2008 — 19 October: Sunday
Somehow it's crept round to 00:40 already. The evening's entertainment (very recently concluded) was the polishing-off of the remaining Boston Legal episodes. The one argued in front of the Supreme Court was particularly fine, though one of the sub-plots detracted a little from it. Now I'm listening to Bob Harris while wondering which picture of Christa to choose next. Here's one from the back garden of our rented flat in the summer of 1975:
Christa in the Old Windsor flat's back garden
Quite near to the place where the scary large cow got loose into the vegetable patch — but that's another story. Sadly, I don't have a picture, either. Christa was not over fond of large domestic animals at close range. In fact, to start with she had a few issues with dogs and cats, too. But she was great with stick insects, fish, and little white rats!
Fry, the über dork, is at it again:
Electronic books are made (as the name suggests) of electrons, which weigh nothing; whatever one's view of the feel and qualities of a proper book, when travelling, zero ounces of electron is better than the heavy molecular mass that makes up the real thing... Cables, of course, are the bane of any globetrotting geek's life, and while there seems to be no perfect solution to the misery of self-knotting spaghetti,...
G'night.
No perambulation...
... today — my chum is still stricken with a chill. Mind you, the weather's not very enticing right now (at 09:12) and, besides, I've only been awake for about 20 minutes (yawn). Doubtless I'll find something with which to improve the Shining Hour. Big Bro, meanwhile, has found some of these in his garden downunder and wonders whether they are "eaters":
That's more Chris Foss artwork on the cover, of course
Let's hope they're not eggs from Alien.1 Thanks, by the way, to the pair of readers (12,000 miles apart) who have told me the word I sought yesterday was "fuchsia". Now the nearer of them tells me Bro is contending with a (poisonous) shaggy inkcap. Have a care, Bro, lest you don't outlive dear Mama! Time for a bit(e) of brekkie, methinks. My cuppa was nearly cold, which tells me I've waited long enough. The music on BBC Radio 3 is very fine, however. Musicians from Odessa.
Weightier matters... dept.
I find myself tempted to add a comment to the "debate" taking place here. But I'm holding back. There's a telling comment already from a chap who lost his wife to cancer. It's also apparent that opinions are thoroughly entrenched "going in", as it were. I have no problem with the idea of euthanasia or suicide2 but I think "quality" of life is infinitely more valuable than "quantity" of life. You can even find well-argued support for this viewpoint in Blade Runner of all places! (Let alone Boston Legal...)
Well, Sunday is supposed to be a day for reflection I suppose, but now it's time to hear Randy Newman making his Desert Island Discs choices!
Have you noticed...
... how everybody is always much wiser (if only briefly) after the event than before it? Messrs (should that be "Messers"?) Brown and Cameron, for example, are having their financial foresight and insight dissected. What was that comment about a politician's job? Something along the lines of "find which way the mob is marching and then leap out in front of them yelling encouragement". Snippet and source:
When Bill Clinton was in the White House, he would rage about the way in which his presidency was dictated to by 'a bunch of f***king bond traders'. One of his senior aides, James Carville, joked: 'I used to think if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the President or the Pope or a .400 baseball hitter. But now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.'
There's a marvellous set of 25 cartoons by Kipper Williams, starting here.
I must say, sometimes BBC Radio astonishes me. It's lovely to be listening to some opinions from Lindsay Anderson — one of my cinematic heroes — not to mention Karel Reisz. Add to the mix some Chris Barber jazz, too. Meanwhile the inner man has again been pacified just after listening to a fascinating look at local food production and consumption in Fife.
Nostalgia heaven... dept.
I've finally got the "round tuit" I needed to spend some time on the DVD-ROM I bought recently of the complete run of National Lampoon magazine. It's wonderful. I've also discovered that, while plums go mouldy, Kiwi fruit goes more than a little soft (and may even start to ferment). Perhaps I'm in the process of inventing a new drink?
It's 17:04 and Radio 4 is now investigating "the crash". Some of the U.S. bosses had obscenely huge pay and bonus packets, and still they wriggle and deny responsibility. Their level of reward would lead most people to assume that they're supremely skilled and valuable, so how come none of them saw this coming. I think I prefer the world of satire to that of "high" finance (which truly stinks to high heaven).
Now, having scoffed my evening meal, I'm delighted to note that Pick of the Week is ending with the hilarious Mitch Benn story I caught very early on the morning of my birthday. I'm less delighted to note the early appearance of fireworks in the neighbourhood. Takes all sorts.
R.I.P. Ray Lowry
I'd missed news of his death (on my birthday), but am listening to the obits programme right now. An excellent artist from the music world. Damn!
Having almost too much fun... dept.
I must say, Guy Garvey's "Radio Hour" on BBC 6Music is superb. It's 22:53 and I've reached April 1974 in the Lampoon saga. Annoyingly, the last few pages of the December 1973 issue are missing. Someone has basically taken a complete set of back issues, scanned them, and converted each pair of pages to a PDF file. The resolution is fairly low, but I have Photoshop, Fireworks, and Xara Xtreme to help out.
I last worked this concentratedly on some of this material back in the early 1990s when I was assembling my first DTP collection of Shary Flenniken artwork on my Acorn RISC system. I would make a greyscale bitmap3 scan, laboriously clean it up, then run a bitmap to vector artwork conversion overnight, image by image, (to reduce file sizes to the point where I could manage them on my initial 4MB system). Those were the days and — don't forget — this was pretty sophisticated compared to the IBM PC platform capability (and speed) at the time.