2008 — 4 November: Tuesday
Tonight's picture shows Christa, her sister-in-law Linda, and (if memory serves) Ria, who is the sister of her other sister-in-law. But now guess who's on the other (higher,1 notice!) end of the seesaw? The picture was taken over in Meisenheim in September 1974, just before we got married. I was being introduced by Christa to various members of the Becker clan — including her parents, of course.
Christa on a seesaw in Meisenheim, September 1974
Last night's entertainment, by the way, started out with "The Untouchables" (for just long enough to confirm that its music [by Morricone] had indeed been the tune that BBC4 used behind their programme trailer for an item on Joseph Stalin) and then moved swiftly on to "The Usual Suspects". What a good film. G'night. (At 01:26.) Damned DVD extras...
All over but the counting...?
When's the last time an incumbent U.S. president took so little part in the campaign to elect the next one? One of the jokes doing the rounds says the Secret Service recently caught a man trying to scale the security fence around the White House... "Go back, Mr President, you can't leave yet." It's also been suggested that some voting machines are "flipping" the voter's input. What was the old slogan? "Vote early, vote often!" Time (08:45) for a spot of breakfast to help me face the (so far) quite sunny day.
An ongoing argument
To justify or not... that's still the textual question in some parts of the DTP world (it seems). Personally, I'm all in favour of it. Today, I'm reminded that one of my heroes (Eric Gill) was agin it. But then, he was also agin underwear. One has to draw a line somewhere, I guess. Amusingly, a bug that's been lying unnoticed by anyone in one of my originally Acorn RISC-based DTP programs for at least ten years has just been nailed. I won't bore you with the details.
I prepared the next batch of crockpottery to the accompaniment of a fascinating radio programme about the last 30 years of trouble in Afghanistan. I listened with renewed interest in light of the material I learned via "Charlie Wilson's war" the other night, though that chap didn't get a mention at all. And the last of the breakfast is going down to Radio 3 as the ex-shopaholic lady on Radio 4's "Woman's Hour" was just too irritating.
My friend Gill (not Eric!) has just very kindly suggested we share a spot of lunch next Tuesday, which alert readers will realise is the first anniversary of Christa's death. Gill thought it might be better for me not to be on my own. I was glad to accept as I suspect she's probably right. Mind you, the whole of the last year so far has been a series of somewhat doleful anniversaries, depending how you view these things. In the right light, the whole process has been fascinating (I'm sure) — of course, getting the light right is the tricky bit!
Time for a little adventure. My main co-pilot has just suggested an outing in his new ground-hugging wasp. Off we go for a spin — possibly literally! (There are loads of leaves around on the roads now.)
Later that day...
It's just gone 15:00 and I've spent the last few minutes trying to get a sharp picture of the large Boris outside the main kitchen window. Tricky stuff, focus. And that's after a completely non-alcoholic lunch at the good ol' Hill Top café in Wiltshire just a couple of miles short of Salisbury.
Can we say "motion blur"?
Who did you say you were, again?
Now here's a disgustingly cheerful, yet interesting, bit of musing on biological identity. Snippet:
More than four times as much space in the human genome is occupied by "endogenous retroviruses" than by all the genes that code for the enzymes and other proteins used to create and run our bodies. These viruses long ago incorporated themselves into our ancestors, apparently by using reverse-transcriptase enzymes of the sort employed by such malefactors as HIV to pry their way these days into the DNA of the immune cells they exploit. The silent viral debris we all carry is "foreign" in nearly every way, yet it must be seen as a large part of "us." (Some of these fossil bits of hitchhiking nucleic acid have even been resurrected in the laboratory, whereupon they can infect mice and act like the perfectly independent viruses they once were.)
And "mycodiesel"? — now that's a new one...
Evening already
It's 19:35 and Desmond Carrington is in full swing (for want of a better word), with the emphasis this week on Leonard Bernstein's music. The crockpot was very tasty, and the rest of it is now being cooled to pop it into the fridge. I think I shall sort out a DVD to spin later, but first I have a hot date with a database, and a scanner.