2008 — 7 June: Saturday
Way too tired after a late evening of TV vegetating.1
Christmas 1977 was quite eventful. For a start we took dear Mama over with us to Meisenheim. This was not wholly unalloyed joyfulness, but Christa and I did what we could to arrange some festivity! As my cousin Leigh said in an email yesterday "I have been looking at your diary from time to time and have seen some of the old pics which just serve to remind me how old I feel! Christa was an unforgettable lady and so loving and kind to us all." I'll drink to that, cous. Thanks.
Christa and me, in Meisenheim. Xmas 1977
And so to bed. It's 01:29 and I'm drooping, despite Mark Lamarr talking to Kinky Friedman. G'night.
It's raining...
... photons galore, rather than water. It's 10:00 and the crockpot is stuffed (I hope, nicely) and I've left it to do its thing. As I've come to recognise is normal, the preparation of future food has temporarily depressed the appetite for present food, so there'll now be a few minutes of pottering (largely indistinguishable, of course, from anything else I do these days, or for many years in the past!) before I tackle brekkie. But enough of J Woss, already, and over (back) to the safer haven that is BBC 6Music.
But we can neither observe nor know the future; it has no pace and no configuration. To be in "close communication" with it means no more than doodling fantasies on a computer screen. In his response to the jury, [Rem] Koolhaas says as much: "After four thousand years of failure," he tells us, "Photoshop and the computer create utopias instantly."
If only. Funnily enough, the refrain of the song currently playing is "Photoshop me out of your life" (by Sparks, if I heard it correctly — I did, but the chap here doesn't like it! "sounds like a bad Sondheim parody"). It's vaguely reminiscent of the style of a piece of Philip Glass. Weird. Still, they do say any noun can be verbed.
For some, of course, utopias are full of virgins. One of my favourite gadflys ("gadflies"?) explains here, ending by wondering "Will the ruling at Lille fill the consulting rooms of surgeons who specialize2 in restoring hymens?".
Not with a bang... dept.
From utopia to dystopia. As I chomp the brekkie, and listen to views about the power of TV back in 1968, hearing people like Michael Frayn and Nigel Kneale, so I also learn "...new universes could be created spontaneously from apparently empty space. From inside the parent universe, the event would be surprisingly unspectacular." (Source.) Can we have a new universe, please?
Politicians will be... politicians
"Mr Chichester stepped down as leader after Ms Spelman asked him to answer allegations that he had broken European Parliament rules on expenses. The party's chief whip in Brussels, MEP Den Dover, has also been replaced after he denied breaking any rules in paying his wife and daughter a reported £750,000 for work over nine years." (Source.) I acidly note that my lifetime earnings are rather less than that nine-year sum. Why do words like "snout" and "trough" and "gravy train" cross my mind, I wonder? Talk about re-arranging deck-chairs on the Titanic...
Other chickenfeed... dept.
My knowledge of a chicken's anatomy (not the strongest item in my intellectual armoury) has been slightly improved by today's recently-consumed lunch. I came over all lazy (who could tell?) about an hour ago and decided to pop out to grab the makings of a salad or two, some more cow juice, the fruit that I forgot (which I now recall I have still forgotten), and maybe an easy-to-cook item or two. I was led by the nose, as it were, past the roast chicken counter — probably better to shop when not suffering hunger pangs next time?
It's now 15:56 and the photons are still largely unabated. In fact, Christa's barometer downstairs in the hallway is registering over the letter "n" of "schön" which always reminds me of the name of the protagonist in the 1969 novel Macroscope by Piers Anthony. Yet another escapee3 from my SF bookshelf...
It seems (from his "podgrams") that Stephen Fry's TV filming schedule across all 50 states in North America means another has had to step into his dork talk / tech spot:
Most of the stuff that doesn't work is to be found at the back of our kitchen cupboards. No matter how many arms or pulleys or grippers are added, the basic corkscrew cannot be improved upon. Basters, broilers, ice-cream makers, melon ballers, juicers, zesters, corers, peelers, steamers, mixers, kneaders — the list is endless. Most come under the title "labour-saving" — a beautiful contradiction, because, when it comes to getting them out and setting them up and rinsing them out and putting them back, who can be bothered?
Aside to Christa
I've just (at 21:45 or so) picked and eaten the first two strawberries of the year, my love. Very nice they were, too. Almost as cheering as this lovely bit of maths analysis by the Guardian's "bad science" chap of the recent burst of maths analysis. Not to mention the Ken Dodd Easter special now on BBC7!