2008 — 30 May: Friday

As the "Fiona" character in Four weddings and a funeral remarked,1 "This won't do at all!" It's 01:00 and Janice Long has just followed "Je t'aime" by Donna Summer's "Love to love you, baby". Good grief! I still recall 1977 — the summer I spent a couple of weeks in Germany ostensibly on holiday, but actually skulking upstairs in the in-law's vast house in Meisenheim listening to the various church bells (such an evocative sound) and AFN (a truly dreadful radio station, but at least it was English language) while hammering out a freelance book (all about software for an ICL 7500 video terminal cluster controller, if memory serves) to earn some jolly handy pocket money. (There was a time when I was a competent, speedy, writer and programmer. Where did I go wrong, I wonder?)

As for the Nikon scanner, it's making my brain and my eyes ache, which is no bad thing. Its owner tells me he uses it simply to scan his slides straight into Photoshop, and performs all the processing on them in that environment. I've been experimenting (it turns out) with a whole raft of scanner settings that he's simply never used. I figure, the better the image is going in (as it were) the more the post-processing software has to get its teeth into. At this rate, Big Bro, I shall be able to charge you vast sums of money as a scanning expert to offset the NZ trip cost and my food bill downunder! Enjoy Chile. See you in June.

Flash floods in Somerset; not good. Oh well, G'night!

Supermac helped kill my Dad!

How's that for a tabloid-style headline? Turns out Harold Macmillan chose to ignore warnings and advice from his health minister in 1956 to "constantly inform the public of the facts" of the link between smoking and lung cancer. Even then, the revenue from "baccy tax" was too valuable. Wonder what else is buried in the National Archives? (Or who, for that matter.)

Remaining on the toxic atmosphere theme, the 2007 "Australian of the year" is suggesting we add sulphur to jet fuel as a means of injecting it into the stratosphere as a permanent sun shield. Mind you, he does concede "The consequences of doing that are unknown." Now, I checked, and it isn't April Fool's day. On the other hand, this was in a Murdochian lump of media. The comments make amusing reading.

"Twelve noon" — how can that be? Better nip out for a breath of unsulphurated air and pick up some more bread, I guess. It's cloudy, but not (yet) actually raining.

That's better!

Having scored a nice loaf in Sainsbury's and browsed the "everything, yes everything, less than £1" shop (a great favourite of Christa's) I've now (14:30) feasted on a healthy ham, cheese and salmon salad that a certain Best Girl would have laughed to see me eat with such gusto. Hunger is, indeed, just about the best appetiser. As usual, it sounds like carnage and chaos out on our road system; presumably this is normal for a Friday in what we laughingly like to think of as an English summer?

I must say, there is a lot more to this slide-scanning business than I originally thought. While (obviously) a good, well-exposed, nicely colour-balanced slide gives excellent results, there is an enormous range of "things" you can do to a rotten slide to try to recover something approaching acceptability. Every pixel tells a story, as it were... (though they're not telling me why the image jiggles sideways):

Christa in our back garden, Old Windsor, August 1976

Now I've just heard Steve Wright pronounce "epitome" as it's spelled (that is, three syllables rather than four). I can still remember my late chum Geoff Cooper gently correcting me over the same error2 about quarter of a century ago.

By the way, our frugal traveller is now in Paris.

Can it be...?

... 35 years since Billy Joel's "Piano Man"? Good God! Thank you, BBC Radio 2.

Just (22:30 or so) had an email from Big Bro; he's now in Santiago, of all places. He does seem to gad about somewhat, but it'll make a useful snippet for the next conversation with dear Mama.

  

Footnotes

1  In, I admit, a very different context!
2  As for the pronunciation of "fatigue" when I first encountered it (at age seven) during a reading level test that I reached around age 13 or so on. Well, does "fatty-goo" ring any bells?