2008 — 22 December: Monday

I'm back after a very pleasant meal and a fantastic film (Across the Universe). The barometer is high, the night is mild, and the emergency ambulance with the flashing blue lights shot past me on the motorway rather as if I were standing still. Probably not a good sign. Oh well, time for tonight's picture of Christa:

Christa in Old Windsor, late 1970s

G'night, at 01:02 or so and a brief tussle with the TextPad 5.2 clipboard, solved by using the clickable commands instead of the keyboard shortcuts — now, what's that all about I wonder? And, yes, I did remember to put the black bin out a day early.

Nine decapitations in Mexico City... good grief! Thank you, BBC World Service. Nice image to go to bed with.

Hang on! This is too good to resist. It's an interview with Ian McKellen ("Gandalf") on the issue of the quality of education in UK "faith" schools (which, to me, sounds like a massive oxymoron) in the context of homosexuality as a sin (whatever that means):

"I think it's a sort of disorder that these old men dress up in frocks to go to work and call themselves celibate, then point the finger at other people," he said. "The 'eternal truth' is that you should love your neighbour as yourself. The 'truth' is not to be found in the minor reaches of Leviticus, where eating prawns and sleeping with a man are matters of moral concern."

Jessica Shepherd in The Guardian

Dammit. I like prawns...

Here we go again...

I must say, a chap can reach an amazingly advanced age before he learns that Judy Garland was 4 foot 11 inches tall. It's 10:05, consciousness has more or less returned, breakfast is at hand, as is the all-important first cuppa. Trouble is, I'm listening to the leader¹ of Brenda's loyal opposition. It occurs to me, too, that I shall have to do some Xmas shopping and other prep sooner rather than later.

Reading this interview with Jan Pienkowski reminds me that one of the first books I bought for Peter was The Haunted House in 1980 — I bought it for all three of us, to be honest. I don't know where it's ended up. Christa had earlier bought all six titles in The Jan Pienkowski Fairy Tale Library for me; these have the lovely silhouette illustrations. I'm looking at them² now.

Right! What's next. Mrs Landingham? Food supplies, I guess.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it...

... is to deduce which Hitchcock film has had this said about a DVD-R release of it on the hallowed pages of Amazon (in the US):

Isn't "Triad" a name for a Chinese criminal gang?

Good afternoon, Mr Postie

What'cha got there? (Sound F/X: ripping of cardboard.)

I yield to few in my admiration for the late journalist James Cameron, and note that (in later life) he came to love India. Now, I've never been there. Indeed, I'm not sure I'd ever want to go there³ and I admit that Paul Scott's Raj Quartet had already defeated me, and slipped from my overcrowded bookshelves, by the time I printed out and bound a comprehensive catalogue back in September 1994. No matter; after all, we're now firmly in the post-literate age. And since the 1984 Granada TV adaptation (which I never saw⁴ at the time, but which gathered considerable acclaim) clocks in at a mere 778 minutes and £12-98 I thought "Why not?"

While I'm admitting stuff, I can confess (as mentioned here) that I simply ignored the overt (and doubtless missed the covert) references to Christianity in the tales of Narnia. I've basically tuned out religion⁵ from the time of the tedious "Religious Instruction" lessons in Junior School. My questions never got answered to my satisfaction, and became ever less welcome (I can tell this sort of thing, you know). I did once (at my brother's suggestion) successfully pray for the return of one of my tortoises, but that was hardly a controlled experiment, let alone a double blind trial. Besides, if God allows himself to get distracted turning up the odd missing tortoise, is it any wonder the world's in such a state?

Good (later) afternoon, Mr Home Delivery Network

What'cha got there? (Sound F/X: ripping of cardboard.)

Jock Sturges is (as I've said) a superb photographer. His latest collection shows the colour work he's been doing alongside the wonderful monochrome stuff. It's also too large (33cm x 37cm) to fit on my flatbed scanner, and I'm too lazy to stitch together yet another Photoshop panorama, so I cheated and used the Canon SLR, the floor of the study, and some "remove distortion" magic. A full-on shot washed out most of the cover with reflected flash, as I feared it would, but this gives you some idea.

It's 15:30 so it must be time for another cuppa.

ASCII art

Now here's someone who takes the art of commenting on an online article to a new level:

Footnotes

¹  When he says the number of Rape Crisis Centres has halved, it is mildly pointed out to him that the halving occurred before 1997 under an administration of (as it were) his colour. He questions that. It's a foolish male politician who "appears" on the BBC's Woman's Hour, though I note he did so by phone.
²  And they're now safely back under the little beeswax candle where they belong; not too tear-stained. This mourning business can still catch me totally unawares, it seems. In this case I suspect there was a mixture of Peter's lost childhood and my lost wife. Hell's bells!
³  A business trip there (giving lectures) by my father 35 years ago when he was already ailing nearly polished him off. And the prospect of my job relocating to Bangalore ("And perhaps you can train your replacements, David?") helped me decide on early retirement from IBM in 2006.
⁴  We watched, and enjoyed, both Gandhi and A Passage to India...
⁵  When the question of our confirmation came up (as I suppose it still tended to in middle class WASP households in the late 1950s and early 1960s) my brother (I suspect) told the visiting vicar where to go while I simply spent my time with him demonstrating the workings of my Meccano bus, of which I was immensely proud. He showed no more interest in the differential and the steering mechanism than I did in his angels and burning bushes and we parted amicably, each baffled by the other. At least Mum and Dad gave up at that point...