2008 — 16 May: Friday

Good grief, it's 00:55 already and I haven't done the dishes! After last night's Panorama programme on BBC4 I promptly got a bit wrapped up in exploring the latest batch of music. On balance, I still prefer the OSX iTunes interface over Vista's Media Player. Oh well, yet another placeholder. See you later today... I must say, it currently looks rather unpromising weather for our next walk, dammit.

It's a brand new...

... but rather grey, grizzly-looking day, at just after 08:30 so I suspect a walk is off the table, as it were. Crockpot stuffing will be commencing shortly, but a chap needs his morning cuppa first. Some genius on the news has just told a grateful nation that it's impossible for all exam results to be fair and equitable (or words to that blindingly obvious effect). Whatever next, I wonder? "All politicians are liars" perhaps?

Gosh, how unusual for a chief executive:

Said to be worth £700,000 by the way.¹ Will it catch on? No more likely, I suspect, than the unlovely "agenbite" proposed by Joseph Bottum (nice piece, though). But my little horror the crockpot is calling to me: "feed me, Seymour!"

Home on the (NZ) range

It's now 09:53, stuffing is done, brekkie awaits (along with the vital second cuppa), a walk is postponed until (possibly) Sunday, and I can think about what's next. First item. As I shall in all probability be spending some time down there shortly, I think the world deserves a recent shot of Big Bro's little pad:

Look for the Green Arrow!

He's more or less underneath the green arrow at the bottom of the map. What map? Click the pic! By the way, those are rather large black cats, surely?

More tranquil, perhaps, than our benighted Kingdom? I went here looking for the noise maps mentioned on today's news but I couldn't hear anything yet. (They are now showing up.)

Friday's therapy session

Time to get out of the house for a bit, methinks. R.I.P. Pygar, by the way. Still like the wings!

It's now 18:29, lunch² has (of course) long since been lunched, a variety of USB memory sticks (for boosting the Vista machine's performance) have been pondered without making a buy, and there are three incoming DVDs, though no books or magazines. Just tell me why bookshops rearrange their shelves from time to time?

Anyway, as I mentioned here, I nearly succumbed to Liv Tyler in Woolies in a "2 for £10" deal. Today, she became mine in Tesco's for a mere £3. We enjoyed "Practical Magic" when it was shown on TV a couple of years ago. But I have highest hopes of the title on the left. Christa and I both very much enjoyed the work of director and writer Robert Benton (his films include "The Late Show", "Nobody's Fool", "Twilight") and I'm sure we'd have enjoyed watching this new one together. <Sigh>

Oh, the perils of a sound bite:

"The point is to nail your colours to a mast that you can actually control rather than house and energy prices which you cannot."

Professor Peter Spencer in CPI target to 'crucify' consumers

Is this ethical?

Talk about tricky small print!

Footnotes

¹ Bro's just chipped in with a related newsletter item which may be of interest. I'm sure, of course, that Mr Walsh is a grand chap, doing a grand job (unlike his predecessor, not leaving people like me and Christa stranded on the Heathrow tarmac in one of his tin toothpaste tubes for ten hours before finally admitting their daily flight to Seattle was never going to get off the ground) and making grand amounts of inedible money for his various shareholders, but does he or anyone else in that sort of position really merit more money as an annual bonus than I managed to earn in a working lifetime? And my own earnings, meagre though they may have been by multinational and oligarchical standards, far outstrip the global average. It is a very strange world.
² I'm belatedly discovering things that Christa knew for years. For example, a simple ham, cheese, tomatoes, hard-boiled egg, and pickled onion salad with plenty of what I used to denigrate as "rabbit food", topped off with a small amount of soured cream and a couple of boiled new potatoes is perfectly adequate and well within the limited range of my culinary grasp. Preparation time approx. 5 minutes, too.