Tea, laziness and filthy HiPPIs

Passed a pleasantly gentle morning churning out plots of temporary disc space usage, writing up notes on how to configure HiPPI and not going to this month's divisional briefing. I feel able to justify my non-attendance, despite pressure from my lords and masters, on the grounds that I find the briefings so depressingly awful that they crimp my productivity for days afterwards.

Having thus efficiently dispensed with my morning chores, I bunked off and passed the rest of the day drinking tea, mulling over life, the universe and everything with apple_ree and generally enjoying the chance to while away a lazy afternoon.

The Seventh Planet

OK, how the fuck do you pronounce the name of the seventh planet in the solar system? I've always pronounced it as yu-rain-us, blithely embracing the spirit of a thousand obscene jokes, while many others seem to prefer yuren-us, but until now — I'm currently listening to In Our Time — I'd never heard anyone call it yu-ran-us. I guess it makes sense given the way that words like annular are pronounced, but it still sounds pretty odd to me.

My favourite Uranus joke? The one from Futurama where, when Fry asks if he can point the smelloscope at Uranus, he is told that the planet was renamed in 2620 to put an end to the stupid jokes once and for all. What did they decide to call it? Urectum, of course.