2008 — 4 May: Sunday

Suddenly, it's 01:21, Bob Harris is still going strong with his excellent "New Orleans" special on BBC Radio 2, I'm nearly at the end of scanning the DVD artwork for the letter "B", and three cups are downstairs undergoing some pretty intensive tannin destaining. And I've (once again) belatedly realised I need to fix my email client's weird treatment of image attachments. For future easier reference (after the next disastrous PC crash, that is) the link I want is here!

Two more scans and I reckon it will be time for some sleep.

Today's plan?

Completely unformulated, though I'd better get some more food in sooner rather than later... And, having cheated Martine out of her £12 by cutting my own hair, I suppose I'd better wash it, too. This independently functioning adult self-sufficiency lark just has no end in sight, does it? Life was so much simpler and (honestly) so much more fun when I had Christa here — believe me! I miss that woman.1 Staying up super late and playing good loud music is a very minor compensation, but I have to content and comfort myself with the knowledge that the poor girl is no longer in any pain or medical misery. And, at the end of her life, that was really all that mattered — not what I wanted, not what she wanted, but so very necessary.

Life is truly strange at times.

Solar film has its uses...

... on reflection, should I explain? We both hated net curtains but desired a certain amount of visual privacy. I first fitted solar film to the inner surface of the glass in our Old Windsor house, having got the idea from the Midland Bank, of all places. (Nowadays, I don't know why all new houses aren't fitted from Day 1 with kappa float glass [a 1980 invention from Pilkington] but that's probably why I'm not rich.2) Anyway, having solar film managed to put me in the picture here. As with the earlier variant, this one's from around 1982. (I remember those red shorts!):

Solar film assisted

I have to say, she always seems to look very happy; I like to think I played a part in this.

Too much!

The drivel from the BBC has driven me back to NPR and the "Car Talk" programme. It's all very well for Lulu to go banging on about sweet romantic things one could (and doubtless should) do with one's partner on a Bank Holiday weekend, but that particular cap doesn't fit this particular head right now. But this sort of twittering helps redress the balance of Nature. And is also just as available as a podcast.

I missed today's Dawn Chorus by a wide country mile; it's now 10:43 and the morning cuppa is working its magic before the rest of the day lurches into gear. But then I didn't actually retire until nearly 3 a.m. so I guess I'm excused.

One of those days... dept.

You know the sort. A CD ripped within the last 24 hours has already gone AWOL. The three cups all manfully resisted the de-staining treatment, lending credence to the idea that the ancient packet of powder I'd excavated was well past its "Use by" date. (Christa was, if truth be told, even more of a domestic squirrel than I am and I know she inherited the trait from her mother. Though I never did see a box labelled "Bits of string too short to keep" — you get the drift.) The BBC has erred in its weather forecasting yet again. I do sometimes wonder what the Met Office does with all those mega-flops that ICL used to sell them, but at least it shows we don't live in quite the Newtonian clockwork universe that at least one of my neighbours seems content to believe in.

On the strange beliefs front, rather than the strange attractors, I briefly browsed the "Evil Bible" site, but I wouldn't advise spending too much time there, regardless of your beliefs. Life is too short as it is.

I've decided (for obvious reasons) this chap is today's interesting link.

Still, my food sortie was successful. So, too, was Brian's car boot sale hunt for a hackable Xbox for Mike, so I'm predicting a degree of software jiggery-pokery in the near future in the Winchester direction. Speaking of which, I'm unamused at the random way in which the Vista system downstairs arbitrarily decides which files I can share between the systems on my internal network and which it won't open as I "lack the necessary authorisation". Mr Vista is, did it but know it, skating on steadily melting ice and would be well advised to recall that he who wields the bootable CDROM can always have the last laugh! My screen saver for many years at work was this lovely snippet of dialogue adapted from "2001":

Poor HAL

Even though it reminds me, rather uncomfortably, of the fate of "Mike, the dinkum thinkum" in Robert Heinlein's "The moon is a harsh mistress". Mind you, I crashed Leopard for the first time last night (this morning, in truth) simply by shutting it down.

Sticking with dubious software, I was following a link (an unlikely one, I felt) on IMDB having just confirmed that James Marsters from "P.S. I love you" was indeed the chap who played "Spike" in "Buffy", and (at my destination) met this3 proposition:

IMDB ideas

Care to guess where I was (as it were) at the time? (Which, incidentally, is now around 15:40 — I'm on a ripping break.)

I'd forgotten how funny...

... this chap could be, back when he was appearing on Thames TV, at least. Here's a Wikipedia description of one set of enemies:

... the Thargoids are a race of beings led by Gort (a parody of a movie character with the same name), who drain all other beings of their knowledge so that they will be the most intelligent beings in the universe. They are described as having transparent heads, furry green eyeballs, seven legs and three lips. This latter feature is the reason the Thargoids drink tea; as Gort explained: "You try asking for llllager and llllime with llllips llllike these!"

The "Captain Kremmen" entry in Wikipedia


I miss Kenny Everett.

Flagging quite fast...

Although it's only 21:50 or so it's starting to feel like it's been a full day. Hair is washed. Washing machine is partially loaded. There's been a nice phone call from Junior wherein we exchanged greetings and hopes for a nice day tomorrow. Plus a call from dear Mama untroubled by any such social niceties but in which she's greatly perturbed to hear (or deduce, who knows?) that I've been talking "about her affairs" with other people. Vita is too brevis, and I am too old, for this particular brand of merde though (of course) I still have no idea what to do for the best. Flee to Big Bro in NZ for a decade or so? That should do the trick, methinks!

Looking at the nearer-term, I foresee an uncoupling of a DVD player from my system in the near future. Mike's need is currently greater than mine, and I do still have a slight superfluity of the devices. Gives me a chance to fire up the latest version of the artwork program and maybe play with some of its new features. Extruded 3D text, anyone?

tsk, tsk!

I unaccountably missed the fact that there's now a biography of Mrs Vincent Price (aka Coral Browne). Her fund of stories (and indeed stories about her) generally raise more than a smile:

After she took up with the producer Firth Shephard during the Second World War, Browne was inevitably called "Shephard's Bush". As she herself said: "Firth is my Shephard, I shall not want. His rod and staff comfort me. Though he makes me lie down in strange places..."

Christopher Hawtree reviewing "Coral Browne: This Effing Lady" by Rose Collis in The Torygraph


  

Footnotes

1  I'm guessing my regular reader already knows this, of course.
2  Nor is Christa. For the first time since her death, she has failed to win anything from ERNIE.
3  Let's brush aside the fact that I own four of these titles, shall we? Damn, I hate to be so predictable.