2008 — 1 September: Monday and rabbits!
September?! Incredible. Here's hoping for the Indian summer that Christa always predicted accurately for the start of the next school year. And now it's time for tonight's picture of her.
Christa in the Old Windsor living room, 1976
It shows her in the Old Windsor living room, fairly soon after we'd first moved into the house, again in the summer of 1976. We had our friends' daughter Claudia (soon to be a goldsmith) staying with us for a couple of weeks. Oh well, let's see what September has to offer, shall we?
Yesterday (by the way) was the first birthday of Big Bro's second grand-daughter — her Mum is the helicopter pilot, Rachel:
Now that I've found Christa's master calendar I have a better chance of keeping track of such momentous events in the future. Sorry to have missed it this year, young Maddison!
G'night at, near-as-dammit, midnight.
Making the brain ache... dept.
A chum suggested overnight that the 9x9 Sudokus at "Easy" I spent yesterday doodling with will pall in time. He personally goes for the 16x16 at "Killer" level where, he says, "arithmetic as well as logic comes into it, that give one's brain a proper work out." Thank goodness he also admits that the right kind of reading will also have the same effect. Thing is, the trawling I do on this Interweb malarkey probably has a deleterious effect on my blood pressure. This morning's random examples: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, with a side order of Media Watching, and a soupçon of Butterflies and Wheels for balance...
Definitely (10:37) time for breakfast! And, as I munch and slurp, time to reveal last night's other brain work out, which was to watch the various "extras" associated with the film Layer Cake. Christa very rarely bothered with such things1 and I have to admit they are not usually particularly insightful. I still recall one of the few times we watched "extras" all the way through together: "Black Book" was the film involved.
Lunch? What, already?!
"Well," says the tum, "it is 13:28, you know." How did that happen?
In later news... dept.
I've just cracked a "standard" Sudoku with 0 hints and 0 invalid moves in 4 minutes 7 seconds.2 Trouble is, of course, I have no idea whether this is good, bad, or indifferent. I rather naively hoped the "Preference" setting labelled "size" would allow me to increase the number of cells; in fact, it changes the overall size of the 9x9 box. But making the box larger, and somehow processing strategies unconsciously as I slept, has led to a marked improvement in my performance today.
Meanwhile, I've been listening in growing disbelief to the depressing radio discussion about rape in light of remarks apparently made by Dame Helen Mirren. Although it's not that funny, I refer my reader to a throwaway remark I made here. This evening, I intend to catch up on the trio of Hugo Blick monologues repeated on BBC 2 tonight — I heard good things about them, from Andrew, during the weekend birthday meal.
It's been quite a while since I read (or even thought about) my copy of Joseph Moncure March's strange long Jazz Age poem "The Wild Party" (my copy is strikingly illustrated by Art Spiegelman3) and I was surprised to learn today that it had been filmed back in 1949. But I enjoyed the article here, and will now dig out my copy (eventually, I hope!) to refresh my memory of it.
And (I must admit) I have never read Garrett Hardin's original 1968 paper in Science that seems to have given us "the tragedy of the commons" though I've obviously soaked up some form of message from it. According to Ian Angus:
For 40 years it has been, in the words of a World Bank Discussion Paper, "the dominant paradigm within which social scientists assess natural resource issues" (Bromley and Cernea 1989: 6). It has been used time and again to justify stealing indigenous peoples' lands, privatizing health care and other social services, giving corporations "tradable permits" to pollute the air and water, and much more.
Another interesting piece.
R.I.P. Ken Campbell
This has not been a jolly year! I've just learned of this sad death from the ever-reliable Ansible newsletter. The Guardian obituary is here though I'm not sure I agree with the description of this wonderful man as "one of the strangest people in Britain"! Funny, yes; endlessly interesting and entertaining, yes; but why strange?
Quick! Cheer yourself up with this.