2008 — 28 May: Wednesday
An early night, so a placeholder entry with one of the fruits of my scanning through the first of three boxes of 35mm slides that have been up in the loft for many years. Setting up the slide projector always seemed to be a hassle, and sharing a hand-held viewer was rarely satisfactory:
Christa on our delayed honeymoon, in September 1975
My NZ sister-in-law likes seeing these old photos, but asks "when could we have possibly looked like that!!" Could she be feeling a little more mature these days, I wonder? Never mind, Lis — another six years and I'll have caught you and Big Bro up, won't I?
Left hand down a bit...
I had no idea individual submarines had their own web sites... HMS Superb has had a spot of bother in the Red Sea.1 I liked the way the BBC turned "Consequently her programme is being re-considered" into "The Navy is now trying to work out how to return the vessel to port". Mind you, I always thought the idea of sonar was to stop you hitting things.
In nuttier news! (What would the Attila the Hen version look like, I wonder?)
Strange creatures, human beings... dept.
There exists an entity called "The Children's Charities' Coalition for Internet Safety (CHIS)". It has a web site on which is kept a series of open letters and comments on proposed legislation. I found this today:
Advances in technology have made it possible to create materials which are entirely artificial but which, in turn, are indistinguishable from photographs or videos of real events. In order to be consistent the law therefore needs to keep abreast of these developments as we know from experience that any loophole will swiftly be exploited by persons with a sexual interest in children.
So the era of George Orwell's "thoughtcrime" is fully upon us. Mind you, I suspect these people haven't read much by Alfred Kinsey. Do they even know the story of King Canute, I wonder?
Popular, or what?
Of how many products can it be said: "Even though Vista has suffered from a poor public image and a lukewarm welcome from many firms and users, Mr Ballmer said the company has shipped 150 million copies of the programme." (Somebody should tell the BBC about the spelling of "program", too.)
As I recall only the first of these products, does that mean I'm not as old as I thought? Hope so!
It's 11:18, the bin men have just "bin" and gone, it's drizzling and somewhat depressing, despite today's delivery of Private Eye. Can't say I wholeheartedly recommend the English summer at the moment. (Despite "Cloudbusting" from Kate Bush with its line "The sun's coming out.") I may just have to take myself off on a little roadtrip adventure, methinks.
Brave New digital World... dept.
This comment on the Guardian's piece about editing digital footprints made me smile:
What we don't need is some pimply teenage pipsqueak in his first cheap suit working in a bank or some other bastion of bureaucratic mindlessness and ineptitude making decisions and judgments about us on the basis of something he probably cannot even read without moving his lips.
Eden revisited... dept.
In May 2002, Christa and I took a one-day coach trip down to Cornwall to visit the Eden project. It was/is completely fabulous, though I could have done without the four-plus hours each way in a rather cramped coach seat. Turns out we also visited, or at least drove past, one of the potential sites for it way back in September 1975:
Eden was just a hole in the ground, September 1975
I wonder...
... what the late Mary Whitehouse made of the work of the sadly now also late Beryl Cook? I shall watch the BBC2 "fact-based drama" tonight about the former (whom I cordially loathed) — I don't expect it will touch on the latter. I also wonder whether I shall make better slide scans with the Nikon Coolscan that I shall borrow for a week or so. I hope so. Good grief, it's already 17:17 and will soon be time to think about food. Is there no end to this relentless tide of domestic duties?!
Carbon-eating trees?
I'm a fan of Freeman Dyson. So I read this review of two climate change books carefully, and learned quite a few things. So might you. We owe a lot to the late Charles David Keeling.