2008 — 20 December: Saturday

It occurs to me that Christmas is thundering down the track, so here's another picture of Christa and Peter from Christmas 1986, a mere 22 years ago:

Christa, Peter, and a little white monkey? Xmas 1986

G'night. (At 01:52 — this really won't do, will it?)

As I crawl...

... bleary-eyed, back towards consciousness at 08:53 I note that Big Bro wants me to collect all the NZ stamps he fondly imagines dear Mama will have been saving for him, and ship them all back to him. So at least he has correctly deduced where I'll be in the near future.

No prizes for guessing... dept.

As I stumble through Life, I pick up the odd nugget of info here and there. There's one from there here:

The ancient Greeks founded the idea of the literary prize. In fact, the Greek calendar was stuffed full of formal contests, most of which were either poetical, athletic or some combination of the two; the competitive singing of dithyrambs — choruses of praise to Dionysus — was a kind of literary team sport, with groups of up to 50 men or boys dancing in circles and declaiming verse. It may have looked like an out-take from Monty Python, but this was art of the most serious kind: a vital component of honouring the gods, and an equally vital focus for national pride. Rivalry was intense and winners' prestige was huge.

Tom Chatfield in Prospect


Better not tell anyone from "reality" TV. Don't miss the telling quote from Auden near the end of this nice essay.

There's another nice piece here, if you have Time. But breakfast is suggesting itself as a good idea — 09:47 already. <Sigh>

Meanwhile...

I must say you don't see many people on foot, do you? I trotted out to replenish the cow juice and — having decided that was the only item on the list — I thought "You don't need the car for that. There's a 'convenience' store within almost convenient reach." Suddenly it's 12:41 and time to consider lunch. Right. The chicken wrapped in bacon is in the oven, the veggies are scraped, sliced and diced, and starting to simmer. There's time yet to sort out the spuds and peas and gravy. Does this man know how to live, or what? So what if it's a re-run of the lunch last Friday? It was still delicious.

Once more unto the PC...

Some tasks are best left for the dark, winter afternoons and evenings. I have been intending, for literally years, to re-order the chaos that is my email archive. I like writing emails, and I like getting them, too. But I've never been particularly happy about their searchability, or (for that matter) their portability. When I ran totally Linux for three months, a while back... (Good God! Before Christa died) I used Evolution which was all very well, but getting the incremental contents of the various "mbox" folders back into Thunderbird on an XP system was a tedious process. Nor (before anyone asks) do I really wish to entrust all my email to a web-based system1 up in "the cloud". Though it is amusing to note that the only Google ads that adorn my Gmail inbox are related to the kind of spam you can eat.

I've already cracked this problem once, for a vital subset of my correspondence. All my email exchanges to and from Carol in New York (and they began back in 1983) are already safely in HTML form on the private section of my web site. Mind you, getting them to that happy state was a fairly mammoth task, as they were initially on IBM mainframe systems, and moved via an intermediate half-life (as it were) on several Acorn RISC OS systems. I've even typeset and bound several volumes of the things. (DTP is a seductive interest, let me assure you.)

I've already mentioned my mild consternation at the realisation that I have some 13,000 emails to contend with, but the actual process of turning them into HTML is suitably mindless2 and I find it strangely satisfying to have all this stuff online. Who can say why?

In later "news"

It's somehow already 19:28 — the inner man has been fed. Loose Ends was amusing; Sarah Miles is quite a character. Wonder if anyone remembers her in Michael Radford's excellent 1988 film White Mischief — another item on my "buy it when it's on DVD" list. There was a Dutch/German pressing last time I checked, but my in-house translator has gone permanently AWOL, so that wouldn't help much. Besides (I've just searched again) it's no longer available.

This tickled me, though (for some reason) I never watched Cosmos at the time. I seem to recall that Sagan had a funny way of pronouncing the word "billions":

To make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the Universe.

Carl Sagan in Episode #7 of "Cosmos"


It occurs to me that there's a vague family resemblance to the Robert Persig quote — ostensibly about Zen — that I keep here.

What a fascinating "Archive Hour". Next stop, the extended edition of HIGNFY (maybe) and then I shall try the James Spader film (The Stickup) I dumped onto the PVR last night. Not one I know, and you can't really judge a film by the number of stars shown in the "Radio Times" now, can you? Even if IMDB shows you that its director turned out an episode of "Tales from the Crypt"!

  

Footnotes

1  I note that 99.999 (recurring) % of my Gmail traffic, for example, is spam (about 30 items every 24 hours). I use that system so very little, however, that I've never even bothered to investigate its filtration or more efficient use.
2  Some unkind folk might even characterise my methods as primitive, but they work.