2008 — 13 November: Thursday
A cold night by the feel of it. Time for my next picture of Christa. It's another one of the gathering of the Becker clan, in September 1974, when Christa took me over to Meisenheim to introduce me to her family a week or so before we got married:
The Becker clan, back in September 1974
This shot is a decade earlier than the previous one I published here. I'm pretty sure Georg had just dashed back to get into the shot. That's Karl with Florian on his shoulders.
I've just heard that Mitch Mitchell has died, at 61. Another one, heh? Oh well, g'night, at 00:39. Tomorrow, as they say, is another day.
A warmer start...
... than yesterday morning's frosty roof tiles indicated. There's even a hint of sunny stuff out there (pretty much still on the horizon at the moment). Breakfast and a packed lunch demand my attention ahead of today's little intake1 of country air. But first, the plump little chap snoozing atop the tree Christa would climb in order to trim it:
This morning's early worm catcher
I've just switched off the BBC Radio 4 news in disgust (not an uncommon reaction, I realise). In what possible sense is it world news to carry the post-election story about Sarah Palin's ignorance when, with luck, she will simply fade into irrelevance and join Dan Quayle? Let sleeping pit-bulls lie, say I. It's 08:53 and I'm hoping the brief rain shower isn't a portent of more to come.
This may pique the interest of my non-New-York-based reader:
Why (you may ask) is he sitting at home testing his connection speed when he could be out in the fresh air getting a life? Well, it's 14:40 and I've just wolfed down my packed lunch having recently returned from Winchester. Sadly, the pair of us wimped out big time at the prospect of a little bit of cold, driving rain. Talk about wusses. It gets wuss, of course. We spent easily three hours on some Interweb research trying to prove the theory that "affordable HD TV projector incorporating TI's DarkChip4 3-chip DLP technology" isn't an oxymoron. We failed quite miserably, assuming £18,000 or upward fails the "affordable" test. But the drool marks from the Sim2 Grand Cinema C3X 1080 should brush out when dry.
The point of having the 3-chip solution means you avoid the need for a colour wheel, which is a Good Thing.
Terrorism
There's a lovely, previously unpublished, speech by Leonard Bernstein dating back to a 1986 Harvard anniversary celebration. Well worth reading. Meanwhile, here's today's "mail drop" — again, down on to the living room windowsill:
Storm in a P.O.
Christa relied on our local Post Office for her job and would have been enraged by its recent relocation, let alone the inept failure to renew the lease on the second nearest branch further up the hill. I love the throwaway line in this story about members of the cabinet voting the measure through, while campaigning in their own constituencies against local closures. I think there's a word for this... could it be arrogant hypocrisy, perhaps? As (foot)noted here I petitioned against this closure 13 months ago.
The average speed of ketchup leaving the bottle is... 25 miles per year! What would I know without a Steve Wright factoid? (Add that to the toenail growing rate at which the U.S. is drifting away from Europe.) Now I'm hearing about seizures in fruit flies; this morning, it was the mind/brain "delusion". The brain of one of my PCs has just taken off on a delusion of its own: the one about not drawing a screen display for me. This may well end in tears. <Sigh>
In later news
Little Dorrit remains interesting. I'm not usually a fan of game shows, but the Buzzcocks made me smile pretty well continuously. And Robin Williams made me laugh on the Graham Norton show. What a terrible couch potato, heh? Time for a cuppa, and some Mark Lamarr...