2008 — 28 April: Monday
Too tired (at 00:21) to do more than pop a simple placeholder entry up. As for the evening, I kept a gentle eye on the Panasonic PVR as it cut three DVDs for me from recent broadcasts — good stuff featuring Ken Dodd, Verity Lambert, Marty Feldman, Van Morrison, Barry Cryer, and Anthony Minghella — and I've been reworking some of my audio database entries. How much fun is that?! G'night.
Dispelling the clouds...
... (I'd never understood why they're called "lowering", by the way, but Mrs Google tells me they appear to lower because the arrival of colder or more humid air with a front lowers the altitude where clouds form, so there you go). Where was I? Oh yes; my regular email newsletter from the delightful Butterflies and Wheels lady tells me that Charles Darwin has just entered cyberspace as a blogger. This is in addition to his other material on the Web, of course. The blog has a nice picture of his statue in the Natural History Museum café — I remember sitting there with Christa on what was (it now turns out) our last trip up there together, too. That was a couple of years ago <Sigh>
"Soon be time to be cut out of my winter underwear" observes one of the listeners to my choice of morning music show. No comment!
Today, Christa's received more snail mail than me by a ratio of two to one. (And I'll be shredding my credit card cheques in any case.) She has her new Tesco Club Card,1 for example. Still, it's 09:56 and the rain has currently stopped according to the BBC:
Time for a change?
I missed this little gem at the time. "The meeting also reviewed what has been described as a Mecca watch, the brainchild of a French Muslim. The watch is said to rotate anti-clockwise and is supposed to help Muslims determine the direction of Mecca from any point on Earth." Actually, the Royal Oak in Hooksway has just such a device behind the bar, though I'd prefer to use Mike's hand-held GPS or a good old-fashioned magnetic compass, I suspect, even if "unlike other longitudes, Mecca's was in perfect alignment to magnetic north". (Which wobbles around, of course, just as the continents themselves do.)
Time for an update?
It's 13:57 and as "Counterpoint" (sadly lacking Ned Sherrin's chairmanship) comes to an end, the latest fait accompli I can report (with a slightly self-satisfied air) has been lunch, taking the form of the second half of yesterday's "serves up to three" gammon joint with a sweet2 maple syrup glaze, the remainder of the potato, carrot and swede mash (not forgetting the cream, butter and nutmeg I'm assured it also [undetectably] contained) and the second half of a Bramley apple to go with it all. And now I even have a small but annoying splodge of gravy on what was a fresh polo shirt, dammit. (I understand better each day what Christa meant about trying not to create extra work3 within the domestic sphere.)
Time to get re-ripping
It's 14:34 and to a musical backdrop of Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" I decided it's a good time to start on those four remaining cartons of CDs from the loft. A-ripping I will go for the first time (essentially) since the day we got Christa's diagnosis ten months ago. I'm sure she'd be pleased to see me resume this little project. It's a tiny step back onto the path of normality for me. Now where's that spare 320GB drive? 15:02, found it, mounted it, started writing to it. I am amazed (and pleased) yet again to see just how quickly the Core 2 Duo munches these things up and spits out lovely crisp MP3s. Thank you, Poikosoft, home of the self-styled "Swiss Army Knife" of digital audio. It's now reached version 11.5 and I've been using it for about five years, on and off.
Time for a dip into the Underworld
The proceedings of the Old Bailey, London's Central Criminal Court, 1674 to 1913 have just gone online, and the site is under severe strain already. Give it time! There are some idiots, of course, who from time to time call for a return to the moral values of earlier times and (I suppose) a presumed Golden Age. I hope they browse and think a little before speaking again (but I doubt they will).
And here's a sweet conspiracy theory.
I know I'm not...
... the only one who likes to see these precious photos of Christa. This is another one from 21st March 2007 during a week she took off work. I like to potter about in the study. Christa always took delight in tidying up all manner of things in, and outside, the garden:
Seeing the world through a Don's eyes
While I certainly found much to admire, and even enjoy, in the film "The Godfather"4 back in 1972 (and while I smiled to hear the several references to lines taken from it in the more recent romantic comedy "You've got mail") I'm not sure it can be stretched quite far enough to conclude "Tom Hagen, Sonny and Michael approximate the three American foreign-policy schools of thought — liberal institutionalism, neoconservatism and realism — vying for control in today's disarranged world order." But judge for yourself, here.
Speaking of films, the first real "date" Christa and I went on in 1974 was to the cinema in Slough where we saw Lindsay Anderson's O Lucky Man! (which has finally come to DVD — my order went off about three minutes ago). I'd seen this amazing film already, but wanted to have someone to discuss it with. We did indeed discuss it, so animatedly that we got lost on the way back from Slough to the vicarage in Old Windsor, ending up in Wraysbury somewhere. And getting back rather late. The Alan Price music is particularly fine, of course.