2007 — 25 June: but is there going to be enough rain left for Wimbledon?
There's still yet another inch or so in the non-pond... She had to start some primitive earthworks lest the bog garden bit become altogether too boggy/soggy.
Start the day as you mean to go on; that's my motto. Today's Guardian publishes one of its occasional corrected corrections and clarifications. It's a beaut:
The ratio of people with broadband to the worldwide population is 1:22, not 1:370 as we miscalculated in a previous correction, page 34, June 20. Sorry.
Still sounds rather a lot to me... I think I'll wait for the next correction. The one that admits they meant to insert the words "access to" in front of "broadband". In fact I'll make that today's prediction.
Hey! I've just learned a new word: mugwump. I was vaguely aware of it, but would have been hard-pressed to slot it confidently and meaningfully into a sentence... the Bloomberg administration has generally offered a model of nonpartisan good government, which was the ideal of that circle of disenchanted old-money Republicans whom Party stalwarts mockingly called Mugwumps, after the Algonquian word muggumquomp — meaning "war leader," or "kingpin." Tony Soprano, in other words?
Daniel Galouye was right on the mark... department
My thanks to chum Len for this link to what seems a rip-off of Counterfeit World with (perhaps) a nod towards Frederik Pohl's The tunnel under the world.
News from Richistan... department
Here's a happy thought for us poor pensioners to mull over:
The American wealth boom has created a boomlet of rich kids and a new generation of anxious Richistani parents. Based on average family size, there are now more than 4m children of American millionaires. And all those silver spoons are dipping into a record amount of disposable income and inherited wealth.
Up to $15 trillion will be passed down to the children of millionaires between 2002 and 2052, according to a study by the Boston College Social Welfare Institute.
On a somewhat related note, and after listening to various bits of NPR during the day, I have learned that the median price of a house in North America is $223,000. 40% of homes bought there currently are second homes. And prices have gone up by 70% since 1995. I deduce, therefore, that property dealing is as popular a "sport" ("hobby"?) over there as it has been here in the Benighted Kingdom. I wonder what their mortgage rates are like. And whether their kids can afford that all-important first step onto the housing ladder. I know mine can't, and he already earns more than I ever did in IBM. Crazy world!
This is exactly what it looks like!
Life goes on, even in the rain.
And a couple of the guilty parties are hanging about here.
No more CD boxed sets
They make for rather tediouser ripping than normal because "progress" seems even slower when you whack six or more CDs through the ripping process and can only "tick off" one lousy title at the end of it. Meanwhile, I have relocated the 1TB1 drive to a more sheltered spot, acoustically that is, and also made sure the MyBook 320GB drive plumbs directly into the iMac rather than via a USB hub (having been reading "the manual" for once).
Sooner or later, I shall have to tell iTunes to point to a different location to serve all its music from. I'm in no hurry, though, as I rather suspect I shall also have to repeat the exercise of combing out duplicated tracks.