The Emperor Qin

Spent the morning lazing in bed. Drove over to Putney for lunch so Brett could pick up his comics. We came home with good intentions of doing domestic stuff, but while Brett got down to tallying his finances, I bottled out and watched TV.

The History Channel does some good documentaries, but they are SO bloated with needless dramatisation and fluff. I watched a two hour documentary on the Emperor Qin which had plenty of interesting information in it, but could have easily been condensed into an hour’s programming.

Qin was the first emperor of all China and was responsible for the Terracotta Army. Some of the finds there are astounding the archaeologists: There is stone replica armour, where the leather plates are represented by plates of stone so thin that they cannot be duplicated with modern technology. There are mechanical weapons which demonstrate a production-line philosophy in their creation. There are swords which are totally free of corrosion and still extremely sharp today, having been treated with a ten-micron layer of Chromium – a technique that has only been discovered in the last few years. Just because they didn’t have mobile phones, doesn’t mean they were primitive.

Had a strange phone call from Owen earlier on: It seems that the Basque separatist movement, ETA, have bombed the hotel in Denia where I worked for a season. Not entirely sure why though, it was hardly a prominent location. News reports are that no-one was killed but there were minor injuries. As far as I can see from their website Saga doesn’t use it any more.

In other news, I came across an interesting blog by a London Magistrate (see the bottom of the right column) which I’ve been following. I applied to become a Magistrate last year and am expecting to hear about an interview sometime in the next month. Probably ought to be doing some background reading ready for it…