Ayrton Senna, with Rubens Barrichello hospitalised. Although Senna's death was caused by a steering and suspension failure and the other two by driver error, death and serious injury was becoming a distant memory in the top levels of motorsport at the time. Which is very much how Henry Surtees' death is met by today's motorsport community.

Where we can take heart is in how Massa survived the impact his Ferrari sustained after he was rendered unconscious by the suspension debris. As yet, the speed in which he hit the tyre crash wall has not been made public, however, from onboard footage, it is clear that it was at a significant speed. Yet apart from the head injury caused by the spring to his head, Felipe suffered no other injuries. The car behaved extremely well under force. As driver's safety cell stayed intact; Massa's legs did not break, unlike Michael Schumacher's in a similar impact at Silverstone for the British GP in 1999. Plus, there is no direct neck injury caused by stopping into the crash wall. This is, in part, thanks to the innovative HANS device worn by all top level drivers to eliminate neck breakage in such a high speed impact.

Hopefully motorsport has endured the last of these freakish accuracies of the past week. There is always a risk involved in all kinds of motor racing but drivers are more vulnerable in open top Formula races. Yet the resulting crash suffered but Massa after the head injury proves that technology and Jackie Stewart's safety revolution has helped in significant ways to to make it many times safer than it was in Henry Surtees' father; John and in Jackie's time at the wheel. For which all racing car driver's take a small piece of reassurance from.

...still cleaning, still!

It's been quite awhile since I last remember a day starting without the prospect of cleaning the house.

I'm not complaining. Well, OK I am. Like I may have mentioned in a post a couple of posts ago, the house is a little (very, very) dusty. To try and illustrate how dusty we're talking about; it's like your favourite fat auntie was completely made of purple fluff, hair, crumbs and other things dusty. She comes to visit your small flat. Standing in a place in your home where she can see into all your rooms, she then explodes; atomizes. The windows are ajar. A breeze blows through the house, spreading the vast amount of er, hmm, pollen laden, gritty, purple fluffy, hairy crumbly dust cloud into every hole and onto every surface. It's like that, but more depressing and less exciting sounding.

Cleaning it is like chasing a naughty child made of, yes of course, dust. So you hoover one place, (s)he moves into another place, leaving a trail as he goes. And as it's also airborne, my lungs now contain an amount of both dust monsters; nan and child.

I'm wheezing as I type.

Well, complaining is now out of the way, the flat is nearly complete, including a reorganisation of er, the storage of er, our precious(?) belongings.

One day soon, I'll get on with living in the living room. dining in the dining room, kitch in the kitchen, etc. But until then, it'll still be cleaning in every room.

Bonjour for now my reader(s)

...trying out igoogle

It's not as straight forward as I thought it would be...

S L's mother had it as her home page on her desktop PC and it looked quite useful.

As a bit of a twitterer, I thought I'll add the twitter tool onto it, simple ask surely...
...as it turned out, I had to then download googledesktop, which in turn, did it's best Vista impression with it's clock face and by rearranging all my bloody icons and window sizes. Thanks for that!

Anyway, after the constant logging in and faff, I managed to find a blogger tool, which is what I'm using now. Lets hope the font and the size and all that are correct as I can't control it with the tool.

It's all just a bit too cool looking but completely devoid of any real usefulness

...thinking where did all this dust and purple fluff come from?

It's been a good long while since the flat had a complete clean. A spring clean, I guess is what your mother would a spring clean. yes, I'm afraid to say that it's been about, well, christmas time it would seem since a duster & hoover have been worked away around this little one bed tenement.

'Err, sick' is no doubt what you're thinking in your head. Followed by, 'well there's why all that purple fluffy dust is there' but it's not that straight forward!

Firstly, well, we had a blitz of a tidy up before a brief holiday holiday about 4 weeks ago.
Secondly, between Christmas and this brief travel abroad, we have only spent a handful of days in the home. S L Bartlett and I have been flying or driving back and forth between Eastbourne and, what is starting to become a Scottish bolt hold, in Glasgow.

I guess This it my point really, basically, so if it was quite tidy at Christmas, not to shabby just after Easter, then what caused this, er, Purple Rain?
Is it all these hardwood floor surfaces? Is it, an army of moths, practising a Red Arrows style display for however many months? Or, hmm, an unrelated grandma, flat sitting, moulting?

See, as I humbly understand the creation of dust, it our skin and hair and soul pieces that create dust. Oh, and lint from clothes and furnishings, moths, too.
But if the place was empty, then well, have I missed something in Mr Ashby's science classes?
Hmm, yes well, I know that in haunted houses, there's dust sheets on everything but isn't that all for the ghosts? or for the dusty furniture to, I don't know where I was going with that?
Some of you, if not all, will be saying that it's all in the air when we're about but then drops when the air's still. OK, but the amount.....

...going to:

blog something worthwhile or just something, anything,
phone Momo & Lalas,
go to see Public Enemies,
have a cooling bath,
recycle cardboard
&
go to bed at a reasonable hour....

(oh and sky+ the Mentalist, nearly forgot that one)