2008 — 11 October: Saturday
No viewing to report from last night. Chatting with Junior is an excellent substitute. Although he did remember to bring the server PC with him, he's somehow forgotten that it originally contained a 2x250GB SATA RAID array.1 But I gather he's added a fairly reasonable graphics card. As I said: Kids!
Tonight's picture of Christa... that little yew tree visible behind her is now, two decades on, a thrice-trimmed giant!
Christa and her (then) new pond, late 1980s
The amazingly clean, smooth, paving stones around the edge proved fatal to an entire generation of young frogs; as the tadpoles Peter got for us metamorphosed, the poor chaps would stick to the surfaces and then promptly dry out. It was a disaster! G'night. But, wait! I bet this lovely typo has gone by the morning...
Good ol' Grauniad. Nope. It's still there at 10:04 on a sun-burning-off-the-mist morning. Just been out harvesting some more grapes. Had Christa not died an unbelievable eleven months ago (today) I'm sure she would have helped me. <Sigh>
Humour is, what humour is... dept.
Sarah Silverman is a funny lady, with an extreme approach to her comedy. One described by Slate as "meta-bigotry". She it was who appeared in that video "I'm f***ing Matt Damon" a few months ago, should you need a memory jog. She's now about to appear here in the UK for the first time. Snippet:
"Everybody blames the Jews for killing Christ, and then the Jews try to pass it off on the Romans," she says, shrugging her broad shoulders to imply that everyone's entitled to their opinion. Then, suddenly serious: "I'm one of the few people that believes it was the blacks."
Understanding begins to dawn... dept.
This well-written piece by Simon Bowers actually explains in a cogent paragraph or two some (at least) of what's going on, and going wrong, in the world of "high finance". As I've said, I don't understand the dismal science (though, in my ignorance, I'm quite confident that stock markets run on smoke, mirrors, greed and fear as much as rational "analysis"). Mr Bowers makes several points:
- Financial firms sold credit default swaps (CDSs) — a form of insurance against a company defaulting on its debt — to investors in Lehman's bonds and those betting on the bank's creditworthiness...
- Banks around the world are hoarding cash partly in preparation for the settlement of these credit derivatives linked to a wave of major corporate defaults and lower than expected recovery levels.
- Credit derivative prices show investors believe many large companies are close to collapse.
- In the almost unregulated credit derivatives market, no one knows the scale of Lehman CDSs that have been bought and sold.
- Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland... have bought and sold, in roughly equal measure, £2.4 trillion of such contracts.
Now, if somebody can explain to me how a couple of banks can buy and sell things approaching in cost (if not value) the gross domestic product of the entire country's economy...
All at sea... dept.
It's 11:05 and a svelte-looking Junior has just left to return to London.
Junior and his Aygo, this morning
It was lovely to see him. He says if I go up by train he's happy to take a day off and hit the bookshops with me just as we used to do in earlier times. Now there's a delightful thought. He's also tried the maritime (Aubrey and Maturin) novels of Patrick O'Brian (which I love) but has found them impenetrable, so I've suggested he start instead with the Hornblower novels of CS Forester.
My paperbacks of these are in some cases over 40 years old, so he's decided to buy his own as he doesn't want mine to fall apart. (I've already told him the "Honor Harrington" space operas by David Weber that we both like are a direct [and admitted] steal from Forester's oeuvre. Well, if you ignore the sex change and the future setting.)
I'm now tucking into a belated breakfast and pleasurably contemplating the just-delivered DVD boxed set of Boston Legal season #4. Season #3 was, of course, the last set Christa and I watched together, so season #4 will doubtless be a bittersweet experience. I'm sure I'll be able to hear her chortle from time to time. Her sense of humour was very similar to mine.
It's 16:38 and still sunny. Time to start gently poking at the new server. Wish me luck.
Perfect radio...
... tonight's BBC Radio 2 tribute to Rick Wright is worth the entire licence fee, in my opinion. This is shamelessly filched from the current Radio Times:
I introduced Christa to the music of Pink Floyd very early in our relationship. It made sufficient impression on her for her to insist on having some of it played at her funeral. 'Nuff said!