2008 — 16 October: Thursday
It's 00:37, quiet, and quite cold. Nitin Sawhney is being interviewed by Janice Long. His new album is out, though its reviews have been rather mixed. Sounds fine to me. Anyway, time for tonight's picture of Christa. A relatively recent one taken on a visit to Gosport, if I remember:
Always a smile for me. How cool is that?
G'night.
Some signs...
... of sunshine, at 08:59, as I chomp the brekkie cardboard. I was pondering what to wear for my little adventure later today, and made a poignant discovery in my wardrobe. I always thought the "flashback" scene in Edge of Darkness1 where the Bob Peck character realises that his terminally-ill wife had been buying clothes for their daughter (knowing full well she wouldn't live to see the youngster wear them) was very moving. Today I discovered a pile of half a dozen brand new shirts from "M&S" and realised that Christa had done essentially the same thing for me. I fear there was a tear or two. Thank you, my love!
When all else fails...
... blame the programmers!
As Richard Dooling wrote in the New York Times: "Somehow the genius quants — the best and brightest geeks Wall Street firms could buy — fed $1 trillion in subprime mortgage debt into their supercomputers, added some derivatives, massaged the arrangements with computer algorithms and — poof! — created $62 trillion in imaginary wealth."
I recommend (though not altogether in a good way) Emanuel Derman's 2004 autobiography "My life as a Quant" for more insights. Physics and finance are odd bedfellows.
Many (photos) are taken... few turn out well... dept.
Our round trip took us Smartly (ha ha) out into Dorset and Wiltshire for a bite to eat and some snapping2 opportunities. In Shaftesbury, there's a steep, cobbled, hill that was used when filming a "Hovis" bread advert some years ago:
Real name? Gold Hill. Meanwhile, in Compton Abbas, there's a (windy) grass airstrip, a café, and a muzzled red bulldog with a wonderful registration:
I expect Big Bro will know what this one is...
And this one...
How can anyone...
... listen to the world news on BBC Radio 4 and remain cheerful? I can't, so I'm reverting to my musical diet as the evening lamb gets its molecules agitated in the cooker. It's 17:25 and the sky outside the study is quite blue, still.
Time to relax... dept.
It was my birthday this week. Today I got a letter3 (in a manner of speaking) from film director Ridley Scott:
There are some who might call me a completeist. (I did so myself here, for example.) But I always rather liked variant one (with the Harrison Ford voiceover) which I had on a 4:3 aspect ratio PAL LaserDisc many years ago. And I also liked what was described by Scott as his "Director's Cut" which I have on a widescreen DVD. I've also kept an eye on various documentaries that have been produced over the years, and I have a couple of books about the film, too. Today's acquisition (the five-DVD boxed set) definitively caps my "Blade Runner" collecting.
In the same mail drop today was perfect proof of the extent to which I was (shall we say?) distracted during poor Christa's final illness last year. I think Mike Nichols is an excellent director, and I think Aaron Sorkin is a well-nigh perfect script writer. I also think that two of the three main actors you see here are eminently watchable. Yet I entirely missed the release of this film (not least, I suppose, since I'd given up Sight and Sound magazine too). She would, I'm absolutely certain, thoroughly approve of my little birthday "treat":
