2008 — 15 December: Monday
Brrr! It's cold. I shall warm myself with tonight's photo of Christa, taken early one morning in the summer of 1974 in the car park of ICL Beaumont:
Christa in the ICL Beaumont car park, Old Windsor, summer 1974
That's much better. G'night.
Clear as a Bell?
Without cheating, I'd say that was Jocelyn Bell on the BBC Radio 4 "Start the Week" as I type. It's 09:34 and well past time for the cuppa that cheers. (Oops! "Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell" in full.) Breakfast!
Kingswhere?
I fear I knew nothing about Kingsnorth and the power station protest in August involving 1,500 Kent police in a £5.9m operation, during which (ministers stated) 70 officers had been injured. Sounds like quite a riot, doesn't it? Not quite exactly what happened, it seems! (Source.)
I had to smile at the "officer injured sitting in car" line. It brought to mind a certain Not the 9 o'clock news sketch with Rowan Atkinson...
I smiled at this, too:
As he leaves to go back into the rehearsal room, [Sam] Mendes tells me a story about his son. Joe's schoolteacher took him aside the other day, he says, because she wanted to tell him
about a conversation she'd overheard between Joe and his best friend, Nicholas. They were standing in the hallway, looking at the trophy cabinet.
'My dad's got one of those,' Joe said, 'it's called an Oscar.'
'What's it for?' asked Nicholas, adding hopefully: 'Soccer?'
'No,' replied Joe, 'it's for farting and burping.'
Nicholas nodded. 'Cool,' he said.
Good afternoon!
Having had a brief pep talk with Christa, it's already time for lunch and then I have some tasks awaiting. Isn't this fun? 12:55 — still dry, still cold, I'm still down, but I'm not out, dammit! Not yet. Mr Madoff's is now being described as the world's biggest-ever fraud. I suppose even that can be smiled at in the right light. Because if you don't laugh, what else is there?
Here I am, back with a full fuel tank, and a somewhat refilled fridge. But (alas) the jam-packed Lidl car park defeated me, so I missed my Sainsbury's well-fired window of opportunity. It's 16:22 and I'm listening, quite angrily, to some of the ghastly revelations in the "Food Programme". Meanwhile, for the first time since early October, the hard drive of my main PVR is once again empty. And I can't even remember the last time I checked on the state of the other one — I don't watch much broadcast TV, I nowadays record very little, and I still need to find those slippery round tuits to catch up.
To think this paper used to regard itself as the nation's top rag:
Some say that foot fetishism gains ground when intercourse becomes too dangerous. Lap dancers, strippers and porn stars wear the highest platforms of all. An Italian urologist has declared that high heels "directly work the pleasure muscles that are linked to orgasm".
This is much to be preferred, by a professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy (who would've thunk it?):
[my students] scream bloody murder if, as I sometimes do, I ask them to read Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary as part of our introductory course... They come to class the first day — they've read up through Emma's disenchantment with her boring husband, Charles — incensed. "Sir," they say flatly, "she's a slut."
I'm now even angrier as I listen to some of the "discussion" on euthanasia. No wonder they call the programme Beyond Belief. It's fair to say I disagree, strongly, with some of the weasel-worded wriggling of the more religiously-inclined speakers. I can still remember the impact of an SF short story ("Ethical Quotient") by John T Phillifent (pen name John Rackham) and recommend it.
Good evening!
Having upped the blood sugar with an evening meal I've just finished a tiny spot of web page tinkering, and the extra "help" page can be inspected (or ignored) here. Time (20:56) for a cuppa. Then, just maybe, I shall start to grapple with TrackLogs Version 3, to use with the Ordnance Survey map of Purbeck and South Dorset that Mr Postie pushed through the door earlier today.