We’re about to redo our bathroom, and I’m wondering if I could get some colour-change tiles past the missus.

(HT: Neatorama)

The main story on BBC News today is the collapse of the I35W bridge in Minneapolis. So far I’ve heard from a few friends who are all OK, and as I don’t know many people from the northern suburbs it’s unlikely to affect me too directly, but it’s still an upsetting thing. I hope that you and your loved ones are similarly unaffected.

£12.50 in consultation fees later (more than all three of them cost initially) we officially have a fat gerbil. On the upside, he’s not clinically obese, so we don’t have to worry yet.

We have 3 boy gerbils. To be honest I have to take the RSPCA’s word on this, because they’re not exactly hung like hamsters, but we’ve had no reason to doubt that. Until now. We currently have one normal gerbil, one who could probably stand to lose an ounce or two, and one who is bordering on morbidly obese. Right now we’re hoping that the biggest problem we’re facing is how to put one gerbil on a diet without starving the others.

There’s a report on the BBC about Britain’s most dangerous roads. The first thing that struck me is that they’re all in the north of the country, probably because there isn’t enough space in the south to get up enough speed for a decent accident.

A little study showed something a little more surprising. In England driving lessons and tests are conducted on public roads without any introduction (at least when I learned, the only requirement was if your instructor asked you to read the Highway Code first). As was common, therefore, my instructor drove us a little way out of town before handing over the tonne of rolling death to my control. I remember very clearly the effort I made not to exceed the 30mph limit, forgetting that the road we were on was a 60mph (not that this was a bad idea, of course).

Anyway, the slightly startling result of the safety survey is that for my very first driving trip, after a brief trip away from town, I turned on to the second most dangerous road in the country, followed that for a while, then cut across to the 8th most dangerous road. Perhaps I should have been doing 20mph.