2008 — 30 August: Saturday
After midnight again already! As I remarked at Christa's funeral service, how she loved to travel. Rain or shine, that delicious smile of hers just carried on carrying on. Tonight's picture shows her during a short weekend break the three of us took in West Bay in 1990 — a little further along the Jurassic Coast than Durlston. We'd first called into West Bay in September 1975 on our way down to Penzance in Cornwall. They'd done a heck of a lot of rebuilding since then, and have done a lot more in the 18 years since I took this picture, too.
G'night, at 00:49ish — still not sleepy though. I think I shall soldier on to the top of the hour. The music on BBC Radio 2 is too good.
(New) Forest of data... dept.
I mentioned only yesterday that too much of my personal data was contained in a letter alongside credit card cheques. Well, a local council has been taking things rather further. You have to love the way that they can be described as failing to uphold their Data Protection duty yet can respond (in classic "Never explain, never apologise" style) by saying what they do:
Information Commissioner: "There is a strong indication that New Forest District Council has failed to comply with the first principle [of the Data Protection
Act 1998] in this case."
Council: "The council is conscious of the sensitive nature of the situation relating to personal data and has taken steps to ensure that any details about an
individual are kept to an absolute minimum and that signatures and other unique information are not now available for public scrutiny."
Down with the first blissful cuppa. It's 08:49 and Brian Matthew is in full swing with such gems as Lance Percival's calypso "Shame and scandal in the family". ("Your girlfriend is your sister but your Mother don't know..." which [of course] brings to my mind some of the quite snappy dialogue in the film "Lake Placid".) Great stuff. Sounds like I shall have to look out for EMI's "20 golden giggles"!
Scattered Mounces... dept.
I read about this surname-mapping project last night and thought I'd give its servers time to cool down before trying it. Mind you, it seems "all" they did was scan through phone books and electoral registers.1 I suppose that's what passes for academic research these days. (Mind you, I recall scanning through the entire set of UK phone books while at Polytechnic, finding about 55 "Mounces". Most of them seemed to live in Cornwall, and there was a presumably posh variant, too: "Mounce-Stephens".) Anyway, "FPM" is short for "frequency per million":
Seems there's a cluster of Mounce cousins in Kentucky. Good hunting, Lis! While you get busy I shall grab some breakfast. (There's a server error or two, and some pages are still "Under Developement" [sic] but these are minor quibbles.) The top region for Christa's surname (Becker) is, indeed, Rheinland-Pfalz (exactly where her family came from) with nearly six thousand Beckers per million. Curiously the top forenames include "Peter".
Thank you, Mr Postie
Much better than yesterday's disappointing haul:
The centre image shows my first (easy) Sudoku. I don't know yet if the colours are a help or a hindrance.
Thank you, Junior
For your weekly "sanity check" phone call. A 30" screen, heh? Quad-core Intel? 4GB of RAM? 64-bit Vista. Twin top-end graphics cards? Good job you're in line of sight from Battersea power station! Pity it's not in use any more. It's 16:39, and I've now got about six more Sudokus under my belt. It's extremely depressing listening to Weekend Woman's Hour, however (assuming that's what it is). A new edition of Alex Comfort's The Joy of Sex2 has had the beards expunged, for random example.
Our North American cousins are in a tizzy over the strain of possibly voting for a chap with darker than average skin tone and an intelligent, articulate wife. Drug use among young prostitutes. ("Is that a kerb-crawler? It may well be.") The Hampshire WI is in favour of legalisation, it seems.
Just what I need. Yet another intelligent, literate blog to spend my time on... Hitchcock blonde, indeed! She's obviously read the Donald Spoto biography then. (Good grief! I bought my copy in Texas, 24 years ago. Where on earth does Time disappear to?)