2008 — 6 October: Monday (aka payday!)
Who cares if it's raining? It's pension day and definitely time for tonight's picture of Christa:
Christa in Croton on Hudson, August 1996
Here she is getting ready to accompany me and Peter, by train, down into Grand Central Station from Carol's house in Croton on Hudson. Another very nice holiday! G'night.
Well, it would have been g'night. Mysteriously, it's now 01:52 and I've just been appalled to read this piece by Jonathan Raban on the US Vice-Presidential candidate, Ms Palin. Fingers crossed! G'night, take 2!
Crock is potting... dept.
It's 10:32 and I'm listening to Jocelyn Bell,1 supping my second cuppa, and contemplating the next round of supplies shopping. I was woken about 90 minutes ago by the gentle sound of my co-pilot's cavity wall insulation chaps doing what we had had done to our house back in 1982. (The day we had it done, it was -12C so the water-based adhesive that was supposed to glue the polystyrene balls together didn't get a proper chance to do its sticky thing. Thus, whenever I have subsequently had to drill into the walls, little white beads have tended to go flying in all directions.)
Good grief! Now there's a discussion about the "unthinkable" — taking overweight children into care and using surgery... it seems our education system and a generation of parents no longer know how to raise healthy children. Wonder if that dates back to "Maggie Thatcher, milk snatcher"? I can clearly hear Christa saying "Good God!"
Lynne Truss cheers me up with her review of the autobiography of Cheeta (Tarzan's chimpanzee companion). Snippet:
Many points are so beautifully made in this excellent spoof of a Hollywood memoir that it is honestly hard to know where to start. But one could usefully begin with Cheeta's incisive contribution to the "infinite number of monkeys" theory of probability. It's all very well hypothesising about those monkeys and typewriters, he says: isn't it time for human beings to look around? "You've had a million humans, at least, writing away for much longer than a thousand years, and only one of them ever managed to produce the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Only one! Well, well, what's the big deal?"
It's already been observed, of course, that the Interweb thingy also clearly demonstrates the falsity of that theory.
Smoking mirrors... dept.
I'm no economist, but I've found one (Ann Pettifor) who seems to make sense. She offers this graph of what has always struck me as an insane obsession with UK house prices:
Can we say "bubble"? I got there from here, by the way. An excellent article. And (if this quotation is accurate) it's just too gorgeous, and makes me quail:
Bank failures are caused by depositors who don't deposit enough money to cover losses due to mismanagement.
In later news... dept.
There is none, really. Certainly what's being reported from out in the "real" world is far too depressing. So I've placated the inner man and am listening to the strange saxophone and piano noises that are the lunchtime concert on Radio 3. That will soon send me out in search of a congenial companion for a cuppa, methinks. The audience is applauding: whatever for? I've also emailed another escapee from the IBM Lab to check up on his sense of humour. Watch this space. (It's true, if you hang around in Waitrose you eventually see everyone you know.)
The latest crockpot is a bit of an experiment. For a start, I'd picked up pork where I thought I'd been getting lamb, so there's a degree of stock mis-match. Also, what I've decided was a swede2 has gone into the mix, as has most of a large leek. Couldn't find any dilithium crystals, though. Meanwhile, I'm just unloading the last of the current batch of recordings from one of the PVRs. I very much enjoyed the "Art of Arts TV" triple bill, and the "30 years of Arena" had some gems in it, too. That young Mr Yentob is a pearl.
Once again, the BBC weather forecast has been confounded by the reality. No "heavy rain" so far... It's now 16:59 and we met some drizzle on the way back from our (closed) tea destination. But we're retired men on a mission, so we diverted into Brambridge. Mileage now 10,727 and rising.
In what sounds uncomfortably close to the plight of the alcoholic prior to joining AA, the BBC's economics chap says: "According to the theory, there can be no sustained recovery until the markets are in the clutches of utter despair... Not everyone subscribes to the pseudo-economic psycho-babble." (Source.)
Shades of the Alan Parsons Project track called "Psycho-babble".
Rumbling tum... dept.
If one of the Raymond Chandler pastiches from the just-concluded BBC Radio 4 quiz show "The Write Stuff" (also featuring Ms Truss) doesn't feature on the next "Pick of the Week" then there's no justice. I was once commissioned3 by an IBM manager to write such a pastiche featuring one of his underlings. I may just dig it out. It was called "The Brief Hello". But first, food, and possibly a picture of some of the unidentified floating vegetable...
Unidentified, but delicious! Next task: the dishes, and the cooling of the rest of the gallimaufry of nutritious goodness. Heavens to Betsy, it's nearly 20:00 already. Good job I put the bin out, it's pitch dark out there now. Time for my dose of vitamin C (sliced orange) pud.