2008 — 23 November: Sunday
I spent the last few minutes of Saturday delightedly rambling through both the ever-changing choices dredged up by my Winamp playlist on "shuffle" and through a New Statesman1 archive of articles by Sean French, who is an excellent writer. Here's an amusing snippet (no pun intended) by way of example:
Here is a story I read in the Guardian... I reproduce it in full:
A 26-year-old man was recovering from surgery in hospital after his genitals were bitten off by a friend's dog. The unnamed man was attacked in Parkfield, Wolverhampton. It is
understood the dog, an American pit bull terrier cross, will be destroyed.
And I expect that the man is pretty devastated, too... Curious that it should happen in Wolverhampton, which sounds like a description in Cockney rhyming slang of what had occurred.
(I'm sure there's a line in an Alan Bennett play in which a woman says: "I come from Hampton Wick and I'm no stranger to innuendo.")
OK, time for tonight's picture of Christa, Peter, and Big Bro in his suit of startling blue (I believe Lis told me once that it's now in the "fancy dress" drawer). If I let my fancy new desktop indexing software loose on my email archive (which I have yet to do) I expect I'll be able to pinpoint her note. Anyway, I think I can carbon date this photo to the summer of 1982:
Again that lovely smile! Brrr! It's gone very cold tonight. G'night. At 01:49 — sometimes sleep can wait!
Compare and contrast... dept.
I have an ex-colleague and fellow retiree, yclept Dave Mitchell (NZ chum Brack reminds me, this morning) who's having a whale of a time having returned to school and then "started a new career2 as a script writer while simultaneously indulging in that interesting practice of taking pictures from kites and taking on the local council concerning several philistinic actions they were taking to ruin Totnes". The evidence here suggests at least one sort of script, as (Brack tells me) Dave is also now heavily involved in open source activity to build microcode to reprogramme (well augment Canon microcode) in a range of Canon digital cameras.
I do nothing by contrast, unless you count not even waking up until 11:21 this sunny, cold, dryish morning! Shame on me!?
Later that day...
Lunch was lunched. Shopping was shopped. The (sadly) last part of The good soldier Svejk was enjoyed. Dear Mama has been phoned. Curtains are now (16:25) being drawn. Is it me, or is November cold, grey, and rather depressing?
Now, is this horribly paranoid or merely good sense? And, more specifically, this? I think I shall (federally) reserve my judgement. Amazing what you can link to when initially setting out just to read Will Hutton's advice to the Chancellor, isn't it?
One good thing, though. I found a localised "Google search" button on the site I've just mentioned, and that led ultimately to my adding my own button to my sitemap page and my main help page. Naturally, they are only as effective as the extent to which the busy little Google gang of spiders have crawled around3 my little web, but they may prove helpful.
By the way, I finally gave in, and let my fancy new desktop search tool loose on my email directory last night (well, technically, earlier this morning). I was quite shocked to discover the best part of 13,000 emails tucked away. It seems a lot, somehow. (And that's in addition to the 20,000 documents [files] scattered around a random hodge-podge of hard drives.) I need a secretary! I also need to think about another small batch of calories — it's 17:58 and the BBC 6Music "Freak Zone" is well under way, as is a Radio 3 programme on tango music that's slurping onto a minidisc downstairs if I pushed all the right buttons...
Surviving the (Terry-fied) Nation... dept.
Call me a cowardy custard, but I feel no need to watch the updated TV version of Terry Nation's novel "Survivors". Perhaps I was spoiled by earlier exposure to, for example, "The darkest of nights" — the 1962 novel by Charles Eric Maine, or the (even better) 1950 novel I mentioned here by George R Stewart... "Earth Abides". (I was never that keen on the Daleks, either!)
I'm quite willing to believe that humanity will be largely finished off by one of the Four Horsemen, and plague is at least as likely a fate. It's been observed in other animal populations. I'm also willing to believe that some percentage would survive. I'm not sure I would wish to be in that subset, though if Christa and Peter were in it I'd feel differently, I'm sure. Time for a cuppa to dispel such thoughts, some lively music, and a spot of whatever else I do to divert myself. Goodness me, it's cold.