2008 — 3 June: Tuesday
Once again, it's just gone midnight and time (00:38) to call it a night. But first, here's one of the fruits of all my recent 35mm slide scanning:
Dramatic wallpaper in Old Windsor, August 1976
We moved into the house in Old Windsor in April 1976 and I promptly had my tonsils out, which knocked me about somewhat. We were also faced with vastly, dramatically different wallpaper and colour schemes in every room. Some very funky, jazzy, stuff, too. (Mostly awful.) By about August, we were just about ready to contemplate some redecorating — a task we eventually1 buckled down to in time for Junior's arrival in March 1980. (We concealed much of the original decor behind book shelves, only to rediscover it when [in 1981] we faced a house move and relocation for my IBM job.)
The rain, it raineth... dept.
As I (Ogden g)Nash my teeth at the promised downpour, my spirits are lifted this morning (it's 09:02) by news of saunas in Moscow:
"Who searches for a sauna in summer?" you might ask, but with three weeks of cold water coming to an end in the center of Moscow, some may feel that they have had enough of warming water in a bucket on the stove, and of cold, invigorating showers. Others may just feel it's time for a wash. The hair may have adapted, creating its own oils like a virgin Rastafarian, but the armpits are not so versatile.
There are, if you follow the link, Internet video-related downsides to the sauna business over there... The news, however, that "Eight leading economists, including five Nobelists, were asked to prioritize 30 different proposed solutions to ten of the world's biggest problems" is, for some reason,2 almost infinitely depressing. I'm not sure I'd trust an economist to boil an egg, personally.
Since many of the 35mm slides I've been scanning date from the 1970s — my earliest years with Christa — my thoughts have also been back in that distant decade (the one that taste largely forgot, I fear). Digging gently in an online archive or two, I found a link to a Washington advisor's 1974 article "Farewell to Oil?" that opens with a potshot at one of my favourite "black beasts":
With their uncorrupted faith in the sublime dynamics of perfect competition, the editorialists of the Economist in London have been proclaiming a coming age of energy abundance in which oil producers will come hat in hand to sell their stuff at declining prices... the present expectations of ever-higher oil and energy prices caused by increasing scarcity are based on the "third-rate political economy of linear projections," which take no account of the inevitable reactions to high prices and their long-run effect on the market.
Oil price back then? $11-58, which in 2006 dollars equated to $47-54. Today? Around $126 — time for a cuppa! The OECD boss is happy, though.
Fishy heck!
And I ate a bit of anchovy at the weekend, too! (Fortunately "T. gondii oocysts are destroyed by high heat. Unfortunately, marine mammals do not have the option of cooking their food before they eat it". So that's OK for us, then, and bad news for Mr Orca.)
Still raining (at 12:49) but time for a bite to eat. Not fish, though. And eaten to the accompaniment of a strange programme about Duran Duran's "lost" album.
33 years ago?!
Given the new mode of address for me by dear Mama, I think my caption is appropriate...
Christa, and her husband's mother(!), June 1975
Speaking of strange things, I mentioned Charles Fort a couple of weeks ago. Well I spotted two of his books nestling on my shelves in their 1970s (slide-scanned) state (though the pair have long since been culled). Still, good to see a new biography is out, though it's not excessively praised here.
What's good for GM... dept.
It used to be said that what's good for General Motors was good for the US economy. Is this news a return to lower levels of insanity? I mean — heavens to Betsy — they're even considering scrapping the obscene "Hummer".
If only...
... technology was all it is usually cracked up to be! By the way, I thought the "Singularity" was due around 2014 rather than "before the century is even half over". I can wait! Now that I know where sarcasm-detection lurks within the noggin...