2007 — 14 Apr: Home is the hunter from the... shops?!
With apologies to AE Housman and RL Stevenson for my heading today. Radiating calm confidence — that's the ticket, while we await this afternoon's arrival of our plumber with the unholey new radiator for Junior's room.
As for the shopping. Well, a chap has to do something with his hard-earned pension. Yesterday, for example, I decided Borders would be the recipient of my littlesse1 and there I stayed until the agreed rendezvous time. Mind you, had we known of the (fresh) sardine supper disaster that was still to come, we might both be there still, in the coffee-serving bit. It's not finny!
The final tally:
- Panic which has an amazing cast and an interesting premise
- The beat that my heart skipped which I've been idly eyeing from time to time on the over-priced "World Cinema" shelves of both HMV and Virgin, but which Borders had, in a 2-disc edition, for £8-99
- The Macintosh iLife '06 as promised earlier, by Jim Heid
- Alice in Sunderland — an entertainment by Bryan Talbot. Definitely (to extend the fishing theme) the catch of the day with, as it puts it additional material by Lewis Carroll, Leo Baxendale and Bill Shakespeare and including artwork "purloined" from William Hogarth and Sir John Tenniel
- Kill Bill: an unofficial casebook by DK Holm which, being written a couple of years earlier than David Carradine's "Kill Bill" diary should be most interesting. It certainly details, scene by scene, the many cinematic, literary, and pop-cultural references that young Mr Tarantino was making
- The Main Point by Bruno Phillips. A biography of Bernd Töst and his career as a porn-movie auteur, with such titles as Super Bitch in the Halls of the Sex Warriors2 (made in 1969 and set in what was possibly a real brothel in North America, I gather) to his credit. Of course, with a name that Mrs Google suggested might better be spelled as "Burnt Toast", and with no trace of him on IMDB,3 I don't rule out the possibility that this is an elaborate hoax. If it is, though, it is clearly an obsessively detailed one.
- Madame Depardieu and the beautiful strangers by Antonia Quirke which is basically a nicely-written (I was tempted to say "quirky") memoir of how her love-life is affected by her obsession with male movie stars. Her next book, by the way, is "Choking on Marlon Brando" and (curiously) Christa was watching "Jaws" (about which Ms Quirke wrote one of those neat little BFI Modern Classics books) while I wrote this
- The road to ruin and Watch your back! both by comic crime (ie caper) master story teller Donald E Westlake and both featuring John Dortmunder. I've been following Mr Dortmunder since his hapless attempts to get (and keep) his hands on The Hot Rock
It's hard work being a completeist
Mr Postie's little shard of evidence this morning is a 2-CD set by Loudon Wainwright III from 1976 and 1978 that I did not even know existed. (Of course, no true completeist would ever admit such a thing.)
- T Shirt
- Final Exam
Pedantic? Moi?
Junior has just chided me about Aptana (whose help texts he worked on, I gather). He seeks to remind me:
[Aptana] ... is a text editor, not a bloody source control system or upload thing. It merely happens to have those as features — the former via the Subclipse wrapper
to subversion, and the latter via an extension to Eclipse.
I thought you'd been called a pedant?
Well, that's told me! Perhaps we should fine him the cost of his new radiator?