2008 — 22 Feb: Friday
I suppose I ought to plan to eat some fish1 today, ahead of the evening's Lab Trivia session. (The sole reason would be to avoid getting plaiced too low.) Well, I'm too tired, and at 00:07 I'm going to call it a day. I leave you with Christa's geometric new top, from last March:
More later.
Roxanne
I was asked recently if I could name ten worthwhile films. Being (in the words used by an old "Giles" cartoon) a conscientious baah-lamb, I wanted to offer up a good set of ten, and therefore failed (of course). But this morning I was reading a review of a biography of Cyrano de Bergerac which prompted me to add the Steve Martin film of my title to that tentative list. It's a real piece of "feel-goodery" with several wonderful comic set pieces. Turns out, though, that just about everything we "know" about Cyrano was invented by Edmond Rostand in his 1897 play:
Cyrano as a gay anti-Catholic sci-fi writer with the pox is perhaps not quite what Rostand and his audience at the Théâtre de la Porte St-Martin had in mind as a representative of la gloire de la belle France. Ishbel Addyman, however, presents a convincing case for him in this, her first book... She is expert at filling in the various period backgrounds, historical and cultural, and, not unlike her hero, is a fearless skirmisher with several of her more pompous or dishonest literary sources. There is enough material here for another kind of Cyrano drama altogether.
First rule of biography: start with someone who's dead, perhaps? I mentioned Giles above. Christa's longest continuous source for her world news was the weekly Der Spiegel magazine. Its cost over the years provided us with a realistic measure of the growing discrepancy between the German and UK domestic economies,2 by the way, but that's an aside. The online issue recounts how a Danish caricaturist has ended up homeless for a cartoon showing "Muhammad with a lit bomb in his turban".
I come back to that phrase of Christa's about "man-made mumbo jumbo". Must be time to stoke up the blood sugar level; it's 09:05 and a bit grey and cloudy looking outside.
Trouble, right here in River City
I thought things were a bit noisy next door... I knew my neighbours have been having difficulties with some aspect of their water supply. My worry, of course, is that their pipework is only a month younger than mine. A hastily snatched picture explains the noise:
One day I shall have to investigate "clancydocwra" which, for reasons that need not detain us here, triggers recall of the equally mysterious "cuprimd" from my IBM days. (Capability, Useability, Performance, Reliability, Installability, Maintainability and Documentation.) You can see why I chose to retire, perhaps?
I have the Grant of Probate!
Hooray. Thank you, Mr Postie.
Now I can move things further along under my own steam rather than rely on others. But first (at 11:43 or so) it's once again time to hit that seemingly endless re-supply trail. At least I've got a generic shopping list stuck inside my wallet. But where's my wallet!?
Reverse Parallel Parking
I owe one of my chums an explanation (as it was taught to me) of how to reverse parallel park in — as it were — three easy steps. I'm not claiming to be the planet's leading exponent of the skill, but here goes:
If you need a fuller theoretical explanation, I have the name and address of an excellent driving instructor! (Thanks, Dennis.) You will also notice a crucial adverb. I cannot emphasise enough the need to do these things slowly! I still have the love bite in my rear bumper to prove this, from four days before Christa died. I admit that was an anti-ram-raid bollard rather than a parked car, and I confess I never told her about this bump. I think I'm going to regard this as my equivalent of a duelling scar, and sport it with pride.
Mystery object delays lunch
It is well said (I sound like Kai-Lung) that a man who never makes a mistake never makes anything. Today's mystery object put a chronological kink into my carefree lunch planning. Click the pic for the sordid details:
Ready for the Inquisition?
The ersatz Ferret Fancier is about to saddle up and head out for an evening of trivia. How hard can it be to beat last month's pitiful score of 45%? We shall soon find out. I shall probably put Cranford on hold for tonight; I seriously doubt there will be much brain power left over later.
Happily, Sofie had the good sense to feed us on peppers stuffed with tuna, olives, and chilli (inter alia) so Thomas and I had our brains engaged in time to push our final score for the evening to a more creditable 73% (and tied for third place). Next month, the team will be reduced to three of us, so I may have to call in a reinforcement or three. Oh, well.
On balance, it seems to have been a pretty good week, but why do I feel I could use a vacation? It's very nearly midnight and, having sorted out some of the "stuff" cluttering the left hand side of the garage (after making physical contact with some of it on the way in a few minutes ago, as it were) I shall leave until tomorrow a more detailed inspection of any damage. I think our one remaining cheap folding pine bookshelf3 from probably two decades ago finally gave up the ghost, much as all the cheap plastic-coated steel shelving did in our earlier years as we could gradually afford to replace it with "real" furniture. It does occur to me that, if I want to throw any of this stuff out, I can just do exactly that. Simple, really. While I was married to Christa that wasn't an option but, alas, she's no longer around to get a vote.