2008 — 15 Mar: Saturday on my mind

It's 00:43 and just about time to declare the weekend started. Junior arrived safely, bearing gifts (legal, I hope)...

... and intends to stay until Sunday morning. Excellent. He's giving me one of his hi-tech castoffs, too. An immensely complex Nokia phone whose facilities I will use very little. But it's a nice thought. Seems I have to play SIM swap — a new game — and possibly unlock the thing from its present network allegiance, too. Let me finish recovering the HP PC's data and setting up the local storage network first, son.

Where's the son/sun?

Still asleep in his bed / see previous answer. It's 09:31 and the crockpot is well-stuffed and already doing its slow heat thing on steak, kidney and typical winter veggies. The initial cuppa has been imbibed (and is now lost without trace), and two snailmails¹ absorbed. The third is an unsolicited invitation to open a two-year interest-free credit card account with a bank — a very large bank — that used to claim to listen but that clearly is now deaf and also doesn't do joined-up departments very well.² Their offer doesn't apply to existing card holders. Which, as Popeye would say, I yam. The freedom from interest also extends to the first year of purchasing, so imagine how thoroughly second-class this makes me feel. It's what our American cousins refer to as "bait and switch", I think.

As hinted in the footnote, I picked up a couple of corkers in Jonathan's little Arcade bookshop after parking at Waitrose, exchanging a few words with Paul Hopewell (who was waiting [for Rose?] outside), and doing the needful fruit and veg and milk and chocolate biscuit thing:

God is not great by Christopher Hitchens
You cannot live as I have lived and not end up like this by Terence Blacker

I've followed Mr Hitchens a bit more faithfully than I have the HSBC (oops, what a giveaway!) over the years since buying a set of his essays (Prepared for the worst) in mid 1989. Then came Monarchy: Britain's favourite fetish, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Vanity Fair's Hollywood, and now this splendid companion piece to Dawkins' God delusion. As for the Blacker, it's a biography of that wonderful chap William Donaldson (whom you may know as "Henry Root"). The assertion that Willie "knew what subjects he was best writing about — tarts (scatty or perceptive), policemen (bent or stupid) and politicians (right-wing and sexually peculiar)" neatly conveys the flavour, I feel.

The Times aligns somewhat:

After studying 2,000 pairs of British twins and 500 pairs of Americans, researchers at the University of Western Ontario in Canada — not a nation famed for its home-grown jokes — concluded that humour lies in the genes. Both nations, the researchers found, liked positive humour, but only the British appreciated sarcasm, self-deprecation, teasing and ridicule, and the less pleasing aspects of racist or sexist humour.

Alan Hamilton, in The Times

Vox populi

Opening an email from one of my drugs dealers (Play.com) and reminded yesterday by Junior returning the "His Dark Materials" trilogy now that Natalie has read them, I followed a link to the pending release on DVD of The Golden Compass (as one would, having a) much enjoyed the first book of the trilogy and b) so far failed to see the film with Junior despite our intention so to do). Compare and contrast the first two "Customer Reviews" however:

Awesome: i saw the trailers and thought not such to it but watched it anyways and its one of the best films ive seen.
well both buyin

Hmmm: As a major fan of the book this film is terrible, as a fan of films, this film is worse than terrible.

The Interweb. You hafta love it. It operates purely on Koestler's lines. For example, I mentioned humans not speaking dolphinese. It turns out the BBC now offers a "ten snippets" page that takes me to the tale of a dolphin in NZ that speaks whale.

Vox ministry

In the week that MPs' expense claims are finally to be opened up for public scrutiny...

Amazing what turns up...

... as you delve into the geological strata of data buried in the depths of a (seemingly fully-repaired) hard disk, which has on it directories copied from two earlier PCs and no less than three Acorn machines. (If I look hard enough, I may yet even find an Amstrad file³ or two.)

Footnotes

¹  One from a credit card company that seems to have a positive knack of sending its bill immediately after a large purchase, thus minimising the interest-free period available to me. The company also has an infinite supply of credit card cheques, and invite me to write one out to myself and pay it into my current account. I invite them to roast in the hell that, according to one of the two books that silently slipped into my little library yesterday, doesn't exist.
²  I'm fully aware of this deficiency from many a merry skirmish with them over the years since 1976. Christa remained loyal to them throughout; I left them in the early 1990s in a fit of pique, but rejoined last year when it became clear that Christa would finally leave them (and me!) permanently.
³  Relatively low probability. The first little program I wrote on the first Acorn RISC machine in 1989 was about a dozen lines of BBC BASIC to transfer ASCII files across the serial port from the Amstrad 3" diskettes onto the more common 3.5" diskettes that, for reasons passing all understanding, Acorn managed to put 1.6MB of data onto with their ADFS (versus the 1.44MB of what was then the DOS standard). Of course, I also had to fiddle with the top bit of each character transferred to render them recognisable when they made it across this perilous digital divide, but that's another story.