Friday 27th September 2018

Pay day.

One week to go.

It is Friday, and I am hoping for an easy day to be honest, as Thursday saw me rooted to the sofa writing mail after mail to be sent out. IN fact, from this point, each week will get busier and busier right through until we come to the end of March, but then it will be busier for different reasons. For the time being, I look to the end of each week, but knowing what is coming, there is also planning for later in the project.

But for now, it is waiting for mails to come in and respond to those, like some kind of serious ping pong.

Ping.

Pong.

Ping.

And so on.

It is a cloudy day to start with, so I don't really mind working, its not as though I am missing butterflies or orchids outside.

I do have the radio or TV on, and knuckle down to work and work.

Work ends at just gone four; Jools had gone into town shopping, so I tidied up and began to dance around the house to some Happy Mondays. As you do.

I gave Jools the choice of chorizo hash or burgers, and she chose purgers. So I fond a pack of venison burgers in the freezer, cook those up, defrost some rolls and pour a beer and a cider. JOb done.

We ate whilst watching a great film on the life of Hollywood star, Heddy Lamarr, who had the most incredible life, not just because she was a star at MGM. She was Austrian, and starred in a film in her native country in which she was filmed naked, married a Jewish industrialist who was making munitions for the Germans. She drugged her maid, put on her clothes, sewed in her jewelry in the lining of her clothes and stole a bike to escape. She made her way to London, met with Sam Goldwyn but turned down a contract to become an actress, had 2nd thoughts and used the last of her money to book passage on the same ship as he, and dressed in the last of her finery for dinner, and caught Errol Flynn's as well as Goldwyn's eye.

SHe won a 500 dollar a week contract yet not being able to speak English!

She did make films, became a star, but was bored, so became an inventor in her spare time, made friends with Howard Hughes who gave her equipment for a laboratory.

She was blessed, or cursed, with being dazzlingly beautiful, but most people only saw that, and wasn't interested in her brain. She was aware that the German U Boats were wreaking havoc on the convoys in the Atlantic, and she had an idea of a radio controlled torpedo. To avoid jamming, she came up with an idea of switching frequencies rapidly, she gave the patent to the US Navy who didn't bother to look at it.

Years went by, her star rose and fell, and meanwhile the Navy looked at her patent and designed a secure radio system based on her patent. Not only that, the same idea was put to weapons and drone aircraft, and then applied to wifi and bluetooth systems, all on her original idea, and no one knew.

She never received a penny for her idea, yet most of modern communications and apps built on her patent, even after her notes were released, some felt unable to believe that a beautiful actress could have had such an original idea. She was recognised just before she dies, and was lauded, but by then she was living in poverty and isolation after a series of botched plastic surgeries in order to try to preserve her youth.

We watched Monty it being a Friday, and we then resisted the temptation to go to bed early, as this only means we wake up earlier and earlier.