2008 — 19 April: Saturday
I needed, and gave myself, a quiet night in last night. It meant missing the latest meeting of the Dinner Party Club, but I needed the quiet time somehow. Maybe next month? Now (09:07) it's a rather grey, drizzly day but a good night's sleep helps me deal with that. And let's not forget all the wonderful 1960s music from the reliable Brian Matthew...
... from whom I have already learned that Tommy Steele's brother was called Colin Hicks! Christa and I saw Mr Steele in an open-air performance of "The Yeoman of the Guard" at the Tower of London in mild drizzle nearly 30 years ago. Good grief!
Who stole the magic?
I was contemplating making a comment on this Marina Hyde story about the Harry Potter court case, but many people have got there ahead of me. It's amusing, if faintly disappointing, to learn that the Marx Brothers versus Warner Brothers "Casablanca" lawsuit story that she refers to is an urban legend. My heading refers to a lovely Larry Niven story from 1969 — Not long before the end.
Fingers crossed... dept.
Junior, who rang me a short while ago from the Gosh comics store I introduced him to, is on the hunt for the October 2007 issue of the American Comics Journal1 for me. I found out, belatedly, that it featured Posy Simmonds that month — I had a lot more important things on my mind back then, alas. He's also agreed to try Forbidden Planet for me, but the fact that he hasn't rung back doesn't make me feel very optimistic about the success of his hunt.
Meanwhile, one has to smile at what researchers get up to, as it were:
Achieving orgasm, brain imaging studies show, involves more than heightened arousal. It requires a release of inhibitions engineered by shutdown of the brain's center of vigilance in both sexes and a widespread neural power failure in females.
Neural power failure, heh? You mean, like blowing a fuse?
Bad case of "red eye"
This is only a mildly-related story, but it's worth the link for the gorgeous picture alone, let alone the idea of applying the "Cyrano de Bergerac" test to a pair of fruit flies:
Not off my oats
I have been kicking off each day with oats for many months. Others prefer tucking in to other stuff:
We didn't win the war to have some kraut come over here and feed us garlic sausage and pumpernickel for breakfast, no doubt with a side order of Lebensraum and a mug of hot Colditz.
Avoid the yellow snow!
This is both delicious and angry-making. And I'm typing it while listening to a somewhat similar piece on Weekend Woman's Hour, too. Yes, I am once again toying with BBC Radio 4 (I enjoyed the "Doctor Johnson as a detective" play this afternoon):
But explaining men still assume that I am, in some sort of obscene impregnation metaphor, an empty vessel to be filled with their wisdom and knowledge. A Freudian would claim to know what they have and I lack, but intelligence is not situated in the crotch — even if you can write one of Virginia Woolf's long mellifluous musical sentences about the subtle subjugation of women in the snow with your willie.
Right! Enough of a break. Now back to my database investigations...
Later.. back in 1976!
I took this in August or September 1976 when Christa's parents popped over to stay with us on the first of several holiday visits to our Old Windsor house:
I scanned this print at too high a resolution for poor old Fireworks to cope (I now discover my elderly copy has a 5,000 pixel size limit) but the latest upgrade to Xara Xtreme that I downloaded2 and paid for today didn't even hesitate.
Happy days. This was at one end of the living room. The curious roof structure belonged to the slightly ramshackle conservatory that was to prove both a useful storage space and a thermal buffer. But not an acoustic barrier, sadly. We were right under one of Heathrow's flightpaths (which was excellent for Concorde watching) but the neighbouring half of our "semi" (which had a mirror image conservatory) was used by the woman next door to house her tiresome pebble-grinding3 tumbler.
And another day...
... is getting ready to bite the dust. I'm still enjoying the new adaptation of the Dance to the Music of Time though I admit it's not a laugh riot. It's now 22:56 and there's a weirdly-familiar Scott Walker track on the radio. Time to turn in, methinks, even though Bob Harris plays such nice music. Hope the weather brightens up a bit tomorrow, but will not be holding my breath. G'night.
Wait! Just had a look at propertysnake.co.uk for my postal code. Amazing. And here's a piece of uncommonsense from the Observer:
Most of the property traded is existing stock, not newly built, so our over-investment in bricks and mortar enriches estate agents, but doesn't bring much benefit to the wider economy. There is also a good argument that the property boom has made many of us dangerously complacent about rising income inequality. Real wages for most people have crept up at a snail's pace over the past 10 years, in contrast to earnings of investment bankers, private equity bosses and chief executives. But there has been relatively little outcry because the property boom has made homeowners feel richer. While they could borrow against the equity in their houses, people have been able to shrug off rising tax bills, utility costs and paltry pay rises; their lifestyles have decoupled from their earnings.