2008 — 12 April: Saturday
It's 00:50 or so, and once again just about time for bed. Junior showed up a couple of hours ago, proudly clutching his brand new MacBook Pro (his own, not from his company). He promptly fixed my ailing email1 on the Gateway machine, and I'm putting the finishing touches to the tottering edifice that is the freshly re-installed XP system on it. He's also (so far unsuccessfully) been trying to convince me of the merits of IMAP over POP.
I have strict instructions to wake him "at about 10" so he can get to the dentist on time.
Here we go again... dept.
It's 09:57, the crockpot is nicely stuffed and starting its magic journey to tastiness. Junior's specially-bought juice is at his bedside and he's been reminded that it was he who insisted on the "wake me" action. Brian Matthew's radio show is just ending. Mr Postie has deposited the New Statesman onto the mat. Time for a bracing snippet from a review of Ronald de Sousa's book "Why Think? Evolution and the Rational Mind":
Second, because of the costs of producing thinkers, humans cannot produce lots of offspring. This in itself means that we have got to have the abilities to raise them successfully. Think of mother ant. She has literally millions of offspring. She sends them out to find food, and to do this they follow chemical (pheromone) trails. It rains and she loses a couple of thousand who cannot find their way home. Who cares? Tant pis. There are always more where they came from...
All of this finding one's way home in the rain means thinking. Which means brains and all of the rest — getting on with others, finding protein and so forth. I am not sure if this is really an evolutionary justification for eating Big Macs, but one can say that this is all very much a feedback situation. As we — and, for much of the journey, other higher mammals — went down the path of big brains, we became better able to be thinkers but more dependent on being thinkers.
The reviewer (now in Florida) says he "spends the winters thanking God that he no longer lives in Ontario and the summers wishing to God that he did".
Happiness
Professor Grayling has popped up in The Telegraph writing about happiness. The comments he's attracted are equally as interesting as his article. Good stuff. Happiness is also when the dentist says "Everything's fine." And when Junior sets up a working Apache server on another machine for me to play with. And, I have to say, "happiness" is my abiding memory of life with Christa. We were generally fooling around and laughing one way or another:
I assure you the bath was empty! Though I have to admit, houses accumulate clutter even faster than cats accumulate fleas. The Old Windsor house2 that seemed so cavernous when the two of us first moved in (in April 1976, after living for 17 months in a rented two-bedroom flat) struck us as quite crowded by the time the three of us came to leave it in September 1981.
Winning words... dept.
Some while ago, I found a delicious (though probably apochryphal) rejection letter worthy of Kai Lung's creator
The task was to name or create a "10" of anything, and mine was the World's Perfect Theatrical Review. It went like this: "I never understood the theater until last night. Please forgive everything I've ever written. When you read this I'll be dead." That, of course, is the only review anybody in the theater ever wants to get.
War of the Wor(l)ds... dept.
Now this puts my (essentially minor-league) interest in the HG Wells novel into graphic perspective. The chap who collated these also hosts some pretty good quotations here. Example: "The difference between a violin and a viola is that a viola burns longer" (Victor Borge). While on the Pratchett front, we have this.