2006 — Day 36 - last (pension) rites
Before I forget: happy (70th) birthday (yesterday) David Carradine. Another of my life's strange Koestlerian coincidences, it seems. Oops! Not only did I forget the full stop back there, I also belatedly realised the calendar on my wrist watch was a day out — shows how much attention I pay to the passage of Time, I guess.
Pension rites?
Yep. Safely pushed into the post box in time (I trust) is the letter containing all the necessary signatures to transmute (for
some reason, the preferred verb is commutate
) a lump of my
accumulated mite into tax-free cash. I must say, the IBM pensions people were commendably quick off the mark, telling me what's what within
one day of my final salary payment.
On the Border(s) department
Can't put it off any longer. Gotta checkout the new bookshop. Earlier to bed, therefore!
And the verdict is? Well, not as good a selection as the branch in Bournemouth, but a good place to browse for ninety minutes or so... Today's little heap:
- A life of privilege, mostly by Gardner Botsford. He was a long-time (40 years) editor at the New Yorker, describing many of the writers he encountered there — including AJ Liebling who had an eidetic memory6 (the only non-fictional7 one I've encountered since Luria's case-study of "S"). Botsford eventually managed to become a firm enemy of William Shawn. Any book described by Sean French as "One of the best, most beautifully-written, memoirs I've read for years" gets my vote
- How to make money like a porn star! by Neil Strauss and Bernard Chang. An amusingly different-looking graphic novel
- It's only a movie by Charlotte Chandler. Her "personal biography" of Alfred Hitchcock. Daughter Patricia approved, and I enjoyed her take on "The trouble with Harry" on the DVD extras the other night.
- Tales of mirth and woe by Alistair Coleman (aka Scaryduck of that blog)
- Transcending CSS: the fine art of web design by Andy Clarke. An extended argument for getting a Mac, if you ask me.
The last two were courtesy of Amazon.
Anyone notice anything?
About the new, and hopefully much more IE7-friendly, site navigation? Not that I know who views my site, or with what, other than (perhaps) faint disdain.