2008 — 29 October: Wednesday
Last night's DVD was amazing. It's Charlie Wilson's war and I heartily recommend it. Based on a true story — and a book by someone I'd never heard of: the late George Crile. (It's sitting in my Amazon shopping basket as I type.) But now, at 00:24 or so, it's time for tonight's picture. It's a relatively recent one, from a day trip we took in March last year down to Durlston:
Christa at Durlston, March 2007
Here's hoping for a dry walk later today. G'night.
Sun, and... snow???
I'm told that Hampshire's gritters are hard at work as I type, which is (I guess) both good and bad. Still, it's only 08:48 and the sun is shining brightly as I contemplate the whichness of the why, and this delightful piece on the ineffable Borges. Snippet and source:
The end-paper pages of William Goldbloom Bloch's "The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel" (Oxford University Press, 192 pages, $19.95) reproduce the first and
last pages of Borges's manuscript, showing that it was written (in what Borges called "the handwriting of a dwarf") on accounting sheets with the heading Haber, or "Credit," in
Gothic letters that magically make the "H" look like a "B" and the "r" like an "l."
Walking 60 miles a day for 100 years, notes Mr. Bloch, our vigorous librarian would only travel a distance slightly less than that which light covers in two minutes.
This is a very interesting story too. Indeed, it might just have an effect on those book-buying habits I mentioned yesterday. But now it's time to pack a little lunch.
Right. Time to don my grit-proof boots, grit my teeth, and step out into the fresh air, before it's all gone. I still remember that 1972 item on the Limits to Growth from the Club of Rome making similar points, but then two-thirds of the world's human population didn't exist at the time. I shall have to start watching for those Four Horsemen as I wander about the countryside.
Getting dark...
... and it's only 16:15 — pretty cool, too. Nice sunny walk, however, with some pictures to show for it. But first, a cuppa.
No colours were falsified in the making of today's images!1 The sky really was this shade of blue (honest):
That inner man...
... has yet again been pacified, and the evening now (18:52) stretches gently ahead of me. Thing is, should I catch the John Prescott item on class that I missed earlier, or could I care less? I think I'll opt for the two Stephen Fry in America items first.
Two plus hours of Mr Fry is enough to be going on with. I shall leave him half way up the Mississippi for now. It's time to catch up on the news from the IBM UK pensions plans web site. Then it will be time to retire (as it were).